Musical short
The musical short (a.k.a. musical short film, a.k.a. musical featurette) can be traced back to the earliest days of sound films.
Performers in the
Vitaphone
The nearly 2,000
1930s
Orchestra leader
For promotional purposes, major film stars, including Gary Cooper and Clark Gable, made guest appearances in such musical shorts as MGM's Star Night at the Cocoanut Grove (1934) and Starlit Days at the Lido[3] (1935), while others featured a single band, such as Freddie Rich and His Orchestra (1938).
Richard Barrios (author of A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film) provided notes for Kino Video's compilation, The Best of Big Bands and Swing:
- During the "Dawn of Sound," musical short subjects were the Dr. Rudy Vallee finds musical deficiencies to be the root of all ills). Perhaps the gem of this collection, however, is Office Blues, in which a pre-Astaire and pre-stardom Ginger Rogers cavorts with Broadway chorines in an Art Deco extravaganza. With artists like these on the bill it's clear that the short subject -- not the feature -- was often the highlight of the program![4]
1940s
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Betty Hutton made a half-dozen musical shorts before her feature debut in The Fleet's In (1942) and then continued to make shorts for the war effort. She was seen in Paramount Headliner: Queens of the Air (1938), Vitaphone's Vincent Lopez and His Orchestra (1939), Broadway Brevities: One for the Book (1939), Paramount Headliner: Three Kings and a Queen (1939), Broadway Brevities: Public Jitterbug Number One (1939), Paramount Victory Short No. T2-1: A Letter from Bataan (1942), Army-Navy Screen Magazine #20: Strictly G.I. (1943), Paramount's Skirmish on the Home Front (1944) and Hollywood Victory Caravan (1945), produced on the Paramount lot by the Treasury Department for the 1945 Victory Loan Drive. Several of Hutton's musical shorts have been shown on Turner Classic Movies in recent years.
Modern jazz was added to the mix in such films as the 16-minute Artistry in Rhytym (1944), with
Television
During the 1950s, musical shorts were revived for telecasting on local stations. Feature films in that decade were usually not edited to fit. Instead, if a feature ended 20 minutes before the hour, footage from musical shorts was used to fill the gap.
Snader Telescriptions were musical shorts made for television from 1950 to 1954. There were thousands of these three- and four-minute films, covering various genres from jazz and pop to R&B and country. Louis "Duke" Goldstone directed for Louis D. Snader.[5]
See also
Development of the music video |
---|
- Dance in film
- List of big bands
- List of musical films by year
- Music video
- Musical films
- Scopitone
- Soundies
References
- ^ a b c Barrios, Richard. A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film, Oxford University Press, 1994.
- ^ "Ruth Etting". IMDb.
- ^ jackusdk (9 February 2015). "Early three-strip Technicolor in HD -- Henry Busse and His Band -- Hot Lips -- Read Notes!". Archived from the original on 2021-12-21 – via YouTube.
- ^ Barrios, Richard. The Best of Big Bands and Swing, Kino Video. Archived 2008-06-22 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Snader Telescriptions". macfilms.com.
Sources
- Bradley, Edwin R. The First Hollywood Sound Shorts, 1926-1931, McFarland, 2005.