When Exclamation Points Attack!!

Historical epochs often generate the seeds of their own undoing.  Something becomes dominant, and then everyone being dominated focuses all their energy on upsetting the prevailing order until it happens and a new dominator is anointed.  For example, the 1950’s was an era of offense for baseball, with the Yankee sluggers achieving such domination that a musical was written about how other teams felt about the “Damn Yankees.”  In the 1960’s the Yankees faded into obscurity, and baseball embraced players like Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson and pitchers ruled the roost.

A similar changing of the guard occurred in, well, musicals.  The 1950’s were the apex of the Arthur Freed unit at MGM, with musicals like An American in Paris and Gigi winning Best Picture Oscars, not to mention Singin’ in the Rain, now considered the greatest musical ever made.  But then came the 1960’s and the big budget film musical almost became extinct.  What happened?

An answer to this question is currently being offered in a new book by Matthew Kennedy called Roadshow!  I should clarify that the exclamation point at the end of that sentence is in the book’s title; one of the nutty trends that happened in the 1960’s is that producers tried to convince filmgoers that a movie was important or historic by adding exclamation points to the title.  Thus there is not only Hello Dolly! but also lesser efforts like Star!, Tora! Tora! Tora!, and I Do! I Do!  I tell myself that the exclamation point in Help! is meant to be ironic.

Producers of film musicals fell under two other psychopathologies in the 1960’s.  One was a nearly-religious belief that spending money on musicals would increase the gross, no matter what the money was spent on.  If putting antique beadwork on the dresses worn by extras standing ten feet away from the film’s star in a long shot cost $10,000, then that was money well spent.  The goal was always to top the gross of The Sound of Music, a film that spent 33 weeks at the top of the box office (now if a film spends three weeks at #1 it is nothing short of a miracle).  The assumption seemed to be that more input would result in higher grosses, with no one noticing that The Sound of Music was a low budget film.

The second psychopathology in the production of film musicals was the immediate reflex to cast non-singing actors in leading roles in musicals.  The theory seems to have been that if it worked for Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, then it would work for [fill in the blank].  This is why film audiences were subjected to the musical croonings of Walter Matthau (Hello Dolly!), Richard Harris (Camelot!), Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin (Paint Your Wagon!) and Peter O’Toole (Goodbye, Mr. Chips, one of the few musicals discussed in the book that looks good in retrospect).  Almost every time a musical was greenlit, the names of Gregory Peck and Richard Burton were run up a flagpole.

Throughout the decade of the 1960’s studios kept pumping money into bad concepts until the studios collapsed like lumbering dinosaurs.  The amazing thing is not that the musicals that were produced were bad; it is that they are almost entirely forgotten.  In reading the book I had to concede that I could not recall big budget musicals like The Happiest Millionaire (Disney’s follow up to Mary Poppins), Star! or Half a Sixpence.  Surprisingly, even though these films are obscure, they are available ion DVD on Netflix.

It is hard to say what was the last gasp of the big budget studio musical: Oliver!, the last musical until Chicago to win a Best Picture Oscar (a decision that is widely derided today), or Cabaret, which won a Best Director Oscar for Bob Fosse in 1972 and pointed the way to a better, more efficient method of producing musicals that simply couldn’t be replicated by anyone less talented than Fosse (which was everyone).

Roadshow! Does an admirable job of keeping all the balls in the air regarding the numerous fiascos perpetrated by studios in the 1960’s (I haven’t mentioned Doctor Doolittle, the poster child for Bad Film Musical Concepts).  I would have liked a little more delving into the economics of the title format, a method of selling advanced tickets at higher prices to “prestige” movie events.  The roadshow format, with its higher potential grosses, drove the studios to create their brobdignanian productions, but after a few references at the beginning Kennedy focuses mostly on production and spends less time dealing with the marketing aspect of film musicals.

So if you've ever wondered why there were no great movie musicals produced in the 1960’s, here is your answer.  If nothing else, you’ll find a wealth of films to add to your Netflix queue.  And most of them will have exclamation points in the title.