6 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
Rushes
NEWS AND VIEWS
IT’S SHOWTIME!
The musical is the big screen genre that keeps
on giving, even in the age of streaming. But
it’s not just all-singing and all-dancing felines,
snowy Disney tales of sisterhood and the
latest from Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda
that will be cinema’s lifeblood over the next
year. Wes Anderson’s making one. So’s Steven
Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro and even a
documentary filmmaker like The Act of Killing’s
Joshua Oppenheimer. But why now?
Traditional wisdom might say that historically
audiences have wanted to lose themselves in
song and dance at times of political and economic
crisis. The BFI’s forthcoming UK-wide celebration
of musicals certainly allows for that, packed as it
is with jaw-dropping, toe-tapping, eye-popping
extravaganzas, be it Ken Russell’s heady 1975
rock opera Tommy (rereleased on 22 November),
Beyoncé channelling Diana Ross in Dreamgirls
(2006) or an explosion of joy like Singin’ in the Rain
(rereleased in the UK on 18 October), as fresh
and charming for Brexit-weary audiences now
as it was for those anxious about the Cold War
and the start of the nuclear arms race in 1952.
But these “trivial soufflés” to quote Mike
Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy, often smuggled social
commentary into their spectacles. Ninety years
after the Wall Street Crash, some of the highlights
of the BFI season are Depression-era films like
Gold Diggers of 1933, which provided escapism
via Busby Berkeley’s dazzling ensemble dance
numbers, but also put some grit into the glitz
by showing the hardships faced by the showgirl
protagonists and World War 1 veterans.
Many films in the season were ahead of their
time: Cabin in the Sky (1943) featured an all-star,
Make ’em laugh, make ’em laugh: Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Dreamgirls (2006)
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