YMMV / Singin' in the Rain

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Did Don's parents really give him the "Dignity, always dignity" motto and he doesn't want to admit that he failed to live up to it? Or was the motto just another one of his lies?
  • Did Cosmo's father really tell him to be a comical actor, and did his grandfather really encourage him to tell jokes with "plenty of hoke"? Or was Cosmo just making those details up because he was singing a song?
• Award Snub:
  • It failed to get an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture when it first came out. Hell, it lost to The Greatest Show on Earth.
  • Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen weren't nominated for Best Director.
  • Jean Hagen's was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, but the performances of Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O'Connor were snubbed.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • "Beautiful Girl" seems to have one purpose and one purpose alone: So Cosmo can notice Kathy among the dancers, and tell Don, re-uniting the two (well, that and make fun of the types of musical numbers and songs that appeared in musicals back then, pre-42nd Street). The costume montage is especially BLAM-ish. In fact, the entire song was added simply because the filmmakers really liked their costume guy and they wanted to give him a chance to show off his work.
  • "Moses Supposes" also counts. The scene starts off alright with Don being given lessons in correct enunciation but when Cosmo enters the picture, things quickly go off the rails as he and Don hijack the lesson by spontaneously creating a song-and-dance routine out of a tongue-twister and the whole thing seems to exist purely for the sake of watching Don and Cosmo mess around for five minutes. As with the other examples though, it's so much fun to watch that it's difficult to care about its BLAM status.
  • "Broadway Melody" really takes the cake. Fourteen minutes of Disney Acid Sequence with no particular relevance to either the actual film or the Film Within a Film it's supposedly a part of! And the part where Don dances ballet with Cyd Charisse in an abstract pink background is weird even for the sequence itself, essentially a BLAM within a BLAM. It is, however, awesomely fun to watch.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: This movie is of course a widely beloved classic, and all characters are very well liked, that said, Cosmo is still considered by many to be the best character in the movie. Lina also has her fans.
• Evil Is Cool: Even after her Face–Heel Turn, Lina's still a fan favorite for turning out to be a Not-So-Harmless Villain who's capable of serious blackmail, and still being able to pull off a convincing innocent voice. Plus it's hard not to appreciate her hilarious one-liners.
• Franchise Original Sin: After the proliferation of "jukebox musicals" in the 2000s, which contrived their stories around pre-existing songs, people very quickly soured on the idea. This can make it weird to realize that this film, considered one of the greatest musicals ever, is also a jukebox musical (even if the term didn't exist at the time) because it used existing songs from the 1920s and 30s. What helps this film is that it has a structured plot — the advent of sound in Hollywood, and how the industry deals with it — that's complimented by and yet not dependant upon the songs; the songs themselves were mainly written during the time of this transition (and mostly by the film's producer!) so they never seem out of place in the world of the narrative; and by this point they're so old and so deeply associated with the film that watching it is likely the first time someone in the 2010s and 2020s would ever hear them, rather than having a pre-existing connection.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Lina's scheme to ruin Kathy's career and preserve her own is quickly foiled, but in reality Hollywood would secretly adopt this method and continue dubbing actors for decades to come. It wasn't until the release of The King and I in 1956 and the reveal of Marni Nixon dubbing all of Deborah Kerr's singing that the industry's secret was exposed. Even then the practice continued into the 1960s with West Side Story (1961) and My Fair Lady, the latter of which generated such a huge controversy with Julie Andrews being passed over for Audrey Hepburn, who then had 90% of her vocals dubbed, that it was perceived as having cost Hepburn an Academy Award nomination.
• Hilarious in Hindsight
  • A character talks about taking Kathy's "credit card" out of the film they're making. At the time, this simply meant removing her name from the credits. Now, viewers might wonder why Kathy has a credit card in a film set in the 1920s.
  • In the Japanese dub, Don is voiced by Ryō Horikawa, whose most famous role is Vegeta, which in the Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods movie, he tries to dance and sing just to please Beerus, the God of Destruction. Needless to say, he really sucks on that.
  • Don sarcastically predicts that Kathy will someday play King Lear on stage. The notion of a woman portraying King Lear came true in 2019, when Glenda Jackson starred in a Broadway production.
• Ho Yay: Don Lockwood and Cosmo Brown have a crazy and sometimes odd relationship with each other that shows signs that they're meant for each other. This is especially present during "Fit as a Fiddle" and "Moses Supposes".
• Jerkass Woobie: Again, Lina Lamont. It's understanable that she is worried about her career after talkies are introduced. However, she's selfish, vain and manipulative to Don and Kathy, she refuses to listen to Don when he plainly and nicely (at first anyway) tells her they are not in a relationship and decides to actively ruin Kathy's career purely out of spite.
• Memetic Mutation: Don declares March 23rd his lucky day. Tumblr users have made a habit of reblogging GIFs of this scene on March 23rd every year. Some will also post on the 24th, with a GIF of Cosmo pointing out that it's actually the 24th since midnight passed.
• Older Than They Think: Many younger viewers mistakenly believe the songs are original to the film. See Franchise Original Sin above.
• One-Scene Wonder: Cyd Charisse in the "Broadway Melody" sequence nearly steals the film, without even a single word of dialogue. Also Julius Tannen, playing the guy appearing in the short film demonstrating the new sound technology.
• One True Threesome: The fanfiction-writing fandom loves Don/Kathy/Cosmo, as can be evidenced on Archive of Our Own.
• Padding: The film is only about an hour and a half long, and quite a lot of that time is taken up by musical numbers that have almost nothing to do with the plot, like "Beautiful Girl" and especially "Broadway Melody". However, those numbers are so awesome that it's difficult to care.
• Retroactive Recognition: Rita Moreno, aka Anita (and Carmen Sandiego), played Zelda.
• Rooting for the Empire: Lina has her fans, most of them out-of-universe, mostly because of her famous one-liners, her cunning personality which subverts the blonde stereotype at times as well as her extravagant wardrobe.
• Signature Scene:
  • Gene Kelly's exuberant dance to the title song, swinging around the lamppost and splashing with his umbrella as he's, well, singing in the rain. (Made even more impressive by the fact that he had a high fever during the shoot, and ad libbed most of it.) It's iconic enough to get its own parody trope: Spoofing in the Rain.
  • "Make 'em Laugh" is a close second, with some truly incredible slapstick from Donald O'Connor.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • When Don runs into the building that explodes, the characters off to the side change position with the cut.
  • During the famous titular number, a wide-angle crane shot reveals several large water puddles in the far background which show no raindrop splashes, revealing the "rain" as occurring only in the foreground where Don is (and where the camera can pick it up).
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Make 'Em Laugh," the only new song Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown are credited with writing for the film, is clearly based on Cole Porter's "Be a Clown" from The Pirate, which Freed had produced several years earlier; the tune is basically a sound-alike that is just different enough to avoid the legal definition of plagiarism. According to the creators, they told Freed that none of his earlier songs would fit Donald O'Connor's big scene, and asked him for something similar to "Be a Clown," not expecting him to come back with something that similar. Porter, who was working on other film projects with MGM, didn't make any public comments on it, though Porter's friend Irving Berlin was reportedly furious when he visited the set and heard a playback of the song, demanding that Freed tell him who stole Porter's song.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: The titular song and dance sequence.
• Values Dissonance: Don gives a completely false account of how he got into acting, mentioning having attended prestigious acting schools while he actually honed his acting skills as a street performer and in minor, lackluster roles. This would be an utterly baffling thing to do from the perspective of a modern viewer, who would be much more likely to relate to a classic "underdog" story instead of that of a person who rode his privilege all the way into glory. From The Roaring '20s to The '60s, Hollywood promoted an idea of respectability, appealing to American middle-class values, so that meant hiding their past, their genuine Rags to Riches story and in some cases their origins (Irish in some cases, but Jewish especially) to make them fit the tastes of what they believed was "WASP middle America", so it is actually quite accurate to the values of the silent era.
• Values Resonance: The reaction of the preview audience to sound being clumsily added to The Dueling Cavalier is very similar to modern reactions to films that show off the latest technological advances (e.g., CGI, 3D conversion) without backing them up with a strong script.
• Vindicated by History: The film had a disappointing box office and was generally snubbed by the Oscars, but is now seen as one of the great movie musicals of the 20th Century.

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