Top 10 musicals
10. Oliver!
Historically, the British musical has been intertwined with British music, drawing on music hall in the 1940s and the pop charts in the 50s – low-budget films of provincial interest and nothing to trouble the bosses at MGM. In the late 60s, however, the genre enjoyed a brief, high-profile heyday, and between Tommy Steele in Half a Sixpence (1967) and Richard Attenborough's star-studded Oh! What A Lovely War (1969) came the biggest of them all: Oliver! (1968), Carol Reed's adaptation of Lionel Bart's 1960 stage hit and the recipient of six Academy awards.
It seems strange that Charles Dickens's dark tale of deprivation – our young hero Oliver Twist (Mark Lester) ends up in a den of thieves, run by the louche Fagin (Ron Moody), after being sold into child labour by the owner of a workhouse – began shooting during the summer of love, but Reed's lavish, cast-of-thousands approach does reflect something of the people-power concerns of the times, notably the "tribalism" of the Broadway musical Hair. The costume design too has elements of shabby chic; the boys have long, unkempt hair, and unlike David Lean's austere Oliver Twist of 1948, the snatch-and-grab-it world of Fagin's lost boys actually seems like fun.
Indeed, Moody has often claimed that his interpretation of Fagin, developed in the original stage version, ran counter to Bart's intention and went some way to reversing the perceived antisemitism of Dickens's novel. But for all the exuberance, not to mention those timeless songs – Food, Glorious Food; Consider Yourself and You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two – Oliver! works principally as a love triangle, with the infatuated Twist powerless to save barmaid Nancy (Shani Wallis) from the vicious Bill Sikes (Oliver Reed). It is part of the magic of Reed's direction that while delivering the modernity and immediacy of Bart's book, music and lyrics, his film keeps intact the dark, brutal melodrama that kept Dickens's readers enthralled in the first place. Damon Wise
9. Tommy
ROGER DALTREY Film 'TOMMY' (1975) Directed By KEN RUSSELL 19 March 1975 SSO56144 Allstar Collection/PARAMOUNT **WARNING** This photograph can only be reproduced by publications in conjunction with the promotion of the above film. For Editorial Use Only. Entertainment Orientation Landscape Portrait looking ahead Film Still Photograph: Allstar/PARAMOUNT/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar
The most excessive movie by the most excessive director of the most excessive decade of the 20th century, Tommy is the madly outlandish pinnacle of 70s rock-opera. It stars a sizable complement of British rock aristocracy – the Who, obviously, Eric Clapton, Elton John – under the insane generalship of Ken Russell in excelsis.
Russell was fresh off his Mahler biopic, in retrospect the last of his conventional (the term is elastic with Ken) musical biographies that began at the BBC with his profiles of Delius and Elgar, and continued on the big screen with Tchaikovsky in The Music Lover. By the time he came to make his movie about Franz Liszt in 1975, he had passed through the creative furnace that was Tommy and was making a whole different kind of movie. Russell adapted the Who's concept album himself, and gave free rein to his wildest instincts.
Tommy, the original album, was, like Pink Floyd's The Wall, a war baby's angry lament that never really made a lot of sense in narrative terms, but Russell found the showpiece songs and mounted many of them with extraordinary vitality and panache. Unforgettable moments include Pinball Wizard with Elton John in mile-high green bovver boots; Tina Turner's demented appearance as the Acid Queen, whose terrifying, Metropolis-style syringe-robot-sarcophagus fails to trip Tommy out of his deaf-dumb-and-blind catatonia (who the hell injects acid, anyway?) and Ann-Margret, a loooong way from Bye Bye Birdie, as she imagines an exploding TV that ejaculates baked beans, chocolate and soap powder all over her writhing body, bringing to bizarre and unsettling life the artwork for The Who Sell Out.
Worth noting: Ken Russell. And Oliver Reed. And Keith Moon – all on the same movie set, a recipe for utter mayhem! John Patterson
8. West Side Story
From the 1961 film of West Side Story. Photograph: Everett Collection / Rex Feature
Filmed in a New York City neighbourhood that no longer exists, and centred on racial tensions made quaint just a few years later by the civil rights movement, West Side Story ought to be an adorable relic. It asks us to believe that street gangs might dance ballet, that a fire escape could host a romantic moonlit tryst, that Natalie Wood with a tan passes as Puerto Rican. It embraces gooey ideas of love at first sight and retells Romeo & Juliet while backing down on the famous, bloody ending.
But West Side Story still feels more modern than any of the other Oscar-winning musicals of the 60s or, really, most of the others that have come since. From the orchestral overture over an abstracted New York City to the pop of Maria's red dress in the final scene on the playground, West Side Story embraces its leap to cinema as boldly as the Jets doing a tour jeté. Every musical uses its songs to express big feelings, but few go bigger than West Side Story, which embraces the passions of youth to make an epic out of a pointless turf war and a new love that gets tragically caught in the middle.
The music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics from Stephen Sondheim, largely unchanged from the Broadway production, run the gamut, from the witty wordplay of America (accompanied by Jerome Robbins's eye-popping choreography) to the achingly naive Something's Coming. No song that includes the word "daddy-o" ought to stand the test of time, but here stands Cool anyway. No movie with such a troubled production, and half its cast not even singing, ought to feel so authentic, but West Side Story still punches hard. Like a Rothko painting or an Eames chair, West Side Story is mid-century modernism that will never go out of style. Katey Rich
7. Bugsy Malone
Long before it became a staple part of the schools and am-dram society production roster, Bugsy Malone was a very knowing screen musical with killer songs, a precociously talented young cast and real eccentricity. Only a madman could have come up with the idea of making a pastiche 1930s gangster musical populated entirely by children and shot in Britain in the mid-1970s. Alan Parker was that madman. Having established himself as one of the country's hottest commercials directors, he was looking to move into film, only to find that every script he dashed off was accused of being too parochial. His response was to write one that was almost absurdly American – a tale of warring gangsters and the battle for Fat Sam's speakeasy. But here the guns fire custard rather than bullets, and none of the thugs has a five o'clock shadow.
Although Parker's pitch was met with bafflement from financiers ("'It's a fusion of two genres – the Hollywood musical and the gangster film,' I would enthuse. 'Except [nervous cough] the guns will fire custard pies and it will have a cast entirely of kids aged about 12'"), the budget was raised and shooting began at Pinewood after a year of casting. It's no surprise that Jodie Foster should be so dazzling as Tallulah, Fat Sam's moll – she already had eight years' acting experience behind her at that point, including her role in Taxi Driver – but the rest of the cast are a delight, including future TV heartthrob Scott Baio as Bugsy, the down-at-heel boxing promoter. Credit should go also to the affectionate production design by Geoffrey Kirkland and the tone of whimsical amusement sustained by Parker.
But there can be no doubting the most seductive element: the songs by Paul Williams. He may be best known today for his recent contributions to Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, but since the 1960s he has been a composer and performer with a knack for the timeless earworm. From writing for the Carpenters, Barbra Streisand and the Muppets to starring in and co-scoring Brian de Palma's Phantom of the Paradise, he is a genuine legend. If he had done nothing but the songs for Bugsy Malone, that status would still be assured. Ryan Gilbey
6. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluis de Cherbourg). Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
To watch Jacques Demy's 1964 musical is to gorge on colour. This is a world where a petrol station's neon lights are as dazzling and poignantly romantic as fireworks, and where turquoise is made to co-exist with orange as though it were the most natural union in the world. Incredibly, the film sounds even more striking than it looks. Catherine Deneuve stars as Geneviève, the dreamer working in her mother's umbrella shop, whose romance with the mechanic Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) is cut short when he is drafted to fight in the Algerian war (though not too soon for her to fall pregnant by him). When he returns years later, everything has changed: she's in love with someone else, he's in love with someone else – but they're still singing.
The picture is filled wall-to-wall with music, though you'll hunt long and hard for verse or chorus here: Michel Legrand's sumptuous score has an abundance of melody, but the "songs" are dialogue set to music, with even the most casual exchange sung rather than spoken. Demy's writing is as fizzy as his colours: he can't resist popping lines as such as "I don't like opera – all that singing gives me a pain" into the mouths of his perpetually warbling cast. Deneuve, meanwhile, has devastating poise and beauty; it requires no imaginative leap to believe that grown men would be moved to burst into song at the sight of her. RG
5. Meet Me in St Louis
Talent on parade: Judy Garland in Meet Me in St Louis. Photograph: Courtesy Everett Collection/Re
Released 69 years ago, on Thanksgiving weekend in November 1944, only six months after the seismic morale-boost that was D-Day, Meet Me in St Louis offered a suddenly more optimistic wartime America the chance to wallow in the sugary comforts of hearth and home, to take refuge in innocence and nostalgia. Can you imagine combat-weary GIs coming off some European or Pacific island battlefield in early 1945, returning to the rear echelon, and seeing this in the camp movie tent? It must have felt like a warm bath and a letter from home.
With its sumptuously vibrant, occasionally ominous Technicolor tones courtesy of George J Folsey (who also shot Million Dollar Mermaid and The Harvey Girls), its American songbook classics, including Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and The Trolley Song, and its evocation of an idyllic, untroubled fin-de-siecle St Louis that surely never existed until Vincente Minnelli dreamed it up, Meet Me in St Louis was the bona fide smash of the 1944-5 box office, and the personal favourite of its legendary producer Arthur Freed, whose musicals unit at MGM was and remains unsurpassed in its utter mastery of the genre.
This is also the movie on which Minnelli met his future wife, Judy Garland, who was initially not enthusiastic about the project. She recanted later, of course, and songs from the book remained staples of her night club act for decades afterwards.
The myriad familiar joys of the movie are etched in America's folk memory: the perfect parents in the form of Leon Ames and Mary Astor, Judy's unrequited affection for the boy next door, The Trolley Song sequence with its riot of brightly coloured 1900s gowns and hats. And Margaret O'Brien as 10-year-old Tootie, one of the greatest child performances ever – her hysterical sobbing as she smashes the snowmen in the yard is not soon forgotten. JP
4. My Fair Lady
My Fair Lady, film still Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/WARNER BROS
The title of George Cukor's adaptation of George Bernard's stage play – the much more self-explanatory Pygmalion – has often eluded cinemagoers since the film's release in 1964. The likeliest explanation – and one that reflects the spirit of Shaw's sophisticated wit – is that it is a spin on Shaw's provisional title Fair Eliza (after Beethoven's Für Elise) and also the Cockney pronunciation of "Mayfair lady", which, after all, is the object of its leading man's boast – to be able to pass off common flower seller Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) as a society duchess.
With book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe, the partnership behind Camelot and Brigadoon, My Fair Lady achieved greatness by staying as mindful of Shaw's original play as Shaw was of Ovid's version of the Greek myth, in which a sculptor creates a beautiful statue that comes to life and causes him to fall in love with her. This fusing of romance and socialist principles gives the film its kick, with Rex Harrison hilarious as the elitist linguist Henry Higgins, who continues to dismiss Eliza as "this thing that I created out of the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden" even as she is accepted into the loftiest echelons of the establishment.
Many off-screen controversies rage, such as whether Julie Andrews was robbed of a role that should have been hers from the stage play, and indeed whether Audrey Hepburn was robbed of an Oscar nomination – she was a notable omission – when it became known that her singing voice had been dubbed by Marni Nixon. But while debate continues to swirl around the mischievous last line – "Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?" delivered after Higgins sings the surrendering I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face – the ambiguity adds to its timelessness. Rather than a walk into the sunset, Cukor's film ends with a scene of domestic detente that any couple will recognise. DW
3. Grease
Grease
The elements that made Grease a smash hit in 1978 now seem impossible to account for: in the year the Sex Pistols imploded, a nostalgic stage show using faux 50s pop songs and featuring a cast with a median age of 30 playing teenagers became the highest grossing musical in the US, an honour it holds to this day. It saw John Travolta, a disco-dancing superstar after the phenomenon that was Saturday Night Fever, continue to reign supreme as world superstar, to be joined briefly by Olivia Newton-John, an MOR singer whose film career would almost immediately hit the skids.
The reason Grease has endured is because Warren Casey's and Jim Jacobs's original 1971 musical is a subversive celebration of the flipside of the era it recreates. The premise – tough guy from the wrong side of the tracks meets cute Wasp girl – is the living embodiment of the Shangri-Las' Leader of the Pack, and the story proceeds to imagine a parallel world in which all the cult fetish items of the real 50s are out in the mainstream. Flick-knives, beehives, rock'n'roll, juvenile delinquency, teenage pregnancy and smoking: though Randal Kleiser's slick movie version airbrushes many of those elements, they are still recognisably there, just beneath the surface.
Today it seems impossible to comprehend that such a family-friendly film contains not only so many double entendres, but so many references to sex, from Greased Lightning's celebration of the "pussy wagon" to Look at Me I'm Sandra Dee and its put-down of the cutesy star as "lousy with virginity". It's possible that Grease inadvertently stands as a testament to the studio system; Kleiser has said that he made the film for hire, didn't have much intuition about the music and was left alone by Paramount, who had bigger fish, such as Heaven Can Wait, to fry. The resulting lack of preciousness is undoubtedly what sells it; breezy and unpretentious, it will always rock the house. DW
2. Singin' in the Rain
Gene Kelly performing Singin' in the Rain. Hollywood faked it: you don't have to. Photograph: Allstar/MGM/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar
Singin' in the Rain's title song is perhaps the most famous musical sequence in the history of the genre (it was made doubly memorable after being psychotically repurposed as a murder ballad in A Clockwork Orange), and many put the movie up there with Bandwagon, Funny Face and Meet Me in St Louis as the high water mark of the mid-century American musical comedy. It's also, handily enough, an astute guide to the myriad technical problems that faced the Hollywood studios in the transition from silents to talkies, as well as an uproarious comedy.
Co-directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen had access to a catalogue of songs co-written over the years by their boss Arthur Freed. The title song had originally featured in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 – and others had first been seen in movies as diverse as the Mickey and Judy musical Babes in Arms and the early disaster movie San Francisco. The screenplay was by legendary songwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who added one imperishable song of their own, Moses Supposes, in which silent stars and best friends Kelly and Donald O'Connor upstage their starchy elocution teacher in wild style.
The movie lives on the charm, energy and clean-cut appeal of its leading quartet: Kelly and O'Connor (next time you watch his frenetically energetic Make 'Em Laugh scene, bear in mind he smoked four packs of cigarettes a day!), and the delightfully effervescent pixie Debbie Reynolds as Kelly's girlfriend. She provides vocal overdubs for an unwitting Jean Hagen, who has a singing voice like a yapping dog but steals every scene she's in (key line, screeched, of course: "I got more money than Calvin Coolidge … put together!"). The very definition of perfect happiness rendered in movie-musical form, and in vivid Technicolor, of course. JP
1. Cabaret
Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, which will be screened as part of the Berlin in the 20s and 30s weekend at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros/SportsPhoto
The devil has all the best tunes, they say, and this 1972 musical used them all: satanically catchy, terrifyingly seductive. It is directed and choreographed with electric style by Bob Fosse, with songs by Kander and Ebb that lodge in your mind like poisoned barbs. Cabaret is drenched in the sexiest kind of cynicism and decadent despair: it is Nero's fiddle, scraping and squawking in the 20th century.
More than 40 years after the movie's release – and 70 since Christopher Isherwood's short story collections, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired it – Cabaret still looks like a brilliantly plausible reimagining of the national mood music in 1930s Germany, gradually acquiescing to the Nazi taint and accepting its evil destiny with a song, a shrug, a grimace of suppressed pain. It is the polar opposite of The Sound of Music which had been such a global sensation seven years earlier: that was a determinedly wholesome, idealistic account of Austrian resistance to Hitlerism. This is anything but. They both have superb songs. To me, the sinister and horribly authentic-sounding pastiche Nazi anthem Tomorrow Belongs to Me, with its jerky waltz-time, sounds worryingly like the ersatz-real Austrian folksong Edelweiss. Cabaret is a thrilling indictment of evil's specious and banal glamour, and of foreigners' feeble and prurient and uncomprehending attitude to the growing European threat. Most of all it is a deeply pessimistic indictment of satire itself, a type of comedy that emerges as fatally ambiguous and parasitic, unable to make any real difference to what it is supposedly attacking. Is the Weimar cabaret scene an assault on Nazism? Or Nazism's minor symptom? Liza Minnelli gives her career-defining performance as the nightclub singer Sally Bowles: entrancingly sexy, a free spirit, unlocatably and indefinably melancholy and damaged. Her unforgettable opening song, Mein Herr, about giving the elbow to a now tiresome lover, gives us a clear clue as to how the romantic storyline will play out. Michael York is Brian, the visiting British scholar who has a room in Sally's boarding house and falls in love with her; Max (Helmut Griem) is the wealthy plutocrat who befriends both and inveigles them into a menage-a-trois. And Joel Grey is the mysterious Master of Ceremonies at Sally's club who has no dramatic part to play and no backstory. His cabaret turns punctuate and comment on the story happening on the outside. This grinning, elegant grotesque mocks the Nazis, sends them up, he appears to be the epitome of what the Berliners call Schnauz: nose, or snout: pure aggressive front. And yet his cynicism is rootless, jaded; he appears also to be satirising the idiots who have allowed the situation to develop, the idiots who are unsophisticated enough to be shocked or to care. The whole world is a panorama of contemptible idiocy to be dismissed with a sharp couplet, a snappy song, a sexy strut. What good is sitting alone in your room, he says, come hear the music play! The world is going to hell and we might as well enjoy ourselves. The film belongs to Liza Minnelli, whose poignant vulnerability is a counterweight to all the grim cynicism. Her saucer-eyed prettiness is almost shocking amid the squalor, and her voice is fascinating. She is capable of belting out showtunes with maximum force, yet also often has – while speaking or singing – a strange kind of swallowed gulp or sob. Her fragility is the nearest thing the movie has to an emotional heart. Sally's relationship with Brian is doomed. What on Earth happens to this American expatriate after the story is over and war is declared? What awful fate is in store for this strange innocent? This unanswered question hangs over the end of the film after the final chords have died away. Peter Bradshaw
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