In 1929, two years after The Jazz Singer, MGM made the first film that could fairly be called a musical, The Broadway Melody. Other talking and part-talking films had featured musical numbers, but The Broadway Melody had a book and a fully integrated musical program. It was a backstage musical about a successful New York songwriter and two sisters from the provinces who're trying to make it on Broadway. Most of the musical performances are logically motivated by the theatrical story, but sometimes the songwriter starts singing one of his compositions just to express his feelings, with an orchestral accompaniment swelling up behind him on the soundtrack -- which puts us squarely in the fantastical realm of the classic musical.
The film has some delightful songs by the real-life songwriting team of Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed, including the title number, which is presented over and over in the film -- four times in the first half hour alone. It's hard to complain about this, since the song is catchy and almost everything else about the production is shabby and second-rate. The lead performers are likable enough, and do a passable job of firing off some quaint contemporary slang, but their singing and dancing are amateurish, as are the bits we see of the Broadway show they're playing in.
The love triangle between the leads is hardly convincing as drama, and verges on the unpleasant, since the hero seems to end up with the wrong girl in the end. The backstage world is presented as a battleground of jealous sniping and general ill-will. This may have passed for a kind of realism in 1929 but it just feels nasty today. The film's locations are confined to cheap-looking interiors recorded with dull proscenium-style camera set-ups. The two girls spend a lot of time dressing and undressing, showing off their lingerie, and either being physically affectionate or wrestling angrily with each other. This gives the film its only erotic charge.
The film was a smash hit with audiences, still enchanted, obviously, by the whole idea of talking pictures, and also won the Academy Award for Best Picture, the first sound film so honored. Go figure. MGM must have thought it had discovered, in the movie musical, a gold mine, if material this crummy could sell so many tickets and reap so much critical praise. All of Hollywood soon jumped on the bandwagon and the next two years saw an avalanche of musicals, a number of them shot in two-strip Technicolor, most of which made money. One of them, Gold Diggers Of Broadway, from Warners, made more money than any studio film had ever made, a record it held until 1939.
And then, suddenly, the audience lost interest -- totally. By 1931, the movie musical was all but dead -- so dead that the studios rarely even bothered to keep prints of the ones they'd made. Almost all the musicals made in this era have been lost, or exist only in fragmentary form. Not even Gold Diggers Of Broadway, one of the most successful and important films in Hollywood history, survives in a complete print today.
From the evidence of The Broadway Melody we may not be missing much in artistic terms but it's still a curious lapse in the record of American popular taste and of the Hollywood musical. The form was reborn, however, in 1933, due almost entirely to the surreal production-number spectacles concocted by Busby Berkeley. Not long afterward Astaire and Rogers, with their wildly successful dance films for RKO, established the movie musical as a permanent fixture in studio-era Hollywood. And Arthur Freed, who had, with his songs, contributed the only really enduring delights to The Broadway Melody, the first Hollywood musical, would, as a producer, elevate the form to undreamed of heights in the 1940s and 1950s.
It's all a most improbable saga.