Merging Genres in the 1940s - The Musical and the Dramatic Feature Film

University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Music.

http://www.jstor.org

University of Illinois Press

Merging Genres in the 1940s: The Musical and the Dramatic Feature Film Author(s): David Neumeyer Source: American Music, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 122-132Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3592971Accessed: 21-10-2015 01:47 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 169.229.11.216 on Wed, 21 Oct 2015 01:47:23 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=illinois

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3592971

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp



DAVID NEUMEYER

Merging Genres in the 1940s:

The Musical and the Dramatic

Feature Film

After the introduction of sound to feature films in 1927, it took nearly a decade before music scoring practices settled down.1 One result of this process was that, by the end of the 1930s, scoring a film was

strongly codified by genre. Technological limitations of recording and

reproduction dictated that most sound films employing music in any significant way before 1932 were musicals-that is, feature-length films belonging to the romantic comedy genre but highlighting (not merely including) musical performances. Famous early examples are

Broadway Melody (1929), Applause (1929), and Forty-Second Street (1932). The reciprocal influence of radio, a commercial medium that was

growing rapidly at the same time, meant that some musicals were

loosely structured in the form of variety shows (such as RKO Studio's

Broadway Melody series, which ran in yearly installments throughout the 1930s, beginning in 1932).

Other feature-length films varied in their uses of music. Filmed

stage plays used little music, in general, because the soundtrack was

strongly dominated by dialogue, which remained difficult to merge with music, despite the introduction of effective postproduction sound mixing in 1932. Indeed, one sign of a high-budget production throughout this period was the underscoring of dialogue (an exam-

ple from late in the decade is Gone with the Wind [1939], which con- tains more than two hours of dialogue underscoring by Max Steiner, who was the decade's virtuoso of this technique). Dramatic feature films-that is, those that tell a serious or melodramatic story, often

David Neumeyer is Leslie Waggener Professor in the College of Fine Arts and Professor of Music Theory in the School of Music, the University of Texas at Austin. He recently published an essay on Psycho in Music in the Mirror, ed. Thomas Mathiesen and Andreas Giger (University of Nebraska Press, 2002). American Music Spring 2004 ? 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois



Merging Genres in the 1940s

(but by no means always) on a historical or literary subject (such as Gone with the Wind, Little Women [1933], or the first film to win an Academy Award for original score, The Informer [1935])-tend toward a clear separation of source and background music; musical performances, when they occur, are used to emphasize a central narrative

point. Musicals by contrast blur background and source music, with

diegetic music migrating to the nondiegetic register and vice versa. The tone of the music, too, helped define the genres, with dramatic films characterized as dark and operatic, musicals as bright and tune- ful, and those dialogue-dominated romantic comedies that used music as occupying a middle ground.

No sooner were these generic distinctions established, however, than they began to break down. Rick Altman's concept of the inter-

play of cycles and genres is a useful tool to explore how music de- stabilizes generic categories in two classic films from the 1940s: Casa- blanca and Meet Me in St. Louis. The treatment of music in Casablanca, especially the first third of the film set in Rick's Cafe americaine, is hardly distinguishable from many of the show musicals of the 1930s. Likewise, the music in certain scenes in Meet Me in St. Louis, most

notably the Halloween sequence, is scored more like a dramatic feature than a musical of the 1930s. The changes in practice for which these films are exemplars enable a more complex treatment of music-and enforce a higher standard for the dramatic treatment of music-in films of all genres in the later 1940s and 1950s.2

Consider the following sequence from Casablanca (1942). Dooley Wil- son's rendition of "Knock on Wood" in the first cafe sequence is one of just four foregrounded performances in this film, all of them abbreviated by cuts in the music. The sequence begins at 6:25; by this time, in typically frantic Warner Brothers style, we have gone through the main-title sequence, a prologue with voiceover narration, and a col- lage of short opening scenes depicting stranded European couples at cafes, a police search for Resistance fighters, and the arrival by plane of the Nazi Major Strasser and his staff. The scene shifts to evening at Rick's Cafe americaine and the pace slows down. Over the course of the next thirty minutes, we are introduced to the rest of the cast of prin- cipal and secondary characters, and the first major story events occur: Peter Lorre's Ugarte asks Humphrey Bogart's Rick to hide a set of let- ters of transit, one type of the exit visas that are the most valuable com- modity in Casablanca at the time; Rick agrees; Ugarte is subsequently arrested; it is established that Rick is neutral-he will not aid Ugarte (or by extension anyone else trying to subvert German or Vichy intentions) but he will not assist those intentions, either; Ingrid Berg- man's Ilsa and Rick encounter and recognize one another; and Ilsa and her husband (Paul Henreid's anti-Nazi hero Victor Laszlo) find them-

123



Neumeyer

selves cut off by Ugarte's arrest. For nearly seventeen of these thirty minutes, we hear diegetic music (that is, music that has a physical source in the world depicted by the film), sometimes onscreen but more often off, sometimes foregrounded but more often in the background. An additional two minutes, forty seconds of nondiegetic (background) orchestral music plays over the final scene, Rick's recognition of Ilsa and the subsequent, strained conversation which, not surprisingly, puzzles both Laszlo and Claude Rains's Vichy Captain Renault.

The performance of "Knock on Wood" lasts a mere seventy seconds; it consists of three iterations of an antecedent-consequent phrase pair (that is, it is not a conventional thirty-two-bar AABA chorus).3 "Led

by Sam, most everybody sings but Rick and Ferrari.... [T]he crowd

sings 'we're unlucky'; and Sam tells them to 'knock on wood'; the jaunty music enables them [all] to make light of their troubles."4 Im-

mediately afterwards, the diegetic music drops into its typically back-

grounded mode for the first conversation between Rick and Sidney Greenstreet's Ferrari.

Now consider the odd coincidence that Casablanca and the classic musical Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) have very nearly the same total duration of diegetic music. In Meet Me in St. Louis, the total is 25:10; in Casablanca, just twenty-five seconds less. One might even suggest that the impact on Casablanca is greater, since the movie's running time is only 102 minutes, as against the 119 minutes of Meet Me in St. Lou- is. Since the boundaries between diegetic and nondiegetic music are

frequently contested in classical Hollywood sound film,5 it would seem

likely that these numbers cover over ambiguities: music behind the conversations between Bogart and Sidney Greenstreet's character in the latter's Blue Parrot cafe is only tenuously diegetic, for example. Furthermore, since I took as my benchmark the plausible diegetic performance-not necessarily merely onscreen performance-one might complain that my counts are skewed against the musical's typically unstable mixtures of the diegetic and nondiegetic (an instability almost

routinely in evidence in Meet Me in St. Louis) in favor of the aurally plausible offscreen nightclub music that murmurs behind much of the first cafe scene in Casablanca. But, in fact, all the performances of Meet Me in St. Louis are included in the counts above, from the two iterations of the title song itself-and "The Boy Next Door," "Skip to My Lou," the "Trolley Song," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christ- mas"-to the diegetically implausible orchestral music for the Christ- mas dance that opens the "Winter" division.

Before taking up the question of genre to which this near match of durations is relevant, let's scrutinize a segment from Meet Me in St. Lou- is: the first of three major Halloween sequences which together com-

prise the film's "Autumn" division. The first sequence concerns the

124




Halloween night adventures of the two younger daughters, Agnes and Tootie (Joan Carroll and Margaret O'Brien, respectively); the second reveals (to themselves) the level of emotional commitment between Judy Garland's Esther and her beau, Tom Drake's John; and the third brings the narrative crux, as Esther's father (played by Leon Ames) arrives home to announce the family's impending move to New York.6

The "Autumn" division begins at 48:30 and lasts thirty minutes. The first sequence is the only major one lacking a song performance or dance, but background music begins immediately and is present for the majority of its ten minutes. The (unexpectedly) intense music for this sequence is a major factor in its effect. The score for Meet Me in St. Louis is nearly as complex as that of Casablanca in its sources. Apart from the songs themselves, the score was composed or arranged by an experienced team of MGM employees: Conrad Salinger, Georgie Stoll, Roger Edens, Calvin Jackson, and Lenny Hayton. According to studio music records, Salinger composed the background music for the first Halloween sequence, and his remarkably evocative and richly scored music could easily have found a place in a movie as recent as the 1980s or early 1990s. Three cues, named "Autumn in St. Louis," "All Hallow's Eve," and "The Most Horrible One,"7 provide an eerie misterioso mood leavened with occasional comic commentary and hits on screen action. Agnes and Tootie are in the kitchen, dressed for Halloween, and after teasing by the family go outside. While feed- ing a bonfire in the middle of the street, the neighborhood children negotiate who will "kill" certain adults (by throwing flour at them when they answer the doorbell). In the confusion, Tootie is left on her own to "kill" a reserved older man, Mr. Braukopf. When she returns, she is crowned "the most horrible one," to her delight. The outland- ishness of this sequence is exacerbated by the fact that it follows the "Trolley Song," one of the quintessential production numbers in the tradition of the American film musical.

The second sequence follows, with three scenes: Tootie is brought home, having been injured (only slightly, as it turns out) while trying to carry out a dangerous trick; through misunderstanding, Esther confronts John about Tootie's injury, and they reconcile when she finds that he helped Tootie and Agnes escape; then Mr. Smith arrives home during dessert in the parlor to make his announcement.

The three Halloween sequences, taken together, provide narrative motivation for the film's climax: Tootie's emotional collapse and de- struction of the family of snowmen after Esther fails to comfort her with "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." Their father witness- es Tootie's outburst, and it affects him so strongly that he calls off the move to New York, an event that was to have happened only three days later.

125



Neumeyer

Is Casablanca a musical? Is Meet Me in St. Louis a dramatic feature film, perhaps a women's film, domestic melodrama, or even-consid-

ering Tootie's penchant for the macabre-a female gothic? Surely not, but the questions are not so absurd as they may seem. Although the literature now includes many statements about narrative functions of music in classical Hollywood films and about style (sometimes by studio but more often by individual composer), we still have relatively little specific knowledge of the role of music in classical Hollywood genres. To make things worse, over the past two or three decades the notion of genre itself has nearly disappeared under the large-scale critical reorientation that is usually gathered under the general term

theory. In brief, attention has shifted from archetypes and instances, from variations on models that assume essential qualities-with the

necessary hierarchies that accompany them-toward flexible, social-

ly constructed categories that shift and change. Nick Browne, for ex-

ample, rejects the positivist project of norms, typologies, and formal

description in favor of a range of

distinctive styles of cultural and historical interpretation.... Genres, here, are understood to gravitate toward specific assem-

blages of local coherencies....The operations of particular genres are pictured as working through the history of cinema at different levels and angles to other genres and other social institutions.8

Yet genre has resisted this paradoxical reduction to complexities and contradictions, to shadows that pass across the face of cinema's cultural history: as Frans de Bruyn has it, "the greatest challenge that the concept of genre poses to contemporary theory is its refusal to

disappear, its insistence on a rapprochement, rather than a rupture, between the old and the new in theoretical discourse."9

Rick Altman finds that rapprochement in a conception of genre oriented toward the historical processes of production, promotion, and

reception that create, guide, and undermine genres.10 For Altman, genre categories that seem stable are better construed as moments of

crystallization in cinema history, and it is a mistake to valorize them to stand for all films.11 Nevertheless, he says that we may locate in historical processes the "logic and mechanisms whereby genres become recognizable as such." The fundamental categories through which these processes operate in the early history of Hollywood sound film are "cycles" and "genres." The former-in effect, groups of sequels-drive production and promotion. Contrary to expectation, a close look at publicity materials reveals that "film publicity seldom

employs generic terms as such. [Instead, although] indirect referen- ces to genre are of course regularly used ... they almost always evoke not a single genre but multiple genres." This strategy reveals "that

126




Hollywood labors to identify its pictures with multiple genres, in or- der to benefit from the increased interest that this strategy inspires in diverse demographic groups." Thus, it becomes clear that "Holly- wood's stock-in-trade is... not the classical practice of generic puri- ty.... [B]y definition, genres are broad public categories shared across the entire industry."12 As a consequence, it is in the economic interest of each studio to create cycles of films that are uniquely identified with it. Cycles arise by adding a twist to existing genres, but genres arise when cycles become industrywide conventions.13 Altman dem- onstrates the surprisingly consistent historical process in Hollywood by which genres (characterized by nouns) spawn cycles (as the nouns acquire adjectival qualifiers), and then the adjectives become nouns when the cycles are redefined as genres. For example, "comedy" that emphasized music became "musical comedy," which was shortened to the term that, sometime between 1930 and 1933, came to represent a genre, "musical."14

It is difficult to look back at Casablanca and Meet Me in St. Louis in terms of a history of cycles and genres because both films have acquired permanent status as, respectively, the epitome of the World War II (nonbattlefield) melodrama and the progenitor of the MGM "Freed Unit" integrated musical. (Indeed, Altman observes that the most hardened genre categories are those created after the fact by critics and scholars.)15 If we can begin to break down this status, however, it seems reasonable to work from the assumption that music par- ticipates, like other film elements, in the complexity of these historical processes. Even so, Casablanca and Meet Me in St. Louis offer some surprises.

We can begin with the main-title sequence, where music reigns su- preme in classical Hollywood. In all films of this period, we expect the main-title sequence to tell us about genre in unmistakable ways, yet in neither of the two films here is this true. In Meet Me in St. Lou- is, we hear a standard three-part main-title cue: the opening section surrounds the main title with a large orchestra-and-chorus rendition of the title song; the second, lyrical, section quotes "The Boy Next Door"; and the final section tails off to merge with the brass motto that announces the "Summer" title. Music then goes out and sound effects and generic speech take over during the establishing shot of Kensington Street. Everything we have heard announces a nostalgic costume drama, either as romantic comedy or light family melodrama. Only when Agnes starts singing several minutes later do the stag- ey and unreal traits of a musical come to the fore.

For Casablanca, Max Steiner borrowed a main-title cue he had used eight years earlier for The Lost Patrol, a strictly military film where the main-title music offers a hyper-rhythmic "Arabic" passage fol-

127



Neumeyer

lowed by a British military march; in Casablanca, Steiner substitutes "La Marseillaise" for the latter. The prologue expands on the tropes of "military" and "Arabic," finally pinpointing Casablanca as the geo- graphical locus. The opening scenes all suggest a wartime melange of fighting, intrigue, and individual human misery and heroism. Only when the scene shifts to Rick's Cafe do the narrative cues become more complex. The main-title sequence and prologue would have left doubt in contemporary audiences only with respect to whether the film that follows would be a combat film or espionage drama. Thomas Schatz includes Casablanca in his list of World War II films; he calls it

Hollywood's "seminal wartime 'conversion narrative"' and shows how it embodies the wartime reinterpretation of classical narrative, as represented in the goal-oriented, individualistic protagonist and the formation of a romantic couple.16 Casablanca is not a combat film, the dominant type of war film after 1942 according to Schatz: only three characters are killed (a resistance fighter near the beginning, Ugarte [this is reported, not seen], and Strasser), and it remains a cu-

riosity that this great wartime film never once shows an American soldier or mentions the U.S. military. Instead, after the opening scenes, Casablanca would have been recognizable to its audiences as a strik-

ing variant of an existing genre that Schatz calls the "espionage drama," where a private citizen is forced to make decisions about patri- otic loyalty and action. The espionage drama was the most common war-related type after 1937 and constituted three-fifths of all war films in 1942.17 (Other examples from Warner Brothers include Confession of a Nazi Spy [1939] and Across the Pacific [1942].)

Casablanca's release came during intense days on all the war fronts, including the Soviet winter offensive, the Battle of Guadalcanal, and the first American landing in Italy, but the closely relevant moments are obviously Germany's completion of the French occupation (as the

Vichy government dropped diplomatic relations with the United States), and Operation Torch, the opening of the major and ultimate-

ly conclusive Allied offensive in North Africa. The initial landings in this campaign were made at Algiers, Oran, and Casablanca itself, all within three weeks of the film's premiere.18 These special circum- stances and the film's box-office success motivated Warner Brothers to create a cyclic twist on the espionage drama: by placing equally strong emphasis on danger and romance (but avoiding battle scenes), the studio created a cycle we might call the "romantic espionage melodrama." The two best-known follow-ups to Casablanca fit into this

cycle: Watch on the Rhine (1943, starring Bette Davis) and To Have and Have Not (1944, starring Bogart and Lauren Bacall). Other lesser- known "sequels" to Casablanca that draw on the same pool of actors continue the espionage drama cycle: among them are Background to

128




Danger (1943), The Conspirators (1944), The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), and

Passage to Marseille (1944). Despite the large amount of diegetic music, then, there is no dan-

ger that an audience would impute traits of the musical to Casablan- ca. The strongest confirming internal clue is that, despite the duration of performances, not a single one meets our minimal expectations for a musical number. None is performed by a lead actor, and none is complete and onscreen. During the first cafe sequence, we hear Sam

singing the chorus of "It Had to Be You" as the camera moves from the exterior across the interior to settle on him just as he finishes the

song and launches immediately into an abbreviated version of "Shine." "Knock on Wood" lacks a verse and we cut away from Sam for nearly half the number's short one minute and ten seconds. When Corinne Mura sings "La Passion" (Tango della Rose), the typical Warn- ers haste to keep narrative moving means two cuts away to a tense conversation between Ilsa and Laszlo. Finally, Sam sings part (but not

all) of the chorus for "As Time Goes By" while the camera spends most of its time settled on Ingrid Bergman's face.19

One of the most difficult notions to accept retrospectively about Casablanca is that Warner Brothers did not consider music to be a special element in the success of the film. Despite the distinctiveness of the nearly continuous music in the first cafe scene, despite the opportunity for music as the new cycle veered in the direction of women's films (a genre that relied heavily on music), and pace the nearly mythic quality that "As Time Goes By" acquired in later decades, none of the film's sequels focused on music. The one exception-To Have and Have Not-differs fundamentally from its source: the performances by Hoagy Carmichael and Lauren Bacall in a crowded hotel cafe are all complete and foregrounded, with little or no competing narrative action, and the background scoring is both minimal and unre- lated to the diegetic songs.

The answer to the question "Is Meet Me in St. Louis a dramatic feature film?" must be more equivocal, since the merger of melodrama and musical is exactly what characterizes the MGM cycle of the "in-

tegrated musical," a cycle that is particularly associated with high- budget technicolor productions and whose first instance is thus, argu- ably, The Wizard of Oz (1939). Meet Me in St. Louis offered unexpected twists on the musical genre to audiences in 1944. If, as Altman has it, "pairing-off is the natural impulse of the musical," Meet Me in St. Louis is exceptional in "raising the ante" to three couples: Esther, her older brother and sister, and their girl- and boyfriends.20 (One might add the parents, whose relationship is strained by the father's decision to move to New York, then restored as he finally sees the effect of this decision on his children.) The only nonfamily character who emerg-

129



Neumeyer

es as at all significant is John, on whom Esther sets her sights from the beginning of the picture. These multiple story tracks dilute, rather than intensify, the concentration on romantic pairing central to the musical. Furthermore, three of the important performances in the film (the two iterations of "Meet Me in St. Louis" and "Have Yourself a

Merry Little Christmas") do not in any way relate to the romantic

couplings. Another genre innovation that adds to the movie's com-

plexity is the fact that "the multi-generational family... becomes permanently fixed as a standard element of the folk musical." The influence of this film was such that "hardly a single folk musical after 1944 lacks a strong family relationship."21 Indeed, the family rela-

tionship is so strongly established at the beginning of the film, with the scene of ketchup tasting and the subsequent passing of the song from Agnes to her grandfather to Rose and Esther, that it takes some forceful redirecting of attention to focus on the older sisters' preoc- cupation with pairing off (as in "The Boy Next Door," which Esther

sings shortly afterwards).22 Another confounding clue is that, by the late 1930s, it was common-

place to have complete and foregrounded performances in feature films that would never have been advertised as musicals. If the par- ty dance-song "Skip to My Lou" and the "Trolley Song" have the artificial, fantastical quality of a production number, "Meet Me in St. Louis" (even its first iteration, obviously "planned" though it is), "The Boy Next Door," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" all

might have found their way into romantic comedies. The Halloween

sequences, on the other hand, by their length and peculiar intensity, take us to the edge of converting Meet Me in St. Louis into the domestic melodrama. Writing about these sequences (and also Tootie's smash-

ing of the snowmen), Altman says that "it is precisely this willing- ness to come at least partially to terms with the real past that gives the... folk musical its characteristic melodramatic tone,"23 but I would argue that Meet Me in St. Louis goes further than that, to mud-

dling-if not quite erasing-genre boundaries, as we are denied a final production number, despite the presence of the only obvious

stage set in the film, a crowd that looks as if it could break into song and dance at any moment, and boxes extended downstage from which the family could easily have sung as a group. Instead, a non-

diegetic chorus pushes the whole scene out and invokes the end title. As musicals go, this ending is decidedly unsatisfactory.

Locating where music (or the soundtrack in general) fits in the historical process of cycle and genre offers much opportunity for inqui- ry. One example, among many, would be the complex convergences and divergences of westerns and the cowboy musical. What to make, for example, of Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (1939) or the

130




men's chorus, Sons of the Pioneers, that performs in several John Ford westerns? Another example is the increasing tendency for framed, foregrounded performances in dramatic films in the 1940s, such as the song performances of Hoagy Carmichael in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) or the disconcertingly unmotivated nightclub performance by Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep (1945). Musicians' biopics are a topic in themselves, but so are the many elegant symphonic, cham- ber, and solo performances in women's films of the 1940s. The exam-

ples of Casablanca and Meet Me in St. Louis suggest that the answers will be as complex as the notion of genre itself.

NOTES

1. It is true, of course, that silent films were never really "silent," since they were almost always accompanied by music. And it is true that sound "shorts" (usually one reel, or ten minutes) were shown in many American theaters by the early 1920s; filmed

performances were most common. However, the term silent is still appropriate because feature films were at the top of the exhibition hierarchy, and before 1927 they were indeed silent for the reason that they lacked dialogue. The crucial distinction, then, was not between films with or without "sound" (whether that was live accompani- ment or a recorded soundtrack), but between feature films that did or did not have soundtracks including speech.

2. Some text in the first three paragraphs comes from my colleague James Buhler's abstract of the conference paper version of this article.

3. The parts for "Knock on Wood" show the song's design as a four-bar intro, a six- teen-bar A section marked with repeats (for "unhappy"), eight instrumental bars, and another iteration of the A section (for "happy"). The eight instrumental bars were

dropped in the film. (The parts are among the musical materials for Casablanca, Warn- er Brothers Collection, University of Southern California.)

4. Martin Marks, "Music, Drama, Warner Brothers: The Cases of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon," in Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neum-

eyer (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000), 173. 5. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1987), 22. 6. Richard Dyer links the late arrival of this essential story element (nearly two-thirds

of the way through the film) to a class of musical in which "utopia is implicit in the world of the narrative as well as in the world of the [musical] numbers." Such films are overwhelmingly nostalgic-"Far from pointing forwards, they point back, to a gold- en age-a reversal of utopianism." Other titles listed by Dyer include My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Hello Dolly! (Richard Dyer, "Entertainment and Utopia," in Hollywood Musi- cals: The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan [London: Routledge, 2002], 28).

7. This information is drawn from the music files for the film (MGM Collection, University of Southern California).

8. Nick Browne, "Preface," in Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), xi.

9. Frans de Bruyn, "Genre Criticism," in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theo-

ry: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, ed. Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 84.

10. Rick Altman, "Reusable Packaging: Generic Products and the Recycling Process," in Refiguring American Film Genres, ed. Browne, 38, 6.

131



Neumeyer

11. Taking a somewhat different tack, David Bordwell argues that critics often in- voke genre categories opportunistically: "Far from being concerned with definition or

reasoning from genus to species, critics often identify the genre only to aid in inter-

preting the particular work." If such labels are "transitory and heuristic," then it follows that "[g]enres, and genre, function as open-ended and corrigible schemata." Da- vid Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 148. 12. The four citations in this paragraph are from Altman, "Reusable Packaging," 2,

7, 9, 11, respectively. 13. Ibid., 15. 14. Ibid., 20-22. 15. Altman explores two examples (melodrama and woman's film) at some length:

ibid., 24-33. For a view of generic conventions in classical Hollywood as more perva- sive, a view that is therefore critical of the notion of "subversive" genres (including melodrama), see David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical

Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia Uni-

versity Press, 1985), 70-72. For a concise account of the "Freed Unit," see James M. Collins, "The Musical," in Handbook of American Film Genres, ed. Wes D. Gehring (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 275-77.

16. Thomas Schatz, "World War II and the Hollywood 'War Film,"' in Refiguring American Film Genres, ed. Browne, 108-9.

17. Schatz, "World War II," 104. 18. Still another factor was that, in September 1942, the government had enlisted the

studios to promote a major war-bond drive (Aljean Harmetz, The Making of Casablan- ca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II [New York: Hyperion, 2002], 276).

19. I have excluded from my reckoning, as a special case, the famous "battle of na- tional anthems" between "Wacht am Rhein" and "La Marseillaise."

20. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 32.

21. Ibid., 271. 22. For an excellent reading that draws together the domestic-feminine, folkloristic

nostalgia, and capitalist notions of progress, see James Naremore, The Films of Vincent Minnelli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 71-89. For more general information on the film, see Gerald Kaufman, Meet Me in St. Louis, BFI Film Classics (Lon- don: British Film Institute, 1994).

23. Altman, The American Film Musical, 314.

132



Merging Genres in the 1940s - The Musical and the Dramatic Feature Film

Documents

Transcript of Merging Genres in the 1940s - The Musical and the Dramatic Feature Film