Word: screens
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...popular screen musical comedy called "Sunny Side Up," which thanks to the engaging presence of Miss Jane Gaynor and several effective DeSylva-Brown-Henderson tunnes is Among the current Broadway successes introduces as many withouit recourse to backstage or college What pases for its plot includes episoedes at a block party in New York's East Side and a charity show at Southampton and the principals and choruses can indulge themselves in song and dance for all they are worth at both affairs...
Whereupon no less than three hundred consecutive dramas with a backstage setting have been produced. The screen critics who are betting men make a comfortable living offering eight to five that each new picture they are forced to attend will deal with the adventures of a song-and-dance team, in which the man is a lovable, but worthless, drunkard and the woman a noble creature who makes sacrifices for him. Occasionally, of course, these gamblers happen to be wrong. Then the photoplay turns out to be a merry narrative of college life, in which the students take excellent courses...
...pictures, yet with equal certainty they have shown that they want the songs to be embedded in the plot with some show of realism. A stage musical comedy can interrupt the story with a song cue and introduce, with no apologies at all, tenors, sopranos and dancing choruses. The screen fans, however, insist that the story provide some excuse for the introduction that is inherent in the narrative. Naturally backstage stories, where sections of a musical comedy can be realistically shown as part of the atmosphere, supply the most likely field for what the paying guests demand...
...true, though, that three recent pictures in which the musical numbers have been added, in the stage, rather than-the screen, manner have proved reasonably successful. They are "Rio Rita," "The Hollywood Revue" and "The Cocoanuts," but in each case there has been an explanation that prevents destruction of the aforementioned theory. "Rio Rita" is frankly a photograph of a famous Ziegfeld success and it has proved popular for the reason that it provides at small cost an opportunity for the general populace to see the work of a nationally publicized showman. "The Hollywood Revue" could hardly fail since almost...
...whole, however, it has been the more naturally cinematic films with music that have been successful. "The Dance of Life," which is the screen edition of the play "Burlesque," is typical of this school and really set the model for it. The vogue has been so successful that such wildly inferior pictures as "Broadway Scandals," "Jazz Heaven," and "The Song of Love," while far from smash hits, seem likely to show a profit merely because they meet that popular demand for song and dance with a touch of the Laugh, Mrs. Clown, Laugh manner...