1967 – Joshua Logan – The story of King Arthur exerts a powerful hold over the minds of almost any generation. This film version of the Broadway musical is a retrospective: on the eve of his last battle, Arthur reflects about meeting Guinevere and establishing the new British culture of Camelot. All the elements are there—musings about Merlin and pulling the sword from the st…
1956 – Henry King – The musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein proved ideal for widescreen treatment, and in the mid-1950s the new emphasis on spectacle in Hollywood (an effort to win audiences away from television) led to a succession of screen versions of their stage hits. One advantage of this is that in the movie theater, the extra-wide dimensions of the screen capture beautifully …
1996 – Alan Parker – Few people outside politics knew much about the life and death of Eva Peron until she burst onto the world's musical stages in the early 1980's in Andrew Lloyd Webber's hit musical Evita. But hers is a life so melodramatic, so filled with “Rainbow Highs” and degrading lows that, if she had not lived, some writer would have had …
1956 – Walter Lang – The classic film rendition of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway hit is based on both a book by Margaret Landon and a movie Anna and the King of Siam. The story follows a widowed Victorian English woman (Deborah Kerr) who goes to Thailand in the 1860s to become governess to the many children of the King of Siam (Yul Brynner). While Mrs. Anna loves the children…
1955 – Fred Zinnemann – Maybe the most popular of all Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's musicals, Oklahoma! is the classic American story of family and community. The 1943 opening of the play launched the collaboration of the duo, who based their work on Green Grow the Lilacs, an earlier play by Lynn Riggs. Laurey (Shirley Jones), the farm girl and Curly (Gordon McRae),…
1968 – Carol Reed – Most people have heard of Charles Dickens and his famous fictional orphan Oliver Twist, but few realize that the 26-year-old writer was one of the first men to explore the link between poverty, ignorance, and crime. Victorians looked upon criminals (children or adult) as morally depraved and innately bad, and more than forty crimes were punishable by death during…
1969 – Joshua Logan – “Where am I going? I don't know! … But who gives a damn! We're on our way!” Few can resist those infectious opening lines of this infectiously energetic musical set during the 1849 gold rush in California. The sentiments are our own; most Americans still have a shred of the pioneering spirit about them somewhere—thus ou…
1965 – Robert Wise – Initially given a cool critical reception, The Sound of Music became the box office king of its time. Few movies have generated such extreme comments, both positive and negative, as this musical about the novice governess who marries a widowed father of seven children while the Nazi threat looms in Austria in the late 1930s. How do you solve a problem like The S…
1958 – Joshua Logan – One of Rodgers and Hammerstein's biggest Broadway hits, South Pacific has a score filled with American classics: “There is Nothing Like a Dame,” “I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair,” and “Some Enchanted Evening.” Based on James Michener's first best-seller, Tales of the South Pacific, the …
1961 – Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins – This energetic musical inspired by Romeo and Juliet places the familiar story in 1950s New York among rival street gangs, the Jets (composed of Anglos) and the Sharks (composed of Puerto Ricans). Exteriors were shot at the current site of the Lincoln Center Performing Arts complex. Based on the stage play written by Arthur Laurents and directed b…
When Al Jolson started talking to the audience in The Jazz Singer (1927)—"Wait a minute, wait a minute! You ain't heard nothin' yet"—he assured that musical's place in cinema history, although it was the musicals throughout the long career of Busby Berkeley that brought a showman's love of epic theatricalism to the screen. Berkeley's fondness for ov…