The Musicals List REDUX

[Tribe]

I'll probably be the only one to do so, but I'm putting Marat/Sade on my list.

Sheesh. I never thought of Marat/Sade. But, yeah, I suppose it can be a musical. Although I do enjoy it as a movie and/or play...I'm not certain it would make a list of best musicals for me. Thanks for bringing it up.

[Yojimbo]

My own provisional top ten:

the Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli 1953)
My Sister Eileen (Richard Quine 1955)
Lili (Charles Walters 1953)
On the Town (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly 1949)
Daddy Long Legs (Jean Negulesco 1955)
Calamity Jane (David Butler 1953)
Good News (Charles Walters 1947)
Singin in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly 1952)
Kiss Me Kate (George Sidney 1953)
Li'l Abner (Melvin Frank 1959)

And just out of the ten, my Spotlight/Swapsie, the only good musical made since the sixties: Reefer Madness: the Movie Musical (Andy Fickman 2005)

Not that I can compete with Cold Bishop, but since I've seen more of the available pool for this genre than the other previous lists, I do look forward to going back and re-watching many of my favorites for the purpose of writing seriously about them in this thread. This is my favorite genre because it is cinema at its fullest, and I can't wait for where this thread goes.

As a rule I don't care for the Kelly/Donen musicals, although I love Demys' 'Lola' which is at least part homage to 'On The Town'
(btw, does 'Umbrellas of Cherbourg' count)
I love the soundtrack of 'Les Demoiselles de Rochefort' and the film will probably make my Top Ten.
I don't think I've actually watched 'Seven Brides...' all the way through but 'Sobbin' Women' is a great 'singing in the shower' song and the film has a greatworking with wood scene to compare with 'Witness'
Most of my fave musicals are from the 30s, especially the 'Fred and Gingers', which is also a good reason for loving 'Pennies From Heaven'

[Yojimbo]

My potential list is still inchoate, and there are a lot of films I need to see or see again, but here are some personal favourites that haven’t been mentioned much yet:

Top Hat – There’s not much between this and The Gay Divorcee, but I find Top Hat funnier, and the completely artificial version of Venice featured in this film is one of the glories of Hollywood art direction. Knives, if you’re looking for splendidly fake sets, run don’t walk – actually, anybody participating in this project without the assistance of the big Astaire / Rogers set is taking their life in their hands.

Footlight Parade – The same probably goes for the two Berkeley sets, though many of those films are more likely to be candidates for the “great musical sequences” sub-list, since the films around the numbers get sillier and more annoying as the decade progresses. Dames, for instance, provides a handful of absolutely astonishing production numbers, with Berkeley pushing his tendency to pop-art abstraction about as far as it ever went, but it’s still not a great film. This weirdly back-loaded musical strikes the best balance for me, with a good basic backstage storyline, strong performances and, if not the greatest Berkeley numbers, a fine representation of his work at its height. Plus there’s dancing Jimmy Cagney to put things over the top for me.

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort – I actually rewatched this just a week or so ago. It’s simply sublime, possibly the last of the great musicals in the classical tradition, though Demy brings some interesting tension to the form, with his focus on (beautifully colour-controlled) actual locations. He realises that, if one of the joys of the musical is seeing ‘ordinary people’ burst into song and dance in public spaces, then upping the reality component should just make that particular high more intoxicating, and he’s right.

It’s Always Fair Weather – I suspect I like this film a lot more than most people, who tend to give it more respect than love. It’s a really bold rethinking of the genre in some respects, with its cynicism and disillusionment, but on the other hand it also delivers so many great, joyous numbers that it also succeeds on the traditional terms that it’s trying to undermine. Domino mentioned Cyd’s stunner, but my favourite, and one that’s very handy for converting genre sceptics, is Kelly’s gobsmacking roller-skate number.

Summer Stock – If you can look past some of the broader comic relief stuff, this is one of the tenderest and most moving of the classic musicals, circling elegantly around Garland at her most vulnerable and Kelly at his most generous, and it’s an interesting musical where some of the most indelible numbers are the quiet introspective ones (which makes the concluding punch of “Get Happy” all the more powerful).

Broadway Melody of 1936 – This movie probably would have been strictly routine if not for the talent on display. Two words: Eleanor Powell. As an actress, she’s appealing but somewhat limited, but as a dancer she might be the greatest thing ever put before a camera. All of her numbers, even the deliberately off-the-cuff one, blow me away.

Nashville – It’s a different beast, sure, but after the collapse of the sixties, so was Hollywood, and almost every musical made after then has a degree of self-consciousness you’d never have seen before. In this film, there are songs galore, all performed by major characters and most of which advance the plot. Unless you’re going to define the genre more stringently than even the MGM bosses of the 50s were prepared to do, I don’t think you can persuasively exclude this film from the mix (hell, it even borrows a bundle of tropes from the old Warners backstage musicals of the 30s).

Which makes me think it might be interesting to create a rough list of post-60s musicals of interest. Distant Voices and Pennies from Heaven I’ve already mentioned, and I expect I’ll be voting for The Wicker Man and The Hole, at least. The Hole is an interesting case in that the film has what amounts to a third lead whose sole purpose is to transform the film into a musical. Now, on the one hand you could argue that this element of extraneousness means that the film isn't really a musical, but since her “sole purpose is to transform the film into a musical”, then surely it is a musical. At any rate, I love the film and love the musical numbers, and when you peer through the Beckettian absurdism of the delivery, you’ll see plenty of other markers of the classical Hollywood musical present and correct.

Other late musicals I’ll be considering: A Mighty Wind, New York New York, Topsy-Turvy (Maybe Leigh’s best film?), Grace of My Heart (great, spot-on pastiches on the soundtrack, with the dreary exception of Dinosaur Jr.’s terribly lazy Wilson approximations), Velvet Goldmine (though I’m a bit leery about going back to it, since it’s a film that dropped like a stone in my estimation between first and second viewing, from a venue with great sound to one with mediocre sound), All That Jazz. I’d love to stick You, the Living in there too, since it’s a film that breaks into music over and over again, but I don’t think enough of those sequences are songs (rather than instrumental pieces) for it to qualify.

We're definitely on the right wavelength, zedz, so I unreservedly recommend the 'Demoiselles de Rochefort' soundtrack double cd to you
I'm also glad to see I'm not alone in ranking The Gay Divorcee as second only to Top Hat; I've always been mystified why so many people rate George Stevens' 'Swing Time' as the best of the series.
I'm with you on Footlight Parade, also; love that one

[Matt]

Romance on the High Seas is wonderful

Seconded. On Moonlight Bay is kind of cute and sweet (another old-timey Americana musical of the kind that Meet Me in St. Louis set the trend for), but maybe not top 50 stuff. Billy Rose's Jumbo gets a lot of love, but I haven't seen it myself. Love Me or Leave Me is a fairly serious biopic/show musical worth looking at if you find yourself becoming a Day fan. The Pajama Game has some nice early Fosse choreography, but not much else to offer.

[domino harvey]

I recall finding On Moonlight Bay pretty insufferable myself, so much so that I've put off the sequel as long as possible, and the Pajama Game makes a disasterous choice concerning "real" location shooting that renders everything on screen pretty worthless in the end

[Michael Kerpan]

I've always been mystified why so many people rate George Stevens' 'Swing Time' as the best of the series.

Maybe because it has (mostly) great music -- whereas much of the music in Gay Divorcee is pretty lame (most of Porter's songs having been replaced with silly junk).

[Matt]

I recall finding On Moonlight Bay pretty insufferable myself, so much so that I've put off the sequel as long as possible

Skip it. By the Light of the Silvery Moon is not very good.

I'm afraid I can't share your and Murdoch's enthusiasm for Calamity Jane. Except for a couple of the calmer musical numbers, Day's performance feels manic and hammy, a shadow of Betty Hutton in Annie Get Your Gun (who is maybe more believable, but just as grating). I like her better as a wisecracking dame in Romance on the High Seas.

[domino harvey]

A pair of Danny Kaye musicals

the Five Pennies (Melville Shavelson 1959) I am mostly immune to the charms of musical biopics (and boy do I still have a lot of 'em in my unwatched pile), but this is one of the strongest I've seen... at least, for a while. I was a little surprised to see Danny Kaye involved in a serious biopic, and pictured a Jim Carrey-esque play for Oscar, but to my delight Kaye merely acts the ham within the confines of the structure, which is far more interesting than playing it straight would have allowed. The first half of the film features some rapturously beautiful mise-en-scene as we explore the smoky prohibition-era dens of Harlem (in a sequence that renders later trifles like the Cotton Club even more embarrassed) and Dixie dance halls. Weirdly, the film turns into something else entirely in its second half, as Kaye quits everything and becomes a bitter dock worker to support his bratty crippled daughter (eventually played by Tuesday Weld). Regardless of its later missteps, it's still the first biopic in contention for my list. The R1 is another of the Paramount OOPs going for ridiculous $$$, but the R2 equivalent is like three pounds right now (and you could also snatch up another nightclubby R2-only musical, Ritt's Paris Blues with Woodward/Newman and Sidney Poitier, for cheap with it)

On the Riviera (Walter Lang 1950) Walter Lang was a terrible enabler of the Fox unit's worst musical tendencies (When in doubt, just throw money at the project so it at least looks important), and while the broken clock principle occasionally worked in his favor (Can Can), this is a pretty dire extreme of the worst case scenario. Kaye plays dual roles, neither particularly funny, and participates in some lousy numbers, all forgettable (thank God though, because who wants to remember that one with him as a lisping child's puppet?). Even the novelty of having Gene Tierney appear in a musical is misused, as she is absent from all of the numbers.

[knives]

Gypsy's pretty good with all of that excellent Sondheim humour and number of really great performances especially Russell, but the direction's just terrible. Usually I respect LeRoy, even more than most, but his plain documentary style is just not for musicals. The sequences on stage are more cinematic than the musical pieces that should be the most memorable. Even than though they're tired and just don't have the energy to move forward. The man needed some lighting up his ass or something to bring this adaptation to life. As a biopic this is better than usual, but as a musical I hope it's worse.

[domino harvey]

It's been a while since I've seen it, but doesn't the movie actually take out most of the music numbers?

[knives]

It keeps in (not counting the stage numbers) about seven or eight.

[knives]

Is the BFI Rochefort the way to go?

[domino harvey]

French Blu-ray

[knives]

Is it R0 (Sherwood broke) and on the subject of Fench Blus is Phantom of the Paradise also R0?

[domino harvey]

Blu-ray.com says all region

[zedz]

I'm working my way through that "10 Musicals for Three Bucks" set that was pointed out a little while ago, without much joy as yet. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was pretty rote, without a memorable song to save it, and even Rogers and Hart didn't manage to raise Hallelujah, I'm Bum! above the mediocre. A lot of musicals are saddled with cliched or frankly dumb plots, but they can work because they're continually distracting us from that fact. Milestone used some interesting filmmaking gimmicks from time to time, but the musical numbers were irrelevant and poorly staged (rhythmic marching from a bunch of character extras doth not a production number make).

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was a more interesting failure, mainly because Richard Lester is a visually inventive director with a style well-suited to the genre. Everyone's trying hard (maybe too hard), but the material is laboured and it all ends up a bit of a trudge, and the scenes of forced wackiness are much less satisfying than the glimmers of more absurdist and Pythonesque humour that crop up now and then. This does remind me that I ought to watch A Hard Day's Night again, and it makes me regret that Lester didn't get a crack at a full-blown, top-flight Hollywood musical.

I suppose there are going to be a number of "what ifs" like that that crop up during this Genre Project: What if Judy Garland had finished Annie Get Your Gun? What if James Cagney had developed his screen career as a hoofer rather than a tough guy? What if some mad producer had the smarts to fund a proper musical by Michel Gondry? What if Cyd Charisse had been a better actress? What if Busby Berkeley had had to choreograph a production number using dead people?

Well, at least I can provide the answer for that last one.

[swo17]

What if Busby Berkeley had had to choreograph a production number using dead people? Well, at least I can provide the answer for that last one.

I love you.

[Matt]

I was also really disappointed in Hallelujah, I'm Bum!. I'd seen it on lists of best musicals and was hoping for more than what I got, which is a routine '30s plot with a little bit of cute rhyming, sing-song dialogue. Some point to it as Jolson's best film, but he apparently thought it was his worst.

I just rewatched That Midnight Kiss last night. It's so enjoyable, especially the subtle physical humor during the early operatic numbers that make them more palatable to a non-opera crowd. It seems weirdly choppy during the early courtship scenes, though, as if one or more dialogue scenes were just truncated in order to get on with the show. The film also sets up some interesting class issues that it eventually jettisons in favor of a tidy happy ending, but I guess you can't expect dialectical rigor from an MGM musical.

I do wonder how much speed MGM gave Lanza in order to trim him down from 250 pounds. He has a handsome face with no double chin in this film, but his shirts and jackets are all blousy as if to hide his gut. You can practically see his corset straining to burst in some scenes. Thomas Gomez lets it all hang free, though, in his insane and hilarious stereotype of an Italian tenor. And speaking of stereotypes, what a turn by J. Carrol Naish.

MGM tried to recapture the essence of this film in its follow-up, The Toast of New Orleans--using much of the same plot and cast--but it's mostly awful.

[tarpilot]

I'll readily admit that one transcendent scene or moment can often eclipse any and all of a film's faults for me, and that's what I remember Jolson's saving of Madge Evans from her suicide attempt did for me in Hallelujah I'm a Bum, but now I really want to re-watch it before mounting a defense.

[PillowRock]

Per zedz's suggestion, were I to cobble together a Top Five musical numbers, this would be a fair list:

I'm not at all sure this would be my final top 5 list if push came to shove, but here are some that I love that come to mind off hand right now and are outside the primary mainstream of "Hollywood Musicals" (or, at least, what is generally remembered and thought of that way; since it includes a couple of Best Song Oscar nominees):

"Blues in the Night" from Blues in the Night; it's just too bad that they put a little dialog from the main characters over the top of a few seconds of it. "My Momma done told me ....."

Speaking of which, having just watched the DVD with my Mom this past weekend, "The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B" by The Andrews Sisters in Buck Privates was a whole lot of fun.

The Lindy Hop number from Hellzapoppin'

The Moulin Rouge opening night finale from Renoir's French Can-Can; really I love that whole last 15 or 20 minutes from the time the doors of the club open to the crowd, but if you force me to whittle it down to *a* "number" I can go with the Can-Can chorus line big finale.

The Tobacco Factory sequence from Carlos Saura's Carmen; right after Carmen slashes with the knife is about as loud of a silence (if you know what I mean) as I can think of in film off the top of my head.

Honorable mention to "Time Warp" - "Sweet Transvestite" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show; yes, it's two songs, but the way that the one just flows directly into the other just plays as one big set piece to me.

Of course, if you start compiling a list of "best musical numbers from movies", you could get a whole slew of good nominees just from Stormy Weather. It meets the requirements in the first post of this thread, but the narrative is extremely thin and clearly just there as a framework on which to hang what plays as almost a WWII era African-American popular music Hall-of-Fame concert: Lena Horne doing the title song, Cab Calloway and his orchestra, Fats Waller and his band, Bojangles Robinson and the Nicholas Brothers showing off their considerable dancing chops, etc.

And I am another who really loves "America".

Note for viewing of a sub-genre: TCM is showing a fair number of "singing cowboy" pictures in July. I think that what I saw said it was on Friday nights.

[Matt]

I was all set to watch Lili and forget about (I am practically allergic to Leslie Caron), but I found myself finishing it and then immediately rewatching the last 20 minutes again. And I'll probably watch the whole film again tonight. It's not a musical in the strict MGM sense of the genre, but it's certainly not not a musical because there is singing and abundant choreography (though you couldn't call anything that Mel Ferrer does in the film "dancing,") and it won the WGA award for Best Written American Musical.

I can't say that I love it, but I'm gong to put it on my list somewhere, and I think that's because it's the closest thing I've seen to an American version of a Powell and Pressburger film. The influence of The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffmann is very apparent in this film, particularly in those last 20 minutes (and more in the vein of those films than An American in Paris, which was directly influenced by Gene Kelly seeing The Red Shoes). It's a pretty dark film, too, with a philosophical bent (I mean, a bitter cripple who uses puppets to relate to people and a homeless girl who talks to the puppets as if they were real people? What a pair!) All of this makes it astounding that it came out of MGM, but it feels almost like a perfect transitional film between the Mayer years and the Schary years.

I tend to love these "B" musicals more than MGM's tentpole Freed productions from around the same time, maybe because the music and dance feels more integrated into the story. It's like Joe Pasternak and Jack Cummings (and the directors who worked for them) understood and absorbed the lessons of Meet Me in St. Louis and made these small films with believable characters and integrated musical numbers, but Arthur Freed just continued to want bigger and longer spectacles, mainly about show business or fantastical characters. I do wonder what this film might have looked like had Vincente Minnelli not turned it down. And after watching Give a Girl a Break and Kiss Me Kate recently, it was nice to see a film in which Kurt Kasznar has some dignity.

[domino harvey]

Certainly I used to make Caron jokes with the best of them, but after seeing the 1-2 punch of Lili and Daddy Long Legs, I could no longer indulge!

[karmajuice]

I'm not participating in this because my knowledge of musicals is lacking, but I did want to make a suggestion. I watched Milos Forman's Konkurs the other day and it strikes me as a contender, depending on the flexibility of your definition of the genre. The whole film is intensely concerned with music and performance, and performances are often used to express the film's ideas and narrative concerns. On the other hand, some of the 'numbers' are purely entertaining and I found them as amusing as anything in a major Hollywood musical.

It's a marginal, oddball entry for sure, but I thought I'd toss it into the mix.

[domino harvey]

AKA Audition. I haven't seen it yet (Love me some Czech-era Forman though), will have to make sure it gets a watch before the project's over.

[zedz]

It hadn't occurred to me that Audition was a musical, but I love that film and am grateful for an excuse to revisit it.

EDIT: The Ondricek connection reminded me of O Lucky Man!, another of those odd films that has characters / material specifically inserted in a quite Brechtian way in order to turn it into a musical. Definitely the outer reaches of the genre, if you feel it qualifies at all, but well worth seeing for any reason, so why not this project?