There’s a reason for “gotta sing, gotta dance.”
Some emotions are just better put to song and with steps.
That feeling has guided Hollywood for more than 90 years. And it’s the inspiration behind “The Movie Musical!” by Jeanine Basinger, an exhaustive history of the toe-tapping, finger-snapping, hip-swiveling genre.
The best musicals don’t reflect reality, she writes. Instead, they create a different reality, a world where Fred Astaire can defy gravity by dancing on the ceiling, or where Gene Kelly is drenched but beaming while dancing in the rain.
Before movies could sing, though, they had to learn to talk. It wasn’t until 1927 that engineers devised a way to synch sound and picture smoothly. Then, in “The Jazz Singer,” Al Jolson opened his mouth, and out came “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face.”
The song itself wasn’t memorable, but his cocky ad-lib afterward was. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet…” he promised the audience. He then launched into his big hit, “Toot Toot Tootsie, Goodbye.”
Sound was here at last, and the movies would never be the same.
The talking picture was immediately followed by the “all-singing, all-dancing” picture, as studios rushed to exploit the new technology. But early musicals were crude. Clumsy equipment kept cameras, and actors, rooted in place. After 30 years, Hollywood seemed to have forgotten how to tell a story.
Two visionaries, with opposite approaches, soon helped them remember.
At Warner Bros., director Busby Berkeley took backstage stories like “Gold Diggers of 1933,” and made them anything but static. Overhead crane shots turned chorus girls into living kaleidoscopes; fast-moving dollies zoomed through dancers’ legs. Berkeley taunted the censors, too, putting actresses in barely-there lingerie, or posing them with giant, suggestively swaying bananas. “I gave ’em a show,” he bragged. In Berkeley’s frenetic films, the director was in charge, the camera was the star, and it never stopped moving.
At RKO, Fred Astaire had a different point of view. If Berkeley was “42nd Street,” Astaire was “Flying Down to Rio.” If Berkeley’s movies were a blur of motion, Astaire’s were specific shots, focusing on the dance.
“Either the camera will dance, or I will,” Astaire proclaimed. Leaving the rom-com elements to his directors, he assumed complete control of musical numbers, insisting the cinematographer keep the dancers’ entire bodies in the frame. Whether a solo piece or a number with Ginger Rogers, every step, every gesture was carefully captured.
It was a style that didn’t allow for imperfection. Berkeley’s fast editing could make even a lead-footed hoofer look accomplished. Astaire, however, had nothing to hide behind. Why would he bother?
“He is the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times,” ballet legend George Balanchine later raved. “You see a little bit of Astaire in everybody’s dancing.”
But dance cannot exist without balance. As soon as Astaire took the movie musical in one direction, it was inevitable someone would eventually reverse course. Enter, Gene Kelly.
It wasn’t that Kelly was crude. He could dance as gracefully as Astaire and had a deep appreciation of ballet. But he worried the art was getting snobbish. As a macho kid from Pittsburgh, he hated that some people saw dancers as “sissies.” Instead of tuxedos and top hats, he performed in sweatshirts and penny loafers. Instead of playing society swells, he played sailors.
And with “An American in Paris” and “Singin’ in the Rain,” Kelly created first one of Hollywood’s most romantic musicals and then one of its most beloved.
As world-famous dancers, both Astaire and Kelly had to stay in top physical shape to perform. Others didn’t need to be as disciplined and fell prey to temptation. Berkeley’s alcoholism not only wrecked his career but took two lives when he caused a fatal car crash.
Some musical artists were destroyed by their studios, regularly fed amphetamines to stay slim and energetic, then given sleeping pills at night to calm down.
Mickey Rooney survived, barely. Judy Garland wasn’t as fortunate.
Garland “grew up on film and the American public had the opportunity to watch it happen,” Basinger writes. “When she became a woman who seemed to carry genuine sadness inside her, audiences bonded to her for life. Most of her musicals contain a moment when she, alone in the frame, sings a sad or melancholy or moody song, seemingly to herself in a contemplative moment, but really directly to the viewer. This ‘Garland moment’ was her signature.”
But Garland’s greatest power, her vulnerability, was also her weakness. By the time of “Summer Stock,” with Kelly, she was already cracking under the pressure of studio demands and addictive pills. Her finest moment in “A Star Is Born,” singing “The Man That Got Away,” took many different takes and changes of costumes to get right. Although Garland could still effortlessly connect with audiences, getting through the day was a struggle. She died in 1969, at only 47.
Elvis Presley was exploited, too, in different ways. With his jet-black hair and icy blue eyes, he was a natural movie star. Add his singing and charisma, and musicals seemed like a natural fit. He could move, too — he’s electrifying in “Jailhouse Rock.”
His manager, Col. Tom Parker, determined to squeeze out every nickel, had Presley make as many as three formulaic films a year. The quality declined quickly, and Presley’s health followed. He was 42 when he died in 1977.
Still, both stars outlived the old studio system – and, it seemed, the classic Hollywood musical. Having lost the knack for original films, desperate studios turned to Broadway hits. Few transferred well to screen. For every “West Side Story” and "Sound of Music," there seemed to be three times as many flops – “Paint Your Wagon,” “Camelot,” “Finian’s Rainbow,” “Hello, Dolly!” “Man of La Mancha,” “Mame.”
Was the musical finally dead?
Looking at it today, Basinger is concerned about its health. Although the late Bob Fosse reinvigorated the genre briefly with daring hits like “Cabaret” and, especially, “All That Jazz,” no one has emerged to take his place.
Modern musicals like “La La Land” reveal the scarcity of real song-and-dance talent among millennials. Searching for Hollywood’s last, genuinely gifted musical star, Basinger has to go back to John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever” and “Grease.”
Yet the old-fashioned Hollywood musical still survives, she says, and in perhaps the most surprising place – children’s cartoons. Walt Disney inherently understood the power of music, and today his studio remains the most dependable source of original song-and-dance romances.
Disney offers a cycle of life, specific to its properties. A musical like “Aladdin” is first a cartoon, then becomes a stage production, then turns into a live-action film. Spin-offs and sequels keep the franchises going, while new projects, like “Coco,” broaden the audience.
Of course, smart as these movies are, they remain kids’ films. Belle and the Beast may dance together prettily, but they’re not Ginger and Fred. The songs they warble, while lovely, are a long way from Gershwin and Porter.
Still, these movies do what all great musicals should. They deliver us into another world. And they allow us to forget, even if only for a moment, the one we’re in.