Free and Easy?: A Defining History of the American Film Musical Genre

Free and Easy? A Defining History of the American Film Musical Genre narrates the evolution of this hugely popular genre from classical Hollywood studio days to contemporary independent cinema, music publishing, and the music recording industry. On the way, the book provides an engaging and comprehensive survey of music history beginning with the music and dance of Native Americans and moving right up to contemporary music performance in streaming media.

Griffin examines the different ways in which the film musical genre has been defined, what gets counted as a musical, why, and who gets to make that decision. The text expands beyond the glory days of MGM and the blockbuster Broadway adaptation to also reflect on sound experiments, short subjects and cartoons, foreign–language films, race movies , documentaries, and contemporary independent cinema. There is in–depth discussion of how the genre has incorporated other forms of musical entertainment, such as folk music, vaudeville, musical theatre, and rock. It also describes the contributions made to the genre by a number of social factors, including marginalized or subordinated identity groups who have helped invent and shape the musical, and how the genre has in turn reflected issues of race, gender, sexuality and class. Underlying this history is an examination of how the genre continually attempts to balance a celebration of individual freedom with efforts to bring people together in a joyous community.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 Overture: Musical Traditions before Cinema

Chapter 2 You Ain t Heard Nothin Yet: The Sound Revolution

Chapter 3 Face the Music and Dance: The Depression

Chapter 4 Singing a Song of Freedom: World War II

Chapter 5 There s Beauty Everywhere: MGM and the Freed Unit

Chapter 6 Something s Gotta Give: The Postwar Musical

Chapter 7 Bustin Out All Over: The Rise of the Musical Blockbuster

Chapter 8 In a Minor Key: The B Musical and Beyond

Chapter 9 The Sound of Money: Musicals in the 1960s

Chapter 10 Whistling in the Dark: A Genre in Crisis

Chapter 11 Can t Stop the Music: Musicals and the New Hollywood

Chapter 12 Just Like Scheherezade: Reviving the Musical Film Genre

Index

Sean Griffin is a Professor of Film and Media Arts at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out (1999). He is the editor of Hetero: Queering Representations of Straightness (2009) and What Dreams Were Made of: Movie Stars of the 1940s (2011). He co–edited Queer Cinema, The Film Reader (with Harry M. Benshoff, 2005), and co–authored America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies (Wiley Blackwell , 2009) and Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in Ame rica (2006).