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In the “Golden Age” of the studio system, musicals were popular fare. Stars were defined as much by their singing and dancing skills as they were by their acting skills, screen presence, and good looks. Though music has been a part of movies almost as long as sound itself, it took time before the movie musical developed into a mature genre. Perhaps the final step in the musical genres coming of age came with the advent of the integrated musical in which songs are linked to both narrative and character development, and in many cases function as dialogue. Singing in the Rain is an excellent example of an integrated musical. As we shall see sound motion pictures develops concurrently with the movie musical genre. When the movies learned to talk, as it were, in the late 1920s, singing wasn’t far behind. Indeed, the first recognized sound motion picture was nothing more than a silent movie with songs. Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer, featuring the then popular singing star Al Jolson as the son of a Jewish cantor who wishes to be a “jazz singer,” contained inter-titles for dialogue but when the singer sings he sings much to the apparent delight of 1920s movie audiences heretofore accustomed to silent offerings. This film was followed by the all-talking Lights of New York, and soon after motions pictures were proudly proclaiming themselves to be “all-talking” and in many instances “all-talking and all-singing” extravaganzas. To say that The Jazz Singer led the way for musicals is questionable since, as noted above, the film in effect was nothing more than a means by which Jolson relayed his unique music hall talents. But music, nonetheless, was the primary marketing tool for much of the sound films that followed. Much like the early melodramas, particularly those of D.W. Griffith, whose impetus for Broken Blossoms (1919) was the enormously successful melodrama The Chink and the Child (sic) by Thomas Burke, the new sound films merely appropriated the musical revues and operettas so popular in the late 1920s. Charles Riesner’s Hollywood Revue of 1929, produced by MGM, for example, was nothing more than a filmed stage revue featuring top talent of the era. Vaudeville comedian Jack Benny and silent movie idol Conrad Nagel combined to introduce the musical routines as well as the burlesque and vaudeville comedy routines, and the whole film was photographed as if it were stage play with each act opening and closing with a curtain. The famous Warner Brothers musicals of the early 1930s featuring elaborate choreography by Busby Berkeley followed such a form by restricting the musical numbers to stage-bound productions. Essentially, the Berkeley narratives were centered on performance; in this sense, characters were either show business types or amateurs who were eager to perform for the sheer pleasure of performing. In Berkeley’s own Gold Diggers of 1935, for example, dowager Mathilda Prentiss (Alice Brady) sponsors a charitable stage show to be directed by the supercilious Nicolai Nicoleff (Adolphe Menjou). In between what is otherwise a romantic comedy, musical numbers are presented during rehearsals of the benefit show with the film’s grand finale, the extravagant “Lullaby of Broadway” sequence, presented during the play’s actual performance. What is so interesting about the above examples is that films calling themselves musicals did in fact build on the form of Crossland’s Jazz Singer the episodic nature of the numbers notwithstanding. The musical numbers were nothing more than filmed acts, as it were, consisting of very distinct and separate numbers, a detail referenced in the “Beautiful Girl” number in Singin’ in the Rain which, at one point, even mimics Berkeley’s style itself (the high angle “kaleidoscopic” finale).
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