Despite its predecessors, Love Me Tonight is one of the best first movie musicals. The inter-class love between Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald blossoms before audiences to the soundtrack of Rodgers and Hart’s original score, providing the perfect mix of familiar and fresh. And thanks to the expertise of director Rouben Mamoulian, the most essential [...]

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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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For those of you puzzled by my inclusion of such an obvious musical classic as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in a book about overlooked movies, I have news: the reputation of Seven Brides isn’t what it was back in 1954, when it was an unexpected box-office smash and nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. [...]

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The Harvey Girls was Garland’s first vehicle in response to Meet Me in St. Louis, a movie hoping to emulate the earlier picture’s scrupulous skill in establishing a sense of place, character, and theme through music. It’s a boisterous, action-packed, picturesque, funny musical, and, though it is uneven, Garland holds it together with her unassailable [...]

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It was also in 1942 that Broadway song-and-dance man Gene Kelly made his screen debut opposite Judy Garland in MGM’s For Me and My Gal, which shared Yankee Doodle’s black-and-white nostalgia for the previous war’s era (plus another trunkful of oldies with which audiences could sing along). It’s not a good movie, but it was [...]

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