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A Glut of Trash
The original sheet music cover for "Singin' in the Rain," which was introduced in MGM's all-star Hollywood Revue of 1929. This popular song by lyricist Arthur Freed and composer Nacio Herb Brown would be used in many future MGM films.

The stock market collapse of 1929 had a tremendous impact on every aspect of American culture. While the film industry suffered its share of losses, it survived the 1930's by meeting a very real need.

True, the movie business would never again enjoy the figures of 1929, when 23,000 theatres were visited by an average of 95 million people a week. By 1936 the number of screens would be shaved by a third. . . The number of weekly filmgoers would also decline permanently, slashed by radio . . . Still, never was escapist entertainment needed more than during the Depression. Hollywood rose to the occasion. As the wolf settled in for a lengthy stay, entertainment provided solace and balm. But reduced prices and varied giveaways were not enough to lure people into trading hard earned pennies for filmed vaudeville. They wanted magic and romance and novelty; stories with happy endings and a chastened wolf.
- Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, The Early Years 1903-1940 (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2001), p. 205.

Meeting this need proved to be a tricky proposition. The commercial success of Love Parade and Broadway Melody spawned a glut of clunky musical spectacles, each bigger and tackier than the last. Every major studio attempted at least one musical revue, most to disastrous effect. The best of the bunch, MGM's Hollywood Revue of 1929 mixed weak production numbers with Joan Crawford performing a Charleston and silent stars Norma Shearer and John Gilbert offering an amateurish balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.

Some screen musicals early were downright bizarre. Director Cecil B. DeMille offered the only musical of his long career, Madam Satan (1930), which included a madcap costume party on a zeppelin – anything for a visual thrill. Small wonder that the public soon became bored with these brain dead spectacles.

Cut the Music!
The Big Pond was part of the glut that made audiences wary of musical films, but it gave Maurice Chevalier the chance to introduce "You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me." 

Thanks to rigid studio distribution systems, some theatres were stuck showing these unappealing musicals for weeks at a time. Audiences started staying home. Combined with the onset of the Great Depression, this silent boycott drove most of Hollywood to the brink of financial extinction. In a sudden twist, movie musicals were written off.

The figures tell the story. Over 100 screen musicals were released in 1930 -- only 14 in 1931. Studios went so far as to cut the songs from musicals already in production, turning Cole Porter's Fifty Million Frenchmen (1931) and Irving Berlin's Reaching for the Moon (1931) into ineffective comedies.

The few filmmakers who tried to swim against this commercial current made some fascinating, innovative films. Eventually redefining the musical film, they opened the way to the genre's future.

Marlene Dietrich: "Falling In Love Again"
As the musical boom palled, a unique screen star appeared with enough talent and sex appeal to soar above shifts in public taste. Marlene Dietrich's smoldering rendition of "Falling in Love Again" (the original German title translates as "From Head to Foot I'm Built for Love") in the German film The Blue Angel (1930) fascinated audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Months later, she caused an even greater furor making her American screen debut in Morocco (1930). A tuxedo-clad Dietrich finished a ballad by kissing a female admirer on the lips. Classy, exotic, daring, and always one of kind, this husky-voiced blonde became one of the most iconographic stars of the 20th Century.

Dietrich's appeared in few musicals, but she sang a number of popular songs in her popular screen comedies and dramas. For example, as a frontier saloon singer in Destry Rides Again (1939), she titillated a screen full of cowboys (and a few million fans) with "See What the Boys in the Backroom Will Have." An early opponent of the Nazis, Dietrich performed for Allied troops during World War II. She remained popular through her final stage performances in the 1970s.

Rodgers & Hart: "Isn't It Romantic?"
At Paramount Studios, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart continued the innovative approach to musical comedy that had marked their stage works. After The Hot Heiress (1931), they collaborated with director Rouben Mamoulian on a film which most buffs (including this author) consider a masterpiece – Love Me Tonight (1932).

One of this film's most remarkable sequences uses a song to travel across time and space. A Parisian tailor (Maurice Chevalier) sings the catchy "Isn’t It Romantic?" to a customer – with a lyric spoofing the notion of romance. The customer hums the tune to a taxi driver, and the driver "la-da-da's" it to a composer – who then sings the tune to soldiers on a train. When these troops sing it as they march, a passing violinist picks up the melody and plays it for a gypsy camp. Their instruments are heard by a melancholy noblewoman (Jeanette MacDonald) who sings the song on her palace balcony – with a lyric about finding her prince in shining armor. 

A sense of inventiveness runs through almost every frame of Love Me Tonight. Each song is woven into the dialogue, propelling plot and/or character development. (The popular "Lover" is interspersed with MacDonald's orders to her misbehaving horse.) But Mamoulian's exacting methods forced the film's production costs into the million dollar range, making it almost impossible for the film to turn a mid-Depression profit. As a consequence, Love Me Tonight's  innovations were ignored in Hollywood.

Rodgers and Hart worked on other ambitious film projects, with disappointing results. The Phantom President (1932) starred George M. Cohan in a dual role as a boring presidential candidate and the charismatic look alike who is paid to campaign in his place. Cohan's only screen musical, it was an unfocused political satire that fared poorly at the box office. Cohan's churlish off screen behavior and open disdain for Rodgers and Hart did not help.

For Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933) Rodgers & Hart provided an integrated score and several scenes of rhythmic lyrical dialogue. Al Jolson starred as a tramp who tries to reform himself in order to please the girl he loves. Film historians have long championed this picture, but most viewers today find it a noble experiment that failed -- preachy, overwritten, and miscast. The dynamic Jolson as a shiftless bum? Rhyming dialog was different, but it served no clear purpose in such a dour tale. From this point, Hollywood made meager use of Rodgers and Hart, assigning them to unimaginative projects. Their only hit song during this period was "Blue Moon," which studio executives had cut from its intended picture! The duo left Hollywood in 1935, realizing that their best creative options were back on Broadway.

By this time, another Broadway veteran was reshaping the musical film into a genre the Depression-era public could not get enough of. Think big, kaleidoscopic ensembles in settings that were naughty, gaudy, bawdy, sporty . . .