Copyright by Kelly Kay Kessler 2004
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Copyright by Kelly Kay Kessler 2004 The Dissertation Committee for Kelly Kay Kessler certifies that this is an approved version of the following dissertation: Tough Guys, Rock Stars, and Messiahs: Genre and Gender in the Hollywood Musical, 1966-1983 Committee: Janet K. Staiger, Supervisor Mary C. Kearney Thomas Schatz S. Craig Watkins Stacy Wolf Tough Guys, Rock Stars, and Messiahs: Genre and Gender in the Hollywood Musical, 1966-1983 by Kelly Kay Kessler, B.A, M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2004 Dedication To Liz, for getting it Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my parents for their love and support and for pretending that they thought what I was doing was interesting. This dissertation would have never been produced without the repeated family viewings of The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz or the countless trips to the St. Louis MUNY to catch Joe Namath in Li’l Abner or Vanessa Redgrave in The King and I. My love and affection for the musical was instilled early and carried me through this project. I would also like to thank my brother Greg for his obsessive-compulsive tendencies which he channeled into various types of research assistance. His inability to leave a stone unturned and his support of my work were at times the push I needed. This project would not have been possible without the support of my faculty. I offer my undying gratitude to Janet Staiger, my dissertation chair and mentor. Over the past six years she has truly made me a better writer and scholar. Though I know she has greater passions than the Hollywood musical—and I am sorry I could not provide her a more pleasurable dissertation on avant-garde—I deeply appreciate the enthusiasm and support she brought to my work. The conclusion of this venture should grant her a momentary stay on watching any more people randomly burst into song and dance. In addition, I would like to thank Thomas Schatz for his enthusiasm, guidance, and willingness to mock bad musicals of the 1970s. My hearty appreciation also goes out to Mary Kearney and Stacy Wolf for supporting this project and sharing their respective specialties. A hearty tip of the hat goes out to two of my high school teachers, Gail and Gordon Mueller, whose inextinguishable font of musical knowledge served as both a personal inspiration and a practical goldmine. As a high school student talking about movies before school with Gordon, my homeroom teacher, I had no way to know that iv those conversations would (or could) parlay into a career. I want to thank them for their early and enduring support and the King and I collector’s plate they gave me for high school graduation. Yul stood in cool judgment over the entire dissertation process. To my friends Sharon Ross, Tom Skapes, and Susan McLeland, thanks for enduring endless hours of dissertation and personal angst. Their time, kind words, supportive indignation, and margaritas were truly indispensable. I would be highly remiss without also giving a hearty thank you—instilled with the verve of Jane Powell and the panache of Gene Kelly—to my partner in academia, Caroline Frick. Her zeal for my project, amazing knowledge of early film history, and willingness to talk through my work and merrily sit through The Pirate Movie, The Boy Friend, et al. made the entire process more manageable and just plain fun. Thank you to Grace and Romeo for serving as excellent viewing partners, but most importantly, to my partner and editor Elizabeth Flauto, thank you for navigating the turbulent—and at times irritating—waters which accompanied this project. Thank you for reminding me that I crash before every chapter. Thank you for your sense of humor, your love and support, your red pen, your mind, and the endless meals you fed me and hours of musicals you watched. Thank you for finding it endearing when as a result of musical overload I began musicalizing our lives and believing I danced like Gene Kelly. For your multiple viewings of Xanadu, Lost Horizon, and countless others, I am forever beholden. Finally, as so eloquently—and repeatedly—declared by Can’t Stop the Music’s construction worker as he overcompensates with a bevy of sexy babes, “I love you to death.” August 2004 v Tough Guys, Rock Stars, and Messiahs: Genre and Gender in the Hollywood Musical, 1966-1983 Publication No._________ Kelly Kay Kessler, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2004 Supervisor: Janet K. Staiger This project seeks to examine how the generic norms (narratives, themes, aesthetics, performers, and performances) of integrated musicals of the 1966-1983 period diverge from those the previous era, and further, how they interrelate with the films' representations of masculinities (visually, intertextually, and bodily). While the musical has oft been discussed academically and popularly as having an underlying mission of projecting an imagined cultural utopia and celebration of romance, many of these later vehicles deviate into a subgenre which features a pattern of unsatisfactory resolutions including unrequited love (Sweet Charity [1969], At Long Last Love [1975]), failed business ventures (Camelot [1967]), and death (The Rocky Horror Picture Show [1975], All That Jazz [1979]). This study interrogates emerging generic dictates in terms of narrative goals, integration of contemporary visual techniques associated with New American Cinema, and a definitively changing pool of musical male stars (eschewing Howard Keel and Fred Astaire for Steve Martin, Burt Reynolds, and The Village People), and ultimately examines their impact on the construction of a less restrictive notion of male gender. vi Table of Contents List of Illustrations...................................................................................................x Chapter 1: The Musical and Masculinity Take a Turn for the Ambivalent.............1 Introduction.....................................................................................................1 Review of Literature .......................................................................................7 The Hollywood Musical: Conventions and Connotations...................10 Maleness and the Cultural Problem of Masculinity.............................27 Masculinity in Film..............................................................................33 Methodology.................................................................................................43 Outline of Dissertation..................................................................................47 Chapter 2: How We Arrived Here - A Brief History of the Musical and Its Arcadian Structure and Conventions............................................................................58 The Great White Way and Other Important Ways .......................................59 Ballad Opera ........................................................................................60 Burlesque .............................................................................................61 Comic Opera ........................................................................................62 Operetta................................................................................................62 Minstrel Shows, Vaudeville, and The Revue.......................................64 The Musical Play .................................................................................66 Sound, Singin’, and the Celluloid Stage .......................................................68 And So Came the Arcadian Musical.............................................................80 Setting ..................................................................................................80 Plot and Characters ..............................................................................81 Use of Music........................................................................................82 Theme of Community..........................................................................82 And Then… ..................................................................................................85 Chapter 3: Narrative and Visual Conventions .......................................................93 Narrative: Everything’s Not Comin’ Up Roses............................................94 Narrative Focus: What Is the Story About Anyway? ..........................98 vii The State of Community and a Utopian Future.................................122 Aesthetics: Camerawork, Eediting, and Mise-En-Scène ............................130 Camerawork and Editing: I Can See Right Through You .................131 Camerawork and Musical Performance.............................................137 Mise-en-scène: It’s the Real Deal Right Here in River City—Well Maybe ...................................................................................................144 Conclusion ..................................................................................................162 Chapter 4: The Musical Male Stars .....................................................................163 Arcadian Musical Stars...............................................................................166 New Stars: They Laughed, Cried, and Tried to Punch Each Other’s Lights Out ............................................................................................................172