University of Illinois Press

Merging Genres in the 1940s: The Musical and the Dramatic Feature Film
Author(s): David Neumeyer
Source: American Music, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 122-132
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3592971
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DAVID NEUMEYER

Merging
The

Genres

Musical

in

and
Feature

the

the

1940s:

Dramatic

Film

After the introduction of sound to feature films in 1927, it took nearly a decade before music scoring practices settled down.1 One result
of this process was that, by the end of the 1930s, scoring a film was
strongly codified by genre. Technological limitations of recording and
reproduction dictated that most sound films employing music in any
is, feature-length
significant way before 1932 were musicals-that
films belonging to the romantic comedy genre but highlighting (not
merely including) musical performances. Famous early examples are
BroadwayMelody (1929), Applause (1929), and Forty-SecondStreet (1932).
The reciprocal influence of radio, a commercial medium that was
growing rapidly at the same time, meant that some musicals were
loosely structured in the form of variety shows (such as RKO Studio's
BroadwayMelody series, which ran in yearly installments throughout
the 1930s, beginning in 1932).
Other feature-length films varied in their uses of music. Filmed
stage plays used little music, in general, because the soundtrack was
strongly dominated by dialogue, which remained difficult to merge
with music, despite the introduction of effective postproduction
sound mixing in 1932. Indeed, one sign of a high-budget production
throughout this period was the underscoring of dialogue (an example from late in the decade is Gone with the Wind [1939], which contains more than two hours of dialogue underscoring by Max Steiner,
who was the decade's virtuoso of this technique). Dramatic feature
films-that is, those that tell a serious or melodramatic story, often
David Neumeyer is Leslie WaggenerProfessorin the College of Fine Arts and
Professor of Music Theory in the School of Music, the University of Texas at
Austin. He recently published an essay on Psychoin Music in the Mirror,ed.
Thomas Mathiesen and Andreas Giger (University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
American Music
Spring 2004
? 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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Merging Genres in the 1940s

123

(but by no means always) on a historical or literary subject (such as

Gone with the Wind, Little Women [1933], or the first film to win an
Academy Award for original score, The Informer [1935])-tend toward
a clear separation of source and background music; musical performances, when they occur, are used to emphasize a central narrative
point. Musicals by contrast blur background and source music, with
diegetic music migrating to the nondiegetic register and vice versa.
The tone of the music, too, helped define the genres, with dramatic
films characterized as dark and operatic, musicals as bright and tuneful, and those dialogue-dominated romantic comedies that used music as occupying a middle ground.
No sooner were these generic distinctions established, however,
than they began to break down. Rick Altman's concept of the interplay of cycles and genres is a useful tool to explore how music destabilizes generic categories in two classic films from the 1940s: Casablanca and Meet Me in St. Louis. The treatment of music in Casablanca,
especially the first third of the film set in Rick's Cafe americaine, is
hardly distinguishable from many of the show musicals of the 1930s.
Likewise, the music in certain scenes in Meet Me in St. Louis, most
notably the Halloween sequence, is scored more like a dramatic feature than a musical of the 1930s. The changes in practice for which
these films are exemplars enable a more complex treatment of music-and enforce a higher standard for the dramatic treatment of
music-in films of all genres in the later 1940s and 1950s.2
Consider the following sequence from Casablanca(1942). Dooley Wilson's rendition of "Knock on Wood" in the first cafe sequence is one
of just four foregrounded performances in this film, all of them abbreviated by cuts in the music. The sequence begins at 6:25; by this time,
in typically frantic Warner Brothers style, we have gone through the
main-title sequence, a prologue with voiceover narration, and a collage of short opening scenes depicting stranded European couples at
cafes, a police search for Resistance fighters, and the arrival by plane
of the Nazi Major Strasser and his staff. The scene shifts to evening at
Rick's Cafe americaine and the pace slows down. Over the course of
the next thirty minutes, we are introduced to the rest of the cast of principal and secondary characters, and the first major story events occur:
Peter Lorre's Ugarte asks Humphrey Bogart's Rick to hide a set of letters of transit, one type of the exit visas that are the most valuable commodity in Casablancaat the time; Rick agrees; Ugarte is subsequently
arrested; it is established that Rick is neutral-he will not aid Ugarte
(or by extension anyone else trying to subvert German or Vichy intentions) but he will not assist those intentions, either; Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa and Rick encounter and recognize one another; and Ilsa and
her husband (Paul Henreid's anti-Nazi hero Victor Laszlo) find them-

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124

Neumeyer

selves cut off by Ugarte's arrest. For nearly seventeen of these thirty
minutes, we hear diegetic music (that is, music that has a physical
source in the world depicted by the film), sometimes onscreen but more
often off, sometimes foregrounded but more often in the background.
An additional two minutes, forty seconds of nondiegetic (background)
orchestral music plays over the final scene, Rick's recognition of Ilsa
and the subsequent, strained conversation which, not surprisingly,
puzzles both Laszlo and Claude Rains's Vichy Captain Renault.
The performance of "Knock on Wood" lasts a mere seventy seconds;
it consists of three iterations of an antecedent-consequent phrase pair
(that is, it is not a conventional thirty-two-bar AABA chorus).3 "Led
by Sam, most everybody sings but Rick and Ferrari.... [T]he crowd
sings 'we're unlucky'; and Sam tells them to 'knock on wood'; the
jaunty music enables them [all] to make light of their troubles."4 Immediately afterwards, the diegetic music drops into its typically backgrounded mode for the first conversation between Rick and Sidney
Greenstreet's Ferrari.
Now consider the odd coincidence that Casablanca and the classic
musical Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) have very nearly the same total
duration of diegetic music. In Meet Me in St. Louis, the total is 25:10;
in Casablanca,just twenty-five seconds less. One might even suggest
that the impact on Casablancais greater, since the movie's running time
is only 102 minutes, as against the 119 minutes of Meet Me in St. Louis. Since the boundaries between diegetic and nondiegetic music are
frequently contested in classical Hollywood sound film,5 it would seem
likely that these numbers cover over ambiguities: music behind the
conversations between Bogart and Sidney Greenstreet's character in
the latter's Blue Parrot cafe is only tenuously diegetic, for example.
Furthermore, since I took as my benchmark the plausible diegetic performance-not necessarily merely onscreen performance-one might
complain that my counts are skewed against the musical's typically
unstable mixtures of the diegetic and nondiegetic (an instability almost
routinely in evidence in Meet Me in St. Louis) in favor of the aurally
plausible offscreen nightclub music that murmurs behind much of the
first cafe scene in Casablanca.But, in fact, all the performances of Meet
Me in St. Louis are included in the counts above, from the two iterations of the title song itself-and "The Boy Next Door," "Skip to My
Lou," the "Trolley Song," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"-to the diegetically implausible orchestral music for the Christmas dance that opens the "Winter" division.
Before taking up the question of genre to which this near match of
durations is relevant, let's scrutinize a segment from Meet Me in St. Louis: the first of three major Halloween sequences which together comprise the film's "Autumn" division. The first sequence concerns the

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Merging Genres in the 1940s

125

Halloween night adventures of the two younger daughters, Agnes and

Tootie (Joan Carroll and Margaret O'Brien, respectively); the second
reveals (to themselves) the level of emotional commitment between
Judy Garland's Esther and her beau, Tom Drake's John; and the third
brings the narrative crux, as Esther's father (played by Leon Ames)
arrives home to announce the family's impending move to New York.6
The "Autumn" division begins at 48:30 and lasts thirty minutes. The
first sequence is the only major one lacking a song performance or
dance, but background music begins immediately and is present for
the majority of its ten minutes. The (unexpectedly) intense music for
this sequence is a major factor in its effect. The score for Meet Me in
St. Louis is nearly as complex as that of Casablancain its sources. Apart
from the songs themselves, the score was composed or arranged by
an experienced team of MGM employees: Conrad Salinger, Georgie
Stoll, Roger Edens, Calvin Jackson, and Lenny Hayton. According to
studio music records, Salinger composed the background music for
the first Halloween sequence, and his remarkably evocative and richly
scored music could easily have found a place in a movie as recent as
the 1980s or early 1990s. Three cues, named "Autumn in St. Louis,"
"All Hallow's Eve," and "The Most Horrible One,"7 provide an eerie
misterioso mood leavened with occasional comic commentary and hits
on screen action. Agnes and Tootie are in the kitchen, dressed for
Halloween, and after teasing by the family go outside. While feeding a bonfire in the middle of the street, the neighborhood children
negotiate who will "kill" certain adults (by throwing flour at them
when they answer the doorbell). In the confusion, Tootie is left on her
own to "kill" a reserved older man, Mr. Braukopf. When she returns,
she is crowned "the most horrible one," to her delight. The outlandishness of this sequence is exacerbated by the fact that it follows the
"Trolley Song," one of the quintessential production numbers in the
tradition of the American film musical.
The second sequence follows, with three scenes: Tootie is brought
home, having been injured (only slightly, as it turns out) while trying to carry out a dangerous trick; through misunderstanding, Esther
confronts John about Tootie's injury, and they reconcile when she finds
that he helped Tootie and Agnes escape; then Mr. Smith arrives home
during dessert in the parlor to make his announcement.
The three Halloween sequences, taken together, provide narrative
motivation for the film's climax: Tootie's emotional collapse and destruction of the family of snowmen after Esther fails to comfort her
with "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." Their father witnesses Tootie's outburst, and it affects him so strongly that he calls off the
move to New York, an event that was to have happened only three
days later.

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126

Neumeyer

Is Casablanca a musical? Is Meet Me in St. Louis a dramatic feature

film, perhaps a women's film, domestic melodrama, or even-considering Tootie's penchant for the macabre-a female gothic? Surely not,
but the questions are not so absurd as they may seem. Although the
literature now includes many statements about narrative functions of
music in classical Hollywood films and about style (sometimes by studio but more often by individual composer), we still have relatively
little specific knowledge of the role of music in classical Hollywood
genres. To make things worse, over the past two or three decades the
notion of genre itself has nearly disappeared under the large-scale
critical reorientation that is usually gathered under the general term
theory. In brief, attention has shifted from archetypes and instances,
the
from variations on models that assume essential qualities-with
that
them-toward
socialhierarchies
flexible,
accompany
necessary
ly constructed categories that shift and change. Nick Browne, for example, rejects the positivist project of norms, typologies, and formal
description in favor of a range of
distinctive styles of cultural and historical interpretation....
Genres, here, are understood to gravitate toward specific assemblages of local coherencies....The operations of particular genres
are pictured as working through the history of cinema at different levels and angles to other genres and other social institutions.8
Yet genre has resisted this paradoxical reduction to complexities and
contradictions, to shadows that pass across the face of cinema's cultural history: as Frans de Bruyn has it, "the greatest challenge that
the concept of genre poses to contemporary theory is its refusal to
disappear, its insistence on a rapprochement, rather than a rupture,
between the old and the new in theoretical discourse."9
Rick Altman finds that rapprochement in a conception of genre oriented toward the historical processes of production, promotion, and
reception that create, guide, and undermine genres.10 For Altman,
genre categories that seem stable are better construed as moments of
crystallization in cinema history, and it is a mistake to valorize them
to stand for all films.11 Nevertheless, he says that we may locate in
historical processes the "logic and mechanisms whereby genres become recognizable as such." The fundamental categories through
which these processes operate in the early history of Hollywood
sound film are "cycles" and "genres." The former-in effect, groups
of sequels-drive production and promotion. Contrary to expectation,
a close look at publicity materials reveals that "film publicity seldom
employs generic terms as such. [Instead, although] indirect references to genre are of course regularly used ... they almost always evoke
not a single genre but multiple genres." This strategy reveals "that

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Merging Genres in the 1940s

127

Hollywood labors to identify its pictures with multiple genres, in order to benefit from the increased interest that this strategy inspires
in diverse demographic groups." Thus, it becomes clear that "Hollywood's stock-in-trade is... not the classical practice of generic purity.... [B]y definition, genres are broad public categories shared across
the entire industry."12As a consequence, it is in the economic interest
of each studio to create cycles of films that are uniquely identified
with it. Cycles arise by adding a twist to existing genres, but genres
arise when cycles become industrywide conventions.13 Altman demonstrates the surprisingly consistent historical process in Hollywood
by which genres (characterized by nouns) spawn cycles (as the nouns
acquire adjectival qualifiers), and then the adjectives become nouns
when the cycles are redefined as genres. For example, "comedy" that
emphasized music became "musical comedy," which was shortened
to the term that, sometime between 1930 and 1933, came to represent
a genre, "musical."14
It is difficult to look back at Casablanca and Meet Me in St. Louis in
terms of a history of cycles and genres because both films have acquired permanent status as, respectively, the epitome of the World
War II (nonbattlefield) melodrama and the progenitor of the MGM
"Freed Unit" integrated musical. (Indeed, Altman observes that the
most hardened genre categories are those created after the fact by critics and scholars.)15 If we can begin to break down this status, however, it seems reasonable to work from the assumption that music participates, like other film elements, in the complexity of these historical
processes. Even so, Casablanca and Meet Me in St. Louis offer some
surprises.
We can begin with the main-title sequence, where music reigns supreme in classical Hollywood. In all films of this period, we expect
the main-title sequence to tell us about genre in unmistakable ways,
yet in neither of the two films here is this true. In Meet Me in St. Louis, we hear a standard three-part main-title cue: the opening section
surrounds the main title with a large orchestra-and-chorus rendition
of the title song; the second, lyrical, section quotes "The Boy Next
Door"; and the final section tails off to merge with the brass motto
that announces the "Summer" title. Music then goes out and sound
effects and generic speech take over during the establishing shot of
Kensington Street. Everything we have heard announces a nostalgic
costume drama, either as romantic comedy or light family melodrama. Only when Agnes starts singing several minutes later do the stagey and unreal traits of a musical come to the fore.
For Casablanca,Max Steiner borrowed a main-title cue he had used
eight years earlier for The Lost Patrol, a strictly military film where
the main-title music offers a hyper-rhythmic "Arabic" passage fol-

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Neumeyer

lowed by a British military march; in Casablanca, Steiner substitutes

"La Marseillaise" for the latter. The prologue expands on the tropes
of "military" and "Arabic," finally pinpointing Casablanca as the geographical locus. The opening scenes all suggest a wartime melange
of fighting, intrigue, and individual human misery and heroism. Only
when the scene shifts to Rick's Cafe do the narrative cues become
more complex. The main-title sequence and prologue would have left
doubt in contemporary audiences only with respect to whether the
film that follows would be a combat film or espionage drama. Thomas
Schatz includes Casablancain his list of World War II films; he calls it
Hollywood's "seminal wartime 'conversion narrative"' and shows
how it embodies the wartime reinterpretation of classical narrative,
as represented in the goal-oriented, individualistic protagonist and
the formation of a romantic couple.16 Casablancais not a combat film,
the dominant type of war film after 1942 according to Schatz: only
three characters are killed (a resistance fighter near the beginning,
Ugarte [this is reported, not seen], and Strasser), and it remains a curiosity that this great wartime film never once shows an American
soldier or mentions the U.S. military. Instead, after the opening scenes,
Casablanca would have been recognizable to its audiences as a striking variant of an existing genre that Schatz calls the "espionage drama," where a private citizen is forced to make decisions about patriotic loyalty and action. The espionage drama was the most common
war-related type after 1937 and constituted three-fifths of all war films
in 1942.17 (Other examples from Warner Brothers include Confession
of a Nazi Spy [1939] and Across the Pacific [1942].)
Casablanca'srelease came during intense days on all the war fronts,
including the Soviet winter offensive, the Battle of Guadalcanal, and
the first American landing in Italy, but the closely relevant moments
are obviously Germany's completion of the French occupation (as the
Vichy government dropped diplomatic relations with the United
States), and Operation Torch, the opening of the major and ultimately conclusive Allied offensive in North Africa. The initial landings in
this campaign were made at Algiers, Oran, and Casablanca itself, all
within three weeks of the film's premiere.18 These special circumstances and the film's box-office success motivated Warner Brothers
to create a cyclic twist on the espionage drama: by placing equally
strong emphasis on danger and romance (but avoiding battle scenes),
the studio created a cycle we might call the "romantic espionage melodrama." The two best-known follow-ups to Casablanca fit into this
cycle: Watch on the Rhine (1943, starring Bette Davis) and To Have and
Have Not (1944, starring Bogart and Lauren Bacall). Other lesserknown "sequels" to Casablanca that draw on the same pool of actors
continue the espionage drama cycle: among them are Background to

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Merging Genres in the 1940s

129

Danger (1943), The Conspirators(1944), The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), and

Passage to Marseille (1944).
Despite the large amount of diegetic music, then, there is no danger that an audience would impute traits of the musical to Casablanca. The strongest confirming internal clue is that, despite the duration of performances, not a single one meets our minimal expectations
for a musical number. None is performed by a lead actor, and none
is complete and onscreen. During the first cafe sequence, we hear Sam
singing the chorus of "It Had to Be You" as the camera moves from
the exterior across the interior to settle on him just as he finishes the
song and launches immediately into an abbreviated version of
"Shine." "Knock on Wood" lacks a verse and we cut away from Sam
for nearly half the number's short one minute and ten seconds. When
Corinne Mura sings "La Passion" (Tangodella Rose), the typical Warners haste to keep narrative moving means two cuts away to a tense
conversation between Ilsa and Laszlo. Finally, Sam sings part (but not
all) of the chorus for "As Time Goes By" while the camera spends
most of its time settled on Ingrid Bergman's face.19
One of the most difficult notions to accept retrospectively about
Casablancais that Warner Brothers did not consider music to be a special element in the success of the film. Despite the distinctiveness of
the nearly continuous music in the first cafe scene, despite the opportunity for music as the new cycle veered in the direction of women's films (a genre that relied heavily on music), and pace the nearly
mythic quality that "As Time Goes By" acquired in later decades, none
of the film's sequels focused on music. The one exception-To Have
and Have Not-differs fundamentally from its source: the performances by Hoagy Carmichael and Lauren Bacall in a crowded hotel cafe
are all complete and foregrounded, with little or no competing narrative action, and the background scoring is both minimal and unrelated to the diegetic songs.
The answer to the question "Is Meet Me in St. Louis a dramatic feature film?" must be more equivocal, since the merger of melodrama
and musical is exactly what characterizes the MGM cycle of the "integrated musical," a cycle that is particularly associated with highbudget technicolor productions and whose first instance is thus, arguably, The Wizard of Oz (1939). Meet Me in St. Louis offered unexpected
twists on the musical genre to audiences in 1944. If, as Altman has it,
"pairing-off is the natural impulse of the musical," Meet Me in St. Louis
is exceptional in "raising the ante" to three couples: Esther, her older
brother and sister, and their girl- and boyfriends.20 (One might add
the parents, whose relationship is strained by the father's decision to
move to New York, then restored as he finally sees the effect of this
decision on his children.) The only nonfamily character who emerg-

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Neumeyer

es as at all significant is John, on whom Esther sets her sights from

the beginning of the picture. These multiple story tracks dilute, rather than intensify, the concentration on romantic pairing central to the
musical. Furthermore, three of the important performances in the film
(the two iterations of "Meet Me in St. Louis" and "Have Yourself a
Merry Little Christmas") do not in any way relate to the romantic
couplings. Another genre innovation that adds to the movie's complexity is the fact that "the multi-generational family... becomes
permanently fixed as a standard element of the folk musical." The
influence of this film was such that "hardly a single folk musical after 1944 lacks a strong family relationship."21 Indeed, the family relationship is so strongly established at the beginning of the film, with
the scene of ketchup tasting and the subsequent passing of the song
from Agnes to her grandfather to Rose and Esther, that it takes some
forceful redirecting of attention to focus on the older sisters' preoccupation with pairing off (as in "The Boy Next Door," which Esther
sings shortly afterwards).22
Another confounding clue is that, by the late 1930s, it was commonplace to have complete and foregrounded performances in feature
films that would never have been advertised as musicals. If the party dance-song "Skip to My Lou" and the "Trolley Song" have the
artificial, fantastical quality of a production number, "Meet Me in St.
Louis" (even its first iteration, obviously "planned" though it is), "The
Boy Next Door," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" all
might have found their way into romantic comedies. The Halloween
sequences, on the other hand, by their length and peculiar intensity,
take us to the edge of converting Meet Me in St. Louis into the domestic
melodrama. Writing about these sequences (and also Tootie's smashing of the snowmen), Altman says that "it is precisely this willingness to come at least partially to terms with the real past that gives
the... folk musical its characteristic melodramatic tone,"23 but I
would argue that Meet Me in St. Louis goes further than that, to muddling-if not quite erasing-genre boundaries, as we are denied a
final production number, despite the presence of the only obvious
stage set in the film, a crowd that looks as if it could break into song
and dance at any moment, and boxes extended downstage from
which the family could easily have sung as a group. Instead, a nondiegetic chorus pushes the whole scene out and invokes the end title. As musicals go, this ending is decidedly unsatisfactory.
Locating where music (or the soundtrack in general) fits in the historical process of cycle and genre offers much opportunity for inquiry. One example, among many, would be the complex convergences
and divergences of westerns and the cowboy musical. What to make,
for example, of Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (1939) or the

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131

men's chorus, Sons of the Pioneers, that performs in several John Ford
westerns? Another example is the increasing tendency for framed,
foregrounded performances in dramatic films in the 1940s, such as
the song performances of Hoagy Carmichael in The Best Yearsof Our
Lives (1946) or the disconcertingly unmotivated nightclub performance by Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep (1945). Musicians' biopics are
a topic in themselves, but so are the many elegant symphonic, chamber, and solo performances in women's films of the 1940s. The examples of Casablanca and Meet Me in St. Louis suggest that the answers
will be as complex as the notion of genre itself.
NOTES
1. It is true, of course, that silent films were never really "silent," since they were
almost always accompanied by music. And it is true that sound "shorts" (usually one
reel, or ten minutes) were shown in many American theaters by the early 1920s; filmed
performances were most common. However, the term silent is still appropriate because
feature films were at the top of the exhibition hierarchy, and before 1927 they were
indeed silent for the reason that they lacked dialogue. The crucial distinction, then,
was not between films with or without "sound" (whether that was live accompaniment or a recorded soundtrack), but between feature films that did or did not have
soundtracks including speech.
2. Some text in the first three paragraphs comes from my colleague James Buhler's
abstract of the conference paper version of this article.
3. The parts for "Knock on Wood" show the song's design as a four-bar intro, a sixteen-bar A section marked with repeats (for "unhappy"), eight instrumental bars, and
another iteration of the A section (for "happy"). The eight instrumental bars were
dropped in the film. (The parts are among the musical materials for Casablanca, Warner Brothers Collection, University of Southern California.)
4. Martin Marks, "Music, Drama, Warner Brothers: The Cases of Casablanca and The
Maltese Falcon," in Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000), 173.
5. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987), 22.
6. Richard Dyer links the late arrival of this essential story element (nearly two-thirds
of the way through the film) to a class of musical in which "utopia is implicit in the
world of the narrative as well as in the world of the [musical] numbers." Such films
are overwhelmingly nostalgic-"Far from pointing forwards, they point back, to a golden age-a reversal of utopianism." Other titles listed by Dyer include My Fair Lady,
Gigi, and Hello Dolly! (Richard Dyer, "Entertainment and Utopia," in Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan [London: Routledge, 2002], 28).
7. This information is drawn from the music files for the film (MGM Collection,
University of Southern California).
8. Nick Browne, "Preface," in Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed.
Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), xi.
9. Frans de Bruyn, "Genre Criticism," in Encyclopedia of ContemporaryLiterary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, ed. Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1993), 84.
10. Rick Altman, "Reusable Packaging: Generic Products and the Recycling Process,"
in Refiguring American Film Genres, ed. Browne, 38, 6.

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11. Taking a somewhat different tack, David Bordwell argues that critics often invoke genre categories opportunistically: "Far from being concerned with definition or
reasoning from genus to species, critics often identify the genre only to aid in interpreting the particular work." If such labels are "transitory and heuristic," then it follows that "[g]enres, and genre, function as open-ended and corrigible schemata." David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 148.
12. The four citations in this paragraph are from Altman, "Reusable Packaging," 2,
7, 9, 11, respectively.
13. Ibid., 15.
14. Ibid., 20-22.
15. Altman explores two examples (melodrama and woman's film) at some length:
ibid., 24-33. For a view of generic conventions in classical Hollywood as more pervasive, a view that is therefore critical of the notion of "subversive" genres (including
melodrama), see David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical
Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 70-72. For a concise account of the "Freed Unit," see James M.
Collins, "The Musical," in Handbookof American Film Genres, ed. Wes D. Gehring (New
York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 275-77.
16. Thomas Schatz, "World War II and the Hollywood 'War Film,"' in Refiguring
American Film Genres, ed. Browne, 108-9.
17. Schatz, "World War II," 104.
18. Still another factor was that, in September 1942, the government had enlisted the
studios to promote a major war-bond drive (Aljean Harmetz, The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II [New York: Hyperion, 2002], 276).
19. I have excluded from my reckoning, as a special case, the famous "battle of national anthems" between "Wacht am Rhein" and "La Marseillaise."
20. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987), 32.
21. Ibid., 271.
22. For an excellent reading that draws together the domestic-feminine, folkloristic
nostalgia, and capitalist notions of progress, see James Naremore, The Films of Vincent
Minnelli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 71-89. For more general information on the film, see Gerald Kaufman, Meet Me in St. Louis, BFI Film Classics (London: British Film Institute, 1994).
23. Altman, The American Film Musical, 314.

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