Merging Genres in the 1940s: The Musical and the Dramatic Feature Film
Author(s): David Neumeyer
Source: American Music, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 122-132
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3592971
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DAVID NEUMEYER
Merging
The
Genres
Musical
in
and
Feature
the
the
1940s:
Dramatic
Film
After the introduction of sound to feature films in 1927, it took nearly a decade before music scoring practices settled down.1 One result
of this process was that, by the end of the 1930s, scoring a film was
strongly codified by genre. Technological limitations of recording and
reproduction dictated that most sound films employing music in any
is, feature-length
significant way before 1932 were musicals-that
films belonging to the romantic comedy genre but highlighting (not
merely including) musical performances. Famous early examples are
BroadwayMelody (1929), Applause (1929), and Forty-SecondStreet (1932).
The reciprocal influence of radio, a commercial medium that was
growing rapidly at the same time, meant that some musicals were
loosely structured in the form of variety shows (such as RKO Studio's
BroadwayMelody series, which ran in yearly installments throughout
the 1930s, beginning in 1932).
Other feature-length films varied in their uses of music. Filmed
stage plays used little music, in general, because the soundtrack was
strongly dominated by dialogue, which remained difficult to merge
with music, despite the introduction of effective postproduction
sound mixing in 1932. Indeed, one sign of a high-budget production
throughout this period was the underscoring of dialogue (an example from late in the decade is Gone with the Wind [1939], which contains more than two hours of dialogue underscoring by Max Steiner,
who was the decade's virtuoso of this technique). Dramatic feature
films-that is, those that tell a serious or melodramatic story, often
David Neumeyer is Leslie WaggenerProfessorin the College of Fine Arts and
Professor of Music Theory in the School of Music, the University of Texas at
Austin. He recently published an essay on Psychoin Music in the Mirror,ed.
Thomas Mathiesen and Andreas Giger (University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
American Music
Spring 2004
? 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
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Neumeyer
selves cut off by Ugarte's arrest. For nearly seventeen of these thirty
minutes, we hear diegetic music (that is, music that has a physical
source in the world depicted by the film), sometimes onscreen but more
often off, sometimes foregrounded but more often in the background.
An additional two minutes, forty seconds of nondiegetic (background)
orchestral music plays over the final scene, Rick's recognition of Ilsa
and the subsequent, strained conversation which, not surprisingly,
puzzles both Laszlo and Claude Rains's Vichy Captain Renault.
The performance of "Knock on Wood" lasts a mere seventy seconds;
it consists of three iterations of an antecedent-consequent phrase pair
(that is, it is not a conventional thirty-two-bar AABA chorus).3 "Led
by Sam, most everybody sings but Rick and Ferrari.... [T]he crowd
sings 'we're unlucky'; and Sam tells them to 'knock on wood'; the
jaunty music enables them [all] to make light of their troubles."4 Immediately afterwards, the diegetic music drops into its typically backgrounded mode for the first conversation between Rick and Sidney
Greenstreet's Ferrari.
Now consider the odd coincidence that Casablanca and the classic
musical Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) have very nearly the same total
duration of diegetic music. In Meet Me in St. Louis, the total is 25:10;
in Casablanca,just twenty-five seconds less. One might even suggest
that the impact on Casablancais greater, since the movie's running time
is only 102 minutes, as against the 119 minutes of Meet Me in St. Louis. Since the boundaries between diegetic and nondiegetic music are
frequently contested in classical Hollywood sound film,5 it would seem
likely that these numbers cover over ambiguities: music behind the
conversations between Bogart and Sidney Greenstreet's character in
the latter's Blue Parrot cafe is only tenuously diegetic, for example.
Furthermore, since I took as my benchmark the plausible diegetic performance-not necessarily merely onscreen performance-one might
complain that my counts are skewed against the musical's typically
unstable mixtures of the diegetic and nondiegetic (an instability almost
routinely in evidence in Meet Me in St. Louis) in favor of the aurally
plausible offscreen nightclub music that murmurs behind much of the
first cafe scene in Casablanca.But, in fact, all the performances of Meet
Me in St. Louis are included in the counts above, from the two iterations of the title song itself-and "The Boy Next Door," "Skip to My
Lou," the "Trolley Song," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"-to the diegetically implausible orchestral music for the Christmas dance that opens the "Winter" division.
Before taking up the question of genre to which this near match of
durations is relevant, let's scrutinize a segment from Meet Me in St. Louis: the first of three major Halloween sequences which together comprise the film's "Autumn" division. The first sequence concerns the
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Neumeyer
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Hollywood labors to identify its pictures with multiple genres, in order to benefit from the increased interest that this strategy inspires
in diverse demographic groups." Thus, it becomes clear that "Hollywood's stock-in-trade is... not the classical practice of generic purity.... [B]y definition, genres are broad public categories shared across
the entire industry."12As a consequence, it is in the economic interest
of each studio to create cycles of films that are uniquely identified
with it. Cycles arise by adding a twist to existing genres, but genres
arise when cycles become industrywide conventions.13 Altman demonstrates the surprisingly consistent historical process in Hollywood
by which genres (characterized by nouns) spawn cycles (as the nouns
acquire adjectival qualifiers), and then the adjectives become nouns
when the cycles are redefined as genres. For example, "comedy" that
emphasized music became "musical comedy," which was shortened
to the term that, sometime between 1930 and 1933, came to represent
a genre, "musical."14
It is difficult to look back at Casablanca and Meet Me in St. Louis in
terms of a history of cycles and genres because both films have acquired permanent status as, respectively, the epitome of the World
War II (nonbattlefield) melodrama and the progenitor of the MGM
"Freed Unit" integrated musical. (Indeed, Altman observes that the
most hardened genre categories are those created after the fact by critics and scholars.)15 If we can begin to break down this status, however, it seems reasonable to work from the assumption that music participates, like other film elements, in the complexity of these historical
processes. Even so, Casablanca and Meet Me in St. Louis offer some
surprises.
We can begin with the main-title sequence, where music reigns supreme in classical Hollywood. In all films of this period, we expect
the main-title sequence to tell us about genre in unmistakable ways,
yet in neither of the two films here is this true. In Meet Me in St. Louis, we hear a standard three-part main-title cue: the opening section
surrounds the main title with a large orchestra-and-chorus rendition
of the title song; the second, lyrical, section quotes "The Boy Next
Door"; and the final section tails off to merge with the brass motto
that announces the "Summer" title. Music then goes out and sound
effects and generic speech take over during the establishing shot of
Kensington Street. Everything we have heard announces a nostalgic
costume drama, either as romantic comedy or light family melodrama. Only when Agnes starts singing several minutes later do the stagey and unreal traits of a musical come to the fore.
For Casablanca,Max Steiner borrowed a main-title cue he had used
eight years earlier for The Lost Patrol, a strictly military film where
the main-title music offers a hyper-rhythmic "Arabic" passage fol-
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men's chorus, Sons of the Pioneers, that performs in several John Ford
westerns? Another example is the increasing tendency for framed,
foregrounded performances in dramatic films in the 1940s, such as
the song performances of Hoagy Carmichael in The Best Yearsof Our
Lives (1946) or the disconcertingly unmotivated nightclub performance by Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep (1945). Musicians' biopics are
a topic in themselves, but so are the many elegant symphonic, chamber, and solo performances in women's films of the 1940s. The examples of Casablanca and Meet Me in St. Louis suggest that the answers
will be as complex as the notion of genre itself.
NOTES
1. It is true, of course, that silent films were never really "silent," since they were
almost always accompanied by music. And it is true that sound "shorts" (usually one
reel, or ten minutes) were shown in many American theaters by the early 1920s; filmed
performances were most common. However, the term silent is still appropriate because
feature films were at the top of the exhibition hierarchy, and before 1927 they were
indeed silent for the reason that they lacked dialogue. The crucial distinction, then,
was not between films with or without "sound" (whether that was live accompaniment or a recorded soundtrack), but between feature films that did or did not have
soundtracks including speech.
2. Some text in the first three paragraphs comes from my colleague James Buhler's
abstract of the conference paper version of this article.
3. The parts for "Knock on Wood" show the song's design as a four-bar intro, a sixteen-bar A section marked with repeats (for "unhappy"), eight instrumental bars, and
another iteration of the A section (for "happy"). The eight instrumental bars were
dropped in the film. (The parts are among the musical materials for Casablanca, Warner Brothers Collection, University of Southern California.)
4. Martin Marks, "Music, Drama, Warner Brothers: The Cases of Casablanca and The
Maltese Falcon," in Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000), 173.
5. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987), 22.
6. Richard Dyer links the late arrival of this essential story element (nearly two-thirds
of the way through the film) to a class of musical in which "utopia is implicit in the
world of the narrative as well as in the world of the [musical] numbers." Such films
are overwhelmingly nostalgic-"Far from pointing forwards, they point back, to a golden age-a reversal of utopianism." Other titles listed by Dyer include My Fair Lady,
Gigi, and Hello Dolly! (Richard Dyer, "Entertainment and Utopia," in Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan [London: Routledge, 2002], 28).
7. This information is drawn from the music files for the film (MGM Collection,
University of Southern California).
8. Nick Browne, "Preface," in Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed.
Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), xi.
9. Frans de Bruyn, "Genre Criticism," in Encyclopedia of ContemporaryLiterary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, ed. Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1993), 84.
10. Rick Altman, "Reusable Packaging: Generic Products and the Recycling Process,"
in Refiguring American Film Genres, ed. Browne, 38, 6.
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11. Taking a somewhat different tack, David Bordwell argues that critics often invoke genre categories opportunistically: "Far from being concerned with definition or
reasoning from genus to species, critics often identify the genre only to aid in interpreting the particular work." If such labels are "transitory and heuristic," then it follows that "[g]enres, and genre, function as open-ended and corrigible schemata." David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 148.
12. The four citations in this paragraph are from Altman, "Reusable Packaging," 2,
7, 9, 11, respectively.
13. Ibid., 15.
14. Ibid., 20-22.
15. Altman explores two examples (melodrama and woman's film) at some length:
ibid., 24-33. For a view of generic conventions in classical Hollywood as more pervasive, a view that is therefore critical of the notion of "subversive" genres (including
melodrama), see David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical
Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 70-72. For a concise account of the "Freed Unit," see James M.
Collins, "The Musical," in Handbookof American Film Genres, ed. Wes D. Gehring (New
York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 275-77.
16. Thomas Schatz, "World War II and the Hollywood 'War Film,"' in Refiguring
American Film Genres, ed. Browne, 108-9.
17. Schatz, "World War II," 104.
18. Still another factor was that, in September 1942, the government had enlisted the
studios to promote a major war-bond drive (Aljean Harmetz, The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II [New York: Hyperion, 2002], 276).
19. I have excluded from my reckoning, as a special case, the famous "battle of national anthems" between "Wacht am Rhein" and "La Marseillaise."
20. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987), 32.
21. Ibid., 271.
22. For an excellent reading that draws together the domestic-feminine, folkloristic
nostalgia, and capitalist notions of progress, see James Naremore, The Films of Vincent
Minnelli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 71-89. For more general information on the film, see Gerald Kaufman, Meet Me in St. Louis, BFI Film Classics (London: British Film Institute, 1994).
23. Altman, The American Film Musical, 314.
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