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New York City and the Hollywood Musical pp 45–74Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Neighbourhood Musical

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Part of the book series: Screening Spaces ((SCSP))

Abstract

During World War II there was a widespread sense that, come peacetime, American cities would need to change to counteract growing concerns about urban blight and urban decline. At the same time, there was a shift away from the extravagance of 1930s musicals towards films more grounded in the everyday urban experience. This chapter focuses on a key musical cycle of the 1940s, the neighbourhood musical. Shearer argues that films including Cover Girl and It Happened in Brooklyn used street dances, passed-along songs and local revues to express the value of tight-knit urban neighbourhoods and urban density and community, resisting perceived threats to the place identities the films constructed at a time of anticipation and anxiety about New York’s future.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    John Mueller distinguishes among six degrees of integration ranging from numbers that are completely irrelevant to the plot to numbers that advance the plot by their content (Mueller 1984). But as I noted in Chapter 2, Martin Rubin sets out a fundamental distinction between the RKO and Warners musicals of the 1930s based on their use of space: the relationship between the extent to which the narrative and numbers deploy different registers and the spaces in which those numbers take place (Rubin 2002).

  2. 2.

    Mortimer brought charges of battery against Sinatra in 1947, accusing him of punching him outside Ciro’s nightclub on the Sunset Strip. In press reports Sinatra claimed he had been aggravated by Mortimer’s articles, which had been ‘needling him’ for two years. A Los Angeles Times report on Sinatra’s arrest noted, ‘In addition to frequently published lack of appreciation for Frankie’s talents, Mortimer has also criticized Sinatra’s politics and questioned his crusades against intolerance and his youth-building endeavors’ (Los Angeles Times 1947, 2). Mortimer had criticized Albert Maltz’s short film The House I Live In (1945), which starred Sinatra, as ‘class struggle or foreign isms posing as entertainment’, and had called Sinatra ‘one of Hollywood’s leading travellers on the road to Red fascism’ (Wiener 1991, 264).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. King’s College London, London, UK

    Martha Shearer

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  1. Martha Shearer
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Shearer, M. (2016). The Neighbourhood Musical. In: New York City and the Hollywood Musical. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56937-0_3

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