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Amusical short, also known as amusical short film ormusical featurette, is a short film that features musical performances, often with little to no surrounding narrative. It can be traced back to the earliest days of sound films, reaching its maximum popularity in the 1940s, with musical shorts produced forsoundies, precursors tomusic videos played on coin-operated video machines in thousands of bars, restaurants, and other public venues.
The history of the musical short can be traced back to the earliest days of sound films.
Performers in theLee de Forest Phonofilms of 1923-24 includedEddie Cantor,George Jessel,Abbie Mitchell ("The Colored Prima Donna") and comic singer-dancerMolly Picon, plus the team ofNoble Sissel andEubie Blake. The husband-and-wife vaudeville team ofEva Puck andSammy White (billed as Puck and White) starred in the PhonofilmOpera vs. Jazz (1923).Max Fleischer used thePhonofilm process in 1924 when he introduced his animatedSong Car-Tunes series.[1]
The nearly 2,000Vitaphoneshort subjects produced byWarner Bros. and its sister studioFirst National from 1926 to 1930 includedvaudevillians, opera singers, Broadway stars, dancers, bands and popular vocalists. One- and two-reel short musical films were valuable to the movie studios as springboards for new talents. Performers who made their film debuts in short films includeJoan Blondell,Humphrey Bogart,Burns and Allen,Sammy Davis Jr.,Judy Garland (as Baby Gumm),Cary Grant,Bob Hope,Bert Lahr andGinger Rogers.[1]
Ruth Etting sang "My Mother's Eyes" (by Abel Baer and L. Wolfe Gilbert) and "That's Him Now" (by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen) in theParamount MovietoneRuth Etting in Favorite Melodies (1929), filmed in a single take at theAstoria Studios inQueens, New York.[2] Astoria Studios was built by Paramount in the early days of sound films to provide the company with an audio-capable facility close to the Broadway theater district. Many features and short subjects were filmed there between 1928 and 1933, including the 16-minuteSt. Louis Blues (1929), the only film ofBessie Smith.[1]
Orchestra leaderPhil Spitalny made a series of musical shorts beginning withPhil Spitalny (1929) atMGM, followed by shorts for both Vitaphone and Paramount, includingBig City Fantasy (1929),Phil Spitalny and His Musical Queens (1934),Ladies That Play (1934),Phil Spitalny and His All Girl Orchestra (1935) andSirens of Syncopation (1935).
For promotional purposes, major film stars, includingGary Cooper andClark Gable, made guest appearances in such musical shorts as MGM'sStar Night at the Cocoanut Grove (1934) andStarlit Days at the Lido[3] (1935), while others featured a single band, such asFreddie Rich and His Orchestra (1938).
Richard Barrios (author ofA Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film) provided notes for Kino Video's compilation,The Best of Big Bands and Swing:
In the late 1930s and early 1940s,Betty Hutton made a half-dozen musical shorts before her feature debut inThe Fleet's In (1942) and then continued to make shorts for the war effort. She was seen inParamount Headliner: Queens of the Air (1938), Vitaphone'sVincent Lopez and His Orchestra (1939),Broadway Brevities: One for the Book (1939),Paramount Headliner: Three Kings and a Queen (1939),Broadway Brevities: Public Jitterbug Number One (1939),Paramount Victory Short No. T2-1:A Letter from Bataan (1942),Army-Navy Screen Magazine #20: Strictly G.I. (1943), Paramount'sSkirmish on the Home Front (1944) andHollywood Victory Caravan (1945), produced on the Paramount lot by the Treasury Department for the 1945 Victory Loan Drive. Several of Hutton's musical shorts have been shown onTurner Classic Movies in recent years.
Modern jazz was added to the mix in such films as the 16-minuteArtistry in Rhytym (1944), withStan Kenton andAnita O'Day, later re-edited into another short,Cool and Groovy (1956), which also featuredChico Hamilton andThe Hi-Los.
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In the mid-1940s,Louis Jordan,Dorothy Dandridge, theNicholas Brothers, and many others made short music films known assoundies. Some of Jordan's were spliced together into a feature-length musical Western,Look-Out Sister (1947).
Soundies were the precursors to the late 20th century onmusic video, the most contemporary evolution of the musical short.
During the 1950s, musical shorts were revived for telecasting on local stations. Feature films in that decade were usually not edited to fit. Instead, if a feature ended 20 minutes before the hour, footage from musical shorts was used to fill the gap.
Snader Telescriptions were musical shorts made for television from 1950 to 1954. There were thousands of these three- and four-minute films, covering various genres from jazz and pop to R&B and country. Louis "Duke" Goldstone directed for Louis D. Snader.[5]
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