The one common thread between The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and most of the Hollywood musicals of the 60s is its use of dubbed vocals for its principal players. There’s no musical star here, no Astaire to wow us, but Umbrellas of Cherbourg oddly doesn’t really require one. The piece is so intimate that none of [...]

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With this picture, the forties musical seemed to have found a forward-looking identity. In its freshness, Cover Girl also sowed the seeds for the sublime exuberance of the genre’s best works of the 1950s. It’s not a great musical, sometimes it’s not even a good one, but when it works, and it works often, it [...]

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Unlike the other masterful MGM musicals of its day—Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and The Band Wagon (1953)—Seven Brides doesn’t have the satiric bite of a Betty Comden-Adolph Green screenplay, nor does it tell a glamorous showbiz tale; it’s a celebration of homespun values set in the Oregon Territory of 1850. Anyone who’s seen it [...]

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Instead of Meet Me in St. Louis’s 1903 Midwest, The Harvey Girls occupies a late nineteenth-century Southwest. This is a western musical, based on the real-life Fred Harvey restaurants that helped tame the territory, and the impact of the recent Broadway sensation Oklahoma! (1943) is evident. You can’t quite describe The Harvey Girls as a [...]

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Lady for a Day is based on Damon Runyon’s short story Madame La Gimp. Capra and Runyon are an ideal match, with their knack for balancing sentiment with humor and in their affection for underdogs. Runyon’s surefire tale is prime fodder for Capra, and the meeting of material and director produces a disarming work full [...]

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