For longtime fans of directorDamien Chazelle, the tremendously talented young filmmaker behindWhiplashand this week’sLa La Land, there is a special nod to the director’s career up to this point in his new Oscar-bound musical. AsEmma Stone’s wild dreamer wanders around the Warner Bros. lot, where her character works, two lot workers push a big marquee banner for a movie calledGuy & Madeline, which looks like aIt Happened One Night-type romantic comedy. It’s actually a reference to Chazelle’s wondrous musical debut,Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, which may still be his best film and is, in its way, a conflation of classical musical comedies with more modern, jazzy influences likeJohn Cassavettes’Shadows.
Where so many can hardly look past the musical eras ofFred AstaireandGene Kelly, the musical genre itself has constantly been renewing itself in a variety of ways.Shadowsis more of a music movie than a musical, a differentiation that has caused more than a few arguments in my circle of friends and fellow cinephiles, but the music movie clearly came from the musical genre. And while vibrant, colorful, and romantic works likeTop Hat,Singin’ in the Rain, andFootlight Paradecontinue to astound, modern incarnations have ventured into stranger, sublime terrain as the perfect landscape for some wildly ambitious directors. Plenty seem to have taken to middling outings likeStuart Murdoch’sGod Help the Girland, of course,Pitch Perfect, as well as Broadway adaptations likeInto the WoodsorTom Hooper’s inexcusableLes Miserables.
More rewarding are films likeJohnnie To’s extravagantOfficeandJacob Krupnick’s elusiveGirl Walk//All Day, which don’t simply try to reimagine the days of Astaire and Kelly in a modern setting but infuse the genre with personal political ideas and formal daring. Still, there’s no fair weighing the substance or quality of something likeOfficeorWoody Allen’sEveryone Says I Love Youagainst classics likeThe Band WagonorMeet Me in St. Louis. All of these movies have a place in the history of how the musical genre ended up here withLa La Landlooking all too likely to grab the Oscar for Best Film in 2017, and here are 10 that you should make an especial effort to see before you hit the theater to seeRyan Goslingand Emma Stone romance each other.
FromMark Sandrich, the director behind the classicHoliday InnandThe Gay Divorcee, comes this prime showcase for the endless, seemingly effortless talents ofFred Astaire. In this one, Astaire plays an American dancer doing his first big show in London, where he falls for a smart, ambitious model (Ginger Rogers) who sees an opportunity for advancement with the dancer. Astaire and Rogers movies often are strung together with potent backstage drama, but the show is really in the numbers, andTop Hathas some great ones. Early on, the gazebo-set “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to Get Caught in the Rain)?” sets a gold standard, only to be matched by the immortal “Cheek to Cheek” and the audacious “Piccolino.” There are other great Astaire & Rogers movies – seeSwing Time, a.s.a.p. – but this is the one that has always stuck out to me as the quintessence of their partnership.
Those who are aware of the work of the brilliant, prolific Chinese filmmakerJohnnie Towill know there’s very little that the man can’t make exhilarating and wondrous. Known mostly for dreamy, unhinged action spectacles -Exiled,Sparrow,Triad Election, etc. - that makeJohn Woolook sober as a judge, To is known to divert off into melodrama and character studies on occasion, and in 2015, he made the musicalOffice, one of his very best films to date. The set-pieces at the financial firm of Jones and Sunn, where two new assistants must get acclimated to get a foot into the big-money door, are themselves exceptionally reflective of the characters, denoted by circular motions, faux-luxury colors, and skeletal materials. The offices, rooms, and lobbies that are contained not only offer a contrast to the song-and-dance numbers, they also speak of a country that is moving more toward Capitalism under the auspices of Communism, leaving plenty of poor people to starve along the way. As joyous and giddily bewildering asOfficeis on it’s exterior, it’s underbelly is rife with criticisms that can get you in serious trouble in To’s homeland.
‘The Band Wagon’
Vincente Minellimade some of the best melodrama of the 1950s and 60s, including tremendous tomes likeSome Came Running, Designing Women,The Cobweb, andThe Courtship of Eddie’s Father, but his iconic works were musicals. This, after all, is the man behindAn American in ParisandMeet Me in St. Louis, butThe Band Wagonclearly touched on more personal matters for Minelli.Fred Astaireis Tony Hunter, a singer-dancer who helps his playwright friends (Nanette FabrayandOscar Levant) get a Broadway comedy off the ground. He’s met by the blowhard “artistic” demands and stylistic necessities of Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan), the multi-hyphenate who is helping to back the show. In Cordova, one can see Minelli poking fun at his own particular ways of doing things, but Astaire’s own artistic temperament grows bold as well, and his sense of creativity signals the very best of what can happen when you leave an artist alone to do their work. The big numbers are fantastic, coated in a distinct sense of texture and spectacle, but this might be the entry that best exemplifies how much greater a film comes off when the day-to-day dialogue is as captivating as Astaire’s elegant sways across the room.
‘A Hard Day’s Night’
Okay, this one blurs the lines between musicals and music movie but hey, I’m writing this thing. And to experience the sheer thrill of being surrounded by the Beatles at the time ofA Hard Day’s Night’s release is to understand the electrifying power of music on an antic, unprocessed level. There’s no self-serious garbage about how music can save a life or how instruments often helps focus young children, though it can and they do. It’s about experiencing the rush of imagination and impulsive comic energy that drove these four musicians, and in the film’s barely-there plot, directorRichard Lesterfinds just enough to get Ringo, John, Paul, and George to give us a convincing view of what it’s like when they’re creating music. The work isn’t there – there had to be some - but work isn’t what Lester and the group are after here. They’re selling an image of rock & roll as the work of misfits and loners, the outliers who at once are attracted to the spotlight and see the tragic half-life of fame from way off. Like a musical, it’s not the reality of the situation in the slightest but it expresses a boundless desire for a heart-it-races world where such dreams were the truth.
‘Everyone Says I Love You’
Woody Allenis not much for stunts. Some would say he’s been making the same movie for a long time, a generalization that ignores some of the more philosophically daring work of the aging director.Everyone Says I Love Youwas about as radical as Allen got post-Hannah and Her Sisters, leaning fully into the musical genre without giving up his aesthetic ideals.Edward Nortonspins a sweet romance withDrew Barrymorewhile Woody himself attempts to dazzle Julia Roberts in Venice, withAlan AldaandGoldie Hawnspy the whole affair from afar. There’s a jazzy, scruffy feel to the movie, one that Allen occasionally disrupts with flights of fancy or sudden spells of loneliness and heartbreak. There’s still a lot of joy to this superb oddity, but it’s undeniably a Woody Allen movie, which ensures that some anxiousness and misanthropy are required.
‘Singin’ in the Rain'
What do you want from me? you’re able to’t have a musical list without includingStanley Donen’sSingin’ in the Rain. If someone were to leave it off a list like this, my immediate thought would be that the writer wanted desperately to be seen as provocative or, god help me, cerebral. This is one of those situations where the status undersells the movie, asGene Kellyand company’s luxurious, thoughtful, and thrillingly physical tale of the birth of sound in motion pictures. “Make’Em Laugh” remains one of the all-time dazzlers of the American moviemaking empire, and Kelly, alongsideDebbie Reynolds, strings the audience along into a dream of nothing but dance and romance. As its subject matter would suggest, it represents not just the height of entertainment in the era of sound and color, but one of the greatest visions of what a Hollywood production could be.
‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’
InJaques Demy’s devastating yet entirely delightful hallucination of Algiers War-era Paris, everyone sings but there’s little in the way of dancing. In fact, the actors are purposefully stilted in their performances, as if to underline the strangeness of Demy’s attempt to turn the tragedies of everyday French life into a sweeping musical. Well, it’s not very sweeping but the story of a young man (Nino Castelnuovo) who knocks up his fiancee, Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve), before he is sent off to the front is certainly gripping. It’s a basic story strewn with the worn-in contours of lived experience, from the struggles of running independent businesses to the cruel jokes that time often plays on passion, love, and desire. The production design is mesmerizing in its use of color and motion, never overplaying either element, but the overall aesthetic is surprisingly lacking in frills. This ultimately works to the film’s advantage, giving a sense of discordant realism that at once zaps the production of any major flourishes and yet doesn’t rob Demy’s work of it’s immense emotional and visual power.
‘Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench’
“Scrappy” is the first word that comes to mind when discussingDamien Chazelle’s infectious debut,Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. A romance blooms and gets bruised on a Boston college campus and in the surrounding streets and neighborhoods. At one point,Jason Palmer’s Guy plays in a jazzy get-down in a crowded rehearsal room; scenes later,Desiree Garcia’s Madeline is doing a choreographed solo number in a cafeteria being turned over by the staff. The grain of the film and the unpolished nature of the whole thing is inevitably, inescapably charming, but Chazelle backs that up with a real sense of experience and bravado. The musicians really play (for the most part) and the dance scenes are done sans bombast but with plenty of wonder all the same. The talk is also ensnaring and sharp, showing the early seeds of the lacerating back-and-forths that would come to defineWhiplashandLa La Land.Guy and Madeline on a Park Benchis the sketch ofLa La Land’scolorful bouquet, and in some ways, the sketch is far more enchanting than the final drawing.
‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’
There are very few movies, nevermind the genre, that are as overflowing with ideas about courtship, capitalism, and sex asHoward Hawks’Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. ShowgirlsMarilyn MonroeandJane Russellset off to Paris by sea, surrounded by adorers and a dutiful private detective, and find themselves wooed by muscle men, shiny things, and maybe something like love. This is where “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” comes from, sung in an undulating, crimson-lined daydream of extravagance by Monroe in pink. Similar precision in editing, pans, and dollies can be seen in “Two Little Girls from Little Rock,” their favored showgirl number, but the film is similarly direct yet whimsical in its dialogue-based scenes. Monroe’s comedic abilities real shine here, especially in her scenes with men attempting to woo her; her musical numbers with Russell are some of the most memorable song-and-dance sequences of the 1950s. Hawks liked the shine of money and jewelry, but his movies never skimped on the illusion of that sparkle, the emptiness of it. InGentlemen Prefer Blondes, he polishes his aesthetic like a prized ruby, but the price of that sort of obsession becomes part of the very fabric of the narrative.
‘Footlight Parade’
Lloyd Bacondirected many of the first wave of great Hollywood musicals and Footlight Parade is inarguably his most immediate work. Like so many other musicals, the subject involves the mounting of a stage production, short plays and spectacles made as prologues for movies, overseen byJames Cagney’s Chester Kent. The productions aren’t particularly fanciful but are endearingly workmanlike and consistently dazzling in their emotional sweep. And by focusing the action, including great supporting turns fromDick Powell,Ruby Keeler, andJoan Blondell, on a miniscule production house, Bacon nods towards the magic that is possible working at even the seeming most bottom wrung of the industry.
