The 25 Best Golden-Age Movie Musicals: Vulture

By the end of the 1950s, costly productions and waning audiences forced studios to pass on any musical pitch that wasn't a guaranteed box-office hit, and the genre began to dwindle. But the Golden Age paved the way for some of Hollywood's biggest musical hits later on, like West Side Story (1961), Grease (1978), and Zoot Suit (1981), and even big-budget Oscar winners like La La Land (2016) and indies like Saturday Church (2018). Below, in no particular order, are 25 of those inspirational films.