There is perhaps no more frequently yet unfairly maligned genre than the movie musical.
Like many genres, it had a strong heyday during the Golden Age of Hollywood, but – like the Western in this regard – has been pronounced “dead” many times over.
Also like the Western, every time a musical film comes along that enjoys even a modicum of success, there are people ready to proclaim a “revival” of the genre (this was last witnessed in 2002 with the release of Chicago).
The musical, though, has never really disappeared, and has certainly never “died” as a genre.
Elements of musical comedy plotting, for instance, still show up in romantic comedies, even though they may be minus the music. Perhaps because it is so indelibly linked to the theater, and to the Broadway stage in particular, there are many crossovers between the two in recent years – not just movies based on Broadway musicals, but musical plays based on films, some of which are not even “musicals” in the traditional sense.
Musicals have come from some of the least likely sources (Chicago was originally a 1927 silent film!) but during the period from roughly 1933-1955, the movie musical underwent an incredibly rich and innovative evolution that resulted in one of the really unique genres the medium has yet produced.
When the transition to sound occurred in the late 1920s, the musical format seemed a logical choice for new screen properties.
The first musicals appeared in 1929, many of them adapted from Broadway shows (like The Cocoanuts, starring the Marx Bros., Sally with Marilyn Miller and Joe E. Brown, Rio Rita with Wheeler and Woolsey, and Whoopee with Eddie Cantor), while others were “revue” style shows produced by studios to show off their talent in the new medium of talking pictures. Among this latter format, some of the more popular titles include MGM’s The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Warner Bros.’ The Show of Shows, and Paramount on Parade. The problem with the earliest musicals is that they effectively nailed the camera down and recorded the musical numbers in a static, continuous take. It would require the genius of artists like Busby Berkeley to transform the genre into an art form.
Berkeley is probably best remembered today for his “overhead shots” – dance numbers filmed from a high angle, with show girls moving in various geometric patterns. This is evidenced even in his first screen work that he did for Whoopee, which he served as the choreographer for. In 1933, he choreographed three musicals at Warner Bros. that forever transformed the genre, even revitalizing it after a brief period of over-saturation.
These films were 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade. Musical numbers like “We’re in the Money” (with Ginger Rogers’ singing in Pig Latin), or “Pettin’ in the Park” (an utterly sexy and outrageous number that has to be seen to be believed) took the form into realms hitherto unexplored, and helped move the fledgling talking pictures out of their infancy and into the kind of unrestrained technical expression that had largely been the domain of the silent film.
By freeing the camera and introducing wildly audacious cinematic technique, the screen musical became a unique art form unto itself through offering viewers a vantage point they couldn’t get on the stage.
If Berkeley emphasized showy technique, then Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, working at RKO Radio Pictures in a series of musicals together, gave audiences an intimate, close up view of their expert dance sequences in film after film like The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Swing Time and Follow the Fleet. Astaire’s genius as a dancer was that he made it all look so effortlessly simple, and he and Rogers were blessed at RKO with sensitive, stylish directors like Mark Sandrich and George Stevens, among others, who knew how to maximize the potential of seemingly minimalist cinematic technique in aiding that illusion of simplicity.
The appeal of the Astaire and Rogers pictures lied in their charming simplicity – boy-meets-girl plots with heavy doses of comedy, often provided by expert character actors such as Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore. By surrounding their incredibly complex dance sequences in such delightful cinematic froth, the entire effort appears deceptively simple and carefree.
It would take the genius of a former songwriter-turned-producer to take the musical to its greatest stylistic heights, though. MGM, the mightiest of the studios, had been turning out musicals throughout the 1930s, including the very popular Nelson Eddy-Jeannette MacDonald cycle. While enjoyable, these films lacked the cinematic thrust of the Berkeley films at Warners, and the Astaire & Rogers films at RKO. After the release of The Wizard of Oz in 1939, it was clear that a new formula had been hit upon – integrating the musical numbers into a plot, as opposed to the “show-within-a-show” moments of the Warners musicals, or the isolated music numbers of the Astaire and Rogers films.
Arthur Freed, who’d written songs for some of the very first screen musicals back in 1929, had served as an associate producer on The Wizard of Oz, and before long, would head up his own unit at MGM where he was given relatively free reign over production of a series of musicals that would – for many critics and moviegoers alike – come to define the genre.
Arthur Freed was an expert producer, in that he recognized in his team their best potential, and allowed them to pursue it to the fullest. Under the Freed unit, that great visual stylist Vincente Minnelli was able to flourish, directing films like Yolanda and The Thief (1945), An American in Paris (1951) and The Band Wagon (1953).
Working in glorious Technicolor, on highly-stylized sets, and with some of the best technicians in the business, Minnelli crafted a series of artistic musicals the likes of which the screen had never seen before. His films demonstrated a totality of style that mark him as one of the truly original artists to emerge from the genre.
Perhaps the most distinctive films from the Freed unit were the post-war musicals of Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen.
Though best known for Singin’ in the Rain (1952), a brilliant send-up of the movie business and particularly the transition to sound, their most innovative work may be their 1949 collaboration, On the Town. Just one year after Jules Dassin shattered tradition by shooting The Naked City on the streets of New York, Kelly and Donen took their cameras on location, filming the “New York, New York” number against a variety of New York landmarks, including the Empire State Building, Central Park and Washington Square. The sheer audacity of filming a Technicolor musical, of all things, on the streets of New York represented the peak of creativity, innovation and style of the musical film.
Right at the same time that the Freed unit at MGM was reaching its zenith, a new series of musicals began appearing from 20th Century-Fox, adapted from the popular Broadway shows of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Though innovative in the way they integrated book and music, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals produced at Fox between 1945 and 1965 now seem like a hopeless regression to the most static and stagebound screen musicals of 1929-1930.
With large, wide shots of actors grouped together, in proscenium framing and minimal editing, going through their choreography before a static camera, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals ushered in a new era of doggedly faithful movie adaptations of Broadway shows, ranging from great (My Fair Lady) to good (The Music Man) to just plain mediocre (Hello Dolly!, ironically directed by Gene Kelly, the man who perhaps did more than any other to move the musical film beyond its stage origins).
While it’s easy to lament the “death” of the Hollywood musical, putting it that way suggests that there isn’t still interesting work being done in the format, which simply isn’t true. As with any other genre, the musical isn’t “dead”, but instead evolved into other formats and found ways to deal with new themes using new devices – such as the films of Bob Fosse (Cabaret and All that Jazz) and Baz Luhrman (Moulin Rouge).
Rather than writing the musical off as a corny, dead genre, it’s worth seeking out the best that this remarkable art form has to offer.
The best works in the musical genre – like the best films of any genre, style, period, or country – remain timeless, inspiring, innovative and enjoyable no matter what temporary shifts in fashion or taste may occur.
