Vanessa L. Williams sells out a Broadway theater for months in a revival of Sondheim's "Into the Woods," but the movies have given her the chance to dance just once (in the charmingly inconsequential "Dance With Me") and they've never given her the chance to sing. Christopher Walken, who may be the movies' great unused song and dance man, has gotten to strut his stuff exactly once, in "Pennies From Heaven." Before he became familiar to audiences on "Law & Order," Jerry Orbach introduced "Try to Remember" in the original production of "The Fantasticks" and originated the part of Billy Flynn in the 1975 production of "Chicago." (I saw him in the touring company of that show, and he was bliss to watch.)

Even when they were dying or dead on American screens, musicals never really went away. Like so many of our other genres, they went to Europe and beyond. In France Jacques Demy made "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and the problematic (but still affecting) "The Young Girls of Rochefort." In 1994 the French director Jacques Rivette made the lovely musical "Haut/bas/fragile." In 1999 the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang made light of the end of the world in "The Hole," and last year, from Thailand, came Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's "Monrak Transistor," which manages to make the oldest boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl plot seem fresh.

A word needs to be said about Baz Luhrmann and "Moulin Rouge," a movie that, like his "Romeo + Juliet," simultaneously drove me crazy and snuck into my heart. Luhrmann sets up the most elaborate sets and scenes only to edit his movies so much that we barely get a chance to see what's there. But there's a true conviction in his heart-on-the-sleeve craziness, a conviction that wouldn't work for other directors who try to adopt his methods.

In this country, Paul Thomas Anderson has felt as if he's been moving toward a musical for some time now. That's apparent less in the end-to-end music of "Magnolia" (and the scene where the entire cast breaks out in song) than in all of "Punch-Drunk Love," which in its own perverse, unique way has the lightness and simplicity and spirit of a '30s musical. The success of "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut" suggests audiences are willing to get beyond the Disneyfied musicals the movie parodies so effectively. The most original American movie musical of recent years was John Cameron Mitchell's "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," the one rock musical where that phrase is not an oxymoron. And "Once More With Feeling," the wonderful musical episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," suggests how good small-scale musicals might be made.

If "Chicago" is the movie that brings back the American movie musical, then the musicals that follow had better take a long look at it and learns its lessons. "Chicago" seems miraculous for a number of reasons, not least of which is that the show hasn't been softened or sweetened in its transition from stage to screen. It's nasty, sharp, cynical and unromantic and it takes for granted that there are still audiences who will respond to its disreputable pleasures.

The original 1975 stage production, like all of director Bob Fosse's work, was steeped in his use of showbiz as a metaphor for life. And it came right on the cusp between his coruscating use of that metaphor (in his film of "Cabaret") and the rancid use of it he made in later films like "All That Jazz" and "Star 80." There was a trace of moralism in the show; Fosse wanted to implicate the audience for taking pleasure in the showbiz triumph of its murderess heroines Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly. Essentially, Fosse said, we were as much to blame for all the amoral phoniness as were his two killer-dillers.

The director of the film, Rob Marshall (taking his cue, I assume, from the 1996 Broadway revival directed by Walter Bobbie), wipes away all that moralism. In effect, he's made a genuinely amoral movie. Marshall knows that we enjoy glitz and glamour, that we don't necessarily want to see the guilty punished, that one of the things we go to musicals or movies to indulge is the fantasy of getting away with what we couldn't in real life. He knows there's something hypocritical in asking us to enjoy Roxie and Velma's murderous scheming and manipulation and then rebuking us for it. It doesn't escape him that the spotlight is not going to be on these girls for long. The show is set in 1929, just before the Wall Street crash, and the closing number, "Nowadays," highlights Roxie and Velma's myopia: "In fifty years or so/ It's gonna change, you know/ But, oh, it's heaven nowadays." Well, it was going to change a hell of a lot quicker than that.

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