The Songs of Hollywood
*Starred Review* Furia’s classic The Poets of Tin Pan Alley (1990) receives ideal complementation with this consideration of the impact of the same cohort of lyricists on the movies. The songwriters brought two functional modes of their craft with them to Hollywood: the crafting of basically freestanding pieces that could be inserted as called for in reviews of greater or lesser topicality, and the creation of dramatically appropriate numbers for the still brand-new “book” musicals, such as Show Boat. Two kinds of films arose to accommodate those song types: the performance musical, whose plot was about putting on a show, and the integral (Furia and Patterson’s term) musical, in which the songs expressed the characters and furthered the developments of a naturalistic story. The first megahit movie musicals, Al Jolson in The Singing Fool and the second best-picture Oscar-winner, The Broadway Melody, rather blurred the lines between the types, but soon the Maurice Chevalier–Jeanette MacDonald films (especially Love Me Tonight) firmly established the integral musical. While Furia and Patterson favor the integral musical and rue its apparent demise (except for adaptations of stage shows, for which they have no time), they discuss great examples of all kinds of singing in the movies so perspicaciously that this is a book thatlovers of warbling on celluloid will utterly treasure. --Ray Olson