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I really enjoyed BBC4's recent three part series The Sound of Movie Musicals with Neil Brand. I like music and I like movies so why would I not like movie musicals? I also like Neil Brand. He's knowledgeable, enthusiastic, he's as eager to listen to his interviewees as he is to impart his own take on the history of the musical, and when he sits down in front of his piano to break down motifs and genres, often hidden within very well known songs, he does it both in layman's terms and without condescension. By the end I didn't even begrudge him his somewhat cushy gig of getting to play the piano on a Chicago boardwalk overlooking Lake Michigan.
His story starts on Broadway, New York City, in the roaring twenties. 1926 saw the invention of the Vitaphone allowing sound and vision to be synched up for the first time ever and ushering in the era of the talkies. Within three years Broadway Melody became the first 'all singing, all dancing' musical film and made use of original songs specifically written (by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed) to fit the story.
It won the second ever Academy Award for Best Picture, and that was it, the musical was born. The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (starring Laurel & Hardy, Buster Keaton, Joan Crawford, and Jack Benny) followed swiftly. It was a big production and it was promoted with no little fanfare. A billboard was made of live scantily clad women to draw attention to a film that was created using the new technicolor process and featured an early version of Singin' in the Rain.
1930's King Jazz looked even more spectacular. Utilising George Gershwin's beautiful and sophisticated Rhapsody in Blue, the film itself included a huge green piano with a lid that opened up to reveal an entire orchestra as well as leggy dancers gyrating around a mocked up model of New York City itself. It cost so much to make that it was always going to end up losing money - and that's exactly what it did.
It wasn't just the cost that affected its reputation though. NYC audiences were pretty up on their jazz at the time and a film that didn't feature a single black musician (Paul Whiteman was musical director and very much lived up to his name) wasn't going to wash with people who were schooled with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. The only black face in the film was as tokenistic as it could be. A small, smiling, little girl sat upon the lap of a happy fat white sailor.
King Vidor was white but he'd been born in Galveston, Texas and at least has the nous to realise that the under representation of black people in the movies, and the musicals, wasn't right. So he proposed a film set in the deep South and featuring an all black cast. Hallelujah, a tale of a sharecropper's fall from grace and eventual redemption. Shot in Tennessee and Alabama, it used some of the traditional spirituals that Vidor had heard growing up.
But it mixed them up with songs, in the spiritual style, written by Irving Berlin. A man obviously neither black nor from the South. Critics found Berlin's music to be both sanitised and inauthentic. Despite this the film was a success but when the depression hit in the thirties some, and not for the last time, thought it was over for the musical.
Also not for the last time, the naysayers were proved wrong. In fact, showbiz was seen as one way out of poverty, a potential escape from the Dust Bowl. 42nd Street captured the mood of the time and, inspired by FDR, was advertised as a 'New Deal in entertainment'. It was 42nd Street that gave choreographer turned director Busby Berkeley his big breakthrough. You'll surely be familiar with his dance routines but perhaps less so with the fact that he filmed them all with one camera, a camera, Brand tells us, that Berkeley made to dance as well as his cast.
Berkeley followed 42nd Street with Gold Diggers of 1933. It's perhaps most famous now for Ginger Rogers and her friends dressed in coins singing We're in the Money but it also closed with the bluesy Remember my Forgotten Man, a wonderful, evocative song by Harry Warren and Al Dubin. The film was such a hit it saved Warner Brothers from bankruptcy.
Back in the USSR agit-trains would travel around the country showing films promoting Soviet values. Stalin commanded there should be cinema for the millions and banned Hollywood films. But, secretly, he loved them himself and had cinemas installed in several of his private homes so he could watch his favourite stars, the likes of John Wayne and Charlie Chaplin. The Great Dictator, one presumes, going straight over his head.
Soviet musicals like The Jolly Fellows (1934) were directed by Grigori Aleksandrov who went on to make the film Circus in 1936. Circus promoted an inclusive society (Soviets were seen to take in a mixed race baby from a mother who'd been hounded out of the US for having said baby, and there was even a man singing in Yiddish) and that, you would think, could only be a good thing.
Unfortunately for Aleksandrov, it was released the same year Stalin embarked on his Great Purge targeting Trotskyists, ethnic minorities, kulaks, and his political opponents and resulting in somewhere close to a million deaths, most of those summary executions.
So the fact the film criticised America while stealing its style from Hollywood was the least of its hypocrisies. In fact it was from France, rather than the Soviet Union, that the next step forward in the history of the musical would come. Rene Clair, an avant-garde film maker, eschewed the 'show' style of musical and added some grit and a touch of his trademark surrealism to the genre in 1931's Le Million, a tale of an impoverished artist who wins the lottery but mislays his ticket.
Rene Clair had invented the 'integrated musical' in which, in lieu of huge set piece song-and-dance routines, characters would simply burst into song where they stood or sat. During one scene, song is even used for a character's internal monologue. It's not certain if this inspired the making of Peep Show but it certainly influenced the work of both Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers as well as the Armenian-American director Rouben Mamoulian who, with 1932's Love Me Tonight, took the integrated musical to Hollywood.
Mamoulian also used a rhythmic street symphony (sounds of machines working, doors banging etc;) that seems remarkably forward thinking for the time. Not all in America were so happy with the pace of change though. Some wanted to turn the clock back and soon the Motion Picture Production Code (popularly known as the Hays Code after Republican politician Will H.Hayes) was introduced cracking down on skimpy outfits, double entendres, and racy songs.
Combine that with the segregation in America and you had no climate any longer for making cutting edge cinema. In 1925 at the age of just nineteen, St Louis born Josephine Baker had sailed to Paris and soon became a much bigger star in France than she would have been allowed to have become in the nation of her birth. First as a dancer but in 1934 she moved into film, playing the title character in Marc Allegret's Zouzou.
Under the Hays Code, Hollywood could not hope to compete with Baker in a fluffy bra swinging in a birdcage so they countered with Fred Astaire and his dancing. Tame in comparison, perhaps, but Astaire's dancing still looks phenomenal, even today, and his routines were more subversive than a cursory glance would suggest.
Astaire, who became the biggest musical star to that day (possibly ever?), had been in a vaudeville double act with his sister, Adele, since they were children but when Adele got married she hung up her dancing shoes and left Fred, briefly, high and dry. Until that is, he was paired with Ginger Rogers.
Because of the 'code', the thrill of the chase had to imply seduction without directly showing it, and this they did with a wonderfully imaginative dance routine to Irving Berlin's Cheek to Cheek in Top Hat (1935). We see Fred and Ginger dance slowly away from the other party goers. They continue dancing together in private and when they're finished dancing they lie back on the balustrade looking for all the world as if they're post-coital. All that's missing is them lighting up each other's cigarettes.
It was about as 'adult' as cinema in America was allowed to get during the thirties. With grown up themes a labyrinthine nightmare to navigate it's perhaps no surprise that the children's film should become so prominent. In 1937 Walt Disney made his first full length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It took three years to make and employed over 750 artists. It still looks amazing now.
Talking heads attest that children everywhere could be heard singing Heigh-Ho and Whistle While You Work but Brand seems more interested in the fact that these songs seemed to owe more to 19c German light opera than to the likes of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, or Cole Porter. Two years after Snow White, MGM made The Wizard of Oz and changed Judy Garland's life forever. One year after that war broke out in Europe and, once again, the future of the musical appeared to be in jeopardy.
With death and destruction decimating Europe why would anybody want to watch people singing and dancing? But in 1942 Die Grosse Liebe (The Great Love) opened in, of all places, Berlin. On the surface Die Grosse Liebe was a simple love story but beneath that veneer it was very clear to all that it was blatant Nazi propaganda. The lead role was taken by the Swedish singer Zarah Leander, one of Hitler's favourites who'd been personally signed up to the 'cause' by Goebbels.
The age of the musical may not have been over but the age of innocence certainly was. Fortunately, in 1945, the war, too, was over and, the following year, cinema attendances hit an all time high as people, those who hadn't been killed at least, set about resuming their normal lives. Arthur Freed hit his peak as a producer with Meet Me in St Louis. Judy Garland took star billing and the film featured new songs like Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas and standards like Down at the Old Bull and Bush.
Gene Kelly was emerging as a star, and reinventing dance, in films like Cover Girl (1944) and 1949's On The Town where Kelly and Frank Sinatra play sailors on shore leave in New York. Shot on location, Sinatra's megastar status attracted huge crowds to watch filming. It didn't hurt Kelly's fame either and in 1952 he made the film he will forever be associated with:- Singin' in the Rain.
Singin' in the Rain starred Kelly alongside Debbie Reynolds and Cyd Charisse but most people remember it now for one oft-repeated but really rather lovely scene. That of Kelly dancing to Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown's now title song euphorically after falling in love. The feeling of sheer joy in knowing the person you love loves you right back. I remember that wonderful feeling. Just.
As the musical hit a peak in Hollywood, it did also in newly independent India, in Bollywood. Guru Dutt's 1957 film Pyaasa took on prostitution and destitution and shed a light on the terrible way women were treated in Indian society while retaining a sense of the poetic and a concurrent theme of interior angst. It sounds, and looks, exactly like the sort of film I need to see.
Mother India (dir:Mehboob Khan), also from 1957, looks equally ace. "If life is a poison we must drink it" is the line that seems to most encapsulate this story of suffering, poverty, and acceptance. It was the first Hindi movie to be nominated for an Oscar but it was not the film's star Nargis (Dutt) who was singing the songs but the legendary, and still around - at 89, playback singer Lata Mangeshkar.
In China, they were turning out a film about once a week. With no unions permitted actors and crew could work for hours on end and though for the most part the Shaw Brothers (Runje, Runme, and Runde - based in Hong Kong) churned out kung fu flicks they also turned their hands to the musical. 1959's The Kingdom & The Beauty and 1963's The Love Eterne both look as amazing as any of the Bollywood films of the time and an old Chinese proverb, 'singing is better than saying', could stand as a motto for any musical film made in any country at any given time.
In 1965 Chairman Mao embarked on his Cultural Revolution (eventual death toll:anything between one and ten million people) to purge China of all Western culture and all Western thought. Of course Hong Kong was separate and there they pushed things forward with groovy go-go films like Hong Kong Nocturne (1967) featuring women bathing in champagne and frustrating horny men with their unavailability. Beijing and Hong Kong at that time must have felt light years apart.
Back in Hollywood, teenagers were being coaxed back out to the picturehouses by Bill Haley and his Comets in Rock Around the Clock (1956) and Gene Vincent in 1958's Hot Rod Gang. Most of these films were cheap cash-ins on the new rock'n'roll sound, low budget affairs that attracted little critical acclaim, but The Girl Can't Help It (1956) was a cut above. With Jayne Mansfield in a starring role, the film also featured musical performances by Fats Domino and Little Richard. Jean-Luc Godard loved it and, for the music alone, he was right to. It really is fucking great music.
Of course, of all the rock'n'roll stars Elvis was the biggest. Not only on stage but also on screen. His star quality could carry some phenomenally flimsy flicks but 1957's Jailhouse Rock is considered one of the best and does showcase 'the pelvis' doing some pretty awesome dance moves.
In the UK we got the decidedly more sedate, and chaste, Cliff Richard. Clips of The Young Ones (1961) and Summer Holiday (1963) are about as wholesome as you could get this side of Butlin's (and even feature The Shadows dressed up as traditional Greek musicians) but, nevertheless, Cliff could sing a bit in those days and they were enjoyable enough romps for their time.
If nothing compared to what was going on in France where Jacques Demy made The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in 1964. A musical coming out of the nouvelle vague scene of Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, and Rohmer seemed an unusual idea but Demy didn't stop there. This would be a musical with no dancing in it - and no speaking. Every single line was sung. Radical enough in itself but just to make it that bit more challenging it was set during the Algerian War of Independence. It looks a bit different to The Battle of Algiers.
Hollywood was, again, playing it safer with films like My Fair Lady (1964) and, a year later, The Sound of Music. Or were they? Brand makes a case for the then highest grossing film of all time and the winner of five Oscars, and now a cinema singalong favourite to crowds of fans dressed as nuns, being, oddly, a game changer. The subject matter, the tracking, the songs themselves. They seemed to have taken the musical to the next level. Had the genre peaked?
As America moved into the time of hippies, the era of civil rights struggles, and the Vietnam War that seemed to be the case. The musicals coming out in the wake of The Sound of Music weren't exactly pushing the envelope either. 1967's Camelot, Rex Harrison talking to the animals in the same year's Doctor Dolittle, and Clint Eastwood, of all people, taking it a step further by talking to the trees in Paint Your Wagon two years later.
It was all very out of step with what was going on in the real world. It was, the programme instructs us, Bob Fosse who solved the dilemma of how to move forward with the genre while staying in touch with contemporary mores. The dichotomy was resolved with 1969's Sweet Charity in which Fosse introduced his trademark small gesture, a shoulder drop perhaps, or maybe something as simple as a finger click.
Three years later Fosse's biggest hit, Cabaret, arrived. Decadence, Nazis, and Liza Minnelli (daughter of Judy Garland) belting out the title track in black stockings and suspenders and a hat tipped at a jaunty angle. It was the first x-rated musical but that didn't stop it scooping eight Oscars. Seven years later Fosse directed All That Jazz. A film that, by the looks of the clips shown, was both very homoerotic and very very of its time.
Of the cinema of its time that is. Not the reality of life at the time of its release. 1970s New York City was gritty, bleak, and violent. The films reflecting the lawless streets were Taxi Driver and The Godfather, most definitely not musicals, yet it was the director of Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese, who made New York, New York in 1977 (with Liza Minnelli singing the title song two years before Sinatra picked it up and made it his own) and the director of The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola, who made One From The Heart in 1982. A tale of a tumultuous romance with songs by Tom Waits.
Both were musicals and both were flops. The new breed of directors may have wanted to pay homage to Hollywood's past but their audiences, clearly, did not. More irreverent stuff like Mel Brooks' The Producers (1967) and Blazing Saddles (1974) had become catnip to the cinema crowd. In 1973 a fledgling director called George Lucas made American Graffiti and it not only proved to be an escape from the grim reality of the Nixon era but to be a new way of doing the musical.
In American Graffiti the cast don't burst into song, the music mostly blasts from cars and jukeboxes and because it includes such great artists as Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, Del Shannon, and The Big Bopper (combined with exquisite period detail) it became as much of a hit as One From The Heart was a flop.
Five years later Grease followed and became pretty much the biggest film of my youth. I still remember people lining up for hours outside the ABC cinema in Basingstoke to see it when I was a kid. Only Star Wars, and perhaps Jaws, ever attracted such large queues.
The songs were great, anyone growing up in that era probably remembers every word now, and the story was a simple, but affecting, tale of young love but, also, to UK audiences at least, it showed us a different world. In Britain we'd had David Essex, Ringo Starr, and Billy Fury in That'll Be The Day in 1973 and the difference was the same as between Coronation Street and Dallas.
All these fifties throwbacks were fun but Ken Russell, apparently, moved things forward with his motion picture version of The Who's Tommy in 1975 featuring Elton John singing Pinball Wizard playing a giant pinball keyboard and wearing massive boots. It looked odd but probably not compared to Alan Parker's Bugsy Malone which followed a year later.
We take it for granted now, and the Paul Williams songs have seeped into the popular imagination, but the idea of kids playing gangsters with custard pies instead of guns is utterly bizarre. It was either going to fail abysmally or be a massive success and, of course we know, it proved to be the latter. The fourteen year old Jodie Foster appeared in both Bugsy Malone and Taxi Driver in 1976. That's quite an achievement no matter how you slice it.
The same year saw the first blaxploitation musical. Michael Schultz's Car Wash came in the wake of Shaft (1971) and Super Fly (1972) and Norman Whitfield's soundtrack, and specifically the Rose Royce version of the title song, helped make the film a success. The Wiz, rather a forgotten film, followed two years later. A black version of The Wizard of Oz that starred Michael Jackson and Diana Ross and featured music by Quincy Jones and Luther Vandross.
That's quite a roll call but the film was not a success and was soon knocked into a cocked hat by Alan Parker's Fame (1980), a much earthier, considerably tougher and more streetwise affair than the TV series that came in its wake. I learnt that when they filmed the iconic dance sequence to the song Fame had not yet been written so they all danced to Donna Summer's Hot Stuff instead. Good choice.
A year after Fame, MTV launched in the US and the rule book was ripped up and replaced with a new one. Pop videos became musicals in miniature but the movies, too, learnt from pop music and started incorporating techniques and styles first developed in the short form format. Specifically in films like Flashdance (1983) and Footloose (1984).
Of course, as with anything new there were hipster types who preferred things how they used to be and The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle director Julien Temple catered for them with 1986's Absolute Beginners. It had David Bowie in it during possibly his artistic nadir, Patsy Kensit looked good but seemed to rub people up the wrong way, the film went hugely over budget, suffered from massive hype that it could never live up to, and massively flopped. Neil Brand was kind in suggesting it was because it was ahead of its time.
The musicals that were doing well in the late eighties/early nineties were the ones from the Disney renaissance. Films like The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Aladdin (1992) saw the house of mouse enjoying their biggest success for years. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken wrote the songs for all three films mentioned but even when they were replaced by Hans Zimmer, Tim Rice, and Elton John for 1994's The Lion King the hits kept coming. In fact I'd wager The Lion King is the most fondly remembered of all. I bet you could sing Hakuna Matata right now.
A year later Pixar took the Disney ball and ran with it. Randy Newman may not have seemed the most obvious choice for 1995's Toy Story but it worked. So much so that he returned to Pixar for Monsters, Inc in 2001, Cars in 2006, and two Toy Story sequels. He's on board for Toy Story 4 to be released in June of this year. Randy Newman, it seems, is a company man.
The musical had been revived and Neil Brand took us on a whirlwind tour of the world:- Moulin Rouge (Australia, 2001), The Happiness of the Katakuris (Japan, 2001), Hipsters (Russia, 2008), and Dil Se (India, 1998) - before returning to Hollywood for a quick look at La La Land (2016) and surprise sleeper hit The Greatest Showman (2017), both films with songs written by the new kids on the block Pasek and Paul.
I've not seen either, they don't look like my cup of tea - too milky, but it's good to know the grand old musical is in safe hands. Music documentaries too when Neil Brand is involved. With interviewees of the standard of Mel Brooks, Alan Menken, David Essex, Jeremy Deller, Bruce Welch from The Shadows, Julien Temple, and Paul Williams as well as historians and critics, and vintage footage of interviews with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and Gene Kelly it was important that Brand was at the top of his game and luckily he was. I'm looking forward to seeing what he turns his dexterous fingers to next. Everybody cut, everybody cut footloose.
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