I noticed that we never did a top 50 musical films on this site before, so maybe I should ask about favorite musicals here.

Some day we might do a Top 50 or even Top 100 musical films. What are some of your favorite musicals?

Re: Favorite Musicals
 

Eventually we will likely do a countdown list for favourite musicals. Some of my favourite musicals include:

Top Hat (1935)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Singin' in the Rain (1952)
There's No Business Like Show Business (1954)
West Side Story (1961)
Les Parapluies De Cherbourg (1964)
The Sound of Music (1965)
The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Les Misérables (2012)
Into the Woods (2014)
La La Land (2016)
The Greatest Showman (2017)
Annette (2021)
In the Heights (2021)
Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

I like those three as well especially the first two listed. I also enjoyed Mary Poppins, White Christmas, and Jesus Christ Superstar as well. I do not know much about musicals, but I am planning on watching ones like Cabaret, Singin in The Rain, and West Side Story very soon.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show
The Music Man
Cabin In The Sky
The Young Girls Of Rochefort
Grease

Probably a bunch more but those are the ones I watch the most, probably, at least the last few years.

Not really into musicals. But there are a few I quite enjoy


La La Land (2016)
Hair (1979)
Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)
All That Jazz (1979)

I believe Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) to be one of the greatest musicals ever made. The dance routines (by Michael Kidd) alone were astonishing, athletic, and innovative. It won the Oscar for the musical score, and was nominated for 4 others.

I recall seeing it in the theater as a kid, and I was not only flabbergasted, but I fell in love with it. It still holds up today.

In no particular order:
Grease 2 (1982)
The Pajama Game (1957)
Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)
Everything I Have Is Yours (1952)
Bloodhounds of Broadway (1952)
South Pacific (1958)
Holiday Inn (1942)
White Christmas (1954)
Swing Time (1936)
Calamity Jane (1953)
Easter Parade (1948)
Sweet Charity (1969)

Just about any musical with: Fred Astaire, Doris Day, Judy Garland, Mitzi Gaynor, Vera-Ellen & Cyd Charisse and I'm sure I forgot a few!

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bnlAso3p7A

I mostly hate musicals, but I love this movie so much.

Re: Favorite Musicals
 

Not counting Disney animated films, these are some of my favorites...

Moulin Rouge!
An American in Paris
Once
The Wizard of Oz
La La Land
Singin' in the Rain
Cabin in the Sky

Musicals, especially the old classic musicals, is one of my favorite genres, so this is a long list. :)


1776 (1972)
A Chorus Line (1985)
Annie Get Your Gun (1950)
Beyond the Sea (2004)
Brigadoon (1954)
Bye Bye Birdie (1963)
Calamity Jane (1953)
Chicago (2002)
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)
Cinderella (1957-TV Movie)
Cinderella (1965)
Damn Yankees (1958)
Eddie and the Cruisers (1983)
Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
Grease (1978)
The Idolmaker (1984)
The Jazz Singer (1980)
Les Misérables (2012)
Mamma Mia (2008)
Mary Poppins (1964)
The Music Man (1962)
My Fair Lady (1964)
Oklahoma (1955)
Oliver (1968)
The Pajama Game (1957)
The Pirate Movie (1982)
The Pirates of Penzance (1983)
Pure Country (1992)
Singin' in the Rain (1952)
Thunder Alley (1985)
West Side Story (1961)
Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory (1971)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Xanadu (1980)
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)


Animated Musicals:
Anastasia (1997)
Beauty and the Beast (1991)
The Jungle Book (1967)
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)


Musicals (Live on Broadway):
Annie (Broadway)
Barnum - with Michael Crawford (Live on Broadway-1986)
Cats - The Musical (1998)
Into the Woods - American Playhouse (1991)
Les Misérables the 10th Anniversary Dream Cast in Concert (1995)
Oklahoma - with Hugh Jackman (Live in London - 1999)
Phantom of the Opera (2004 movie, but dubbed with the original London cast starring Michael Crawford)
The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall (2011)
'South Pacific' in Concert from Carnegie Hall (with Reba McEntire - 2006)

Re: Favorite Musicals
 

I don't think we ever will if I'm honest. That's just my thought though.

Yes we will. There has got to be one for musicals.

I like your spirit!

I absolutely LOVED Cry-Baby!!

I noticed that you had West Side Story on your list...any thoughts on the remake? Have you seen it? As for your stage choices, I once tried to watch a DVD of the stage version of Cats and was bored to death by it. Have never been able to get through Les Miz, though I did love the Hugh Jackman Oklahoma and the Carnegie Hall South Pacific more for Brian Stokes Mitchell than McEntire...Nellie's songs seemed to be a bit out of McEntire's range.

I like the remake of West Side Story, but not as much as the original. I thought Ansel Elgort was a little bland as Tony, but I also thought that Richard Beymer was a little bland as Tony in the original version, so maybe that's just the way character is supposed to be. I liked that they changed the locations of some of the songs, like setting "Officer Krupke" in the police station.

I haven't seen the recent movie version of Cats, (and I'm not expecting to like it based on the reviews), but I love the stage version. I was supposed to see it on Broadway many years ago, but something came up and I wasn't able to go. I still regret not seeing it live.

I saw Les Misérables on Broadway with Colm Wilkinson as Jean Valjean, and I've been a fan of it ever since. I thought Hugh Jackman did a phenomenal job in the movie, but I'm not a fan of Russell Crowe's singing voice.

I love Brian Stokes Mitchell in South Pacific, as well as Reba McEntire. I saw her on Broadway in "Annie Get Your Gun", and she was terrific. I wish I could find her version on DVD.

Tony is a very difficult character to cast, I've never seen any actor nail it, but I think Elgort got closer than Beymer. I really didn't like "Gee Officer Krupke" in the remake, the number was much funnier in the original. The other number I preferred in the original was "Cool"...I think the choreography in the original is breathtaking. On the other hand, I did like the position of "Cool" in the story. As a storytelling tool, I think "Cool" worked better in the remake.

I like this one an awful lot...
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://i.imgur.com/OXkCKyK.jpg
Pennies from Heaven
Directed by Herbert Ross
Screenplay by Dennis Potter
Cinematography by Gordon Willis
CAST: Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, Jessica Harper,
Vernel Bagneris, John McMartin, and Christopher Walken
1981, approximately 108 minutes

In 1981, Steve Martin took an artistic risk which might have drastically changed his then-new screen image and Herbert Ross tried to reinvent the Musical for a new, post-modern sensibility. The film was Pennies from Heaven, and it was a box-office flop. A few critics sang its praises, including Pauline Kael, but by and large it was dismissed. I think it is a brilliant movie that was so far ahead of its time, and still lies mostly undiscovered.

http://www.movieforums.com/community...1&d=1310677038

British television writer and novelist Dennis Potter ("The Singing Detective") had a long, successful career starting in the 1960s in the UK, and one of his biggest accomplishments was the 1978 BBC mini-series "Pennies from Heaven", starring Bob Hoskins. It tells the story of a sheet-music salesman in 1930s Britain who dreams of living out the lyrics of the songs he peddles. These rich fantasies are contrasted sharply with the darkness of his real life. Potter pared down and adapted his own eight-hour teleplay into a film screenplay, shifting the setting to Depression-era Chicago, which caught the attention of Herbert Ross who had been on quite a roll in the 1970s, helming such projects as The Goodbye Girl, The Sunshine Boys, The Last of Sheila, The Turning Point, California Suite, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and Play it Again, Sam. Steve Martin, fresh from mega success as a stand-up comic playing to rock-and-roll-size crowds and distilling that wild and crazy persona first to the small screen on "Saturday Night Live" and his own specials, and then into The Jerk (1979), signed on to play the dark and complicated lead. Broadway star Bernadette Peters, who was Martin's co-star in The Jerk and at the time his real-life paramour, and Jessica Harper (Phantom of the Paradise, Suspiria, My Favorite Year) would co-star, with Christopher Walken in film-stealing support.

Pennies from Heaven is the musical as psychotic episode. The numbers are often elaborate set pieces replicating the styles if not the scenes of some classic cinema Musicals, of which Busby Berkeley himself would have been proud. But in a break from the language of the Musical they are delusions that have absolutely zero to do with reality. The usual conceit of the Musical is that the song interludes further the plot and/or give voice to internal emotions of the characters. But not here. Martin's character Arthur is a bizarre and almost irredeemably amoral man, who creates a pretend morality in the music he loves and envisions. He claims, certainly to himself and by extension the audience, to be a pure romantic dreamer trying to honestly make his way in the world, but his selfish and hurtful actions tell otherwise. It's a rather brilliant concept, and to me works even better as a movie than as a TV project (though make no mistake, the BBC version is also spectacular and a must-see). Many of the film's references are to the otherworlds created by movie magic, worlds that millions flocked to during the Depression in order to delude themselves into a fantasy for part of an afternoon or evening. As Fred Astaire was floating across screens in top hat and tails, much of the audience was wondering if they could find steady work or keep the tenuous hold on their income and possessions. So in one of Heaven's best sequences when Martin and Peters actually enter Follow the Fleet (1936), the Astaire & Rogers classic, the circle is complete and Arthur's fantasy blends with the larger societal fantasy.

http://www.movieforums.com/community...1&d=1310681051

Another stylistic risk/choice the film makes, carrying over from what was done in the TV version, is to have the actors lip-synch to the existing period tracks, rather than re-record them with these actors. Obviously stage star Peters could have done just about anything they asked, vocally, but this added layer of artifice is intentional, both making some of the song choices seem that much odder and funnier, being mouthed by the protagonists, and also not pretending these fantasies are to be taken in simple genre terms, but almost as if they were being done in front of a mirror in your attic when nobody was home to catch you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHyWFWJV61k

The look of the film is fantastic, with two basic palettes: the glitz of Hollywood and the dim of Edward Hopper. Several of his paintings are brought to life, including his most iconic, "Nighthawks". Gordon Willis, who was one of the most respected and imitated cinematographers of his era, having lensed The Godfather series for Coppola and Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men before becoming Woody Allen's go-to collaborator on Annie Hall, Manhattan, Interiors, Stardust Memories, Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo and on and on, creates some stunning tableaus and homages.

http://www.movieforums.com/community...1&d=1393752161
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...opper_1942.jpg

Steve Martin has had an incredibly successful and quite diverse career in film, and while he eventually worked his way into some darker and sometimes intentionally comedy-free projects a couple decades later, it was probably too early and too bizarre a project for his fanbase to accept at the time, en masse. How might his career trajectory had changed if Pennies from Heaven wound up with multiple, high-profile Oscar nominations like Picture and Director? We'll never know.

http://www.movieforums.com/community...1&d=1393754081

This scene, in the next YouTube link, is a perfect example of what the film does. Christopher Walken only has one scene, really. At a particularly low point for the Peters character she wanders into a bar on the bad side of town. The resident pimp, Walken, approaches her, buys her a drink, and offers her a job...on her back. It is tense and frightening, a cruel fate for this character who did nothing but trust the wrong man. And then, right when things look bleakest, Walken breaks into the Cole Porter tune "Let's Misbehave" by Irving Aaronson and His Commanders...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54iR0xFkEfQ

Dark and ironic eye-candy, this is Herbert Ross' masterpiece in my book, waiting to be rediscovered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPRL3IdIcVc

https://www.movieforums.com/communit...62#post1047762
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------