Movie genres rise and fall, they wax and wane, they live and die. Just look at the western. Until its long decline began in the 70s, it was the lasso-swinging genre that US film-makers used most often to analyse their nation and its discontents. Now that job is mostly done by sci-fi and fantasy, genres that were barely even respectable before 2001: A Space Odyssey. Likewise, film noir: once deemed a sleazy disreputable B-movie genre, and now reclaimed as the acme of respectability.
Not so the musical, though. That sucker will never die, though you’d think otherwise if you listened to anyone surprised by the success of La La Land, those fools who thought the musical had perished long ago. Yes, it’s so dead we already have another blockbuster heading our way: Beauty and the Beast. Better yet, director Bill Condon – who also made Chicago and Dreamgirls – is a brand name in musicals (and not the only one, if you count Baz Luhrmann). Some dead genre.
In the late 60s, it did look as if the institutional version of the musical – the CinemaScope-Technicolor roadshow bombs (Star!, Thoroughly Modern Millie et al) that followed The Sound of Music, trying to replicate its successes – was on its last legs. Always a protean genre, however, the musical simply mutated into spikier, more grownup forms like Cabaret and Saturday Night Fever.
But if you broaden your definition of musical to include all films that have music or song in them, then the musical has enjoyed a parallel life in a kind of out-of-genre musical diaspora. Even as The Sound of Music was wowing them in 1965, we’d already seen A Hard Day’s Night, an ancestor to the music videos of two decades later. In 1973, the wall-to-wall soundtracks for American Graffiti and Mean Streets offered contrasting ideas about what could be done with old songs in new contexts, and rearranged the sonic architecture of every movie since.
And those contexts proliferate day by day, building entire new sub-genres of their own: Pixar and Disney animated musicals; High School Musical and variants such as Glee and Pitch Perfect; talent-show TV and live musicals; jukebox musicals such as Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys; musicals about musicals like Saving Mr Banks; followed by the next trend, remakes of musicals (Mary Poppins Returns). There is no bottom to it, and no end.
It’s music, eternal, the food of love. It goes anywhere, fits anything, and never ages or dies. You can’t say that about a rifle, a pony and me. Except that, of course, Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson already did, in Rio Bravo. In a song. In a western. You see? It’s everywhere. Alive and well.
