A street that isn't a street. Night, and it isn't night either — it's a backlot with a painted sky at the end of it. Overhead, pipes. Up a ladder, a man with a valve and a wristwatch. Down below, a camera operator walking backwards while somebody's hand rests on his shoulder to steer him past the kerb. Then the water comes on and the lamp-post gets its halo, and a man in a soaked suit swings round it as if he'd only just thought of it.
Gene Kelly was born in Pittsburgh on this day in 1912. He wanted, he said, a dance for the common man — the sort of step you could believe a person might do because he was happy and the bus was late. He worked out a great deal of it with Stanley Donen, who co-directed with him and shared the choreographing, and the pair of them shared it further with the crew: the grips who rigged the rain, the men who had to make it fall on cue and then stop, and then do it again, and again, for hours, in a puddle that had to look the same depth in every take.
I have run that sequence more times than I can count, and the thing I love is the sound of the house. People sit up. Somebody always laughs at the policeman. And afterwards, in the lobby, somebody's child is always jumping in something.
Constance, the man grew up playing ice hockey in Pittsburgh, and he always said dancing was the softer landing — no boards, no blades, and nobody checking you into the lamp-post. Athletes will do almost anything to protect their shins!
Constance, the song was already an old friend by then: Nacio Herb Brown wrote the tune with Arthur Freed's lyric back in 1929, and Freed went on to produce the picture that gave it the lamp-post. Twenty-odd years in the catalogue, and it took a man in a soaked suit to make it permanent.