The Sounds of Silence: Songs in Hollywood Films since the 1960s

Since the 1960s, filmmakers have responded to the demise of the classical Hollywood musical, especially to the loss of the convention that characters could spontaneously "burst into song" without realistic motivation. Nashville, All That Jazz, Yentl, and Everyone Says I Love You, as well as films we do not ordinarily think of as musicals, such as The Graduate and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, have developed new conventions for presenting song in film that build upon traditions established by studio-era musicals. When MGM brought out That's Entertainment in 1974, the anthology of spectacular musical numbers seemed like Hollywood's own eulogy to the end of an era in which song and film were united. The implicit message of That's Entertainment--delivered as much by the old film clips as by Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and the other aging stars who chattily introduced the numbers--was that they don't film songs like they used to. The message was essentially accurate: Hollywood no longer makes the type of film musical that flourished between the 1930s and the 1950s. Indeed, film critics have often lamented the musical's demise, as David Thompson did a few years ago in Sight and Sound: "Whatever happened to the musical?" Is it just that Astaire, Rogers, Kelly, Garland, and Charisse got too old--or too dead--to do it anymore? Did the astonishing age of American songwriting just lapse? [...] Did rock and roll crush the musical? Did the genre need the studio system, rich in chorines, arrangers and choreographers? Was it MTV? But if it was MTV (at least a derivative of music), why haven't the movies been capable of fashioning decent musicals since the late 50s? One moment we were getting Funny Face (1956), Silk Stockings (1957), and Gigi(1957)--and then there was nothing. (22) Crippled by economic difficulties, changing film and music styles, and the loss of the convention that allowed movies to present songs as spontaneous expressions of characters' feelings, contemporary cinema had to develop new conventions in order to incorporate musical entertainment into film narrative. While in fact the kind of musical Thompson describes has died, several films of the past forty years use songs just as imaginatively as did the films evoked by That's Entertainment. Nashville (1975), All That Jazz (1979), Yentl (1983), and Everyone Says I Love You (1996), as well as films we do not ordinarily think of as musicals, such as The Graduate (1967) and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1975), have developed new conventions for presenting song in film, conventions that build upon traditions established by the "classical" Hollywood musicals of the studio era. These new conventions, which we will explore, all in some way respond to the demise of the classical Hollywood musical, especially to the loss of the convention that characters could "burst into song" without realistic motivation. In order to understand the relation between recent approaches to presenting song and the history of songs in movies, we must first briefly survey the ways in which Hollywood initially developed the conventions for incorp orating songs into narrative cinema. Incorporating Song in the Classical Hollywood Musical The conventions of cinematic realism seemed to preclude the stage practice of spontaneously breaking into song to express one's feelings. In operettas and stage musicals, audiences had come to accept such outbursts as conventional, and applause after a song cushioned the awkward transition back to dialogue. But, in the late 1920s, film had no comparable conventions to rely upon for bridging the separation between singing and "regular" speech. Hence, very early film musicals nearly always concerned professional singers who sang only when they were performing for an on-screen audience, in order to provide a realistic "excuse" for the musical numbers. The Jazz Singer (1927) established cinema's "song-as-performance" convention. …