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.

The Musical is not only escapism nor mere entertainment as many film scholars have written. It is also ideological operations. This paper focuses on the narrative analysis of the Hollywood Musical genre during World War II, suggesting how it produces the ideological effects of ”utopian vision” on the spectator through its structure, style, and theme. To this end, I first proceed to clarify the difference between the Musical and the classical narrative. I then explore the historical development of the Musical narrative, with relation to the technological innovations and the ideological shifts.

The Musical narrative contains the classical narrative and the spectacular song and dance numbers, which provide the spectator with the images of “real” and “utopia”. This dual structure is frequently concluded with a big production number, emphasizing the American brotherhood and unity. Through these examinations, I suggest that the Musical narrative helps to bring to the spectator, more or less, the progressive utopian sensibility, the anticipation of the better world, and the faith in American Democracy.