In this post, The Retreat at Tampa is featuring four movie musicals for you to enjoy this fall. As nights get longer and days get shorter, spend your evening at home watching a classic movie musical. We are featuring three of our favorite classic musicals in this post and one new musical coming out in December; we hope that you enjoy!
Silent film star Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) scrambles to make it big in “talkies” when The Jazz Singer (1937) makes crowds crazy for talking pictures. With the help of his best friend (Donald O’Connor) and girlfriend (Debbie Reynolds), Don plans to win over the talking world with The Dancing Cavalier, a musical. The only problem? His screechy-voiced co-star, Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen).
From Roger Ebert: “One of this movie's pleasures is that it's really about something. Of course it's about romance, as most musicals are, but it's also about the film industry in a period of dangerous transition. The movie simplifies the changeover from silents to talkies, but doesn't falsify it.”
Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly) is a painter trying to make it big in Paris. He falls in love with a girl, Lise (Leslie Caron), who works at a perfume shop. Jerry’s possessive patron Milo (Nina Foch) and Lise’s fiance (Georges Guetary) complicate their romance.
From Roger Ebert: “...’American’ has many qualities of its own, not least its famous ballet production number, with Kelly and Leslie Caron symbolizing the entire story of their courtship in dance. And there are other production numbers, set in everyday Parisian settings, that are endlessly inventive in their use of props and locations.”
Jerry Travers (Fred Astaire) and Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers) dance their way into romance in Top Hat. Dale mistakes Jerry for her best friend’s husband; when Jerry proposed marriage, a scandalized Dale rushes into the arms of another man. Wrongs must be righted before the couple can find their happily-ever-after.
From Roger Ebert: “Because Astaire believed that movie dance numbers should be shot in unbroken takes that ran as long as possible, what they perform is an achievement in endurance as well as artistry. At a point when many dancers would be gasping for breath, Astaire and Rogers are smiling easily, heedlessly. To watch them is to see hard work elevated to effortless joy: The work of two dancers who know they can do no better than this, and that no one else can do as well.”
This throwback to classic musicals is coming out on December 2, 2016. Variety wrote that the movie “is the most audacious big-screen musical in a long time, and — irony of ironies — that’s because it’s the most traditional. In his splashy, impassioned, shoot-the-moon third feature, Chazelle, the 31-year-old writer-director of “Whiplash,” pays virtuoso homage to the look and mood and stylized trappings of the Hollywood musicals of the ’40s and, especially, the ’50s (glorious soundstage spectacles of star-spangled rapture), with added shades of Jacques Demy and “New York, New York.” A lot of people still find old musicals corny or think (mistakenly) that they’re quaint. Yet the form remains stubbornly alive in the bones of our culture. That’s why it feels so right, in “La La Land,” to see a daring filmmaker go whole hog in re-creating a lavish studio-system musical, replete with starry nights and street lamps lighting up the innocence of soft-shoe romance, and two people who were meant for each other literally dancing on air.”