The Songs of Hollywood Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)On the whole, I enjoyed this book and will be coming back to visit its pages many times in the future. It is a marvelous history of the remarkable talents that came together to make the American musical film a unique and wonderful experience. Who hasn't had their spirits lifted by a song from a Hollywood musical?
Furia is a noted scholar of American popular song. Precisely what Laurie Patterson brings to the party is unknown.
Essentially this is a history of the Hollywood musical and particularly the people who wrote those wonderful songs, made sure they got into the movies (producers and directors), gave them a framework (directors) and character (actors). There is no question of Furia's knowledge, including backstage lore, which in turn makes this an interesting book.
It is, unfortunately, not a particularly well-written book. Furia writes like an academic. His style lacks verve and is somewhat stiff. The feeling that you are reading a textbook is never far away.
But the book is readable and, with all its information, enjoyable for anyone who likes Hollywood musicals.
A surprising omission is that the book lacks a fimography, that is a list of all the movies mentioned, dates of production, stars, songwriters and so on. Anyone who doesn't want to watch some, most or all of these films again after reading this book is probably dead and, thus, a filmography would be helpful. There is a song index.
The design of the book is, charitably stated, a total disaster.
The cover of the copy I read has a picture of Gene Kelly and Debby Reynolds on the cover. It is an iconic shot from "Singing In The Rain". But instead of the raincoats being bright yellow, they are an ugly, vile, repulsive shade of orange/brown or perhaps umber. The skin tones are rendered as a sunburn red. The effect is just plain awful. It is possible that this is a printing error, but it looks more like just plain bad design. The Amazon cover shot has the same coloration.
The book has a couple of hundred illustrations, frames from the films. All of them are in black and white and all are about the size of a 35mm photo frame. Another piece of extremely dubious graphic design.
Overall, despite the ugly design and the somewhat stilted writing style, I enjoyed the book because of its subject matter and Furia's encyclopedic knowledge of the Hollywood musical and its songs.
Jerry


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