10 Best Musical Numbers In Film

There are only so many ways someone can say a film "hasn't aged well", and I think I've used most of them just writing this article. The Sound of Music - like Grease, Fiddler on the Roof, and West Side Story - is so uniquely of its time that it just doesn't feel at home with modern movie audiences. And yet its DNA has found its way into every movie we watch.

And sometimes you just can't beat simplicity. Many modern musical films - from Chicago to Phantom of the Opera - have struggled to create iconic images for their production. But this film, with a sweeping shot of the Austrian mountains, immediately creates a single image with a stronger legacy than the rest of the film combined. And if you see this film on the big screen, it is easy to see why.

The main change that happened to film over the last 60 years or so is a growing obsession with movement. Kinetic movement, choreography, and editing have surpassed the simple awe of staring over a vast landscape. This number came from a time before the music video influence had reached the big screen.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, this scene is pure musical and pure cinema rolled into one.