Keywords

British silent cinema made its transition to sound in the middle of 1929, a year or so behind Hollywood and six months ahead of mainland Europe. Hollywood’s sizeable production and distribution interests in Britain enabled American talkies to rapidly dominate British screens, and the arrival of Warner Bros’ Al Jolson Musicals The Jazz Singer (1927) and The Singing Fool (1928) yielded substantial returns for those exhibitors smart enough to convert their cinemas to sound in 1928. Their success also convinced British film producers to wire their studios post haste in the race to get British-made talkies on British screens. However, Jolson’s films and those British Musicals that followed were heavily criticised by Britain’s intellectual elite. This opprobrium was partly fuelled by a wave of anti-Americanism linked to the post-World War I influx of American film, music and culture, but was also tinged with anti-Semitism aimed both at Jolson, himself Jewish, and the Jewish interests on Broadway where his films had originated.1 But Britain’s highbrow and anti-Semitic critics were out of touch with popular tastes and Jolson’s British fans turned out en masse to witness his on-screen renditions of popular songs like ‘Sonny Boy’, ‘My Mammy’ and ‘I’m Sitting on Top of the World’ in such numbers that the profits generated helped finance the costly installation of sound equipment in British cinemas. As the new technologies and the aesthetics of synchronised sound amalgamated with the visual language of silent cinema, British producers experimented with inserting popular songs into their talkies.

Using case studies from Britain’s first talkies produced between 1929 and 1932, this chapter explores how early ‘musical moments’2 explored the dramatic potential of music to signify pivotal moments in the plot; to emphasise gender and sexuality and to delineate differences in class and culture through the representation of musical tastes, styles and leitmotifs associated with different characters. It also considers how diegetic and synchronised musical moments allowed actors to temporarily revert to silent modes of mimetic expression, as music liberated them from delivering dialogue into static microphones. The performance of music also created spaces for ‘aural spectacle’ where the flow of the plot is temporarily halted to accommodate moments of authentic emotional expression that the spoken script could not convey. Film producers too saw the potential of music to forge a recognisable national identity for British films, as distinct from Hollywood and Europe. Commercial opportunities were also exploited by marketing the ‘song-from-the-film’ through sheet music and gramophone tie-ins.

Theme songs specifically linked to particular films had been played live in cinemas and sold as sheet music from the 1910s. As early as 1913, The Abyss, starring Asta Nielsen had a score composed for its erotic ‘Gaucho Dance’ and the practice of composing memorable songs for popular films increased during the 1920s. Notable examples include ‘The Sheik of Araby’ composed for The Sheik (1921) which capitalised on Rudolph Valentino’s mass appeal and became associated with the film thereafter. By 1926, Warner Bros’ Don Juan was exhibited with a complete music score on Vitaphone discs and Cecil B. De Mille’s Volga Boatmen had the Russian traditional ‘The Song of the Volga Boatmen’ released as sheet music for domestic and cinema performances. Full cinema scores for silent films were rare; most were accompanied by a combination of short generic library pieces and improvisation, though Albert Cazabon’s compilation for the British war film The Flag Lieutenant (1926) is an exception (see Brand 2002: 217). Live music, sound effects and the occasional choral accompaniment had always been intrinsic to silent cinema, but synchronised sound opened creative possibilities for diegetic music where creative decisions were now taken by producers rather than left to exhibitors and cinema musicians at the point of exhibition.

Writing on the British Musical, John Mundy (2007: 33) describes the 1930s as the ‘most musical of decades’ as the genre, born with the arrival of sound, quickly established itself. By June 1930, 13 of the 80 British talkies produced were classified as ‘Musicals’ or ‘Revues’ (Gifford 1986).3 The historiography of the early British Musical remains patchy and many films are now hard to access. Mundy (2007: 1) ascribes this neglect to the disdainful attitudes of British critics and film music historians like John Huntley who felt that while Britain excelled at the ‘serious film score’, no British Musical could rival Hollywood (Huntley 1947: 10). Victor Saville, director of several early 1930s Musicals, reflected these attitudes; ‘I don’t think enough credit has been given to the British musicals of the early Thirties. I say this with modesty—it took nearly 40 years before I could look at my early work’ (Saville 1979: 49). Despite his modesty, Saville was mistaken in stating that he directed the first ‘musical Musical’ in December 1931 with Sunshine Susie, a claim easily challenged by Walter Summers’ Raise the Roof from February 1930 (ibid.: 48). The British Musical certainly flourished throughout the 1930s, accounting for approximately one-fifth of all British productions until 1939 when the genre faded from British production. But we will now turn our attention to the very first musical moments in British talkies from which the ‘musical Musical’ developed.

Musical Moments Before Musicals

The first British Musicals appeared in 1930, but songs were intrinsic to Britain’s first talkies from March 1929 with Hitchcock’s Blackmail, shot in both silent and sound versions at Elstree Studios and released in June. Not all early talkies had successful releases however, and Arthur Maude’s The Clue of the New Pin (1929) was heralded by The Bioscope trade paper as the ‘First British All-Talkie’ (9 January 1929: 24), but its fate was to be released only as a silent. This was a time of boom and bust for film companies, unsure of which technologies to invest in, unfamiliar with the new aesthetics of sound and uncertain whether talkies were a short-term fad. In May 1929 alone, eight companies were set up to produce talkies but only one survived into the mid-1930s (Wood 1986: 12). Notwithstanding these setbacks, sound technology stabilised and the transition quickly gathered momentum. Exactly a year after Blackmail, Britain produced its last silent feature with The Woodpigeon Patrol (June 1930), a boy-scout adventure featuring the movement’s founder Robert Baden-Powell.

Much has been written about Hitchcock’s creative use of sound in Blackmail’s famous breakfast table ‘knife scene’ where the word ‘knife’ is repeated and foregrounded to reflect the psychological turmoil of the female protagonist Alice (Annie Ondra), traumatised after recently stabbing her sexual attacker, Crewe (Cyril Ritchard).4 But Hitchcock’s use of music in the sequence leading up to the attack is also highly significant. Having abandoned her detective boyfriend on a date, Alice goes to Crewe’s studio where she dresses in a dancer’s costume while he sings ‘Miss Up-to-Date’ on his piano. The song’s lyrics reflect Alice’s youthful confidence as she participates in a light-hearted flirtation for which she is soon to be punished. Powrie’s concept of the ‘crystal-song’ is useful here whereby the song serves as a pivot around which the drama takes a new turn (Powrie 2017: 4). Crewe’s performance begins playfully upbeat, but takes a sinister turn when he ceases playing to secretly steal Alice’s clothes, before reprising the song without the lyrics and aggressively hammering the piano keys. The song’s performance is transformative and signals Crewe’s sexual intentions, just prior to his attack on Alice. Hitchcock uses the song to prepare the audience for the attack of which Alice is unaware. This second rendition shifts the song’s meaning from a representation of female agency, ‘Miss-Up-to-Date’, into an indicator of aggressively aroused masculine sexuality. Comparing the film’s sound and silent versions also reveals how the song’s lyrics and its various iterations help construct the drama. In the silent version, Hitchcock builds the tension visually through Crewe’s body language and facial expressions; his attack on Alice filmed with a forward tracking shot from his perspective at the piano. Hitchcock drew a link between sex and death with his first ‘musical moment’ which Sullivan (2006: 7) describes as ‘the debut of a Hitchcockian opera’ in which ‘out of control musical performances’ became a prelude to violence in his later films. During the film’s production, Hitchcock’s famously sadistic treatment of Ondra can be seen in her failed sound test where he taunts her with accusations of ‘sleeping with men’ provoking her to break down into embarrassed laughter (Spoto 1983: 118). Her voice thereafter was dubbed by another actress, Joan Barry. Despite its sinister associations in the film, the sheet music for ‘Miss Up-to-Date’, composed by popular songwriters Billy Mayerl and Frank Eyton, blithely advertised its link to ‘The Great British All-Talkie Film’ and sold for two shillings.

Three months after Blackmail, Sinclair Hill’s melodrama Dark Red Roses was among a string of British talkies released in September 1929 and had a narrow escape when its negative was rescued from the fire that destroyed Wembley Studios shortly after its production there. If Blackmail explored the creative potential of the ‘crystal-song’ to signify a sinister plot turn, then Dark Red Roses took this a step further with musical leitmotifs embedded throughout the plot. The film opens with the eponymous, slightly melancholic ‘waltz song’ sung by tenor Geoffrey Withers over another blatant sales pitch for the music’s publishers. Like Blackmail’s ‘Miss Up-to-Date’ the sheet music was sold as ‘The Theme Song of “Dark Red Roses”. An All-British Sound Film Production’. The ‘All-British’ assertion reflected another backlash against Hollywood and British talkies used music to espouse their cultural patriotism. The film is a marital melodrama with a dark twist, starring Stuart Rome and Frances Doble as David and Laura Cardew. David, a sculptor, suspects Laura of having an affair with handsome French cellist Anton (Hugh Eden) and offers to sculpt the musician’s hands, while intending to amputate them in a grisly revenge plot. The opening scenes present an idyllic English thatched cottage but a title-card enigmatically foreshadows darker times:

Life is composed of sunshine and shadows. When happiness radiates it seems impossible that shadows can creep in—but they do—and at times the cloud that creates them is no larger than a man’s hand or his handwriting…..

The theme song, played over the titles, blends into Cardew’s Irish gardener singing W.B. Yeats’s 1889 poem Down by the Salley Gardens while David sings from his bathroom window. The film’s opening three minutes feature three distinct musical moments in which songs act as leitmotifs, positioning characters and foreshadowing the plot. The melodrama pivots on key musical moments, including a cello recital where Anton plays ‘Dark Red Roses’ while David watches in anguish as Laura becomes transfixed. There is also a rare glimpse of the legendary Russian dancer Georges Balanchine, who choreographed and performed his iconic ‘Russian Ballet’ (set to Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina), about a husband who catches his wife with another man. As the couple watch Balanchine’s dance, parallel editing links his performance to David’s intensifying jealousy of which Laura, like Blackmail’s Alice, remains innocent. Like Hitchcock’s ‘Miss Up-to-Date’, ‘Dark Red Roses’ accompanies the seduction of a woman by a male interloper, and both songs destabilise masculine control which then plunges into violence and turmoil.

The British press praised Dark Red Roses for the quality of its sound recording which was still experiencing teething problems during these early months. Accent and dialogue delineate social status throughout the film, from the thick Irish brogue of the gardener, to David’s assured theatre-honed baritone, Laura’s clipped ‘BBC English’ and Anton’s exotic faux-French accent. The film’s music emphasised these cultural differences from the popular folk songs sung by the gardener, to Anton’s cello rendition of the title song, to Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina ballet performed to the film’s fictional upper-middle-class clientele. Music is also intrinsic to the film’s ‘quality’ and The Bioscope (23 October 1929: 30) patriotically asserted that Dark Red Roses outclassed the more expensive and populist (Hollywood) counterparts in which Al Jolson ‘sobbed out’ his ‘sob-songs’ stressing that the film ‘should please every class of audience’ indicating its suitability for upper and middle-class cinema patrons (ibid.: 35).

Thomas Bentley’s The American Prisoner and Harry Lachman’s Under the Greenwood Tree, also released in September 1929, adopted further approaches to weaving music and pivotal ‘crystal-songs’ into early talkie narratives. The American Prisoner was an action-adventure film, adapted from Eden Phillpotts’ 1904 novel about American POWs captured in the War of Independence who escape from Britain’s isolated Dartmoor Prison. Danish silent star Carl Brisson plays the eponymous American prisoner Lieutenant Stark who, injured in his escape, is sheltered and nursed by local girl, Grace Malherb (Madeleine Carroll). Brisson’s speaking voice is accented and stilted, partly due to the wooden script and inadequacies in early microphone technology. But Brisson’s Danish accent became neutralised by his singing voice such that the film’s press advertisements boasted: ‘Our mother tongue as it should be spoken, with all the charm of the English voice’ in this ‘All British Singing and Talking film’ (The Biggleswade Chronicle 15 August 1930: 2). Brisson’s musical moment comes when he serenades Grace from his sickbed with the song ‘I Wonder if you will Remember?’ for which she later joins him in a piano duet, signalling her reciprocal feelings for him. Although these musical interludes appear incongruous in an action-adventure talkie, they are key to the seduction of the female protagonist and explicitly progress the romantic sub-plot. In September 1929, writing and delivering film dialogue was a new art-form and British cinema’s all-male scriptwriting teams often found it difficult to write dialogue for female characters. Music and songs, performed and recorded synchronously on the film set, could now carry the emotional weight of the scene with a spontaneity which the dialogue often lacked. Again, the song was advertised for purchase from Lawrence Wright Music Co.

Released the same month as The American Prisoner, Under the Greenwood Tree was another literary adaptation, this time from Thomas Hardy’s 1872 Wessex Tale about the ousting of the Mellstock Village ‘Quire’ (choir) and its ‘west-gallery musicians’ following the arrival of the new church organ. Described by the threatened choristers as a ‘miserable machine’ and ‘box of wind’, Mellstock’s villagers tellingly mistake the organ for a coffin when it first arrives on a pony and trap. In Hardy’s nineteenth-century world, the Mellstock organ represented the demise of tradition. In the 1929 film adaptation, the ousting of Mellstock’s ‘Quire’ mirrored the fate of thousands of cinema musicians being ousted from cinemas by the arrival of the talkies. Under the Greenwood Tree contains several musical sequences composed by Hubert Bath and Harry Stafford and arranged by up-and-coming film music director John Reynders. The musical interludes again delineate class and culture, reflecting Hardy’s preoccupation with the threat of urban modernity on older rural values. The doomed choir, filmed in expressive close-ups, represents the heart of the community, performing Christmas carols and traditional folk songs at New Year’s celebrations. Here, music embodies the values of an idealised English pastoral and binds local communities on the cusp of change. Musical moments are again deployed in relation to the female protagonist, this time the attractive new schoolmistress and musician Fancy Day (Marguerite Allen). Day quickly becomes the object of desire among Mellstock’s bachelors, but her complicity in agreeing to play the church organ sees her branded as a ‘brazen town girl’ by her young suitor Dick. Like Blackmail’s Alice, Fancy Day embodies a level of female modernity and independence that is both desirable and problematic for male protagonists.

British Musical Revues

Early British talkies used songs to exploit the novelty of fans hearing their stars sing as well as talk, but these musical moments also heightened dramatic and romantic expression, particularly with the limitations of early spoken dialogue which required the camera to remain static and performers to enunciate clearly into fixed microphones hidden on set. In Dark Red Roses and Under the Greenwood Tree music is intrinsic to the plot; in The American Prisoner and Blackmail, music is extrinsic but develops subplots around sexual seduction, both consensual and otherwise. But these films cannot be categorised as ‘Musicals’ when compared to the succession of all-singing and dancing Hollywood extravaganzas with predictably consistent titles like Broadway, Broadway Babies, Broadway Melody, Broadway Scandals, and Gold Diggers of Broadway (all 1929) flooding British screens. British producers sought to emulate their commercial formula by transferring popular West End theatre revues and stage Musicals onto film. These adaptations created an artistic and historical link between popular Music Hall and Variety Theatre, to Cine Variety (which combined live performance with cinema exhibition), to full-scale film Musicals of the 1930s. Three such productions are particularly noteworthy but ultimately represented a dead-end for the subgenre as producers grappled to find successful formulas for music in film and sometimes failed. The Co-optimists (1929)5 was a direct translation of a West End ‘gang show’; Splinters (1929) a musical-comedy based on the eponymous all-male drag show that had entertained frontline troops in World War I; and Elstree Calling (1929) a variety-style omnibus featuring popular entertainers. With the exception of Splinters, these were critical and popular failures and failed to gain traction in British film thereafter but paved the way for Musical Variety which became a staple of British radio and television for several decades to come.

Britain’s First Musicals and the Rise of the Star Tenor

An early British Musical subgenre featured the figure of the ‘star tenor’, particularly Joseph Hislop and Jan Kiepura who collectively starred in three very different early Musicals; The Loves of Robbie Burns (1930), City of Song (1931) and Tell Me Tonight (1932). Producer Herbert Wilcox had entered into a commercial partnership with His Master’s Voice (HMV) giving him access to the company’s recording stars including acclaimed Scottish tenor Hislop (Wilcox 1967: 86). The Loves of Robbie Burns is a romantic bio-pic recounting the poet’s complex relationships with his doomed lover Mary Campbell (Eve Gray) and his long-suffering wife Jean Armour (Dorothy Seacomb). It is also a romantic celebration of eighteenth-century Scottish landscape and culture with Hislop singing traditional songs like ‘Annie Laurie’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in picturesque locations around Burns’ birthplace in Ayr. Reviews praised the film for democratising access to Hislop’s vocal talents which were hitherto confined to Europe’s opera houses and opera goers, but critics struggled to define the film without a structuring ‘backstage Musical’ narrative familiar from Hollywood imports. It was neither opera nor drama, and the phenomenon of characters bursting into song without diegetic motivation was a new experience for critics. Reviewer Michael Orme (12 March 1930: 504) described it as ‘a curious indefinite formula which is neither that of coherent, dramatic narrative, nor […] operatic’. The idea of the ‘Musical’ had not yet fully formed in British cinema. Mindful of satisfying ‘elite’ cultural tastes, The Bioscope (5 March 1930: 31) considered the film suitable for ‘first class houses’ with plaudits for Hislop’s singing and the film’s excellent recording quality. But the film was a commercial failure that failed to increase record sales, and HMV pulled out of the partnership. Wilcox blamed the ‘indigenous’ nature of the subject and Hislop’s lack of appeal among popular cinemagoers (Wilcox 1967: 86). The implication of Wilcox’s remarks was that the film was both ‘too highbrow’ and ‘too Scottish’ for popular tastes and audiences south of the Scottish border. Hislop was forty-six at the time and his operatic acting and declamatory vocal style appeared dated and un-cinematic and he made an unconvincing romantic lead, a role that Jan Kiepura was soon to fulfil with aplomb.

Song and musical interludes were rapidly becoming integrated into the narrative structure and dialogue patterns of British films as creative techniques and technology progressed. Following Hislop’s failure to impress audiences, producers turned to young Polish tenor Jan Kiepura. Kiepura was handsome, a more naturalistic film actor and made a perfect romantic lead with his charismatic mittel-European accent that recorded well in early talkies when voices were particularly noteworthy. Critics and publicists heralded him as the ‘new Caruso’6 and exploited his real-life bachelor status to entice his growing army of British female fans. Kiepura starred in three Multi-Language Versions (MLVs): City of Song (1930), Tell Me Tonight (1932) and My Song for You (1934), featuring a range of European talent. MLVs were shot in different languages simultaneously using the same sets and locations but substituting stars and technical teams where necessary. MLV Musicals were popular during the transitional period as they enabled producers to spread production costs, engage the best European talent and maximise distribution by exploiting the international appeal of their music. City of Song (Die Singende Stadt in Germany), a musical romance set in London and Naples, was a British-German co-production, directed by Italian Carmine Gallone with an Austrian producer, Hungarian cinematographer and Danish editor working with a Polish star. This European line-up represented the ambitions of the film’s newly-established British production company, Associated Sound Film Industries, to collaborate with European producers rather than attempting to conquer American markets or confine themselves to a narrow domestic output.7

Kiepura plays Giovanni Cavallone, a lowly Neapolitan singer and tourist guide who encounters Claire (Betty Stockfeld), a wealthy English socialite who spots his potential. In contrast to the ways in which musical leitmotifs serviced masculinity in the examples we have seen so far, the musical plot device here services female agency when Claire becomes Giovanni’s sponsor and brings him to London to find his fame and fortune. Here, Giovanni is introduced to Claire’s wealthy, xenophobic English friends at a specially organised debut performance where he is the special attraction. As Giovanni appears, one of Claire’s male friends instructs him to ‘do the odd spot of bowing’ in response to the applause, emphasising Giovanni’s awkward inexperience of social etiquette. Unusually for an early sound film, the camera then escapes its sound booth and tracks fluidly around the dinner-suited guests, eavesdropping on snippets of gossip about Claire’s relationship with her protégé and observing the film’s social and sexual dynamics. When Giovanni sings, the camera cuts away from him to focus on the looks between Claire and her distracted male admirers as she, rapt in his performance, becomes annoyed at their inattentiveness. This scene echoes silent film technique as the performances are largely mimetic, with Giovanni’s off-camera singing and diegetic waltz music providing the soundtrack to the various flirtations and interactions, culminating in a private, shared kiss between Claire and Giovanni. The music also provides the rhythm and choreography of the scene in terms of the movement of performers and camera.

Mistaking Claire’s patronage for love and becoming increasingly childlike in his jealous sulks, Giovanni’s advances are thereafter rebuked. His possessive and fiery Italian ‘nature’ cannot accommodate her socialite lifestyle and jazz-era urbanity, and even his sparkling tenor performances cannot protect him from being branded an unsophisticated Neapolitan by London society. Broken-hearted and unable to transcend his position without Claire’s patronage, Giovanni returns to Naples. But despite the ways in which the plot emasculates Giovanni, it pivots around Kiepura’s singing; from popular Neapolitan ballads like ‘Fishermen of Pusilleco’ in the ruined theatre at Pompeii, to opera classics like ‘La Donna è mobile’ and Paul Abraham’s newly commissioned ‘Signora, I Want to Say Carissima’. Although Giovanni’s talent offers no passport into English society, his singing creates moments of authenticity which represent the moral centre of the film and highlight the vacuous superfluity of Claire’s clique. Throughout the film, musical interludes effectively free the performers and film technique from the constraints of serving Miles Malleson’s rather stilted script, allowing the unbridled expression of mimed emotion, which early film dialogue often stifled. The film’s final wordless scenes show Giovanni’s passionate reunion with his long-suffering girlfriend Carmella (Heather Angel) on the picturesque Napoli coast before cutting to a reclining and crestfallen Claire, listening to his singing on a gramophone player controlled by the hand of an unseen male in her London apartment, Giovanni’s physical presence now substituted for a mechanical recording. The contrast between Giovanni’s Italian passion and Claire’s English restraint is evident, and the final shot shows her miserably slumped across her couch implying thwarted desire and romantic frustration over what might have been. Both Giovanni and Claire are trapped into their respective social and geographical spaces which music allowed them temporarily to transcend.

If City of Song introduced Kiepura to British audiences, his next feature Tell Me Tonight, promoted by its eponymous title song, cemented his star status in Britain. The film is a Musical-comedy set in the Swiss Alps where Kiepura plays Enrico Ferraro, another Italian opera singer, but this time one so overwhelmed by success that he changes places with a petty criminal Alexander Koretsky (Sonnie Hale) to escape ‘Non-Stop Nora’, his over-zealous tour manager. Unlike City of Song where music diminishes the male lead in the face of sexual and social rejection, in Tell Me Tonight music services male sexual agency and romantic appeal. Having escaped his contractual obligations to tour, Enrico drives incognito along Locarno’s vertiginous mountain roads where he rescues the local mayor’s daughter Mathilde (Magda Schneider) from a car crash. The romantic plot then contrives to get the couple together and to maximise opportunities for Kiepura to sing by spontaneously accompanying village choirs, singing opera classics in local civic concerts and seducing Mathilde with the film’s crystal-song, ‘Tell Me Tonight’. Such was the song’s impact that the Kinematograph Weekly’s Musical Supplement (Owen, 8 December 1932: 30) advised exhibitors to play the song before the start of the film and during the interval, with live orchestra or gramophone, to create atmosphere in the cinema. In the film, John Orton’s dialogue fizzes with energetic wit and the producers exploit Kiepura’s talents as a romantic comedian, played off against Hale’s likeable rogue and Schneider’s wholesome sexual vivacity. Directed with bravura by Ukrainian-Lithuanian Anatole Litvak working with an Austrian, German, Spanish and Ukrainian crew, it was released as Das Lied einer Nacht in Germany and Chanson d’une nuit in France. The film tapped into a pan-European taste for MLV Musical-comedies and operetta films exemplified by Melody of the Heart (Melodie des Herzens, 1929), Three from the Filling Station (Die Drei von der Tankstelle, 1930), Sunshine Susie (Die Privatsekretärin, 1931) and Congress Dances (Der Kongress tanzt, 1931). Nevertheless, critic Sydney Tremayne (1932), citing the exemplar musical achievements of French film maker René Clair, argued that despite its excellent qualities the film still failed to incorporate music that ‘was part of the plot, with synchronised action and vocalisation contributing to the rhythm and credibility of the “pattern”’. Tremayne was referring to the ways in which the film’s narrative flow halts to allow Kiepura to sing in largely static performances designed to showcase his talent and the film’s title song. The integration of action and vocalisation that Tremayne called for was addressed to some extent, in the films and performances of Gracie Fields which combined song and physical movement as we shall see below.

Working Class Culture and Musical Tastes: The Rise of Gracie Fields

By 1931 the language and technology of early talkies had evolved significantly and Britain’s producers were becoming more au fait with addressing popular musical tastes, particularly after the commercial failure of The Loves of Robbie Burns. The talkies had also opened up class, regional and cultural differences around accent and idiomatic speech, and ordinary cinemagoers from the British regions found that the default ‘BBC English’ of early talkies bore no relation to their own idiom. Popular Lancashire-born Variety star Gracie Fields was discovered by producer Basil Dean who cast her in Maurice Elvey’s Sally in Our Alley (1931). Fields had a unique soprano vocal style with a range that lent itself to blues or comic songs which she delivered with a pronounced Lancashire accent, and a restless performance style in which songs emanate from her physicality and movements.

Fields plays Sally Winch, a coffee-shop waitress in the crowded Victorian inner city who entertains her clientele with songs like the ‘Lancashire Blues’, performed with vocal gymnastics, whistles, scat singing and the impersonation of a trombone. Sally sings with unselfconscious spontaneity while simultaneously shouting orders into the café’s kitchen, and the song becomes an integral part of the cacophony and rhythms of the teeming café and the physicality of Sally’s work and social interactions. The song’s lyrics promote Lancashire over Tennessee (‘Rochdale is good enough for me’); local ‘hot-pot’ over ‘waffles’, and clogs over shoes, making a virtue of hardship and deprivation. The film’s title song ‘Sally’, first played on a barrel organ over the film’s opening credits, also firmly establishes links between geography and musical culture with images of children playing among the crowded Victorian tenements. Like ‘The Lancashire Blues’, the title song also extols a sense of working-class fixity and identity with place, imploring the eponymous Sally never to leave the ‘alley’. Social mobility is both discouraged and undesirable. According to Gledhill (2003: 20), British silent cinema worked to maintain class divides through the delineation of social and geographical spaces which are rarely breached. In early sound films, it also sought to delineate social divisions through musical tastes and musical performance. When Sally’s talents are spotted by a couple of aristocratic ‘slum tourists’ who exclaim that ‘she’s quite too marvellous’, she is hired as their party entertainer. But on arrival at their wealthy home, she finds herself totally out of place with the hostess audibly declaiming ‘look at the state of her!’ Like Giovanni being taught to bow in City of Song, the family’s servants make her more acceptable to the exquisitely costumed guests before she is allowed on stage. Sally’s comic nonsense song ‘Fred Fannakapan’, performed with comedic expression and exaggerated plosives, gets even the stuffiest old dowager singing along. But once the performance is over the status quo resumes and she is an outcast, invisible to the indifferent partygoers. Mistaking a waiter’s attentions for an invitation to dance, she loses him his job and is herself summarily dismissed, returning to the bosom of her coffee shop to perform ‘Sally’ to her own people and a rapturous welcome. The contrast between the stifling upper-class party and the seething humanity of the coffee shop could not be greater. Again, the performer and performance, plucked from their origins, are commodified by an unappreciative social elite who regard them and their culture as a temporary curio.

Both Sally and City of Song celebrate working-class authenticity at a time of economic deprivation and hardship, Sally confronts the realities of slum poverty and violence against women and Sally’s young friend Florrie (Florence Desmond), a Garbo-obsessed work-shy, is constantly beaten by her abusive father, her only escape being in the pages of cinema fan magazines. The studio sets for Sally’s coffee house and adjoining slums echo contemporary German films like Pabst’s The Threepenny Opera (1931) and Fritz Lang’s M (1931), where crowded tenements house authentic humanity and vibrant working-class culture, but also trap people into poverty and casual violence.

American Variety (21 July 1931: 34) offered a typically muted review, saying Sally was ‘better than most English films […] the songs are not particularly impressive and the general standard nothing to shout about’. The British magazine Picturegoer (25 July 1931: 4) claimed that Fields did not have a ‘film face’, suggesting that she was not classically beautiful, but that her personality shone through. Field’s popularity cannot be underestimated; producer Basil Dean described her as a ‘financial lifebelt’ at a time when his company’s fortunes were precarious and studios built their films around her (Guy 2000: 103). Ironically perhaps, it was Fields’ controlling husband, Archie Pitt, who asked Dean to put her in pictures (Dean 1973: 133). The success of Sally alerted producers to the spending power of mass regional audiences and Fields starred in a number of Musicals set among working-class communities such as Looking on the Bright Side (1932) and Sing as We Go (1934) in which she plays ordinary, unlucky-in-love women, overlooked for more beautiful rivals, but whose indomitable personality and singing ultimately triumph.

Conclusion

The dramatic power of synchronised music and song was recognised from the moment British cinema converted to sound and producers experimented with its potential with varying degrees of creative success. Musical moments were deployed as pivotal plot devices, to intensify drama and to convey gender, class and cultural differences. They also helped to compensate for the shortcomings of early talkie dialogue by creating moments of spectacle which freed the performers, camera and sound from simply delivering dialogue. Static microphones on early talkie sets required fixed performative spaces and staccato movement in which the actor had to remain still, or move from one microphone to the next to speak dialogue. Diegetic music, performed and recorded in situ on set, helped to reintroduce a sense of fluidity and movement by superseding and supplanting dialogue as we saw in City of Song.

In Blackmail and Dark Red Roses, songs also reflect complex and contradictory impulses around male sexual aggression and jealousy. In Under the Greenwood Tree, music was a signifier of an idealised bucolic past and the destabilising influence of the ‘outsider’ female protagonist. In City of Song, music is associated with Giovanni’s emasculation as he fails to seduce his powerful female benefactor and find international fame, but his singing represents moments of cultural authenticity and emotional intensity in contrast to the stultifying xenophobia of upper-crust London society. The desirable and powerful male tenor soon became Kiepura’s default persona as producers realised his commercial potential as a romantic lead, particularly on his growing army of female fans who formed the majority audiences for British cinema. As screenwriters began to ascribe more meaningful talkie roles to women characters, rather than confining them to passive or romantic victims, popular stars like Betty Balfour and Gracie Fields were granted agency as Musical-comedians and heralded the rise of female-led Musical performances exemplified by the films of Jessie Matthews in the 1930s.

Decisions around the inclusion of music in early talkies were often based on commercial as well as creative considerations, particularly by producers like Herbert Wilcox and Basil Dean who needed to realise a quick financial return following the expense of wiring their studios for sound and the increased production costs of early talkies. Commercial partnerships with gramophone companies, later to become ubiquitous in cinema, got off to a precarious and short-lived start as producers grappled to find their hit ‘crystal-song’. Caught between the commercial imperatives of Hollywood and the revered cultural reputation of European cinema, producers also tried to forge a distinct national identity through music and dialogue by foregrounding British songs and singing stars, and the ‘English voice’. Notwithstanding early flops like The Co-Optimists, the 1930s became a ‘golden decade’ for the genre until the start of World War II when British cinema, now under governmental direction, turned its priorities into servicing the War effort, where Musicals had little space to thrive.

Influential and highbrow British theatre and music critics largely deplored British films in general and early British Musicals in particular and American critics consistently derided British productions, which largely stymied the ambitions of Musical producers like Herbert Wilcox to break into the big international Anglophone markets with films like The Loves of Robbie Burns. Early British Musicals like Raise the Roof or Sally in Our Alley addressed the realities of social inequality but the intellectual Left, represented by journals like Close Up, still disregarded them as too frivolous compared to European films like Pabst’s Kameradschaft (1931) which they adored. However, critical opprobrium made little impact on the business of cinema as it was ordinary people who paid to see British films and not the readers of Close Up, and Musicals satisfied a crucial need for affordable and escapist entertainment during the economic depression of the early 1930s. But we cannot simply accuse contemporary 1930s’ critics for their disparagement, as the majority of early British Musicals and their musical moments remain overlooked even among revisionist cinema historians today.

Notes

  1. 1.

    See Porter (2020).

  2. 2.

    I am drawing on Amy Herzog’s (2009) definition of a ‘musical moment’ throughout this article.

  3. 3.

    For the purposes of this article Gifford’s (1986) classification, which uses information from original tradeshow records will be used to ascribe release dates of films and their genre classification.

  4. 4.

    See Rohmer and Chabrol (1979: 24), Spoto (1983: 119), and Truffaut (1978: 72).

  5. 5.

    See Wallace (1930) and Bond (1930) for withering critique of The Co-Optimists.

  6. 6.

    See Kinematograph Weekly, 16 January 1930: 22.

  7. 7.

    For a more detailed account of the production and exhibition of City of Song (Die Singende Stadt) see Brown (2013: 194–199).