Welcome to this month’s Late To The Movies, where I try to educate myself on cinematic history one film at a time. This month, I thought I’d take a look at musicals – how they emerged as a genre and the ways in which they influenced the film industry later on.
It would be easy to think that the invention of sound was simply a great leap forward for cinema – a clean, triumphant moment when films suddenly found their voice and everything improved.
However, like all new technologies, the reality was messier, stranger, and far more interesting. Sound didn’t arrive as a gift: it actually presented a problem.
For three decades, cinema had learned how to tell stories without speech. There was nothing primitive about silent film – it was supple, expressive, and visually confident.
Filmmakers knew how to tell stories through movement, composition, and rhythm, and how to engage the emotions of the audience to increase the impact of the story.
Then, almost overnight, that fluency was disrupted.
Early sound technology was cumbersome and unforgiving: cameras were trapped in booths, actors hovered nervously around hidden microphones, and the graceful motion of silent cinema stiffened into something awkward and static.
Like all new technologies, sound wasn’t going anywhere, but if cinema was now going to make noise, it had to work out what that noise was going to be for.
The film usually credited with starting the sound revolution is The Jazz Singer (1927). Starring Al Jolson, it tells the story of a young man torn between family tradition and a career in popular music.
Most of the film is silent, but it contains several synchronised musical numbers and brief moments of spoken dialogue – enough to astonish contemporary audiences. When Jolson says, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” it functions less as dialogue than prophecy – it’s especially fun to watch when you know that this really is just the beginning.
The Jazz Singer matters less because it is artistically refined – it isn’t, particularly – but because of the impact it had. Studios rushed to convert to sound. Silent-era stars such as Greta Garbo suddenly found themselves unemployable. Accents, diction, and vocal presence became as important as faces.
For a few years, films seemed unsure what they were meant to be: dialogue scenes sat heavily on the screen, while musical numbers felt bolted on, more novelty than narrative.
I found watching these early musicals compelling precisely because of this uncertainty. They document an industry scrambling to adapt, trying – and sometimes failing – to integrate sound into a medium that had evolved without it. It’s exactly the kind of challenge that we face every time a new technology arises, and one which was met with great creativity by the film industry.
That integration begins to take shape in 42nd Street (1933), a backstage musical set around the production of a Broadway show. The plot is simple and efficient: rehearsals, rivalries, a young understudy thrust into the spotlight.
What makes the film significant is not the story itself, but the way it solves the problems that sound brought with it: by placing performance at the heart of the narrative, 42nd Street gives characters a reason to sing and allows the camera to rediscover its freedom.
The film also introduces the distinctive choreography of Busby Berkeley, whose musical numbers abandon theatrical realism altogether. Berkeley’s dances are made for the camera, not the stage. He films from above, arranges performers into geometric patterns, and treats human bodies as moving shapes rather than individuals.
These sequences would be impossible in a theatre, but they’re perfect for cinema.
Produced and set in the depths of the Great Depression, 42nd Street also offers reassurance to its audience: success comes through hard work and collective effort. The show will go on.
In this way, the musical becomes a fantasy of order and reward at a moment when both were in short supply.
By the middle of the 1930s, the genre had found not just its footing but also its polish. Top Hat (1935), starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, represents the musical at its most elegant. The plot is a light romantic comedy built around mistaken identity and courtship, but the story exists largely to support the dancing.
Astaire and Rogers move with a precision that makes effort invisible. Their dances unfold like conversations – flirtatious, playful, occasionally competitive. This is the first film of theirs that I’d seen and it is a real joy to watch, not just for the dancing but also the clothes, the sets, the dialogue.
Zoom out from all the detail though, and what Top Hat most demonstrates is control: sound is no longer intrusive or novel; music, movement, and dialogue are seamlessly integrated. The camera glides and the performances have space to breathe.
In contrast to Berkeley’s mass choreography, these numbers emphasise intimacy and partnership. Dance becomes a way of thinking and feeling rather than just sheer spectacle.
Also made during the Great Depression, all the elegance seems to come with an added ideological dimension. Top Hat offers a world of immaculate clothes, luxurious spaces, and solvable problems. In the midst of economic uncertainty, it insists on grace, charm, and inevitability – especially the inevitability of love.
It is escapism, but carefully designed escapism, built on precision rather than excess. I imagine it must have shone even more brightly to contemporary audiences who weren’t yet used to colour and who were living through a difficult time in history.
If Top Hat is the musical as reassurance, then Gold Diggers of 1933 reveals the genre’s more surreal potential. Nominally another backstage story, the film quickly gives way to Berkeley’s increasingly abstract musical numbers. Narrative logic dissolves, faces multiply, bodies repeat. The camera floats through impossible spaces.
These sequences are dazzling, but also strange. The famous finale, “Remember My Forgotten Man,” ends not with romance but with images of war veterans and unemployment lines, glamour giving way to social unease.
Here, the musical format doesn’t deny hardship or provide escapism but rather reconfigures it into something stylised and haunting.
Gold Diggers of 1933 is a good reminder that early musicals are not uniformly cheerful. They seem able to absorb the anxieties of their moment – labour, conformity, disposability – and transform them into spectacle. The result is both beautiful and faintly disquieting.
Taken together, these films help to show how the musical taught cinema to live with sound.
What began as technological disruption soon found an artistic solution. By embracing song, rhythm, and movement, filmmakers found a way to integrate dialogue without sacrificing visual dynamism.
By the end of the 1930s, sound was no longer an obstacle, but part of cinematic grammar.
This matters because so much of what follows depends on it. Screwball comedy’s rapid-fire dialogue, film noir’s voiceovers, even the swelling orchestration of later epics all rely on lessons learned here.
The musical was not a decorative side road in film history: it was the bridge.
Early movie musicals are sometimes dismissed as lightweight, but they are among Hollywood’s most inventive responses to crisis. Faced with a new technology threatening to bring cataclysmic change, cinema did not retreat. It danced.