Top 100 Musicals

85 thoughts on “Top 100 Musicals”

1. PART FOUR : KATHRYN GRAYSON/JANE POWELL/ESTHER WILLIAMS: ALL MUSICALS RELEASED 1955-59
   SOURCE: BRUCE COGERSON-All figures are domestic and inflation adjusted.

   Hit the Deck – Jane Powell/$100 million

   Jupiter’s Darling- Esther Williams/$75 million
   The Vagabond King – Kathryn Grayson/$66 million
   The Girl Most Likely- Jane Powell/$19 million

   NOTES:
   The figures speak for themselves and only Hit the Deck turned a modest profit. The average of the 4 films is $87 million. That compares with the whopping average of $420 million that the top 4 grossers drawn from all the musical films collectively that the quartet made in their heyday. The 4 films listed above sunk without trace the stardom of these 3 lovely and talented women. A professional tragedy in my view: all that talent GWTW.

   In my opinion nothing more illustrates the post 1954 decline of the great traditional Hollywood musical-movie star than the miserable table above and the weak box office performance in terms of profits of the Astaire/Kelly/Kaye musicals in the 1955-1959 period shown in Part 3.

   “I never left they movies: they left me,” Jane Powell.

   NOTE: In earlier decades the audiences that some of the flops listed would, on the basis of Bruce’s grosses, have ensured they made profits. However sharply increased production costs were beginning to demand mega bucks for serious profits.

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2. PART THREE: SINATRA/KAYE/KELLY/ASTAIRE: ALL MUSICALS RELEASED 1955-59. SOURCE: BRUCE COGERSON-All figures are domestic and inflation adjusted.

   Guys and Dolls: Sinatra-Brando-Simmons $325 million

   High Society: Crosby-Sinatra-Grace Kelly $279 million
   Pal Joey: Sinatra-Hayworth-Novak $219 million

   The Tender Trap: Sinatra-Debbie Reynolds $151 million
   Joker is Wild: Sinatra-Jeanne Crain-Mitzi Gaynor $140 million
   Daddy Long Legs: Astaire-Leslie Caron $126 million
   The Five Pennies: Kaye-Louis Armstrong $120 million
   Always Fair Weather: Kelly-Dan Dailey-Cyd Charisse $119 million
   Funny Face: Audrey Hepburn/Astaire $117 million
   Les Girls: Kelly-Mitzi Gaynor-Kay Kendall $113 million
   The Court Jester: Kaye-Basil Rathbone $105 million

   Silk Stockings: Astaire-Cyd Charisse $81 million
   Merry Andrew: Kaye-Pier Angeli $59 million
   Invitation to the Dance: Kelly $30 million.

   NOTES: Sinatra was obviously way out in front in the 1955-59 period and the decline of the other 3 is even more obvious obvious when one is aware of the complete picture:

   1/Fred, Eugene and Danny among them made a total of 9 musicals [3 each] in the 55/59 period and their average gross was $110 million. That compares with a massive average of approx 3 times the sum for the overall top grossing 9 movies drawn collectively from all of the musicals in the heyday of those three singer/dancers : $330 million. However it’s even worse than that.

   2/Two of Danny’s 3 films in the chart above were flops [The Court Jester and Merry Andrew].

   3/All 3 of Gene’s films were financial disasters, particularly Invitation to the Dance which turned out to be the biggest financial failure among all 1956’s flops.

   4/Two of Fred’s 3 movies, Silk Stockings and Funny Face were serious box office failures. However following Audrey’s great success in My Fair Lady, Funny Face was re-released and on the strength of Hepburn’s popularity in 1964 finally turned a modest profit; but of course Fred was no longer a force on the musical film scene at that point.

   In short of the 9 55/59 films listedmovies only two were successful on initial release.

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3. PART 2/ 3.Esther and Jane also turned to straight roles to try to save themselves but the public were having none of it and when the 60s came in they were inconsequential as movie stars. Judy who had health issued was in effect finished with the big screen after arguably her greatest triumph A Star is Born in 1954 and made only 4 more movies.

   4/After the flop of The Vagabond King in 1956 the beautiful Kathryn, a trained operatic singer with a wonderful voice for even popular musicals, seemed to just give up on movies and confined herself to the stage [in for example 14 musicals/plays between 1959 and 1997] and television in productions such as Angela Lansbury’s long-running detective series Murder She Wrote where for 3 episodes 1987-9 Katie played scandal gossip Ideal Molloy.

   Bruce’s stats, as they always do, largely tell the tale and the stats based on his figures in Parts 3 and 4 of this post tend to support what I have said above. Hollywood producers seemed to turn to dramatic artists to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the old movie-musical divas: successfully, Deb Kerr in King and I, Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Natalie Wood in West Side Story and, among the men, Brando in Guys and Dolls.

   Of those 4 only Marlon used his own voice and the 3 women were dubbed a la Singing in the Rain’s Lina Lamont. In My Fair Lady Rex Harrison virtually talked his lyrics as he had done on the stage.

   “When it goes into survival mode Hollywood will prioritise profits over art form. However critics, who tend to be purists and may have their reputations invested in continuing to laud the old ways with the established stars, can’t or will not accept that genres like the musical reach the point where they must try to reinvent themselves and there must be a changing of the guard at least to extent that the very greatest stars be employed in say musicals regardless of how comfortable they have been in other genres.

   By the mid-1950s Hollywood was struggling against the ever-increasing power of television and many of its musical stars were ageing and their box office was slipping. That could be seen particularly in the case of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Mr Kelly had been in 3 flops in a row at MGM – The Devil Makes Three, Crest of a Wave and Brigadoon. Mr Astaire had just had back-to-back flops with The Belle of New York and even the prestigious 1953 musical The Band Wagon. The number crunchers must have seen that other major musical stars would follow Astaire and Kelly down the slippery slope. However even today some contemporary critics and historians simply won’t accept the necessity of the sea-change in musical film production that occurred almost out of the blue in the 1950s. Post 1954 musicals are judged even today by standards that applied pre 1955 ” [William Fawley Sight and Sound 1974]

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4. PART ONE: Movie historians and scholars suggest that the period 1950-54, with hits such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Annie Get Your Gun, An American in Paris, Singin in the Rain and White Christmas, marked the end of the traditional Hollywood musical as one of the top stable annual genres of the film business.

   Certainly when the 1960s dawned all but a few of the great stars of the Hollywood musicals from the beginning of the talkies until the mid- fifties were no longer major stars. For example-

   1/Among the men Sinatra survived [and became even greater**] by turning to dramatic films and his Clan/Rat Pack movies; but even as early as 1957 Margaret Hinxman of Photoplay, Britain’s 1950s top film critic and magazine respectively, correctly opined that the heydays of Kelly and Astaire had as she put it “had it”.

   Like Frankie the pair tried to save themselves by going dramatic in usually lower billed supporting parts [for example Gene in Inherit the Wind and Freddie in On the Beach] but their glory days were GWTW.

   2/Prominent among the successful musical females of the golden period of the classic era films were the likes of Judy Garland, Esther Williams, Jane Powell, Kathryn Grayson and Doris Day. Doris survived by turning to what were called “sex comedies” [Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, Move Over Darling, The Thrill of it All, do Not Disturb, That Touch of Mink and the Glass Bottom Boat aka The Spy in the Lace Panties] but by 1968 even she had run out of steam and she retired from screen acting.

   **Sinatra is the only Hollywood Musical Star to be included in Time Magazine’s 100 greatest people of the 20th Century – ie even undeniable greats like of Bing, Fred, Geneand Judy never made the cut.

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