The first commercial succcessful talking picture The Jazz Singer (1927) was also the first film musical. Jazz era musical numbers  without sound had been staged in silent  movies such as Ernst Lubitsch's So This Is Paris (1926) and MGM's The Boob (1925) with Joan Crawford but now the great names of Broadway and vaudeville could be heard as well as seen.
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The first great star to be heard was of course Al Jolson but his film career soon went into decline because he was cast either as a mammy's boy or a sonny boy's dad. Jolson's singing wasn't really meant for the movies, it was meant for live concerts or to make the pillars of a Broadway theatre shake without the aid of a microphone. Al also really needed an audience to make love to, that would respond to him with applause, he felt stilted singing to an empty camera lens. In 1946 though the first star of the Hollywood musical returned top centre stage with Columbia's production of The Jolson Story in which Larry Parks played the World's Greatest Entertainer. The film was a great success and accurately portrayed Jolson's love affair with his audiences which resulted in three broken marriages.

Producer Samuel Goldywn signed up another of Broadway's greatest stars Eddie Cantor for a series of musicals in the early Thirties : Whoopee! (1930), Roman Scandals (1932), The Kid from Spain (1932) and Kid Millions (1934). These films provided choreographer Busby Berkeley with a lot of his early film work.

Paramount cast the net for musical stars abroad and found Maurice Chevalier. The French boulevardier made an impact right away in his first film by singing "Every Little Breeze
Seems To Whisper Louise" in the otherwise forgettable Innocents of Paris (1929).
Chevalier was paired with Jeanette MacDonald in Ernst Lubitsch's The Love Parade (1929)
and both stars were at their peak in Rouben Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight (1932)
one of the finest musicals of the early Thirties. Later Jeanette MacDonald would star
in a series of light operettas with Nelson Eddy at MGM where the tradition of filmed
operettas continued with stars like Kathyrn Grayson and Howard Keel.
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As well as borrowing Broadway stars in the early years of sound Hollywood also made primitive versions of hit musicals like Showboat (1929) and The Desert Song (1929). Two other styles of musical film first appeared in those early years : the all-star musical revue and the backstage musical.

The all-star musical revue was a convenient way of studios' showcasing talkie talents and introducing silent stars to sound. MGM produced The Hollywood Revue of 1929 which included the song Singin' In The Rain. Universal had Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys in The King of Jazz (1930) and Warner Brothers presented their Show of Shows in which Rin-Tin-Tin introduced each of the acts. The standout performer in Paramount on Parade
(1930) was Maurice Chevalier but more influential than any of these was MGM's The
Broadway Melody (1929) which was the "putting on a show" backstage musical. It starred
Bessie Love and Anita Page and won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1929.

Unfortunately the popularity of the movie musical declined as the Depression began to bite, people tired of the genre. By 1931 the surfeit of musicals of the preceding years had dwindled to a tiny handful.

In 1932 Busby Berkeley joined Warner Brothers and began work as a choreographer on a musical which was considered a last ditch attempt to attract the public to the genre. The important thing about 42nd Street (1933) was its realism and the cinematic nature of its musical numbers. It was the quintessential backstage musical but the numbers were filmed from above not straight on like a stageplay.

Ruby Keeler who was then Mrs Al Jolson was serenaded by a new kind of singer crooner Dick Powell. Keeler and Powell were to appear in a series of Berkeley musicals which often had a harder edge reflecting the Depression : GoldDiggers of 1933, Footlight Parade (1933) and Dames (1934). Eventually film economics and changing times restricted Berkeley's spectacular visions but he continued to work on film musicals till the 50s.

The biggest musical star of all was Bing Crosby, signed by Paramount in 1932 they kept him for light comedy musicals for the next 25 years.

When Fred Astaire first appeared with Ginger Rogers in Flying Down To Rio (1933) it began the most popular musical team in the history of the cinema. They were to make 10 films together, all but one produced for the smallest of the Hollywood majors : RKO Radio. The films were characterised by scores by the greatest American songwriters, fine choreography by Hermes Pan and often lightly comedic mistaken identity plots.

The success of Deanna Durbin at Universal led to a series of teenage musicals at other studios. 20th Century Fox was THE musical studio in the late 30s and early 40s. They had a musical star for almost every taste from the growing up Shirley Temple, ice skating Sonja Henie, the extraordinary Carmen Miranda, lovely Alice Faye and of course Betty Grable.

At MGM Arthur Freed and his team were embarking on something new and totally different. Freed was the lyricist along with Nacio Herb Brown responsible for such evergreens as "Singin' In the Rain", "You Were Meant For Me" and "I've Got a Feelin' You're Foolin"

By 1939 Freed was being groomed as a producer at MGM. He bought the book of The Wizard of Oz and oversaw the whole musical side of it. He also pressed for the casting of Judy Garland when the studio wanted to borrow Shirley Temple from 20th Century Fox. The resulting film closely corresponded to his ideal of a musical film as a story told in a natural progression from one sequence to another. Songs were closely integrated into the plot. This approach was to inform the greatest productions of the famous Freed unit over the next 20 years which included some of the greatest film musicals ever made : Meet Me In St Louis (1944), On the Town (1949), An American In Paris (1951), Singin' In the Rain (1952) and Gigi (1958).   

The last great MGM musical Gigi (1958) was also one of the last to be written specifically for the screen. These were now viewed as too risky so the studios concentrated on surefire Broadway hits like the Rogers and Hammerstein musicals. There was also a decline in innocence making musicals less popular, more realism was wanted. The songsmiths of Tin Pan Alley were practically written out too and there were no really popular successors. A growing teen audience was more interested in rock and roll.


Even Broadway transfers are few and far between these days. It may well be that as far as the film musical is concerned as Al Jolson said we "ain't seen nothin' yet!" but I have a sneaking suspicion that we've heard everything that's worth hearing.y