Parky at the Pictures (DVD 21/2/2013)

Unfortunately, we don't get off to a good start, as Harry Beaumont's Broadway Melody (1929) has never been released on DVD in this country. Premiered amidst much ballyhoo, this was the first talkie produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and it helped establish the musical as a viable genre after the novelty success of Alan Crossland's Al Jolson vehicle, The Jazz Singer (1927). Its sound quality left much to be desired and the staging was often inert. But the story of sisters Anita Page and Bessie Love graduating from the small-time vaudeville circuit and falling for the same song-and-dance man, Charles King, charmed audiences already captivated by such Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown songs as `You Were Meant for Me' and the eponymous anthem, which would be recycled for the show-stopping dream ballet in Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain (1952), which won't feature in our survey, as, for some unfathomable reason, it was considered inferior to Cecil B. DeMille's circus drama, The Greatest Show on Earth.

The only other monochrome winner of the top prize is Robert Z. Leonard's The Great Ziegfeld (1936), which is more a musical by default, as it is primarily a biography of the Broadway entrepreneur Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., whose stage spectacles were renowned for glorifying the American girl. Acquired by MGM from Universal when production costs began to spiral, it broke all genre records with its $2,183,000 budget and was promoted as a sophisticated entertainment whose 170-minute running time testified to its cultural significance. However, the film said less about the career of a Chicago sideshow barker-turned-theatre mogul than it did about Louis B. Mayer's resoundingly middlebrow taste and his crass desire to convince audiences that he was more of an artistic visionary than a conceited logistician and bean-counter. 

How very differently things might have turned out had Vincente Minnelli made the picture a decade later in colour for producer Arthur Freed. But, while this hoary hokum has dated in places, it still pairs William Powell and Myrna Loy and contains an Oscar-winning performance from the peerless Luise Rainer. Moreover, it landed Seymour Felix the soon-to-be-defunct award for Best Dance Direction for his meticulous staging of the 15-minute sequence to Irving Berlin's `A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody', which was filmed in a single take after weeks of rehearsal, required 180 performers and, in running up a bill of $220,000, cost more than one of Ziegfeld's legendary Follies.

Despite having been raised to appreciate the finer things in life by his musicologist father (Joseph Cawthorn), Florenz Ziegfeld (William Powell) breaks out of the stuffy confines of the conservatory to promote strongman Sandow (Nat Pendleton) at the 1893 Chicago Fair. He is dismayed to see rival barker Jack Billings (Frank Morgan) drawing much bigger crowds to see his singer Little Egypt (Misa Morocco) and learns the valualble lesson that sex sells when he begins promoting Sandow's rippling torso to blushing young ladies and their matronly chaperones rather than envious men.

Buoyed by his success, Ziegfeld tells the besotted Mary Lou (Jean Chatburn) that he cannot marry her and sets sail to make Sandow a star in Europe. On the ship, he bumps into Billings, who is keen not to let his rival know that he is heading to London to meet French cabaret star Anna Held (Luise Rainer). However, when Ziegfeld loses all his money at the casino in Monte Carlo, he travels to Britain and is so smitten with Held's rendition of `Won't You Come Play With Me?' that he uses the money borrowed from Billings for his passage home to buy her flowers and sign her to an exclusive contract.

At first, New York proves resistant to Held's charms. But she becomes the talk of the town after Ziegfeld announces that she bathes in 20 gallons of milk a day to keep her skin soft and her love for her new husband is readily evident as she sings `It's Delightful to Be Married' before her adoring fans. However, Ziegfeld refuses to rest on his laurels and he taps Billings for another loan to launch the Ziegfeld Follies, which become an annual event and makes stars of Will Rogers (AA Trimble) and Eddie Cantor (Buddy Doyle), while also introducing such hit tunes as `If You Knew Susie', `You', `You Gotta Pull Strings' and `You Never Looked So Beautiful'. The secret of the Follies' success, however, lay in the set-pieces designed to showcase the chorines Ziegfeld dubbed his `glorified girls', with numbers like `A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody' persuading such established vaudeville stars as Fanny Brice and Ray Bolger and acclaimed dancers like Harriet Hoctor (playing themselves) to make guest appearances.

Unfortunately, Ziegfeld's reputation as a charmer goes before him and Held becomes convinced he is having an affair with rising star Audrey Dane (Virginia Bruce). But her drinking prevents her from realising her potential and she is upstaged by Mary Lou, who has reinvented herself as the perky Sally Manners. Having scored a legitimate stage hit with Sally, Ziegfeld borrows more money from Billings to help Audrey beat the booze. Money men Sampston (Reginald Owen) and Sidney (Ernest Cossart) warn Ziegfeld that he can't keep living beyond his means, but he spends a small fortune on lavish gifts while courting starlet Billie Burke (Myrna Loy) and Anna is forced to hold back the tears as she phones Flo to wish him every happiness with his new bride.

Although content at home with Burke and their daughter Patricia (Joan Holland), Ziegfeld goes through something of a professional dry patch and, after overhearing customers in a barber's shop declaring him a has-been, he vows to have four shows running simultaneously on Broadway. The success of Whoopee, The Three Musketeers, Rio Rita and Show Boat is reinforced by a song montage comprising `Look For the Silver Lining', `After the Ball Is Over', `Shine on Harvest Moon', `Rio Rita' and `Ol' Man River'. But, no sooner has Ziegfeld confirmed his status than he and Billings are wiped out by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the film ends with family and friends gathering around his deathbed to reassure Ziegfeld that he will always be a legend and will get to stage bigger and better shows in heaven.

There's no point trying to deny the ponderousness of Robert Z. Leonard's direction or the verbosity of a William Anthony McGuire screenplay that excuses all of Ziegfeld's faults and fails utterly to persuade modern viewers that his flesh fests were a form of populist art rather than an up-market variation on burlesque. But, even though they opted not to attempt impersonations of theic characters, Powell, Rainer and Loy are splendid, while the musical interludes are staged with real panache by Seymour Felix and the Oscar-nominated design team ofCedric Gibbons,Merrill Pye and John Harkrider. Contemporary audiences clearly agreed, as the film grossed $4,673,000 worldwide and it still provides a fascinating insight into Tinseltown's conception of prestigious entertainment at the height of the Golden Age.

Fifteen years were to pass before another musical won Best Picture, although the process to bring An American in Paris to the screen started in 1949, when during one of their regular games of pool, MGM producer Arthur Freed persuaded Ira Gershwin's to rework his brother George's 1928 Broadway smash. Twelve years earlier, Samuel Goldwyn had dropped a George Balanchine ballet based on the score from The Goldwyn Follies, because `the miners in Harrisburg won't understand it'. But Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli were intent on proving that film was not merely escapist entertainment, but had a legitimate claim to being the Seventh Art. Thus, in their hands, the story of a GI bent on becoming an artist was fashioned into a cinematic tone poem by the fusion of music, design and performance.

Sally Forrest, Cyd Charisse and Odile Versois were all considered for the role of Lise. But Kelly had seen Leslie Caron dancing on stage as a 15 year-old and was convinced that she had the necessary gamine quality and balletic technique to play the war orphan who steals the heart of Jerry Mulligan, a genial expat who only comes to terms with himself and his talent through her love. Carl Brisson and Maurice Chevalier were mooted for vaudevillian Henri Baurel. But the part went to Georges Guetary (who was known as the French Fred Astaire) after Chevalier refused to play a character who failed to get the girl.

Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner was hired to write a scenario that could accommodate highlights from the Gershwin songbook at key dramatic and psychological points in the narrative. But the music also had the dual responsibility of reinforcing the picture's bid for universal appeal by combining Americans and Europeans, the young and the old, the concert hall and the music-hall, friendship and romance, and the populist and the highbrow. An American in Paris was, therefore, conceived as a film of set-pieces, each of which flowed from the storyline while remaining entirely individual.

Kelly's rendition of `I Got Rhythm' with some street kids, for example, contrasted charmingly with his exhilarating duets with Guetary (``S Wonderful') and Oscar Levant (`By Strauss') and his serenade of Caron with `Our Love Is Here to Stay'. But the showstoppers were even more consciously ingenious, with a grand Folies-Bergère staircase with illuminated steps being created for Guetary's `I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise', while deft process photography was used to enable both the six facets of Lise's personality to appear simultaneously during `Embraceable You' and Levant to play the entire orchestra and audience on the Third Movement of Gershwin's Concerto in F.

Nothing, however, matched the scope, refinement and sheer audacity of the `American in Paris' ballet, which lasted an unprecedented 16 minutes and 37 seconds. Meticulously designed by Irene Sharaff and Preston Ames and photographed by John Alton with a smoky quality that enhanced the pastoral shades, the ballet was a Hollywood tribute to the spirit that inspired both the Impressionists' art and Gershwin's music. Each location evoked the style of a specific painter - Dufy (Place de la Concorde), Renoir (Le Madeleine flower market), Utrillo (a street carnival), Rousseau (Jardin des Plantes), Van Gogh (Place de l'Opéra) and Toulouse-Lautrec (Montmartre) - while Kelly switched brilliantly between classical and modern ballet, Cohanesque hoofing, tap, jitterbugging and athletic exuberance to counterpoint the character of the visuals and create `a synthesis of old forms and new rhythms'.

Taking six weeks to rehearse (during which time Minnelli made Father's Little Dividend, 1951) and a month to shoot, the ballet accounted for $542,000 of the $2,723,903 budget. But while this Technicolor extravaganda grossed in excess of $8 million, some critics complained about its lack of humour and surfeit of calculated sophistication. Yet Minnelli and Kelly had set out to make a serious musical and they certainly impressed their peers, who rewarded them with six Oscars from eight nominations, including Best Picture. Moreover, Kelly received an honorary award `in appreciation of his versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer, and specifically for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film'.

Although many consider it inferior to Singin' in the Rain, which was released the following year, An American in Paris finally saw the MGM musical accepted as an artform in its own right. But, by the end of the decade, it had become something of an anachronism, as rock`n'roll captured the juvenile imagination like no previous form of popular music. Yet, ironically, more musicals won the Oscar for Best Picture while Elvis Presley and The Beatles were creating the soundtrack for daily living than at any other time before or since.

Arthur Freed and Maurice Chevalier had been pivotal figures in the birth of the movie musical. So, it was apt that they should be involved in Gigi (1959), which proved to be the genre's last hurrah under the old studio system. Returning to Hollywood for the first time in 20 years, Chevalier crooned insouciantly through songs like `Thank Heaven for Little Girls' and `I'm Glad I'm Not Young Any More', which traded mischievously on his image and earned him a special Oscar. But Freed seemed to realise that he was presiding over a swan song and meekly allowed screenwriter-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner to call the shots during its fractious post-production.

The project had rather stuttered through its protracted development, too, with the Breen Office taking a dim view of both Jacqueline Audry's 1948 screen version and Anita Loos's 1951 stage adaptation of Colette's saucy source novella. Moreover, composer Frederick Loewe didn't initially share Lerner's enthusiasm for musicalising the story of a trainee fin-de-siècle courtesan who snags herself a rich husband - and neither did Audrey Hepburn (who had headlined Loos's play) nor Dirk Bogarde, who refused the leads. However, this enabled Freed to cast Leslie Caron (who had played Gigi in London) opposite Louis Jourdan, while also reuniting her with director, Vincente Minnelli.

As with An American in Paris, Minnelli drew heavily on artistic inspiration - this time from Seurat, Guys, Boudin, Renoir and Manet, as well as the caricaturist Sem - and his vision was further refined by the exquisite taste of production designer, Cecil Beaton. Moreover, Minnelli had insisted on shooting in authentic Parisian locations. But 24 days into filming and with the budget overspent by $500,000, MGM executive Benny Thau ordered the unit home and the picture was completed over 35 days at Culver City and Venice Beach. However, Charles Walters and Ray June were still required to shoot a further 11 days of retakes and new footage in order to appease Lerner, who had been appalled by editor Margaret Booth's charmless preview cut.

It was at this stage, therefore, that Gigi became what historian Gerald Mast called `the best Broadway musical ever written directly for the screen'. Lerner and Loewe were men of the theatre and under their influence the picture came more closely than ever to resemble their stage smash, My Fair Lady. No wonder Bosley Crowther of the New York Times suggested that they `may want to sue themselves' for plagiarism, especially as `Say a Prayer for Me Tonight' had originally been written for Eliza Doolittle.

Yet, in spite of its self-conscious theatricality, Gigi perfectly exemplifies the screen musical's dependence on structural duality (see page 00). It's much more of a mood piece than a linear narrative, with more emphasis being placed on character and period trappings than the intricacies of the traditional plotline. Indeed, the narrative arc matters less than the twinning of ideas, attitudes and actions. Thus, from its opening sequences, the script divides the Parisian world into male and female domains and surrounds Gaston and Gigi with paralleled people, props and proceedings that while gender specific show them to be eminently compatible.

Furthermore, by having the couple reminded of their social and sexual responsibilities by his uncle and her grandmother and great aunt, the film places them within an endless cycle of attraction, passion and companionship that is genially satirised in the duet `I Remember It Well'.

But Gigi also adds an age-gap quandry to this formula and, thus, initiates a fresh set of pairings and parallels that witness an excited teenager growing up and a bored roué recapturing something of his lost youth. Indeed, this merger in marriage of such seemingly diametrically opposed personalities typifies the musical's generic approach to romance and continues the chain initially forged in Chevalier's teamings with Jeanette MacDonald.

Having won Academy Awards in all nine categories in which it was nominated, Gigi went on to return $13,208,725 on its $3,319,335 budget over the next decade. Furthermore, its cast album became the first soundtrack to win a Grammy and it spent 10 of its 43 weeks on the Billboard chart at No1. But while Freed's 39th and penultimate musical proved to be his most profitable, it signalled the shift of musical power back to Broadway. Indeed, the triumph of the song show over the dance film was confirmed by the fact that trained ballerina Leslie Caron (who was dubbed by Betty Wand) was denied a single dance routine. Pre-sold stage transfers were now to become the norm, as the days of the prestigious Hollywood musical original were over.

The first of this new breed of stage transfers to make its mark at the box office was Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins's West Side Story (1961). Yet, for a musical that is now regarded as an unimpeachable classic, this updating of Romeo and Juliet took a buffeting from both stage and screen critics. The majority of the Broadway notices were positive. But the naysayers were vocal and acerbic, with one branding the show `a juke-box Manhattan opera', while others identified either a lack of humanity and humour or an excess of posturing and ferocity. Many found the pace and the storylines overly abrasive, while others still suggested that the treatment of race and gang rivalry was too superficial and sentimental to engender true tragedy.

A laudable opening run of 732 performances was followed by a near-shut out against The Music Man at the 1958 Tonys and a 249-show revival in 1960. Yet the reception accorded the Panavision 70 movie couldn't have been more antithetical. The reviews were almost unanimously ecstatic and the picture scooped 10 Academy Awards, including a special Oscar for Jerome Robbins for his contribution to screen dance. But there were dissenting voices. Composer Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Stephen Sondheim and librettist Arthur Laurents all disliked the film, while Pauline Kael dismissed it as `a piece of cinematic technology' whose dancing tries `so hard to be great it isn't even good'.

Bernstein's score was also singled out for pastiching everyone from Friml, Herbert and Romberg to Kern, Porter, Rodgers and even Stravinsky. Moreover, the stereotypical characterisation and platitudinous dialogue were similarly castigated alongside the unpersuasive juxtaposition of street realism and studio artifice and the mediocre performances of Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood. Yet West Side Story is unquestionably an artistic landmark - a concept musical, with a danced opening and a mimed finale, that aspired higher than much musical theatre before it. 

Conceived, choreographed and directed by Jerome Robbins, the show was originally entitled East Side Story and set Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet amongst New York's Catholics and Jews. However, over the six years that followed Robbins and Bernstein's initial discussions, the focus shifted onto the tensions between the Americans and Puerto Ricans across the city, in order to exploit the poetic argot and ethnic energy of 1950s urban life. Yet while Sondheim's lyrics reflected the angst and inarticulateness of the disenfranchised, Robbins was intent on having the characters primarily express themselves through dance and `Prologue', `Dance at the Gym', `Cool', `Rumble' and `Somewhere' formed the core of the action. Introducing jive and rock steps to Broadway, Robbins also gave the routines an aspirational twist by using raised arms and legs to symbolise a determination to get out of the ghetto.

Unfortunately, what proved seismic on stage felt more contrived on screen. Having fought to retain artistic control, despite his cinematic inexperience, Robbins deeply resented having to rethink his acclaimed choreography to suit the expanses of West 68th Street and what associate producer Saul Chaplin had envisaged as `a little black-and-white picture' soon assumed blockbuster proportions. Despite the effective opening swoop from the sky to ground level, Robbins made little use of camera movement or depth of field. Moreover, his insistence (after an unprecedented 10 weeks of rehearsals) on experimenting with alternative angles with a disregard for continuity convinced co-director Robert Wise (who had made his name as an editor) that the routines would not cut together. Thus, with costs rising and the schedule elapsing, Robbins was dismissed - much to the relief of many cast members, who found him an egotistical taskmaster - leaving Wise to overuse close-ups in his interpretation of the choreography. Indeed, his pursuit of `dramatised realism' transformed a dance show into a song film and, unsurprisingly, neither Wise nor Robbins mentioned the other in his Oscar acceptance speech.

However, Beymer and Wood were scarcely more compatible - although she failed to have him removed from a role that had been coveted by Marlon Brando. With their vocals provided respectively by Jimmy Bryant and Marni Nixon, they rarely suggest the reckless passion that could culminate in slaughter and are easily upstaged by Russ Tamblyn, George Chakiris and Rita Moreno (who was dubbed by Betty Wand).Yet, West Side Story added a bestselling soundtrack album and a $20 million gross to its Oscar haul by introducing `dance movement' to the screen and suggesting new topics for the genre to explore. Futhermore, it offered a starkly contrasting view of American youth to those presented in either the Mickey and Judy barnyards or the rock vehicles of Elvis Presley. But its release coincided with the decline of the traditional musical format and the arrival in Hollywood of nouvelle vague techniques that quickly dated its melodramatic conventionalism and patronising social propaganda. Thus, yet another stage show that was considered ahead of its time was calcified by a movie version lacking in courage, creativity and class.

Some would say the same about George Cukor's My Fair Lady (1964). But they would be wrong, as would those who still insist that this would be a much better picture had Julie Andrews been allowed to reprise her stage role as Eliza Doolittle..

The great Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw had so disliked The Chocolate Soldier, Oscar Strauss's 1908 operetta version of his play Arms and the Man, that he refused to allow any further musical adaptations of his plays during his lifetime. Indeed, when producer Gabriel Pascal suggested that he could make a splendid show out of the story of a phonics professor who wagers that he can turn a flowergirl into a duchess, Shaw retorted, `I absolutely forbid such an outrage. If Pygmalion is not good enough for your friends with its own verbal music, their talent must be altogether extraordinary.'

Fortunately for Pascal, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe were sufficiently gifted, with Loewe's genius for period idioms provided a quaintly restraining accompaniment to Lerner's self-consciously clever lyrics. Yet, he only entrusted them with the project after first offering it to Rodgers and Hammerstein, Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Arthur Schwarz and Howard Dietz, and Fred Saidy and Yip Harburg. And then they needed a false start before they finally managed to tear down what they called the play's drawing-room wall.

My Fair Lady is a combination of class and character comedy, in which the antipathy between Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle is exacerbated by the respective intellectual pomposity and social deprivation that prevent them from realising their human connection. By showing how a street urchin with diction, but no education, could pass muster in society, Shaw sought to expose the link between accent and perception. But, by sticking to Shaw's screenplay for Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard's 1938 film of Pygmalion, Lerner realised that he could still explore the economics of language, while also focussing on the triumph of love over hierarchy.

Consequently, the score took its character from Shavian politics and its context from a romanticised  London. As a result, Higgins's songs were cast as recitatives that allowed Lerner to keep Shaw's caustic wit from descending into musical cant. Moreover, the technique also permitted the neat irony of suggesting that the linguist was out of his depth in a world of song, unlike the full-throated Cockney songbird and her roistering dustman father, Alfred. Thus, with its pleasing mix of Gilbert and Sullivan, operetta, music-hall and Tin Pan Alley, the score was tantamount to a potted history of the genre, whose diverse approach to the past made it seem timeless.

Lerner always insisted that he wrote Higgins with Rex Harrison in mind. But Noël Coward, Michael Redgrave, George Sanders and John Gielgud were all considered for a role that forced Harrison to learn to talk on pitch and rely on his innate sense of rhythm to stay on note. The 20 year-old Julie Andrews similarly benefited from the disinterest of Mary Martin, Deanna Durbin and Dolores Gray - although her performance ultimately owed much to director Moss Hart's patient tuition. But, the tensions and tantrums of the rehearsals and tryouts were soon forgotten, as My Fair Lady was hailed as `the greatest musical of the 20th century' by the infamously testy critic, Brooks Atkinson. It ran for 2,717 performances on Broadway (and a further 2,281 in London) before finally closing after a record six years and nine months.

Warners secured the screen rights for an unprecedented $5.5 million and promised to retain all 21 of the musical slots. However, Jack Warner was determined to cast James Cagney as Doolittle and Cary Grant as Higgins. Yet, both declined the picture, with Grant famously stating, `not only will I not play in it, but if Rex Harrison doesn't do it, I won't even go to see it'. But Harrison was not to be reunited with Andrews, whose Tony loss to Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing only reinforced impressions that she was a box-office risk. Yet, while Audrey Hepburn's casting has been the subject of much controversy, she epitomised Eliza's Cinderella spirit and, after all, she had already played a similar role in Funny Face (1957).

This time, however, she would not be allowed to sing for herself. Yet, she still acts the lyrics to `Wouldn't It Be Loverly?', `I Could Have Danced All Night' and `Show Me', while lip synching to Marni Nixon's playback, with as much musicality as either Harrison musters for `I'm an Ordinary Man' and `I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face' or Holloway manages on `With a Little Bit of Luck' and `Get Me to the Church on Time'. Much of this was due to George Cukor's decision to place Eliza at the centre of the action, with Cecil Beaton's costumes and Gene Allen's sets consciously evoking her trade. Flashes of flowerful colour consistently reveal her presence and growing influence on everyone she charms, and while such a scheme enables her to stand out from the grime of Covent Garden, the fusty browns of Higgins's study and the colourless snobbery of the Ascot enclosure, it also intimates that she is blooming in Higgins's hot house.

Yet while their coming together doesn't necessarily guarantee marital bliss, Higgins and Eliza nevertheless unite the worlds of academe and nature, emotion and machines, colour and monochrome, high society and the streets. But Cukor also succeeds in binding Broadway to Hollywood, by taking a theatrical conception and enervating it with cinematic flourishes and star wattage in a manner that so many other transfers would seek to emulate over the next decade.

Deploring the fact that it wasn't shot on location in London, Lerner disliked this 70mm Super Panavision masterpiece. Yet, the takings doubled the estimated budget of $17 million and the picture converted eight of its 12 Oscar nominations. But, more significantly, it proved an impeccable amalgamation of script, score, lyrics, design and performance and it elevated the musical to a new level of literate, artistic entertainment that has yet to be surpassed - and anyone who cites Robert Wise's The Sound of Music (1965) in mitigation doesn't know what they are talking about. .

`No musical with swastikas in it will ever be a success,' Billy Wilder told Ernest Lehman, when he heard that he was adapting Rodgers and Hammerstein's final collaboration for the screen. Indeed, Gene Kelly even less enthusiastic in responding to Lehman's overtures, telling him `to go find somebody else to direct this shit'. However, Welsh housewife Myra Franklin would have disagreed with both Wilder and Kelly, as she entered the Guinness Book of Records in 1988 for having seen The Sound of Music 940 times. But, then this had been a production that had confounded showbiz sages from the start.

Paramount had acquired the rights to Wolfgang Liebeneiner's 1956 feature, Die Trappe Familie, with a view to fashioning a drama for Audrey Hepburn. But director Vincent Donehue thought that the story of a nun who marries an Austrian captain and helps his singing offspring escape the Nazis would make a splendid vehicle for Mary Martin and hired Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse to write the scenario. Initially, the Von Trapps were to sing folk songs and hymns, but it was suggested that Rodgers and Hammerstein could be persuaded to contribute an original song - but they insisted on composing an entire score. However, Hammerstein was so preoccupied with Flower Drum Song that he allowed Lindsay and Crouse to complete the book. But, while they stuck to key Hammersteinian themes, the narrative's contrivances and melodramatics conspired to make the score seem trite. It was still well integrated into the narrative, but its contents were rather conventional.

The majority of the melodies recalled operetta or folk and were short of complexity and innovation. Moreover, there were no ballets or soliloquies to offer variation from the string of hummable tunes, like `Do-Re-Mi', `My Favourite Things' and `The Lonely Goatherd', whose wholesomeness was out of step with both contemporary Broadway and rock`n'roll. But, with Martin dominating proceedings, the show traded on the sound of its music rather than its subject matter, dramatic integrity or staging. It ran for 1,443 performances and won six Tonys before playing 2,385 dates in London. The critics deemed it Rodgers and Hammerstein lite. But the lyricist's death, nine months after the Broadway opening, gave the production a cherishability that the movie inherited.

Stanley Donen and William Wyler followed Kelly's lead in rejecting Fox (who had paid a record $1,250,000 for the rights). But Robert Wise signed up without seeing a show that his associate producer, Saul Chaplin, detested. However, they were seduced by Lehman's screenplay and the prospect of working with Julie Andrews. She was always Wise's first choice for Maria, but Audrey Hepburn and Doris Day had been mooted, as had Bing Crosby, Yul Brynner and Walter Matthau before Christopher Plummer finally reneged on repeated refusals to play Von Trapp. He would later dub the film `The Sound of Mucus'. But his stiff presence, especially while lip synching to Bill Lee, is one of its major weaknesses. Yet, this was easily the most cinematic Rodgers and Hammerstein transfer. There was less emphasis than before on static performance and Wise achieved a greater sense of interaction between the characters and their environment, in order to reinforce the contrasts between the confines of the abbey and the Alpine expanses, and between Austria before and after the Anschluss.

However, a fatal whimsicality infests the picture and bolsters the risible equation of song with freedom, as though the Nazis would be less evil if, like Maria, they surrendered to the power of music. The original score had contained harder edged numbers like `How Can Love Survive?' and `No Way to Stop It'. But they were dropped from the film, leaving Cabaret to prove that the National Socialists could sing, and that they knew some pretty sinister songs. Consequently, this is a fairy-tale musical, with a folk soul, as for all its Neverland romanticism, the emphasis is firmly on family unity, the sovereignty of the land, and the potency of tradition to withstand change and pernicious ideology. It also employs the classic musical tactic of having Maria assist the Captain in reconnecting with his family, while he helps her find a purpose in caring for his children. Thus, a free spirit once more sets down roots, while a stoic rediscovers his suppressed self, in this instance by agreeing to sing at the Salzburg festival. However, this resort to the backstager gambit of linking the fate of the romantic leads to the success of the show takes on a greater urgency here, as lives depend on the Von Trapps turning their performance into a disappearing act.

The Sound of Music is often labeled a fresh and youthful picture. But it's very much the work of a man who knew he was dying. Hammerstein's nostalgic lyrics are tinged with the regret and despair of an author who isn't sure what the future holds and his evocation of bygone wars and moral rectitude at a time of uncertainty goes some way to explaining the film's extraordinary popular appeal. It proved virtually critic-proof and took around $80 million on an $8,250,000 outlay. Indeed, it became a cultural phenomenon, whose depiction of resistance to a tyrannical regime helped redefine  America's self-worth following the Cuban incidents, JFK's assassination, the exposure of its own racist shame by the Civil Rights movement and the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam.

Yet these notions of liberty and patriotic pride did not go down well in Cold War Germany, where Hollywood's patronising approach to Nazism and the concept of Heimat condemned the most commercially successful musical of all time to ignominious failure. Clearly the vanquished and divided population didn't concur with Richard Rodgers's contention `that anyone who can't, on occasion, be sentimental about children, home or nature is sadly maladjusted'.

If The Sound of Music is the most overrated musical to win Best Picture, Carol Reed's Oliver! (1968) is probably the weakest. Based on Lionel Bart's 1960 West End hit, it became the first British musical to win big at the Oscars and proved more successful on screen than anything since adapted from the works of Andrew Lloyd Webber (with or without Tim Rice). The inescapable problem, however, is that the screenplay does such a disservice to Charles Dickens's source and the grim realities of the milieu it depicted. Rarely has poverty looked so quaint and Michael Palin squarely hit the target in satirising the boisterous staging style in the `Every Sperm Is Sacred' routine in Monty Python's Meaning of Life (1983).

Yet, for all its shortcomings, this is a polished piece of work and counters any suggestions that Reed had lost the touch that had made such postwar dramas as Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949) so admired. Admittedly, Reed struggles to replicate the 19th-century squalor captured by David Lean in his 1948 monochrome version of Oliver Twist. But John Box's sets are evocatively lit by Oswald Morris, while the combination of John Green's orchestration and Onna White's choreography ensures that the musical segments feel like proper Hollywood production numbers rather than pale Shepperton imitations. But it is always more difficult to persuade cinema audiences to suspend disbelief and accept characters bursting into song in a realistic rather than a stylised setting. Thus, no matter how good the score is or how deft the direction, there is always the risk that the action will become pantomimic and, sadly, this is too often the case here.

When nine year-old orphan Oliver Twist (Mark Lester) dares to ask workhouse beadle Mr Bumble (Harry Secombe) for more gruel, he conspires with Widow Corney (Peggy Mount) to sell the ungrateful wretch to grasping undertaker Sowerberry (Leonard Rossiter). However, as co-worker Noah Claypole (Kenneth Cranham) delights in taunting the boy about his mother, Oliver runs away to London, where he is befriended by the Artful Dodger (Jack Wild), who introduces him to the other waifs and strays who pick pockets across the capital for an East End gang master known as Fagin (Ron Moody). 

He takes a shine to Oliver and teaches him the tricks of his trade. But Oliver is arrested while trying to lift the wallet belonging to Mr Brownlow (Joseph O'Conor) and is brought before a sneering magistrate (Hugh Griffith). Brownlow takes pity on the lad, however, and installs him in his Bloomsbury home. But Fagin is concerned that Oliver will blab about his operation and he instructs fence Bill Sikes (Oliver Reed) and his accomplice Nancy (Shani Wallis) to lure him into the street and abduct him.

Unaware that Bumble has been searching for him since discovering that his mother was Brownlow's niece, Oliver is confident that his guardian will rescue him. However, with Sikes becoming increasingly violent, Fagin begins to wonder whether he is cut out for a life of crime and reluctantly consents to Oliver participating in a burglary that night. The robbery is bungled, however, and Sikes murders Nancy when he learns that she has been negotiating Oliver's safe return to Brownlow. However, Sikes's dog, Bullseye, betrays his master and, as the police close in, Fagin loses his ill-gotten gains in the Thames mud and Sikes is left swinging beneath the rooftops when his flight is halted by a marksman.

As the scene fades, Oliver settles into his comfortable surroundings, while Fagin and Dodger seek to return to their old ways in pastures new. Yet this hint of harsh reality cannot curdle the sugary sentimentality of the happy ending. Indeed, the entire enterprise is effected by this
all-pervading air of cosiness, which is reinforced by the relentless chirpiness of Jack Wild's Dodger, the soft-hearted toughness of Shani Wallis's Nancy and the clownish perfidy of Ron Moody's Fagin and Harry Secombe's Bumble. Only the director's nephew rustles up some genuinely menacing villainy, but Oliver Reed's Sikes has none of the ferocity that Robert Newton brought to David Lean's interpretation.

The songs will be familiar to many, especially as `Food, Glorious Food', `Consider Yourself', `Pick a Pocket or Two' and `I'd Do Anything' were so regularly requested on radio shows like Family Favourites and Junior Choice. However, the standout is `As Long As He Needs Me', which is delivered with such touching pathos by Shani Wallis that it is surprising it didn't become a major chart hit. But, while Oliver! was winning six Oscars and Barbra Streisand was landing the Best Actress award for playing Fanny Brice in William Wyler's biopic Funny Girl, the other big-budget musicals of the period flopped and many critics blamed the spectacular failure of titles like Joshua Logan's Camelot, Richard Fleischer's Dr Dolittle (both 1967), Robert Wise's Star! (1968), Bob Fosse's Sweet Charity and Gene Kelly's Hello, Dolly! (both 1969) for the fact that it would take the arrival of a new millennium for another musical to be named Best Picture.

Bob Fosse's 1975 stage version of Chicago had perished in the shadow of Michael Bennett's A Chorus Line. It ran for a respectable 898 performances. But the reviews were mixed and it failed to convert any of its 11 Tony nominations, as Bennett's show won nine. However, Richard Attenborough's 1985 screen take on A Chorus Line proved a commercial and critical calamity, while Chicago went on to enjoy a new lease of Broadway life in 1996, when it not only won six Tonys, but also embarked upon a record-breaking run that is currently heading towards 4,000 performances. Moreover, Rob Marshall's film adaptation landed six Oscars from 13 nominations and has since grossed over $300,000,000 from a $45 million budget.

This study of celebrity and the public's complicity in its bestowal started as a George Abbott stage drama in 1926, with Maurine Dallas Watkins basing the action on her Chicago Tribune coverage of the jazz slayings committed by cabaret singer Belva Gaertner and Beulah Annan, the Windy City's `prettiest prisoner', who was acquitted of shooting her lover in the back thanks to a media frenzy and the artful pleading of attorney, W.W. O'Brien.

Cecil B. DeMille produced a silent variation of Chicago in 1927, with Phyllis Haver in the Annan role that Ginger Rogers assumed for William Wellman's Roxie Hart (1942). But the born-again Watkins came to despise this glamorisation of such tawdry events and proceeded to frustrate Gwen Verdon's bid to musicalise the play up to her death in 1969. Eventually, Verdon persuaded Fosse to devise a show with his Cabaret composers, John Kander and Fred Ebb. But he suffered a massive heart attack during rehearsals and returned to impose a darker mood after scrapping 60% of the material following lacklustre tryouts in Philadelphia.

Keen to explore the concept that life had become a three-ring circus, in which key institutions like the law and the press were tantamount to cheap entertainments, Fosse set the action on a vaudeville stage and mounted the numbers as performance pieces that commented on the narrative rather than being integral to it. Moreover, he drew on his childhood memories of Minsky's Burlesque to stage some routines in the style of such showbiz legends as Bert Williams, Helen Morgan, Sophie Tucker and Eddie Cantor, while others were inspired by ventriloquist, clown and drag acts and such contemporary dance crazes as the Charleston, the shimmy and the black bottom.

But such variety schtick led to accusations of excessive cynicism and theatrical decadence and much of it was stripped away by Walter Bobbie for his leaner, meaner, sexier revival, which he insisted was no longer a satire, but a documentary, thanks to the O.J. Simpson trial. The mean spirit and sardonic wit that had riled Americans faced with the shame of Watergate and capitulation in Vietnam now chimed in with the public appetite for celebrity scandal, which was shamelessly  exacerbated by the yellow press and sensationalist teleplays.

However, no one seemed keen to make Chigaco the movie. Liza Minnelli had been mentioned in the mid-70s and Fosse had been planning talks with Madonna when he died in 1987. But Baz Luhrmann, Herbert Ross, Stanley Donen and Milos Forman all refused a project, which then boasted Goldie Hawn and Madonna as Roxie and Velma, and a screenplay by Larry Gelbart. The latter was replaced by Wendy Wasserstein when Nicholas Hytner agreed to direct. But he departed amid press speculation that Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman were set for the female leads, while John Travolta, Rupert Everett and Kevin Kline were competing for the role of Billy Flynn.

A futher round of rumours followed Rob Marshall's appointment. Catherine Zeta Jones was always his first choice for Velma, but Gwyneth Paltrow, Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, Milla Jovovich, Marisa Tomei and Angelina Jolie were all considered before Renée Zellwegger was selected for Roxie, despite her admission that she didn't understand the shifts between stylised reality and fantastical escapism in Bill Condon's scenario. Hugh Jackman, John Cusack and Kevin Spacey, Kathy Bates and Whoopi Goldberg, and Britney Spears were also mooted before Richard Gere, Queen Latifah and Lucy Liu were respectively cast as Billy, Mama Morton and Kitty.

Meanwhile, Marshall and Condon had rethought the libretto to accommodate the MTV generation's scepticism about characters bursting into song in supposedly everyday situations. Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark (1999) had shown that musical routines could be presented as interior monologues and, thus, they set the numbers in Roxie's imagination, in order to exploit her celebrity-fixated conviction that her life was one big song and dance. Marshall further borrowed von Trier's tactic of using random sounds to motivate the escapist shifts - although he did devise some neat visual cues of his own and made shrewd use of blatant symbolism to heighten the corniness of the starstruck contexts.

Marshall had to drop six songs to make the new structure work. But while stage favourites like `Class' were lost, he atoned with bravura renditions of `All That Jazz', `We Reached for the Gun' and `Razzle Dazzle', while `All He Cares About' and `Funny Honey' neatly alluded to the Ziegfeld Follies and Show Boat. With its CGI-enhanced 1920s street scenes evoking the paintings of Reginald Marsh and the photography of Brassaï, Chicago was sold as a biting allegory on millennial morality. But, it's intriguing to note that this self-proclaimed champion of the musical eschewed all mention of song and dance in its trailer. The genre was still clearly considered a risky curio rather than the box-office banker it had once been.