Increasingly, historians of film music are attending to the conversion-era soundtrack. Whereas scholars who address this period tend focus on scores and their composersFootnote 1 or technologies and industries,Footnote 2 Katherine Spring's Saying It with Songs looks at the discrete unit of the song in order to examine its role in promoting films and shaping narratives. This lens allows her to tell a story about the conversion in which a unique set of players—song pluggers, forgotten singers, and lyricists—all get starring roles. Perhaps even more importantly, Spring extends her focus beyond musicals. Songs were valuable components of films in a variety of genres, and their function in films that were not musicals is certainly understudied. Thus, the title of Spring's book is not only a play on the fabulous Al Jolson vehicle Say It with Songs (dir. Lloyd Bacon, 1929), it also prompts an intriguing question: what exactly does Hollywood cinema say with songs? Spring finds some surprising answers in film archives, legal cases, trade papers, and the films themselves.
The author's conscientious research suits her two-pronged approach: she examines the function of songs for Hollywood's methods of storytelling and its bottom line. Her book is organized according to an argument that takes both commercial and narrative aspects into consideration: “Changes to the relationship between the film and music industries in the late 1920s influenced the form of Hollywood's earliest sound films” (10). To support this point, Spring first unravels the often messy relationship between Tin Pan Alley and the Hollywood studios between 1927 and 1931. This connection forms part 1 of her book, which is all about industry. In chapter 1, Spring provides background on how popular music was written and sold during the 1920s. She takes readers through the sheet music, record, and radio markets to explain how the strategies used by songwriters and entrepreneurs in these fields would play a key role when recorded music came to Hollywood. Most significant here is that Spring traces two strategies, star-song identification and the thematic approach, back to pre-sound practices. Stars had been used to sell sheet music by Tin Pan Alley publishers even when their voices could not be heard on film soundtracks, and the repetition of recognizable musical themes throughout a feature film had been a common silent cinema practice. By pointing these facts out, Spring subtly dissuades her readers from understanding the coming of sound as a “revolution,” an interpretation that is unfortunately still all too common.
Chapter 2 provides a thorough historical account of the business relationship between Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood from the early twentieth century through the beginning of recorded sound on film. Spring's exhaustive reading on this topic is evident in her summary of the period, yet the aspects she selects for in-depth study are particularly worthwhile. For example, she highlights the Mills Agreement, a contract signed in 1927 whereby the major studios received permission to use copyrighted music. By calling attention to the contract's failings, Spring explains why movie producers sought to purchase music publishing houses and why they eventually created their own music departments. The chapter also offers some useful graphics: a map of Manhattan locating each of the major music publishers in the city in 1927 (44), and a graph that illustrates the corporate relationships of music publishers and movie studios in 1929 (54).
The book's second part is divided into three chapters, each of which is dedicated to a different technique filmmakers exercised to include songs in the cinema during the conversion to sound. This period is rife with experimentation, and Spring looks at the trade press, advertisements, and pressbooks to study studios’ motivations for various approaches. The first of these involved constructing a story around well-known singers and capitalizing on the fame of these stars to justify the appearance of their songs. In chapter 3, Spring traces this strategy to Broadway, and, in particular, to the performances of Al Jolson in which he would abandon his character and sing as himself to the crowd. Focusing primarily on two films, Applause (dir. Rouben Mamoulian, 1929), and Weary River (dir. Frank Lloyd, 1929), Spring reveals how film narratives relied on star texts to present songs, in this case, the torch singer Helen Morgan and the actor Richard Barthelmess, respectively. Although many would call these films musicals and therefore ineligible for inclusion in the book, Spring uses their self-proclaimed genre classifications at the time of their release to avoid this label. Indeed, this distinction is key to Spring's originality. She gives ample evidence to demonstrate that during the conversion period, the mere inclusion of popular songs did not transform a melodrama or gangster film into a musical. Rather, genres themselves were in flux thanks to the coming of sound. Studios would plug songs over the radio or in advertisements, not to situate films as being musicals, but to identify the song with its singer and generate interest in both song and film. Although her analyses are convincing and the primary research sound, I wished that the chapter had included more examples; it is likely, however, that Spring limited herself to two films per chapter out of concern for the book's length.
The final two chapters, which explore two ways that songs were integrated into film narratives, are Spring's most innovative. In chapter 4, she discusses what she calls “strained integration,” whereby stories find ways to motivate performances as attractions. She argues that this process worked during the conversion era in a unique way: “What is distinctive about the use of songs in transitional-era films is the peculiar way in which they are sometimes overly motivated by their narrative contexts, so that the narrative conditions for justifying a song seem so carefully orchestrated that the film ceases to function as a plausible fiction” (97). Indeed, Spring claims that the inclusion of songs might not just be a spectacle that puts the narrative on pause; it actually breaks down the believability of the story altogether. The two examples she uses to illustrate this claim are excellent because they are quite different from one another in terms of filmic genre and yet operate similarly: The Amos and Andy film Check and Double Check (dir. Melville W. Brown, 1930), and the Joan Crawford vehicle Possessed (dir. Clarence Brown, 1931). In contrast, Spring identifies “plausible integration” as the more nuanced method for including songs in a film and paving the way for the classical film score. Plausible integration, the subject of chapter 5, involves deemphasizing theme songs and star-song performances in favor of incidental numbers and songs that contribute to the construction of character. Spring's two case studies are In Old Arizona (dir. Irving Cummings, 1929), and Safe in Hell (dir. William A. Wellman, 1931), each of which illustrates how popular songs are made convincing elements of the diegesis.
Spring's emphasis on songs during the conversion period matters not just because it helps us better grasp corporate relationships and cinematic storytelling, but also because it complicates the generally accepted reading of classical Hollywood's romantic score. Indeed, Spring claims that conversion-era film offers early examples of both the popular song score and orchestral score that would become typical much later. Her careful retelling of this period's history is therefore important for anyone who wants to understand Hollywood film music in any era.
