Top 10: Movie Musicals

I love musicals, especially the old-fashioned 50s and 60s types. There's something about singing and dancing in a film that makes me happy. Here I put together 10 movie musicals I like, but because I'm too tired to conceive my own writing the notes I include below are excerpts from movie reviews written by others.

Unfortunately I only have 10 slots. Singin' in the Rain (pictured above), as much as I love that film, is at the dreadful 11th place.

(10) South Pacific (1958)
It gives out with most of the enchantments of the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein 2d musical. It is performed by a cast almost as winning as the one that played it on Broadway. And what it lacks in the more subtle values the show had upon the stage is balanced by frank spectacular features that will probably fascinate folks who go to films.
            ~ Bosley Crowther, New York Times

(9) Moulin Rouge! (2001)
The movie is all color and music, sound and motion, kinetic energy, broad strokes, operatic excess. While it might be most convenient to see it from the beginning, it hardly makes any difference; walk in at any moment and you'll quickly know who is good and bad, who is in love and why--and then all the rest is song, dance, spectacular production numbers, protestations of love, exhalations of regret, vows of revenge and grand destructive gestures. It's like being trapped on an elevator with the circus.
            ~ Roger Ebert

(8) West Side Story (1961)
So the dancing is remarkable, and several of the songs have proven themselves by becoming standards, and there are moments of startling power and truth. "West Side Story" remains a landmark of musical history. But if the drama had been as edgy as the choreography, if the lead performances had matched Moreno's fierce concentration, if the gangs had been more dangerous and less like bad-boy Archies and Jugheads, if the ending had delivered on the pathos and tragedy of the original, there's no telling what might have resulted. The movie began with a brave vision, and it is best when you sense that vision surviving the process by which it was turned into safe entertainment.
            ~ Roger Ebert

(7) Hairspray (2007)
"Hairspray" is just plain fun. Or maybe not so plain. There's a lot of craft and slyness lurking beneath the circa-1960s goofiness. The movie seems guileless and rambunctious, but it looks just right (like a Pat Boone musical) and sounds just right (like a Golden Oldies disc) and feels just right (like the first time you sang "We Shall Overcome" and until then it hadn't occurred to you that we should).

            ~ Roger Ebert

(6) Les Misérables (2012)

Less a fully realized film than a strung-together series of set pieces, showstoppers, diva moments and production numbers, “Les Misérables” contains multitudes -- not only in the form of a huge cast but in its own contradictions. If, by the film’s inescapably stirring final half hour, even the most inured audience members find themselves weeping openly for the story’s tragic heroines, plucky revolutionaries and idealistic young lovers.

            ~ Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

(5) My Fair lady (1964)

"My Fair Lady" is the best and most unlikely of musicals, during which I cannot decide if I am happier when the characters are talking or when they are singing. The songs are literate and beloved; some romantic, some comic, some nonsense, some surprisingly philosophical, every single one wonderful.

            ~ Roger Ebert

(4) Mary Poppins (1964)

Maybe it's our imagination, but there's something about the tunes that Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman have written for this film that reminds us of the tunes in "My Fair Lady." And also the Edwardian costumes and the mellow London settings recollect that hit. A brilliant ballet in which Miss Andrews and Dick Van Dyke as Bert scatter and leap with a gang of sooty chimney-sweeps on the London rooftops is reminiscent, too. The comparison is not unflattering to either. "Mary Poppins" is a fair-lady film.

            ~ Bosley Crowther, New York Times

(3) Oliver! (1968)
"Oliver" succeeds at both. John Box, the designer, has created magnificent sets that reproduce Victorian England in perfect detail --and never to excess. John Green, musical director at M-G-M during its "golden age of musicals" in the late 1940s and early 1950s, was brought in to do the music and has hit the right balance. "Oliver!" succeeds finally because of its taste. It never stoops for cheap effects and never insults our intelligence. And because we can trust it, we can let ourselves go with it, and we do. It is a splendid experience.
            ~ Roger Ebert

(2) Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
Fiddler – a classic tale of Russian Jews circa 1905 struggling to hold onto their tradition in the face of tumultuous change – remains a vivid, joyous, searingly moving affair. In a large part, it’s thanks to leading man Topol, simultaneously an immovable object and irresistible force.
            ~ Ali Catterall, Total Film

(1) The Sound of Music (1965)
Robert Wise's adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical still has a little soul in its bones, with its reactionary nature tempered by Ernest Lehman's supple screenplay, and its elephantine running-time eased by a set of songs that lodge in your system like hookworms. The mood is set by that spectacularly brazen, unblushing opening shot, in which the camera comes swooping over the Alps, tilting south to target Julie Andrews' singing governess.
            ~ Xan Brooks, The Guardian