I was surprised when two noted sportswriters, Keith Law and Joe Posnanski, came out with personal top-ten lists of movie musicals around Christmas time. You would think that this kind of subject would be off-limits given the assumption, made often by some of my bosses in my early years of Pinstriped-Bibling, that the audience was so macho as to barely tolerate reading words of more than one syllable, let alone references to the broader culture. Now, here we are, more than a decade later, writing about musicals in sports blogs.
The lists by the respected Mssrs. Law and Posnanski gave me much to agree and disagree with. First their lists (annotations available on their sites) followed by my own annotated list.
1. Singin’ in the Rain
2. My Fair Lady
3. The Music Man
4. Once
5. White Christmas
6. Royal Wedding
7. Holiday Inn
8. Aladdin
9. Moulin Rouge
10. Mary Poppins
1. Singin’ in the Rain
2. The Music Man
3. The Sound of Music
4. West Side Story
5. Fiddler on the Roof
6. Beauty and the Beast
7. Grease
8. Oklahoma
9. My Fair lady
10. Hairspray
THE PINSTRIPED BIBLE TOP 10 MUSICALS
10. A HARD DAY’S NIGHT (1964)
This thought isn’t original with me, and I wish that I remembered the author of it: the version of the Beatles depicted in this film is often compared to the Marx Brothers, but that is inapt: the Marx Brothers were insane men in a sane world, whereas the Beatles are the only sane people in an insane world. This may, in fact, describe the whole career of the band. The supporting cast, playing characters whose entire existences are devoted to making the Lads’ lives difficult, is extremely difficult. Highlights include the title number, as the Beatles try to escape the world’s love, the card game that turns into “I Should Have Known Better” (the scene most like a trad musical), and Ringo’s time in exile to the tune of “This Boy.”
9. SWING TIME (1936)
It’s tough to choose among Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers vehicles, but this one gets my vote because of the sheer number of great Dorothy Fields-Jerome Kern songs debuted: “Pick Yourself Up,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “A Fine Romance,” “Never Gonna Dance.” Points deducted for some really asinine staging by director George Stevens (Astaire sings “The Way You Look Tonight,” a top ten American popular song, to a bathroom door) and the one blackface number of Astaire’s career (should have taken the 0-fer, Fred). Still, a lot of points are earned back by “Pick Yourself Up,” Fred pretending he needs help from Ginger’s dance instructor. “Shall We Dance,” which the duo made the next year, is also quite good, with a Gershwin-Gershwin score that includes “They All Laughed,” “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” However, I might be the only one amused by Astaire saying “Orchichornya!” over and over again for the first 15 minutes of the film.
8. AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951)
This Gene Kelly film came out the year before “Singin’ in the Rain,” and took all the Academy Awards, so the better film got stiffed. The use of old Gershwin tunes works fine, but the climactic ballet, which might have been the selling point back in ’51, stops the picture dead. The film as a whole is kind of dour, with Kelly showing more bitterness than charm throughout (exception: the “I Got Rhythm” number), and you never do get the sense of why Leslie Caron is so compelling to all these people. On the plus side, the film doesn’t just hit big Gershwin songs, but some undeserved obscurities such as “By Strauss,” “This Time It’s Really Love,” and “Stairway to Paradise,” everything Oscar Levant does is wonderful, and the actual Winston Churchill shows up.
7. GREASE (1978)
As the father of a young girl, I really wonder about its lesson to women: to get the guy, you have to conform, or more than conform, completely overlay your personality to fit his tastes. It’s also overlong, and the songs don’t all fit (there are interpolations both of pop from the 50s and songs written specifically for the film). All the “teenagers” also appear to be 35, particularly Stockard Channing, who though excellent, was at least twice as old as the character she played.
6. THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)
Hard to believe both Law and Posnanski dropped this film while listing “The Music Man.” You can only lose by arguing with a classic bit of Americana, but I’m dumb enough to try: the problem with the Robert Preston picture is its calculated artificiality. All musicals ask you to suspend disbelief in requiring that you accept that people are going to burst into song at key moments. The key challenge in making a film of a musical is setting: a stage set is automatically an artificial construct, a box-sized reproduction of a place set inside another box. If it’s “Oklahoma,” the corn is made of cardboard. If it’s “South Pacific,” the ocean is implied but unseen, or at best (and worst) a painted backdrop. Thus you’ve already had to set aside some sense of reality as soon as the curtain went up. A movie is a picture of a place, and the hard truth of the corn or the ocean makes it just a little bit harder to accept the operatic nature of the story. Consider Gene Kelly’s “On the Town,” one of the first musicals to mix in some location shots along with scenes filmed on sets. When Kelly dreams of romancing Vera-Ellen, dancing out his feelings on an obviously artificial rooftop (the “Miss Turnstiles Ballet”), it works wonderfully: why should a dream look real? Conversely, when Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin wrap up “New York, New York,” on the ice rink at Rockefeller Center, you’re too aware of the crowd watching them and the blocking of the shot to really buy into the illusion that it’s anything but a show. That’s why the few modern musicals that are made are either (1) cartoons or (2) turn all the musical numbers into heightened reality dream sequences, as in “Chicago,” where they take place parallel to the action (something cribbed from the late Dennis Potter).
“The Music Man” tries to attack this problem by emphasizing the artificiality of the musical construct, and while I can’t say that the director made the wrong choice—what are you going to do to add realism to “The Music Man,” put the Battle of the Bulge around it?—it looks so artificial, so plywood-tacky, that you expect the whole two-dimensional set to blow over with the next Shirley Jones high note. There had to be a middle ground somewhere, and the film just doesn’t hit it. I will concede, however, that when Jones flings off her glasses and joins the revels in the “Marian the Librarian” number that it’s one of the more subtly erotic gestures you’ll ever see in a purely “wholesome” story.
“Oz” tackles the artificiality of the musical by very intelligently setting the first segment of the film in sepia tones, so that when Dorothy is sent on her twister-motivated head-trip, the fantasy setting of Oz pops off the screen in garish three-strip Technicolor. There’s no doubt you’re somewhere where the normal rules apply. Sure, the people sing, but the trees are also pissed. The film could rank higher but for two factors: pacing is a problem, perhaps the result of having had two or more directors work on the thing, and it stops being a musical in the third act.
5. MARY POPPINS (1964)
Walt Disney should have made “The Music Man,” because the old master confronts some of the same problems here and licks ‘em (by way of director Robert Stevenson). You get an Edwardian England that’s clearly artificial and yet seems real enough for the characters to inhabit. The cast is perfect, even Dick Van ****, who Neil Gaiman mocked in “The Sandman” for his broad fake cockney. David Tomlinson never gets much notice, but he’s very good in the potentially unsympathetic role of the career-obsessed father. The Sherman Brothers never wrote a score this good again, not for lack of trying.
4. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1991)
Pretty much a classic book musical, with great art. Probably should have won the Best Picture Oscar that year; the field was “Beast,” “Silence of the Lambs,” “Bugsy,” “JFK,” and “The Prince of Tides.” “Silence” is a good picture with a great performance by Anthony Hopkins, but in the end is just another serial killer film.
3. HIGH SOCIETY (1956)
Cole Porter’s last great score; Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Grace Kelly, Celeste Holm, and Louis Armstrong as a Greek Chorus figure? Wow. You could argue that this is even better than its original, “The Philadelphia Story.” I’m not sure that I believe that Crosby could ever have been married to Kelly, but I didn’t believe Cary Grant could have married Katherine Hepburn either.
2. THE BAND WAGON (1953)
Born in 1899, Fred Astaire kept trying to retire during the 1950s, but good vehicles always kept him coming back. In this film, he parodied himself, playing a washed-up Hollywood actor who is going to try to relaunch his career with a Broadway hit. It’s all an excuse to revisit a bunch of old Howard Dietz/Arthur Schwartz songs, but the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who had earlier been asked to revitalize the Arthur Freed/Nacio Herb Brown catalogue for “Singin’ in the Rain,” pull off the same trick here. I can do without the painfully ubiquitous “Triplets” number, but you can’t beat the self-pitying “By Myself” or “A Shine On Your Shoes.” The film suffers from the deplorable 1950s Metro habit of ending every picture with some kind of ballet, but the Mickey Spillane parody that Astaire works through at least doesn’t take itself seriously.
1. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN
I assume you know why. Compelling real-world story of the coming of sound to the motion pictures, a great comedy turn by Jean Hagen, a terrific specialty number by Donald O’ Connor (though the song was blatantly stolen from Cole Porter), and Kelly at his peaches ‘n’ cyanide best.
RELATED NOTES THAT DON’T FIT IN THE TOP TEN:
I. POSSIBLY THE WORST FILM MUSICAL I’VE EVER SEEN
“Grease II.” In musicals, the purpose of a song is to advance the plot or tell you something about the characters you didn’t know. Why, then, a four-minute song about bowling?
II. A FILM MUSICAL THAT MAKES BETTER USE OF A BOWLING ALLEY THAN “GREASE II”
Until someone makes a “Big Lebowski” musical, “Across the Universe” with “I’ve Just Seen a Face.”
III. GREAT SCENES IN MUSICALS THAT OTHERWISE HAVE THEIR UPS AND DOWNS
In no particular order. You can find at least fuzzy versions of most of this stuff on youtube:
• Aretha Franklin’s waitress singing “Think” in “The Blues Brothers.”
• Gary Busey as Buddy Holly switching from country to rock by way of Sonny Curtis’s “Rock Around With Ollie Vee” at the beginning of “The Buddy Holly Story.”
• Errol Flynn’s one musical number in the Paramount mash-up, “Thank Your Lucky Stars.” Errol: “Hooray, I won the war—and I won the one before!”
• Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling in “Royal Wedding.”
• Astaire and Eleanor Powell dancing to about 14 minutes of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” in “The Broadway Melody of 1940.”
• The unlikely trio of Bing Crosby, Cedric Hardwicke, and William Bendix “Busy Doing Nothing” in the largely drab, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”
• Cyd Cherise getting to know the wonders of lingerie in “Silk Stockings.”
• “Cool, Considerate Men,” filmed for “1776” but cut, reportedly because it annoyed Richard Nixon. It’s included in the DVD version.
• Gene Kelly dancing with his reflection in “Cover Girl.”
• The entire population of Paris (and the French military marching on the Ruhr valley?) joining Maurice Chevalier in “Isn’t it Romantic” in “Love Me Tonight.”
• Bobby Van’s relentless hopping in the “Take Me to Broadway” sequence of the otherwise forgettable “Small Town Girl.” Had it been done without cuts it would have been even more impressive, but there are a few. The “That’s Entertainment” version cuts it down, so beware of that.
• Audrey Hepburn in that black suit for her dance sequence in “Funny Face.”
• Gene Kelly singing “I Like Myself” (never doubted that, Gene) while dancing on roller skates in “It’s Always Fair Weather,” the sort-of sequel to “On the Town” that felt like we needed an answer to the question, “What if those three happy-go-lucky sailors came back from the war and spent the rest of their lives feeling really depressed?”
• The barn-raising scene in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”
• Betty Hutton breaking through to stardom doing Johnny Mercer’s “Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry” in “The Fleet’s In.”
• Danny Kaye’s “Maladjusted Jester” in a personal favorite of mine (more of a swashbuckler parody than a musical, though it has about four songs), “The Court Jester.”
• Christopher Walken’s striptease in “Pennies from Heaven.”
• Richard Gere and company performing “We Both Reached for the Gun” in Chicago.
• The utterly melancholy “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by Judy Garland in “Meet Me in St. Louis.”
• Tommy Steele and Petula Clark singing “Something Sort of Grandish” in “Finian’s Rainbow.”
• Astaire pitching off a high set to his doom in “Blue Skies,” the downer version of “Holiday Inn.”
OTHER STUFF ON THIS TOPIC THAT DOESN’T PARTICULARLY FIT ANYWHERE
• I can’t think of an Elvis musical that deserves to be here or that I would even watch again, but any time I catch “Viva Las Vegas” on TV I wait around for Ann-Margaret to show up.
• Someone should remake “Gypsy.” Rosalind Russell was a great actress in the right part, but that Mama Rose wasn’t the right fit.
• There’s something about “My Fair Lady” that doesn’t work for me. Maybe it’s the Marni Nixon dubbing of Audrey Hepburn.
• “West Side Story” seems a mess to me. The dramatic sequencing is all out of place compared to the play, the New York-realism doesn’t work, and you’ve got more dubbing, this time of Natalie Wood. And once again, the “kids” are pushing 40.
• True story or not, and as good as some of the songs are, the juxtaposition of Nazis and joyous singing is hard for me to take. I’ve also never seen a version of it when I believe the attraction between the two leads. I sure don’t believe that Christopher Plummer is at all interested in Julie Andrews.
• “Fiddler on the Roof” gives you the problem of realism vs. fantasy again, and the reality of pogroms and expulsion is a bit too hard to defeat in this setting.
• I’ll take “Moulin Rouge” in segments, but watching it straight through was a test.
• “Topsy-Turvy” might actually go on my top ten, a making-of “the Mikado” in which we learn that ugly people make beautiful things.
• The two baseball musicals, the MGM original “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” which was meant to costar Leo Durocher but doesn’t, and the adaptation of “Damn Yankees,” just aren’t very good in whole or in part.
