A Song in the Dark
The Birth of the Musical Film
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Product details:
- Edition number 2
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 26 November 2009
- ISBN 9780195377347
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages504 pages
- Size 231x155x25 mm
- Weight 703 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 76 black and white halftones 0
Categories
Short description:
Film aficionados and musical aficionados. Students and scholars in film studies and in music theater studies. People wanting an enjoyable read about a strange group of movies and the people who made them.
MoreLong description:
Drawing on meticulous research, sharp wit, and insightful analysis, Richard Barrios illuminates the origins of the movie musical in this extensively revised and updated edition of his highly acclaimed A Song in the Dark. From Warner Bros. and Jolson, to the Oscar-winning Broadway Melody and beyond, here is the whole funny and peculiar history of these films, their creators, and their audiences. Ranging from the smash hits of The Singing Fool and Sunny Side Up to bizarre flops like Golden Dawn and Cecil B. DeMille's Madam Satan, they form a body of work unlike anything else in the history of popular entertainment. Here too are legendary performers, directors, and composers: from Fannie Brice, James Cagney, and Mae West, to Busby Berkeley, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, and countless others. With many new rare photographs, some not published in nearly 80 years, this new edition traces the rise and fall, and rise again, of this quintessential piece of the American experience.
This lively, intelligent and well-researched survey tells the tumultuous and often delightfully absurd saga of the film industry's frantic, disaster-laced efforts in the late 1920's and early 1930's to fabricate a new, lucrative product -- the movie musical -- as part of its effort to come to grips with the new technology of sound. Mr. Barrios makes clear that contrary to myth The Jazz Singer, featuring the overbearing Al Jolson, was neither the first major motion picture to use sound nor the first to make notable use of music. A Song in the Dark deals engagingly with its colorful and fascinating subject, and it is illuminating not only on artistic concerns, but on business and technical ones as well, including the process by which many of these films, previously declared lost, have been found and restored. It makes an effective case for a re-examination of this audacious, excessive and underappreciated moment in motion picture history.
Table of Contents:
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
VITAPHONE PRELUDE
THE SOUND BARRIER
"YOU WERE MEANT FOR ME"
ON WITH THE SHOW!
FINDING A VOICE
DUELING MAMMIES
HOLLYWOOD, REVUED
BROADWAY BABIES
"WITH ALL ITS ORIGINAL STAGE ENCHANTMENT"
JUST IMAGINE
THE CUCKOOS
OF VIENNESE NIGHTS AND GOLDEN DAWNS
IS IT A MUSICAL?
THE MARCH OF TIME
VOICES IN THE WILDERNESS
"WE'RE IN THE MONEY"
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE
FINALE
Appendix One:
NOTES ON LOST FILMS
Appendix Two:
A SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY: EARLY MUSICALS ON RECORD
SOURCE NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
