Music Hall, Revue and Modernity in Victor Saville'sEvergreen

Abstract

Victor Saville's Evergreen (1934) has long been regarded as an innovative British film musical in its aspirations to the idioms and production values of American cinema of the period and in its integration of continental European artistic design. Complementing these features, this article argues, is a less noted but unusually specific engagement with popular British performance practices and their historical contexts. An examination of the film's representation of music hall and revue, both in its narrative and in its diegetic dance and song sequences, suggests their importance for Gaumont-British's attempt to establish Jessie Matthews as a distinctively novel performer in changing contexts of both British and American film production. More broadly, it also complicates the dominant model of the alleged decline of popular theatre in the period as a result of its competitive engagement with cinema, presenting instead a nuanced sense of their interaction in the 1930s that prefigures the importance of domestic performance traditions for a later period of British national cinema.