The Best American Crime Writing by Otto Penzler

The Best American Crime Writing by Otto Penzler

From the earliest sound films to the present, American cinema has represented African Americans as decidedly musical. Disintegrating the Musical tracks and analyzes this history of musical representations of African Americans, from blacks and whites in blackface to black-cast musicals to jazz shorts, from sorrow songs to show tunes to bebop and beyond.

Arthur Knight focuses on American film's classic sound era, when Hollywood studios made eight all-black-cast musicals--a focus on Afro-America unparalleled in any other genre. It was during this same period that the first black film stars--Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge--emerged, not coincidentally, from the ranks of musical performers. That these films made so much of the connection between African Americans and musicality was somewhat ironic, Knight points out, because they did so in a form (song) and a genre (the musical) celebrating American social integration, community, and the marriage of opposites--even as the films themselves were segregated and played before even more strictly segregated audiences.

Disintegrating the Musical covers territory both familiar--Show Boat, Stormy Weather, Porgy and Bess--and obscure--musical films by pioneer black director Oscar Micheaux, Lena Horne's first film The Duke Is Tops, specialty numbers tucked into better-known features, and lost classics like the short Jammin' the Blues. It considers the social and cultural contexts from which these films arose and how African American critics and audiences responded to them. Finally, Disintegrating the Musical shows how this history connects with the present practices of contemporary musical films like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Bamboozled.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780375713026
ISBN 10	0375713026
Title	The Best American Crime Writing
Author	Otto Penzler
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2004-08-10
Number of pages	432
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.