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Free and Easy examines the evolution of how the film musical genre has come to be defined: what gets counted as a musical, why, and who gets to make that decision. Surveying centuries of music history from the music and dance of Native Americans to contemporary music performance in streaming media, including the growth of American musical theater, music publishing, and the music recording industry, Free and Easy examines how social factors helped invent and shape the musical, and the genre's ongoing balance between celebrating individual freedom and reaffirming the joys of community. Expanding beyond the glory days of MGM and the classical Hollywood musical or the blockbuster Broadway adaptation to sound experiments, short subjects and cartoons, foreign-language films, "race movies," documentaries, and contemporary independent cinema, this history questions exactly how "free and easy" it is to determine what is and what is not a musical.
List of contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Overture: Musical Traditions before Cinema 11
2 You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet: The Sound Revolution 35
3 Face the Music and Dance: The Depression 67
4 Singing a Song of Freedom: World War II 97
5 There's Beauty Everywhere: MGM and the Freed Unit 125
6 Something's Gotta Give: The Postwar Musical 147
7 Bustin' Out All Over: The Rise of the Musical Blockbuster 175
8 In a Minor Key: The B Musical and Beyond 197
9 The Sound of Money: Musicals in the 1960s 225
10 Whistling in the Dark: A Genre in Crisis 251
11 Can't Stop the Music: Musicals and the New Hollywood 279
12 Just Like Scheherezade: Reviving the Musical Film Genre 307
Index 335
About the author
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 America (2006).
Summary
A History of the American Musical narrates the evolution of the film musical genre, discussing its influences and how it has come to be defined; the first text on this subject for over two decades, it employs the very latest concepts and research.
