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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 . . .

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