‘The Movie Musical!’ Review: That’s Entertainment – Wall Street Journal

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Westerns, detective stories, romances, comedies, but perhaps above all musicals were on offer. I say “above all musicals” for, in the Middle West, among the petit-bourgeois milieu in which I grew up, musical comedy meant culture—if not high culture then culture as high as we, children and our parents both, were likely to find of interest. Families among my parents’ friends might go to New York for a four-day holiday and see five musicals on stage, then see the same shows again with their on-the-road casts when they played in Chicago, and authoritatively compare the two versions. Businessmen, who did battle with strong-arm unions and had arrangements with the Crime Syndicate, sat in the audience, mesmerized, as performers sang “My Boy Bill” or “We Got Steam Heat” or “The Surrey with a Fringe on Top.” What was the attraction?

Jeanine Basinger has since seen many more movies than I. She seems, in fact, to have seen all movies, right up to yesterday, whereas I dropped out as long ago as the advent of the multiplex, after which moviegoing never quite seemed the same. The most recent fruit of her relentless moviegoing, “The Movie Musical!” is at once an impressive history and a penetrating criticism of movie musicals, nicely punctuated by the author’s wit (of

Eddie Cantor’s

musical performances, she remarks that “today they’d put him on Ritalin”) and insider knowledge (Sonja Henie, the sweet-faced, cuddly ice-skating star of ’30s and ’40s movies, was, according to a skating partner, “a hard-nosed bitch”).

After defining the movie musical—a film “built around the idea that songs and dances can be used to tell a story, or to tell part of a story,” and in which actions are conveyed through musical performance—Ms. Basinger distinguishes movie musicals made from adaptations of stage musicals and operettas, and from biopics and original ice-skating and swimming-pool stories. She provides mini-biographies of the important figures, of directors, choreographers, above all of the performers, in the history of the movie musical. Crucial among directors and choreographers to the formation of the movie musical were the innovators

Ernst Lubitsch,

Busby Berkeley,

Rouben Mamoulian

and

Fred Astaire.

She also devotes several pages to what was known at MGM as “The Freed Unit,” the movie musicals made under the guiding hand of the producer Arthur Freed, among them “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “On the Town,” “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Show Boat,” “An American in Paris,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Gigi” and more. Freed was also the man who brilliantly cast “The Wizard of Oz.” MGM and Twentieth Century Fox (called by

Alice Faye,

upon leaving the studio, “Penitentiary Fox”) were the two top studios for making movie musicals, though RKO made most of the Astaire and

Ginger Rogers

movies.

The emphasis throughout “The Movie Musical!” is on the stars at the center of the most successful movie musicals. Ms. Basinger is, quite properly, mystified by the phenomenon of movie stardom. She notes that many successful stage actors—

Katherine Cornell,

Tallulah Bankhead,

Alfred Lunt,

Lynn Fontanne

—couldn’t cut it in the movies.

Ethel Merman

and

Mary Martin,

two great musical comedy stars, never succeeded on film. All that can finally be said on the subject is that in movie musicals stars filled the frame, as Ms. Basinger might put it, and, in Hollywood’s phrase, “registered,” which is to say rang the cash register at the box office because masses of people enjoyed watching them perform.

Casting pairs in musical movies was difficult: looks, voices, dancing ability, so much else had to work in perfect conjunction. In non-musical movies there were bankable screen couples:

Myrna Loy

and

William Powell,

Humphrey Bogart

and

Lauren Bacall,

Cary Grant

and whatever woman happened to be around the house. “Musical pairs were harder to cast than non-musical,” Ms. Basinger writes, “and yet the business worked hard to create them, because once found, they were a goldmine.” In the 1930s and ’40s, Hollywood created three musical pairs that became legendary:

Nelson Eddy

and

Jeanette MacDonald,

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and

Mickey Rooney

and

Judy Garland.

“The Movie Musical!” offers lengthy portraits of

Al Jolson,

Bing Crosby,

Elvis Presley

(who made no fewer than 31 movies). Women, though, seem to have predominated in the most memorable movie musicals. Some among Ms. Basinger’s cavalcade of female stars (

Esther Williams,

Betty Grable

) have been covered by the dust of history, others have been buried in that dust (Ruth Etting, Alice Faye,

Betty Hutton

).

Doris Day

is among those movie musical stars whose films seem not entirely to have lost their glow. “Day wasn’t beautiful,” Ms. Basinger writes, “she was pretty, however, very pretty, and she was appealing and had warmth.” As a gloss on Day’s on-screen image,

Oscar Levant

claimed to have known her before she became a virgin.

In “The Sound of Music,”

Julie Andrews

starred in what Ms. Basinger informs us is “the greatest all-time-grossing musical in the history of the genre.” Wholesome, nice but neither dazzling nor sexy, Andrews had a fine sense of measure, never overplaying her part. “She can sing ‘Spoonful of Sugar,’ ” her friend

Carol Burnett

said, “and you don’t get diabetes.” The prize for overplaying in movie musicals—the envelope, please—goes to Barbra Streisand, of whom Ms. Basinger writes that she “does a song as if it’s a Shakespearean soliloquy. She’s just got to be the one to interpret it for eternity.”

The queen of movie musicals, surely, was Judy Garland. “The consummate pro,” Jeanine Basinger calls her. A singer, a dancer, an actor, she was the whole package. Along with several movie musicals she starred in with Mickey Rooney (of whom Ms. Basinger writes that he “had talent to burn—and he burned it”), Garland made among other movie musicals “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “Easter Parade,” and what is perhaps the movie musical to top all others, “The Wizard of Oz.” A small woman (4’ 11”), she was at once perky and vulnerable. Ms. Basinger refers to “The Garland Moment,” her signature, that moment in a film when “wistfully, sadly, yearningly, but powerfully she put an audience into an emotional musical conversation that made each person feel as if she were singing directly to him or to her.” Knowing what we now do about Garland’s wretched life off camera—the drugs, the booze, the wrong husbands, the death at 47—somehow lends added luster to her movie musical roles.

The two dominant male movie musical stars were Fred Astaire and

Gene Kelly.

Astaire represented sophistication, suavity, elegance to the highest power; Kelly, altheticism, masculinity, sexuality. Ms. Basinger says a woman was likely to give her heart to Astaire, her body to Kelly. About Gene Kelly, opinions differ. For some his dancing was overly ambitious, which is to say more consciously artistic-balletic than movies really could or should be asked to support. Ms. Basinger says he is “emotionally a soloist,” which is just right.

Gene Kelly claimed that “the history of dance on film begins with Astaire.”

George Balanchine

thought Astaire “the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times.” Irving Berlin said that he would rather “have Fred Astaire sing my songs than anyone else.” Astaire had many partners, but none so perfectly in sync with him as *Ginger Rogers. To their partnership, it has been said, Rogers contributed sex, Astaire class. “Astaire and Rogers paired,” Jeanine Basinger writes, “is the high point of American movie musicals.”

The golden era of movie musicals was coterminous with the studio system in Hollywood, roughly between the advent of sound in movies in 1927 and the breakup of that system around 1969, when Kirk Kerkorian purchased MGM. During that same period the great composers and lyricists of what today is known as The American Songbook were at work and available to Hollywood: George and

Ira Gershwin,

Irving Berlin,

Cole Porter,

Jerome Kern,

Richard Rodgers,

Lorenz Hart,

Oscar Hammerstein,

and others. The Hollywood studios also commanded the financial resources, as Ms. Basinger reports, to keep composers, arrangers, orchestras and of course singers and dancers under contract. The studios also kept their actors under control, so none was permitted, through errant interviews, to reveal what ninnies they might be.

In her book’s final section, Ms. Basinger discusses, in sometimes tedious detail, many of the movie musicals made after the close of the studio era, all the way up to 2016’s “La La Land” and 2018’s “A Star Is Born.” She grants the strengths to be found in some of these movies, but also locates their usually ruinous flaws. Often these flaws, even in the hands of such talented filmmakers as

Francis Ford Coppola

or

Martin Scorsese,

are in the realm of seriousness, trying to make “the musical, the tried-and-true old-fashioned musical, into a modern treatise about politics, bad experiences, sex, death, the end of Hollywood, and all sorts of things that were heavy burdens for the format to carry.”

Jeanine Basinger understands that, in her words, the movie musical exists in a “second layer” of reality, a layer “constructed for us out of experience we don’t have, can’t have—or aren’t having. . . . Musical characters are living in a world of musical performance, and the viewer is transported accordingly from a ‘real’ world to that world, whether there’s a logical explanation for it or not.” Living in that world, however briefly, is what long attracted audiences to the movie musical. Writing well before the invention of the movie musical, the novelist

William Dean Howells,

anticipating Ms. Basinger, wrote that what the average person seeking entertainment craves is “a tragedy with a happy ending,” which is what, for so many years, movie musicals satisfactorily provided. No one, after all, leaves

“Oedipus Rex”

or “Macbeth” humming a tune.

—Mr. Epstein is the author, most recently, of “Charm: The Elusive Enchantment.”