The musical is the form where the artifice is the point, which is why the best entries here are the ones that decide what the singing is for. In Cabaret every number happens on a stage inside the story. In All That Jazz the numbers are a dying man’s hallucinations. In Top Hat the dancing is the courtship and there is no separating them.
The weakest entries are the ones where the songs are decoration on a plot that would have proceeded identically without them.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year.
1. Top Hat (1935)
► Read the full review of Top Hat (1935)
"Astaire and Rogers at their fourth collaboration, and the plot is an excuse the film is honest about."
Top Hat takes the top position because it is the purest example of what the form can do when it stops apologising for itself. The plot is a mistaken-identity contrivance so thin that nobody involved pretends otherwise, and the film is better for the honesty.
What it exists to do is put two people in a room and let them dance at each other. Cheek to Cheek is a courtship conducted entirely through movement, with the negotiation, the resistance and the surrender all legible without a word, and the Irving Berlin score produced four standards from one picture.
It cost around six hundred thousand dollars, took roughly three point two million, and was the second-highest-grossing film of its year. The fourth of ten Astaire and Rogers pairings and the one where the partnership was operating at full capacity.
Astaire insisted on full-body framing with unbroken takes, which is why the dances read as performance rather than as editing.
The Cheek to Cheek number required a feather dress that shed continuously, and Rogers refused to change it, which Astaire complained about for decades.
The plot is a mistaken-identity farce that exists entirely to keep the two apart between numbers, and nobody involved pretended otherwise.
2. West Side Story (1961)
► Read the full review of West Side Story (1961)
"Romeo and Juliet with Bernstein, Sondheim and Robbins, and the prologue is ten minutes of dance before a word is spoken."
This is here because the source material was better than the form usually gets. Bernstein’s score and Sondheim’s lyrics gave the 1957 stage production material that exceeded what Broadway typically supplied, and Robbins’s choreography was built to carry narrative rather than to decorate it.
The prologue is the proof. Ten minutes establish two gangs, a territory, a hierarchy and a mutual hatred entirely through movement, with no dialogue at all, and by the time anybody speaks the audience already understands the situation completely.
Rita Moreno’s Anita is the performance that has held up best and America is the number that still works hardest, because it is an argument between two positions rather than a celebration. The film dominated its Academy year and shaped how the genre was regarded for a decade afterward.
Robbins choreographed and co-directed and was removed partway through for overrunning, and the prologue he completed is the best sequence in the film.
The opening moves from an aerial shot of Manhattan down to a playground and into the first snap without a cut that announces itself.
It won ten Academy Awards and the dubbing of the principal singing voices was standard practice and is now the main objection to it.
3. Mary Poppins (1964)
► Read the full review of Mary Poppins (1964)
"Julie Andrews’s film debut, and the actual subject is the father."
Mary Poppins rates this high because it is a considerably harder film than its reputation allows. The nanny does not change across the running time, has no arc and learns nothing. She is a fixed point, which means the story has to belong to somebody else.
It belongs to George Banks. He is a man who has organised his entire life around an institution that does not love him back, and the film’s climax is his dismissal from the bank, played as a liberation. A children’s musical whose emotional resolution is a middle-aged man losing his job is a stranger piece of work than it gets credit for.
Julie Andrews won Best Actress for her first film after Warner Bros passed her over for My Fair Lady, which is the most satisfying piece of industry history attached to any film on this list. Five Academy Awards on a five million dollar budget against a hundred and two million worldwide.
Travers hated it and the recorded production meetings are a document of an author losing an argument with a studio across two years.
The Jolly Holiday sequence combines live action with animation using sodium vapour matting, which Disney developed and which produced cleaner edges than blue screen.
Julie Andrews won Best Actress in her film debut after being passed over for My Fair Lady, which is the most satisfying fact in musical history.
4. Cabaret (1972)
► Read the full review of Cabaret (1972)
"Every song happens on a stage inside the story, and that rule is the whole film."
Cabaret is the defining American film musical of its decade because Fosse abandoned the convention the form had run on for forty years. Nobody bursts into song. Every number occurs on the Kit Kat Klub stage as a performance somebody is paying to watch.
That rule does something no amount of staging could. The songs become commentary on the action rather than expressions of it, so the club’s decadence and the Berlin outside it are always in the same frame, and the audience watches entertainment continue while the country changes around it.
Then the rule is broken exactly once. Tomorrow Belongs to Me is sung outdoors, in daylight, in a beer garden, by a boy in a Hitler Youth uniform, and it is the most effective structural decision in any musical. The audience does not need to know the rule consciously for the violation to land.
Every number takes place on the Kit Kat Club stage, so the film has no character bursting into song in the street and the songs comment rather than express.
Fosse won Best Director over Coppola for The Godfather, which remains the most contested result in that category.
Joel Grey’s emcee has no dialogue outside the numbers and is the film’s entire argument about what was being tolerated.
5. All That Jazz (1979)
► Read the full review of All That Jazz (1979)
"Fosse made a musical about his own self-destruction while still doing it."
All That Jazz is the strangest American musical a major studio has produced and it is here because of what it cost the man who made it. Fosse fictionalised his own working habits during the editing of Lenny and the staging of Chicago, having had open-heart surgery, and then kept working the same way.
Roy Scheider plays a director medicating himself through a schedule he refuses to reduce, greeting each morning in the mirror with a ritual that the film repeats until it becomes unbearable. The structure is a man rehearsing his own death as a production number.
The open-heart surgery intercut with a musical sequence is the most audacious thing in the genre and it is not a metaphor the film arrived at afterward. Fosse was staging his own operation while still smoking, and he died eight years later in circumstances the film had essentially predicted.
Fosse made a film about a director like himself editing a film while dying of the habits that are killing him, and then died of them eight years later.
The open-heart surgery intercut with a musical number is the most extreme thing in any American musical.
Roy Scheider was not the first choice and plays the self-loathing without asking for sympathy at any point.
6. An American in Paris (1951)
► Read the full review of An American in Paris (1951)
"A seventeen-minute ballet with no dialogue, at the end of a film that had not earned it."
This is the clearest case on the list of a sequence outrunning its film. Minnelli built the 1951 production around Gene Kelly as an ex-GI painter in postwar Paris, with Gershwin throughout and the Freed unit at MGM operating at its peak.
The closing ballet is seventeen minutes, has no dialogue, and moves through a series of set designs based on French painters. It is among the most ambitious sequences the American studio system ever financed and it is genuinely extraordinary.
The ninety minutes preceding it are conventional. The romance is thin, the rival is a device, and the film is marking time until it can do the thing it was made for. It won Best Picture on the strength of the last reel.
The seventeen-minute ballet that closes the film has no dialogue and cost around half a million dollars, which was extraordinary for a sequence with no plot function.
Each section is staged in the manner of a different French painter, which is a genuinely unusual organising principle for a Hollywood finale.
It won Best Picture, which almost no musical has, and Gene Kelly received an honorary award the same year.
7. Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
► Read the full review of Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
"De Palma fused Phantom of the Opera, Faust and Dorian Gray into a rock opera, and almost nobody went."
Phantom of the Paradise earns its place by combining three source texts that should not combine and making the fusion hold. A composer’s music is stolen by a record producer, he is disfigured, and he signs a contract in blood.
The reason it works is that all three sources are about the same mechanism, which is a bargain that costs somebody their face. De Palma found the common structure rather than layering the references, and Paul Williams wrote the score and plays the producer, which is a piece of casting that should not work and does.
It cost around one point three million and failed completely on release. It has since become the most influential cult musical of the period, and the split-screen work is early De Palma developing technique he would use for the next thirty years.
De Palma made a rock opera combining Faust, The Phantom of the Opera and The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is three sources too many and works anyway.
Paul Williams wrote the songs and plays the antagonist, which means the villain’s music is genuinely good rather than parodic.
It failed everywhere except Winnipeg, where it ran for months, and the cult built from there.
8. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983)
► Read the full review of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983)
"A sketch film organised around birth and death, with the best worst song ever written for one."
The Meaning of Life is the loosest of the Python features and it is on this list for one sequence. Terry Jones arranged the material around the stages of human life, which is a frame rather than a structure, and the film is consequently uneven in a way Holy Grail and Life of Brian are not.
Every Sperm Is Sacred is a full production number with dozens of children processing through a Yorkshire terrace, staged with the scale and commitment of a genuine musical and deployed against Catholic doctrine on contraception. It is the most elaborate thing the group ever filmed.
It won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury at Cannes, which nobody involved appears to have anticipated, and the rest of the film ranges from the Crimson Permanent Assurance to material that does not land at all.
The Christmas in Heaven and Every Sperm Is Sacred numbers are staged at full musical scale with hundreds of performers, which is the joke.
It is structured as sketches rather than a narrative, which the Pythons had abandoned after Holy Grail and returned to here.
The Crimson Permanent Assurance short that opens it was made separately, overran its budget, and Gilliam attached it rather than lose it.
9. Moulin Rouge! (2001)
► Read the full review of Moulin Rouge! (2001)
"Luhrmann rebuilt the genre out of other people’s pop songs and the cutting is deliberately unbearable."
Moulin Rouge is here because it revived a form that had been commercially dead for two decades, and because the method it used to do it was genuinely new. The 1899 Paris setting is scored entirely with anachronistic popular music, from Nirvana to Elton John to Madonna.
The editing rate in the first twenty minutes is the most aggressive in any musical ever released, and it functions as a filter. Viewers who survive the opening are the audience the rest of the film was built for, and Luhrmann has been explicit that this was intentional.
It is the central entry in his Red Curtain trilogy and it made the 2002 Chicago possible, which restarted the studio musical. Eight Academy Award nominations and a hundred and eighty million worldwide against a fifty million budget.
Luhrmann cuts at a rate nobody had attempted in a musical, with the Elephant Love Medley assembling about a dozen pop songs into one argument.
The anachronistic soundtrack is the device and is applied without exception, so the audience learns the rule immediately.
It was the first musical nominated for Best Picture in over twenty years and is credited with reviving the form commercially.
10. La La Land (2016)
► Read the full review of La La Land (2016)
"A musical about two people whose ambitions are incompatible, and it has the nerve to say so."
La La Land sits at the bottom of a strong list rather than being a weak film. Chazelle made the most commercially successful original musical in decades, took fourteen Academy Award nominations and won six, and the craft is not in question.
What holds it here is that the songs are the least interesting part. Hurwitz’s score works, City of Stars is a genuine standard, and the singing is the weakest element in a film whose best sequences are a traffic jam and an observatory.
The ending is what earns its place. The final montage shows the version of their lives that did not happen, in full, as a musical sequence, and then returns to the one that did. The film gives the audience the feeling and refuses to give them the outcome.
The opening freeway number is a single continuous take on a closed Los Angeles interchange in summer heat, rehearsed for months.
The ending refuses the resolution the whole film has been promising, which is why it divides audiences and why it lasts.
It won six Academy Awards and was briefly announced as Best Picture in error, which is the only thing most people remember about that ceremony.