|
Every major Hollywood studio of the 1930s developed its own particular style of
screen musical, and its own bevy of resident musical stars. It was almost as if each
studio's executives felt their formula was a sort of talisman guaranteeing success.
This did not leave room for frequent artistic innovation, but it resulted in a decade
packed with enjoyable (if predictable) cinematic entertainment. Hollywood
produced more feature length musicals during the 1930s than during any other
decade. We already covered Busby Berkeley's
Warner Brothers series and RKO's Astaire-Rogers
films, Here is what the other studios were up to during these musical-packed
years.
Paramount: Bing
Crosby & Mae West
Founded in 1912 as Famous Players, Paramount was the oldest major American film
studio. Under Adolph Zukor, who had a hand in managing the studio
until his death in 1976, the stress was on great stars. The most successful
studio of the silent era, it was bankrupt by 1933, yet managed to survive in
large part thanks to three extremely popular stars. One was Marlene Dietrich,
discussed elsewhere in these essays.
Paramount also created a series of wholesome musicals designed to showcase pop singer
Bing Crosby. His film
career began with featured roles in a series of minor Mack Sennett comedies.
After Crosby's recordings and radio series took off in the early 1930s, Paramount featured
him in The Big Broadcast (1932). When he delivered a winning performance in MGM's
Going Hollywood (1933), Paramount decided never to loan him out again. Crosby's
Paramount vehicles included a mixture of full musicals
and comedies with a few interpolated songs. He earned Paramount millions with
such titles as Mississippi (1935), Pennies From Heaven (1936) and Sing You
Sinners (1938). Often mediocre, these films were popular thanks to Crosby's
folksy, laid back screen persona, and his warm baritone crooning of many
hit songs, including "Temptation," "Pennies From Heaven" and
"Blue Hawaii." Crosby's best screen work lay ahead, so you'll find more on him
in our coverage of 1940s screen musicals.
Mae West's films were not
full-blown musicals, but her daring comedies usually featured the curvaceous
comedienne crooning a suggestive song or two. Trained in vaudeville, West had
achieved notoriety when her racy Broadway play Sex brought her a stint in jail.
As a screenwriter, she continued to push accepted limits. In She Done Him Wrong
(1933), West played an 1890s Bowery saloon singer, and dared to sing "Frankie and
Johnny," a well-known bawdy period ballad about a prostitute who murders her cheating
male lover. Despite a bowlderized lyric, the infamous song and West's racy
wisecracks ("It was a toss up between whether I go in for diamonds or sing
in the choir . . . the choir lost.") helped make the film a massive hit,
and inspired the outcry which led to the enforcement of a restrictive Production
Code. Although West was the most highly salaried women in the world in
1935, the code became so restrictive that she stopped making
films in 1943, but her nine comedies with music became lasting cult favorites.
Goldwyn: Eddie Cantor
By the time Samuel Goldwyn's studio merged with two others to create
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he had already been tossed out by ruthless partners.
Undaunted, he became Hollywood's first major independent producer. Celebrated
for unintentionally hilarious misstatements, ("I don't think anybody should
write his autobiography until after he's dead"), Goldwyn saw himself as Hollywood's equivalent of Broadway's Florenz
Ziegfeld, going so far as to produce six screen musicals starring Follies
comedian Eddie Cantor. The highly
profitable series of Goldwyn-Cantor screen musicals included Whoopee
(1930), The Kid From Spain (1932), Roman Scandals (1933), Kid Millions
(1934) and Strike Me Pink (1936). In accordance with the Hollywood star system,
these films followed a set plot formula, with Cantor playing nervous weaklings who somehow
outsmart tough bad guys, along the way offering such hit songs as "Makin' Whoopee,"
"My Baby Just Cares for Me" and "Keep Young and Beautiful."
This series gave Broadway choreographer Busy Berkeley
his first opportunity to work on film, developing the techniques he would later
use at Warner Brothers.
Cantor & Goldwyn's creative partnership was a high point in both
of their careers, but Cantor eased away from films in the 1940s, working
primarily on radio. Goldwyn continued to make successful films into the 1950s, including a series of Cantor-esque musical comedies starring Danny Kaye
-- more on this in the pages ahead.
Universal
Carl Laemmle founded Universal Studios in 1915, then passed it on to
his son Carl Jr. in 1928. Dismissed by some as a "family" business,
Universal is best remembered for making Hollywood's most stylish horror
films, beginning with Lon Chaney's silent version of Phantom of the Opera
(1925). British director James Whale, who helmed the stylish Universal versions
of Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) gave
the studio a landmark musical hit when he directed the finest screen version
of the stage hit Show Boat (1936). Since Universal had no set
formula for musical projects, Whale was granted a relatively free hand. He opted
to treat a classic with extraordinary respect. Commissioning several new songs
from Kern & Hammerstein, he left much of their stage score and the basic
plot intact. Original Broadway stars Helen Morgan and Charles Winninger
repeated their acclaimed performances, and Paul Robeson was on hand to sing the
definitive "Ol' Man River." Whale filmed the complex story with
simple but frequently striking visual style. A critical success, Show Boat was
a one-shot prestige project -- as a rule, Universal preferred to focus on cheaper,
less work-intensive projects. The gifted Whale never got to film another musical.
When MGM dropped unknown teenage Canadian soprano
Deanna Durbin, Universal had the good
sense to put this attractive, upbeat girl under contact and showcase her in a
series of budget-conscious musical comedies that blended operatic selections with
popular songs. Durbin's Three Smart Girls (1936), 100 Men and a Girl
(1937), and Mad About Music (1938) proved so profitable that she was credited with saving
cash-strapped Universal from financial ruin. A dedicated professional,
Durbin would remain the studio's top musical star through the the mid-1940s. (There
is more on her in the pages ahead).
20th Century Fox: Three Blondes
In 1934, the long-lived Fox Studio merged with the newly formed 20th Century
Pictures to form Twentieth Century Fox, and this new studio, under
mogul Darryl F. Zanuk, had the luck to stumble upon the multi-talented tot Shirley Temple. When
this irrepressible six year-old with blonde curls stole Fox's
otherwise forgettable musical Stand Up And Cheer (1934), studio
executives realized
that they had a pint-sized goldmine on their hands. Temple's acting & singing
seemed unstudied, and her on screen enthusiasm was irresistible. Loved by both
children and adults, her likeness soon appeared on lunch boxes, dolls and other collectibles.
Most of Temple's films were not full-scale musicals, and almost all were done
on the cheap, but many of the interpolated songs she
performed became top hits, including "Animal
Crackers in My Soup" and "On The Good Ship Lollipop."
Temple also gave the world the memorable image of herself and
Bill "Bojangles" Robinson
tap dancing in several films, including The Little Colonel
(1935). This was the first interracial pairing
to succeed in commercial film, effectively smashing a long-standing
Hollywood color barrier. Temple's popularity faded as she grew older, but she
has remained a lasting icon of Depression-era optimism.
Other Fox musicals from this period tended to follow a remarkably limited
formula, putting attractive blonde leading ladies in distinctively American backstage love
stories. Alice Faye became Fox's top adult musical star
of the 1930s. This throaty-voiced blonde co-starred with Temple in Poor Little Rich Girl
(1936), and went on to delight audiences in a series of showbiz-themed romances, including
Sing Baby Sing (1936), In Old Chicago (1938), Alexander's Ragtime Band
(1938) and Rose of Washington Square (1939). Faye's reign would continue into the
1940s – you can find more on her in the essays covering
that decade.
Fox created a less likely musical star when it
featured Olympic figure skating champion Sonja Henie in
Once in a Million (1936). This shapely blonde could not act or sing, but her
natural enthusiasm and skating ability
delighted moviegoers. Placing the music and dramatics in the hands
of stellar co-stars, Henie headlined a series of highly profitable screen
musicals through the late 1940s. She also produced a series of popular
skating spectacles that played in Broadway's 3,000 seat Center Theatre
(the same space that now serves as Rockefeller Center's parking garage). Rarely
seen today and often dismissed by film scholars, Henie's skating musicals were a
popular Hollywood staple for more than a decade -- a noteworthy accomplishment
in any era.
In a departure, Fox produced Music in the Air (1934),
a surprisingly effective screen version of the Kern-Hammerstein stage hit.
Former silent star Gloria Swanson got to show off a handsome soprano voice and
deft comic timing playing an egotistical theatre diva, but with the Great
Depression at its height, Fox watched its budgets closely and made no attempt to
follow up on this unusual charmer.
Disney
Walt Disney had been turning out animated
short subjects for years, but industry experts scoffed at his plans for a
full-length animated musical, questioning whether there was much of an audience for
such a project. MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer refused to distribute the film. Thanks to Disney's insistence on quality, Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs (1937) was as expensive to produce as a live-action film. However,
Snow White's visual beauty, tuneful score and genuine sense of wonder made
it a sensation with all age groups. Every number (including the hits "Heigh-Ho"
and "Some Day My Prince Will Come") was used to develop plot and character, and
there was a polished balance of humor, color and sentiment. Other studios would occasionally
dabble in feature-length animation, but none matched the Disney team's accomplishment.
Disney seemed to overplay his
hand with Fantasia (1940), an animated revue that blended
classical music and stunning cartoon imagery and was initially
rejected by the movie-going public. Over the years, Fantasia
developed a cult following and is now recognized as a unique
achievement. But the film's initial failure effected the future course of Disney's
output. As much a businessman as he was an artist, he thereafter stuck to
straightforward animated book musicals.
Almost all of these films became classics, introducing such Academy
Award-winning songs as "When You Wish Upon a Star" (Pinocchio - 1940)
and "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" (Song of the South - 1946).
Disney remained the pre-eminent creator of animated musical features until his death in 1966.
MGM: The Lion's Roar
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the only studio that showed an annual profit and paid regular
dividends to shareholders through every year of the Great Depression. More than any other studio,
MGM used audience reaction from sneak previews to re-shape and re-shoot its films. Studio
head Louis B. Mayer (a former scrap metal dealer) blended a tyrannical
managerial style with a shrewd eye for talent. His insistence on family
entertainment and personal passion for great singers made musicals a big part of MGM's
annual output. Mayer and production head Irving Thalberg managed over 6,000
employees in more than 150 professions, including many of the finest creative and performing talents
available.
Inspired by Busby Berkeley's success at Warner Brothers,
Thalberg decided to film a lavish sound version of The Merry Widow
(1934). Sparing no expense, he hired Ernst Lubitsch to direct the already established screen team
Maurice Chevalier and
Jeanette MacDonald. The production amounted to a radical rethinking of Franz Lehar's
beloved stage operetta, filled with the sexy visual wit that was Lubitsch's trademark,
but all calibrated to appease the dreaded Production Code. New lyrics by no
less than Lorenz Hart certainly helped, and the film opened to critical raves.
MGM placed creative control in the hands of its producers, all
of whom had to answer to Louis B. Mayer. Thanks to this centralized system ,
Mayer carefully varied the studio's output, balancing expensive
prestige projects with lower-cost fare. For example, dancer
Eleanor Powell
was first showcased in the relatively
inexpensive Born to Dance (1936), followed by more ambitious projects like
Rosalie (1937) and three profitable installments of the Broadway Melody
series. Powell's natural charm and sensational tap technique made her limitations as
a singer and actress irrelevant. Her "Begin the Beguine" with
Fred Astaire in Broadway Melody of 1940
may be the best tap duet Hollywood ever filmed. Powell retired in
the 1940s to marry and raise a family, making a brief nightclub comeback in the 1950s.
More was going on at MGM -- enough to take the world all the way
from the Canadian Rockies to somewhere over the rainbow . . .
Next: Film 1940s
|