Merging Genres in the 1940s: The Musical and the Dramatic Feature Film

Abstract

of the conference paper version of this article. 3. The parts for "Knock on Wood" show the song's design as a four-bar intro, a sixteen-bar A section marked with repeats (for "unhappy"), eight instrumental bars, and another iteration of the A section (for "happy"). The eight instrumental bars were dropped in the film. (The parts are among the musical materials for Casablanca, Warner Brothers Collection, University of Southern California.) 4. Martin Marks, "Music, Drama, Warner Brothers: The Cases of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon," in Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000), 173. 5. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 22. 6. Richard Dyer links the late arrival of this essential story element (nearly two-thirds of the way through the film) to a class of musical in which "utopia is implicit in the world of the narrative as well as in the world of the [musical] numbers." Such films are overwhelmingly nostalgic-"Far from pointing forwards, they point back, to a golden age-a reversal of utopianism." Other titles listed by Dyer include My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Hello Dolly! (Richard Dyer, "Entertainment and Utopia," in Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan [London: Routledge, 2002], 28). 7. This information is drawn from the music files for the film (MGM Collection, University of Southern California). 8. Nick Browne, "Preface," in Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), xi. 9. Frans de Bruyn, "Genre Criticism," in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, ed. Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 84. 10. Rick Altman, "Reusable Packaging: Generic Products and the Recycling Process," in Refiguring American Film Genres, ed. Browne, 38, 6. 131 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.125 on Sun, 17 Jul 2016 05:14:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms