Tragicomedy, Melodrama, and Genre in Early Sound Films: The Case of Two “Sad Clown” Musicals

Michael G Garber

doi:10.5195/cinej.2016.135

Abstract

This interdisciplinary study applies the theatrical theories of stage genres to examples of the early sound cinema, the 1930 Hollywood musicals Puttin’ on the Ritz (starring Harry Richman, and with songs by Irving Berlin) and Free and Easy (starring Buster Keaton). The discussion focuses on the phenomenon of the sad clown as a symbol of tragicomedy. Springing from Rick Altman’s delineation of the “sad clown” sub-subgenre of the show musical subgenre, outlined in The American Film Musical, this article shows that, in these seminal movie musicals, naïve melodrama and “gag” comedy coexist with the tonalities, structures, philosophy, and images of the sophisticated genre of tragicomedy, including by incorporating the grotesque into the mise en scene of their musical production numbers.

Highlights

This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press
The sad clown’s dilemma captures the quintessence of the concept that everybody is a performer on the stage of society: each one must fulfill a role in the comedy of life, no matter how deeply hurt onstage or off – and, no matter how insane the rules that society dictates, the game must be played. (Figure 1.) As Wolfgang Kayser describes in his discussion of the romantic grotesque and tragicomedy, this is “an unimpassioned view of life on earth as empty, meaningless puppet play” (Kayser 1963, 186)
The following interdisciplinary analysis reveals the links between these two media, united as they are in both transmitting stories in the form of drama, CINEJ Cinema Journal: Tragicomedy, Melodrama, and Genre in Early Sound Films and helps highlight the idiosyncratic aesthetics and the value of the Hollywood musical genre

Summary

Introduction

Both films incorporate tragicomedic elements in their musical production numbers: the royal court intruded upon by a commoner; odd settings, representing a kind of mysterious “nowhere”; and most, of all, various manifestations of the supernatural, the unexplained, the grotesque – in Puttin’ on the Ritz, of the macabre and the dream and, in Free and Easy, the image of the magic clown. I could never be happy making believe all my life.” Here, in Free and Easy as in Puffin’ on the Ritz, there is a glancing reference to a worldview which sees society (or at least that part of society upon which the film dwells) as false artifice – a view reminiscent of Jacobean tragicomedy.

Results

Conclusion