‘MAKE ’EM LAUGH’ FROM SINGIN' IN THE RAIN
DONALD O’CONNOR HITS THE SWEET SPOT
GENE KELLY KICKING up a puddle gets all the love. But all-timer musical Singin’ In The Rain has another sequence with just as much power to contort your face into an almighty grin. And it’s all down to the genius of Kelly’s impish co-star, Donald O’connor.
O’connor’s backstory seems like it was invented by a Hollywood screenwriter. His father was a circus strongman; his mother a tightrope-walker. From the off there was no doubt his destiny would lie in entertaining.
“I was about 13 months old, they tell me, when I first started dancing,” he told one reporter. “They’d hold me up by the back of my neck and they’d start the music, and I’d dance.” He made his first film aged 12, then pumped out movies at an outrageous rate, several of them opposite a donkey in the Francis The Talking Mule series.
All of which goes some way to explaining the existence of the miraculous ‘Make ’Em Laugh’ number midway through Singin’. It doesn’t advance the plot in any way; in fact, it wasn’t even written until the shoot was underway, the film’s composers cribbing heavily from the ‘Be A Clown’ tune, sung by Gene Kelly and Judy Garland, in 1948’s The Pirate. So O’connor, as sidekick Cosmo Brown, essentially made up the high-energy vaudeville routine from scratch on set. And it is phenomenal (even more so when you know that O’connor was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day). There are pratfalls, facial contortions, a fight with a mannequin, a reckless kamikaze dive into a tearaway wall, and two incredible backflips after running up two more solid ones. When asked in 2003 how he pulled the latter off, O’connor replied simply, “Experience.”
A celebration of what the human body is capable of, and the limits to which a performer will push themselves for an audience, it remains, almost 70 years on, an utter, eyebrow-raising joy to behold. Make ’em laugh? He did then. And he does now.