ミュージカル映画に対するラジオの影響――1930年代初頭のアメリカにおける娯楽産業との関連で

抄録

With the corning of sound, the American film industry converted silent films into talkies, and produced many “all talking, all singing, all dancing” films in the late 1920s. In the early 1930s, however, such musical films lost public favor and were rarely produced between 1931 and 1932, until the revival of the genre beginning with 42nd Street (1933). This temporary demise of musicals, which some historians call “musical moratorium” has been generally accounted for by the change of public taste and economical difficulty of filmmaking during the Great Depression.

This article examines this musical moratorium by focusing on the contemporary growth of radio, and pointing out that the extended radio network at the time absorbed all the important elements to make musical entertainment programmes of its own. American radio broadcasting began in 1920, but it is in the early 1930s that radio began to produce variety shows for their programme and became the major entertainment industry equal to screen and stage. Radio absorbed the artists from vaudeville and became the central supplier of popular music. It attracted millions of audience that were either staying home listening to radio or going theatres for radio free shows. This popularity of radio damaged the box office of movie theatres, and there were some conflicts between radio and film industries. But by 1933, when radio reached the saturation point, the film industry began to capture this popularity of radio, bringing out the revival of musical genre in the motion picture.