The heyday of American movie musicals is over, but as Sweeney Todd, Mamma Mia! and High School Musical show, there's life in the old genre yet. Donald Clarkereports.
IN 1965 the movie musical enjoyed one of its greatest triumphs. On March 2nd, The Sound of Music ,that blend of totalitarian chic and Alpine whimsy, began an assault on the world's cinemas that ended with the film being recognised - for a few years - as the most financially lucrative picture of all time.
The soundtrack album, though enormously successful, didn't quite manage to become the biggest selling LP in America that year, but that was only because another Julie Andrews entertainment, Mary Poppins, had also spawned a spin-off album. Indeed, in every year of the decade to that point, a stage or movie musical - West Side Story, Camelot, Hello, Dolly! all figured - had generated America's biggest selling record.
When The Sound of Music picked up the Oscar for best picture a year later, it seemed as if the movie musical's place was secure for the foreseeable future. "Tomorrow belongs to us," the tunesmiths may have warbled. "Everything's coming up roses," others might have added. "Some other optimistic tune from a musical," further hubristic geniuses probably crowed.
It was not to be. In retrospect, the happy days of 1965 seem, for the movie musical, analogous to the famously glorious summer of 1914: one last hurrah before oblivion. Oh, what an unlovely war it was. Pumped up on the public's enthusiasm for Julie and her cavorting novices, Hollywood launched a series of horrendously expensive, eye-wateringly unsuccessful musical spectaculars: Eastwood and Marvin growled through Paint Your Wagon, Streisand coasted in Hello, Dolly!, Andrews blotted her own copybook with the interminable Star!And then there was Oh! What a Lovely War. (Oh, what a dizzying excess of exclamation points!)
Well, not quite oblivion. Oliver! did win the Oscar for best film in 1968. Grease was a huge hit in the late 1970s. Moulin Rouge did good business in 2001. But that class of traditional musical, in which characters sing their way through daily life, never again secured a steady foothold in the mainstream.
Every December some extravagant version of a Broadway smash - Dreamgirls, Phantom of the Opera, Evita, and now Sweeney Todd - is wheeled hopefully before audiences and the Motion Picture Academy. Some succeed. More fail. But the modern public continues to remain suspicious of the form.
Observe how Warner Brothers has marketed Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Tim Burton's deliciously bloodthirsty adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim show concerning a murderous hairdresser has received glowing reviews and and, last week, picked up three Oscar nominations.
Yet, despite the confidence of the critics, the studio is conspicuously cautious about letting the public know that the characters sing more often than they talk. The television trailer features plenty of fog and much cackling, but neither Johnny Depp nor Helena Bonham Carter is allowed more than a semi-quaver of warbling. It seems the distributors have almost as little confidence in musicals as they do in subtitled films.
The 1960s did for the musical in much the same way the decade did for the western. As the counterculture belatedly took hold of Hollywood, two of the industry's staples were tidied away into a box marked "special interest" and put on the highest shelf in the second most remote broom cupboard.
Still, the comparative decline of the musical is, in some ways, still more baffling than the fall of the cowboy picture. Whereas the western involves a particular type of story - a precise locale, an era, a singular cast of characters - the musical defines a way of telling a story. There are musicals about love, musicals about war, musicals about Nazis, musicals about anti-Semitism and musicals about gangsters.
Consider the sequence in The Simpsonswhen Smithers, Mr Burns's tireless lickspittle, heads off to New Mexico to help stage a camp extravaganza concerning Barbie dolls. "A show about a doll?" the tyrant laughs. "Hah! Why not do a musical about the common cat or the king of Siam? Give it up, Smithers."
The very first talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927), was a kind of musical, and the first sound film to win the best picture Oscar, The Broadway Melody (1929), was firmly within the genre. The pioneers of talking cinema surely believed the form to be as immovably resilient as the comedy or the thriller.
Social histories of the 1930s never tire of explaining how the mighty extravaganzas of Busby Berkeley (such films as Gold Diggers of 1933 and 42nd Street) set out to cheer the jobless during the bleakest years of the Great Depression. Few artists in any field have achieved the transcendent grace displayed by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in classics such as Top Hat and Swing Time.
The high point of the American film musical was, however, not reached until the 1940s and 1950s, when Arthur Freed and his colleagues at MGM began dismantling the form and putting it back together in startling fashion. Directors such as Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen recognised that imaginative use of camera and visual effects could deliver an experience radically different from that experienced in the theatre. The supreme manifestation of their confidence arrived in 1952 with Donen's timeless Singin' in the Rain.
It is worth noting that, though the musical may have declined in popularity with mainstream audiences, the critical reputation of Singin' in the Rain has grown dramatically over the decades. The fact that the picture, set in Hollywood during the early days of the talkies, finds the dream factory examining its own entrails may have endeared it to snooty French post-structuralists. But it is the sheer exuberance of the action and the dazzling boldness of the colours that has secured the film's place in audiences' affections.
No amount of Marxist waffle can distract from the invention displayed by Gene Kelly - a Rolling Stone to Astaire's Beatle - as he splashed and gambolled his way about damp streets in the film's key number. This is pure cinema: the narrative is temporarily forgotten as the viewer revels in the joys of uninhibited technique.
Freed, originally a brilliant lyricist, also produced such masterpieces as Easter Parade, An American in Paris and The Band Wagon. By the mid 1950s, the American film musical was firmly established as one of the nation's great artistic forms.
Yet, even before the genre's sad withering a decade later, it had become clear that a loss of nerve was setting in. With the exception of Walt Disney's Mary Poppins (surely sui generis) all the big hit American musicals of the early 1960s were based on grand stage shows. Jacques Demy, stubbornly French, may have felt able to celebrate the Freed Unit in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, but serious American directors, increasingly in thrall to leather-jacketed method actors, were coming to regard the musical as a bourgeois indulgence.
One might reasonably point out that, in the decades since, clever variations on the musical have made money and won critical acclaim. Who doesn't love This Is Spinal Tap? Walk the Line was a smash.
Last year we adored John Carney's Onceand Todd Haynes's I'm Not There. But none of those pictures followed the classic custom whereby dialogue is communicated through song. Many recent musicals that have observed this convention - the exhausting Moulin Rouge, the moronic Across the Universe - are so weighed down by irony they can barely stand straight.
At some point in the paisley years, audiences appeared to lose the willingness to suspend belief when otherwise sane characters burst into song at moments of high emotion. Millions are still prepared to accept that Hobbits could rule the earth, that newspaper photographers might take on the abilities of a spider and that Virginia Woolf could have looked like an Australian with a fake nose the size of Portugal. But the odd warble is still regarded as a distortion too far. Why else would the commercials for Sweeney Toddbe so coy about its true nature?
For all that, the musical refuses to lie down and die. For decades, animated films, both traditional and digital, have continued to find time for song-and-dance numbers. One of the most popular episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayerwas a pocket musical. And, over the past two years, largely unnoticed by respectable commentators, a Disney musical franchise has begun worming its way into teenage bedrooms.
Since its release in 2006, High School Musical, a shiny TV movie, has gone on to gather a colossal following, spawn two sequels and make a star of some child named Zac Efron. Last year, Efron helped propel the highly entertaining musical Hairspray to the top of the box-office charts.
And what's this? The biggest-selling album in the US in 2006 was, it seems, the soundtrack to High School Musical. Hey, this is where we came in. "Something's coming, something good," the music men croon. And so on.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opens today.
Thoroughly modern musicals
Moulin Rouge (2001) Luhrman lays it on
Chicago (2002) Broadway smash remade for cinema
Walk the Line (2005) Cashing in on Johnny
Dreamgirls (2006) Another Broadway smash remade
Once (2006) Adorable Irish Oscar nominee
Hairspray (2007) Travolta does a turn
I'm Not There (2007) The sound of Dylan
Across the Universe (2007) Moronic, ironic Beatles tribute
Mamma Mia! (2008) Released this year
High School Musical 3 Currently shooting
