13 Movie Musicals of the 1950s Ranked, Plus, Where to Watch Them
The 1950s was the decade of the American Dream. World War II and the Depression were fading in the rearview mirror and the future looked bright. The age of television was just dawning, but there was still something special about movies that kept theaters filled: singing, dancing, and a good time for all, in Technicolor and VistaVision.
No matter what real life lay outside theater doors — nuclear bomb tests, saddle shoes and bobby socks, the Korean War, suburbia, McCarthyism, McDonald’s, T-birds and Furys, rock ‘n’ roll, Disneyland, Brown v. Board of Education, Howdy Doody — Hollywood movie musicals promised a vintage world of imagination, magic and toe-tapping pizzazz.
Sometimes there was polish to these movie musicals: tuxedoes and ball gowns, shiny shoes dancing on glittery floors. Other times they took us to distant places like Paris or the South Pacific, or into the golden past, be it a frontier farm out west, an old South riverboat floating down the Mississippi or a cab up Broadway in the Roaring ’20s.
We wish we had room to dance through them all, but here are 13 of the top movie musicals of the 1950s.
1950s Musicals
November 2020
Bright and brassy, toe-tapping musicals from the 1950s
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