Nowadays, the appearance of a new movie musical (most recently Les Misérables) is sufficiently rare to draw significant media attention. Yet the first talking picture was a musical, and the genre dominated the early years of sound. In The Songs of Hollywood, Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson survey the history of song on film and examine Hollywood’s key role in shaping what we now think of as the “Great American Songbook.”
Despite its youth, the film musical reached maturity earlier than its stage counterpart, thanks to the dizzying pace of artistic and technological innovation which followed the introduction of sound in 1927. At first, writing songs for film was regarded as a lesser endeavor than writing songs for the stage, although the lure of Hollywood salaries during the Great Depression soon led songwriters to overcome their scruples. Studios, concerned that audiences would not accept actors singing on screen without motivation, soon became overly reliant on formulaic backstage plots in which songs were presented as performance numbers. As a result, by 1930 the public had become so tired of musical pictures that studios found themselves deleting all the songs from movies before releasing them.
A breakthrough came when visionary directors like Ernst Lubitsch and Rouben Mamoulian chose to embrace the artificiality of singing on screen, creating sophisticated modern operettas whose European settings helped justify the characters’ bursting into song. One of the best, 1932’s Love Me Tonight, featured a score by a team newly arrived from Broadway, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. (Those who only know “Isn’t It Romantic?” as a love ballad will be surprised by the film lyrics, in which Maurice Chevalier sings “Isn’t it romantic/ Soon I will have found some girl that I adore/ Isn’t it romantic/ While I sit around, my love can scrub the floor.”) The next year, the songwriter Harry Warren and the director/choreographer Busby Berkeley rejuvenated the “backstage” picture with 42nd Street. A mere six years after Al Jolson first sang on film, Hollywood was creating movie musicals that would become classics and rank with the best of the genre.
But were the songs of Hollywood inherently different from those of Broadway? The authors postulate that having actors sing into a microphone in a recording studio freed songwriters to write more conversational lyrics. For instance, despite his successful stage career, Fred Astaire did not have a large voice, but the microphone enabled him to deliver songs with the elegance and musicality that characterized his dancing. His studio, RKO, hired some of Broadway’s best songwriters, from Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields to Irving Berlin and the Gershwins, to score the films he made with Ginger Rogers. The resulting songs, including such standards as “Cheek To Cheek,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” may constitute Hollywood’s single greatest contribution to the American songbook.
The Songs of Hollywood encompasses not only songs originally written for the screen but also preexisting songs showcased in films. The major studios had acquired the publishing houses which controlled the rights to songs from Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, and thus gained a financial interest in promoting these songs. This gave rise to the “anthology” musical, based on the catalogue of a particular songwriter or team. These could take the form of biopics, such as Words and Music (about Rodgers and Hart) and Night and Day (about Cole Porter), or original stories built around older songs, such as An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain.
Casablanca’s “As Time Goes By” shows how movies could turn preexisting songs into standards.
Casablanca’s “As Time Goes By” shows how movies could turn preexisting songs into standards. The song, originally written for the obscure 1931 stage musical Everybody’s Welcome, was featured in Everybody Comes to Rick’s, the unproduced play on which Casablanca was based. (Max Steiner, who composed the score for the movie, did not care for the song, but by the time the producer Hal Wallis agreed to replace it, Ingrid Bergman had cut her hair for her next role, making reshoots impossible.) After Casablanca was released, the song became hugely popular, spending twenty-two weeks on the hit parade—and since it was published by Harms/Chappell, owned by Warner Brothers, the studio shared in the royalties.
The authors invite us to view beloved movie musicals with fresh eyes. The Wizard of Oz is so familiar that it is easy to lose sight of its formal innovations. The use of an integrated sequence of songs to drive the plot, particularly in the early scenes in Munchkinland, predated Rodgers and Hammerstein’s achievement in Carousel six years later. Nor do the authors ignore Disney musicals, both cartoon and live action, which not only introduced millions of children to the genre but also kept it alive in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.
This is important because, just as the screen musical reached maturity before its Broadway counterpart, it also began to decline sooner. Due to a convergence of factors—including competition from television, a Supreme Court ruling that studios had to divest themselves of movie theaters, and the advent of rock and roll—studios began to curtail their production of movie musicals with original scores. Instead, they concentrated on film adaptations of hit Broadway musicals which, as proven properties, were believed to be less risky. Nevertheless, these adaptations enabled millions of moviegoers to experience musicals that they might not be able to see on stage. Eventually the process came full circle with Broadway stagings of classic film musicals—some more successful (42nd Street) than others (Meet Me in St. Louis).
Understandably, the authors’ attention flags when they reach the 1970s, and the last forty years of the Hollywood musical are dismissed in just twenty-two pages. The bulk of the book, however, reminds us that the best Hollywood musicals may well constitute the most enduring repository of the glorious fusion of song, dance, and story that is the American musical.
