Old movies with songs in them

Do you remember any of the old classic movies like South Pacific, My Fair Lady and West Side Story? You may not be old enough to remember them, and if that's the case and you're in the US you probably will never see them because American TV very rarely shows movies that are more than about ten or fifteen years old.

One reason for this is probably that a lot of those old movies were musicals - and who wants to see a movie where the lead characters break into a song every ten minutes? Of course, there's a reason why they made so many musicals in those days; a lot of movies were adaptations of big stage productions that were, of course, musicals. Somehow the people that wrote (and still write) stage plays think the audiences want songs breaking up the action every few minutes.

For some reason movie writers also seemed to think that films for children also had to be musicals. It's as if they really thought that kids went to see a movie for the songs. I remember seeing Doctor Dolittle - the original movie with Rex Harrison as the Doctor, not the Eddie Murphy remake - when I was about seven (give or take a couple of years), and even then I was inwardly groaning every time they started singing. "Get on with the damn story", was what I was thinking. The fact that Rex Harrison couldn't sing and basically said the words in time to the music, so that he became "Doctor D, the sixties rap star", didn't help. Mary Poppins was no better, because of Dick van Dyke's horrible idea of what a Cockney accent was supposed to sound like.

I can't remember when the musical movies died. I guess the middle to late sixties must have been about the time - I don't really remember any musicals made during or after the seventies.

That includes movies that are adaptations of sources that do have songs. I'm glad to see that - thank goodness - Peter Jackson had the good sense to limit the singing in the Lord of the Rings films. The books (yes, it seems that there are still some people on the planet that don't know that the films are based on books that were written over half a century ago) had songs in them. In the movies Aragorn sings one short song and Pippin another (neither with the help of an invisible orchestra to back them) and none of the others made it into the movie. (By the way: thank you, Peter Jackson, for losing the entire Tom Bombadil sub-plot. I think having Tom dancing through the woods singing would have been a bit too much, even for those of us that already knew and loved the books.)

Basically, adults don't like musicals and kids don't either, which is probably why they don't make the things any more. This has to be a good thing. Can you imagine some recent movies if they'd been made as musicals? The Terminator with Arnie singing "I'll be back", and Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton singing the touching duet "Come with me if you want to live"? Or even more recently, Vin Diesel belting out "Are you afraid of the dark?" in a musical version of The Chronicles of Riddick?

So, a couple of messages to any film makers who happen to stumble over this blog. First, watch where you're treading. Second, and more importantly: No More Musicals, Ever. Ok?