In the last article of Cinematic storytelling we talked about the new challenges brought by the sound in movies. Today we are going to explore the many benefits brought by the talkies for the innovation of cinema and its genres.

Musical

From the very beginning of sound cinema music has been a key component, playing a crucial role in establishing sound as an added value for audiences. As Harry Warner famously said, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”. But hearing them singing is a completely different story. Not by chance, the first real sound movie, The Jazz Singer, was a musical, or rather, the father of Hollywood musicals.
The most popular of the early forms of musical was the backstage musical. Following the lead of “The Jazz Singer”, backstage musicals plot was set in a theatrical context and was centred around the production of a play or musical show. In conclusion, actors had to play the part of actors and singers. Basically, they had to play themselves. This formula used to get a better reception, since the setting and plot made the movie more realistic and thus easier for the audience to absorb. One of the greatest movies of this series was probably “Broadway”, filmed in 1929 as the film adaptation of the 1926 homonymous theatrical play.
However, Hollywood produced too many musicals in those first years of sound, and audiences grew tired of them: it’s said that some theaters started advertising “Not a musical” to attract the public back.
During the ’30s and ’40s the duo Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers marked a turning point for movie musicals, with extraordinary performances.
But musicals golden era might be dated to the ’50s and early ’60s, when massive coreographies were realized in order to provide the audience with a mesmerising show.

Western

Even if the first western movie might be traced back to the silent era with The Great Train Robbery of 1903, western is definitely a sound cinema genre. As you probably already know, Western stories talk about cowboys and Indians, sometimes allied and sometimes enemies, who live in the Wild West. The western stories current was launched by Buffalo Bill, an American explorer and hunter, at the end of the XIX century. This is when American people started moving and conquering the western lands of the continent. Buffalo Bill was one of those people and he became famous for his hunting abilities and due to a bunch of legends about him and his duels with Indians. A book about his story was written and he decided to stage his life stories in the theaters. His shows reached European audience, so that the Western genre was spread out of US. Actually, the greatest Western movies were made in Italy in the ’60s and for this reason they are called Spaghetti Western. The main names of this current are the director Sergio Leone and the actor Clint Eastwood, who together gave life to the unforgettable Dollars Trilogy. The Spaghetti Western inspired a great revolution in American Westerns, which started to change their plots and take distance from the old-fashioned Buffalo Bill’s stories, in order to give back a more authentic perspective of the historical events happened between American and Indian people. This field was called Revisionist Western and gained a great success in the late ’60s and throughout the ’70s.

Gangster movies

This genre took hold throughout the ’30s in the US as a reaction to the late history of the States. America was going through a very hard period after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The government had dictated the policy of Prohibition and, as a consequence, organised crime had increased its activity to sell people what the governement forbade them. It was the rise of urban myth like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano. Usually set in Chicago and Newyork suburbs, gangster movies were based on the stories of this famous gangsters. Still considered milestones of cinema, The Public Enemy of 1931 and Scarface 1932 are the most representative of the genre.

Mystery and Thrillers
Throughout the ’40s and ’50s a new genre sprang up: the noir. Noir movies usually depicted a dark, cynical and ambivalent reality, using a low-key lighting and oneiric, strange settings. However, this genre includes a remarkable variety of plots and critics don’t give an unanimous definition of it. But, due to its obscure nature and since many of the noir movies revolve around a detective story, we can consider noirs as the first mystery movies. If we think about it, it would have been quite difficult to realize mystery movies during the silent era: plots would have been too tangled to explain without dialogues!
Detective stories are the mainstream mystery movies of the ’70s. Still set in a cynical reality, detective stories from the ’70s usually have as a protagonist a restless, solitary and maverick detective, who, despite everything, still struggles for justice. This type of character was the perfect hero for the anti-establishment audience of those years. One of the first popular figures of this kind, who set the blueprints for this genre, was Detective Harry Callahan from the film series Dirty Harry, starring the former western hero Clint Eastwood. The great difference from the noir is the clearer distinction between good and evil and the hope for a better future.
Thrillers, instead, are a completely different kettle of fish. Thrillers don’t focus on the mystery, but on the protagonist’s survival. The protagonist is dragged, against his or her will, in a high-risk venture and he/she will have to figure out a way to get out of it on his/her own, while the world around him/her keeps moving normally. Suspense is the main feeling triggered by thrillers. The father of this genre may be considered the great British director Alfred Hitchcock. His first thrillers date back to the ’30s. The 39 steps, film adaptation of the homonymous novel was one of the first successes. Throughout the ’40s, ’50s and ’60 Hitchcock thrillers production was really thriving with masterpieces such as Notorius, North by Northwest, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho and Birds.

Screwball comedy

With the advent of the sound, physical comedy could take advantage of dialogues and music to enhance the comic effects of the slapsticks. Alongside the renewed physical comedy, a new style of comedy arose in the ’30s: screwball comedy. Unlike physical comedy, screwball was based on witty dialogues, absurd situations and interesting unconventional characters. The plot was often romantic and involved a “battle of the sexes”. One of the most representative movies of this series is Philadelphia Story, starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and James Stewart.

SOURCES: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/movies/homevideo/17kehr.html#:~:text=The%20gradual%20transition%20from%20silent,expectations%20%E2%80%94%20before%20it%20was%20complete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backstage_musical
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Bill
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_revisionista
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_di_gangster
https://www.cinescuola.it/thriller/#:~:text=Il%20thriller%20si%20%C3%A8%20sviluppato,Michael%20Crichton%2C%20Ken%20Follett).
https://nofilmschool.com/screwball-comedy#:~:text=Screwball%20comedies%20are%20a%20genre,a%20battle%20of%20the%20sexes.