(All images below are thumbnails – click on them to see larger versions.)

With the exception of Columbia Studios (which began the 1930s as a small studio that was initially unable to invest in musicals) 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.

Paramount
As the 1930s progressed, Paramount's top directors focused primarily on non-musical projects. Soon, all of this studio's major musicals were designed to showcase a pop singer who turned out to be one of the most well-liked and long-lasting celebrities of the 20th century. Bing Crosby's film career began with featured roles in a series of minor Mack Sennett comedies. After his recordings and radio series took off in the early 1930s, Paramount featured him in The Big Broadcast (1932). After he delivered a winning performance in MGM's Going Hollywood (1933), Paramount decided never to loan him out again. Bing was simply too valuable.

Crosby's starring 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 -- you'll find more on him in our coverage of 1940s screen musicals.

Goldwyn: Eddie Cantor
Independent producer Samuel Goldwyn liked to think of himself as Hollywood's equivalent of Broadway's Florenz Ziegfeld. He went so far as to produce six screen musicals starring Ziegfeld Follies comedian Eddie Cantor, who national popularity was fed by his ongoing radio series. The Goldwyn-Cantor 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 guys, along the way offering such hit songs as "Makin' Whoopee," "My Baby Just Cares for Me" and "Keep Young and Beautiful." It was also this series that 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 would remain a high point in both of their careers. But Cantor eased away from films in the 1940s, focusing on radio and early television. Goldwyn, the most successful independent producer of Hollywood's so-called Golden Age, continued to make successful musicals into the 1940s, 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) were such money-makers that she has been widely credited with saving 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, found multi-talented tot Shirley Temple was its most bankable asset. When this irrepressible six year-old blonde stole Fox's otherwise forgettable musical Stand Up And Cheer (1934), the new studio realized that they had a pint-sized goldmine on their hands. Temple's acting & singing seemed unstudied, and her natural enthusiasm was irresistible on screen. Loved by both children and adults, her likeness 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 - photo at left). This was the first interracial pairing to succeed in commercial film, effectively smashing a long-standing Hollywood color barrier.

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. 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.

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 film 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 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!)

MGM executives carefully varied the studio's output, balancing expensive prestige projects with lower-cost fare. Dancer Eleanor Powell starred in a series of first-rate MGM musical comedies, including the relatively inexpensive Born to Dance (1936), follwed by more ambitious projects like 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 may be the most acclaimed tap duet Hollywood ever filmed. Powell retired in the 1940s to marry and raise a family, making 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 that tangible but indefinable on-screen quality called "chemistry," and some films historians now suggest that the longstanding charges of too much sweetness are 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 adaptations of the stage hits Maytime (1937) and The New Moon (1940). The romantic plots may seem corny today, but the two stars always shine through, giving a warm believability to emotions that could easily have seemed ridiculous on the big screen. If you watch Sweethearts (1938) with its witty Dorothy Parker script, you can understand why Nelson and Jeanette became such favorites. After co-starring on screen for the last time in Rodgers and Hart’s I Married An Angel (1941), the team 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 justifiably 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 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