That's a good point. Life with Father was the longest running show on Broadway in the 1940s and the film version was, and to some extent still is, beloved, but I've never understood why. It's pretty dopey and neither William Powell, who won the NY Film Critics award and was Oscar nominated for it, nor Irene Dunne, who are among my favorite actors of the era, were anywhere near their best in it so I can understand people feeling the same way about My Fair Lady. To those who saw the show on stage, as I did in 1960, it was a glorious reconstruction, not a scene-by-scene retread. If you've never seen it on stage, it is just as you imagined it from listening to the cast recording which wasn't the biggest selling album of its day for nothing. 1964's film critics, though, preferred Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, which as many times as I've tried to appreciate it, always falls short for me.Okri wrote:I love musicals, but I don’t love My Fair Lady. It isn’t my favourite Lerner/Loewe musical (that would be Brigadoon and can listen to “I Loved You Once in Silence” from Camelot endlessly), nor my favourite stage musical of 1956 (Most Happy Fella), nor my favourite movie musical of 1964 (Mary Poppins or Umbrellas of Cherbourg). I find Cukor’s direction cinematically inert and think it’s three-hour runtime a slog to get through [yes, I’ve seen a restoration]. I don’t find any of the performances of that much attention. That said, I’ll also be honest and say I deliberately chose My Fair Lady for the reasons Reza and danfrank cite. The fact that it was an important stage production in New York/London is true but not relevant to film quality. The cast recording was a massive hit and the Broadway show became the longest running show at that time, but again, that’s not the film being a masterpiece (if the adaptation of shows that ran the longest on Broadway all won best picture, Hello Dolly! Wins in 1969; Fiddler on the Roof in 1971; Grease in 1978; A Chorus Line in 1985; Phantom of the Opera in 2004 and of course, Cats in 2019 – and I don’t think anyone of us would prefer that universe). The casting decisions took up oxygen and the film was hugely successful at the box office (2nd to Mary Poppins), of course. I know the stage show was such a massive success that it’s impossible to imagine another film winning best picture, but is it just historical context that makes it seem reasonable?
Of the other musicals you mention, the film version of Fiddler on the Roof comes closest to being on the same level but had stronger competition at the Oscars from Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, and the winner, Friedkin's The French Connection which aside from the chase scenes really wasn't all that great to begin with.
Hello, Dolly! doesn't work because of its leading lady who was much too young to bring it off. It would not have been nominated except for the big push Fox gave it in one of its last attempts at repeating its former glory. Grease, aside from its obviously too long in the tooth cast, suffers from the inability of most of its cast members to be able to dance, which is why you don't see their feet in most of the production numbers. A Chorus Line is ineptly directed by Richard Attenborough. The Phantom of the Opera was decent enough, but the reason it lasted so long on Broadway and probably in London as well, was because repeat audiences went for the chandelier. Cats was just plain dumb.
The original cast recording of Brigadoon is sublime but the studio bound film version is not, besides which they leave out some of the best songs from the score. The film version of Lerner and Loewe's Camelot is disappointing, but there is a DVD of the 1982 Broadway revival that was done for TV that is thrilling in the way that the film should have been. The film version of their Paint Your Wagon which destroys the concept of the stage show by making it about a ménage-a-trois instead of a father and daughter and her beau, works in spite of itself. Lee Marvin couldn't sing but with the Yale Men's Chorus helping him out he almost convinces you that he can, and Clint Eastwood, who couldn't sing either, almost makes you believe he can. Fortunately, they had Harve Presnell to sing "They Call the Wind Maria" the way it was supposed to be sung.