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About Musical Movies

Musical Movies belong to a film genre that features songs, sung by the actors, interwoven into the narrative. The songs are usually used to advance the plot or develop the film's characters. A sub-genre of the musical is the musical comedy, which includes a strong element of humor as well as the usual music, dancing and storyline. Of course, musical comedy movies are also a sub-type of comedy movies. The musical is the genre associated with the transition from silent film to sound film in the development of the motion picture. The popularity of movies grew rapidly during the golden days of the silent film era, but the concept of "talking pictures" was considered a risky investment by the major Hollywood studios, until the Warner Brothers studio took the leap and produced "The Jazz Singer", starring Al Jolson. Jolson's song "Mammy" in the picture forever changed the medium of film, and it jolted Hollywood into the era of sound. As Hollywood adapted to sound films, musicals were an important part of Hollywood's movie output, ranking alongside action movies, western movies (or "westerns"), dramas, and comedy movies. During the 1930s, director Busby Berkeley began to enhance the traditional dance number with inspiration he drew from the drill precision he had experienced as a soldier during the first world war. Meanwhile, musical stars such as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were among the most popular and highly-respected personalities in Hollywood during the thirties. Their coupling was tremendously successful in a number of films. Many dramatic actors gladly participated in musicals as a way to break away from their typical typecast roles. James Cagney, for example, had originally risen to fame as a singer and dancer, and he was highly talented; but his repeated casting in "tough guy" roles and gangster movies gave him few chances to display these talents. Cagney's Oscar-winning role in Yankee Doodle Dandy allowed him to sing and dance, and he considered it to be one of his finest moments. - The preceding paragraph was derived from a full article available from Wikipedia and its use is governed by the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2.