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So wide is the gap between what Singin' in the Rain says and what it does that one is tempted to see a relation between the two - to see the moralizing surface story of Singin' as a guilty disavowal of the practices that went into its own making. Certainly the film itself invites a reflexive reading: the final movie in a sequence of movies it is about, the one the others lead up to and the one advertised on the climactic billboard, is Singin' in the Rain. Of course this narrow, in-house reading cannot explain the film's enormous popularity with four decades of viewers who know nothing of the backstage circumstances of its production. But if we proceed from the assumption that what may seem to be local anxieties are often universal ones in neighborhood drag, we might look again at the gap between Sing in the Rain's theory and its practice and ask what the larger resonances are. That is the point of departure for this essay, in which I argue that Singin' in the Rain's morality tale of stolen talent restored is driven by a nervousness about just the opposite, about stolen talent unrestored, and that one reason for its abiding popularity is the way it redresses our underlying fear that the talent or art we most enjoy in movies like Singin' in the Rain is art we somehow "know" to be uncredited and unseen. The question is what talent and who it belongs to.
...But my point here is not to argue that Singin' in the Rain is built on thefts, much less to identify the sources or insist on "ownership". Nor is it to suggest that this musical is unusually derivative or derivative in unusual ways. It is to suggest that, for whatever reason, Singin' in the Rain is itself worried about something along those lines - if not about whether the screen credit "Musical Numbers Staged and Directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen" really meets the terms of its own moralizing about giving credit where credit is due, then more generally about the possibility that too many of the unseen artists whose moves have been put to such brilliant and lucrative use in the "white dancer's field" of the film musical are black...Singin' in the Rain's concern with miscredit has a racial underside -...it's real subject is not white women's singing voices, but black men's dancing bodies.