Singin' in the Rain
It’s not as technically impressive as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but more than makes up for it with the Lina plot, and the freaking vaudeville. It’s like that initial scene in King Kong, stretched to insanely cool levels.
Gene Kelly is a fine leading man, but his pal Donald O’Connor is a better dancer. That scene in the studio with the two wall runs back to back, oof. That is the stuff of legends, it’s almost Buster Keaton.
The sound recording gag is so much better here than Babylon, how does this happen? Just steal from here!
Of course, this is Little Miss Sunshine all over again. The leading lady was 19, she and the comic relief were scared shitless of angering Gene Kelly. She couldn’t really dance properly, that’s why she is not on the big gonzo dance numbers. Her own voice was dubbed over by the Brooklyn rage lady, that’s some meta meta-commentary on the nature of Hollywood.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.