ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to the decade’s most important directors in the melodrama genre, Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli. Douglas Sirk had a little-studied long-term collaboration with Universal Studios house composer Frank Skinner. Skinner’s scores have been critiqued as overdetermined hackwork that add little to the films they accompany, but his scores create conditions of melodrama in which the actors can more effectively portray their characters. In comparison, Vincente Minnelli often worked with Hollywood’s top composers. Sirk, a modernist of early twentieth-century vintage working within the quintessential Romantic genre of melodrama, creates dialectical oppositions between styles of music and acting. Minnelli, with a sensibility more rooted in the late nineteenth century, ironically used composers of a more modernist bent. These two very different melodramatists show how much classical Hollywood acting can be heightened with different types of music.
