The sounds of silence: songs in Hollywood films since the 1960s - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2002 by Todd Berliner, Philip Furia

Since the 1960s, filmmakers have responded to the demise of the classical Hollywood musical, especially to the loss of the convention that characters could spontaneously "burst into song" without realistic motivation. Nashville, All That Jazz, Yentl, and Everyone Says I Love You, as well as films we do not ordinarily think of as musicals, such as The Graduate and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, have developed new conventions for presenting song in film that build upon traditions established by studio-era musicals.

When MGM brought out That's Entertainment in 1974, the anthology of spectacular musical numbers seemed like Hollywood's own eulogy to the end of an era in which song and film were united. The implicit message of That's Entertainment--delivered as much by the old film clips as by Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and the other aging stars who chattily introduced the numbers--was that they don't film songs like they used to. The message was essentially accurate: Hollywood no longer makes the type of film musical that flourished between the 1930s and the 1950s. Indeed, film critics have often lamented the musical's demise, as David Thompson did a few years ago in Sight and Sound:

"Whatever happened to the musical?" Is it just that Astaire, Rogers, Kelly, Garland, and Charisse got too old--or too dead--to do it anymore? Did the astonishing age of American songwriting just lapse? [...] Did rock and roll crush the musical? Did the genre need the studio system, rich in chorines, arrangers and choreographers? Was it MTV? But if it was MTV (at least a derivative of music), why haven't the movies been capable of fashioning decent musicals since the late 50s? One moment we were getting Funny Face (1956), Silk Stockings (1957), and Gigi(1957)--and then there was nothing. (22)

Crippled by economic difficulties, changing film and music styles, and the loss of the convention that allowed movies to present songs as spontaneous expressions of characters' feelings, contemporary cinema had to develop new conventions in order to incorporate musical entertainment into film narrative.

While in fact the kind of musical Thompson describes has died, several films of the past forty years use songs just as imaginatively as did the films evoked by That's Entertainment. Nashville (1975), All That Jazz (1979), Yentl (1983), and Everyone Says I Love You (1996), as well as films we do not ordinarily think of as musicals, such as The Graduate (1967) and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1975), have developed new conventions for presenting song in film, conventions that build upon traditions established by the "classical" Hollywood musicals of the studio era. These new conventions, which we will explore, all in some way respond to the demise of the classical Hollywood musical, especially to the loss of the convention that characters could "burst into song" without realistic motivation. In order to understand the relation between recent approaches to presenting song and the history of songs in movies, we must first briefly survey the ways in which Hollywood initially developed the conventions for incorp orating songs into narrative cinema.

Incorporating Song in the Classical Hollywood Musical

The conventions of cinematic realism seemed to preclude the stage practice of spontaneously breaking into song to express one's feelings. In operettas and stage musicals, audiences had come to accept such outbursts as conventional, and applause after a song cushioned the awkward transition back to dialogue. But, in the late 1920s, film had no comparable conventions to rely upon for bridging the separation between singing and "regular" speech. Hence, very early film musicals nearly always concerned professional singers who sang only when they were performing for an on-screen audience, in order to provide a realistic "excuse" for the musical numbers. The Jazz Singer (1927) established cinema's "song-as-performance" convention. Al Jolson sings only when he is performing, rehearsing, or, in the case of the song "Blue Skies," demonstrating his talents to his proud mother. His songs, moreover, do not express his emotions or dramatic situation; they are popular tunes--popular even before The Jazz Singer--included in the film merely so that Jolson can perform them and not to reveal character or advance the plot. In the years after The Jazz Singer, as Richard Barrios details in A Song in the Dark: The Birth of Musical Films, Hollywood produced a series of "backstagers," such as the 1929 films On With the Show and Broadway Melody, in which characters sing and dance as they struggle to put on a show. In most of these early backstagers, the songs' lyrics bear no relation to story, but in 1933 Warner Brothers launched a series of musicals--42nd Street, The Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade--in which gritty scripts, jazzy songs by Al Dubin and Harry Warren, and the spectacular choreography of Busby Berkeley all resonate with one another. In Gold Diggers of 1935, for example, Ginger Rogers leads chorus girls costumed as huge coins in a performance of "We're in the Money," only to have their rehearsal suddenly interrupted by the police. The sheriff repossesses the lavish costumes and closes the show, putting Ginger, Joa n Blondell, and the other girls out of work--and out of the money--during the Depression.