The Music Man

[GregSaunders 0]

I love THE MUSIC MAN and think it needs to join ROCKY HORROR (which is so far the only musical in the canon). The whole movie is worthy of consideration, but let me make my case for inclusion based on a single scene, the song "The Sadder But Wiser Girl" :

• It's a damn catchy tune perfectly performed by Robert Preston.
  
• It's got a wicked sense of humor. "I cheer, I rave for the virtue I'm too late to save...I hope, and I pray, for a Hester to win just one more 'A'"
  
• It's a great character bit. Harold Hill is a lecherous con-man who's planning to seduce the only person in town who can reveal him as a fraud.
  
• The staging is super-weird. Robert Preston and Buddy Hackett singing a song about women who love having sex to a ten year old girl in a barn??
  

The whole movie is terrific. It's got heart and humor, the music runs the gamut from bizarre to instantly iconic, and the plot is a perfect encapsulation of how marketing and politics work in a grand scale (invent a problem, sell a solution). Even if it overstays its welcome by 30 min (sorry in advance for the runtime, the last act can be a bit of a slog), I adore this movie.

[Muthsarah 124]

I love THE MUSIC MAN and think it needs to join ROCKY HORROR (which is so far the only musical in the canon). The whole movie is worthy of consideration, but let me make my case for inclusion based on a single scene, the song "The Sadder But Wiser Girl" :

• It's a damn catchy tune perfectly performed by Robert Preston.
  
• It's got a wicked sense of humor. "I cheer, I rave for the virtue I'm too late to save...I hope, and I pray, for a Hester to win just one more 'A'"
  
• It's a great character bit. Harold Hill is a lecherous con-man who's planning to seduce the only person in town who can reveal him as a fraud.
  
• The staging is super-weird. Robert Preston and Buddy Hackett singing a song about women who love having sex to a ten year old girl in a barn?

I'm 'bout ready to go to bed, but I can't let myself do that while a thread like this lies, unreplied-to.

 

 

It was all done in the best of early-60s decorum. Great song, yes. Even

. And, yes, I'll admit the Hester Pryne reference is both classy and catchy.

 

As for Harold Hill, he's not out to seduce, at least not first-and-foremost. He just sees her as an obstacle to his far more shallow aims to make money. The best part of his "seduction" scenes are knowing he doesn't mean a word of it, and she knows he doesn't mean a word of it. He has to charm her despite her knowing, 100%, that he's full of $#!+. As for the ten-year-old girl, the song's lyrics are far above her head. Like all the best "fun for all ages" films, it has stuff that will connect with the adults, while running right off the backs of the children. It's not even smutty, it's just suggestive, while still maintaining the illusion of chastity. What better way to sum up what worked in Hollywood in the early-mid 60s?

 

I ADORE this musical (film). I adore "South Pacific", "Hello Dolly", even (to some extent) "West Side Story". And any musical with Gene Kelly. There are fanTABulous musicals out there, classical stuff, even non-Rogers-and-Hammerstein-stuff.

 

That said...I have NO idea, beyond "West Side Story", what kind of musicals would be best nominated for The Canon. There seems to be such apathy, if not antipathy, for Golden-Age musicals today. And while "The Music Man" is, I feel, one of the more energetic and relatable ones, it's still very much a product of an earlier era, not least because it is itself a throwback to an era five or six decades before its time (not unlike "Hello Dolly", which, again, I will state I adore to ridiculous degrees).

 

Devin, Amy, if you would be willing to give a classic musical an honest shot (admit it, you were both aiming to destroy "The Sound of Music", which, I guess is understandable, as it's by no means among the best, even in its decade), don't just leap to "West Side Story", a lazy slam-dunk of a musical film if anything ever was. There are lots of others you could tackle: "Oklahoma", "My Fair Lady", even (/doubtful) an old Astaire/Rogers flick.

 

FWIW, I 100% endorse an episode based on a high/late Hollywood musical such as "The Music Man". Or "Hello Dolly" (even if it would surely lose). Even Hollywood's last gasps at big-studio musicals were very entertaining, they just ended up being too expensive to survive. And they're wonderful entertainment, if you're not totally dismissive of all musicals.

 

C'mon, "West Side Story" would be WAY too easy. You both know that. Please, use your platform to introduce film buffs to musicals they probably HAVEN'T seen. Spread the love of a long-dead genre. Either "The Music Man" or "Hello Dolly" would be beautiful movies, and are certainly films more people should see, if only to learn to appreciate the last dying years of the old Hollywood spectacle machine. Which, occasionally, did strike right once in awhile.

[Threshold 93]

Yeah, but what about inducting Marge vs the Monorail instead?

[GregSaunders 0]

Yeah, but what about inducting Marge vs the Monorail instead?

 

The funny thing about "Marge vs. the Monorail" is that it seems like a Music Man parody on its surface, but the original is just as damning of its subjects. It's not a parody as much as an homage/remake. The people of Springfield are mindless sheep who are easily manipulated by a traveling salesman? That's THE MUSIC MAN, which spends the entire movie pushing the point that the citizens of River City Iowa are judgemental, close-minded people who will fall for the simplest flattery. In fact, the second song in the movie (Iowa Stubborn) could be summed up as "Welcome to town, we're terrible".

[GregSaunders 0]

That said...I have NO idea, beyond "West Side Story", what kind of musicals would be best nominated for The Canon.

 

There are a handful of movies that are so obvious that I'm surprised they haven't been discussed already (WIZARD OF OZ, WILLY WONKA, SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, A HARD DAYS NIGHT, GREASE), though I expect we'll see some more recent musicals that could prove to be controversial get discussed first (MOULIN ROUGE, CHICAGO, LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, FROZEN).