“Stanley Donen is one of the great builders of the film musical,” Drew Casper, author of “Stanley Donen,” a 1983 critical study of Donen’s films, told the Los Angeles Times in 2004. With the arrival of Donen, musicals snapped to and noticeably came of age, integrating in a naturalistic fashion the elements of song, plot and realistic character motives.”
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In his book, Silverman credits Donen with “changing the face and form of the American movie musical. It was because Culver City people were watering their lawns.” Indeed, as Donen explained on another occasion, “The only problem came when the downpour suddenly turned into a drizzle in the late afternoon. We had to finish at a certain time of day because of a water-pressure problem in Culver City.” The rehearsal took place without the rain, which was piped in with sprinklers. “We covered the entire East Side Street on (MGM’s) Lot Two with a black tarpaulin (to simulate nighttime) and designed, to the music, the puddles in the pavement for where Gene would splash around. “It only took a day and a half to shoot,” he recalled. In “Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies,” Silverman’s 1996 biography, Donen said that neither he nor Kelly “knew it was going to be such a great number.” The film featured many memorable song and dance numbers, including O’Connor’s stand-out pratfall routine “Make ‘Em Laugh,” and, of course, Kelly’s joyous expression of being in love by singing - and dancing - in the rain.
More than three decades later, Donen directed a similar gravity-defying number for the music video of Lionel Richie’s hit “Dancing on the Ceiling.”Īmong Donen’s other movie musicals: “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” (1954), “Funny Face” (1957), “The Pajama Game” (1957, co-directed by George Abbott) and “Damn Yankees” (1958, co-directed by Abbott).īut it is “Singin’ in the Rain,” the exuberant 1952 classic co-directed by Donen and Kelly that is, in the words of the late New Yorker magazine film critic Pauline Kael, “perhaps the most enjoyable of all movie musicals - just about the best Hollywood musical of all time.”Ī satirical tale about Hollywood’s transition from silent films to talkies, “Singin’ in the Rain” co-starred Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds.
I was behind the camera in the dramatic and musical sequences.”ĭonen made his solo directing debut with “Royal Wedding,” a 1951 musical in which Fred Astaire famously danced up the walls and across the ceiling - a breathtaking effect created by attaching the camera to the base of a large revolving steel-reinforced cylindrical chamber containing the hotel-room set. In general, Donen once explained, Kelly “was responsible for most of the dance movements (in the film). Join the conversation at /columbusdispatch and connect with us on Twitter age 19, he assisted Kelly on the dance numbers for the 1944 movie musical “Cover Girl,” for which Donen conceived and directed (uncredited) the “Alter Ego” double-exposure number in which Kelly danced with his window reflection after it leapt off the windowpane.Ī year later, Donen came up with the equally innovative idea of having Kelly dance with Jerry, MGM’s cartoon mouse, in director George Sidney’s 1945 musical “Anchors Aweigh.” He was 94.ĭonen, a master of filming dance with imagination and style and a director whose nonmusical credits include “Charade,” “Indiscreet” and “Two for the Road,” died of an apparent heart attack Thursday, his sons Joshua and Mark Donen confirmed Saturday.Ī one-time Broadway chorus boy whose film career was launched in the 1940s, Donen’s name was inextricably linked with MGM and its athletic dancing star Gene Kelly. Stanley Donen, who directed or co-directed some of Hollywood’s best-known movie musicals, including “On the Town,” “Royal Wedding” and what many consider the greatest movie musical of all time, “Singin’ in the Rain,” has died.
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