Movie musicals have been a persistent staple in American culture nearly as long as movies themselves have. Their history and creation are no doubt intertwined. Most viewers are willing to look beyond the silliness and suspend their disbelief to dive into the infectious unrealism of singing and dancing mid-narrative when emotion moves a character to do so. Still, it seems that lately a musical has to hide the fact that it is a musical in its marketing to guarantee a successful release.

While they have gone in and out of fashion, the movie musical manages to endure. Recent hits like La La Land, Wonka and others have received a lot of attention and a lot of award nominations. Therefore, it is worth discussing ten movie musicals you may have seldom stopped to consider next to standards like Singin’ in the Rain or Cabaret or Grease. These unsung heroes of the movie musical genre are begging for more love and attention.

Funny Face (1957)

Funny Face was just moments too late for her call time. Since it included Audrey Hepburn; author of picturebook series Eloise, Kay Thompson; late-career Fred Astaire, and the song catalog of Gershwin hits, Funny Face should have made it. But critics were lukewarm on the film. It wasn’t a strong adaptation of the stage show. It was too late for the golden age of movie musicals and too early for the musical renaissance of the mid-sixties. The film’s biggest problem is that no one ever knew what to do with it.

It follows Jo (Hepburn) as she is transformed from dorky bookstore attendant to covergirl for fashion magazine, Quality. She, Quality’s publisher (Thompson) and fashion photographer (Astaire) travel to Paris to shoot the very pink spring issue. Once there, bookish Jo is swept up into the world of 1950s Parisian existential philosophy and modern dance. Along the way, she falls in love with her tap-dancing photographer who's thirty years her senior (but they never mention that part).

Many claimed it was too smart of a film, with others indicating it was pretentious. Still, it is beloved enough to be a plot-point in a later season of Gilmore Girls. What’s not to love? Hepburn sings for herself in her first career musical, while Astaire does what I find to be his most impressive tap routine. Funny Face received four Oscar-nominations, but garnered zero wins. Always a bridal cover-shoot, never a bride… I still think it ‘S Wonderful.

The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)

Straying from the Great American Musical formula is Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort. It is a sweeping Herculean effort of filmmaking. It is clear that this isn’t Demy’s first musical rodeo, after the success of his prior musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). By this point, he’s perfected the art. This film is actually extremely popular and considered a part of the canon of French standards. Due to being such a mythologized titan, Young Girls rarely pops up in lists of top movie musicals…. As if reducing it to a genre some find to be as lowbrow as the musical is detrimental its classy reputation.

Identical twin music and dance teachers, Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) and Solange (Françoise Dorléac), get tied up in a plot of romantic miscommunications and soul-searching in the most visually stunning small town ever seen on the silver screen. It even features everyone’s favorite American in Paris, Gene Kelly.

This film is not only a musical, but an operetta. An operetta has come to indicate a hybrid opera/musical, having all the conventions of a musical with most of, if not all, of the story being told via song. Each song rolls from one to the next, the connective material between scenes is scored, and the same musical riffs and lyrics are repeated frequently throughout the story to different effect. This is also the only musical on this list that is primarily in a language other than English. That may put off the très casual musical fan, or elevate Young Girls’ status above the Paramount Pictures musicals of the ‘50s for American fans throughout the decades—as a result, it remains underrated.

The Boy Friend (1971)

Ken Russell, the director who brought you Tommy, did an arguably superior musical first: The Boy Friend. In this bizarre, high-spectacle, meta nightmare musical, Russell took the British stage musical of the same name and made it unrecognizable. The original has an unremarkable romance plot set in the Villa Caprice.

Russell decided his picture would only use that story and music as a backdrop, and became more interested in the players that play the characters in The Boy Friend. He wrote a meta-narrative following the inner lives of the players of a two-bit musical revue in a nasty part of London who are producing The Boy Friend. Devout assistant stage manager, Polly (Twiggy), understudies the leading lady one afternoon following an injury. Of course, that afternoon is when Hollywood’s biggest director, Cecil B. DeThrill shows up looking for talent. Everything that can go wrong, does.

It is one of the most visually striking films I have encountered.

While it adheres to the things expected of classic movie musicals, the story is told by a very deluded girl that envisions a higher production quality than what her theatre company is capable of attaining. It darts back and forth between numbers of A-list quality, to moments where rage and jealousy in the personal lives of the actors threatens the figurative stability of their show, to sequences where the set is literally falling apart. The quality of the film and the attention it has received is violently skewed. This one is crying to be watched.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

A movie musical almost escaping the clutches of its midnight movie background is Phantom of the Paradise. Haunting composer Winslow Leach is severely disfigured after an accident involving a hot record press to the face. He dawns a birdlike silver mask and too much eyeliner and is forced to write a rock opera for soulless record producer, Swan (Paul Williams of Three Dog Night). Winslow lives in the depths of studio/concert venue called The Paradise. Swan and Winslow work tirelessly on this rock opera for their new muse, Phoenix (Jessica Harper), while Winslow plots abject revenge on those that have gotten him into this position.

That was a concise description of a movie with a senseless plot. I didn’t get to the part where Winslow has his teeth removed in prison and replaced with steel fangs. It’s Phantom of the Opera meets The Picture of Dorian Gray meets Faust and set in the underbelly of the music industry. Directed by the visionary Brian De Palma and composed by Paul Williams, it is the most ridiculous movie ever made about human cruelty. Phantom of the Paradise is campy and dangerously grounded in one of the deepest fears every artist has: how to keep working when there is nothing left of yourself to give.

Popeye (1980)

Popeye is not exactly an adored underrated musical. The film stars Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall as the most perfect Popeye and Olive Oyl imaginable. It’s also, weirdly, directed by Robert Altman. People hated this film when it came out.

The plot is fairly straightforward for anyone even vaguely familiar with Popeye cartoons and culture. It’s about Popeye (Williams) coming into port in a town called Sweethaven. He has come to search for his father. Here, he meets lovely Olive Oyl (Duvall), town bully Bluto, and local glutton Wimpy. As Popeye and Olive’s flirtmance begins, they encounter a baby in a basket that they call Swee’Pea. Eventually, they fight a giant octopus and Popeye has to down his famous can of spinach to save the day.

Never has there been a film with more detail in nearly every frame. It is truly the perfect live-action take on a cartoon. Humans at the mercy of cartoon physics and proportion is an underused tactic in filmmaking. Popeye is the type of adaptation begged for today. The music is catchy and beautifully written. Olive Oyl’s song “He Needs Me” pops up in commercials and films, like Punch Drunk Love often. Popeye was shot on a fully functional set built in a seaside area in Malta. Tourists can still visit the Popeye Village there today!

The true flaw that kneecapped Popeye was not knowing its audience. It’s too complex to be a kids movie, too cartoonish to be for grownups. It didn’t fit into the box musicals were expected to, so it flopped hard.

Cry-Baby (1990)

Cry-Baby could be director John Waters’ most normal movie. The movie is still unhinged, but it is somehow cleaner and more contained than the films that earned him the title “Pope of Trash.” Starring Johnny Depp, Ricki Lake, Iggy Pop, Traci Lords and more, Cry-Baby still lacks a streamable cast album despite having hit after hit in the film.

Set in 1950s Baltimore (a time and place Waters is quite interested in), Cry-Baby follows a charm-school girl named Allison and neighborhood gang leader with the voice of an angel, Cry-Baby Walker (Depp). Despite being on opposite ends of the social ladder, they start to fall for each other. After a redneck party gone wrong, Cry-Baby is sent to a boys' prison run by Willem Dafoe. Near the end, Cry-Baby gets a melodramatic prison tattoo of a teardrop on his face. After breaking out of jail, he plays vehicular chicken with the high school squares, wins and gets the girl. The end.

When this movie came out, it received super mixed reviews. It is not your grandma’s movie musical. Cry-Baby’s plot lampoons American social culture in the 1950s by showing it as tacky, trashy, gross, queer and kind of gorgeous. Cry-Baby is an endorsement for being a freak. It's the epitome of camp, which Waters on The Simpsons would define as “The tragically ludicrous? The ludicrously tragic?” This movie is absolutely both, earning it cult-classic status.

Velvet Goldmine (1998)

An early career film for Ewan McGregor, Christian Bale, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Toni Collette, Velvet Goldmine never ceases to impress. Titled for David Bowie’s song, Velvet Goldmine is director Todd Haynes queer epic about fictional glam rock musician Brian Slade (Meyers). He’s modeled primarily after Bowie. Slade’s life and career is profiled from a distance by journalist Arthur (Bale) following Slade’s apparent disappearance from society.

Arthur seeks out Slade’s exes, dealers, and so-called friends in an attempt to piece together the man’s life. I looked for a copy of this film for ages before seeing it on MUBI after years of searching. One of the biggest draws to hunting this film is its soundtrack. Songs in both their original forms, covers and tracks for the film come from artists like Brian Eno, Lou Reed, The New York Dolls, and Roxy Music.

The music by the film’s fictional bands, The Venus in Furs and Wylde Ratttz, is performed by members of Radiohead, Mudhoney, Sonic Youth, The Stooges and more. Velvet Goldmine also has a notorious contribution from one of my favorite bands, Placebo. All of the band’s members are characters in the film as well as producing new songs for the film.

Upon seeing the film, by the way, Bowie hated it.

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

Dancer in the Dark is a Palme d’Or-winning musical about a legally blind woman directed by Lars von Trier, featuring Björk.

I feel that little else needs to be said, but I’ll proceed. With the tragedy and monotony of her daily life as a factory worker in Washington state in the early sixties, Selma (Björk) copes by daydreaming. Due to her severely reduced quality of sight, she makes music out of everything around her, like the factory machinery or vehicular noise. The film has a Björk-style industrial soundtrack lacking in proper tonal musicality. It’s haunting.

Selma is working in order to save money for a surgery that will prevent her young son’s vision from sharing the same fate. Then, she’s involved in murder, runs from the police, commits perjury and is sentenced to death by hanging in a brisk 140 minutes.

It is the bleakest film I have ever seen.

Across the Universe (2007)

Changing the pace entirely from Dancer in the Dark is high-concept Beatles jukebox musical, Across the Universe. Directed by veteran musical theatre director Julie Taymor, this literal acid trip of a film follows characters all named for Beatles songs: Jude, Lucy, Maxwell, Sadie, Prudence and Jo-Jo. It also has two really odd cameos from Eddie Izzard and Bono.

Jude (Jim Sturgess) is an illegal immigrant to the U.S. from Liverpool in the 1960s, searching for his father he has never met. After a disappointing encounter with dad, Jude falls in with scraggly college boy, Max, who takes him home for Christmas break. There, Jude meets Max’s younger sister, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) that he simply adores. The rest of the film tracks this band of misfits chronologically through the Beatles various album eras over years.

There is a mappable line from innocent joyful songs like “I’ve Just Seen a Face” at the beginning, followed by a trippy sequence featuring “I Am The Walrus” and “For The Benefit of Mr. Kite.” This leaves the thematically heavier tracks like “Happiness is a Warm Gun” and “Helter Skelter” nearer to the end when Max returns from his time drafted in Vietnam.

As mentioned, this is a proper jukebox musical (debatably, the only one of its kind on this list). A jukebox musical infers a spectacle-heavy, thinly contained plot existing to connect songs by typically one artist. Across the Universe is not lacking in thin plot, great music and a barrage of references to Beatles history to be decoded.

Annette (2021)

The final, and potentially the strangest film on the list is rock opera Annette. Failing comedian Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) and opera singer Ann Desfranoux (Marion Cotillard) are the parents of a miracle child, Annette. Annette is played by a complex wooden puppet. Henry and Ann never acknowledge this fact.

Henry, like many of Driver’s characters, turns hostile. Ann is the victim of a perceived accident and dies at sea. Henry begins to neutralize those that stand in his way as he and his late wife’s Accompanist (Simon Helberg) kickstart baby Annette’s own international singing career.

This movie pulls me back in over and over like a siren. Its enchanting music is by your favorite band’s favorite band, Sparks. It received mixed reviews and is only socially remembered for one particular sex scene involving Adam Driver. Annette hinges on the same theme that other films on this list do: what is left for you when you fail your art? Optimistically, Annette is a film entirely about failure. Failure in love, career, crime, art, yourself, friendship, family. Henry McHenry fails until he has nothing left but failure. It also failed to get major mainstream attention, so I recommend you make a pass at Annette.

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Movie Musical Underdogs, A List