The Musical Film is a film genre in which several songs sung by the characters are interwoven into the narrative. The songs are most commonly used to advance the plot or develop the film's characters, although some films simply plop the songs in as unrelated "specialties".
The Musical Film was a natural development of the Stage Musical. Obviously, the most noticable difference between film and stage musicals is the use of lavish background scenery which would be impractical in a theatre environment.
Musical films charactistically contain elements reminiscent of theatre. Performers treat their song and dance numbers as if they have a live audience watching, and the performers often look directly to the camera to perform it.
Over the last thirty-five years or so, the musical film has declined in popularity, although with the success of the films
West Side Story,
The Music Man,
My Fair Lady,
Mary Poppins, and
The Sound of Music, there was a resurgence in the 1960s. One reason for the decline in interest in musical films was the change in culture to
rock n' roll and the freedom and youth associated with it. Elvis Presley made a few movies that have been equated with the old musicals in terms of form. Most of the musical films of the 50s and 60s, for example
Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music, were straightforward adaptations or restagings of successful stage productions. The most successful musical of the 1960s created specifically for film was Mary Poppins, one of Disney's biggest hits.
Despite the success of a few musicals, Hollywood failed to capitalise on these by producing a series of enormous musical flops in the late 1960s and early 1970s which appeared to seriously misjudge public taste. These included
Camelot,
Hello Dolly!,
Sweet Charity,
Doctor Dolittle,
Star!,
Darling Lili,
Paint Your Wagon,
Song of Norway,
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,
Man of La Mancha,
Lost Horizon and
Mame. Collectively and individually these failures crippled several of the major studios. By the early 1970s it was felt that the film musical had had its day.
With the traditional musical seen as box-office poison, by the mid-1970s filmmakers avoided the genre in favor of using music by popular rock or pop bands as background music, in the hope of selling a
soundtrack album to fans. Even so, there were exceptions to this rule, notably the 1978 film version of
Grease, filmed in the traditional style, albeit using a different musical genre. Once again, however, a follow-up (
Grease 2) bombed at the box-office, as did a calamitous attempt to resurrect the old-style musical in
Can't Stop the Music (a vehicle for
The Village People) which was released in 1980. Instead, films about actors, dancers or singers have been made as successful modern-style musical films, with the music as a
diegetic part of the storyline. Many
animated movies also include traditional musical numbers; some of these movies later became live stage productions, such as
Beauty and the Beast and
The Lion King.
In the early 2000s, the musical film began to rise in popularity once more, with new works such as
Moulin Rouge!,
Across the Universe,and
Enchanted; film adaptations of stage shows, such as
Chicago,
The Phantom of the Opera,
Rent,
Dreamgirls,
Sweeney Todd and
Mamma Mia!; and even film versions of stage shows that were themselves based on non-musical films, such as
The Producers,
Hairspray and
Reefer Madness.
No doubt most people would have seen at least one of these musical films! Do you feel the musical films do the stage show justice??
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