MERRY MELODIES

Celebrating Hollywood’s Top Movie Musicals Of The 1950s.

t was the decade of the American dream. World war and the Depression were fading in the rearview mirror. The future looked bright. The age of television was just dawning, but there was still something special about movies that kept theaters filled: singing and dancing and a good time for all, in Technicolor and Vistavision.

Hollywood movie musicals promised a vintage world of imagination, magic and toe-tapping pizzazz.

Sometimes there was polish to these movie musicals: tuxedos and ball gowns, shiny shoes dancing on glittery floors. Other times they took us to distant places like Paris or the South Pacific, or into the golden past, be it a frontier farm out West, an old South riverboat floating down the Mississippi or a cab up Broadway in the Roaring ’20s.

Stage musicals moved to Hollywood with the beginning of sound technology. Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer (1927) was the first of its kind, offering snatches of singing and speech and a recorded score. Talkies soon replaced the era of silent film, and Hollywood’s golden age of musicals began in earnest.

In the movie musical, songs usually advanced the plot, but sometimes served as breaks in the action for an elaborate production number. Director Busby Berkeley was imported from Broadway by Warner Bros. to produce dazzling dance routines featuring scores of dancers in geometric patterns in films like Footlight Parade (1933) and Wonder Bar (1934). A string of glitzy Fred Astaire/ginger Rogers song-and-dance films including Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936) set the high bar for Depression-era escapism. MGM musicals took center stage in the ’40s with Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and On the Town (1949). Some dramatic actors took to movie musicals as a way to avoid typecasting, as James Cagney did in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942).

In the late ’40s, a production unit at MGM Studios headed by Arthur Freed began to look for new ways to produce movie musicals, whose formula had grown stale. This led to gems like An American in Paris (1951), Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Gigi (1958). MGM also produced non-freed musicals like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and High Society

(1956). (MGM’S 50-year legacy was celebrated in the 1974 film That’s Entertainment! and featured musical moments from the ’20s to the ’50s.)

The other Hollywood studios also had success with musicals in the ’50s. Four Rodgers and Hammerstein productions — Oklahoma!, The King and I, Carousel and South Pacific — were all box office successes. Paramount had hits with White Christmas and Funny Face,

while Warner Bros. scored with A Star Is Born

and Calamity Jane.

We wish we had room to dance through them all, but below we take you back to some of the very best musicals of the ’50s.