The First Hollywood Musicals

Author(s):  
Ethan Mordden
Keyword(s):  
2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 52-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bianca Freire-Medeiros

Author(s):  
David Eldridge

A number of Hollywood social dramas had documented the ‘youth crisis’ of the Depression era – limited employment prospects, vagrancy, delinquency, deprival of normal childhood. MGM’s Babes in Arms (1939), made when the worst of the economic crisis seemed over, was the first to do so in musical form. It confronted audiences not only with visions of an angry army of youth, but with young Americans facing impoverishment, crumbling parental authority, the threat of being taken into care, and incipient delinquency. Its commercial success spawned three other musicals – Strike Up the Band (1940), Babes on Broadway (1941) and Girl Crazy (1943), each of which raised the spectre of the ‘youth crisis’ that perplexed politicians, educators and sociologists. All of them had a happy ending, however, through the utopian instrument of kds putting on a musical show that demonstrated their capacity for collective action in a good cause, for still having wholesome fun, and for demonstrating patriotism.


Author(s):  
Todd Berliner

Chapter 11 examines the aesthetic value of novelty in a genre’s evolution by tracing the history of the convention that characters in Hollywood musicals spontaneously burst into song without realistic motivation. The convention emerged in 1929 and largely vanished by the end of the 1950s. The chapter studies how studio-era filmmakers developed novel conventions that exploited the aesthetic possibilities of song in cinema. The eventual loss of the convention created new constraints on the uses of song, but it also enabled new aesthetic possibilities. Post-studio-era filmmakers transformed the convention, exposed it, and reclaimed it in ways that added novelty to spectators’ aesthetic experience.


Author(s):  
Thomas F. DeFrantz

In the early 1980s, Hollywood began to exploit hip-hop dance—especially breaking—to produce a limited series of movie musicals. These “breaksploitation” films set a standard of participation for young artists, and in particular, young artists of color, to enter the movie industry as laborers, and to enter the global imagination of film audiences as representative agents of change. This chapter explores the traditions of Hollywood musicals and dance artists of color just before the hip-hop film production era; the innovations of these early 1980s films in terms of their casting, creative approaches, and presentation of contemporary social dance; and the communities that these mediated projects both catered to and generated. Together, these films inspired a global audience for breakdancing, and are inextricably linked to the sweep and scale of young people’s interest in these corporeal practices.


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