This book chronicles the birth and early years of an art form — the musical film. When sound came to film in the 1920s, musicals led the way as the testing ground upon which sound film proved itself — dauntlessly, intrepidly, sometimes artistically, often ineptly, through works and artists both familiar and forgotten: Al Jolson, the Oscar-winning Broadway Melody, director Ernst Lubitsch, the aberrant Golden Dawn, many more. After immense popularity, the musical market collapsed almost overnight as oversaturated audiences began to feel the effects of the Depression. There was nearly three year ... More

This book chronicles the birth and early years of an art form — the musical film. When sound came to film in the 1920s, musicals led the way as the testing ground upon which sound film proved itself — dauntlessly, intrepidly, sometimes artistically, often ineptly, through works and artists both familiar and forgotten: Al Jolson, the Oscar-winning Broadway Melody, director Ernst Lubitsch, the aberrant Golden Dawn, many more. After immense popularity, the musical market collapsed almost overnight as oversaturated audiences began to feel the effects of the Depression. There was nearly three years of down time, and then the genre returned, phoenix-like, with the triumphant 42nd Street. After seeming to contradict the national mood, musicals came to symbolize the country's recovery from crisis; in 1934, they assumed their final form with the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code. They would continue successfully for decades, but that early pioneer spirit and willingness to experiment and take chances were now mainly gone. Posterity has mainly misunderstood these films and underestimated their importance, yet their echoes and experiments resonate into the twenty-first century, and they form an intensely vital national heritage. Through meticulous research and analysis based in reception theory, this book reclaims the films and their creators, as well as the culture that embraced, rejected, then reconnected with them.