Perhaps you are here to comment on my thoughts about Oliver! so I am here to elaborate. I admit my generalization that "everyone hated it" is untrue (I am learning this myself). When writing and researching, I read some authors' opinions that Oliver! was the worst of all the pictures nominated in 1968 (and 2001 should have been nominated in its place.) Despite its commercial success, I had always heard the same opinion echoed before making the video. I now understand that it is an important picture to many people. After the influx of comments (including death threats that had to be removed), I decided to rewatch the film. As a lover of the novel, I, and the people I watched it with, felt that Oliver! would have made a marvelous adaptation of the novel...if it wasn't a musical. It doesn't work tonally, Mark Lester's dubbed voice is awkward, and the big ensemble numbers (especially "Consider Yourself" and "Who Will Buy?") are what I called them in the video: tacky. It's too happy-go-lucky for the dark humor of Dickens. (And classic musicals can deal with serious issues...as problematic as Carousel is, it has its highs ("June is Bustin Out All Over") and sincere moments ("If I Loved You" "What's the Use of Wonderin'?") making it very effective. Oliver!'s only moment of fresh air is "As Long As He Needs Me" and we have to wait until the second act for that one.) Oliver! deserves more credit than I gave it and several of its Oscar wins were merited. Regardless, I maintain that the win for Best Picture was still an attempt by the academy to add more interest into musicals.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this. And I don't get all the fuss about "2001" beyond the special effects (magnificent for their time, tackyish by today's standards); it's a slow-moving , crashing bore -- just the sort of thing the film "pundits" would enjoy. Read the book instead.
@@fuzzylon I agree that it absolutely sanitized the story, making Fagin and the boys seem a bunch of lovable scamps and such. If you knew "Oliver Twist," the movie was probably laughable. If, like me, you didn't, it was a great movie on its own terms. (The original West End play, if the cast album is any indication, is a dreary, trying-too-hard enterprise.)
This was the days before home video, and as a preteen, I remember Grease was still showing in theaters in the summer of 1979 because it was so popular. While musical movies can be fun to watch, it’s unrealistic to expect that every musical would have the mass audience appeal that Grease had. Grease 2 in 1982 was a perfect example of making a musical movie no one wanted, nor were they interested in seeing.
@@collegeman1988 It goes to prove that star power fueled the original Grease. Both John and Olivia were at the top of their early careers and the public loved them!
@@AXander1978You know, as a kid in London UK 🇬🇧 in the 70s I still remember #BobGeldof of the #BoomtownRats tearing up a Grease poster on #TopofthePops, the BBC chart TV show, when his song finally took Summer Nights down from number 1.
Don't forget Saturday Night Fever from the previous year. In the 1980s there was The Blues Brothers, Staying Alive, Footloose and Dirty Dancing. All were the top grossing musicals in their respective year. The traditional musical may have been dying but the rock musical was thriving. It was no longing the 1950s and 1960s formula of taking current hit songs and weaving a thin plotline around them. There was a real story and songs written (or at least carefully selected) to fit, much like a traditional musical. It was only logical to update the musical with modern music, for it to be a success. After all, movies were becoming primarily date night material for the teenagers and young adults, so a film had a much higher probability of success if it reflected their musical tastes.
Hard to justify saying that "nobody liked " the movie of Oliver. It won best picture of the year (won 6 out of 11 awards), grossed $40 million dollars (more than $200 million in today's dollar) received very favorable reviews from critics as diverse as John Simon,Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert and has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 90% even today!
After hearing him unceremoniously flushing Oliver down the toilet, I decided this is not someone who needs to be taken serious or watched and turned off the video.
Absolutely! My only "complaint" (if you can call it that) is that Barbra Streisand was WAY too young for the role. BUT, she is so magnificent as Dolly Levi that it's completely forgivable. When the show returned to Broadway in 2017, I was fortunate to see it with Bette Midler in the role of Dolly. Easily one of the most magical theater experiences I have ever had.
I was a young teenager when Hello Dolly was released, so we saw it in the movie theater. It was wildly out of place in 1969, when the country was convulsed with Nixon, Vietnam, campus protests, drug culture, the sexual revolution. But 55 years later, it’s a wonderful evocation of another epoch, like a Viennese operetta. Silly characters, slight story, but a wonderful confection with memorable songs. Unfortunately, Sondheim’s musicals do not translate well onscreen.
It's almost a parody of musicals and horror films but it sort of has some shared DNA with Greece in harking back to the 50s and Little Shop of Horrors - 50s music and horror elements.
I agree. In terms of Disney movie musicals, I went from Mary Poppins to The Little Mermaid. Years later I enjoyed movies like The Happiest Millionaire and Citty-Chiity Bang Bang, but not nearly as much.
@@alandombrow908 ... you could have mentioned that aside from VanDyke they also took from Disney, the Sherman Brothers writing team, for the music in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Bedknobs and Broomsticks was a successful musical in the 70s. While not remembered as fondly, 1977's Pete's Dragon was also a mild success but the studio was hoping for a runaway hit.
Obviously "everyone" is an exaggeration, and nearly all absolutes are false. I mean, some people like "The Emoji Movie". But when I saw "Oliver!", I got bored. It didn't have the talent of MGM musicals, nor the grand scale of the 20th Century Fox/Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals. It tried as hard as "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" to be as great a musical as the famous ones, and was a real yawner. I couldn't connect with any characters, the songs were forgettable, and the story line got lost. "Oliver!" winning the Best Picture Oscar was IMHO as wrong as Judy Garland *not* winning the Best Actress Oscar for "A Star Is Born".
HAIR, JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR and TOMMY were all released in the 1970's and not a word about them? What about EVITA in 1996? There were musical films before HAIRSPRAY, PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and CHICAGO.
@@GreasyFilms-qc1xo Not to mention _Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory_ -- although that became more of a cult film due to it being shown on college campuses as a midnight movie when most of the audience was stoned.
Yup. "Annie," ""Godspell," "The Wiz,' even "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "The Young Girls of Rochefort." Seem like too many exceptions to consider the question answered..
The 70s musicals you mention were all "experimental" Broadway shows with some degree of success (I found Tommy dreadful), but questionable on screen. Not all Broadway shows are suitable for movies (I found Hair an abomination. Tommy was dismal. Jesus....I walked out.) That may be one reason split three ways that no one mentions these particular films; no reason to remember them. Chicago was okay, Cabaret was better. It surpassed the show on Broadway, which is saying a lot. Cats was tailor-made for it's fans. They loved it as always. I missed that one. I was out of town that week. Missed the Titanic musical of all time, the Gen Z masterpiece, Barbie. I had to miss that one too cause I stubbed my toe, complicated by an embedded splinter. I was so upset that the next afternoon I bought myself a $15 popsicle.
It's pretty inaccurate to say that with the film "Oliver!", everyone hated it. It was critically acclaimed with Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert (just starting their decades long strongholds in the film criticism arena) among others giving the film rave reviews and was a commercial success as well, becoming the 5th highest-grossing film of 1968 in the US. So...clearly both critics and audiences in the US and abroad liked it at the very least. You may hate it, which you have every right to and you certainly wouldn't be alone among cinephiles who to this day can't understand how "Oliver!" won Best Picture and "2001: A Space Odyssey" wasn't even nominated. But nevertheless, "Oliver!" isn't a film that "everyone hated", then or now. I say all this as an aspiring filmmaker that considers this film both my favorite movie musical and one of my favorite movies.
You are 100% correct. Oliver! is still the biggest British movie musical hit of all time by global ticket sales. It was a massive, massive success and remains a beloved film and is regarded as a classic by critics and public alike.
I agree completely. The 1968 version of "Oliver!" is a brilliantly executed piece of filmmaking with impressive acting, set design and a swag of iconic and memorable songs. It's been one of my fave movies for many years. In my opinion it's better than the well-put-together but rather sugar-coated and sentimental Sound of Music, where about 80% of the songs are sung by the same character. To say that everyone hated "Oliver!" is not only a sweeping generalisation but simply untrue.
Oliver was the sixth highest grossing film of the year. The highest grossing was Funny Girl, which was pretty much musical as well. To call the film childish and tacky is, well, childish and tacky. Further your education.
Yes, but Lionel Bart's follow-up musical "Twang!" (about Robin Hood) was the biggest financial disaster to ever hit London's West End and Bart sold all his rights to "Oliver" in a desperate attempt to keep it going and so died broke.
@@peterdavy6110That’s not quite true, because when Cameron Mackintosh got the rights to Oliver he paid Lionel money from every production, which kept him comfortable for his last few years. But yes, he did piss away a fortune, and he did sell his rights, originally to Max Bygraves for £350, who then made a fortune selling them on to Essex music.
Just for the record, I loved "Oliver!" I recently caught a clip of the big "Who Will Buy" number -- with Onna White's splendid choreography and traffic management-- and found it every bit as engaging as before.
Not sure if this reviewer has ever actually seen Oliver! He certainly didn't research the public's reaction to the film at the time. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote. "The musical numbers emerge from the story with a grace that has been rarely seen since the musicals of René Clair. Rodger Ebert called it "A treasure of a film" and said " as a work of popular art, it will stand the test of time, I guess. It is as well-made as a film can be." And as for the suggestion that musicals were flopping because they weren't "human" enough for the new 60's sensibility, Oliver Twist is literally a story about people who can't worry about putting on their Sunday-clothes because they are dealing with real problems in real time.
I saw it in the theater when it was released. Looking back on it now I can remember being absolutely frightened of Oliver Reed's Bill Sykes. It's as if his character wandered in from a different movie. Truly one of the great movie villains of all time. For me his performance is up there with Joe Pesci's Tommy in Goodfellas. I'm not being funny.
@@nellgwenn I've never seen "Goodfellas," so I'll take your word for that one. I have to admit, I didn't find the Sykes character as frightening as that (though Reed acted it well); then again, I was already fourteen. (In the stage musical, BTW, Sykes actually has a song! It was cut from the movie to make him more menacing.)
@@Blaqjaqshellaq Since I don't know the stage show in much detail -- the cast album was too depressing -- I don't know the undertaker number. But "Boy for Sale" certainly left an impression -- didn't realize it was Harry Secombe.
A perfect musical? "As long as he beats me..." oh wait, "Needs".... but still. The school I taught at did Oliver in the 8th grade one year. Our tradition was at 8th grade graduation to sing a medley from that year's musical. Boy, was it a downer to hear some of the songs from that show.
@@paules3437 Conrad's point is that at the time the movie of the musical was very well received. It was nominated for 19 Oscars (more than any other single studio Musical ever). Won 6 (the Sound of Music only won 5 three years before). Made four times it's budget back at the box office (and this was when the impact of new cheaper televisions was changing peoples spending habits). One theater in London played it for 90 strait weeks. Offering souvenirs and an intermission and was responsible for almost two million in sales (or 20% of the budget). It was called a perfect film by Robert Siskel. And the character portrayal of Fagin by Richard Moody forever changed how that character would be portrayed. Taking him from a very anti-symmetic Sylock like villain, to a much more sympathetic one. All this is said to make the point Oliver! the film was definitely not hated by everyone. In fact really the opposite was true
@@mic7504 Wow! Lots of statistics. You seem to know a lot about the history of it. And yeah, I got that it wasn't "hated." I liked it as a kid, but not so much now. I had to laugh when you wrote that Fagin was "antisymmetric"! : )
@@paules3437 He totally was not symmetric (like most faces)... Good catch and thanks for reading. I really was fatigued after writing that overly long reply.
Exactly. We grew up on fairy tales of villainous characters who gobbled children, and eventually got their just deserts. If only villains were as easy to spot in real life, but adulthood teaches us otherwise, sadly.
Exactly, we LOVED him, actually, as he was a properly villainous scary villain who remained safely behind the screen. The idea that kids cant cope with scary characters is so American Disney, all sanitized dullness. We were brought up on European fairy tales of kids being baked in ovens and wolves gobbling up girls in the woods, ffs.
If the three of Sherman Brothers films Poppins, Chitty and Charlotte's Web....Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is the best for me. Produced by the James Bond team with Scrumptious living at Spectre HQ (the studio mansion)...on a kids spy story written by Ian Flemming heavily rewritten by Rhold Dahl (you have to have a scary character)
Who is your source for 'everyone hated Oliver!'? It won Best Picture and was a box office smash and well reviewed. And in the 1970s got a re-release, and made even more money then.
I echo those here who correct your assertion that "everyone hated" the film of Oliver! As one who was a child in 1968, I can attest that my family and every family we knew were amazed by it, and that it got a heap of good press. Not to mention its half-dozen Oscars. It was clearly a phenomenon at the time, unlike Star!, Doolittle, and Camelot. Whoever told you it was a hated film doesn't know what they're talking about.
Finian's Rainbow, Fred Astaire s last musical from 1968 and Goodbye Mr. Chips (1969) should have been included in this. While both were flops, the one good thing these 2 had was the glorious singing of Petula Clark.
_Goodbye, Mr. Chips_ was dreadful, as it was a story that had no business being turned into a musical in the first place. (It was based on a novel by James Hilton, who also wrote _Lost Horizon_ , which got turned into an even bigger bomb in 1973, one that wound up ending the Bacharach-David songwriting duo. Ironically, both novels had been done well as non-musical films earlier.) _Finian's Rainbow_ , OTOH, is just plain weird in an enjoyable way. Interestingly, it was directed by a young Francis Ford Coppola, with an even younger George Lucas as first assistant director.
@@mikewhelan4261they used existing sets from *Camelot* to save money. That's why it didn't cost as much as its contemporaries. The original show was too radical for the 1950s but not radical enough for the 1960s, and a lot of the major black civil rights battles had already been won by that point in time. And I wonder whether the fallout over Petula's NBC-TV special in the US with Harry Belafonte had any affect on ticket sales of this movie. Boomers didn't care and preferred movies about malignant narcissists simping instead. Tommy Steele was better in Disney's *The Happiest Millionaire* where at least they let John Davidson do the romancing of women.
A picture of Barbra Streisand should never be the thumbnail for a video that has the word flop in it… She’s the greatest star and deserves a lot more respect than that, and by the way that movie did find its legs years later and is now a classic
Agree! I cannot understand why Hello Dolly apparently got or continues to be criticized. Given her age at the time of filming she is astonishing. It may be a a bit long, and some of her lip syncing is off but the production values and her performance make this a classic.
@@thegailyreview245 Certainly not a beautiful voice. Very whiny tho perhaps distinctive. She played the frantic Jewish woman reasonably well, I guess; that seemed to be her schtik (sp?) I never saw her in something like "The Way We Were." Maybe she was a more versatile actress than I know. Still, I find her voice irritating. But then she probably feels that way about mine.
All criticism of every post-1964 Sherman brothers musical is just projecting the faults of their worst and most overrated one, that Julie Andrews atrocity, onto them. I wish that movie had never been made and the books they were based on had never been written.
Hold on hold on. You’re wrong about “Oliver!” Were you around in 1968? From the look of your face, I don’t think so. Everybody did not hate “Oliver!” In fact, I’ve never heard anyone who has seen that movie do anything but praise it. It’s a fantastic movie musical- in my opinion, one of the best ever made. And it got glowing reviews from film critics.
@@larrydirtybird Be fair. You don't need to have lived history to study it. I think it's fantastic that younger people are interested, and it's up to us oldies to gently put them straight if they get it wrong. Kindness is encouragement.
Technically, Rex is singing to a PUPPET of a seal, which is worse. "Rex Harrison doing his best impression of Himself As Henry Higgins" was a golden observation!
I hate to tell you - Rex Harrison always played Rex Harrison - watch an earlier movie of his such as 'The Ghost and Mrs. Muir' - same ol' Rex! Caesar? The Pope? Always Rex playing Rex.
The problem with *Doctor Doolittle* besides the foolish discarding of "Something In Your Smile" for an inferior song where Anthony Newley simps for the dubbed Samantha Eggar, was that Baloo and Bagheera in *The Jungle Book* had more interesting things to say, and those things were put in their mouths by veteran animators who built their careers around, making cartoon animals talk.
@@tarotbearJulie Andrews was worse. The same performance since 1964 and it wasn't Oscar worthy then, either. Julie as a flying nanny. Julie as a failed nun turned hausfrau. Julie as a missionary's wife. Julie as a flapper. Julie pretending to be Gertrude Lawrence. Julie as a drag king. Julie as a princess. No range at all. Even the movie where she exposed her bosoms is just her playing a proxy version of herself. There's a reason Jack Warner could be talked out of casting Cary Grant as Henry Higgins but not Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle, his first and only choice for the part.
Hello Dolly was the #5 biggest box office hit of 1969. Paint your wagon #7. They lost money, but sure sold more tickets that most other films released that year. I'd also say Hello Dolly has stood the text of time. Most musicals seem to live on and are regularly rewatched or discovered more than many films that are released.
The Music Man is my favorite. And why no mention of: Grease; Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; Hair; Carousel; State Fair; Flower Drum Song; The King And I; The Unsinkable Molly Brown? Are Annie; The Wiz; and Pete's Dragon not within the covered time period?
I’m willing to the only one who thinks Babs was perfectly cast in “Hello, Dolly”. I saw it at the cinema when it first came out at the age of 8 and adored it! It never occurred to me that she was too young for the role. I thought of her backstory as this ..... Dolly was around 28 in the movie’s storyand she married wealthy Ephraim when she was around 20 and he was 25. After a fabulous 5 year marriage in which they were devoted to each other and frequented the Harmonia Gardens restaurant every night, Ephraim died tragically in an accident at just 30, and broken-hearted Dolly hid away for 3 years from grief, working as a marriage broker to support herself after Ephraim’s fortune went on repaying the debts they built up from their philanthropy. After meeting Horace she decided to end her recluse and pursue him. Although Babs was only 24 when she made this, my backstory for Dolly works! And I’m sticking to it so I can still love this wonderful, silly, expensive romp of a movie 💖💖💖
Hair. Rocky Horror. Grease. Xanadu. Can't Stop The Music. Streets Of Fire. Movies about dancing: Saturday Night Fever. Thank God It's Friday. Staying Alive. Flashdance. Footloose. Body Rock.
Exactly - a whole demographic slice wasn't interested in paying to watch the kind of musicals their parents preferred. I was a teenager during this era and mostly avoided this form of entertainment - and still do. However, I enjoyed Paint Your Wagon and Tommy despite their flaws.
The soundtrack from Mary Poppins was uniquely outstanding. For me, the music plus the much-needed theme that fathers need to prioritize their families made it a beloved film.
"Oliver" was the first film my twin and I saw in a theater. An older brother bought us the soundtrack and it became an instant classic for us. (To this day I still know all the words to the songs.)
It's mainly Kubrick supporters who can't get over his movies losing Oscars to musicals pushing the smear campaigns against them. At least they lost to good ones and not that shitty movie that enabled Julie Andrews' film career. At least he could still tell Stephen King's stories better than Stephen King.
@@AttmayTotally agree, in fact THE SHINING IS HIS TRUE MASTERPIECE FILM! Literally the only Stanley Kubrick film ive not just seen more than once or twice.... I've watched it like 30 or 40 times in the extended version. His other films ive seen maybe 2 or 3 times each!
re: Oliver (1968) I saw that picture when it first came out when I was 9. "...except everyone hated it..."? Really? That doesn't jibe with MY recollection. Your strange comment sent me to look up the original notices where I discover that both Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert (among others) gave it superlative reviews. So who exactly is this "everyone?"
Movie musicals didn't die. They just morphed into music videos. Regardless of all the political crap that goes on, audiences still like to see talented people sing and dance.
I grew up in the 1970s which was the era of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang having regular showings on TV. I never thought of this film as "nightmarish" as a child. Granted, the Child Catcher was scary, but other than that, this film was as memorable to children of the 1970s as Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music. It was much better than most of the other musical adaptations that came after Mary Poppins.
@@dmnemainePan and scan did the 65mm cinematography no favors. The widescreen laserdisc released by MGM/UA in the 1990s was a revelation for those who were not alive for the original theatrical release.
Chitty was another childhood favourite. The child catcher was just scary in the way kids like to be scared. No lasting trauma, just lots of booooo, and yay when he get his.
I started my Hollywood career in the early 90s when I saw there were still remnants of the immense New York set built for Hello Dolly: most of it was sold to Steven Bocho for exclusive use in Hill Street Blues, the Harmonia Garden facade was falling apart but still recognizable, the main entrance to Fox Studios was the Main Street for the parade are now office spaces & Central Park would eventually become the glass buildings for FoxSports & FX Network by the late 90s. Sad it’s all gone now, but I got to see it & I was the only one on the lot that seem to appreciate it & recognize any of it from Hello Dolly.
That is so cool to hear! I had no idea the set lasted that long. Dolly!, in particular, is one of my favorite films, so it is sad to hear about being forgotten.
@@MovieMusicalMania Fox had already sold their backlot which is now Century City, so they spent a lot of money building a new New York street set just for Hello Dolly & it was their primary New York backlot which is why it lasted as long as it did. I think the huge Dolly budget should have been amortized to pay for something they needed in the long run.
@@patimuseDavid Merrick, whom Jerry Herman once called "the anti-Christ," was responsible for the smear campaign against the movie before it even opened. And he was also responsible for making 20th pay him a million dollars so they could release it before it closed on Broadway, on top of the tens of millions expended on the actual production of the film when the studio refused to consider shooting it in Rome to save money. They said the unions would never go for an Americana musical being shot overseas. Nearly 4 decades later, *Hairspray* had to be shot in Toronto because Baltimore had gotten too expensive to shoot there though John Waters made the original film there for only $2 million.
@@Attmay speaking of Jerry Herman, who had a home in nearby Bel Air, I would occasionally see him walking with a care-taker around the Century City mall which is literally a minute away from that Fox entrance where they filmed Hello Dolly.
Two points: First, Part of the problem is the evolution of the stage musical as well. 1954's "The Band Wagon" features Fred Astaire trying to do a show you would expect Fred Astaire to do, while a one man equivalent of Rodgers and Hammerstein wants the show to be IMPORTANT. And so a light show about a children's book illustrator doing murder mysteries turns into a disastrous intepretation of "Faust." The 1950s stage musicals were about being IMPORTANT, and Hollywood would follow suit. Second, the change in pop music styles is a factor by the time you get to the 1970s. The songs in a 1930s-50s movie musical were the pop music of the day, and songs that would regularly be recorded by singers and bands of the day. By the time we get to the 1970s, most of the pop element was gone and musicals became a source of the dreaded "show tune."
*A Chorus Line* was the turning point. That's a show that in theory should have been a hit as a movie. It wasn't to say the least despite a good review from Roger Ebert. Its fate as a flop was sealed the day Norman Lear got the rights. That IMO did more damage to the form than any other musical film without Julie Andrews in it up to that point not just because it barely scratched the surface of why it ran 15 years on Broadway, but it because its failure was used to deprive other shows of adaptations that might not have failed. Even getting a mid movie made out of *Evita* in the 1990s took a lot of pushing for it as a result. Rodgers and Hammerstein actually produced the movies of *Oklahoma!* and *South Pacific* themselves. The latter is basically a 20th Century-Fox film in all but name based on the personnel they hired to bring it to the screen. Meanwhile, a lot of the 1960s and 1970s attempts at social relevancy aged like milk. *Hair* was not a bad movie by any means, but the timing of its release (1979, not long after the end of the Vietnam War and a year before Ronald Reagan became President) could not have been worse. Being a hippie in 1967 was one thing. Being one in 1979 already made you an anachronism.
@@gildersleevefan67 I agree about “the dreaded show tune,” but the ‘70s also saw the emergence of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the first composer to integrate pop sounds into a conventional musical. He laid the groundwork for everything from the Disney Renaissance to the “hip hopera” of Hamilton. They all produced songs that could be both show tunes and radio hits.
This video is not just ludicrous in its factual inaccuracies and idiotic assessments, it's dangerous misinformation pushing a boomer narrative. That generation killed musicals with its shitty taste in music and by proxy in musicals. They are the reason that lush, harmonically complex songs were replaced by bombastic glorified nursery rhymes that sometimes don't even rhyme!
As I’ve said to others, “Take Me To The Fair” was included on the OBC recording, but the song was removed at the very beginning of the run/during tryouts and added back in for the movie
"Do something! Start swimming!" "I don't swim!" "Then start drowning!" It was based on an Ian Fleming book, produced by Cubby Broccoli, and even has Desmond Llewellyn (Q) in a cameo as the nasty junk dealer!
Nooo, not Dolly! Like for Wall-E, this is my favourite muscial (my second fav is Newsies). But I see your point. Yes, Barbara was too young, but she was absolutely fantastic in it, as was everyone else. In this sense I find it curious that Michael Crawford began his fame with Dolly, the movie that helped end the muscial craze, but then also rose to his biggest height with Phantom, the musical that saved Musicals.
@@MovieMusicalManiaI blame boomers. Their parents offered them the world on a silver platter, but they traded it in for a cheap TV tray. They replaced movies like this with cheap ugly movies glorifying simping while almost every musical that didn't have animated characters or Muppets was rated R. Just like how they have tried to replace real food with fake food.
You most salient observation was that show tunes were the pop music of the 40s and 50s. Elvis and tge Beatles turned show tunes into your parents music.
Geez! This has to be a troll video to annoy anyone that grew up in that era so that they will leave a comment telling you are off the mark on almost everything presented. There you have it, my engagement comment to help your algorithm.
The flop l liked was Streisand ‘s “0n a Clear Day You Can See Forever” the year after “Hello, Dolly” was released. The production values in the reincarnation sequences were not only splendid. but APPROPRIATE. But then they saddled the present day storyline with a love interest 20 years older than Barbra whose hottie days were long over, a coture wardrobe and several buffoonish, blah subplots, and the whole thing died slowly and agonizingly onscreen. I’ve kept the DVD in my collection just to rewatch the songs and regression sequences, and noticed Barbra shied away from musicals after that until “Funny Lady” and then “Yentl”.
FWIW, it's more fun just to listen to the soundtrack album. You still have to deal with M. Montand's strange singing and accent, but you get lots of Barbra, along with the Nelson Riddle orchestrations.
I love the score of On A Clear Day, but so much of the film was butchered to get to a reasonable running time. In the credits you will see actors who never appeared on screen in the final cut. Nevertheless, still a fun movie in my view
That was yet another example of weird Hollywood casting of that era. Just as Hollywood (or, to be more accurate, Jack Warner) refused to cast Julie Andrews in any of the musicals in which she'd starred on Broadway, so it became a standard in the late part of the '60s that practically every musical had to star Barbara Streisand, no matter how ill-suited she was for the part, including replacing Carol Channing in _Dolly_ and Barbara Harris in this one.
I don’t understand how lala land was so successful given that the most important thing, singing and dancing of the protagonists, was sub par. Imagine “Hair” or “Grease” or “ Staying alive” with brilliant actors who are half decent singers and dancers, it would be a disaster.
I liked La La Land a lot, especially that opening number and the song that Emma Stone sang but when she and Ryan Gosling started to "dance" all I could think was they're no Fred and Ginger. Why the hell couldn't they find two actors who could actually deliver? Channing Tatum was one I know who could.
Not sure if this reviewer has ever actually seen Oliver! He certainly didn't research the public's reaction to the film at the time. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote. "The musical numbers emerge from the story with a grace that has been rarely seen since the musicals of René Clair. Rodger Ebert called it "A treasure of a film" and said " as a work of popular art, it will stand the test of time, I guess. It is as well-made as a film can be." It was also a box-office hit making four times its ten million dollar budget back. And as for the suggestion that musicals were flopping because they weren't "human" enough for the new 60's sensibility, Oliver Twist is literally a story from one of the greatest humanist authors of all time about people who can't worry about putting on their Sunday-clothes because they are dealing with real problems in real time. And to suggest it was nominated for 19 Academy awards because there was no competition that year or in order to "save the genera". I mean really.. It was in up against epics, art house tear jerkers, and ground breaking masterpieces as well as a couple of pretty important musicals. The competition that year included The Battle of Algiers, The Lion in Winter, The Subject Was Roses, War and Peace, Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rosemary's Baby(for *** sake) and modern musicals like The Producers, Star! and Funny GIrl (as well as the agreed upon truly childish and sacranine Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) . Oliver! is a two and a half hour long masterpiece of effort from every one of its film departments. And the performances Sir Carol Reed drew from the almost entirely unknown child cast shin when placed beside other child centered musicals. And the empathetic character interpretation by Ron Moody of the oft anti-semetically depicted Fagin changed forever how this anti-hero would be performed. When you consider Sir Reed had had never directed a Musical before and was known for his tense Film Noir classics more so than a few family Comedies, you can understand how Oliver! is a story set to music rather than a spectacle with an undertone of a story. Nice insights about the history of Musicals. But I think he needs to re-watch Oliver!
Pauline Kael calling David Tomlinson "a sexless pixie" as Mr. Browne in *Bedknobs and Broomsticks* (a part that almost went to Ron Moody) really soured me on her. She was subtly accusing him of being a homosexual. If only she had seen the actual uncut film. Not like she was the only woman film critic who ever lived. Meanwhile, Molly Haskell had some interesting comments on 1974's *Mame,* the movie Angela Lansbury was kept out of, suggesting Lucille Ball was not the problem with the film but the character she was playing was. And no, *Chitty Chitty Bang Bang* is not childish or saccharine. That's more projection of the flaws of that terrible Julie Andrews movie she made for Walt Disney onto a superior work with the same songwriters and the same male lead. It's a metaphor for the Holocaust that went over the heads of movie audiences of the day.
Yeah, me too. They were ok for kids, I thought, but I know more than one adult now who was terrified of the kid catcher. I think that guy was actually a trained ballet dancer.
@@paules3437 Robert Helper WAS a professional ballet dancer. In fact, during one take, his wagon overturned and he saved himself by executing a perfect leap from the wagon and landing lightly on his feet.
Thanks for putting this history together. While I saw all these movies and others, I didn't really have a chronological record of them. When I moved from the far edges of East San Diego County suburbia to Los Angeles in 1970, I started to see movies in theaters as they were released rather than years later on television. It's a bit of a revelation to see the differences as the evolution of the genre rather than as just differences in productions.
According to Robert B. Sherman's autobiography *Moose,* the former made more money in the UK than the US where the source material was unknown despite the popularity of James Bond movies. The Broccolis got the rights to Chitty along with Bond and were able to take advantage of Dick and Bob Sherman being allowed one non-Disney work in their contract with Walt. Movies based on stage shows tend to have more built-in recognition because their songs were often sung by pop singers of the day. With an original movie musical score, you are taking an even bigger chance because you are gambling on the public's acceptance of new songs. Now, nobody covers showtunes anymore except Broadway actors recording albums the record companies never promote and radio never plays. Can you imagine Shawn Mendes attempting to cover "Another Winter in a Summer Town" or Sabrina Carpenter recording anything from the *Mean Girls* musical which seems to have crashed and burned as a movie?
Legend has it that 700 years in the future, a certain garbage compactor robot will love his VHS of Hello Dolly so much that it will indirectly cause him to save the planet and humanity.
A mostly fair assessment… but you err with OLIVER! which not only received 6 Oscars, but was a box office hit and earned a rare rave review (for a musical based on a play) from The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael. I was there in 1968 (granted only just shy of 8 years old) but the movie was extremely well loved. If you look at Oliver! from an auteurist perspective the fingerprints of Carol Reed, the man who made Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man and A Kid for Two Farthings, are all over the picture. In its heavily stylized approach it reminds me (in parts) of Powell & Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann. It’s a far better movie than Funny Girl precisely because William Wyler’s movie was meant to be a showcase for Streisand (and, in that, it succeeds beautifully); whereas Reed’s film was meant to be a stylized fable - it has more meat on its bones, and the second act doesn’t sag drearily as does Funny Girl’s.
@@mckeldin1961 Oliver! was so successful that it led to the creation of another Dickens-based musical film, Scrooge. While not as successful at the box office, Scrooge did well on television and spawned a stage version that is popular with community theater companies. (We have a theater near me, Spring Lake Theater Company, that has performed Scrooge every year for four decades).
11:05 Overspending. Same problem Hollywood has today. Too much spectacle & it stops feeling special. Cut the budgets, cut the spectacle to a reasonable amount, & make movies with good stories on modest budgets. This has been the path to success since the 1930's.
In addition to the stellar cast and an incredible Austrian backdrop, the music in The Sound of Music featured Rogers and Hammerstein tunes that were hypnotic and hummable. Every tune! How can another movie compete with this standard? No wonder musicals tanked after TSoM.
I hate that Hello Dolly is seen as the death of the musical genre. It is so spectacular. If it had been released a number of years earlier, Im sure it would have been a raging success. A victim of poor timing.
@@jimmyjamestruscott Dolly is ripe for another try at a film - probably with the most recent Broadway Dolly, Bette Midler, in the lead. Or even Babs herself, since she’s actually old enough now!
A lot of people--even Saul Chaplin, who should have known better--like to say the all the big roadshow musicals made after "Sound of Music" were flops, and several were. But "Thoroughly Modern Millie" was more than a "moderate success" (it is overlong, though), Funny Girl" was huge, and the brilliant "Oliver!" did quite well at the box office for a movie "everyone hated." "Half a Sixpence," not mentioned here for some reason, made its money back--pretty good for a title no one had heard of and with a star no one had heard of, but it was made in England where filming was cheaper. "Paint Your Wagon" was Paramount's sixth highest grossing film up to that time and did great at the box office; it lost money because location filming doubled the budget. That's also true of the benighted "Hello, Dolly!" which for some reason people love to cite as the biggest bomb in movie history. It actually grossed respectably considering how tired everyone was of that song by then, but again the location filming did it in. It's in profit now (okay, so it took half a century; "The Wizard of Oz" took nearly 20 years to make its money back). "Sweet Charity" finally found its audience when it was re-released in the eighties. Likewise, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," which bored and annoyed kids (including Yours Truly) in 1971, somehow became a classic twenty years later. Though you'd never guess from this video, posterity has tended to be kind toward the big overstuffed movie musicals of the era.
Julie Andrews has said that making "Millie" a "roadshow" film was a mistake because it didn't need to be. They had to pad it to make it a "roadshow" event. I agree that the Jewish Wedding sequence is totally unnecessary and does nothing for the plot.
I'm told PAINT YOUR WAGON was hugely popular in Europe. Julie's great in THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE, but its central white slavery plotline and depiction of Chinese people must have made thoughtful audiences cringe even upon its initial release, let alone now. I loved WILLY WONKA in 1971, and I still love it today.
Actually "Half a Sixpence", like "Oliver" before it, was a big hit on the London stage before coming to Broadway where it was also a big hit. Tommy Steele was a huge British pop star in the late 50's. I think the movie is kind of hit and miss. It only comes alive during the musical numbers with Tommy Steele. You can find clips of some of the numbers on youtube.
@@kenrfc Tommy Steele also appeared in Disney's musical THE HAPPIEST MILLIONAIRE (1967), released the same year as HALF A SIXPENCE, and in the following year he would appear in the Broadway-based musical FINIAN'S RAINBOW, co-starring with Fred Astaire and Petula Clark. Previously, Steele had headlined a British "pantomime" stage adaptation of Rodgers & Hammerstein's CINDERELLA (1958), just a year after the TV musical had premiered on American television with Julie Andrews in the title role.
One contributing factor to the Disappearing Movie Musical phenomenon that you didn't mention, was 1970's Barbara Streisand's evisceration of "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever," due to her having put up the funds to buy the movie rights to the once popular musical play. I directed the show, in 1969, in Heidelberg, Germany, and knew the show, intimately. In order to make it, above all else, a Barbara Streisand movie, she had the writers drop large segments of plot and a number of songs, so that all eyes would be constantly on Her, and she hadn't any competition for the audience's attention. I can't tell you how disappointed I was upon seeing the movie. It was a once in a lifetime moment for me, and ended my interest in Ms. Streisand, forever.
You need to dig in deeper into your own assumption that audiences in. the late '60s didn't want "characters . . . singing about putting on your Sunday clothes, when there was [sic] real problems happening in real time." Audiences in the 1930s and '40s were living through the Great Depression and the biggest war in human history -- and they LOVED musicals. So what had changed to make tastes change so much? I don't have an easy answer (and I doubt that a better answer will be all that easy), but it is too simplistic to say that the times were serious and musicals are frivolous. I appreciate this video, and your interest, and your knowledge --but could't you find a better space than your dorm room to record this? (Oh, and Streisand way, way too young to play Dolly at the time. "Back where you belong"?? How long had she been a well-known matchmaker in New York City, from age 20-26?? How long had she been away, 6 months? Dolly is supposed to be around 40-50 years old, not 27, as Streisand was at the time . . .
For what its worth Oliver! had a huge influence on musicals since and you only need to look at 1970's Scrooge and 1971's Bedknobs & Broomsticks to see how much was lifted from Oliver!
@@alg11297 In his interview he sounds like a jealous fool possibly because Streisand rejected a script he presented her. He had little of anything to say that was positive even regarding her exemplary singing. After all, Streisand's a woman who took control of a project in many of its aspects and he possibly thought only a man can do that.
@MrLourie sure, she just had no part in the script writing, and the story was taken from his short story. But what did he know? He only won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his output which included novels, short stories and children's books? Many films were made from his other works but they didnt didnt fail like this one with Babs at the helm. What a talent!
Actually, Ian Fleming (THE Ian Fleming of James Bond fame) wrote the original book of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and it's considered a stone-cold kids' classic in the UK, playing every Christmas on TV without fail. The Child-Catcher was a special delight as a child, as he was a proper villainous villain we could be safely scared of as he was obviously a fantasy behind a screen. Children can actually cope with scary characters and as a child, I hated pandering, sanitized stuff that assumed we couldn't. Adults of my era all remember this element of the film if none other. The songs are pretty cool too.
2:15 "Can-Can," "West Side Story," and "South Pacific"were just a couple of the movies that received a larger-than-life treatment. A couple.... all three of them... 6:58 "cumbersome and misguided adaption..." You mean adaptation? I used to jokingly threaten my kids that if they misbehaved, I'd force them to watch "Oliver". (Hmmm.... maybe I should have made them watch "Ain't Misbehavin'"!... but naw, cuz that music's awesome.) I think it's awesome that you made this with your slightly askew quilt in the background! Authentic! Certainly, "Cabaret" was a successful stage-to-screen event, and I thought the kind of postmodern way they handled Chicago, where the film story would cut to cabaret-style songs, was ingenious.
_South Pacific_ (another Joshua Logan travesty) was especially weird because someone in post-production decided that, to heighten the "mood" of the musical numbers, they'd put a colored filter over the scene to highlight the dominant emotion. As I understand it, they tried it as an experiment, looked at it, decided it was a bad idea, but somehow managed to destroy the original untinted negative so they had no choice but to go with it. I can say that, upon seeing it in the theater, the general impression was that something had gone wrong with the projector.
@ a travesty of a work he was involved with the creation of at every level? Fie and foo. There would be no *South Pacific* without him. The whole point of the filters is that they alter the thing that people are being judged by, the color of their skin, by turning them into colors that no real human skin can manifest. The guy who restored it at Fox in the 2000s actually talked to Leon Shamroy's family about how they did it. They even still had some filters on hand! They were not universally hated in 1958 if Shamroy received an Oscar nomination for Best Color Cinematography, and the film played in London for almost five years! There's a reason the guy who ran the Widescreen Museum website preferred it to *The Sound of Music,* but not for the reasons I do. The movie was shot in Hawaii, and there was barely any infrastructure for film production there. There were no labs they could take it to and watch dailies.
I actually liked Paint Your Wagon as a kid. I never knew it was a musical. I thought it was a western with singing. I still watch it occasionally on DvD.
Absolutely! Menken and Ashman, who did Little Shop of Horrors, were brought on board for several films starting with The Little Mermaid to specifically make these movies feel more like musicals in terms of structure (ie the protagonist always has an "I want" song, etc). And that ushered in Disney's second golden age.
I absolutely love Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! It has some editing problems but all the musical numbers are brilliant. I've watched Doll On a Music Box 1000 times. And the Child Catcher is the best part!
I highly recommend Jeanine Basinger’s The Movie Musical, about the most incisive book on this subject. I have the (dis)advantage of coming of age during the sixties and seventies, having seen most of these musicals at the time of their release as well as more recently. When you have, say, Hello Dolly and Midnight Cowboy released the same year, you can see the major contrasts of the times. I could like and appreciate both, but I could never admit to my friends that I loved musicals, for appearing not with the times. Yet, in their own way, these musicals were a part of their times, in their own particular way. Seeing them out of the context of that era, many of them seem much better and more enjoyable. But maybe it’s because I don’t have to feel guilty about being not with the times anymore.
I think it's that - more than most cinematic art forms - movie musicals require a level of disbelief suspension that modern audiences lack. We find it easier to believe in zombies, space adventures and dinosaurs made to look real through special effects than that somebody doing their shopping would suddenly burst into song and have an 80 piece orchestra materialise out of nowhere to accompany them.
I've never heard it opined that 1954's "A Star is Born" marked the beginning of the end of the movie musical. And I'm not sure what the length of the movie would have to do with anything. LIke "The Wizard of Oz" in 1939, "A Star is Born" was in the top five of the year's "money makers," but so much money had been spent on production and advertising that the movies didn't make the "nut."
Plus Warner Bros idiotic decision to cut 30 minutes from a highly acclaimed premiere version was the reason for box office dropping off. If you were going to see it after the premiere which you heard was so great and you saw a different film and told your friends, guess what? You felt cheated and rightfully so.
@@chgoboy69Disney learned that lesson the hard way after Walt died: cutting every musical they made over the next decade, forgetting how he had to fight his own distribution company to get the last movie musical Disney released in his lifetime at the running time he wanted. Its film editing Oscar is a sick joke in light of Disney's subsequent behavior.
@@chgoboy69 Exactly when they cut it they ruined the plot and as you said and afterward it bombed, very sad, what's worse is that much of what was chopped was destroyed.
I worked in Hollywood for years. I was on the Fox lot back in the 80’s and still remember the MANY set artifacts that were still on the lot just like it was 1969. You see pictures that go over budget never have $ to strike the exterior sets so they literally just sit there until someone wants to rent the space. Then it is THAT production company that has to pay to strike the old sets. However, they only strike what they have to do artifacts still hang around for years and years.
Dale Hennessey's *Annie* sets remained standing for decades to honor his memory: he died of a heart attack during its production. His Oscar nomination for the film (Ralph Burns got the only other one for arrangements) was posthumous.
@@Andrew12759 The two albums I listened to the most in the waning years of the ‘70s were Pink Floyd’s The Wall and the Muppet Movie soundtrack. Paul Williams wrote a BRILLIANT score for that film - “I’m Going to Go Back There Someday” is more moving than most songs from conventional musicals. (See also the score for another Williams/Muppets collaboration, Emmett Otter’s Jugband Christmas.)
You mischaracterized Thoroughly Modern Millie. It was Universal's biggest moneymaker since Spartacus and remained so until Airport in 1970. It also received several Oscar nominations. That same year there was not only Camelot, but Finian's Rainbow, Half a Sixpence, and The Happiest Millionaire contributing to the decline. The latter was Disney's attempt at another Mary Poppins-sized success. For 1968, as has been pointed out by several others, Oliver! was very much loved (although I'm personally in the head-scratching crowd over that). Between Oliver! and Funny Girl, Columbia became the only studio to dodge the bullet that hit all the others by the end of the decade.
@@uuclmusic2711it was a commentary on the original movie by showing how a black man in the audience wasn't fooled and called it out. Lucie Arnaz left *They're Playing Our Song* for this. That should've gotten a movie adaptation before MTV changed everything because by then it would've been too late.
@@uuclmusic2711 that’s because the kind of music he wanted to play in the clubs he was playing in he had to disguise himself as a black man cause the audience wouldn’t accept him as a white msn playing with a black band and the black face was also done in the original in the 30’s
Jack Warner thought it was too long; he wanted to make more profits with a shorter version. That's why he tore most of it away after the film's premiere.
@@fromthesidelines Warner also vandalized 1776, at the request of President Richard M. Nixon, but happily, all or virtually all of the lost footage has been restored in a Director's cut now widely available.
Disney is still doing it today if *Bedknobs and Broomsticks* went back to the short version for everything after DVD and *Pete's Dragon* has had five minutes unaccounted for since its original premiere and they would rather do an anti-musical in-name-only fleamake than find the missing scenes which they should have done in the 1990s after they restored B&B and *The Happiest Millionaire.* They also gutted *The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band* and refuse to even look to see if the missing scenes, including two songs called "Westerin'" and "I Couldn't Have Dreamed it Better if I Tried," still exist. There were demo pressings of the soundtrack LP with those songs, then they were removed for the version released to stores.
@@fromthesidelines according to a 2001 miniseries about Judy Garland, it was not so much Jack Warner himself as "the money men in New York," as he described them. This is why I don't object to the running time of *My Fair Lady.* we obviously use that to make it up to George Cukor.
Oh, everyone hated Oliver? Quite the reverse. Again, was brought up on that film in the 70s as a kid. We all loved it, and it was shown regularly on holidays on the TV. TV actually meant that cinema attendance was lower at the time, that and the absolute crumbling state of many cinemas which were old converted theatres at the end of their natural lives in many cases.
Oliver won an Oscar except everyone hated it. Speak for yourself, it s a quality musical movie. Maybe too British for you or true to life. It was a big success in Western Europe and the UK in 1968/69. Don t call a musical based on a book of Charles Dickens childish, than you really don t understand the movie at all!
I was interested in this history until you said Oliver was childish and tacky and everyone hated it. I almost feel insulted. Have you seen this film lately? It is wonderful, far better than The Sound of Music and just about everything you talk about. I saw it again recently and went back and read most of the reviews from the time. Most of them were full of praise and, of course, it was Best Picture of the Year.
Glad to find someone else who didn't care for Oliver!. First off, most of it was ugly to look at. Secondly, the orchestrations were often jarring. Shani Wallis was good but even she couldn't overcome the grimness and grime. And then they killed her off. Thirdly, the kid who played Oliver had zero personality. Was he supposed to be such a blank? If so, why? And then there were the out-of-place production numbers. Egad, almost the whole endeavor was awful.
@@johnjdevlin2610 How could you depict the slums of 19th century London and not have them be grim and look grimy? Not ugly to look at, just startlingly realistic. They didn't kill Nancy off, Charles Dickens did. The kid who played Oliver was perfect. Incredibly innocent, younger than the other boys. If you don't like production numbers, then you must not like musicals of that period. Obviously the vast majority of critics, as well as the Academy, disagreed with you.
@@joelangford7601 Despite the rationalization, there's still no getting away from the fact that I don't find Oliver an enjoyable film. I've been subjected to it on numerous occasions and it always fails to entertain. For me it stinks out loud, Academy Award or not. But that's just my opinion.
Three great sequences, really: Big Spender, Rich Man's Frug and Rhythm of Life. The rest is forgettable. Maybe if they'd kept Gwen Verdon it would have been improved enough to make a difference, but the book was just weak.
@@leonlinton634 Aw, that mundane plot comes directly from Fellini's Nights of Cabiria! I think Sweet Charity is chronically underrated. It is too long (it's basically a remake of the Fellini but with songs), but filled with imagination from a budding director who would go on to even greater things.
The money they spent pushed them into "too big to fail" territory based on a statistical anomaly in the genre. That is an unfair position to put any movie into. Hollywood always does it with everything that becomes a success: they give 50 more versions of the same thing.
Don't you think rock and roll had something to do with killing off THESE kind of movies? Oh, and (12:35) what about Rocky Horror, Grease, and Little Shop of Horrors ?
Just because a movie doesn't make money doesn't mean its bad. That just means audiences weren't ready for it at the time. Today, "Doctor Dolittle" is charming, "Hello, Dolly!" is splashy, and "Sweet Charity" has some of the best dancing of the decade.
Perhaps you are here to comment on my thoughts about Oliver! so I am here to elaborate. I admit my generalization that "everyone hated it" is untrue (I am learning this myself). When writing and researching, I read some authors' opinions that Oliver! was the worst of all the pictures nominated in 1968 (and 2001 should have been nominated in its place.) Despite its commercial success, I had always heard the same opinion echoed before making the video. I now understand that it is an important picture to many people.
After the influx of comments (including death threats that had to be removed), I decided to rewatch the film. As a lover of the novel, I, and the people I watched it with, felt that Oliver! would have made a marvelous adaptation of the novel...if it wasn't a musical. It doesn't work tonally, Mark Lester's dubbed voice is awkward, and the big ensemble numbers (especially "Consider Yourself" and "Who Will Buy?") are what I called them in the video: tacky. It's too happy-go-lucky for the dark humor of Dickens. (And classic musicals can deal with serious issues...as problematic as Carousel is, it has its highs ("June is Bustin Out All Over") and sincere moments ("If I Loved You" "What's the Use of Wonderin'?") making it very effective. Oliver!'s only moment of fresh air is "As Long As He Needs Me" and we have to wait until the second act for that one.)
Oliver! deserves more credit than I gave it and several of its Oscar wins were merited. Regardless, I maintain that the win for Best Picture was still an attempt by the academy to add more interest into musicals.
No. You were right the first time. OVER produced.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this. And I don't get all the fuss about "2001" beyond the special effects (magnificent for their time, tackyish by today's standards); it's a slow-moving , crashing bore -- just the sort of thing the film "pundits" would enjoy. Read the book instead.
Even as a child I thought that the juxtaposition of song-and-dance with Oliver Twist didn't work although my parents enjoyed it and bought the album.
@@fuzzylon I agree that it absolutely sanitized the story, making Fagin and the boys seem a bunch of lovable scamps and such. If you knew "Oliver Twist," the movie was probably laughable. If, like me, you didn't, it was a great movie on its own terms. (The original West End play, if the cast album is any indication, is a dreary, trying-too-hard enterprise.)
Don’t apologize about OLIVER!, since that movie was godawful. 🙉🙈
1978's Grease kept the genre going later into the 70's. It made $393 million dollars on a $6 million dollar budget.
This was the days before home video, and as a preteen, I remember Grease was still showing in theaters in the summer of 1979 because it was so popular. While musical movies can be fun to watch, it’s unrealistic to expect that every musical would have the mass audience appeal that Grease had. Grease 2 in 1982 was a perfect example of making a musical movie no one wanted, nor were they interested in seeing.
@@collegeman1988 It goes to prove that star power fueled the original Grease. Both John and Olivia were at the top of their early careers and the public loved them!
But Grease wasn't a massive bombastic musical. it was lower budget and easier to film
@@AXander1978You know, as a kid in London UK 🇬🇧 in the 70s I still remember #BobGeldof of the #BoomtownRats tearing up a Grease poster on #TopofthePops, the BBC chart TV show, when his song finally took Summer Nights down from number 1.
Don't forget Saturday Night Fever from the previous year. In the 1980s there was The Blues Brothers, Staying Alive, Footloose and Dirty Dancing. All were the top grossing musicals in their respective year. The traditional musical may have been dying but the rock musical was thriving. It was no longing the 1950s and 1960s formula of taking current hit songs and weaving a thin plotline around them. There was a real story and songs written (or at least carefully selected) to fit, much like a traditional musical. It was only logical to update the musical with modern music, for it to be a success. After all, movies were becoming primarily date night material for the teenagers and young adults, so a film had a much higher probability of success if it reflected their musical tastes.
Hard to justify saying that "nobody liked " the movie of Oliver. It won best picture of the year (won 6 out of 11 awards), grossed $40 million dollars (more than $200 million in today's dollar) received very favorable reviews from critics as diverse as John Simon,Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert and has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 90% even today!
Best musical ever 👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻
@@stuartgeorge2324 LOL. That was funny...
but over "2001: a space odyssey"? come on!
After hearing him unceremoniously flushing Oliver down the toilet, I decided this is not someone who needs to be taken serious or watched and turned off the video.
Oliver! is a lovely film. Maybe nobody "liked" it but tons of people loved it.
It may have been the final nail in the coffin, but Hello Dolly is SO MUCH FUN to watch now
I love Hello, Dolly!
My boyfriend and I saw it on the big screen in 2019 for the 50th Anniversary!
Absolutely! My only "complaint" (if you can call it that) is that Barbra Streisand was WAY too young for the role. BUT, she is so magnificent as Dolly Levi that it's completely forgivable. When the show returned to Broadway in 2017, I was fortunate to see it with Bette Midler in the role of Dolly. Easily one of the most magical theater experiences I have ever had.
I was a young teenager when Hello Dolly was released, so we saw it in the movie theater. It was wildly out of place in 1969, when the country was convulsed with Nixon, Vietnam, campus protests, drug culture, the sexual revolution. But 55 years later, it’s a wonderful evocation of another epoch, like a Viennese operetta. Silly characters, slight story, but a wonderful confection with memorable songs. Unfortunately, Sondheim’s musicals do not translate well onscreen.
And also the Tate/La Bianca murders had just happened 4 months earlier. That also contributed to the loss of America’s innocence.
@@wotan10950 Sondheim did not write Hello Dolly, Jerry Herman did.
An enduring musical made in the1970s that still delights audiences today is The Rocky Horror Picture Show
It's almost a parody of musicals and horror films but it sort of has some shared DNA with Greece in harking back to the 50s and Little Shop of Horrors - 50s music and horror elements.
Disney has been able to successfully carry on the film musical genre via animation.
I agree. In terms of Disney movie musicals, I went from Mary Poppins to The Little Mermaid. Years later I enjoyed movies like The Happiest Millionaire and Citty-Chiity Bang Bang, but not nearly as much.
@@alandombrow908 ... you could have mentioned that aside from VanDyke they also took from Disney, the Sherman Brothers writing team, for the music in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Perhaps until Dis went to live action remakes.
@@alandombrow908 Don't forget Newsies
Bedknobs and Broomsticks was a successful musical in the 70s. While not remembered as fondly, 1977's Pete's Dragon was also a mild success but the studio was hoping for a runaway hit.
Oliver is a classic, well made movie. What are you talking about everyone hated it.
My memory was that it was a hit and looking at the Wikipedia page, it certainly was.
Obviously "everyone" is an exaggeration, and nearly all absolutes are false. I mean, some people like "The Emoji Movie". But when I saw "Oliver!", I got bored. It didn't have the talent of MGM musicals, nor the grand scale of the 20th Century Fox/Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals. It tried as hard as "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" to be as great a musical as the famous ones, and was a real yawner. I couldn't connect with any characters, the songs were forgettable, and the story line got lost. "Oliver!" winning the Best Picture Oscar was IMHO as wrong as Judy Garland *not* winning the Best Actress Oscar for "A Star Is Born".
@@elwoodblues9613 I thought it was a bore too but I was a kid at the time. I might like it better today but I kind of doubt it. And I'm a musical nut.
@@lucialamprey2690As an adaptation of a Charles Dickens novel.... It's the greatest of all!
HAIR, JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR and TOMMY were all released in the 1970's and not a word about them? What about EVITA in 1996? There were musical films before HAIRSPRAY, PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and CHICAGO.
Godspell and Phantom of the Paradise as well!
@@GreasyFilms-qc1xo Not to mention _Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory_ -- although that became more of a cult film due to it being shown on college campuses as a midnight movie when most of the audience was stoned.
Yup. "Annie," ""Godspell," "The Wiz,' even "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "The Young Girls of Rochefort." Seem like too many exceptions to consider the question answered..
There was also Grease in 1978. It is a major classic.
The 70s musicals you mention were all "experimental" Broadway shows with some degree of success (I found Tommy dreadful), but questionable on screen. Not all Broadway shows are suitable for movies (I found Hair an abomination. Tommy was dismal. Jesus....I walked out.) That may be one reason split three ways that no one mentions these particular films; no reason to remember them. Chicago was okay, Cabaret was better. It surpassed the show on Broadway, which is saying a lot. Cats was tailor-made for it's fans. They loved it as always. I missed that one. I was out of town that week. Missed the Titanic musical of all time, the Gen Z masterpiece, Barbie. I had to miss that one too cause I stubbed my toe, complicated by an embedded splinter. I was so upset that the next afternoon I bought myself a $15 popsicle.
It's pretty inaccurate to say that with the film "Oliver!", everyone hated it. It was critically acclaimed with Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert (just starting their decades long strongholds in the film criticism arena) among others giving the film rave reviews and was a commercial success as well, becoming the 5th highest-grossing film of 1968 in the US. So...clearly both critics and audiences in the US and abroad liked it at the very least. You may hate it, which you have every right to and you certainly wouldn't be alone among cinephiles who to this day can't understand how "Oliver!" won Best Picture and "2001: A Space Odyssey" wasn't even nominated. But nevertheless, "Oliver!" isn't a film that "everyone hated", then or now. I say all this as an aspiring filmmaker that considers this film both my favorite movie musical and one of my favorite movies.
You are 100% correct. Oliver! is still the biggest British movie musical hit of all time by global ticket sales. It was a massive, massive success and remains a beloved film and is regarded as a classic by critics and public alike.
It also won best picture of 1969.
@tommoncrieff1154 The BFI has it in their top 100 films of the 20th century. Not at all the same as "everyone hated it."
I agree completely. The 1968 version of "Oliver!" is a brilliantly executed piece of filmmaking with impressive acting, set design and a swag of iconic and memorable songs. It's been one of my fave movies for many years. In my opinion it's better than the well-put-together but rather sugar-coated and sentimental Sound of Music, where about 80% of the songs are sung by the same character. To say that everyone hated "Oliver!" is not only a sweeping generalisation but simply untrue.
Oliver was the sixth highest grossing film of the year. The highest grossing was Funny Girl, which was pretty much musical as well. To call the film childish and tacky is, well, childish and tacky. Further your education.
“The childish and tacky Oliver. Everyone hated it”
No doubt that’s why it won best picture, made a fortune and is shown regularly on TV
One of my favorites.
Puleaze. Name the last time it was shown on TV.
Yes, but Lionel Bart's follow-up musical "Twang!" (about Robin Hood) was the biggest financial disaster to ever hit London's West End and Bart sold all his rights to "Oliver" in a desperate attempt to keep it going and so died broke.
@@DDumbrille I saw it last night.
@@peterdavy6110That’s not quite true, because when Cameron Mackintosh got the rights to Oliver he paid Lionel money from every production, which kept him comfortable for his last few years.
But yes, he did piss away a fortune, and he did sell his rights, originally to Max Bygraves for £350, who then made a fortune selling them on to Essex music.
Just for the record, I loved "Oliver!" I recently caught a clip of the big "Who Will Buy" number -- with Onna White's splendid choreography and traffic management-- and found it every bit as engaging as before.
Not sure if this reviewer has ever actually seen Oliver! He certainly didn't research the public's reaction to the film at the time. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote. "The musical numbers emerge from the story with a grace that has been rarely seen since the musicals of René Clair. Rodger Ebert called it "A treasure of a film" and said " as a work of popular art, it will stand the test of time, I guess. It is as well-made as a film can be."
And as for the suggestion that musicals were flopping because they weren't "human" enough for the new 60's sensibility, Oliver Twist is literally a story about people who can't worry about putting on their Sunday-clothes because they are dealing with real problems in real time.
I saw it in the theater when it was released. Looking back on it now I can remember being absolutely frightened of Oliver Reed's Bill Sykes. It's as if his character wandered in from a different movie. Truly one of the great movie villains of all time. For me his performance is up there with Joe Pesci's Tommy in Goodfellas.
I'm not being funny.
@@nellgwenn I've never seen "Goodfellas," so I'll take your word for that one. I have to admit, I didn't find the Sykes character as frightening as that (though Reed acted it well); then again, I was already fourteen. (In the stage musical, BTW, Sykes actually has a song! It was cut from the movie to make him more menacing.)
@@stevevasta They also cut the Sowerberrys' undertaker number "That's Your Funeral."
I love Harry Secombe's "Boy for Sale"!
@@Blaqjaqshellaq Since I don't know the stage show in much detail -- the cast album was too depressing -- I don't know the undertaker number. But "Boy for Sale" certainly left an impression -- didn't realize it was Harry Secombe.
"Everyone hated" Oliver!? That's ridiculous. It was loved when released, and it's still a perfect musical.
A perfect musical? "As long as he beats me..." oh wait, "Needs".... but still.
The school I taught at did Oliver in the 8th grade one year. Our tradition was at 8th grade graduation to sing a medley from that year's musical. Boy, was it a downer to hear some of the songs from that show.
@@paules3437 Conrad's point is that at the time the movie of the musical was very well received. It was nominated for 19 Oscars (more than any other single studio Musical ever). Won 6 (the Sound of Music only won 5 three years before). Made four times it's budget back at the box office (and this was when the impact of new cheaper televisions was changing peoples spending habits). One theater in London played it for 90 strait weeks. Offering souvenirs and an intermission and was responsible for almost two million in sales (or 20% of the budget).
It was called a perfect film by Robert Siskel. And the character portrayal of Fagin by Richard Moody forever changed how that character would be portrayed. Taking him from a very anti-symmetic Sylock like villain, to a much more sympathetic one. All this is said to make the point Oliver! the film was definitely not hated by everyone. In fact really the opposite was true
@@mic7504 Wow! Lots of statistics. You seem to know a lot about the history of it. And yeah, I got that it wasn't "hated." I liked it as a kid, but not so much now.
I had to laugh when you wrote that Fagin was "antisymmetric"! : )
@@paules3437 He totally was not symmetric (like most faces)... Good catch and thanks for reading. I really was fatigued after writing that overly long reply.
@@mic7504 Yes, it must have been exhausting! : )
4:41 I always liked "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", & the Child Catcher is no worse than the Wicked Witch of the West.
Exactly. We grew up on fairy tales of villainous characters who gobbled children, and eventually got their just deserts. If only villains were as easy to spot in real life, but adulthood teaches us otherwise, sadly.
Exactly, we LOVED him, actually, as he was a properly villainous scary villain who remained safely behind the screen. The idea that kids cant cope with scary characters is so American Disney, all sanitized dullness. We were brought up on European fairy tales of kids being baked in ovens and wolves gobbling up girls in the woods, ffs.
Well said. 👍
Recently rewatched Chitty, and the score is so infectuous! I was singing it for days.
If the three of Sherman Brothers films Poppins, Chitty and Charlotte's Web....Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is the best for me. Produced by the James Bond team with Scrumptious living at Spectre HQ (the studio mansion)...on a kids spy story written by Ian Flemming heavily rewritten by Rhold Dahl (you have to have a scary character)
What do you mean everyone hated Oliver? I loved it. Right now it has a 7.4 rating on IMDB from people and an average of 74 from critics.
Who is your source for 'everyone hated Oliver!'? It won Best Picture and was a box office smash and well reviewed. And in the 1970s got a re-release, and made even more money then.
I was around back then and nobody under fifty went to watch such tripe!
I echo those here who correct your assertion that "everyone hated" the film of Oliver! As one who was a child in 1968, I can attest that my family and every family we knew were amazed by it, and that it got a heap of good press. Not to mention its half-dozen Oscars. It was clearly a phenomenon at the time, unlike Star!, Doolittle, and Camelot. Whoever told you it was a hated film doesn't know what they're talking about.
Well said.
*Oliver!* was the last film my dad saw before leaving the Midwest for the West Coast.
Where the hell did you get the idea that Oliver was hated? This video lost all credibility with that statement.
Yeah my reaction as well.
I was around when it came out. No one liked it!
@@wisemanwalkingdowntheroad4275 if no one liked it how did it win 6 Oscars including Best Picture, get rave reviews and make $40 million?
We've got a kid here, with barely any facial hair, trying to tell us, who were alive back then, about an era he never lived in. Consider that,
@@kurtb8474 Yeah, that immediately came to mind. The kid is wet behind the ears!
Finian's Rainbow, Fred Astaire s last musical from 1968 and Goodbye Mr. Chips (1969) should have been included in this. While both were flops, the one good thing these 2 had was the glorious singing of Petula Clark.
FINIAN didn't flop. It made profit.
_Goodbye, Mr. Chips_ was dreadful, as it was a story that had no business being turned into a musical in the first place. (It was based on a novel by James Hilton, who also wrote _Lost Horizon_ , which got turned into an even bigger bomb in 1973, one that wound up ending the Bacharach-David songwriting duo. Ironically, both novels had been done well as non-musical films earlier.) _Finian's Rainbow_ , OTOH, is just plain weird in an enjoyable way. Interestingly, it was directed by a young Francis Ford Coppola, with an even younger George Lucas as first assistant director.
And Finian had Francis Coppola at the helm.
Don Francks was as easy on the eyes as she was on the ears, so that helped.
@@mikewhelan4261they used existing sets from *Camelot* to save money. That's why it didn't cost as much as its contemporaries. The original show was too radical for the 1950s but not radical enough for the 1960s, and a lot of the major black civil rights battles had already been won by that point in time. And I wonder whether the fallout over Petula's NBC-TV special in the US with Harry Belafonte had any affect on ticket sales of this movie. Boomers didn't care and preferred movies about malignant narcissists simping instead.
Tommy Steele was better in Disney's *The Happiest Millionaire* where at least they let John Davidson do the romancing of women.
Actually 2001: A Space Odyssey IS a musical! The orchestra is literally a Greek chorus to the action. It started me on my path as a musician.
An astute observation!
Yes indeed. Also noting the musical repartee atop Devil's Tower in "Close Encounters"
Bit of a stretch. But yes, the Strauss waltzes and "Thus Spake Zarathustra" did contribute to the film's atmosphere immeasurably.
A picture of Barbra Streisand should never be the thumbnail for a video that has the word flop in it… She’s the greatest star and deserves a lot more respect than that, and by the way that movie did find its legs years later and is now a classic
THANK YOU!!
Meh. I've never understood her "star" appeal.
@@paules3437 one of the most beautiful singing voices in history, terrific actress, and director, I’m failing to see what you don’t get
Agree! I cannot understand why Hello Dolly apparently got or continues to be criticized. Given her age at the time of filming she is astonishing. It may be a a bit long, and some of her lip syncing is off but the production values and her performance make this a classic.
@@thegailyreview245 Certainly not a beautiful voice. Very whiny tho perhaps distinctive. She played the frantic Jewish woman reasonably well, I guess; that seemed to be her schtik (sp?) I never saw her in something like "The Way We Were." Maybe she was a more versatile actress than I know. Still, I find her voice irritating. But then she probably feels that way about mine.
I loved Chitty Chitty Bang Bang when I was a kid, and it remains one of my favorite movies to this day. Why so down on it?
All criticism of every post-1964 Sherman brothers musical is just projecting the faults of their worst and most overrated one, that Julie Andrews atrocity, onto them. I wish that movie had never been made and the books they were based on had never been written.
It was more popular in the UK.
"Hello, kiddywinkies!"
I've always liked THAT flick a lot better than Marry Poppins. And part of it WAS that child snatcher character (very effective).
@@IanFindly-iv1nl my fave musical too, but it did feel a bit long as a child
Hold on hold on. You’re wrong about “Oliver!” Were you around in 1968? From the look of your face, I don’t think so. Everybody did not hate “Oliver!” In fact, I’ve never heard anyone who has seen that movie do anything but praise it. It’s a fantastic movie musical- in my opinion, one of the best ever made. And it got glowing reviews from film critics.
Not having Mrs. Edwards in it helped.
My memory - and I was 17 when it came out - was that it was a good movie and successful.
He looks like he was born about 2005.
@@larrydirtybird Be fair. You don't need to have lived history to study it. I think it's fantastic that younger people are interested, and it's up to us oldies to gently put them straight if they get it wrong. Kindness is encouragement.
An old man once told me, "Before I die, I want to watch Oliver one last time."
Technically, Rex is singing to a PUPPET of a seal, which is worse. "Rex Harrison doing his best impression of Himself As Henry Higgins" was a golden observation!
That's hilarious.
I hate to tell you - Rex Harrison always played Rex Harrison - watch an earlier movie of his such as 'The Ghost and Mrs. Muir' - same ol' Rex! Caesar? The Pope? Always Rex playing Rex.
The problem with *Doctor Doolittle* besides the foolish discarding of "Something In Your Smile" for an inferior song where Anthony Newley simps for the dubbed Samantha Eggar, was that Baloo and Bagheera in *The Jungle Book* had more interesting things to say, and those things were put in their mouths by veteran animators who built their careers around, making cartoon animals talk.
@@tarotbearJulie Andrews was worse. The same performance since 1964 and it wasn't Oscar worthy then, either. Julie as a flying nanny. Julie as a failed nun turned hausfrau. Julie as a missionary's wife. Julie as a flapper. Julie pretending to be Gertrude Lawrence. Julie as a drag king. Julie as a princess. No range at all. Even the movie where she exposed her bosoms is just her playing a proxy version of herself. There's a reason Jack Warner could be talked out of casting Cary Grant as Henry Higgins but not Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle, his first and only choice for the part.
Hello Dolly was the #5 biggest box office hit of 1969. Paint your wagon #7. They lost money, but sure sold more tickets that most other films released that year. I'd also say Hello Dolly has stood the text of time. Most musicals seem to live on and are regularly rewatched or discovered more than many films that are released.
What about The Music Man and Gypsy, both from 1962? I watch them whenever they’re on TCM !
The Music Man is my favorite. And why no mention of: Grease; Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; Hair; Carousel; State Fair; Flower Drum Song; The King And I; The Unsinkable Molly Brown? Are Annie; The Wiz; and Pete's Dragon not within the covered time period?
I love The Music Man. Shirley Jones was magical. Meredith Wilson is one of the most unsung genius's of the 20th Century.
And then there's TOMMY--you haven't lived till you've seen Ann-Margret wallowing in beans, clutching a phallic cushion!
I’m willing to the only one who thinks Babs was perfectly cast in “Hello, Dolly”. I saw it at the cinema when it first came out at the age of 8 and adored it! It never occurred to me that she was too young for the role.
I thought of her backstory as this ..... Dolly was around 28 in the movie’s storyand she married wealthy Ephraim when she was around 20 and he was 25. After a fabulous 5 year marriage in which they were devoted to each other and frequented the Harmonia Gardens restaurant every night, Ephraim died tragically in an accident at just 30, and broken-hearted Dolly hid away for 3 years from grief, working as a marriage broker to support herself after Ephraim’s fortune went on repaying the debts they built up from their philanthropy. After meeting Horace she decided to end her recluse and pursue him.
Although Babs was only 24 when she made this, my backstory for Dolly works! And I’m sticking to it so I can still love this wonderful, silly, expensive romp of a movie 💖💖💖
Hair. Rocky Horror. Grease. Xanadu. Can't Stop The Music. Streets Of Fire.
Movies about dancing: Saturday Night Fever. Thank God It's Friday. Staying Alive. Flashdance. Footloose. Body Rock.
Little Shop of Horrors,
And All That Jazz.
@@billolsen4360 I LOVE that movie! Shame on me for forgetting it.
FAME!
@@mic7504 I'm gonna live forever...
Lost Horizon (1973) was considered the nail in the coffin of the musical.
A crucial factor in the death of the old school musical was The Beatles musical film Yellow Submarine from 1968. Musical tastes had changed.
Exactly - a whole demographic slice wasn't interested in paying to watch the kind of musicals their parents preferred. I was a teenager during this era and mostly avoided this form of entertainment - and still do. However, I enjoyed Paint Your Wagon and Tommy despite their flaws.
The soundtrack from Mary Poppins was uniquely outstanding. For me, the music plus the much-needed theme that fathers need to prioritize their families made it a beloved film.
"I once met a man with a wooden leg named Smythe."
"What was the name of his other leg?"
I demand you do a follow up, about how modern movie musicals are being advertised as “not musicals”. Great video! Subscribed
"Oliver" was the first film my twin and I saw in a theater. An older brother bought us the soundtrack and it became an instant classic for us. (To this day I still know all the words to the songs.)
Actually Oliver! Is my favorite musical film. It was perfectly cast. I deserved its Best Picture win.
It's mainly Kubrick supporters who can't get over his movies losing Oscars to musicals pushing the smear campaigns against them. At least they lost to good ones and not that shitty movie that enabled Julie Andrews' film career. At least he could still tell Stephen King's stories better than Stephen King.
@@AttmayTotally agree, in fact THE SHINING IS HIS TRUE MASTERPIECE FILM!
Literally the only Stanley Kubrick film ive not just seen more than once or twice.... I've watched it like 30 or 40 times in the extended version.
His other films ive seen maybe 2 or 3 times each!
re: Oliver (1968) I saw that picture when it first came out when I was 9. "...except everyone hated it..."? Really? That doesn't jibe with MY recollection. Your strange comment sent me to look up the original notices where I discover that both Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert (among others) gave it superlative reviews. So who exactly is this "everyone?"
Movie musicals didn't die. They just morphed into music videos. Regardless of all the political crap that goes on, audiences still like to see talented people sing and dance.
I grew up in the 1970s which was the era of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang having regular showings on TV. I never thought of this film as "nightmarish" as a child. Granted, the Child Catcher was scary, but other than that, this film was as memorable to children of the 1970s as Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music. It was much better than most of the other musical adaptations that came after Mary Poppins.
CHITTY is a gorgeous film. And a success.
@@mikewhelan4261 It wasn't a hit movie initially. It became a hit after it became a TV event.
@@dmnemainePan and scan did the 65mm cinematography no favors. The widescreen laserdisc released by MGM/UA in the 1990s was a revelation for those who were not alive for the original theatrical release.
Chitty was another childhood favourite. The child catcher was just scary in the way kids like to be scared. No lasting trauma, just lots of booooo, and yay when he get his.
@@BlackCatMargie Exactly.
I started my Hollywood career in the early 90s when I saw there were still remnants of the immense New York set built for Hello Dolly: most of it was sold to Steven Bocho for exclusive use in Hill Street Blues, the Harmonia Garden facade was falling apart but still recognizable, the main entrance to Fox Studios was the Main Street for the parade are now office spaces & Central Park would eventually become the glass buildings for FoxSports & FX Network by the late 90s. Sad it’s all gone now, but I got to see it & I was the only one on the lot that seem to appreciate it & recognize any of it from Hello Dolly.
That is so cool to hear! I had no idea the set lasted that long. Dolly!, in particular, is one of my favorite films, so it is sad to hear about being forgotten.
@@MovieMusicalMania Fox had already sold their backlot which is now Century City, so they spent a lot of money building a new New York street set just for Hello Dolly & it was their primary New York backlot which is why it lasted as long as it did. I think the huge Dolly budget should have been amortized to pay for something they needed in the long run.
@@patimuseDavid Merrick, whom Jerry Herman once called "the anti-Christ," was responsible for the smear campaign against the movie before it even opened. And he was also responsible for making 20th pay him a million dollars so they could release it before it closed on Broadway, on top of the tens of millions expended on the actual production of the film when the studio refused to consider shooting it in Rome to save money. They said the unions would never go for an Americana musical being shot overseas.
Nearly 4 decades later, *Hairspray* had to be shot in Toronto because Baltimore had gotten too expensive to shoot there though John Waters made the original film there for only $2 million.
@@Attmay speaking of Jerry Herman, who had a home in nearby Bel Air, I would occasionally see him walking with a care-taker around the Century City mall which is literally a minute away from that Fox entrance where they filmed Hello Dolly.
Two points: First, Part of the problem is the evolution of the stage musical as well. 1954's "The Band Wagon" features Fred Astaire trying to do a show you would expect Fred Astaire to do, while a one man equivalent of Rodgers and Hammerstein wants the show to be IMPORTANT. And so a light show about a children's book illustrator doing murder mysteries turns into a disastrous intepretation of "Faust." The 1950s stage musicals were about being IMPORTANT, and Hollywood would follow suit. Second, the change in pop music styles is a factor by the time you get to the 1970s. The songs in a 1930s-50s movie musical were the pop music of the day, and songs that would regularly be recorded by singers and bands of the day. By the time we get to the 1970s, most of the pop element was gone and musicals became a source of the dreaded "show tune."
*A Chorus Line* was the turning point. That's a show that in theory should have been a hit as a movie. It wasn't to say the least despite a good review from Roger Ebert. Its fate as a flop was sealed the day Norman Lear got the rights. That IMO did more damage to the form than any other musical film without Julie Andrews in it up to that point not just because it barely scratched the surface of why it ran 15 years on Broadway, but it because its failure was used to deprive other shows of adaptations that might not have failed. Even getting a mid movie made out of *Evita* in the 1990s took a lot of pushing for it as a result.
Rodgers and Hammerstein actually produced the movies of *Oklahoma!* and *South Pacific* themselves. The latter is basically a 20th Century-Fox film in all but name based on the personnel they hired to bring it to the screen.
Meanwhile, a lot of the 1960s and 1970s attempts at social relevancy aged like milk. *Hair* was not a bad movie by any means, but the timing of its release (1979, not long after the end of the Vietnam War and a year before Ronald Reagan became President) could not have been worse. Being a hippie in 1967 was one thing. Being one in 1979 already made you an anachronism.
@@gildersleevefan67 I agree about “the dreaded show tune,” but the ‘70s also saw the emergence of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the first composer to integrate pop sounds into a conventional musical. He laid the groundwork for everything from the Disney Renaissance to the “hip hopera” of Hamilton. They all produced songs that could be both show tunes and radio hits.
WALL-E loved Hello Dolly!
As clever a metaphor for the hubris and disconnect of humankind as ever thought of.
"Take Me to the Fair" was not added for the film version of CAMELOT. It is in the original Broadway production.
This video is not just ludicrous in its factual inaccuracies and idiotic assessments, it's dangerous misinformation pushing a boomer narrative. That generation killed musicals with its shitty taste in music and by proxy in musicals. They are the reason that lush, harmonically complex songs were replaced by bombastic glorified nursery rhymes that sometimes don't even rhyme!
As I’ve said to others, “Take Me To The Fair” was included on the OBC recording, but the song was removed at the very beginning of the run/during tryouts and added back in for the movie
@@MovieMusicalMania Maybe "restored" would have been a better choice than "added".
Leave Chitty out of this. What a classic. I love that film.
The lack of appreciation for CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG calls into question every other statement in the video.
@oliverbrownlow5615 yes CHITTY is a GORGEOUS, delightful film
I love Chitty! (By “Nightmarish,” I was simply referring to the Child Catcher and some of the more uncanny elements)
"Do something! Start swimming!"
"I don't swim!"
"Then start drowning!"
It was based on an Ian Fleming book, produced by Cubby Broccoli, and even has Desmond Llewellyn (Q) in a cameo as the nasty junk dealer!
I was forced to watch that as a kid and fucking hated it!
"Cabaret" 1972 was a hit and won 8 Oscars!
Nooo, not Dolly! Like for Wall-E, this is my favourite muscial (my second fav is Newsies). But I see your point. Yes, Barbara was too young, but she was absolutely fantastic in it, as was everyone else. In this sense I find it curious that Michael Crawford began his fame with Dolly, the movie that helped end the muscial craze, but then also rose to his biggest height with Phantom, the musical that saved Musicals.
Dolly is definitely one of my favorites so I felt the need to defend it as much as possible! (And what a cool connection with Michael Crawford!)
Barbra*
@@MovieMusicalManiaI blame boomers. Their parents offered them the world on a silver platter, but they traded it in for a cheap TV tray. They replaced movies like this with cheap ugly movies glorifying simping while almost every musical that didn't have animated characters or Muppets was rated R. Just like how they have tried to replace real food with fake food.
THE WIZ had the opposite problem from HELLO DOLLY: thirtysomething Diana Ross was way too old for the role of Dorothy!
You most salient observation was that show tunes were the pop music of the 40s and 50s. Elvis and tge Beatles turned show tunes into your parents music.
I loved Oliver. They used to play songs from it on the radio.
Hello Dolly was very popular in Europe and later on became one of the more popular musical adaptations around the world ...
Geez! This has to be a troll video to annoy anyone that grew up in that era so that they will leave a comment telling you are off the mark on almost everything presented. There you have it, my engagement comment to help your algorithm.
This kid doesn't have enough film history under his belt. Just reading Wiki pages doesn't do it.
The flop l liked was Streisand ‘s “0n a Clear Day You Can See Forever” the year after “Hello, Dolly” was released. The production values in the reincarnation sequences were not only splendid. but APPROPRIATE. But then they saddled the present day storyline with a love interest 20 years older than Barbra whose hottie days were long over, a coture wardrobe and several buffoonish, blah subplots, and the whole thing died slowly and agonizingly onscreen. I’ve kept the DVD in my collection just to rewatch the songs and regression sequences, and noticed Barbra shied away from musicals after that until “Funny Lady” and then “Yentl”.
Don’t forget A Star Is Born in 1976. I was in high school and every girl and queer boy had the soundtrack!
FWIW, it's more fun just to listen to the soundtrack album. You still have to deal with M. Montand's strange singing and accent, but you get lots of Barbra, along with the Nelson Riddle orchestrations.
I love the score of On A Clear Day, but so much of the film was butchered to get to a reasonable running time. In the credits you will see actors who never appeared on screen in the final cut. Nevertheless, still a fun movie in my view
Papa can you hear me?
That was yet another example of weird Hollywood casting of that era. Just as Hollywood (or, to be more accurate, Jack Warner) refused to cast Julie Andrews in any of the musicals in which she'd starred on Broadway, so it became a standard in the late part of the '60s that practically every musical had to star Barbara Streisand, no matter how ill-suited she was for the part, including replacing Carol Channing in _Dolly_ and Barbara Harris in this one.
I don’t understand how lala land was so successful given that the most important thing, singing and dancing of the protagonists, was sub par. Imagine “Hair” or “Grease” or “ Staying alive” with brilliant actors who are half decent singers and dancers, it would be a disaster.
I liked La La Land a lot, especially that opening number and the song that Emma Stone sang but when she and Ryan Gosling started to "dance" all I could think was they're no Fred and Ginger. Why the hell couldn't they find two actors who could actually deliver? Channing Tatum was one I know who could.
The jury has spoken. Everyone DID NOT hate "Oliver!"
Not sure if this reviewer has ever actually seen Oliver! He certainly didn't research the public's reaction to the film at the time. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote. "The musical numbers emerge from the story with a grace that has been rarely seen since the musicals of René Clair. Rodger Ebert called it "A treasure of a film" and said " as a work of popular art, it will stand the test of time, I guess. It is as well-made as a film can be." It was also a box-office hit making four times its ten million dollar budget back.
And as for the suggestion that musicals were flopping because they weren't "human" enough for the new 60's sensibility, Oliver Twist is literally a story from one of the greatest humanist authors of all time about people who can't worry about putting on their Sunday-clothes because they are dealing with real problems in real time.
And to suggest it was nominated for 19 Academy awards because there was no competition that year or in order to "save the genera". I mean really.. It was in up against epics, art house tear jerkers, and ground breaking masterpieces as well as a couple of pretty important musicals. The competition that year included The Battle of Algiers, The Lion in Winter, The Subject Was Roses, War and Peace, Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rosemary's Baby(for *** sake) and modern musicals like The Producers, Star! and Funny GIrl (as well as the agreed upon truly childish and sacranine Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) .
Oliver! is a two and a half hour long masterpiece of effort from every one of its film departments. And the performances Sir Carol Reed drew from the almost entirely unknown child cast shin when placed beside other child centered musicals. And the empathetic character interpretation by Ron Moody of the oft anti-semetically depicted Fagin changed forever how this anti-hero would be performed. When you consider Sir Reed had had never directed a Musical before and was known for his tense Film Noir classics more so than a few family Comedies, you can understand how Oliver! is a story set to music rather than a spectacle with an undertone of a story.
Nice insights about the history of Musicals. But I think he needs to re-watch Oliver!
Pauline Kael calling David Tomlinson "a sexless pixie" as Mr. Browne in *Bedknobs and Broomsticks* (a part that almost went to Ron Moody) really soured me on her. She was subtly accusing him of being a homosexual. If only she had seen the actual uncut film. Not like she was the only woman film critic who ever lived. Meanwhile, Molly Haskell had some interesting comments on 1974's *Mame,* the movie Angela Lansbury was kept out of, suggesting Lucille Ball was not the problem with the film but the character she was playing was.
And no, *Chitty Chitty Bang Bang* is not childish or saccharine. That's more projection of the flaws of that terrible Julie Andrews movie she made for Walt Disney onto a superior work with the same songwriters and the same male lead. It's a metaphor for the Holocaust that went over the heads of movie audiences of the day.
I was a kid in the 60s and I absolutely LOVED both Chitty and Doolittle!!!!
Yeah, me too. They were ok for kids, I thought, but I know more than one adult now who was terrified of the kid catcher. I think that guy was actually a trained ballet dancer.
@@paules3437 Robert Helper WAS a professional ballet dancer. In fact, during one take, his wagon overturned and he saved himself by executing a perfect leap from the wagon and landing lightly on his feet.
@@LyleFrancisDelp VERY COOL. I love that the Child Catcher's real name was "Helper"!
@@paules3437 Yes! And if I'm not mistaken, this was his first, and perhaps only, film.
@@LyleFrancisDelpYou would think Sally Ann Howes would have gotten more film work out of it.
I think you missed a giant nail in the coffin by not mentioning Lost Horizon.
Amen to that!
Thanks for putting this history together. While I saw all these movies and others, I didn't really have a chronological record of them.
When I moved from the far edges of East San Diego County suburbia to Los Angeles in 1970, I started to see movies in theaters as they were released rather than years later on television. It's a bit of a revelation to see the differences as the evolution of the genre rather than as just differences in productions.
I notice a lot of comments about Oliver. An old man once told me, "Before I die, I want to watch Oliver one last time."
i remember chitty chitty bang bang and Oliver! in real time. they were great and hugely popular.
According to Robert B. Sherman's autobiography *Moose,* the former made more money in the UK than the US where the source material was unknown despite the popularity of James Bond movies. The Broccolis got the rights to Chitty along with Bond and were able to take advantage of Dick and Bob Sherman being allowed one non-Disney work in their contract with Walt.
Movies based on stage shows tend to have more built-in recognition because their songs were often sung by pop singers of the day. With an original movie musical score, you are taking an even bigger chance because you are gambling on the public's acceptance of new songs. Now, nobody covers showtunes anymore except Broadway actors recording albums the record companies never promote and radio never plays. Can you imagine Shawn Mendes attempting to cover "Another Winter in a Summer Town" or Sabrina Carpenter recording anything from the *Mean Girls* musical which seems to have crashed and burned as a movie?
All the films you insist were hated, I remember loving.
I think you have to look at what audiance most movies are made for, and it's no longer adults.
Legend has it that 700 years in the future, a certain garbage compactor robot will love his VHS of Hello Dolly so much that it will indirectly cause him to save the planet and humanity.
We should be very lucky for earth to last that long
it was a WALL-E reference
A mostly fair assessment… but you err with OLIVER! which not only received 6 Oscars, but was a box office hit and earned a rare rave review (for a musical based on a play) from The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael. I was there in 1968 (granted only just shy of 8 years old) but the movie was extremely well loved. If you look at Oliver! from an auteurist perspective the fingerprints of Carol Reed, the man who made Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man and A Kid for Two Farthings, are all over the picture. In its heavily stylized approach it reminds me (in parts) of Powell & Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann. It’s a far better movie than Funny Girl precisely because William Wyler’s movie was meant to be a showcase for Streisand (and, in that, it succeeds beautifully); whereas Reed’s film was meant to be a stylized fable - it has more meat on its bones, and the second act doesn’t sag drearily as does Funny Girl’s.
OLIVER's six Oscars, by the way, is one more than THE SOUND OF MUSIC's five, if anybody's counting.
@@oliverbrownlow5615 It is also the most nominated musical of all time released by a single studio.
@@mckeldin1961 Oliver! was so successful that it led to the creation of another Dickens-based musical film, Scrooge. While not as successful at the box office, Scrooge did well on television and spawned a stage version that is popular with community theater companies. (We have a theater near me, Spring Lake Theater Company, that has performed Scrooge every year for four decades).
I don't hate Oliver. I love it. It's an amazing movie.
11:05 Overspending. Same problem Hollywood has today. Too much spectacle & it stops feeling special. Cut the budgets, cut the spectacle to a reasonable amount, & make movies with good stories on modest budgets. This has been the path to success since the 1930's.
In addition to the stellar cast and an incredible Austrian backdrop, the music in The Sound of Music featured Rogers and Hammerstein tunes that were hypnotic and hummable. Every tune! How can another movie compete with this standard? No wonder musicals tanked after TSoM.
"Everyone hated Oliver"? Wrong. It was a masterpiece, and I'm one of many who adore it. You destroyed your credibility.
I hate that Hello Dolly is seen as the death of the musical genre. It is so spectacular. If it had been released a number of years earlier, Im sure it would have been a raging success. A victim of poor timing.
...and rotten miscasting.
@@jimmyjamestruscott Dolly is ripe for another try at a film - probably with the most recent Broadway Dolly, Bette Midler, in the lead. Or even Babs herself, since she’s actually old enough now!
"A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" by the director of "A Hard Day's Night" & "Help", is terrifically entertaining.
They were going to do *Forum* without the songs (like *Fanny* and *Irma La Douce* did) but Lester intervened to save 1/3 of the score.
Oh dear, it started well.....what happened? Gave up after 5 minutes when I realised where it was going.......
A lot of people--even Saul Chaplin, who should have known better--like to say the all the big roadshow musicals made after "Sound of Music" were flops, and several were. But "Thoroughly Modern Millie" was more than a "moderate success" (it is overlong, though), Funny Girl" was huge, and the brilliant "Oliver!" did quite well at the box office for a movie "everyone hated." "Half a Sixpence," not mentioned here for some reason, made its money back--pretty good for a title no one had heard of and with a star no one had heard of, but it was made in England where filming was cheaper. "Paint Your Wagon" was Paramount's sixth highest grossing film up to that time and did great at the box office; it lost money because location filming doubled the budget. That's also true of the benighted "Hello, Dolly!" which for some reason people love to cite as the biggest bomb in movie history. It actually grossed respectably considering how tired everyone was of that song by then, but again the location filming did it in. It's in profit now (okay, so it took half a century; "The Wizard of Oz" took nearly 20 years to make its money back). "Sweet Charity" finally found its audience when it was re-released in the eighties. Likewise, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," which bored and annoyed kids (including Yours Truly) in 1971, somehow became a classic twenty years later. Though you'd never guess from this video, posterity has tended to be kind toward the big overstuffed movie musicals of the era.
Julie Andrews has said that making "Millie" a "roadshow" film was a mistake because it didn't need to be. They had to pad it to make it a "roadshow" event. I agree that the Jewish Wedding sequence is totally unnecessary and does nothing for the plot.
I'm told PAINT YOUR WAGON was hugely popular in Europe. Julie's great in THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE, but its central white slavery plotline and depiction of Chinese people must have made thoughtful audiences cringe even upon its initial release, let alone now. I loved WILLY WONKA in 1971, and I still love it today.
Love your comment!
Actually "Half a Sixpence", like "Oliver" before it, was a big hit on the London stage before coming to Broadway where it was also a big hit. Tommy Steele was a huge British pop star in the late 50's. I think the movie is kind of hit and miss. It only comes alive during the musical numbers with Tommy Steele. You can find clips of some of the numbers on youtube.
@@kenrfc Tommy Steele also appeared in Disney's musical THE HAPPIEST MILLIONAIRE (1967), released the same year as HALF A SIXPENCE, and in the following year he would appear in the Broadway-based musical FINIAN'S RAINBOW, co-starring with Fred Astaire and Petula Clark. Previously, Steele had headlined a British "pantomime" stage adaptation of Rodgers & Hammerstein's CINDERELLA (1958), just a year after the TV musical had premiered on American television with Julie Andrews in the title role.
One contributing factor to the Disappearing Movie Musical phenomenon that you didn't mention, was 1970's Barbara Streisand's evisceration of "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever," due to her having put up the funds to buy the movie rights to the once popular musical play. I directed the show, in 1969, in Heidelberg, Germany, and knew the show, intimately. In order to make it, above all else, a Barbara Streisand movie, she had the writers drop large segments of plot and a number of songs, so that all eyes would be constantly on Her, and she hadn't any competition for the audience's attention. I can't tell you how disappointed I was upon seeing the movie. It was a once in a lifetime moment for me, and ended my interest in Ms. Streisand, forever.
You need to dig in deeper into your own assumption that audiences in. the late '60s didn't want "characters . . . singing about putting on your Sunday clothes, when there was [sic] real problems happening in real time." Audiences in the 1930s and '40s were living through the Great Depression and the biggest war in human history -- and they LOVED musicals. So what had changed to make tastes change so much? I don't have an easy answer (and I doubt that a better answer will be all that easy), but it is too simplistic to say that the times were serious and musicals are frivolous.
I appreciate this video, and your interest, and your knowledge --but could't you find a better space than your dorm room to record this?
(Oh, and Streisand way, way too young to play Dolly at the time. "Back where you belong"?? How long had she been a well-known matchmaker in New York City, from age 20-26?? How long had she been away, 6 months? Dolly is supposed to be around 40-50 years old, not 27, as Streisand was at the time . . .
For what its worth Oliver! had a huge influence on musicals since and you only need to look at 1970's Scrooge and 1971's Bedknobs & Broomsticks to see how much was lifted from Oliver!
For me, Streisand can do no wrong. Her musical film 'Yentl' in '84 is a masterpiece.
1983
Except that the author of the story IB Singer allegedly walked out of the premiere
@@alg11297 In his interview he sounds like a jealous fool possibly because Streisand rejected a script he presented her. He had little of anything to say that was positive even regarding her exemplary singing. After all, Streisand's a woman who took control of a project in many of its aspects and he possibly thought only a man can do that.
@MrLourie sure, she just had no part in the script writing, and the story was taken from his short story. But what did he know? He only won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his output which included novels, short stories and children's books? Many films were made from his other works but they didnt didnt fail like this one with Babs at the helm. What a talent!
@@alg11297 Your reply seems to confirm my assessment of him and also a poor reflection of yourself. Whatever.
didnt Oliver win an Oscar for best Movie that year?
It did, as well as five other Oscars, for a total of six -- one more than THE SOUND OF MUSIC.
Oliver is great. Thoroughly Modern Millie is great.
Actually, Ian Fleming (THE Ian Fleming of James Bond fame) wrote the original book of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and it's considered a stone-cold kids' classic in the UK, playing every Christmas on TV without fail. The Child-Catcher was a special delight as a child, as he was a proper villainous villain we could be safely scared of as he was obviously a fantasy behind a screen. Children can actually cope with scary characters and as a child, I hated pandering, sanitized stuff that assumed we couldn't. Adults of my era all remember this element of the film if none other. The songs are pretty cool too.
2:15 "Can-Can," "West Side Story," and "South Pacific"were just a couple of the movies that received a larger-than-life treatment. A couple.... all three of them...
6:58 "cumbersome and misguided adaption..." You mean adaptation?
I used to jokingly threaten my kids that if they misbehaved, I'd force them to watch "Oliver". (Hmmm.... maybe I should have made them watch "Ain't Misbehavin'"!... but naw, cuz that music's awesome.)
I think it's awesome that you made this with your slightly askew quilt in the background! Authentic!
Certainly, "Cabaret" was a successful stage-to-screen event, and I thought the kind of postmodern way they handled Chicago, where the film story would cut to cabaret-style songs, was ingenious.
_South Pacific_ (another Joshua Logan travesty) was especially weird because someone in post-production decided that, to heighten the "mood" of the musical numbers, they'd put a colored filter over the scene to highlight the dominant emotion. As I understand it, they tried it as an experiment, looked at it, decided it was a bad idea, but somehow managed to destroy the original untinted negative so they had no choice but to go with it. I can say that, upon seeing it in the theater, the general impression was that something had gone wrong with the projector.
@ a travesty of a work he was involved with the creation of at every level? Fie and foo. There would be no *South Pacific* without him. The whole point of the filters is that they alter the thing that people are being judged by, the color of their skin, by turning them into colors that no real human skin can manifest. The guy who restored it at Fox in the 2000s actually talked to Leon Shamroy's family about how they did it. They even still had some filters on hand! They were not universally hated in 1958 if Shamroy received an Oscar nomination for Best Color Cinematography, and the film played in London for almost five years! There's a reason the guy who ran the Widescreen Museum website preferred it to *The Sound of Music,* but not for the reasons I do.
The movie was shot in Hawaii, and there was barely any infrastructure for film production there. There were no labs they could take it to and watch dailies.
I actually liked Paint Your Wagon as a kid. I never knew it was a musical. I thought it was a western with singing. I still watch it occasionally on DvD.
Paint Your Wagon and Hello Dolly are my two favorite musicals. Go figure.
Even though they are not live musicals, Disney's animations such as "Little Mermaid", "Beauty and the Beast", "Lion King" etc should count too. No?
Absolutely! Menken and Ashman, who did Little Shop of Horrors, were brought on board for several films starting with The Little Mermaid to specifically make these movies feel more like musicals in terms of structure (ie the protagonist always has an "I want" song, etc). And that ushered in Disney's second golden age.
You may as well throw in Nightmare Before Christmas on that front.
Chicago , Moulin Rouge , Victor Victoria amongst others prove the genre is alive and kicking , just not as frequently.
I absolutely love Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! It has some editing problems but all the musical numbers are brilliant. I've watched Doll On a Music Box 1000 times. And the Child Catcher is the best part!
I highly recommend Jeanine Basinger’s The Movie Musical, about the most incisive book on this subject. I have the (dis)advantage of coming of age during the sixties and seventies, having seen most of these musicals at the time of their release as well as more recently. When you have, say, Hello Dolly and Midnight Cowboy released the same year, you can see the major contrasts of the times. I could like and appreciate both, but I could never admit to my friends that I loved musicals, for appearing not with the times. Yet, in their own way, these musicals were a part of their times, in their own particular way. Seeing them out of the context of that era, many of them seem much better and more enjoyable. But maybe it’s because I don’t have to feel guilty about being not with the times anymore.
Well said.
I think it's that - more than most cinematic art forms - movie musicals require a level of disbelief suspension that modern audiences lack. We find it easier to believe in zombies, space adventures and dinosaurs made to look real through special effects than that somebody doing their shopping would suddenly burst into song and have an 80 piece orchestra materialise out of nowhere to accompany them.
I've never heard it opined that 1954's "A Star is Born" marked the beginning of the end of the movie musical. And I'm not sure what the length of the movie would have to do with anything.
LIke "The Wizard of Oz" in 1939, "A Star is Born" was in the top five of the year's "money makers," but so much money had been spent on production and advertising that the movies didn't make the "nut."
Plus Warner Bros idiotic decision to cut 30 minutes from a highly acclaimed premiere version was the reason for box office dropping off. If you were going to see it after the premiere which you heard was so great and you saw a different film and told your friends, guess what? You felt cheated and rightfully so.
@@chgoboy69Disney learned that lesson the hard way after Walt died: cutting every musical they made over the next decade, forgetting how he had to fight his own distribution company to get the last movie musical Disney released in his lifetime at the running time he wanted. Its film editing Oscar is a sick joke in light of Disney's subsequent behavior.
@@chgoboy69 Exactly when they cut it they ruined the plot and as you said and afterward it bombed, very sad, what's worse is that much of what was chopped was destroyed.
I worked in Hollywood for years. I was on the Fox lot back in the 80’s and still remember the MANY set artifacts that were still on the lot just like it was 1969. You see pictures that go over budget never have $ to strike the exterior sets so they literally just sit there until someone wants to rent the space. Then it is THAT production company that has to pay to strike the old sets. However, they only strike what they have to do artifacts still hang around for years and years.
Dale Hennessey's *Annie* sets remained standing for decades to honor his memory: he died of a heart attack during its production. His Oscar nomination for the film (Ralph Burns got the only other one for arrangements) was posthumous.
The inaugural Muppet Movie was brilliant! Subsequent films were as well.
@@Andrew12759 The two albums I listened to the most in the waning years of the ‘70s were Pink Floyd’s The Wall and the Muppet Movie soundtrack. Paul Williams wrote a BRILLIANT score for that film - “I’m Going to Go Back There Someday” is more moving than most songs from conventional musicals. (See also the score for another Williams/Muppets collaboration, Emmett Otter’s Jugband Christmas.)
You mischaracterized Thoroughly Modern Millie. It was Universal's biggest moneymaker since Spartacus and remained so until Airport in 1970. It also received several Oscar nominations. That same year there was not only Camelot, but Finian's Rainbow, Half a Sixpence, and The Happiest Millionaire contributing to the decline. The latter was Disney's attempt at another Mary Poppins-sized success. For 1968, as has been pointed out by several others, Oliver! was very much loved (although I'm personally in the head-scratching crowd over that). Between Oliver! and Funny Girl, Columbia became the only studio to dodge the bullet that hit all the others by the end of the decade.
reminds me of how much i LOVE hit movie musical chitty chitty bang bang (with winning characters like the child catcher)
And Truly Scrumptious and Caractacus Potts, ofc
The jazz singer in the 80’s with Neil Diamond is really good and the soundtrack is really good also
I agree about the soundtrack, but it's telling that Neil Diamond has not had another credit playing someone not named Neil Diamond.
Just has that one stupid scene of Neil Diamond in blackface…
@@uuclmusic2711it was a commentary on the original movie by showing how a black man in the audience wasn't fooled and called it out.
Lucie Arnaz left *They're Playing Our Song* for this. That should've gotten a movie adaptation before MTV changed everything because by then it would've been too late.
@@uuclmusic2711 that’s because the kind of music he wanted to play in the clubs he was playing in he had to disguise himself as a black man cause the audience wouldn’t accept him as a white msn playing with a black band and the black face was also done in the original in the 30’s
Can you do an episode covering the problematic re-cutting of "A Star Is Born" along with other movie musicals with lost media?
Jack Warner thought it was too long; he wanted to make more profits with a shorter version. That's why he tore most of it away after the film's premiere.
@@fromthesidelines Warner also vandalized 1776, at the request of President Richard M. Nixon, but happily, all or virtually all of the lost footage has been restored in a Director's cut now widely available.
Disney is still doing it today if *Bedknobs and Broomsticks* went back to the short version for everything after DVD and *Pete's Dragon* has had five minutes unaccounted for since its original premiere and they would rather do an anti-musical in-name-only fleamake than find the missing scenes which they should have done in the 1990s after they restored B&B and *The Happiest Millionaire.*
They also gutted *The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band* and refuse to even look to see if the missing scenes, including two songs called "Westerin'" and "I Couldn't Have Dreamed it Better if I Tried," still exist. There were demo pressings of the soundtrack LP with those songs, then they were removed for the version released to stores.
@@fromthesidelines according to a 2001 miniseries about Judy Garland, it was not so much Jack Warner himself as "the money men in New York," as he described them. This is why I don't object to the running time of *My Fair Lady.* we obviously use that to make it up to George Cukor.
Oh, everyone hated Oliver? Quite the reverse. Again, was brought up on that film in the 70s as a kid. We all loved it, and it was shown regularly on holidays on the TV. TV actually meant that cinema attendance was lower at the time, that and the absolute crumbling state of many cinemas which were old converted theatres at the end of their natural lives in many cases.
Oliver won an Oscar except everyone hated it. Speak for yourself, it s a quality musical movie. Maybe too British for you or true to life. It was a big success in Western Europe and the UK in 1968/69. Don t call a musical based on a book of Charles Dickens childish, than you really don t understand the movie at all!
It was cloying. That was the problem...
@DDumbrille Rubbish! "Cloying"!! Sound of Music is positively vomit inducing in comparison. Oliver! Is the greatest musical ever written.
@@AdrianLee-i7g The greatest musical ever written. Thanks, that was funny... lol
@@DDumbrille I love to hear what you think was the greatest musical.
@@AdrianLee-i7g Too difficult to pick one, but 'Singin' in the Rain', "The Wizard of Oz", "Funny Face", and are probably the top 3...
Oliver! is very much loved here in the UK. And I have to say, I have a soft spot for Thoroughly Modern Millie.
I was interested in this history until you said Oliver was childish and tacky and everyone hated it. I almost feel insulted. Have you seen this film lately? It is wonderful, far better than The Sound of Music and just about everything you talk about. I saw it again recently and went back and read most of the reviews from the time. Most of them were full of praise and, of course, it was Best Picture of the Year.
To each his own. I hated Oliver in 1969, and I still hate it today. A few nice songs. I’d rather read the book.
Glad to find someone else who didn't care for Oliver!. First off, most of it was ugly to look at. Secondly, the orchestrations were often jarring. Shani Wallis was good but even she couldn't overcome the grimness and grime. And then they killed her off. Thirdly, the kid who played Oliver had zero personality. Was he supposed to be such a blank? If so, why? And then there were the out-of-place production numbers. Egad, almost the whole endeavor was awful.
@@johnjdevlin2610 How could you depict the slums of 19th century London and not have them be grim and look grimy? Not ugly to look at, just startlingly realistic. They didn't kill Nancy off, Charles Dickens did. The kid who played Oliver was perfect. Incredibly innocent, younger than the other boys. If you don't like production numbers, then you must not like musicals of that period. Obviously the vast majority of critics, as well as the Academy, disagreed with you.
@@joelangford7601 Despite the rationalization, there's still no getting away from the fact that I don't find Oliver an enjoyable film. I've been subjected to it on numerous occasions and it always fails to entertain. For me it stinks out loud, Academy Award or not. But that's just my opinion.
Fiddler on the Roof is amazing.
That dance sequence in Sweet Charity was really good but the rest of the movie, not so much.
Three great sequences, really: Big Spender, Rich Man's Frug and Rhythm of Life. The rest is forgettable. Maybe if they'd kept Gwen Verdon it would have been improved enough to make a difference, but the book was just weak.
The song sequences are all fantastic, as good as it gets really - but even Fosse couldn't fix the mundane plot between them.
@@leonlinton634 Aw, that mundane plot comes directly from Fellini's Nights of Cabiria! I think Sweet Charity is chronically underrated. It is too long (it's basically a remake of the Fellini but with songs), but filled with imagination from a budding director who would go on to even greater things.
The only problem with it is that it's just not Fellini. It's about as good as you can expect an American musical version to be.
In most of these cases it was the wrong music at the wrong time. Not that musicals were hated.
The money they spent pushed them into "too big to fail" territory based on a statistical anomaly in the genre. That is an unfair position to put any movie into. Hollywood always does it with everything that becomes a success: they give 50 more versions of the same thing.
Don't you think rock and roll had something to do with killing off THESE kind of movies? Oh, and (12:35) what about Rocky Horror, Grease, and Little Shop of Horrors ?
2001 was practically a musical
@@mercurywoodrose I loved those extravagant dance numbers in 2001.
Just because a movie doesn't make money doesn't mean its bad. That just means audiences weren't ready for it at the time. Today, "Doctor Dolittle" is charming, "Hello, Dolly!" is splashy, and "Sweet Charity" has some of the best dancing of the decade.
I hear Barbra makes all her own meals...on a solid gold stove.
@@BrettTwinSavage Get yer hands off me, ya creep!
@ Don't touch me! I got a condition!
@@BrettTwinSavage Ran all the way, huh?
@ Don't come any closer! I got a broom!