By Patrick F. Cannon

Purely on a whim – I hadn’t seen it since it came out in 1962 – the other night I watched The Music Man, starring Robert Preston and Shirley Jones in the film version of Merideth Wilson’s hit Broadway musical that was recently revived with Hugh Jackman.

            Wilson grew up in Mason City, Iowa, and the movie is a nostalgic look back at early 20^th Century small town America. Preston plays “Professor” Harold Hill, a con man who comes to town to talk the locals into forming a boy’s marching band, the idea being that he collects money for instruments and uniforms and flees with the cash. Alas for Hill, he meets the local librarian played by Shirley Jones as the best-looking spinster of all time. Predictably, he is reformed. Along the way, we hear songs like “Goodnight my someone,” “Being in love,” “Till there was you,” “Gary, Indiana,” and “76 Trombones.” The cast even included an eight-year-old Ron Howard!

            It’s a fine musical if a bit long. If you’re tired of gloom and doom, you might want to give it a watch and add to your joy by watching some of my other favorites from the Golden Age of the movie musical. To me, the pinnacle is held by 1952s Singing in the Rain, starring Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Conner in a fond and hilarious look at Hollywood during the transition from silent to sound films. It defines the term “musical comedy.” Songs, mostly by Herb Nacio Brown, with lyrics by Arthur Freed, include “You Were Meant for Me,” “All I Do is Dream of You,” “Make ‘Em Laugh,” and of course “Singin’ in the Rain,” sung and danced by Kelly in a legendary sequence.

            Just a year earlier, Kelly again starred, this time with Leslie Caron, in the more romantic An American in Paris, with music by George Gershwin. In addition to songs like “S Wonderful,” “I Got Rhythm,” and “Our Live is Here to Stay,”  it included the “American in Paris Ballet,” which was featured in a recent program of the Chicago Symphony. The pianist Oscar Levant, who also provides comic relief as a neurotic composer, also played the third movement of Gershwins Concerto in F.  The art direction is also notable, making visual references to artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Dufy, van Gogh, and Renoir.

            The final film on my list is 1953’s The Band Wagon, starring the 54-year-old Fred Astaire and the somewhat younger and stunningly beautiful Cyd Charisse. The cast also includes Oscar Levant (again!), Nanette Fabray, and the British musical star Jack Buchanan. Fred plays a fading Hollywood actor, lured to New York to do a new musical. The film opens as he gets off the 20^th Century Limited at Grand Central Station, ignored by the press who instead flock to see the also debarking Ava Gardner.

Fred finds that the British director, played by Buchanan, conceives of the musical as a kind of Greek tragedy, moaning chorus, and all. Charisse is a ballet dancer with a Svengali-like manager. Eventually, after a lot of singing, dancing, and romantic complications, all comes right in the end, with the cast on stage singing the final Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz song, “That’s Entertainment!” And it was.

Copyright 2026, Patrick F. Cannon