The Musical Film Genre

As stated by English professor and film historian, John Belton, “In the cinema, genre is a term used to designate various categories or motion picture production. Major movie genres include such types of films as musicals, comedies, action and adventure films, Westerns, crime and detective films, melodramas, science fiction and horror films, gangster films, and war films” (123). During the course of this class we have studied a majority of these genres. Recently, we took a look at the development of silent film melodramas (a drama accompanied by music). In the late 1920s, the coming of sound took place and transformed melodramas into “talkies” (with speech and song). With song, comes dance; musicals were on the rise. Throughout this paper, I will discuss the elements of the musical film genre, and how it has changed and

These films became extremely popular during the Great Depression. Operettas, bring musical numbers about unrealistically. For example, in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Snow White is talking to one of the dwarfs right before breaking into song to finish telling her story. Astaire-Rogers musicals, such as Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), could also be called screwball musicals. These films are similar to and share many elements of screwball comedies including romantic and sexual matters. A character’s desire for another is displayed through song and dance rather than slapstick comedy.

Martin Rubin points out that the various forms of the musical did not replace one another but continued to exist alongside each other. He argues that the movement toward integration, though clearly a dominant trend in the musical’s had its limits. Total integration of story and number threatened to destroy the crucial gap that gives the musical number is affective power to enthrall audiences (Belton