Available:*
Library | Audience | Home Location | Material Type | Shelf Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Heights | Adult | Non-fiction | Book | 791.436 B276 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Singin' in the Rain, The Sound of Music, Camelot - love them or love to hate them, movie musicals have been a major part of all our lives. They're so glitzy and catchy that it seems impossible that they could have ever gone any other way. But the ease in which they unfold on the screen is deceptive. Dorothy's dream of finding a land "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" was nearly cut, and even a film as great as The Band Wagon was, at the time, a major flop. In Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter, award winning historian Richard Barrios explores movie musicals from those first hits, The Jazz Singer and Broadway Melody, to present-day Oscar winners Chicago and Les Misérables. History, film analysis, and a touch of backstage gossip combine to make Dangerous Rhythm a compelling look at musicals and the powerful, complex bond they forge with their audiences. Going behind the scenes, Barrios uncovers the rocky relationship between Broadway and Hollywood, the unpublicized off-camera struggles of directors, stars, and producers, and all the various ways by which some films became our most indelible cultural touchstones - and others ended up as train wrecks.Not content to leave any format untouched, Barrios examines animated musicals and popular music with insight and enthusiasm. Cartoons have been intimately connected with musicals since Steamboat Willie. Disney's short Silly Symphonies grew into the instant classic Snow White, which paved the way for that modern masterpiece, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. Without movie musicals, Barrios argues, MTV would have never existed. On the flip side, without MTV we might have been spared Evita. Informed, energetic, and humorous, Dangerous Rhythm is both an impressive piece of scholarship and a joy to read.
Author Notes
Richard Barrios worked in the music and film industries before turning to film history with the award-winning A Song in the Dark. He lectures extensively and appears frequently on television and in film and DVD documentaries. Born in the swamps of south Louisiana and a longtime resident of New York City, he now lives in bucolic suburban Philadelphia
Reviews (2)
New York Review of Books Review
ALL MOVIES ARE musical, film being as reliant on rhythm and tempo as sonatas are. Only a few movies are musicals, though, and the fewness isn't going away. Live-action musicals are nearly as endangered a movie species as westerns. Whether you think those few are too many or nowhere near enough will go a long way toward determining your response to Richard Barrios's "Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter." The subtitle indicates which side Barrios comes down on. The fact of his having written the exhaustively researched and exuberantly argued "A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film" (1995) should settle any doubts. "Dangerous Rhythm" takes its title from the opening line of the Conrad and Magidson Academy Award-winning tune "The Continental," which Ginger Rogers sings to Fred Astaire in "The Gay Divorcee" (1934). They proceed to dance, quite gloriously, even by their nonpareil standards. Embracing musicals at that level is one thing. It's quite another when Elvis Presley is going through the motions; when Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin are warbling in the Wild West, as they do in "Paint Your Wagon" (1969); or when the cast includes not just the Village People but also a pre-Kardashian Bruce Jenner ("Can't Stop the Music," 1980). Like it or not, those are musicals, too. In such cases, "embracing" is out of the question, or should be. What about "accepting"? One of the virtues of "Dangerous Rhythm" is that Barrios doesn't let intoxication with his subject - waiter, more champagne, and heavy on the bubbles - keep him from being both cleareyed and catholic about the genre. He recognizes that no small part of why movie musicals matter is that they contain multitudes. In their early days, Barrios writes, they would "traverse the entire map: dramas and comedies that didn't need songs, westerns, gangster pictures, even science fiction," and he has the examples to prove it. Yet along with magic, those multitudes encompass mediocrity and much, much worse. Devoted as he is, Barrios is anything but a purist. The "conundrum" of musicals, he writes, is that "they are vital, they are necessary and they are impossible." Barrios covers a very extensive waterfront: from the first Vitaphone shorts, of 1926, to passing mentions of last year's "Black Nativity," "Frozen" and NBC's live "Sound of Music." Certain titles and names keep cropping up: "The Broadway Melody" (1929); Al Jolson; "Love Me Tonight" (1932), which is every bit as good as Barrios says it is; "42nd Street" (1933); considerably more Astaire than Gene Kelly; Barrios's ne plus ultra, "The Wizard of Oz" (1939); "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1944); MGM's Freed unit, with Vincente Minnelli as its chief directorial talent; "The Sound of Music" (1965); "Cabaret" (1972); "Chicago" (2002); "Mamma Mia!" (2008), which Barrios dislikes even more than he likes "Chicago," and he likes "Chicago" a lot. As that list suggests, "Dangerous Rhythm" offers a lot of history. The book also offers a lot of analysis, and so much personality that it verges on autobiography. It's no one of those things. Barrios calls it a "fantasia." A fair enough description, that term has the further virtue of letting him off the hook. "Dangerous Rhythm" lacks any sort of through-line (not that it necessarily requires one). It's more revue than book musical. But it does repeat itself an awful lot. Some of that is understandable. One of Barrios's precepts is that the history of movie musicals "has been a thing less of evolution than recurrence, often regression." The template has been in place for nine decades. It's a question of what to do within it rather than what to do with it. "From 'The Broadway Melody' to 'Rock of Ages,' from Jolson to hip-hop," Barrios contends, "it's all of a piece." So collapsing chronology is part of the point. Since each chapter is about a particular theme or motif, hopping around within the genre's history makes sense. Those themes include the role of tradition (which makes the chapter on that subject effectively a précis of the book), musical stars, the business side, the relationship between artifice and verisimilitude, the music of musicals, fiascos, animation (maybe the most illuminating chapter), the role of race and gayness, and the impact of television. BARRIOS KNOWS THIS material inside out, which allows him to step back to make often inspired observations. "Dance on film, pre-Astaire," he writes, "had been finite and self-contained, more for groups than solos or duets, a toilsome thing not connected with life or emotion or anything other than exertion." Speaking of exertion, Joan Crawford on-screen offers "Kabuki spontaneity." The movie version of "Hello, Dolly!" (1969) resembles "a convention of wedding cakes." The chemistry between Shirley Temple and Bill (Bojangles) Robinson in "The Little Colonel" (1935) is "about two performers connecting, like Astaire and Rogers did or Hope and Crosby or Monroe and Russell, finding in their shared music an irresistible path to a very particular kind of joy." Of course some kinds of joy are more particular than others: Betty Hutton was "extroverted to the point of exhaustion." Though drawn to the past, Barrios is very much aware of the present, whose roots extend back half a century now. The acceptance of rock 'n' roll, he writes, meant that "musicals were effectively taken out of the mainstream and removed from relevance." More recently, he suggests, big-budget comic-book films figure in the movie firmament of today as big-budget musicals did in the firmament of the past: as events and tent poles. That's a shrewd bit of cinematic taxonomy - except that he has to undercut it with an aside: "What's the difference, really, between a chorus line and an interplanetary explosion?" Well, with all due respect to Kelly and Rita Hayworth, one man's "Cover Girl" (1944) isn't another's cosmology. Betty Hutton is not alone in exhausting extroversion. Hyperbole and ungainliness are not a happy combination, and Barrios can write with vigor at the expense of care - or, too often, good sense. Musicals' "wide range is what is known as the gamut, one these films run with a force that belies their glistening veneer." You can almost hear those words being read aloud by Lina Lamont. Of the director Ernst Lubitsch, he says, "Few deem his musicals prime among his biggest-bang efforts." We're back to interplanetary explosions. Or an even bigger bang: Barrios suggests that Jeannette MacDonald's talent "could reach nearly to infinity," and "Love Me Tonight," which she made with Maurice Chevalier, "helped to bring in a more golden age for film songs." Presumably, a more golden age is like a more perfect union, only with a national anthem written by Rodgers and Hart. The movie musical tradition is "surprising and surpassing to the point of occupying an unshakable bomb shelter in the collective heart." It's those shakable bomb shelters you have to watch out for. Even Barrios's inflation can get inflated. He says that Warners bought the rights to "My Fair Lady" (1964) for $75 million in constant dollars. Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator for the original $5.5 million price, you get a 2014 figure that's $33 million less. He writes of 1960s musicals generally, "A certain elephantiasis, respectful yet pernicious, was beginning to creep in, and more and more of these films would fall under that spell." You know what he means but find yourself wondering, "What was he thinking when he wrote that?" Maybe he was just thinking in German. Barrios refers to "the über-gifted Bernadette Peters"; "the fiber-smooth Mark Sandrich" (the director of Astaire-Rogers musicals like 1934's "The Gay Divorcee," 1934, and "Top Hat," 1935); and "the fiber-splashy" 1951 version of "Show Boat." In "Dangerous Rhythm" - good, bad and never indifferent - it's certainly musicals fiber alles. MARK FEENEY, an arts writer for The Boston Globe, is the author of "Nixon at the Movies." He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
Library Journal Review
Film historian Barrios (A Song in the Dark; Screened Out) chronicles music musicals as they move in and out of popular and critical favor, from The Jazz Singer to The Wizard of Oz to TV's Glee. The book often circles back to the polarized nature of movie musicals: trivial subjects, produced at tremendous expense; awkward episodes of nonsingers singing and nonactors acting; plots or presentations that are clueless and even offensive, yet garner devoted followers. The author isn't afraid to call them as he sees them, sharing his encyclopedic knowledge, in a style free from academic jargon and sporadically laced with stinging criticism or effusive praise. Occasional black-and-white photographs accompany the text. VERDICT -Barrios's work offers little that is "dangerous" (the title is taken from a song) but much that will interest movie musical buffs looking for detailed analysis of singers, actors, directors, songs, budgets, notable flops, animated musicals, and comments about what triumphs in a musical, what doesn't, and why.-Maggie Knapp, Trinity Valley Sch., Fort Worth, TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
