10. “The Sound Of Music” (1965)
It’s never exactly been cool, even by musical standards, but find us a person who claims they’ve never taken any pleasure from “The Sound Of Music” and we’ll show you a liar. Yes, it’s sentimental, and a bit sickly, but Rodgers & Hammerstein stuffed it with great tunes; Robert Wise directs it beautifully, keeping the pace up over three hours and summoning up more than one truly iconic composition; and the performances from Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer are perfect. One only has to look at how many of the roadshow blockbuster musical films of the ’60s were so leaden and lumpen to see what a feat it is to have made “The Sound Of Music” so sprightly.
Best Number: It’s hard to beat the soaring opening title number.
9. “Hedwig And The Angry Inch” (2001)
The rare off-Broadway hit to make the big-screen trip, John Cameron Mitchell’s opus was mostly ignored on release, but has become an enduring cult favorite since, in part thanks to all-star Broadway revivals. It’s also a pre-Chazelle forerunner in that the musical doesn’t have to be a big-budget all-star bonanza, but can be re-appropriated and revived by independent cinema. Mitchell stars (as well as directs, with songs by Stephen Trask) as the title character, an East German trans woman whose sex change operation was botched, leaving her with the titular mono-inch member as she now fronts a rock band in the U.S. after following her American lover (Michael Pitt) there. It could have just been a monument to a mighty performance, but Mitchell makes something that feels raw, deeply felt, imaginatively shot, defiantly and gloriously queer, and with a soundtrack of terrific glam-rock songs.
Best Number: The deeply moving power ballad “Wig In A Box.”
8. “My Fair Lady” (1964)
Something of a return to form for genius director George Cukor, who’d been off the boil for a decade or so (actually since around the time of “A Star Is Born;” see above), “My Fair Lady” is as close to perfect as film adaptations of Broadway plays can get. It’s unashamedly theatrical, but the film frees up the production in interesting ways, most crucially perhaps in enabling the casting of Audrey Hepburn in the role of Eliza Doolittle, despite her lackluster singing voice (she was dubbed by Marni Nixon). Hepburn’s contribution is invaluable, even if her Cockney accent at the beginning is wildly erratic, and her morphing from guttersnipe to fine lady is one of the most satisfying and sublime ugly-ducking transformations in cinema — especially when she wears that Ascot outfit. Rex Harrison had already played the irascible Prof. Henry Higgins on stage, so the role fits him like the slippers he can never find, and it is all shot through with such charm, wit and romance that we’d even forgive it a dud song or two. But there aren’t any.
Best Number: We’re soppy, so it’ll be one of the love songs, but while “On the Street Where You Live” is probably the best tune, and we adore Harrison’s rendition of “I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face,” “I Could Have Danced All Night” takes the ribbon.
7. “Beauty And The Beast” (1991)
A live-action remake with songs intact is imminent (we’re both disturbed by the idea, and super excited to see Luke Evans as Gaston), which is as good a time to remember that even by the high standards of the ’90s Disney revival (we could have easily included “Aladdin” and “The Lion King,” too), “Beauty And The Beast” might be the best, or is at least the best musical. Inventively embellishing the classic fairy tale, it’s gorgeously animated while not shying away from being cartoonish, legitimately romantic, unafraid to be scary, and often very funny, but it truly soars with the songs. There isn’t any filler in the selection of songs by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman (the latter of whom sadly passed away before the film was released), from the raucous “Gaston” and the infectious “Be Our Guest” to Angela Lansbury’s melancholy delivery of the title song. Keeping them intact for the new film is the smartest decision they could have made.
Best Number: “Be Our Guest” edges it for us.
6. “The Wizard Of Oz” (1939)
The pop-culture legacy of “The Wizard Of Oz” is fascinating. On the one hand, you have the fantasy elements, capturing imaginations in a way that still sees Hollywood return to L. Frank Baum’s magical world today, as with Sam Raimi’s recent prequel or new TV series “Emerald City.” But almost separately, there’s its legacy as a musical, summed up best by the enduring classic “Over The Rainbow,” but enduring far beyond that: The film’s stuffed with music, and almost every song is gorgeously filmed, performed and written (all we have to do is write the words “We’re Off To See The Wizard” and that shit will be running ’round your head all day).
Best Number: “Over The Rainbow,” obviously.
5. “Cabaret” (1972)
One of the richest, most sophisticated and most grown-up Broadway musicals in the history of the form finds exactly the adaptation it deserves in Bob Fosse’s extraordinary film version. Loosely adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s “The Berlin Stories,” detailing the friendship between a young British expat (Michael York) and American singer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) against the rise of the Nazis, it sees Fosse pretty much take the hit stage show apart and put it back together, ensuring that all the musical numbers are diegetic. By refusing to let the film escape into fantasy, he makes his story of Weimar decadence and the rise of evil (beautifully performed by Minnelli, Joel Grey and others) feel all the more powerful, and while some of the films on this list feel like relics of their era, it’s perhaps only now in 2017 that it rings out the loudest as a warning.
Best Number: Hard to pick, but Minnelli absolutely nails “Mein Herr.”
4. “West Side Story” (1961)
We’re normally supporters of letting Steven Spielberg do whatever the hell he wants to do, but the news in the last few years that he’s planning a “West Side Story” remake feels like the exception, because Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ film of Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents’s musical masterpiece is virtually impossible to improve upon. The most Oscar-awarded musical in history takes the story of “Romeo & Juliet” and sets it on the streets of then-modern-day New York, and has a thrilling energy that still feels fresh today. Gorgeous-looking; lushly romantic; hugely exciting; impeccably staged, choreographed and edited; and stuffed with classic songs, it’s an ageless classic and with due respect, Spielberg should stay the hell away from it.
Best Number: The balletic opening prologue still feels like a firecracker.
3. “The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg” (1964)
The most obvious influence on Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land,” Jacques Demy‘s adorable, sweet-sad film is deceptively meticulous in everything from its staging to the sherbet-fountain palette he uses throughout. It bears more in common with an opera than a regular musical (or than “La La Land,” for that matter) in that even the most casual of conversational lines are sung, but the lightness of the melodies and the voices (all dubbed) keep it fresh as opposed to heavy or overly classical. Starring Catherine Deneuve at her most dazzlingly beautiful as the daughter of an umbrella-shop owner whose lover is drafted and unknowingly leaves her pregnant with his child, it is a slip of a plot really, but somehow it feels like life, and though it is always unassuming and intimate, the fate of these two separated lovers feels like the most tragic and epic love story ever to have mostly unfolded in gas stations and railroad cafes. Just completely gorgeous.
Best Number: The whole film is a number really, but the catchiest and loveliest recurring melody is the love theme, as heard here.
2. “All That Jazz” (1979)
Bob Fosse‘s extraordinary metafictional semi-autobiographical odyssey shared the Palme d’Or with Akira Kurosawa‘s “Kagemusha” and it’s with nothing but respect for the Japanese master’s epic that we say Fosse maybe should have won outright. “All That Jazz” is a truly incredible piece of work, a swirling, psychedelic, scorching and self-annihilatingly scabrous piece of work that uses music and dance as a conduit into the unraveling psychology of Fosse surrogate Roy Scheider (in an absolutely barnstorming performance that never gets the props it deserves). Fosse, more prolific on stage, only directed five films, three of which, including this one, netted him Best Director nominations. He won, deservedly, for the terrific “Cabaret” (see above), but “All That Jazz” is his masterpiece, one of those rare films where it feels like the filmmaker has left everything, but everything, up there on the screen so that there simply can’t be anything left.
Best Number: The orgiastic, explosive, surrealist ending is just incredible, but for pure visual pleasure and as a great example of the way Fosse could choreograph and then shoot dancing bodies with an unequalled level of sensual, tactile sexiness, here’s “Take Off With Us (Airotica).”
1. “Singin’ In The Rain” (1952)
The recent passing of Debbie Reynolds brought Stanley Donen‘s 1952 musical back into the popular conversation for the saddest of reasons, but not even that tragic circumstance can make watching this film anything other than an instant jolt of joy. “Singin’ In The Rain” is not just a peerless musical, but also a very romantic romance, a very funny comedy and a surprisingly biting satire about the hubris and mythmaking of Hollywood, all set with an insider’s skewering eye for detail during the era when silents gave way to talkies. In being all those things, in the package of a musical — perhaps the quintessential American genre alongside the Western — there’s a very good case to be made that “Singin’ In The Rain” is in fact the finest Hollywood film ever made. Certainly, the seemingly effortless concoction of song, dance, romance, drama and pratfall makes it one of the most evergreen products of the studio era. More than many genres, musicals come into and out of fashion, but “Singin’ In The Rain” is, now and forever, the exception that can always be made for perfection.
Best Number: Gene Kelly‘s lamppost dance is iconic for a reason, but it’s impossible to choose just that one, so we’re adding Donald O’Connor‘s “Make ‘Em Laugh” and the trio’s “Good Morning” below. For a blast of pure happiness, hit play on any one of them.
As ever, even 50 isn’t enough to cover all the things we would have liked to include. Among the heavy-hitters that found themselves on the outside were Parker & Stone’s other cinematic musical “Team America: World Police;” Tim Burton’s pretty good “Sweeney Todd;” the not-quite-as-good-as-we-remembered-it “Seven Brides For Seven Brothers;” Otto Preminger’s mostly unavailable “Porgy & Bess” film; and Spike Lee’s recent, rather uneven but rewarding “Chi-Raq.”
We also considered “Oklahoma,” “Hairspray,” “Moulin Rouge!,” “Fiddler On The Roof,” “The Young Girls Of Rochefort,” “Circus,” “Evita,” “Funny Face,” “Tommy,” “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Hair!,” “Sing Street,” “Brigadoon,” “Silk Stockings,” “Easter Parade,” “Dreamgirls,” “Fame,” “Aladdin,” “The Lion King” and “Carousel,” but for one reason or another, they didn’t quite make the cut. Anything else you would have included? Let us know in comments (ideally through the medium of song).
