The Hollywood Film Musical

Barry Keith Grant

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118231814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

This revealing history of the American film musical synthesizes the critical literature on the genre and provides a series of close analytical readings of iconic musical films, focusing on their cultural relationship to other aspects of American popular music.

• Offers a depth of scholarship that will appeal to students and scholars
• Leads a crucial analysis of the cultural context of musicals, particularly the influence of popular music on the genre
• Delves into critical issues behind these films such as race, gender, ideology, and authorship
• Features close readings of canonical and neglected film musicals from the 1930s to the present including: Top Hat, Singin' in the Rain, Woodstock, Gimme Shelter, West Side Story, and Across the Universe

Chapter 1

Historical Overview

Movies and music, two of the most important mass media in American culture, have intertwined histories from the outset. Movies began as part of the program in vaudeville shows and music halls. They interacted, as Charles Merrell Berg notes,

in the darkened, smoke-filled chambers of Bijou Dreams during the first decade of [the twentieth] century. Sitting beneath cataracts of flickering images, pianists ragged and riffed through the pop and standard tunes of the day. Sometimes their efforts helped underscore the drama. Mostly, however, their improvised medleys served to fill up the aural void and cover up the wisecracks and whirs from the projector. (Berg, 1978: 1)

Peter Wollen, meanwhile, begins his monograph on Singin' in the Rain (1952), generally acknowledged as one of the best film musicals of all time, by declaring that “[t]he history of cinema coincides with that of twentieth-century dance. . .. [A]s film itself developed as an art form, it intersected with dance to create a new phenomenon – film dance, dance created expressly for film, with camera, framing and editing in mind” (Wollen, 1992: 9). In the United States, the film musical genre, the site of the most intense interaction and synergy between movies and music, evolved from such diverse cultural forms as minstrelsy, vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, and musical theater.

Before Cinema

In the nineteenth century, minstrel shows were the most popular form of musical and comedy entertainment. Featuring white performers in blackface, the shows developed a formal structure with clearly established conventions built on comic racial stereotypes. Minstrel shows featured three distinct parts. In the first, the walkaround, the entire troupe came onto the stage, taking their seats in a semi-circular arrangement in unison upon the command from the master of ceremonies, or Interlocutor, “Gentlemen, be seated” and performing a selection of popular tunes. The two endmen, known as Mr Tambo (who played the tambourine) and Mr Bones (who played percussive castanets), engaged in comic banter with the dignified Interlocutor, who always sat in the middle of the semi-circle. The second part of the show, known as the olio, consisted of a medley of variety acts, and the finale was a series of comic skits, originally about plantation life but changed after the Civil War to parodies of classic and contemporary plays.

Minstrel shows toured the United States and Canada until as late as the middle of the twentieth century, when people began to regard them as racially embarrassing. Yet the influence of minstrelsy on popular music was enormous. Several classic blues singers such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey began their careers with black minstrel troupes. Some important songwriters also emerged from the tradition, including Dan Emmett, composer of “Dixie” (1859), originally written for the walkaround, and “Turkey in the Straw” (1861), among others; and Stephen Foster, composer of “Oh, Susannah” (1948), “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” (1854), “Beautiful Dreamer” (1863), and “My Old Kentucky Home” (1853), which was originally introduced by The Christy Minstrels. These songs, played in white middle-class homes across the United States on parlor pianos, were known as “Ethiopian Songs” – a euphemistic term that, like record companies' later segregation of black music on “sepia” series and the like, revealed the dynamics of race that have informed so much of the country's popular music.

In popular film, the influence of minstrelsy may be seen directly in early film musicals starring Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor. Both popular singers had performed in blackface on the stage and then brought their “burnt cork” personas to Hollywood: Jolson in The Jazz Singer (1927), the first hit film musical; and Cantor in Whoopee! (1930) and Palmy Days (1931), the first two musicals on which Busby Berkeley worked. (Berkeley is discussed further below and in Chapter 3.) Later in the 1930s, blackface numbers included Fred Astaire's “Bojangles in Harlem” in Swing Time (1936) and Harpo's “All God's Chillun Got Rhythm” in the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races (1937). Even into the 1940s, Bing Crosby sang in blackface in the “Abraham” number of Holiday Inn (1942) and for “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the the Positive” in the war musical Here Comes the Waves (1944). More recently, Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000) satirically explored the iconography and cultural legacy of minstrelsy in American culture.

Minstrelsy evolved into “the basic components of all American stage entertainment. The minstrel line evolved into what became known as the ‘coon show’ before emerging as revue, the olio developed into vaudeville, and the concluding sketch inspired both burlesque and the musical comedy” (Parkinson, 2007: 4). Further, the demand for and sales of sheet music for many of the songs featured in minstrel shows helped significantly to stimulate the growth of the popular music industry in the United States. Until the invention of the phonograph and the commercial availability of recordings, sheet music was the primary medium for the retailing of popular music. Hit songs could sell millions of copies. In 1902, Harry von Tilzer's “On a Sunday Afternoon” sold 10,000 copies in one day in a single New York department store (Kingman, 1979: 268).

In 1897, the pianola, or player piano, was introduced to the consumer market and was very popular through the 1920s. Piano rolls, paper rolls with perforations in them, were inserted into the instrument which, when turned, moved the keys to play a song. Piano rolls featured the popular songs of the day, including those of such important songwriters as George Gershwin. Player pianos allowed people to have piano music in their parlors even if they could not actually play the instrument, and for music to be played in bars and other venues that could not afford a live pianist, furthering the dissemination of popular songs. This innovation was accompanied by “song-slides” which began to appear in vaudeville acts from 1907 and showed song lyrics projected on a screen as they were being sung by a live performer (Burns, 1988: 221).

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, but it was with Victor's introduction in 1906 of the Victrola, the first phonograph designed as furniture, that music truly became a consumable commodity. The phonograph, said media guru Marshall McLuhan, was a “music hall without walls” (McLuhan, 1964: 248). As philosopher Evan Eisenberg writes, with the phonograph and records, “[n]ow the Symphony of a Thousand could play to an audience of one. Now a man could hear nocturnes at breakfast, vespers at noon, and the Easter Oratorio on Chanukah. He could do his morning crossword to the ‘One O'Clock Jump’ and make love right through the St Matthew Passion” (Eisenberg, 1987: 29). Music, in other words, was now a thing that could be “owned” and “used.” Popular music gained further portability in the 1950s with the introduction of the transistor radio, a process that would continue toward the end of the century with audiotape cassettes and walkmans, and then digital technology, which has offered a variety of personal listening devices and the ability to access music through the internet.

As with pop music makers today releasing their own CDs, early twentieth-century songwriters churned out songs in the hope of scoring big with a hit. Pluggers publicized the songs the publishers were promoting as potential sheet music hits by playing them in music and department stores, and paying vaudeville singers to sing them in their acts. Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and George Gershwin were among the important songwriters who began as song pluggers before composing their own songs for Broadway musicals (Kingman, 1979: 268). Many of these songwriters worked in Tin Pan Alley, along with the pluggers, publishers, and, later, record companies. Named after a street in New York (its actual location changed over the years), Tin Pan Alley originated as a journalist's vivid phrase to describe the din of all the composers' pianos rattling through the open windows of their offices. It has since become synonymous with the institution of popular music itself, both as an industry and as a conservative ideology (see the discussions of Woodstock [1970] in Chapter 7 and Pennies from Heaven [1981] in Chapter 9).

The songwriters wrote first for vaudeville and then musical theater. Vaudeville became a national pastime beginning in the 1870s, particularly with urban working-class and immigrant audiences. American composers such as George M. Cohan (Little Johnny Jones, 1904) and Victor Herbert (Babes in Toyland, 1903) began to weld musical numbers to narrative, setting the foundation for the film musical. Impresario Florenz Ziegfeld created a revue program known as the “Follies” that was an annual Broadway event for two decades. Ziegfeld's “Follies” featured such performers as W.C. Fields, Will Rogers, Eddie Cantor, and Fanny Brice (the subject of Funny Girl [1968] with Barbra Streisand) and a dazzling chorus line. Similar musical revues followed, including Earl Carroll's “Vanities” and George White's “Scandals.”

With the arrival of sound film in 1927, several of Ziegfeld's productions, including Whoopee!, were adapted for the big screen. Movies, in the words of J. Hoberman, offered “Ziegfeld for the masses,” with film prints distributed around the country to the movie palaces of the big cities and small theaters in rural communities alike (Hoberman, 1993: 11). Many film musicals were adaptations of theatrical musicals, or contained songs borrowed from them. In turn, many performers, choreographers, composers, lyricists, and directors moved from musical theater to Hollywood musicals after the arrival of sound. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's Show Boat was adapted for the screen no fewer than three times – in 1929, 1936, and 1951. Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), a musical biopic about Kern, begins with the debut performance of this milestone play in December 1927.

The Arrival of Sound

Researchers beginning with Thomas Edison, the American inventor of both the motion picture camera and phonograph, had been experimenting with ways to combine or synchronize sound with film images for years, but early efforts were met largely with indifference from the film industry because of the technical problems involved. Early technology, which relied on sound-on-disc systems (records that would be played at the same time as a movie was projected), was problematic and unreliable. Things changed dramatically, however, when Warner Bros, then a second-rank studio looking for a competitive edge, collaborated with Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T, on a sound-on-film system that Warners dubbed Vitaphone. The studio initially had the idea of “canning” musical scores for their movies, which would allow them to have orchestral accompaniment for their productions, something that only the major studios could afford live for their big releases in first-run theaters; but it did not take long for the Brothers Warner to realize that talking pictures would be more than a passing fad.

Opening in October 1927, Warners' The Jazz Singer, often cited as the first feature-length sound film and the first film musical, was a sensational hit (Plate 1). The movie, which featured established Broadway star Al Jolson, was in fact mostly a silent film – it even included intertitles – with seven musical sequences added, including the signature Jolson tunes “Mammy” and “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.” The story of a young Jewish man who abandons his future as a cantor and, against his father's wishes, becomes a popular singer was the stuff of melodrama; but it was the talking and singing that audiences remembered. Jolson's famous ad-libbed line “You ain't heard nothin' yet” seemed to announce the arrival not only of The Jazz Singer but of the musical genre itself. The film's box-office success, as well as that of The Lights of New York in 1928, a Warner Bros' two-reeler that was expanded to become the first all-taking feature, allowed the studio to undergo rapid expansion and become a fully integrated major by the end of the decade.

Plate 1 Al Jolson as Jakie Rabinowitz in The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927; Producer: Darryl F. Zanuck).

Audiences clamored for talkies, and, as a result, in a mere three years, by the end of the decade, musicals had become a staple Hollywood product. By the middle of 1929, 25 percent of movies in production were musicals (Hoberman, 1993: 15), and, according to one historian of the genre, “[t]he studios turned out musicals like sausages” (Stern, 1974: 19). As Hollywood pundits observed, Greta Garbo and Rin Tin Tin were the only stars who were not taking singing lessons. The rush of the studios to convert to sound and to produce musicals to exploit the new technology is treated humorously in the plot of Singin' in the Rain: when the attempt to make a sound film with silent film star Lina Lamont (Jean Hagan) results in disaster because of her thick Brooklyn accent, Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Cosmo Brown (Donald O'Connor) save the film by changing the romantic adventure they were making, “The Dueling Cavalier,” into a musical entitled “The Dancing Cavalier” and dubbing Lamont's voice with that of Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds). One hilarious scene shows some of the problems filmmakers at first faced with the new technology, which required that cameras be “blimped” in order for their motors not to be picked up by microphone.

Although tie-ins between movies and music began as early as 1918, when the song “Mickey” was commissioned for Mack Sennett's film of that name (Hall and Neale, 2010: 84), the coming of sound significantly increased the demand for songs in Hollywood. Jolson's recording of “Sonny Boy” for The Singing Fool (1928), another part-talkie musical that was his follow-up to The Jazz Singer, sold 370,000 records in the first three months of the film's release and ultimately achieved combined sales of over a million discs and sheet-music copies. All the studi...