From There's Magic in Music to The Hard-Boiled Canary: Promoting "Good Music" in Prewar Musical Films

"Meet those amazing kids from 'America's Music Town'--Interlochen!--in the screen's joy-filled, song-filled entertainment treat! Your new singing-starlet, Susanna Foster, leads the parade of youth!"¹Such advertisements heralded the opening of Paramount Pictures' There's Magic in Music (also known as The Hard-Boiled Canary, 1941), a film starring the studio's first operatic ingénue, the sixteen-year-old Susanna Foster, and a host of talented teenagers representing the students of what was then known as the National Music Camp.²Incorporating ideas of intellectual, cultural, and moral uplift proselytized by proponents of the music appreciation movement, There's Magic celebrated the then widespread belief that so-called "good music" could transform ne'er-do-wells into model citizens.³

The movie opens with a sequence in which Michael Maddy, the director of the Interlochen Music Camp, conducts a radio interview with the acclaimed music critic Deems Taylor--and causes quite a stir. During his interview, Maddy enthusiastically espouses the universal appeal of art music, claiming that he overheard the audience of a cheap burlesque theater in New York going "wild over a young girl singing grand opera." His idealistic remark prompts the radio's horrified directors to terminate the interview immediately. Maddy then persuades the publicity director of the Manhattan Opera Company to accompany him to the burlesque. There they discover the film's protagonist, a teenaged soprano named Toodles LaVerne, singing the "Shadow Song" ("Ombre légère") from Giacomo Meyerbeer's Dinorah.⁴To Maddy's chagrin, Toodles is "shadowed" by a striptease artist whilst singing her aria for the highly appreciative and chiefly working-class, male audience. A police raid subsequently drives everyone out of the theater, and Maddy finds Toodles taking refuge in his car. He whisks the girl away to safety and awards her a scholarship to attend Interlochen. Surrounded by the camp's upright management and middle-class prodigies, Toodles eventually renounces her morally dubious past as a reform-school refugee for a future full of magical music making.

There's Magic in Music seemed to contain all the ingredients necessary for box office appeal. It offered romance, a hint of sex, drama, and comedy as well as a variety of musical styles. The film's popular numbers featured "Fireflies on Parade," a dance band tune written especially for There's Magic by composer Ann Ronell; a "celebrity imitation...