Pre-Code Musicals on Film

"When the movies learned to speak, singing soon followed," wrote scholar William Kenly. Hoping to capitalize on the invention of pre-recorded film sound, filmmakers in the late 1920s and early 1930s used the musical as a testing ground for depicting sound and dance onscreen. Studios became inundated with Broadway stars abandoning theater careers for the promise of success in sound film, including Ginger Rogers, Claudette Colbert, and Eddie Cantor, as well as Rouben Mamoulian and George Cukor, who had already received acclaim for their Broadway direction. Before the enforcement of the Hays Code in mid-1934, Hollywood musicals were marked by their candid portrayals of sexuality and class struggle. Often focusing on the backstage dynamics of struggling performers navigating an exploitative industry — especially in the films of choreographer Busby Berkeley — under the surface of these films' deceptively lighthearted fare lie earnest meditations on life in Depression-era America. Far from being simple entertainment, the films' exploration of filmic versus theatrical space and spectatorship was quite radical, as directors juxtaposed the dreamlike "non-space" of the stage with the Art Deco architecture of the modern city. These pre-Code musicals endure as evidence of the boldness of early Hollywood, at once glamorous and subversive.