There were no sound engineers nor cinematographers who were experts with sound cameras. There was no proven formula for success and no established methods for musical filmmaking. A good example of the changing landscape was that esteemed theater composer George M Cohen (who, aptly, was the man who wrote “Give My Regards To Broadway”) had songs in 40 films during the Depression and only six in stage shows.įor Hollywood, however, everything was new. The writers followed the money, with many of the new film songs written by Tin Pan Alley greats such as Harry Warren. With the ability to put the same movie in hundreds of thousands of picture houses, Hollywood operated on an entirely different financial scale to Broadway. Broadway producers were easily persuaded to sell the film rights to their shows. Lucrative contracts also tempted Broadway songwriters and librettists into the new medium. Stage stars – including Fred and Adele Astaire, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, Maurice Chevalier, and Marilyn Miller – followed Jolson to Hollywood. Following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, many New York theaters closed. This was in part down to the effects of The Great Depression. In the next decade “the studios turned out musicals like sausages,” according to one noted film historian. By 1929, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayers Studios (MGM) had caught up, and its film The Broadway Melody won the first Oscar awarded to a musical film. That “musical talkie” set a record for box-office takings that stood for 11 years, until it was overtaken by Gone With The Wind. By 1928, when Jolson’s second film, The Singing Fool, was released, most cinemas were equipped with new sound systems. Though patrons were used to seeing music in live drama (that was a core of the Vaudeville tradition), many screen theatres had to show The Jazz Singer as a silent film because the venues were not wired for sound. Hollywood knew that massive structural changes were needed to alter the way audiences watched film. Rudolph Valentino was dancing the tango on film in 1921 (in The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse), and, only five years later, one of the first Vitaphone short films, which starred John Barrymore, had a score played by a 107-piece New York Philharmonic Orchestra.Ī year later came the first feature-length “talkie.” The Jazz Singer, made by Warner Bros in 1927 and featuring Al Jolson, had seven songs and a few lines of screen dialogue, but its impact was seismic. Music and film have always been inextricably linked. Evidence that little changes in terms of taste is the fact that Lady Gaga starred in the fourth remake of A Star Is Born. Even in thin decades, such as the 90s, however, there have been musical film gems such as Evita.ĭown the years, Hollywood musicals came to epitomize the very idea of light entertainment, and though films such as Singin’ In The Rain, The Sound Of Music or La La Land are undoubtedly escapist, they have provided cinema with some of its most iconic moments. Their heyday was arguably the 30s, when stars such as Fred Astaire and Judy Garland sang and danced their way through numerous hit movies every year, along with the golden era of theatre-inspired film musicals in the 50s and 60s. The fortunes of film musicals – movies that include lots of song and dance by the main characters, rather than an interlude of singing – have ebbed and flowed down the decades. Over the past 90 years, this cinema genre has celebrated freedom, self-expression, and the pursuit of dreams down life’s yellow brick road. Westerns originated from dime novels about cowboys, but musicals developed in tandem with Hollywood itself. Film musicals are one of the most quintessentially American art forms, and one that was eventually exported around the world.
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