![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Many popular singers made film musicals in the period 1930–1960. This article focuses on two of the most popular and well-known chanteurs de charme in France, Tino Rossi and Georges Guétary, neither of whom has had academic work devoted to him. The article reviews their major films and their themes, and contrasts their reception and performance styles, arguing that they may well be seen in a relatively undifferentiated way, but that this disregards a shift in performance styles that is anchored in pre-war and post-war sensibilities.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Filmography
Amour et compagnie, 1950. Gilles Grangier, France.
Amour, tango, mandoline, 1955. Arthur Maria Rabenalt, West Germany.
An American in Paris, 1951. Vincente Minnelli, USA.
Les Aventures de Casanova, 1947. Jean Boyer, France.
Baron Tzigane, 1954. Arthur Maria Rabenalt, West Germany.
Le Cavalier noir, 1945. Gilles Grangier, France.
Le Chanteur inconnu, 1947. André Cayatte, France.
Le Chemin du paradis, 1956. Willi Forst and Hans Wolff, France/West Germany.
Der Zarewitsch, 1955. Arthur Maria Rabenalt, West Germany/France.
Destins, 1946. Richard Pottier, France.
Deux amours, 1949. Richard Pottier, France.
Et Dieu… créa la femme, 1956. Roger Vadim, France/Italy.
Fièvres, 1942. Jean Delannoy, France.
Folies-Bergère, 1957. Henri Decoin, France.
Le Gardian, 1946. Jean de Marguenat, France.
Jo la romance, 1949. Gilles Grangier, France.
Lumières de Paris, 1938. Richard Pottier, France.
Marinella, 1936. Pierre Caron, France.
Mon amour est près de toi, 1943. Richard Pottier, France.
Paris chante toujours, 1951. Pierre Montazel, France.
Plume au vent, 1953. Louis Cuny, France/Spain.
Sérénade aux nuages, 1946. André Cayatte, France.
Toi, c’est moi, 1936. René Guissart, France.
Trente et quarante, 1945. Gilles Grangier, France.
Une fille sur la route, 1952. Jean Stelli, France.
Une nuit aux Baléares, 1957. Paul Mesnier, France.
White Christmas, 1954. Michael Curtiz, USA.
Notes
1. ‘I really don’t know why critics want to prevent shopgirls from enjoying Tino Rossi’s charm, and the escape from reality that he offers them.’
2. ‘Films that you see with your ears.’
3. ‘His warm, fluid and simple voice/His silky voice, full of warm inflections/moves women deeply.’
4. ‘The king of the crooners.’
5. The biographical information on Rossi is indebted to an extensive and well-researched website by Claude Rizzo-Vignaud: http://tinorossi.monsite-orange.fr/index.html.
6. ‘This costume would have made an inhabitant of Sartène laugh, but it would seduce French women: a baggy shirt, an accessorised jacket that I decided to hold casually over my shoulder, baggy trousers, boots, and my guitar to give a pretty and typical look.’
7. ‘You’ve got a nice voice.’
8. ‘You’ve got a diamond in your throat.’
9. ‘I dance badly.’
10. ‘Like a nightingale on a branch.’
11. ‘Undeniably he has a nice voice, but he delivers with so little conviction, he is so not there when he sings, that I always feel that he’s singing the same thing every time.’
12. ‘Pure and seductive/replaces expressiveness with tone.’
13. ‘His acting is so stripped down that it is non-existent.’
14. It is the fourth song from the posthumous collection ‘Schwanengesang’ or ‘Swan Song’ D957, arranged by Franz Liszt, with lyrics by Henri Martinet adapted from the original poem by Ludwig Rellstab.
15. ‘I know like everyone that millions of female admirers get drunk on this trickle of charm, that addicts write to him saying “to see you and die”, that ladies who are of sound mind and body fight to touch him at the music-hall exits. I saw an older rounder gentleman, who sings with his hand over his heart. When he stops, he seems rather bored having to stay there, having to walk and talk. He doesn’t move much, actually, because his Sunday best is a bit tight, and he talks as little as possible. Is it his fault if he only has one voice and that his fans see him, when they could be content with listening to him, want to see him and see him as someone slim, expressive and handsome? Who knows? Maybe one day someone will make a good film with him, or rather around him: The Invisible Singer. Compared with his previous films, apparently this one, in which you hear him more than you see him, shows remarkable progress.’
16. ‘I’ve sung love songs all my life and my biggest success is a children’s song! The song is miraculously simple. We were still referring to Father Christmas but the three words “Petit Papa Noël” really moved children!’
17. ‘Georges Guétary has died. He was best known for his two great numbers in An American in Paris. But he was also the star of a few film operettas in France, Greece and Germany.’
18. Guétary in fact has three musical numbers in the film, not two: the trio ‘By Strauss’, the duo ‘S’Wonderful’, and the number that he is most remembered for, ‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise’. A number of songs that he was due to sing were eventually dropped (Padilla Citation2010, 74–75).
19. It is the title of a CD of their best-known songs, still available from RDM Editions; see also the second of two radio programmes devoted to Guétary on the equivalent of BBC Radio 3, France Musique, titled ‘Georges Guétary, prince de l’opérette’ (Pénet Citation2017).
20. ‘Nice voice.’
21. ‘His warm and delicate tone and nightingale high notes.’
22. ‘A slight accent that he needs to lose.’
23. He remained in the USA, appearing twice more on the Ed Sullivan Show, alongside the Everly Brothers on 2 March and Frankie Vaughn on 30 March (Inman Citation2006, 90).
24. ‘Loves of the stars.’
25. ‘Les amours de nos vedettes’ were all produced by Paule Corday-Marguy: 1946: 8–9, 1949: 8–9, 1951: 8–9, 1953: 8–9, 1956: 14.
26. ‘Like many of my films, this one didn’t live up to my expectations.’
27. Jo la romance, Une fille sur la route, Plume au vent, Le Chemin du paradis, Amour, tango mandoline.
28. ‘Jobbing cinema.’
29. ‘M. Guétary speaks French with a foreign accent, and talks with Mme Thamar, who has an even more indistinguishable accent and a third person, French, who speaks Berlitz-style English. If you don’t believe me, just go and see this tower of Babel.’
30. ‘Charming views of the Côte d’Azur.’
31. ‘Women are always sniffing around him.’
32. ‘His destiny is to sing and to travel the world.’
33. ‘All women dream about me.’
34. ‘They are all the same.’
35. ‘Women give you a colourful time.’
36. ‘I need to see you to sing.’
37. ‘A real operetta village.’
38. ‘If there were only one blonde in the world, boys wouldn’t have to choose.’
39. ‘A real fairy-tale princess, a Sleeping Beauty, us around you like troubadours, all we need now is a song.’
40. ‘Has aged and we don’t find it touching any more.’
41. ‘Eternal seducer.’
42. ‘In films as in the theatre it’s already difficult to go from the role of the matinée idol to that of the fifty-year old; in operetta it would seem that it’s well-nigh impossible.’
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Phil Powrie
Phil Powrie is Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Surrey and the chief general editor of French Screen Studies. He has published a number of books on French cinema, the last of which is Music in Contemporary French Cinema: The Crystal-Song (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He is currently co-authoring The French Film Musical (to be published with Bloomsbury) with Marie Cadalanu.
Marie Cadalanu
Marie Cadalanu’s PhD thesis, ‘The French Film Musical in the Thirties: The Birth of a Genre?’ was awarded in 2016. Her main fields of research are French cinema, the film musical and music in film. She has published work on the short film musicals of Nicolas Engel, on the film musical screenwriter Marcel Achard and on the reception of songs in films (all in 2016). She is co-authoring a book on the French film musical with Phil Powrie.