THE NEW MUSICAL BOX

Variations On A Theme (Part 2 of 3)

I set myself a task and half with this three-part look at the role of popular music on both the small and big screens.

Last time, television was under the forensic gaze and in this instalment, films and cinema are subject to my enquiring scrutiny. It's a huge subject, so firstly, three house rules:

• This is a look at existing recorded music being used by cinema (In this insalment: 1927 - 1969)
• It's not an exhaustive summary, rather a dip into realms of interest
• It excludes documentaries and live concert performances

It goes without saying that if you have other suggestions or examples, then please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments section at the end of the blog. 

So where to start? How about the advent of the talkies?

1 - From Jolson to Judy

Al Jolson - The first recorded
songs on screen in 1927

Experiments with sound-formats had been underway in Hollywood for a few years by the time 1927 came round. In that year, a crucial decision was made by the five principal production companies to use a common provider for sound conversion, thus opening the door for adoption of the new technology. The first production was a short news-reel showing the launch of Charles Lindbergh's epic flight across the Atlantic to Paris: that was on May 20th. The big breakthrough came six months later on October 6th when Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer. This was the first feature film with synchronised sound dialogue and, more impressively, the song sequences featuring Al Jolson were recorded live on set. Thus, with the immortal words, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothing yet..." recorded music made its debut on the silver screen. Looking back, it's easy to underplay the quality of the sound production: there were barely two minutes of proper dialogue and aside from the songs, the rest of the action relied upon the silent film staple of caption cards. But, it struck a chord with the public who flocked to showings around the country. Production costs of $422,000 were rewarded with a box-office take of $3.9m - and this spurred investors to back the new "wonder of the age".

1936 - Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers
in Swing Time

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 had a big impact. With millions out of work and money tough to come by, Hollywood needed something to encourage punters into their films - and the "talkies" seemed to fit the bill. Just a year later, Hollywood had waved goodbye to the silent era and, for the purposes of our story, embarked on its first golden age, an age which included the birth of the musical. The musical emerged in 1929 with On With The Show which was not only in sound, but shot in colour too. Over a hundred musicals were cranked out in 1930 and 1931, but their limitations and similarity to each other soon palled and it took celebrated choreographer and director Busby Berkeley to reinvigorate the genre. With colour, innovative photography and massive set-pieces showing his trademark kaleiodoscopic dance drills, their popularity exploded once more. This led to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers - complete with popular songs - in their run of  films that not only had a narrative, but also  epic dance routines. A good example of a memorable song, one that has endured through to today with many covers, comes from their 1935 film, Roberta:

Astaire & Rogers: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (1935) 

Judy Garland (1940)

But, for our purposes, we need to consider films in which there is a real plot, a real story within which songs can play a central part. Let's look at a landmark 1939 film based on the books of L Frank Baum and starring a young Judy Garland: The Wizard Of Oz. It emerged in the wake of Disney's Snow White (1937) which had shown that films developed from children's books could be big at the box-office. Filmed in black and white (in the Kansas scenes) and colour (the Oz scenes), it was a big film in many ways and today, is a staple of TV movie channels around the world. But it's the songs that we recall and in my view, it's the classic example for showing the impact of music and performance in a pre-war film. Here's star Judy Garland with Over The Rainbow:

Judy Garland "Over The Rainbow"  

Recorded music, though, was going to take quite a buffeting as the world was engulfed once more by a global war.

2 - From Conflict to Cliff

World War II changed the movie and musical landscape in many ways. With much of mainland Europe impacted by land and air battles, the movie industry became fragmentary. In the UK, the industry - always the poor relation to Hollywood - became more focused on feel-good films and propaganda: with large numbers of the work-force either called-up for the forces or set to work in munitions production, the opportunities for recorded music was quite limited. The different approach in Hollywood was marked. The USA didn't enter the war until after the battle of Pearl Harbour and whilst large numbers of troops were sent overseas, the day-to-day impact was much less limited.

In 1940, one of the most popular entertainers was singer and actor Bing Crosby. Teaming up with comedian Bob Hope, their big vehicle was the series of "road" movies which kicked off with Road To Singapore. It was a successful mix of light comedy, drama and song and here's a typical number -  It's Always You - from 1941's Road To Zanzibar:

Road To Zanzibar: Bing Crosby - It's Always You

Bob Hope & Bing Crosby

Crosby's popularity grew even further in the following year with Holiday Inn, a film with 12 songs written specially by Irving Berlin  including the perennial White Christmas, later a film in its own right in 1954. 1942 also saw the start of a run of patriotic Hollywood movies as the reality of war began to become more apparent. Yankee Doodle Dandy - starring Jimmy Cagney - was one of a new breed of films, a biographical picture, this one in honour of the "king of Broadway", George M Cohan. Aside from the title number and Give My Regards To Broadway, there was a revival of the World War I *hit*, Over There:

Jimmy Cagney with Over There (1942)      

Here in the UK, the wartime approach was exemplified by artists such as Gracie Fields, Vera Lynn - and particularly from a movie basis, George Formby. He featured in several cheap and cheerful comedies during the war years, perhaps none more famous than 1940s' Let George Do It where our hero ends up in Europe and is mistaken for an undercover agent. Most of his well known songs appeared in these pictures and like many artists, he spent much time overseas entertaining the troops.

Anchors Aweigh - 1945

With the war coming to an end, a rising star in the US was Frank Sinatra. Since 1940 he had wowed the teenagers of the day with a wide range of songs, helping in the process, to create a more youthful musical market which was to have its impact in the movies. In 1945 he starred with Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh, a tale of two sailors on shore leave in Hollywood. They meet up with an aspiring young singer and try to help her achieve her ambition of an audition with MGM. With plenty of memorable songs - including a dance sequence between Gene Kelly and Jerry (of Tom & Jerry) - it also shows much of the behind-the-scenes working at a large movie studio. 

Here's a fine number from the movie - Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly singing If you Knew Susie:

Frank Sinatra & Gene Kelly - If You Knew Susie

The pairing teamed up for two more musicals - Take Me Out To The Ball Game and, in 1949, On The Town - both well received and also profitable for the studio.

The bio-pic took on a new approach in 1946 with The Jolson Story, a tribute to Al Jolson and featuring Larry Parks as the musical star - but with the soundtrack songs performed by Jolson himself. Such was its success with Academy Awards for Best Music and Best Sound that the studio produced a sequel that was released in 1949, Jolson Sings Again. Less successful, it nevertheless still brought the money in. This pairing of films had shown the studios two things: firstly, that relatively recent musicians and entertainers could become the subject of a movie - and secondly that the Hollywood desire for cash-spinning sequels could be really made to work. In the 1950s, several more biopics followed, perhaps most notably he Glenn Miller Story (1954) before they fell from favour in the wake of the next revolution.

Anarchy In The UK?

The 1950s was a decade of much change, but also challenge. The UK, now some five years down the line from  wartime victory, was still suffering the strictures of rationing. Life was still tough. Over in the USA, television started making ever greater inroads into the traditional movie-going audiences. The studios had to move with the times to keep box office numbers up and this was reflected by the musical genres that were starting to influence the films being made and the songs featured in them. Arguably the genre that was to have the greatest commercial impact was rock and roll and in 1955, Hollywood was ready to unleash The Blackboard Jungle. Based on an Evan Hunter novel about teaching in an inner city school, it's inclusion of Bill Hayley & The Comets' "Rock Around The Clock" was enough to propel the movie into a world of notoriety.

At first, it was refused a certificate in the UK and when, a year after its US release a heavily cut version was shown in British cinemas, it's largely teenage audience reacted in somewhat exuberant fashion. Reports of wrecked cinemas and seats being torn up were probably exaggerations, but there's no doubt of the impact it had. It added fuel to the flames of the rock and roll bandwagon and served to emphasise the widening gulf between youngsters and their parents, the so-called generation-gap.

But if Bill Hayley - who was in his 30s at the time and, let's be honest, looking less than dangerous - could have that impact, what about a white kid from Tupelo Mississippi who had already been banned on TV? Enter Elvis Aaaron Presley. His movie career was long and largely forgettable, but in 1956 (with Love Me Tender) and the following  year (Jailhouse Rock), his moment on the silver screen had come.

Bill Hayley and Elvis Presley (1955)

Presley was a one-man musical revolution taking a range of influences and combining them with his own primal and sexual approach. For the teen market, this is what they had wanted, this was something which spoke to them and it was hip to obsessively follow an artist who your parents viewed with disquiet. Jailhouse Rock with its avantgarde set designs, its songs from the pens of Lieber & Stoller and most of all, the anti-hero approach of Presley himself, became a genuine landmark in movie history. Here's the title song:

 Elvis Presley - Con Turned Singer: Jailhouse Rock

Wild Man Cliff Richard hits
those bongos in 1959

Back in the UK, a smaller-scale movie industry didn't want to get left behind, but as in the world of music at the tail-end of the 50s, there were few genuine musical stars. Harry Webb changed his name to Cliff Richard and had a brave stab at being a rock and roll star - and for a very short time, it looked as if it he might succeed. Like Presley he had the looks and also quickly ended up in the movie business.His first appearance - as a layabout teenage musician - was in Serious Charge (1959), but it's in Expresso Bongo later that same year that he first really made his screen impact. But being the UK, this couldn't be an all-out and threatening rock and roll film, but rather a satire of the music industry based on a 1958 stage production. Our Cliff plays Bert Rudge a young and aspiring singer who is spotted in a coffee bar by hustler and manager, Johnny Jackson (Laurence Harvey). He changes Bert's name to Bongo Herbert and sets out to put him on the road to musical fame and fortune. It's a very hit and miss affair, but at least an effort was made and it no doubt did Cliff Richard & The Shadows no harm at all in terms of record sales.

As the 1950s came to a close, recorded music in the movies was at a threshold: television competition was even greater and in the UK, the music scene was in limbo, the charts largely in thrall to American artists and the next big thing had yet to happen. 

3 - From Moptops To More       

It could be argued that the 1960s didn't really start until 1963, the first few years being a hangover from the previous decade - as poet Phillip Larkin famously put it:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

A Hard Day's Night (1964)

The Beatles were a musical whirlwind and, looking back from today, there's no denying the huge impact they had on everything from fashion to politics, from witty quips to clever lyrics and, of course, music and movies. They were the first UK band to truly dominate the charts both here in the UK and in the USA. The British invasion, as it became known, saw a string of other acts follow in their footsteps and when 1964 dawned, it seemed only natural for The Beatles to make a movie. Wisely, they chose a maverick and happening director, Dick Lester and the resultant production - A Hard Days Night - successfully married several genre types in the one piece: a musical, a comedy, a tour documentary - and in doing so, reset the blueprint for the future. It was a highly influential production in all sorts of ways and there's no denying the quality of the music. 

Despite their hectic recording and touring schedule, a follow-up was released in 1965 - Help!, again directed by Lester and this time featuring more of a plot which was a comical satire on the James Bond movies. As with its predecessor, it featured copious numbers of songs, several of which appeared on the album of the same name.  

Catch Us If You Can (1965)

The explosion of Merseybeat in various regional forms also saw a handful of other tie-in films emerge. The most interesting was directed by John Boorman and was also released in 1965: Catch Us If You Can. This focused on the progenitors of "The Tottenham Sound", The Dave Clark Five. The band appear throughout although don't actually feature as themselves, rather as a group of freelance movie stuntmen who go off on a number of adventures. It's much more than just another band-vehicle though as it explores the uncertainties of the music business, the frailty of relationships and the drive to "make it" in the business. Sprinkled with some fine songs - including the title track - it's very worthy of attention. Here's the opening title credits:

Dave Clark Five: Catch us If You Can

 An interesting development - as with television - was the increasing use by movie makers of existing songs to aid plot-lines or provide mood music at crucial moments. Although we'll return to this in a big way later on, we do need to cite a fine example from a film directed by Stanley Kubrick. Throughout his career, he made judicious use of songs and music in his films (who can forget 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example), but in 1964 came perhaps the ultimate in black comedies, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. Featuring the acting talents of Peter Sellers (in three roles), George C Scott and Slim Pickens, it's closing sequence shows a montage of nuclear explosions set to the World War II classic number We'll Meet Again sung by Vera Lynn:

Dr Strangelove - Vera Lynn: We'll Meet Again  

As the sixties progressed, music became more pervasive: television started colour broadcasts, BBC radio introduced a pop station and of course, the UK was at the centre of the summer of love. Whilst The Beatles became animated heroes in Yellow Submarine, other bands were given the chance of directly contributing to movie soundtracks. That year saw the release of a film based on a Hunter Davis novel, Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush. A suburban coming-of-age tale set in Stevenage New Town, it features songs and music from The Spencer Davis Group and Traffic. Here's the title song:

Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush - Traffic (1967)      

Up The Junction - Music by
Manfred Mann

For almost the first time, popular music was being taken seriously in cinematic terms, very much in parallel to some of the work going on in the musical business itself. The following year saw a much underrated film version of Nell Dunn's novel, Up The Junction. Set in contemporary London and starring Suzy Kendall and early roles for Maureen Lipman and Denis Waterman, it successfully showed the uneasy changes from an older-world working class city as popular culture started to have its impact. The memorable theme music, also used as a repeat refrain at key points during the film, was by Manfred Mann. Here the opening titles evoke a very specific time and place, highly atmospheric and cleverly shot and edited.  

Manfred Mann - Up The Junction (1968)     

An intriguing film was The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols and released just in time for Christmas 1967. Starring Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft and Katherine Ross, it's a comedy drama telling the story of recent graduate Hoffman and his seduction by the "older woman" (Bancroft) only for him to then fall for her daughter (Ross). It was seen by some as an allegory of a crumbled old generation exploiting the innocence of a new generation, a view that "read well" in the late 1960s. 

"You're trying to seduce me, Mrs Robinson..."  

Our interest is the involvement of Simon & Garfunkel with the soundtrack. Although relatively established as a folk-rock duo, the exposure from this film lifted them to even greater popularity - and Simon's key song (Mrs Robinson) very nearly didn't make it. Nichols had initially wanted to use existing songs such as The Sound Of Silence and Scarborough Fair, the latter itself a reworking of a British folk song taught to Paul Simon by Martin Carthy. He then approached Paul Simon direct to ask him to write three specific numbers but, as the story goes, Simon was too busy touring and didn't have the time. He did offer up a rough copy of a song he'd been working on, a song he said was "about times past, Mrs Roosevelt, Joe Dimaggio...it's not for a movie". Mike Nichols was a persuasive man and got Paul Simon to change the lyric to Mrs Robinson. It was released as a single, stormed up the charts and gave a huge boost not only to the film, but the soundtrack album too.  

Simon & Garfunkel - The Graduate Soundtrack: Mrs Robinson

One of the most influential films of the 60s scene in London was Blow Up which was directed by Michaelangelo Antonioni and starred David Hemmings as a fashion photographer who believes he's stumbled across a murder. Loosely based on the life of David Bailey, it also features some fascinating music from Herbie Hancock and a performance by The Yardbirds in a nightclub, a line-up including both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. Here's a great number from the film, Stroll On:

Blow Up - featuring The Yardbirds and Stroll On 

Blow Up (1966) with music
from Herbie Hancock and
The Yardbirds.

As noted in the House Rules at the start of this piece, we're not including documentaries and live concert performances, so Woodstock and Monterrey Pop (for example) are beyond our scope. The same applies to Sympathy For The Devil, a fascinating study of The Rolling Stones filmed by Jean-Luc Godard and showing - in some detail - the alienation of Brian Jones from the band. I mention it, though as Rolling Stone Mick Jagger took a turn as an actor in another landmark 60s film, Performance. Ostensibly a 1968 crime drama starring James Fox and directed by Nicholas Roeg (who as we shall see, also directed David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth), Jagger puts in a mesmerising turn as Turner, an eccentric and somewhat reclusive rockstar. The soundtrack comprises music from Ry Cooder, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Jagger himself in a number co-written with fellow Glimmer Twin, Keith Richards. This was Memo From Turner, a song that entered the UK singles charts, and a song that is by turns creepy and wonderful. 

Performance - Mick Jagger: Memo From Turner     

Before we say farewell to the 1960s, we must look at just three more contrasting contributions: one from a manufactured pop band, one from the heart of the US counterculture and the third from a progressive rock outfit learning to live without their original creative force.

The Monkees in Head (1968)

The Monkees were a band put together in a TV vehicle to exploit the popularity of bands such as The Beatles. With four actors who could all sing and songs written by the cream of Tin Pan Alley, their TV series was a big hit with its teenage audience. The band, though, rarely played their own instruments and were frustrated that their musical songwriting experiments were being overlooked. The TV series was cancelled in 1968 and the band turned to the world of movies with Head. Released towards the end of that year, it was mainly a stream of consciousness run through their lives and features cameos from all manner of people - Victor Mature, Frank Zapper and Sonny Liston being the most quirky. Clearly more the sort of film they wanted to make, it didn't meet with fan approval as it was just so different than their TV personas. The soundtrack album did better, reaching #45 on the Billboard charts and was compiled and edited by Jack Nicholson, who is rather more well known today.  

The following year, 1969,  in many ways marked the death of the 1960s ideals.

Easy Rider - Keep Your Motor Runnin' (1969)

The summer of love had turned into a slowly collapsing mass of contradictions and copycat adherence. Pop festivals had moved from the disorganised loved-up chaos of Woodstock to the Altamont Free Festival where Hells Angels murdered a fan just yards from the stage. And in amongst all of this was a road movie, Easy Rider. Directed by Dennis Hopper, it is the counter culture in capsule form as two bikers (Hopper and Peter Fonda) travel the roads of Mexico and the States, smuggling cocaine along the way. With its depiction of the world of drugs, the fall of the hippie ideal and the promotion of communal life, it was an influential production that led to a grittier style of film-making in the early 70s. The soundtrack reflected this milieu with its choice of bands with acts such as Jimi Hendrix, The Byrds, The Band, Joe Cocker and most famously, Steppenwolf.  Complete with its downbeat ending, it's a world away from A Hard Days Night of just five years previously. Here's the title song from The Byrds' Roger McGuinn: 

Ballad Of Easy Rider - Roger McGuinn

More (1969 - Soundtrack by
Pink Floyd

The final example is from Pink Floyd, a band that in the 1970s would become international bestsellers, but at the tail end of 1969, were still at the heart of the London alternative music scene. Founder and lyricist Syd Barrett had left after their first album, contributed a song to their second - and in that year of 1969, the band's third saw the chance to provide the soundtrack to More, a film directed by Barbet Schroeder. It was a bleak tale about heroin addiction and was set mainly on the island of Ibiza. The Pink Floyd soundtrack underpinned the action throughout the film with a mixture of acoustic numbers and some fairly heavy stuff such as The Nile Song. As an album, it stands up well and is worthy of attention even today.

More - Soundtrack by Pink Floyd: Cymbaline    

So, in just six years, we have gone from the pop masterpieces of the early Beatles through to the progressive sounds of Pink Floyd. Both the film industry and the world of popular music had undergone a major transformation in the 1960s, the eruption of the counter-culture feeding the explorative nature of musicians and directors alike.

The trials and misadventure of
Spinal Tap - coming next time

In the third and final part of Variations On A Theme, we'll look at the last 40 years of music in the movies. We'll discover how the youngsters of the summer of love became the movie makers of the 70s and 80s and see what influences they brought to bear. We'll study the growth of the musical parody, films based on make-believe artists and amplifiers which "go up to 11".Plus, there's an overview of the veritable torrent of recorded songs that have been used in soundtracks to help "market" movies across the last 20 years.

Join me then.

Alan