Singin’ in the Rain was not exactly conceived as a masterpiece. Arthur Freed, head of the musicals unit at MGM, had a back catalogue of songs – not all of them classics – that he’d co-written for various films at the studio between 1929 and 1939, and had the idea of stringing them together as a song score for a single new musical. Screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green were hired to cobble a story around the disparate tunes; Howard Keel, a stolid bass-baritone in the MGM stable who had acquitted himself respectably in Annie Get Your Gun, was pencilled in as the lead.
As a producer, Freed tended to alternate artistically ambitious prestige musicals – just one week before Singin’ in the Rain premiered, he picked up a best picture Oscar for Vincente Minnelli’s ravishing, Gershwin-scored pop ballet An American in Paris – with cheerful, brightly disposable filler. (Remember Pagan Love Song? The Belle of New York? No?) At the outset, one might have expected the sketchily contrived Singin’ in the Rain to fall firmly on the B-list.
