The Broadway Melody (1929)

Many things make The Broadway Melody (1929) a noteworthy film in cinema history. It was the first feature-length musical: although Warners were filming The Desert Song (1929) at the same time, they held back its release and so missed a further opportunity to make history. 

The Broadway Melody was also the first musical from the studio that became synonymous with that genre. It was the first musical to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and also the first talking picture to do so, the only previous winner, Wings (1927) having had only a synchronized score and sound effects.

The Broadway Melody also saw the invention (or perhaps more accurately the discovery) of the playback system, whereby performers in musicals lip-synced to songs they had recorded earlier. The Wedding of the Painted Doll was the film’s biggest production number and Irving Thalberg was so dissatisfied with the original footage that he ordered it shot again. According to Bosley Crowther in The Lion’s Share (1957), it was sound engineer Douglas Shearer who suggested that money could be saved by reusing the live music previously recorded. Pre-recording musical performances went on to become standard operating procedure throughout the classical period.

The Broadway Melody was the first backstage musical, putting in place many of the tropes that became genre clichés. This includes the convention that the show being staged is almost always a revue rather than a drama; and the recurring dichotomy between highbrow and lowbrow music.

It also includes the first musical number integrated into a film’s narrative. Eddie sings You Were Meant for Me not on stage but in Queenie’s apartment, to a non-diegetic musical accompaniment, sealing his declaration of love and moving forward the narrative.

 Conversely, The Wedding of the Painted Doll is a template for the extraneous production number, filmed on a large scale and without the participation of the film’s principal players. It is also the first musical number filmed in (two-strip) Technicolor.

Arthur Freed, who would become MGM’s most important musical producer, made his first contribution to the genre with the seven songs he provided with his partner, Nacio Herb Brown. It is fitting that the trailblazing The Broadway Melody should have used original compositions rather than standards. Freed and Brown provided numbers that complemented the action. The lyrics of the title song, for example

Broadway, you magic street

River of humanity

I have trudged my weary feet

Down your Gay White Way

Dreaming a million dreams of fame

Yearning for you to know my name

reflect the story and experience of Hank, the character at the heart of the picture.

The Broadway Melody is unsophisticated to contemporary eyes, even in comparison to musicals made just a few years later. It is also a rare musical that also exists in a silent version, and even the talkie includes intertitles. And it is undeniable that the clod-hopping chorus line would not have made it into a Busby Berkeley number.

But it is important to remember that, in 1929, Photoplay’s review described it as the film in  which talking pictures found new speed and freedom. Harry Beaumont and cinematographer John Arnold devised a “coffin on wheels”: a soundproof camera booth that was also compact enough to move around the set, enabling a sense of space. In a sense, The Broadway Melody was an experimental film: sound technology improved during the shooting period and it has been noted that the quality of sound recording is much better in the later scenes filmed. Irving Thalberg actually drew attention to the studio’s concern that audiences might be confused by a character bursting into song, accompanied by an unseen orchestra–bewilderingly, a stumbling-block to enjoyment of musicals that continues to this day.