The film musical - that most joyous and creative of movie forms - was born in 1927 when Al Jolson sang "Toot, Toot, Tootsie," "Blue Skies" and "My Mammy" in the first talkie, The Jazz Singer. TCM's unprecedented, comprehensive review of the genre's first 50 years begins with that landmark movie and ends with Martin Scorsese's New York, New York (1977), with Liza Minnelli in a dazzling performance as a big-band singer who emerges as a superstar.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the most-loved musical couple of the 1930s, are at their scintillating best in Top Hat (1935), strutting their sophisticated stuff to "Cheek to Cheek" and other Irving Berlin tunes. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), a disarming bit of Americana and one of the most charming movies of the 1940s, is a valentine to both the film-musical form and a burgeoning romance between director Vincente Minnelli and ultimate movie-musical star Judy Garland.

The Hollywood musical hit its sparkling peak in the 1950s at MGM, which produced such masterpieces as Minnelli's An American in Paris (1951), an exhilarating visualization of George Gershwin's tone poem. The 1960s marked the age of the epic musical based on stage hits, with My Fair Lady (1964, TCM premiere), the delightful musicalization of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalio, winning an Oscar® as Best Picture. Among the top musicals of the 1970s was Norman Jewison's Fiddler on the Roof (1971), based on Joseph Stein's perennial stage favorite about the Ukrainian milkman who struggles mightily to hold on to tradition.

by Roger Fristoe