Produced and Distributed by Metro Goldwyn Mayer (USA).
The most beloved of all screen musicals is also the most scholarly – a mock film-historical piece about the travails of a silent cinema star, Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly), struggling to make the transition into the talkies.
Some of the film’s choicest humour is, a little cruelly, at the expense of lofty diva Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), who is priceless as Don Lockwood’s co-star in the preposterous The Duelling Cavalier, whose aura is destroyed by her Noo Yawk accent (“I cyan’t stan’im!”).
Gene Kelly and director Stanley Donen’s classic, and the film industry crisis it depicted, were paid due homage in Michel Hazanavicius’s brilliantly tricksy silent pastiche The Artist (2011).
