Princeton University Press Chapter Title: The Movie Musical Book Title: The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity Book Author(s): Raymond Knapp Published by: Princeton University Press. (2006) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rjwz.8 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Princeton University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity This content downloaded from 76.77.171.98 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:49:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Movie THE AMERICAN MUSICAL has maintained a double life, Musical between Broadway and Hollywood, ever since it reached its full “maturity” with Show Boat in 1927. That very year, The Jazz Singer introduced the era of the “talkies” (movies with synchronized sound),1 which from the begin- ning were often as much “singies” as “talkies” (to borrow Andrew Sarris’s distinction)2 and have remained partial to musicals ever since, whether through re-creating staged mu- sical numbers or shows or through exploring ways in which film musicals could and should differ substantially from staged musicals. Overall, the interaction between stage musicals and film musicals, between Broadway and Hollywood, has been an extremely pro- ductive one, if sometimes contentious. Synchronized sound was one of two major technological enhancements to film under development in the 1920s, the other being color. Both were prohibitively expensive in their early development and involved complex mechanical arrangements to maintain reliably steady camera and projection speeds, although both the incentives toward development and the prospects of unmanageable expense were much greater with sound. The greater ex- pense of sound was due to the dual needs to produce a synchronized product (difficult enough in itself) and to upgrade theaters to accommodate it; in- deed, because of the latter difficulty, both sound and silent versions were made for many films during the transition.3 But the incentives for developing synchronized sound were even stronger than the disincentives, stemming in large part from the fact that the “silent” films were not actually silent but accompanied throughout by music performed live in the theater (or, in later days, by recorded sound tracks), so that music, unlike color, had long been an expected part of seeing a film. It was only later, when the art of accompa- nying film had all but died out, that these films became (and became known as) “the silents.”4 The constant presence of music during the screening of a “silent” film was deemed necessary to enhance the drama and increase the sense of continuity, the latter especially after the wide adoption of montage techniques—that is, cutting between shots—after 1915. But this accompanying music also provided a near-constant reminder of its own clumsiness as a device, continu- ally underscoring (so to speak) how crudely it performed these tasks. The accompanist (sometimes a full orchestra, but more often an organist or pia- nist), however well prepared or skilled, was awkwardly placed, neither part of the film nor merely part of the audience, but forced to simulate the first This content downloaded from 76.77.171.98 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:49:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 66 CHAPTER TWO while being in reality the second. As a result, music was too obviously some- thing layered over the film, which was particularly distressing when people on-screen were either producing music or responding to it. Indeed, with the advent of synchronized sound, music’s importance in film briefly began to diminish somewhat (except in musicals) so as to make room in the sonic foreground for speech and other sounds added to give more reality to the filmic world.5 Even so, it was song—which an accompanied “silent” film was particularly inadequate in representing—that sold the new technology in its early stages (that is, in the wake of The Jazz Singer) and forced the hand of those reluctant to take the expensive plunge into sound film. Four things about The Jazz Singer seem surprising to those who know it only by its historical position as the first successful “sound” film. First, well over half of the film was “silent”; the new technology was exploited mostly in the musical numbers. Second, beyond experiencing the initial gratifying shock of seeing Al Jolson perform, many of its early viewers were even more viscerally engaged by the moments in which he spoke, particularly the lines he ad-libbed: “Wait a minute—wait a minute—you ain’t heard nothin’ 2.1 yet!” Third, its technology was not the one that ultimately held sway for synchronized sound, which shortly thereafter and ever since has placed the recorded sound directly on the film to ensure synchronicity. Instead, The Jazz Singer relied on a rival technology (Vitaphone) in which wax records were played while the film was screened. Although this approach allowed a higher sound fidelity at that time—an important marketing consideration, since Jolson’s recorded voice was well known—it created enormous diffi- culties of synchronization, which were solved, at least in theory, by using the same motor to drive both projector and turntable. The fourth surprise is in its way the most disturbing today, although then it was simply taken for granted: Jolson’s casual use of blackface. The long tradition of blackface minstrelsy has since been so thoroughly “edited out” of American cultural life that, even given the often unacknowledged racial stereotypes that still persist from the heart of that tradition, blackface has come to seem particu- larly repellent, especially in the wake of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Thus, often what is most shocking to later viewers of The Jazz Singer is not the use of blackface itself but the complete absence of any sense that there was something wrong with the practice.6 But while the technological and racial dimensions of The Jazz Singer are in themselves quite important (and the latter will be reconsidered here in relation to Stormy Weather), our more immediate concerns are with the first two surprises, which highlight the importance of musical numbers in early sound films and offer an intriguing perspective on how those numbers interface with the perceived “natural- ness” of a film’s world. Although the prospect of being able to preserve musical performance on film was one of the principal incentives for developing the supporting tech- nology, singing came fairly early on (in fact, already in The Jazz Singer)to become associated with a kind of staginess that seemed to violate the new This content downloaded from 76.77.171.98 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:49:31 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE MOVIE MUSICAL 67 standard of naturalness taking shape in American sound film. Many of those making nonmusical sound films sought to avoid such obvious artificialities along with the melodramatic acting styles of the silent era, favoring instead a more understated and natural-seeming style. More than might have been expected, musical numbers jumped out within a film as something artificial and alien, especially as musicals, too, began quickly to favor a less melodra- matic style. In The Jazz Singer, this aspect was additionally emphasized first through the “silent” film that surrounded the musical numbers and, even more significant, by Jolson’s spontaneous spoken outburst, quoted earlier. Thus were established the twin but antagonistic pulls of musical perfor- mance in film, toward the spontaneity and enhanced realism of live perfor- mance and toward an overt artificiality. Significantly, color, too, seemed an artificial enhancement when it first became a more widely used technology, and so it occasioned the same polarized impulses, toward a more “natural” muted quality and a more artificial vibrancy. The extreme instance of the latter polarity is The Wizard of Oz (1939; see chapter 3), a musical that, in a kind of primitive synesthesia, used black-and-white (actually, sepia-tone) sequences for the “real world” of Kansas and color for the “not-in-Kansas- anymore” land of Oz (see also the later discussion of the black-and-white sequences in Singin’ in the Rain). In parallel fashion, musical numbers in film became occasions for escaping the real world and its constraints and were valued—but also derided—accordingly. Thus, if sound films made it possible to create a fuller sense of the world, they also made music, especially when sung on-screen to unseen accompani- ment, seem an artificial intrusion. Yet, there were powerful incentives to make musical numbers in films work. First, of course, were the commercial considerations: musicals were popular; their songs could both make money on their own and advertise the film; and their stars were often either already known as singers or eager to become so known. But even putting aside these considerations, an honest concern for naturalness had to allow for the fact that people in the real world do, in fact, sing and dance, although not typi- cally with the skill and technological advantages afforded by Hollywood or Broadway. Moreover, a long tradition onstage (in opera and its derivatives) had reinforced the idea that music gave access to a reality beyond the “natu- ralness” of a “real world” simulated through scenery and spoken drama.