The party features a jazz band, and its conductor is played by the angular, antic Curt Bois (whose eighty-year career included “Casablanca” and “Wings of Desire”).
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But the centerpiece of the movie is a gigantic set piece: the wedding reception, thrown for the family’s fifty closest friends, featuring a horde of servants whose ministrations are choreographed with a comedic precision. What results is a saga of mistaken identities that culminates in a burst of effervescently erotic comedy, of the sort for which Lubitsch is justly famed. Quaker, the Oyster King (Victor Janson), whose daughter, Ossi (played by Ossi Oswalda), is desperate to get married. The comedic story line involves an American plutocrat, Mr. It was made by Ernst Lubitsch, in his native Berlin he subsequently directed many musicals in Hollywood, with sound, but he was never so extravagantly imaginative as when he had to conjure music through images alone. This is a silent movie, but it is a virtual musical nonetheless. As Al Jolson said in “The Jazz Singer,” the first musical feature, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” Their achievements suggest that, even with the current glut of movie musicals, there are possibilities for the genre yet untapped. (Were space no object, the list might also include great musical moments in films that are otherwise in no sense musicals, including such classic examples as Charlie Chaplin’s nonsense patter in “Modern Times,” and such surprising ones as Marianne Faithfull’s performance of “As Tears Go By” in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Made in U.S.A.”) The directors of these movies don’t just film the musical spectacles before them they seem to reconceive the very possibilities of music on film. But the list also includes dramas, documentaries, and idiosyncratic hybrid forms that put the pleasures and the performance of music front and center. The list of thirty films presented here, in chronological order, includes works by Berkeley and other auteurs of the traditional movie musical, including Stanley Donen-though not his most celebrated film, “Singin’ in the Rain,” which, great though it may be, is more inventive as a comedy than as a musical. Which is to say that many of the films that advance the genre can’t be pigeonholed as musicals at all. (Indeed, some of the greatest song-and-dance performances on film, such as those of the Nicholas Brothers, are, depressingly, filmed with little imagination.) These movies are all, first and foremost, cinematic experiences in which a concept of music is realized through images. What the great movie musicals have in common is more than top-notch singers and dancers and songs. As their example proves, the filming of music demands more than other subjects do. His demand rendered his directors inert and his celebrated dance numbers of the thirties numbingly dull.
“Either the camera will dance or I will,” he famously declared.
Fred Astaire, who rose to stardom in 1934, insisted on being filmed dancing in extended takes that simply showed his entire body in motion. It found new commercial life and cultural prominence, along with new inspirations, thanks to the 1933 film “42nd Street,” which featured fantastic production numbers by Busby Berkeley-but even the revitalized genre soon revealed its limitations. That’s what happened in the early decades of talking pictures, when musicals proliferated under mediocre direction, until they glutted the market and the genre nearly went out of business. Singing and dancing are so intrinsically joyous to watch, so naturally suited to the medium of talking pictures, that they can lull filmmakers into passivity: just point the camera and let the pleasures unfold. (It’s no coincidence that the genre thrived during the Depression and the Second World War.) But the movie musical is as perilous as it is exhilarating, and its pitfalls are built into its glorious enticements. BOOM!” (his directorial début), and Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story.” The trend is well timed: the intrinsic pleasure of hearing music, seeing it performed, and watching dancers in motion is a baseline of ecumenical gratification in times of trouble. Chu’s film of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights,” Leos Carax’s “Annette,” and an adaptation of the recent Broadway hit “Dear Evan Hansen.” Still to come is another Miranda production, “Tick, Tick . . . This year’s most prominent releases so far include Jon M.
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