MGM Musicals Hello, Sign in. Just as the movie musical had been sustained by radio and sheet music, so now pop music broke out in the excitement of rock'n'roll and a teenage audience who reckoned the old musicals were quaint and sentimental. The conclusion is oddly un-American in denying enterprise and mobility, yet it's one of the most touching and dramatic scenes in a musical. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) is a leading entertainment company focused on the production and global distribution of film and TV content across all platforms.

Matthew Sweet celebrates the all-singing, all-dancing world of MGM musicals on film. The coincidence of those three seems explanation enough for the surge of musicals at MGM.
Of course, all these talents might never have been assembled without one other phenomenon: the glory of the American songbook. Its founding figures had died or retired. (1943), Carousel (1945), Annie Get Your Gun (1946) and South Pacific (1949). But in the musical, such tests were apparently abandoned. Featuring Judy Garland, Gene Kelly and Howard Keel in music from Easter Parade, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Show Boat, An American in Paris, and our classic score of the week Singin' in the Rain. David Thomson looks at a time when a little cheer at the movies was appreciated – and wonders if the same couldn't be said now, aerial shots of waves and whirlpools of chorus girls, Cyd Charisse putting on lingerie in Silk Stockings. With Loew's lackluster assortment of Metro films, Loew purchased Goldwyn Pictures in 1924 to improve the quality. All rights reserved. And music changed. If so, if planning meant that much, then surely it's time now for a new wave of musicals. Astaire was nearly 60. Was that how it happened? As the nationwide BFI Musicals season continues Matthew Sweet celebrates the all-singing, all-dancing world of MGM musicals on film. They quickly became a sensation which expanded to other Hollywood studios, but Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's are arguably the best. He and Garland fell in love on the picture (it shows) and they represented the level of talent that Freed and the studio believed in. From the moment Judy Garland — as a young woman in love for the first time in Meet Me In St. Louis — crooned "The Boy Next Door," the tune became her own personal property. As the nationwide BFI Musicals season continues Matthew Sweet celebrates the all-singing, all-dancing world of MGM musicals on film. In 1924, movie theater magnate Marcus Loew had a problem. Why did musicals at MGM end? There had been musicals before. But not everyone is happy with the move. MGM meant musicals for more than a decade after the second world war. But we should recall that the genre was also having enormous encouragement from the theatre. Try Prime. When Dorothy sang Over the Rainbow there was no question that the song meant something. A few years later, at RKO Pictures, the Astaire-Rogers films came into being – where the gravity, beauty, and exhilaration of the set-piece numbers (effectively directed by Astaire) ignored the weightless framework of the stories and their inane romantic complications. This is a list of feature films originally released and/or distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (to include MGM/UA Entertainment Co., MGM/UA Communications Co., MGM–Pathe Communications Co. and MGM/UA Distribution Co.).. These were years in which the nation and the world were singing the works of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and so many others, including Freed himself, who wrote the song Singin' in the Rain. Minnelli was an MGM contract director all his career, and his musicals include The Pirate (again with Garland, though they were divorced by then), An American in Paris (best picture Oscar-winner for 1951, and a bravura vision of Paris as seen by some of its great painters), The Band Wagon, Brigadoon and Gigi. Garland was too unreliable.

If the MGM musicals offered moviegoers a luxe and lovely escape from the everyday, they also bestowed their stars with the signature songs that shaped their own legends. David Thomson looks at a time when a little cheer at the movies was appreciated – and wonders if … But MGM had ranks of stars. A wonderful and different interpretation from the Broadway musical but still it is amazing. Freed was driven to make some pretty bad dramatic films. Image © Warner Bros. Ent. Howard Keel MGM musicals: Texas Carnival publicity shot with Esther Williams.In his MGM musicals of the 1950s, Howard Keel was almost always paired with small, girl-like leading ladies – Betty Hutton, Kathryn Grayson, Ann Blyth, Jane Powell – which at times made the broad-shouldered, six-foot-three actor-singer look less like their love interest than their lover daddy. To support them, Freed gathered a remarkable team of craftspeople: Roger Edens, songwriter and arranger; Betty Comden and Adolph Green, scriptwriters (On the Town, Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon); André Previn, who joined MGM as a composer and arranger at the age of 15; Kay Thompson, who did so much to look after Garland; the choreographer Michael Kidd. Tootie (Margaret O'Brien) is so moved she runs down and smashes the snowmen. Encontrá Mgm - Música en Mercado Libre Argentina. As always, it was a matter of chance and public response, but in hindsight, we can say that for about 15 years, under the leadership of the producer Arthur Freed, Metro made a succession of musicals that now looks like a campaign to keep people cheerful as war ended and darker threats loomed. There were other directors, such as Charles Walters (Easter Parade, Summer Stock and High Society) and George Sidney (Anchors Aweigh, The Harvey Girls, Annie Get Your Gun, Show Boat and Kiss Me Kate). The other essential director in this history was Stanley Donen, once a dancer and choreographer, and very close to Gene Kelly. Gotta Dance! In Broadway Melody of 1940, Astaire and Eleanor Powell, dressed in white on a glossy, black floor, had done the fabulous Begin the Beguine number so that the rest of the clunky picture was forgotten. The Prodigal (1931) The Broadway Melody (1929) Hallelujah (1929) Marianne (1929) So This Is College (1929) The Hollywood Revue of 1929 … Read about our approach to external linking. This need not have been a musical: it was based on a series of stories published in the New Yorker by Sally Benson about family life in St Louis at the turn of the century. Account & Lists Account Returns & Orders. It was also a sign of MGM embracing colour and a bold, theatrical quality of production design. It also boasted Esther Williams, June Allyson, Van Johnson, Debbie Reynolds and Howard Keel. Moreover, these shows had a greater faith in story, character and ideas than the revue musicals that had been dominant before 1939.
The sets are phenomenal, the costume are amazing, and the performances by Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, Lena Horne, and the Broadway originals Mabel King and Ted Ross, are to die for. A few years later came Meet Me in St Louis (1944).

That's when Garland sings what may be the most melancholy of Christmas songs (grave enough that its lyrics would later be spruced up at the request of singers). MGM meant musicals for more than a decade after the second world war. This is 1944, when so many people longed to believe that an earlier state of affairs would endure and be enjoyed.