From Stage to Screen: Musical Films in Europe and United States (1927-1961) ed. by Massimiliano Sala (review)

This, the nineteenth installment of an Italian series of essay collections from the Centro Studi Opera Luigi Boccherini, is something of a departure from its predecessors. While the other works in the series have dealt exclusively with opera, this edition is centered on the Hollywood musical. Editor Massimiliano Sala writes that the contributions had two central objectives: to chronicle “the life of the American musical in its progression from its theatrical format to the cinema” and “to trace the borrowings and influences passing between American and European musical cinema” (x-xi). Not every paper accomplishes these goals, and some don’t even attempt them – one essay focuses entirely on Into the Woods, a stage musical that has never been turned into a movie, and another deals with Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop cartoons. This is a collection of papers presented at a 2010 Italian academic conference (about a quarter of the papers are written in Italian), and like any such collection the writers display varying levels of connection with the topic at hand, and their wide range of approaches meets with mixed success.

There are several engaging articles in the collection. Leanne Wood’s excellent paper on Oklahoma! looks at the musical’s pastoral ideal and how it is communicated through, and complicated by, Todd-AO, the Cinemascope-like widescreen film technology. Jonathan De Souza looks at Tom Gunning’s idea of “the cinema of attractions” in film musicals through a lively close reading of the 1932 Maurice Chevalier vehicle Love Me Tonight. One of the most prominent scholars in the field of musical theater, Raymond Knapp, contributes an article that speaks directly to the conference’s stated objectives and looks at how the theatrical idea of the “eleven o’clock number” – the second act show-stopper - works in films. Marija Ciric offers an interesting look at Yugoslavian musicals in the 1950s, and their journey from classical opera to Hollywood musical. And Clara Huber’s examination of 1940’s Spring Parade and its roots in Viennese opera hits every one of the conference’s stated objectives: it looks at how the work’s movement from Europe to Hollywood and from stage to screen transformed the operetta into the movie musical, and at what was gained and lost along the way.

However, many of the articles in the collection feel like first drafts. Some theses feel rushed or incomplete; introductions to more than one essay promise topics to be discussed that are then forgotten; and spelling, punctuation, and grammatical mistakes abound. There are also some basic problems of scholarship that are difficult to ignore. An article about the 1954 film Carmen Jones states that the African American actress Dorothy Dandridge did not do her own singing and instead lip synced to the vocals of “white opera singer Marilyn Horne” (217). The writers of the piece then make much of the racial dichotomy of white voice and black body. Unfortunately, the writers are mistaken - Horne was also African American, and this sort of error renders much of the essay moot and throws into question the value of the remainder. Ultimately, this is a collection of conference papers, and while many of them treat interesting topics and display fine scholarship, a firmer editorial hand would have made them more ready for publication.