Musical film
Musical film is a film genre in which songs by the characters are interwoven into the narrative, sometimes accompanied by dancing. The songs usually advance the plot or develop the film's characters, but in some cases, they serve merely as breaks in the storyline, often as elaborate "production numbers".
The musical film was a natural development of the
With the
During the 1940s and 1950s, musical films from
During the 1960s, films based on stage musicals continued to be critical and box-office successes. These films included,
Since the 21st century, the musical genre was rejuvenated with darker musicals, musical biopics, musical remakes, epic drama musicals and comedy drama musicals such as
Hollywood musical films
1930-1950: The first classical sound era or First Musical Era
The 1930s through the early 1950s are considered to be the golden age of the musical film, when the genre's popularity was at its highest in the
The first musicals
Musical short films were made by
Warner Brothers produced the first screen operetta,
Hollywood released more than 100 musical films in 1930, but only 14 in 1931.
Busby Berkeley
The taste in musicals revived again in 1933 when director
Musical stars
Musical stars such as
Many comedies (and a few dramas) included their own musical numbers. The Marx Brothers' films included a musical number in nearly every film, allowing the Brothers to highlight their musical talents. Their final film, entitled Love Happy (1949), featured Vera-Ellen, considered to be the best dancer among her colleagues and professionals in the half century.
Similarly, the vaudevillian comedian
The Freed Unit
During the late 1940s and into the early 1950s, a production unit at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer headed by Arthur Freed made the transition from old-fashioned musical films, whose formula had become repetitive, to something new. (However, they also produced Technicolor remakes of such musicals as Show Boat, which had previously been filmed in the 1930s.) In 1939, Freed was hired as associate producer for the film Babes in Arms. Starting in 1944 with Meet Me in St. Louis, the Freed Unit worked somewhat independently of its own studio to produce some of the most popular and well-known examples of the genre. The products of this unit include Easter Parade (1948), On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951), Singin' in the Rain (1952), The Band Wagon (1953) and Gigi (1958). Non-Freed musicals from the studio included Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in 1954 and High Society in 1956, and the studio distributed Samuel Goldwyn's Guys and Dolls
This era saw musical stars become household names, including Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Ann Miller, Donald O'Connor, Cyd Charisse, Mickey Rooney, Vera-Ellen, Jane Powell, Howard Keel, and Kathryn Grayson. Fred Astaire was also coaxed out of retirement for Easter Parade and made a permanent comeback.
Outside MGM
The other Hollywood studios proved themselves equally adept at tackling the genre at this time, particularly in the 1950s. Four adaptations of Rodgers and Hammerstein shows - Oklahoma!, The King and I, Carousel, and South Pacific - were all successes, while Paramount Pictures released White Christmas and Funny Face, two films which used previously written music by Irving Berlin and the Gershwins, respectively. Warner Bros. produced Calamity Jane and A Star Is Born; the former film was a vehicle for Doris Day, while the latter provided a big-screen comeback for Judy Garland, who had been out of the spotlight since 1950. Meanwhile, director Otto Preminger, better known for "message pictures", made Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess, both starring Dorothy Dandridge, who is considered the first African American A-list film star. Celebrated director Howard Hawks also ventured into the genre with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
This section possibly contains original research. (October 2010) |
In the 1960s, 1970s, and continuing up to today, the musical film became less of a bankable genre that could be relied upon for sure-fire hits. Audiences for them lessened and fewer musical films were produced as the genre became less mainstream and more specialized.
The 1960s musical
In the 1960s, the critical and box-office success of the films West Side Story, Gypsy, The Music Man, Bye Bye Birdie, My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Jungle Book, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Oliver!, and Funny Girl suggested that the traditional musical was in good health, while French filmmaker Jacques Demy's jazz musicals The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort were popular with international critics. However popular musical tastes were being heavily affected by rock and roll and the freedom and youth associated with it, and indeed Elvis Presley made a few films that have been equated with the old musicals in terms of form. A Hard Day's Night and Help!, starring the Beatles, were audacious. Most of the musical films of the 1950s and 1960s such as Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music were straightforward adaptations or restagings of successful stage productions. The most successful musicals of the 1960s created specifically for film were Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book, two of Disney's biggest hits of all time.
The phenomenal box-office performance of The Sound of Music gave the major Hollywood studios more confidence to produce lengthy, large-budget musicals. Despite the resounding success of some of these films, Hollywood also produced a large number of musical flops in the late 1960s and early 1970s which appeared to seriously misjudge public taste. The commercially and/or critically unsuccessful films included . Collectively and individually these failures affected the financial viability of several major studios.
1970s
In the 1970s, film culture and the changing demographics of filmgoers placed greater emphasis on gritty realism, while the pure entertainment and theatricality of classical-era Hollywood musicals was seen as old-fashioned. Despite this,
A number of film musicals were still being made that were financially and/or critically less successful than in the musical's heyday. They include 1776, The Wiz, At Long Last Love, Mame, Man of La Mancha, Lost Horizon, Godspell, Phantom of the Paradise, Funny Lady (Barbra Streisand's sequel to Funny Girl), A Little Night Music, and Hair amongst others. The critical wrath against At Long Last Love, in particular, was so strong that it was never released on home video. Fantasy musical films Scrooge, The Blue Bird, The Little Prince, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Pete's Dragon, and Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks were also released in the 1970s, the latter winning the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
1980s to 1990s
By the 1980s, financiers grew increasingly confident in the musical genre, partly buoyed by the relative health of the musical on
Many
2000-now: The second-classical era or New Musical Era
21st-century musicals or New Age
In the 21st century, movie musicals were reborn with darker musicals, musical biopics, epic drama musicals and comedy drama musicals such as Moulin Rouge!, Chicago, Walk the Line, Dreamgirls, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Les Misérables, La La Land, and West Side Story; all of which won the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy in their respective years, while such films as The Phantom of the Opera, Hairspray, Mamma Mia!, Nine, Into the Woods, The Greatest Showman, Mary Poppins Returns, Rocketman, Cyrano, and Tick, Tick... Boom! were only nominated. Chicago was also the first musical since Oliver! to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
Joshua Oppenheimer's Academy Award-nominated documentary The Act of Killing may be considered a nonfiction musical.[9]
One specific musical trend was the rising number of
Disney also returned to musicals with Enchanted,
Biopics about music artists and showmen were also big in the 21st century. Examples include
Director Damien Chazelle created a musical film called La La Land, starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. It was meant to reintroduce the traditional jazz style of song numbers with influences from the Golden Age of Hollywood and Jacques Demy's French musicals while incorporating a contemporary/modern take on the story and characters with balances in fantasy numbers and grounded reality. It received 14 nominations at the 89th Academy Awards, tying the record for most nominations with All About Eve (1950) and Titanic (1997), and won the awards for Best Director, Best Actress, Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, Best Original Song, and Best Production Design.
Live! television events
In 2013,
Indian musical films
An exception to the decline of the musical film is
Despite this exception of almost every Indian movie being a musical and India producing the most movies in the world (formed in 1913), the first Bollywood film to be a complete musical,
Early sound films (1930s–1940s)
The first Indian sound film, Ardeshir Irani's Alam Ara (1931), was a major commercial success.[14] There was clearly a huge market for talkies and musicals; Bollywood and all the regional film industries quickly switched to sound filming.
In 1937, Ardeshir Irani, of Alam Ara fame, made the first colour film in Hindi, Kisan Kanya. The next year, he made another colour film, a version of Mother India. However, colour did not become a popular feature until the late 1950s. At this time, lavish romantic musicals and melodramas were the staple fare at the cinema.
Golden Age (late 1940s–1960s)
Following India's independence, the period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s is regarded by film historians as the "Golden Age" of Hindi cinema.[18][19][20] Some of the most critically acclaimed Hindi films of all time were produced during this period. Examples include Pyaasa (1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), directed by Guru Dutt and written by Abrar Alvi, Awaara (1951) and Shree 420 (1955), directed by Raj Kapoor and written by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, and Aan (1952), directed by Mehboob Khan and starring Dilip Kumar. These films expressed social themes mainly dealing with working-class life in India, particularly urban life in the former two examples; Awaara presented the city as both a nightmare and a dream, while Pyaasa critiqued the unreality of city life.[21]
In the 1960s and early 1970s, the industry was dominated by musical romance films with "romantic hero" leads, the most popular being Rajesh Khanna.[26] Other actors during this period include Shammi Kapoor, Jeetendra, Sanjeev Kumar, and Shashi Kapoor, and actresses like Sharmila Tagore, Mumtaz, Saira Banu, Helen and Asha Parekh.
Classic Bollywood (1970s–1980s)
By the start of the 1970s, Hindi cinema was experiencing thematic stagnation,
The 1970s was also when the name "Bollywood" was coined,
Along with Bachchan, other popular actors of this era included Feroz Khan,[36] Mithun Chakraborty, Naseeruddin Shah, Jackie Shroff, Sanjay Dutt, Anil Kapoor and Sunny Deol. Actresses from this era included Hema Malini, Jaya Bachchan, Raakhee, Shabana Azmi, Zeenat Aman, Parveen Babi, Rekha, Dimple Kapadia, Smita Patil, Jaya Prada and Padmini Kolhapure.[37]
New Bollywood (1990s–present)
In the late 1980s, Hindi cinema experienced another period of stagnation, with a decline in box office turnout, due to increasing violence, decline in musical melodic quality, and rise in video piracy, leading to middle-class family audiences abandoning theaters. The turning point came with Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988), directed by Mansoor Khan, written and produced by his father Nasir Hussain, and starring his cousin Aamir Khan with Juhi Chawla. Its blend of youthfulness, wholesome entertainment, emotional quotients and strong melodies lured family audiences back to the big screen.[38][39] It set a new template for Bollywood musical romance films that defined Hindi cinema in the 1990s.[39]
The period of Hindi cinema from the 1990s onwards is referred to as "New Bollywood" cinema,
Since the 1990s, the three biggest Bollywood movie stars have been the "
Influence on Western films (2000s–present)
Baz Luhrmann stated that his successful musical film Moulin Rouge! (2001) was directly inspired by Bollywood musicals.[46] The film pays homage to India, incorporating an Indian-themed play and a Bollywood-style dance sequence with a song from the film China Gate. The critical and financial success of Moulin Rouge! renewed interest in the then-moribund Western live action musical genre, and subsequently films such as Chicago, The Producers, Rent, Dreamgirls, and Hairspray were produced, fueling a renaissance of the genre.[47]
Spanish musical films
Spain has a history and tradition of musical films that were made independent of Hollywood influence. The first films arise during the
Soviet musical film under Stalin
Unlike the musical films of Hollywood and Bollywood, popularly identified with escapism, the Soviet musical was first and foremost a form of propaganda. Vladimir Lenin said that cinema was "the most important of the arts". His successor, Joseph Stalin, also recognized the power of cinema in efficiently spreading Communist Party doctrine. Films were widely popular in the 1920s, but it was foreign cinema that dominated the Soviet filmgoing market. Films from Germany and the U.S. proved more entertaining than Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein's historical dramas.[49] By the 1930s it was clear that if the Soviet cinema was to compete with its Western counterparts, it would have to give audiences what they wanted: the glamour and fantasy they got from Hollywood.[50] The musical film, which emerged at that time, embodied the ideal combination of entertainment and official ideology.
A struggle between laughter for laughter's sake and entertainment with a clear ideological message would define the golden age of the Soviet musical of the 1930s and 1940s. Then-head of the film industry Boris Shumyatsky sought to emulate Hollywood's conveyor belt method of production, going so far as to suggest the establishment of a Soviet Hollywood.[51]
The Jolly Fellows
In 1930, the esteemed Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein went to the United States with fellow director
"Movies for the Millions"
The success of The Jolly Fellows ensured a place in Soviet cinema for the musical format, but immediately Shumyatsky set strict guidelines to make sure the films promoted Communist values. Shumyatsky's decree "Movies for the Millions" demanded conventional plots, characters, and montage to successfully portray Socialist Realism (the glorification of industry and the working class) on film.[54]
The first successful blend of a social message and entertainment was Aleksandrov's Circus (1936). It starred his wife, Lyubov Orlova (an operatic singer who had also appeared in The Jolly Fellows) as an American circus performer who has to immigrate to the USSR from the U.S. because she has a mixed-race child, whom she had with a black man. Amidst the backdrop of lavish musical productions, she finally finds love and acceptance in the USSR, providing the message that racial tolerance can only be found in the Soviet Union.
The influence of Busby Berkeley's choreography on Aleksandrov's directing can be seen in the musical number leading up to the climax. Another, more obvious reference to Hollywood is the Charlie Chaplin impersonator who provides comic relief throughout the film. Four million people in Moscow and Leningrad went to see Circus during its first month in theaters.[55]
Another of Aleksandrov's more-popular films was The Bright Path (1940). This was a reworking of the fairytale Cinderella set in the contemporary Soviet Union. The Cinderella of the story was again Orlova, who by this time was the most popular star in the USSR.[56] It was a fantasy tale, but the moral of the story was that a better life comes from hard work. Whereas in Circus, the musical numbers involved dancing and spectacle, the only type of choreography in Bright Path is the movement of factory machines. The music was limited to Orlova's singing. Here, work provided the spectacle.
Ivan Pyryev
The other director of musical films was Ivan Pyryev. Unlike Aleksandrov, the focus of Pyryev's films was life on the collective farms. His films, Tractor Drivers (1939), The Swineherd and the Shepherd (1941), and his most famous, Cossacks of the Kuban (1949) all starred his wife, Marina Ladynina. Like in Aleksandrov's Bright Path, the only choreography was the work the characters were doing on film. Even the songs were about the joys of working.
Rather than having a specific message for any of his films, Pyryev promoted Stalin's slogan "life has become better, life has become more joyous."[57] Sometimes this message was in stark contrast with the reality of the time. During the filming of Cossacks of the Kuban, the Soviet Union was going through a postwar famine. In reality, the actors who were singing about a time of prosperity were hungry and malnourished.[58] The films did, however, provide escapism and optimism for the viewing public.
Volga-Volga
The most popular film of the brief era of Stalinist musicals was Alexandrov's 1938 film Volga-Volga. The star, again, was Lyubov Orlova and the film featured singing and dancing, having nothing to do with work. It is the most unusual of its type. The plot surrounds a love story between two individuals who want to play music. They are unrepresentative of Soviet values in that their focus is more on their music than their jobs. The gags poke fun at the local authorities and bureaucracy. There is no glorification of industry since it takes place in a small rural village. Work is not glorified either, since the plot revolves around a group of villagers using their vacation time to go on a trip up the Volga and Moscow Canal to perform in Moscow. The film can be seen as a glorification of Moscow canal without any hint that the canal was built by Gulag prisoners.
Volga-Volga followed the aesthetic principles of Socialist Realism rather than the ideological tenets. It became Stalin's favorite film and he gave it as a gift to President
Lists of musical films
- See List of musical films by year for a list of musical films in chronological order.
- See List of Bollywood filmsfor a list of Bollywood musical films.
- See List of films based on stage plays or musicalsfor a list of musical films based on theatre productions.
- See List of highest-grossing musicalsfor the highest-grossing musical films.
See also
References
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- ^ '"Eyman, Scott. The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution Simon & Schuster, 1997, p. 160
- ^ a b Kenrick, John. "History of Musical Film, 1927-30: Part II". Musicals101.com, 2004, accessed May 17, 2010
- ^ a b Kenrick, John. "History of Musical Film, 1930s: Part I: 'Hip, Hooray and Ballyhoo'". Musicals101.com, 2003, accessed May 17, 2010
- ^ Kenrick, John. "History of Musical Film, 1930s Part II". Musicals101.com, 2004, accessed May 17, 2010
- ^ The Big Broadcast of 1938 on imdb.con
- ^ The Big Broadcast of 1938 - Awards on IMDb
- ^ Szebin, Frederick C. (October 1998). "Roberta Collins:'Caged Heat'! Diary of a Drive-In Diva:Partyin' and Bustin'-Out with Pam Grier". Femme Fatales. Baltimore, Maryland: King Features Syndicate, Inc. p. 46. Retrieved August 28, 2023.
- ^ "Build my gallows high: Joshua Oppenheimer on The Act of Killing". British Film Institute. Retrieved 2018-04-29.
- ^ "Bohemian Rhapsody: Queen biopic surpasses $900m at box office". BBC. Retrieved 15 April 2019.
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Further reading
- McGee, Mark Thomas. The Rock and Roll Movie Encyclopedia of the 1950s. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1990. 0-89950-500-7.
- Padva, Gilad. Uses of Nostalgia in Musical Politicization of Homo/Phobic Myths in Were the World Mine, The Big Gay Musical, and Zero Patience. In Padva, Gilad, Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture, pp. 139–172. Basingstock, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ISBN 978-1-137-26633-0.