The MoFo Top 100 Musicals Countdown

The Uncle Tom's Cabin segment is absolutely stunning.

42nd Street was my number 17! Really dug it.

Never got to The King and I although I wanted to.

Seen both, but neither made my ballot.

Seen: 25/26

That surprises me. But very cool!

It's gonna be an interesting one for sure. I would have had both of these in the top-50 in my wildest imagination of how low they could go.

That's because it's a true story?

New topic! CHICAGO! What a great movie! Where you think it'll fall in the top 100?


I'm going to say around #35.

(Super subtle topic change!)

I was all excited to see yesterday and today's classic musicals, but come to think of it, you're right they are low on the countdown, which then makes me think just what the heck is the top 25 going to look like??? (that was one long run-on sentence)

You're probably right. I'm thinking newer musicals will dominate the upper part of the countdown, to me newer is anything made after the 1980s

42nd Street is very good, but it didn't make my ballot.

I haven't seen The King and I.

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Where did I leave off? Okay, I have seen everything that has been mentioned since Gigi (which was on my list) except The Burden, which can be rectified quickly. Only Funny Girl is on my list. I had to pick at least one Streisand musical.
Fun fact, Calamity Jane was embraced by lesbians when It came out. It is one of those movies that was considered to be coded gay and especially the song Secret Love. I love Doris Day and I meant to have at least one of her musicals on my list but I did not.
White Christmas is not on my list, but it is my favorite Danny Kaye musical as an adult. Before that I loved him in Hans Christian Andersen which was on every year when I was a child in the Sixties.
I didn’t like Purple Rain, the movie. Of course, I did love the music and I especially liked Morris Day’s performance.
The Bandwagon is not a favorite of mine. The set pieces are great but the story is too loose for me.
As for Charlotte’s Web, Paul Lynde was hilarious as Templeton.
I love Easter Parade, it should have been on my list.
I haven’t seen 42nd St. in ages so its not on my list, but I am a Dick Powell fan. He is in one of my favorite noirs.
The King and I is great and I wish it was on my list. It is Yul Brynner’s iconic role. And the whole thing is dazzling. Too the young people in our forum, you really need a broader historical perspective. Women in the Siam of that time, were chattel. In the United States, women have only had the vote for a little over a century. You are living in a very new world that is in tremendous flux.

CHICAGO! I'm focusing on talking about Chicago.

He Had It Coming was definitely the best number, although We Both Reached for the Gun is a strong second.

Join me in talking about Chicago!

Whoa, my internet/cable was down all day or I would have been on here much earlier. In fact, I was on here when it when down and we were texted that it would not be up till 9:00 pm then 11:00 pm! Well, it hit somewhere in-between so there's that. I'm just happy we didn't bundle our phone with our services. Even so, the phone was acting wonky. But anyway, I digress.

42nd Street is grand fun. I love all these spectacles, with the mix-and-match casts that usually has Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler at least in there. And the beautiful Ginger Rogers and sometimes Joan Blondell. And Ned Sparks. Love that guy, the eternal grump. I didn't include it, though.

I haven't watched The King and I in a long time but I really enjoyed it. Yul Brynner deserved his Oscar for this film. And Deborah Kerr is lovely as can be here. I currently have the non-musical version from 1946 that stars Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne. I haven't seen it yet but I'm looking forward to it. I was lucky enough to see the stage musical starring Stacy Keach (one of my favorite actors) and It was great. So all kinds of connections to this classic. Need to see it again. Not on my list. I'm glad to see both made it.

So far:
#1. On the Town #93 (list proper)
#6. Easter Parade #78 (list proper)
#10. Gigi #85 (list proper)
#12. Calamity Jane #84 (list proper)
#25. Neptune's Daughter (one-pointer).

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"Miss Jean Louise, Mr. Arthur Radley."

I think it's gonna lean heavily into animated films, honestly, maybe a couple very contemporary ones, with jukebox "musicals" and movies that have music performed in them but not in the way traditional musicals do, pretty evenly split with traditional musicals.

Also, same. To me, Grease is a pretty modern musical.

(And not anything that would cause the thread to melt down to everyone yelling at each other.)

I would like to but I was a bit underwhelmed by Chicago. I think probably it was just Marshall's, to me, very modern style.

SPOILER: It's on my list, but not on the top half. If we were only judging the musical numbers alone, and not the movie as a whole, it'd be in my top 4.


I agree many parts of it couldn't been done better.

Seen both of these two, voted for neither...

76. 42nd Street (1933) - Hoping this might have come in at number 42, but not for any other reason than being able to type "42. 42nd Street". When I watched this I was surprised at how similar it was to Gold Diggers of 1933, which I'd seen first. Maybe not quite as funny, but I thought the musical numbers in this were better - ending up with the huge stage production where the title song is sung. I watched it because I wanted to broaden my knowledge as far as musicals go - you can't go much farther back before the lack of sound in films meant they couldn't be musicals.

75. The King and I (1956) - I have to admit to having been blown away by this when I saw it - the whole "Shall We Dance?" number is fantastic and I watched it another half dozen times I was so taken by it. I wrote on Letterboxd : "The King and I, powered as much by an all-out performance of incredible magnitude by Yul Brynner, has the music, sets and costumes to make an impact already - but it's just such a cinematically astute version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. It's everything, and everything leads up to that pivotal and very famous moment when the King of Siam dances with Anna (Deborah Kerr) in a golden palatial room to the strains of "Shall We Dance" - a moment often highlighted in "history of cinema" montages. There are moments that had my jaw dropping - such as the adapted Uncle Tom's Cabin (Small House of Uncle Thomas), which becomes a play with unforgettable artistic invention - a must see for anyone who loves to be dazzled and enchanted. Did it have to break my heart as well? It had my heart by that stage, after what felt like an inauspicious start - and I never expected to be as captivated as I was. I don't know if it mattered what songs were sung - the performances (again - Brynner's is outstanding) and sentiment suited me fine. The art direction and set decoration were out of this world.

But then, we have to talk about the fact that the West was "civilised" and that the King of Siam is immediately, consistently and always looked upon as some kind of barbarian and beneath us. Sometimes the Siamese are treated as fools - and much is made of their reluctance to acknowledge the world as not being flat and not being carried around on the back of a giant turtle. A lot is made of polygamy and Western culture. But hell, this was made in the mid-1950s, and is set in the early 1860s. I just thought that the best of this film took me right out of the politics, cultural sensibility and lack of progressive foresight. The King and I had led up to the scenes which were it's crowning glory in it's own timely fashion to catch me off guard - and I loved it." Now - that's a lot, but I really loved The King and I - it was certainly in contention for my list, and was on it and off it at one stage. A shame to have had to leave it off.

Seen : 17/26

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42nd Street was #41 on the MoFo Top 100 of the 1930s.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

I haven't seen 42nd Street, but as most of you know, that dance number was heavily "parodied" or "homaged" in The Big Lebowski.

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