Gang members, gold diggers, witches and nuns all have their place on our list of the best musical movies ever made
No film genre is more polarising than the musical. Even if you love both music and movies, combining the two into a storytelling device can drive certain cinephiles insane. Why would you sing dialogue rather than speak it? Why the hell are all the extras suddenly dancing? One person’s heart-swelling song-and-dance number is another’s nails on a chalkboard. But the truth is, lavish musical performances have been an integral part of movie culture ever since the first major talkie, 1927’s The Jazz Singer. So if you’re going to consider yourself a true film fan, learning to love the musical is a crucial part of your education. Here are 40 great places to start.
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In this fun, fizzy Jacques Demy musical comedy, real-life siblings Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac star as sisters teaching ballet in the French coastal town of Rochefort who long to run away to Paris. The movie has long existed in the shadow of Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but it possesses charms all its own, notably an upbeat soundtrack from Michel Legrand and Gene Kelly as Dorléac’s American love interest.
A landmark in Indian cinema, Sholay isn’t strictly a ‘musical’, just as it isn’t strictly a western, comedy, action movie or melodrama. But song-and-dance numbers are a significant part of the film’s multigenre stew - see the five-minute scene of heroes Veeru and Jai rolling around the countryside on a motorcycle built for two, singing an ode to friendship, which took nearly a month to shoot.
An adaptation of late Rent playwright Jonathan Larson’s semi-autobiographical account of his early career struggles, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut is powered by a spirited lead performance from Andrew Garfield and pared-down, character-driven musical numbers. It’s still not for everyone – what musical is? – but it’s an ideal entry point for sceptics.
MGM used only four of Leonard Bernstein’s numbers from the 1944 Broadway show, though of course they retained the fresh-off-the-boat anthem “New York, New York” (with its handy mnemonic, “The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down”). On the plus side: Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and other Navy boys dancing around NYC landmarks. In fact, it was the first time a studio sent a crew to shoot on real locations around New York City. How’s that for a picture postcard?
‘Please sir: I want some more,’ says the titular waif, unsated by his rations at a gruelling workhouse for orphans, in the opening scene of Oliver! And the rest of director Carol Reed’s movie – adapted from Lionel Bart’s tune-stuffed 1960 musical version of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist – gives us more, more, more in every scene: giant production numbers set in teeming 19th-century London, committed clowning and melodrama from actors large and small, and a generous slab of savoury Jewish hamming by Ron Moody as the criminal ringleader Fagin, who seems to have immigrated from some seedy corner Fiddler on the Roof. It also marked the end of a certain era of filmmaking: this was the last musical to win the Oscar for Best Picture for more than 30 years.
Only gonzo director Ken Russell could film the Who’s trippy rock opera about an abused child turned deaf, dumb and blind neo-Jesus for the Me Decade. Lean, bronzed and golden-haired Who frontman Roger Daltrey took the lead and the cast is stuffed with outrageous cameos (Tina Turner, Elton John). Pete Townsend’s ingenious blend of arch art-rock and stadium anthems sounds sensational.
Well, the exclamation point is certainly well earned. In typically glitzy Baz Luhrmann fashion, the Aussie director’s jukebox musical uses modern pop songs from the likes of the Beatles, Queen and Madonna to tell the story of a young writer (Ewan McGregor) who falls for the star performer (Nicole Kidman) at an underground cabaret in 19th century Paris. It’s huge and over-the-top, but like most Luhrmann productions, it’s trying to overwhelm, and to that end succeeds marvellously.
Maverick director Chantal Akerman wrote all the songs in this oddly affecting romantic ouroboros, which takes place entirely in a Belgian shopping mall. A pair of hairdressers pine over the son of the woman who owns the neighbouring clothing store, while the son longs for the hairdresser’s boss, and everyone breaks randomly into song, with shoppers serving as backing dancers. Known as a trifle in Akerman’s daring filmography, it’s utterly unique to the musical genre, and touches on themes from consumerism to Jewish identity, post-Holocaust.
It took more than 20 years for this groundbreaking look at African-American musical history to reach the silver screen, but when it did, it had a hell of a cast. Beyoncé, Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson headlined director Bill Condon’s wide-scoped musical à clef about a Supremes-like girl group working for a Motown-like record company. Hudson’s big number, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” is desperately commanding.
Formally audacious and unapologetically melodramatic, Lars Von Trier’s mighty musical looks laughable on paper: An especially naive Czech immigrant (Björk, who composed the heartbreaking tunes) falls prey to the worst instincts of her American neighbors. The director had the last laugh, though, turning a whole new generation onto a reinvigorated genre.
Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters star in this heartbreaking, stylistically daring depiction of the gulf between showbiz glitz and hard reality in the Great Depression. When the characters sing, they lip-synch to original recordings from the period, and the world around them shifts into MGM dreamland – but then, invariably, they come crashing down to a very lonely earth. Dennis Potter adapted it from his own 1978 BBC series, and Herbert Ross directed it; highlights include Christopher Walken hoofing up a storm to the strains of ‘Let’s Misbehave.’
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are at the peak of their elegant powers in this breezy squabble-of-the-sexes farce, in which Rogers provides just enough emotional ballast to ground the lighter-than-air Astaire. Art deco decor, ostrich-feather couture and a marvellous cast of character actors (including Edward Everett Horton and the pricelessly unflappable Helen Broderick) add to the escapist fun. Along with an Irving Berlin score that includes the swooning ‘Cheek to Cheek’ and the dapper ‘Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,’ they help make this as colourful as a black and white film can get.
By turns diverting and trenchant, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s genre-spanning epic deals with racial integration, and it is also a key work in the theatrical history of the so-called "integrated" musical, in which music and dance are welded to serious storytelling. Paul Robeson’s performance of “Old Man River,” perhaps the greatest of all show tunes, is a highlight of this panoramic look at life on and around a Mississippi riverboat.
Combining inspired live-action sequences (Dick Van Dyke and the chimney sweeps’ rooftop dance) and animation, the Edwardian-set domestic fantasy took hold of imaginations young and old. The delightful sing-along score (“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” “Feed the Birds”) is by the Sherman Brothers. Julie Andrews staked her claim upon pop-cultural icon status as the flying nanny.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s pre-Hamilton play about life in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of Upper Manhattan practically explodes off the screen in its post-Hamilton film adaptation. Directed with head-spinning energy by Crazy Rich Asians’ Jon M Chu, it radiates with love for its predominantly Dominican American characters and the pride they take in preserving their small corner of the big city.
My friends, ya got trouble, right here in River City! With a capital T, and that rhymes with p, and that stands for Preston—as in Robert Preston, who brings immense gifts of persuasion to the role of fast–talking (and talk-singing) con man Harold Hill in this adaptation of Meredith Willson’s hit 1957 Broadway show. Small-town American life is treated with gentle, teasing affection that ultimately blooms into love.
Director-choreographer Rob Marshall brought the Hollywood musical back in a big way. Kander & Ebb’s louche and glittering tale of Jazz Age murder had everything: killer flappers, courtroom drama and a vamptastic score. Renée Zellweger dazzles as a little blond with big dreams (and a murder rap), while Catherine Zeta-Jones, as her brassier prison counterpart, sets the screen on fire.
Transposing the Technicolor spirit of Jacques Demy to modern day Los Angeles, Damien Chazelle’s near-Oscar-winner turns even sitting in rush hour traffic into the stuff of dreams. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling play starry-eyed Angelenos drawn to each other by their struggles to get their own dreams off the ground. Stone has never been better, and while Gosling probably has, he pulls off maybe his greatest acting feat: making a pretentious, white-saviour jazzbo seem endearing.
Is it blasphemous to suggest the Steven Spielberg remake is better than the beloved 1961 original? It shouldn’t be. After all, it’s Spielberg, who applies every cinematic trick he knows to bring the old story of starred-crossed lovers and sing-fighting street gangs in 1950s New York roaring into the 21st century. It’s breathtaking in its scope, but those Leonard Bernstein tunes remain ageless. Spielberg, Bernstein, plus lyrics from Stephen Sondheim? Bless the OG, but how can it compete?
Is there a better rainy-day movie than this? Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s musical comedy about the birth pangs of “talking pictures” is a rush of pure, undiluted joy. Stars Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor radiate good-humored appeal; the title song and the “Make ’Em Laugh” number will make you feel positively ecstatic.
Like many of the greatest musicals, Cabaret is about show business, but its hands grasp out luridly beyond itself. In Bob Fosse’s sordid, magnetic, exhilarating depiction of a Weimar-era nightclub, the sexy and creepy entertainment onstage serves as a grotesque funhouse reflection of the darkening reality of Germany; the divinely decadent party of the Kit Kat Klub is on the verge of death, and the Nazi party—with its signature goose step, like a kick line gone bad—is waiting in the wings. Liza Minnelli, as the tragicomically delusional singer Sally Bowles, and Joel Grey, as the sinister Emcee, deliver John Kander and Fred Ebb’s razor-tipped songs with sensational verve.
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