The era of sound cinema burst onto cinema screens with a song, performed by the inimitable Al Jolson. And the success of The Jazz Singer persuaded the studios that the best use of this new medium would be to crank out as many All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing! musicals as they possibly could.

The first film that could be described as a true musical, rather than just a movie with a few songs, was The Broadway Melody (1929). It’s a formula which soon became a cliché: a backstage melodrama about a pair of sisters (Bessie Love and Anita Page) and a small-time hoofer (Charles King) who make it to the big time but suffer heartache and disappointments along the way. It was the first talkie to win an Oscar for best film (although some uncharitable commentators argue that the win was due to the exceptionally poor level of competition that year). It was also the first musical to include a Technicolor segment, which is now presumed lost.

The Broadway Melody was a major hit but it was eclipsed by another musical, The Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), a fast-paced comedy shot entirely in Technicolor, which claimed the crown for highest grossing film for the following ten years. Sample dialogue: Mabel: “I don't care what kind of a man he is as long as he has pants and an income.” Topsy: “And you're not so particular about the pants, are you?” Unfortunately, all but two incomplete reels of the film are presumed lost forever.

The floodgates were opened. The studios snapped up talent from musical theatre and rehashed hit stage shows for the screen. In a particularly cynical move, MGM and Warners forced their contract players take part in the film equivalent of a variety show, in which even those stars with no previously demonstrated musical talent were require to sing and dance.

But the golden era of the Hollywood musical, which extended through the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, really got underway when Hollywood stopped looking to the theatre for inspiration and started staging spectacular eye-popping extravaganzas, which could only be truly appreciated through the eye of the camera. And the first real architect of these films was choreographer and director Busby Berkeley.

Berkeley’s speciality was to uses the bodies of his army of dancers to create fascinating kaleidoscopic patterns – these were often filmed from above offering a viewpoint that a theatre audience could never enjoy. He capitalised on the Depression-era audience’s taste for glamour and women of dubious morality, with four more Gold Diggers movies and a host of movies with titles like Dames, Stage Struck and Ziegfeld Girl. He said of his work at the time, “In an era of breadlines, depression and wars, I tried to help people get away from all the misery, to turn their minds to something else. I wanted to make people happy, if only for an hour.”

Equal to Berkeley in influence was Fred Astaire, a dancer and stage performer since childhood who achieved his greatest success paired with Ginger Rogers. The pairing worked primarily because, as Katherine Hepburn allegedly said, “He gives her class and she gives him sex.” But Astaire’s contribution was more than 50 percent of the chemistry of a magical screen partnership – he was an outstanding choreographer and demanded a new way of shooting dance routines: a single shot, photographed by an almost stationary camera holding the dancers in full view at all times. He quipped, “Either the camera will dance, or I will.”

Lesser known than Berkeley and Astaire, but just as influential, was producer Arthur Freed who reinvigorated the musical by releasing it from the stage or the nightclub and into the street, the backyard and the yellow brick road. One of the producers on The Wizard of Oz, Freed was instrumental in launching the careers of stars such as Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. He also allowed another musical great, Gene Kelly, to realise his potential by giving him absolute creative freedom on films such as Singin’ In The Rain and An American In Paris, even when that resulted in a 15 minute interpretive ballet sequence at the end of the latter.

It was arguable the rock ‘n roll era sealed the fate of the musical – choreographed song and dance routines suddenly seemed very old fashioned. From the 1960s to this day, Hollywood musicals now tend to be adaptations of existing stage productions, coming full circle back to the early days of the genre.