Sound and Music in Film.

Singing in the Rain & Rocketman

Music can be used for a number of different reasons in film, it can help persuade the audience to feel a certain way, help to convey the emotions a character may be feeling, or just make a scene feel more alive and add to the overall atmosphere created by said scene.

While personally Musicals are not even close to my favourite genre, I can still enjoy a good one when I watch it. An example of this would be Singing in the Rain (1952), I feel like, although the musical numbers featured in this film were well performed and very well choreographed, it didn’t resonate with me as well as a film like Rocketman (2019) did. However I did find many of the musically numbers in Singing in the Rain enjoyable, I felt that some, if not most of them didn’t fully hit their mark for me. Music in film can be used to help the audience understand the characters, their emotions and motives.

Although some of the music and songs used in this film, helped with this, such as ‘You were meant for me’. This song was used in place of the characters actually admitting their feelings for each other, this song helped to convey the emotions felt by two of the lead characters well. 

‘You were meant for me’ (Singing in the Rain)

‘Make ‘Em Laugh’ (Singing in the Rain)

I found that many of the songs felt like just filler that lacked any meaning or addition to the film. Make ‘Em Laugh is an example of this and while an entertaining song, it did nothing but further expand on the goofiness and eccentricity of the character singing the song, Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor).

 Many Musicals offer vast amounts of escapism as people bursting into a perfectly routined song and dance number is pretty unrealistic and while this film does offer that with many of the musical pieces featured, there are a few times where it falls short. The song ‘The Broadway Melody’ was one of these, this song was used during a dreamlike sequence, while Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) was explaining an idea to the head of the studio.

 I felt like the music used in this scene fit well with what was happening during the scene, it just went on for far far too long, I was just waiting for it to end after about 5 minutes, much like the last song mentioned it did not add anything to the film or the character in general. This scene felt like they just wanted to include a massive musical number while a lot of dancers and big set designs, and it shows. 

As the film was made in the 50s, you can probably guess the music is very reminiscent of 50s era music, this isn’t exactly a negative thing though. Some of the songs, like ‘Singing in the Rain’ still hold up well and are classic examples of great music used in films. There are some songs that I personally didn’t think hold up quite as well for me such as ‘All I do is Dream of You’. I feel this is more of a generational thing though, rather than poor music choices, the film was made in the 50s and set around the transition from silent film to sound era in the late 20s, so I kind of get why some of the music used doesn’t hit the mark for myself as it is a lot less recognisable and dissimilar to the music I am personally into.

When comparing this film to Rocketman (2019), I find the music used in this film much more effective at adding to the characters motives and emotions. I also found myself enjoying the music a lot more as it felt much more modern, even though it was made in the 70s and 80s, mainly because I found it more recognisable. As this film is a semi bibliographical story of Elton John’s life, all the music used in this film are his own songs, this really helps to sell the emotions of the character as we can see him at times when the songs were written which adds to the impact of the songs used.

Similarly to Singing in the Rain, songs are used in this film to help convey the emotions felt by Elton John, played by Taron Egerton. The music used in this film gave audiences an idea of how he was feeling and thinking at the time of writing them, it does a great job at using his own songs and him singing them to add to the emotional aspects of this film. I think the fact that this film is more based off a true story than Singing in the Rain allows the songs used to actually add to the emotion of a scene and the film in general.