Singin' in the Rain (movie)

In spite of this, the movie has been digitally restored to an impressive standard of picture and sound quality. His is a heavily modified version, played on the soprano saxophone, in which the initial theme ("Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens...") is repeated again and again, separated by long soloing vamps. The audio commentary on the movie's "Special Edition" DVD includes a claim that the original negative was destroyed in a fire. The jazz musician John Coltrane adopted the tune "My Favorite Things" as his signature tune. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. The seven von Trapp children are five girls and two boys: Liesl (16 years old "going on 17"), Friedrich (14), Louisa (13), Kurt (11), Brigitta (10), Marta (6), Gretl (5). Jean Hagen was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Combine this with its success around the world in sales of tickets, videocassettes, laserdiscs, DVDs and its frequent airings on television, it is called "the most widely seen movie produced by a Hollywood studio" by Amazon.uk  (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005AA0L/qid=1105834994/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_11_1/026-3134903-6248437).

Kelly was also responsible for the Choreography. According to boxofficemojo (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm?p=.htm), the film ranks third in both all-time number of tickets sold (142,415,400) and in gross adjusted for inflation ($911,458,400) in North America (behind Gone with the Wind and Star Wars). The film was directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen. In 2001 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. Shooting began on June 18, 1951 and was completed on November 21, 1951. Despite the enormous popularity of the movie, which at the time became the second-largest grossing picture of all time (behind Gone With The Wind, and has continued through the present day, noted film critic Pauline Kael blasted the film in a review in which she called the movie "The Sound Of Mucus." This review allegedly led to Kael's being fired from her position as a film critic. This was done using three break dancers, a recreation of the original set and superimposing Kelly's face onto the dancer. The title song's four-line prelude ("My day in the hills has come to an end, I know..."), sung by Mary Martin in the stage play (available on CD), is reduced to an instrumental hint during the overture and dramatic zoom-in shot to Julie Andrews on the mountaintop at the start of the movie.

It has also been the subject of a 2005 advert for the new VW Golf GTI, where Kelly appears to be break dancing instead of doing his usual routine until he reaches a policeman standing by the car. "How Can Love Survive?" was reduced to an instrumental, one of several waltz numbers played at the party occurring just before intermission. It has of course been parodied several times, notably by Morecambe and Wise and Paddington Bear. A couple of the songs were altered. The dance routine in which Gene Kelly sings the title song while twirling an umbrella, splashing through puddles and generally getting soaked to the skin, is probably the most famous of all movie musical sequences. One example is that in the play, "My Favorite Things" is sung at the convent. The song "Make 'Em Laugh" uncomfortably resembles the Cole Porter song "Be a Clown." Comden and Green wrote the music and lyrics to the number "Moses Supposes.". The order of several of the songs is markedly different between the stage play and the film.

The film features a rendition of the 1929 song "Singin' in the Rain" by Arthur Freed (who also produced) & Nacio Herb Brown, along with other Freed and Brown tunes from the late 1920s and the 1930s. As pointed out in one of the DVD's extras, the real Maria and one of her daughters can (barely) be seen starting to cross the road at that point. Meanwhile Lockwood falls in love with the overdub artist Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) and Lamont does everything possible to sabotage the romance. During the extensive "Do-Re-Mi" segment, at one point Maria and the children run under an archway. After a terrible screen test, Lockwood and his partner Cosmo Brown (Donald O'Connor) decide to return to their roots and convince the studio to overdub Lamont's voice and turn The Dueling Cavalier into The Dancing Cavalier, a musical comedy. Another error, noted by astute observers who know the geography, is that in the scene where the family is hiking up the mountain presumably toward safe ground, they are actually walking toward Austria. The production is beset with difficulties, not least Lina's inadvertently comical speaking voice. This error cannot be seen in the film itself.

After the smash-hit of the historical talking picture innovator, The Jazz Singer, Lockwood's studio decides to convert the current Lockwood/Lamont vehicle, The Dueling Cavalier, into a talkie. In some publicity shots for the film, a noteworthy error can be seen in a market scene immediately preceding the "Do-Re-Mi" number: an orange crate is marked 'Made in Israel'; however, Israel did not exist in the 1930s. Lockwood barely tolerates his vapid leading lady, Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), who is convinced their screen romance is real. The Ländler dance that Maria and the Captain shared was not performed the traditional way it is done in Austria. Kelly plays Don Lockwood, a silent film star with humble roots. In fact, the "Sound of Music" itself is virtually unknown in the country, except in backpacker's hostels in Salzburg, where it is screened daily on DVD. Themes of certains arts being inferior to others, or the immortal if you seen one of them, you've seen them all (which is what Rossini also said about his operas) are today as vivid as ever. Many people believe "Edelweiss" to be the national anthem—in fact, this song is nearly unknown in Austria.

The movie has an extraordinarily intelligent plot, which greatly contributes to the work being systematically classified as the best musical comedy ever. The musical has created a few misconceptions about Austria. Singin' in the Rain, a 1952 Gene Kelly musical film, chronicled Hollywood's transition from silent films to "talkies". It had never been performed before anywhere in Austria. In the lead in to Make 'em Laugh, O'Conner/Cosmo sarcastically references the tragic line "ridi pagliaccio" ("Laugh, clown") from I Pagliacci. In February 2005, the musical premiered at the Volksoper in Vienna. Dora Bailey, the gushy gossip columnist is an uncredited role played by Madge Blake who was later famous for her role as Aunt Harriet on Batman. This was the first stage production to incorporate the two additional songs that Rodgers had composed for the film version.

Simpson also uses one of Freed's frequent expressions when he says that he "cannot quite visualize it and has to see it on film first", referring to the Broadway ballet sequence. Playing to 101% of seating capacity, the show set the highest attendance figure for a single week (October 26-31, 1981) of any British musical production in history, as chronicled by The Guinness Book of Theatre. F. Due to an unprecedented demand for tickets, Clark extended her initial six-month contract to thirteen months. R. Maria von Trapp herself, present at the opening night performance, described her as "the best" Maria ever. Simpson are a reference to Arthur Freed. Despite her misgivings that at age 51 she was too old to play the role convincingly, Clark opened to unanimous rave reviews (and the largest advance sale in the history of British theatre at that time).

F. In 1981, at producer Ross Taylor's urging, Petula Clark signed to star in a revival of the show at the Apollo Victoria Theatre in London's West End. The initials of the fictional Monumental Pictures' owner, R. Hammerstein died before the film was made, and two of the numbers added to the score were written solely by Rodgers: "I Have Confidence" and "Something Good". Surviving prints of the sequence feature Reynolds singing in her own voice. Robert Wise won an Academy Award for Directing for the film, which stars Julie Andrews as Maria and Christopher Plummer as Captain von Trapp. One possible reason why the scene was cut is that it somewhat contradicts the initial scene where Debbie does not immediately identify Gene when he jumps into her car. The film, which was released in 1965, was named Best Picture of the Year.