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With the exception of Columbia (which was too tight fisted to invest in many musicals)
every major Hollywood studio of the 1930s had its own particular style of musical, and its
own bevy of musical stars. It was almost as if each studio's executives felt their formula
was a sort of talisman against the embarrassing failures that had plagued the start of the
sound era. This did not leave much room for artistic innovation, but it resulted in several
decades of enjoyable (if predictable) cinematic entertainment.
Paramount
Bing Crosby's film
career began with featured roles in a series of Mack Sennett comedies. His pop
recordings and radio series took off in the early 1930s, and Crosby soon
became the most popular entertainer of the mid-20th Century. Paramount
Studios featured Bing in The Big
Broadcast (1932). After his winning performance in MGM's Going Hollywood (1933),
Paramount never loaned him out again -- Bing was too valuable.
Crosby's starring vehicles included 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. His warm baritone crooning popularized many
hit songs, including "Temptation," "Pennies From Heaven" and
"Blue Hawaii." Crosby's best screen work lay ahead -- you'll find more on him
in our coverage of the 1940s.
Goldwyn: Eddie Cantor
Independent producer Samuel Goldwyn
produced six screen musicals starring Broadway comedian
Eddie Cantor, who was more popular than
ever thanks to his ongoing radio series. The Goldwyn-Cantor films included Whoopee
(1930), Roman Scandals (1933), Kid Millions (1934) and
Strike Me Pink (1936). Cantor played nervous weaklings who somehow
outsmarted tough guys, offering such hit songs as "Makin' Whoopee,"
"My Baby Just Cares for Me" and "Keep Young and
Beautiful."
Cantor & Goldwyn's creative partnership would remain a high point in both
of their careers. But Cantor eased away from films in the 1940s, focusing on radio and
television projects. Goldwyn, the most successful independent producer of
Hollywood's so-called Golden Age, continued to make successful musicals into the 1950s.
Universal
When MGM dropped teenage soprano
Deanna Durbin, Universal Studios had the good
sense to put her under contact. They showcased this attractive, upbeat girl in musical
comedies that blended operatic selections with popular songs. Durbin's biggest 30s hits
included Three Smart Girls (1936), 100 Men and a Girl (1937), and Mad About
Music (1938). Her films were such major money makers that they saved Universal from
financial ruin during the worst of the Depression.
Fox: Temple, Faye & Henie
Shirley Temple was Hollywood's top box
office star of the late 1930s. When this irrepressible child stole Fox's
otherwise forgettable Stand Up And Cheer (1934), the studio realized
that they had a pint-sized goldmine on their hands. Temple's acting & singing
seemed unstudied, and her natural enthusiasm and charm were
irresistible. Loved by both children and adults, her likeness appeared
on lunch boxes, dolls and other collectibles. In 1935, Fox merged with 20th
Century Studios to form 20th Century Fox -- and this new studio, under
mogul Darryl F. Zanuk, found little Shirley Temple was its most bankable asset.
Although most of Temple's
films were not full-scale musicals, the songs she performed on screen
rank among the top hits of the decade, 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 hits, including The Little Colonel
(1935 - photo at left). It was the first interracial pairing
to succeed in commercial film, smashing a long-standing
Hollywood barrier.
Alice Faye was
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 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).
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. Many believed there was little of any audience for
such a project. Thanks to Disney's insistence on quality, Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs (1937) was as expensive to produce as most live-action films. However,
Snow White's visual beauty and genuine sense of wonder made it a sensation with all
age groups. Every number in its tuneful score ("Heigh-Ho," "Some Day My Prince
Will Come") was used to develop plot and/or characterization, and there was a refreshing
balance of humor, color and sentiment. Other studios would 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 blending
classical music and stunning cartoon imagery that 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 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, and they introduced 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 features until his death in 1966.
One more studio spent the 1930s building a peerless dynasty of musical
talent, so much so that they were considered the premier musical film
factory. For more on these legendary years at MGM . . .
MGM: The Lion's Roar
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had the most well-funded production system in the
business. It was the only studio that showed an annual profit and paid regular
dividends to shareholders throughout 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 4,000
employees, including many of the finest creative and performing talents
available.
When Thalberg decided to use a new version of The Merry Widow
(1934) to herald MGM's renewed interest in musicals, he spared no expense,
hiring Ernst Lubitsch to direct the already established screen team
Maurice Chevalier and
Jeanette MacDonald. The
acclaimed production amounted to a radical rethinking of Franz Lehar's 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!)
MGM executives varied their output, balancing expensive
prestige projects with lighter fare. Dancer
Eleanor Powell
starred in a series of first-rate MGM musical comedies, including Born to
Dance (1936), Rosalie (1937) and three 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
proved to be the most electrifying tap duet Hollywood ever filmed. Powell retired in
the 1940s to raise a family, and enjoyed a brief nightclub comeback in the 1950s.
Nelson and Jeanette:
"Wanting You"
Nelson
Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald have inspired several books, including this tribute
to their film careers. The cover shows them singing their best remembered duet,
"Indian Love Call" in Rose Marie (1936).
Jeanette MacDonald's most
memorable screen partnership began when MGM paired her with unknown baritone
Nelson Eddy in Naughty Marietta
(1935). This initiated a series of popular operettas
starring the pair. Their heartfelt rendition of "Indian Love Call"
("When I’m calling you-oo-oo-oo") in Rose Marie (1936)
cemented their place in popular culture. Some critics complained that MacDonald and Eddy were too
sweet, their acting limited and their singing less than perfect. None of this mattered
to the movie-going public. Eddy and MacDonald had a tangible on-screen chemistry,
and some experts now feel that the charges of sweetness were off the mark.
On the contrary, in a cycle of films where
physicality is repressed, the erotic often ends up all the more insistent
which just may account for the hypnotic pull these films continue to exert on so
many viewers. In Astaire-Rogers musicals, overt physical playfulness is
essential to courtship. In MacDonald-Eddy pictures, sex behaves differently.
Channeled through song, it becomes as disembodied as Indian spirits echoing
sweet love calls throughout the Canadian Rockies.
- Edward Baron Turk, Hollywood Diva: A
Biography of Jeanette MacDonald (Berkley: Univ. of California Press, 1998),
p. 174.
Eddy and MacDonald's screen hits included
Maytime (1937) and The New Moon (1940). The romantic
plots may seem corny today, but the two stars still shine through, giving a warm believability to emotions
that might otherwise have seemed ridiculous on the big screen. If you watch
Sweethearts (1938) with its witty Dorothy Parker script, you
can better understand why Nelson and Jeanette became such favorites. After co-starring for the
last time on screen in Rodgers and Hart’s I Married An Angel (1941), they
made occasional joint appearances on radio. For all their on-screen passion,
the two stars were just friends in real life. The suggestion that they had an
off-screen affair (promoted in the ludicrous book Sweethearts) has been dismissed
as nonsense by all responsible sources.
Both stars made films with other partners. MacDonald was memorable as a
nightclub singer who pursues Clark Gable and survives a
devastating earthquake in San Francisco (1936), and Eddy had more
than a little fun opposite Metropolitan Opera diva Rise Stevens in The Chocolate
Soldier (1941). However, the pairing of "Nelson and Jeanette" became
the stuff of show business legend, spawning fan clubs that would outlast both
stars by several decades.
More was going on at MGM -- enough to take the world all the way
from a barnyard to somewhere over the rainbow . . .
Next: Film 1940s