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| The Sound of Music: The biggest of five musicals that won Best Picture between 1958 and 1968. |
From 1958 to 1968, five musicals won the Academy Award for Best Picture: Gigi, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Oliver! This ended up being the last big surge in popularity for the genre, however. By the end of the 1960s, musicals - alongside other previously popular films such as westerns and Biblical epics - were flagging in popularity. But why were musicals so honored during their final decade as a major movie genre?
As I've noted in my reviews, and despite me thoroughly enjoying a few of them, the musical really isn't my genre. Still, when just shy of half of Best Picture winners during a (roughly) decade long period belong to one specific type of movie, and when that type of movie then almost immediately falls out of favor thereafter, I think it bears at least a passing examination.
ESCAPISM IN A TIME OF CHANGE:
"It’s refreshing and not too complicated. A love story, with children and music. That word ‘joyous’ has an awful lot to do with it."
-Julie Andrews on the success of The Sound of Music.
Musicals had been a popular genre since the introduction of talkies. The first synced dialogue in a full feature film came in The Jazz Singer, which was a musical. Even so, from 1927 - 1957, the only musicals to win Best Picture were The Broadway Melody, The Great Ziegfeld, and An American in Paris. This wasn't because of any lack of quality musicals. Examples of musicals that, in my opinion, were better than any of the ones that actually won the Oscar during this period included: the 1937 and 1954 versions of A Star Is Born, The Wizard of Oz, Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones, and Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain. None of these won the award. Despite now being regarded as one of the greats in the genre, Singin' in the Rain wasn't even nominated!
So why, starting in 1958, did musicals suddenly start routinely winning the big award? I think one reason is that it was a turbulent era. Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 launched in October 1957, prompting enormous anxiety in the West and effectively kicking off the Space Race. The Civil Rights movement grew, with increasingly large-scale demonstrations against segregation and violent incidents that included the bombing of the 15th Street Baptist Church in 1963 and the Freedom Summer murders of 1964. Political assassinations occurred throughout the 1960s, including the murders of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. US involvement in Vietnam expanded, culminating in the unrest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Entertainment provides a refuge from reality, and musicals are a largely escapist genre. Four of the five Best Picture winning musicals were period pieces, far removed from the chaos of moviegoers' contemporary world. Only West Side Story, with its conflict between Irish/Polish and Puerto Rican street gangs, was set in the present or dealt directly with current issues. The other four titles were more geared toward simple entertainment. Even The Sound of Music is mostly quite light until the shift in tone in the final Act.
It was a period that drove people to seek escape... and it helped that these were well made movies that found great popular success, making it that much easier for the Academy to bestow those honors.
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| Rita Moreno in West Side Story - the only one of the winning musicals dealing directly with contemporary issues. |
A REALIGNMENT OF VIEWER TASTES:
"I could feel musicals were dying, because there wasn't a renewal of stories and styles and they kept repeating the same plot."
-Leslie Caron, quoted in Roadshow! The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s.
The success of musicals in the early/mid 1960s seemed to promise a long life for the genre. Instead, it was a last gasp, a big final production number before the genre danced mostly off the stage. By the end of the 1960s, and despite the popularity of 1968's Oliver!, the musical was in sharp decline.
There are several reasons for this. The success of musicals - particularly The Sound of Music - led to the market becoming saturated. The back half of the decade saw more and more musicals being greenlit in an attempt to replicate that windfall. But The Sound of Music is an extremely well-made film with an excellent script and strong performances. Productions such as Hello Dolly!, Star!, and Paint Your Wagon (I'm actually rather fond of that last... but I'd love to know who thought a musical starring Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood was a good idea!?!) lacked the qualities needed to connect with either critics or audiences. And because it was an expensive genre, when these movies failed, it cost studios dearly.
Even beyond the issues of oversaturation and declining quality, I think there was a realignment in viewer tastes. Three classic genres had been cinematic mainstays for most of the life of the motion picture industry: the Biblical epic, the musical, and the western. All three genres seemed to be flourishing at the start of the 1960s. In a time of change, though, these films started to look not just old-fashioned but downright creaky. By 1970, all three were on the wane.
The Biblical epic all but died on the bigscreen, with most productions moving to television. Westerns and musicals hobbled through for a while, in large part by shifting to try to reflect the new age. Much has been written about the "anti-westerns" of the late 1960s and 1970s, and that same time period saw what I would dub the "anti-musical." Bob Fosse's Cabaret and All That Jazz were more cynical than classic musicals, with production numbers that embraced the darkness rather than providing relief from it. Even then, such films were not always successful. Martin Scorsese's New York, New York, for example, was a well-made, well-acted movie... that failed spectacularly both with contemporary critics and audiences.
There would continue to be scattered hits. 1978's Grease was a traditional musical that tapped into nostalgia for a bygone age, leaning into the same corniness that audiences had begun rejecting a decade prior. But I doubt Grease would have struck a chord had there been ten similar films that same year. And just as Dances with Wolves did not lead to a new western boom, neither Les Miserables nor La La Land led to a big-scale revival of the musical. And Cats - from the same director as Les Miserables - proved a stark reminder that when such films flop, they tend to flop hard.
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| Gigi's very story - a lighthearted romance between an adult man and a teen girl - proves that viewer sensibilities can and do change. |
POST-SCRIPT:
"Movies can be seen as a mirror for society."
-Godwin Francis, Medium
I think the musical "boom" for Best Picture Winners in the late 1950s and '60s was, in its way, a reflection of that time, or at least a reaction to it. In an age of massive social change, viewers and Academy voters alike took refuge in the comfort of a familiar genre. It didn't hurt that the quality was often high: The Sound of Music absolutely deserved its Oscar, and I wouldn't particularly argue with the awards for West Side Story or My Fair Lady (I would argue against those for Gigi and Oliver).
But the same social changes that made musicals an attractive escape during the first half of the decade made the same films seem like artifacts of a bygone age by the decade's end. Just as I don't think it's a coincidence that this time of change was one that resulted in so many wins for an inherently escapist genre, I also don't think it's a coincidence that the musical went out of style at roughly the same time that the western and the Biblical epic did.
The cultural shift resulted in audiences also shifting, turning away from previously unassailable genres. The next decade's major titles - and major awards - would be dominated by very different fare...
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