The concept of genre is slippery, especially with sui generis directors such as Terence Davies, whose 1992 film “The Long Day Closes” I discuss in this clip. Davies has spoken of his devotion to Hollywood musicals, and that devotion is fully visible—and audible—in this autobiographical movie, set in his native Liverpool in the mid-fifties. “The Long Day Closes” is filled with music; it contains perhaps more minutes of song than the average musical, but, with its absence of production numbers and its integration of musical performance into the dramatic texture, the film doesn’t look or feel at all like the classic musicals that partly inspired it. The mix of media goes back to the earliest talking pictures—a format that started, of course, with a musical, “The Jazz Singer.” Howard Hawks’s first sound film, “The Dawn Patrol,” a First World War drama about the grim destiny of fighter pilots, is also filled with music—the singing of officers in the canteen as they await their perilous missions or hear the bad news about the missions of others. Some of Frank Sinatra’s greatest musical scenes are in the film noir “Meet Danny Wilson,” in which he plays a singer whose career takes off with the help of a gangster. “Saturday Night Fever” is more of a musical than most musicals, though it has no singing; it does, however, have lots of dancing and lots of records, which makes it all too easy to lose sight of its hard-nosed and sociologically nuanced drama. And some of the greatest musical moments in the cinema can be found in John Cassavetes’s dramas, including “Faces” and “Husbands,” though it would be strange to call them movies musicals. Ultimately, the notion of genre is something that matters mainly to marketing departments, and every great movie is a genre unto itself.
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