Hollywood Musicals
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i HOLLYWOOD MUSICALS Hollywood Musicals offers an insightful account of a genre that was once a main- stay of twentieth- century fi lm production and continues to draw audiences today. What is a fi lm musical? How do musicals work, formally and culturally? Why have they endured since the introduction of sound in the late 1920s? What makes them more than glittery surfaces or escapist fare? In answering such questions, this guidebook by Steven Cohan takes new and familiar viewers on a tour of Hollywood musicals. Chapters discuss defi nitions of the genre, its long history, different modes of analyzing it, the great stars of the classic era, and auteur directors. Highlights include extended discussions of such celebrated musicals from the studio era as The Love Parade, Top Hat , Holiday Inn , Stormy Weather, The Gang’s All Here, Meet Me in St. Louis, Cover Girl, Mother Wore Tights, Singin’ in the Rain , Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Band Wagon , Seven Brides for Seven Brothers , and Jailhouse Rock as well as later fi lms, such a s Cabaret , All that Jazz, Beauty and the Beast, and La La Land. Cohan brings in numerous other examples that amplify and extend to the present day his claims about the musical, its generic coherence and fl exibility, its long and distinguished history, its special appeal, and its cultural signifi cance. Clear and accessible, this guide provides students of fi lm and culture with a succinct but substantial overview that provides both analysis and intersectional context to one of Hollywood’s most beloved genres. Steven Cohan’s books include Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties, Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical , and Hollywood by Hollywood: The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies. He is Dean’s Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University. ii Routledge Film Guidebooks The Routledge Film Guidebooks offer a clear introduction to and overview of the work of key filmmakers, movements or genres. Each guidebook contains an introduction, including a brief history; defining characteristics and major films; a chronology; key debates surrounding the filmmaker, movement or genre; and pivotal scenes, focusing on narrative structure, camera work and production quality. James Cameron Fantasy Alexandra Keller Jacqueline Furby and Claire Hines Jane Campion Crime Deb Verhoeven Sarah Casey Benyahia Horror Science Fiction Brigid Cherry Mark Bould Film Noir Bollywood: A Guidebook to Justus Nieland and Jennifer Fay Popular Hindi Cinema, 2nd Edition Documentary Tejaswini Ganti Dave Saunders European Art Cinema Romantic Comedy John White Claire Mortimer Hollywood Musicals Westerns Steven Cohan John White For more information, visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge- Film- Guidebooks/ book- series/ SE0653 iii HOLLYWOOD MUSICALS STEVEN COHAN iv First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Steven Cohan The right of Steven Cohan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Cohan, Steven, 1948– author. Title: Hollywood musicals / Steven Cohan. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge film guidebooks | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019024217 (print) | LCCN 2019024218 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138497443 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138497450 (paperback) | ISBN 9781351018746 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Musical films–United States–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.M86 C58 2019 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.M86 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/750973–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024217 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024218 ISBN: 978- 1- 138- 49744- 3 (hbk) ISBN: 978- 1- 138- 49745- 0 (pbk) ISBN: 978- 1- 351- 01874- 6 (ebk) Typeset in Joanna MT Std by Newgen Publishing UK v For C.K. vi newgenprepdf vii CONTENTS 1 Defining the musical 1 2 A brief account of the long history of the Hollywood musical 26 3 Analyzing musicals 67 4 Stars of the classic musical 108 5 Five auteur directors 156 Epilogue: La La Land 203 Works cited 208 Selected further reading 212 Index 214 viii 1 1 DEFINING THE MUSICAL What exactly is a film musical? Many scholarly books on the musical begin with just this question, indicating that this genre is a slippery fish, indeed. At first the question may seem rhetorical, or at least an easy enough question to answer. Perhaps most everyone reading this book will instantly agree with Tom Brueggemann, writing for indiewire.com about “why musicals are box office gold again” with the release of Mama Mia! Here We Go Again (2018). He states, albeit parenthetically as if the genre is now strange enough that it needs defining for some con- temporary readers, “(A musical is a film with singing actors, including numbers that aren’t just stage performances)” (Brueggeman 2018). Fair enough as a starting point, but we need to amend his definition right away to include dancing actors along with singing ones. After all, some of the most important and influential stars of musicals during Hollywood’s Golden Age— Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, Gene Kelly— were known for their dancing, which they choreographed themselves. More important, though: why does Brueggeman privilege “numbers that aren’t just stage performances”? No doubt he has in mind those 2 2 DEFINING THE MUSICAL numbers in which, like the soliloquies in Shakespeare’s plays, characters spontaneously express their innermost feelings or thoughts, whether through a song or a dance or both, and whether as a solo or duet, or with a full ensemble. Certainly, many musicals feature such musical moments to reveal a character’s desire, joy, conflict, sadness, or inse- curity. By the same token, the convention of having characters burst into song, their vocalizing accompanied by an unseen orchestra that does not exist in the fictional world, may occasion laughter or even discomfort from today’s audiences due to its breaking with codes of cinematic realism. Indeed, to work around that convention of suddenly breaking into song for twenty- first- century viewers, Chicago (2002) framed almost each number as fantasies of the heroine, Roxie Hart (Renée Zellwegger), thereby creating the impression that the film’s musical moments were happening in her mind. Yet there are also scores of musicals that feature only show numbers taking place in the fictional world (or the “diegesis”) on a theater stage or in a night club, as a film within a film, or offstage but with onscreen accompaniment from a record player or the radio. Betty Grable’s hugely popular backstage musicals of the 1940s tend to be of this type. A good example is Coney Island (1943). Grable performs eight stage numbers and a ninth with costar George Montgomery when they join a group of picnickers singing the title tune to their own musical accompaniment. Similarly, in A Star Is Born (1954), all but one of Judy Garland’s numbers take place on stage, in a jazz club, on a sound stage, in a recording studio, as a film within a film, or in her character’s home with a rehearsal record playing on the phono- graph. Biopics about real- life performers, such as The Jolson Story (1946) about Al Jolson and Lady Sings the Blues (1968) about Billy Holliday, fea- ture mainly stage performances, too. Woodstock (1970), chronicling the famous music festival of 1969, and The Last Waltz (1978), recounting The Band’s farewell concert in 1976, also have many musical numbers that are filmed stage performances. Although concert films such as those two tend to be classified as documentaries, many scholars con- sider them to be musicals as well. 3 What Brueggemann’s definition further sidesteps are musicals in which characters never sing. I have in mind dance musicals such as Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Flashdance (1983). Variants are ballet films such as Gene Kelly’s Invitation to the Dance (1956), composed entirely of three long dance sequences. For that matter, some of the earliest examples of the genre following the introduction of sound, such as Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929) and The Show of Shows (1929), have singing and dancing but lack a plot with characters as they are filmed revues. Revues were a staple of Broadway during the first part of the twen- tieth century; in the 1950s they moved to television as variety shows. Lacking a storyline, filmed revues of this early moment in the his- tory of sound were all- star affairs comprised of many different styled numbers interspersed with comedic sketches, and they were meant to show off both the new sound technology and a studio’s stable of new and old contract players, speaking, singing, or dancing for the first time on screen. Most musicals, however, do thread numbers through a plot that creates characters for the actors to play. When revues were briefly revived during wartime in the 1940s, most added a thin backstage storyline to give the semblance of a narrative holding the film together.