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The Nostalgia Musical

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New York City and the Hollywood Musical

Part of the book series: Screening Spaces ((SCSP))

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Abstract

This chapter explores the ‘nostalgia musical’ of the 1940s and early 1950s: films set in romanticized historical cities, especially in the ‘Gay Nineties’. Shearer contends that the urban context of films such as Coney Island and The Belle of New York were crucial to their nostalgic effects. She argues that the nostalgia musical emerged from a tension that was acute in the 1940s, between a desire for the transformation of American urban space and a fear of loss. At a time when plans were being put in motion to dramatically rebuild the city, the nostalgia musical enabled the creation of ideal musical cities in the studio, showing off studio resources, revelling in artifice and assuming of a certain kind of urban density as positive.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Svetlana Boym’s work on exile and changes to post-socialist Eastern Europe makes a convincing case for nostalgia as spatial as much as it is temporal (Boym 2001).

  2. 2.

    Aside from passing references, Central Park does not feature in Denis Tilden Lynch’s 1927 biography of Tweed.

  3. 3.

    The marble arch was preceded by a temporary wooden arch in 1888, yet the version we see in the film is clearly meant to represent the arch’s contemporary form.

  4. 4.

    In brief references to the film’s ending, Raymond Knapp calls the fair a MacGuffin (R. Knapp 2006, 102), while for Richard Dyer it is lacklustre (Dyer 2011, 74).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. King’s College London, London, UK

    Martha Shearer

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Shearer, M. (2016). The Nostalgia Musical. In: New York City and the Hollywood Musical. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56937-0_4

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