Richard Barrios
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195377347
- eISBN:
- 9780199864577
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195377347.003.0015
- Subject:
- Music, Popular
Numerous factors accounted for the precipitous decline in musicals starting in mid-1930. The stock market crash and the Pathé studio fire in 1929 were dire omens, and the overabundance of backstage ...
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Numerous factors accounted for the precipitous decline in musicals starting in mid-1930. The stock market crash and the Pathé studio fire in 1929 were dire omens, and the overabundance of backstage films and unsuitability of filmed revues and operettas played a prominent role. Songs were cut from a number of (former) musicals such as The Life of the Party, while some major projects were aborted shortly before shooting. Most calamitous was MGM's The March of Time, a lavish and shapeless revue that was tinkered with incessantly and finally abandoned, a symbol of the hubris and miscalculation of the era.Less
Numerous factors accounted for the precipitous decline in musicals starting in mid-1930. The stock market crash and the Pathé studio fire in 1929 were dire omens, and the overabundance of backstage films and unsuitability of filmed revues and operettas played a prominent role. Songs were cut from a number of (former) musicals such as The Life of the Party, while some major projects were aborted shortly before shooting. Most calamitous was MGM's The March of Time, a lavish and shapeless revue that was tinkered with incessantly and finally abandoned, a symbol of the hubris and miscalculation of the era.
Charles Barr
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780197266434
- eISBN:
- 9780191884191
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266434.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Silent films were commonly adapted for foreign markets not simply by translation of intertitles but, when desired, by more radical change, both to the titles and to the whole structure and thrust of ...
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Silent films were commonly adapted for foreign markets not simply by translation of intertitles but, when desired, by more radical change, both to the titles and to the whole structure and thrust of the narrative. The young Soviet Union systematically transformed films from the West in order to make them ideologically acceptable for its own public, as well as to train filmmakers in the craft of editing. The discovery in Moscow of the re-edited version of the 1922 Anglo-American production Three Live Ghosts—on which Alfred Hitchcock worked as title designer—enables an unprecedentedly full case study of this transformation process. Characters and their Great War context are ruthlessly reworked, in the service of a fresh anti-capitalist story. Finally, the same process is traced in reverse, in the sound period, through Hollywood’s own re-editing, for Cold War audiences, of its pro-Soviet wartime feature North Star into an anti-Soviet narrative.Less
Silent films were commonly adapted for foreign markets not simply by translation of intertitles but, when desired, by more radical change, both to the titles and to the whole structure and thrust of the narrative. The young Soviet Union systematically transformed films from the West in order to make them ideologically acceptable for its own public, as well as to train filmmakers in the craft of editing. The discovery in Moscow of the re-edited version of the 1922 Anglo-American production Three Live Ghosts—on which Alfred Hitchcock worked as title designer—enables an unprecedentedly full case study of this transformation process. Characters and their Great War context are ruthlessly reworked, in the service of a fresh anti-capitalist story. Finally, the same process is traced in reverse, in the sound period, through Hollywood’s own re-editing, for Cold War audiences, of its pro-Soviet wartime feature North Star into an anti-Soviet narrative.
