The Musicals List REDUX

[knives]

At least as much credit belongs to Fosse as anyone else as the setup of the film and even the overall style retains his imprint.

[domino harvey]

As I've said before, the main reason Chicago works is that it uses what the studios insist on imparting in most modern big budget musicals-- typically artless overcutting and editing-- and utilizes it to its advantage in form and function by using it to vacillate between the worlds in the numbers. It's an extremely intelligent and resourceful adaptation choice

[L.A.]

Saw Paint Your Wagon (1969) couple weeks ago and I wholeheartedly recommend it, just brilliant. Been humming Wand'rin' Star constantly. Really surprised there still is no Blu-ray available.

[Never Cursed]

Yours is the first positive notice I've ever read about that film - my immediate association with the title is from Ebert's review of Heaven's Gate:

This movie is $36 million thrown to the winds. It is the most scandalous cinematic waste I have ever seen, and remember, I’ve seen Paint Your Wagon.

[knives]

I love it a lot too. I think I wrote it up in its dedicated thread here.

[domino harvey]

My thoughts from the Westerns list

Paint Your Wagon (Joshua Logan 1969) As a western, it's mediocre; as a musical, it's atrocious. Yessir, Paint Your Wagon, while not being as bad as I'd heard/feared, is still not worth the three hours I had to put into it. There's nothing wrong per se with having singers who can't sing in a musical, but a good musical would work around their limitations, not highlight them-- there was probably no good way to have Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin sing, but the material they're given is written for a bland Broadway vocal range, not craggy talk-singing. But to be fair, no one would sound good singing these songs, as they are among the lamest and uninspired I've ever heard. Some good sight-gags to be had in the destruction of the finale. Jean Seberg really puts her push-up bustiere to work.

[soundchaser]

In case anyone else wants to start prepping for next year’s redux early, here’s the final list in Letterboxd form.

[therewillbeblus]

Godspell was a bit alienating for me, though if I was rating the film based on the music alone it’d be near-perfect. I’m unfamiliar enough with church youth groups to find a lot of the material esoteric, but still felt like the explanatory biblical teachings were poorly conceived via loose half-measures of expressionistic modeling. Perhaps a second watch for the musical project will lend a more charitable eye to the strengths of such uniquely-minuted choreography, that clearly has a purpose beyond converting me as its audience, and that intent may just be to frolic around playfully riding the static high of spiritual awakening.

[mizo]

Godspell is at least good for contextualizing this (I would link to the original version, but MTV/Viacom sucks)

[JakeB]

In case anyone else wants to start prepping for next year’s redux early, here’s the final list in Letterboxd form.

Thanks for this. Makes it very easy to keep on top of what to watch.

[soundchaser]

In case anyone else wants to start prepping for next year’s redux early, here’s the final list in Letterboxd form.

Thanks for this. Makes it very easy to keep on top of what to watch.

You're welcome! I've just complied the orphans as well. I suspect several of these will place (and even place highly) in the redux; I know I'll be shouting from the rooftops about a few.

[therewillbeblus]

Wow, that's a surprising list of orphans. soundchaser, you can at the very least rest assured that Up, Down, Fragile will not be orphaned again

[senseabove]

Wow... I can't decide if that orphan list bodes well for some of my most beloved movies, regardless of genre, or it means I'm going to have to sacrifice a whooooole lot of darlings for this list.

Also, among the many reasons I'm looking forward to this list is using it as motivation to start exploring more Bollywood, so if anyone has any pointers on that front, please share.

[knives]

Anything with Aamir Khan is worthwhile as a starting point.

[Tom Amolad]

My youngsters aren’t up for full length movies, but they like singing and dancing numbers. The blu-ray of Singin in the Rain (the US issue with the grotesquely airbrushed cover) has a handy (though not quite optimally executed) feature that allows you to play through just the musical numbers. (It even lets you choose which one — though, absurdly, you can’t include the whole long fantasy sequence at the end.)

What other DVD or Blu Ray issues of good musicals offer this? Films I’d be interested in:

Lubitsch musicals
Berkeley musicals
Show Boat (Whale)
Wizard of Oz
On the Town
The Band Wagon
Cabaret
Further suggestions?

There’s also That’s Entertainment! and East Side Story, which have their issues, though I suppose beggar can’t be choosers. I wonder if they’d like Demy.

[bottled spider]

I just re-watched Cover Girl by mistake, forgetting I'd seen it before. Justly orphaned with barely any mention in this thread. The colour palette is mostly revolting, probably the least attractive use of Technicolor I've seen. If they'd naively gone overboard with bright saturated primary colours, the result might have been forgivably garish. But instead the film seems addicted to puce and various bilious shades of green. It's as if the colour processing just went completely wrong and they had to live with it for better or worse. Otherwise one has to assume the DP was colour blind. This also features one of the worst musical numbers ever, the "Poor John" routine. That it's deliberately cringemaking does nothing to redeem it. On the plus side, Hayworth can refresh anything she graces, and I liked Eve Arden.

While I have no objection to films that shout "LOOK! I"M IN TECHNICOLOR!!", My Sister Eileen provides a great example of how beautifully Technicolor can render pale, delicate colours, powdery pastels, shades of white and grey. Note how many scenes in this movie are given a muted palette, with just an accent or two of vibrant colour. The dance numbers are just great, one highlight being the charming duet between Leigh and Fosse after Frank reveals his affections.

[therewillbeblus]

I’ve never seen anything quite like West Indies, Med Hondo’s 1979 Afro-Caribbean musical-dance satire of French colonialism. Veering from sometimes deliriously intense musical numbers to protracted ‘70s radical speechifying, the film’s sequences — non-chronologically spanning 400 years of the African slave trade, rebellions against colonial landowners, and the mid-20th century machinations of the French to manipulate local elections and encourage emigration out of the islands — are all set on an enormous recreation of a slave ship. As fascinating as that sounds — and West Indies is an absolutely unique cultural artifact — the repetition of the many long polemical speeches makes it more of a slog to actually sit through than if it was more tightly focused on the musical elements and the more successful satirical moments. Really curious if anyone else has seen this, and intent on checking out Soleil Ô soon to see if it more successfully carries out what Hondo is attempting here.

I just finished this - it took me a little while to acclimate to its wavelength, but my appreciation locked completely in sync with the film's cumulative structure, as it blossomed from a more grounded, didactic history lesson into a looser but tightly-visioned eclectic palette of spectacular musical numbers, inspired set pieces, and increasingly biting satire. Its internal sense of rhythm seems intentionally constructed around formally arrhythmic content to signify its themes, including the sensations of discomfort from disruptions of expectations (on half of both victims and persecutors) that are inherent in history's unstoppable evolution containing multifaceted variables interweaving. The numbers serve to document fantasies, but also the periods where people are playing defined roles they're "comfortable" in, honing in on the value of predictability even if the circumstances themselves are far from ideal. This is a film that is hilarious and horrifying, entertaining and frustrating, and everything in between. Its shifting narrative economy and repetition of ideas worked wonders for me: Hondo demonstrates that he's not short on creative juices, and could easily have made a film with purely forward propulsion.. but his directorial wit is to reflexively issue restraint. By refusing to return to the same rote situations you're critiquing, Hondo would be indirectly be schematically transforming history into a forward march of potential and enthusiasm, a problematic consequence he avoids with attentive film grammar. The regressive elements of its composition help earn its frustration, the kind many of us feel on a macro level as we watch history repeat itself. The final musical number reads as less of a delusion to me, and more of a statement that aligns the internal logic of the Musical Number with the necessity and impenetrability of a cultural spirit of hope. The community and its ethos will always retain a forcefield to imperialism, existing in a vacuum divorced from a level of corporeal threat. The optimistic of intragroup empowerment sits side by side with the pessimism of intergroup relations.

This is an easy contender for both a Musicals list and the 70s project, and I hope the new restoration gets released ASAP, ideally with academic extras

[Michael Kerpan]

Hello Dolly (Gene Kelley, 1969) -- I resisted watching this for decades, having resented the casting of Barbra Streisand instead of Carol Channing, who we saw in the roadshow version of the musical. However, since it could be watched "for free" on Disney+, my wife and I decided to take a look. What a fricking fiasco. Except for the abstract beauty of Streisand's singing, there was almost nothing I found appealing with this mess. Matthau was utterly unsuited -- portraying not a curmudgeon but rather a massive jerk. Striesands accent(s) were all over the map, And she was WAY too young appearing and acting (Shirley Booth, in Matchmaker, and Carol Channing were FAR more suitable). The supporting cast was pretty uniformly weak in singing and acting (only the lady who portrayed a fake rich heiress at the end got my unqualified approval). The direction was abysmal -- mammoth earlier production numbers earlier in the movie undercut the impact of the supposed-to-be-climactic scene at the posh restaurant. And the comic timing generally was execrable, while moments of pathos were utterly unconvincing. This disaster made me yearn for the comparatively tolerable contemporary also-failed-movie-musicals Paint Your Wagon and Camelot.

[andyli]

How lucky I was to enjoy Lili on a 4K-restored blu-ray for the first time, with a vivid transfer that does justice to the film. The Sound of Music used to be my go-to musical for stories of innocent girl saving wounded man. I like the power of music and dance and show performance in general being harnessed to express something beyond words can describe. But Lili does it so much better, with a much tighter plot line and a firm emphasis on the protagonists' inner worlds, as opposed to any external trouble. I like how the puppet show is used as a special form of courtship, very much tailored for the girl, in contrast to the predatory and deceptive ways of earlier men. At the same time, it seems to serve as a therapeutic and cathartic tool to pull the 'angry' man down and force him operate on the level of an innocent boy as well. It is so much more magical and wonderful to see love emerging from the playful communication of two innocents, than say, a man falling in love for a girl because she takes good care of his children. Even better than the series of puppet shows is the final fantastical dance that is basically visualized epiphany, a double revelation in that the girl not only understands love but also the way love is expressed. It's all done with mis-en-scene, with choreography, hitting much harder than any words could possibly achieve.

[domino harvey]

In case anyone else wants to start prepping for next year’s redux early, here’s the final list in Letterboxd form.

I lost track of this, was I the one that canceled a redux list? Is there interest in doing this later this year (to avoid the vampire one)?

[therewillbeblus]

Yes, I was just thinking about bringing it up again the other day

[soundchaser]

I'm not inherently opposed, but I also know I've never watched enough to vote in one of the projects (and I've been watching even less since the last one I posted for, which I think was Cary Grant).

It's interesting to think about how that list would change nonetheless. Some high-profile releases in the last few years - Annette, La La Land, Emilia Perez (for good or for ill), and some orphans that are much more widely available now, like Haut bas fragile and At Long Last Love.

[domino harvey]

Yeah, a big change is how many titles are now available on Blu-ray or UHD in the last fifteen years (!) since we first did this (esp since I know most of us aren’t buying DVDs anymore). I’ll set up a poll

EDIT Poll is here

[Never Cursed]

Just to emphasize once again:

Since (EVENT REDACTED) on (WEBSITE REDACTED) is happening soon, if anyone has any recommendations for musicals they very much like that do not otherwise have English-friendly distribution, please let me know. I would love nothing more to hear an out-of-left-field rec for something great and hard to find

[domino harvey]

No release/OOP/DVD-R only:

Where Do We Go From Here?
Daddy Long Legs
Merry Andrew
Two Tickets to Broadway
the Girl Next Door
My Blue Heaven
Small Town Girl
Lucky Me
the Girl Most Likely
Red Garters
Lil Abner