tship. The loss of status of singing and courtship, as uniquely valuable activities to be celebrated, coincided with the decline of the studio system. The thirties and forties were the great decades for the musical with an average of between forty and fifty per year being produced. By the seventies this had declined to single figures. Seven video packages designed for use in the study of the musical have recently been added to the Film and Video Lending Collection designed for use in the study of the musical. Each package is made up of either two or three VHS videocassettes and notes which contextualise the packages within the genre and place them in relation to other musicals in the Film Study Collection on film. The notes also provide specific suggestions for the use of extracts from the films on videocassette. Films on both VHS and 16mm are organised below into three sub-genres (fairytale, show and folk) proposed by Rick Altman. Not all musicals fall neatly within boundaries of one of these sub-genres. It's Always Fair Weather, for example, as a whole operates as an urban folk musical but the satire of television in the last third of the film draws it towards the show musical. Although Altman locates Ziegfield Follies in the fairytale sub-genre it seems marginally placed between the fairytale and show musical. Ostensibly a tribute to the Follies it lacks any unifying narrative. Although the introductory numbers --`Bring on the Beautiful Girls' and `Bring on the Wonderful Men' --display sexual desire as a motive force, this is not consistently maintained through the series of musical numbers and comedy sketches that follow. The Fairytale Musical This sub-genreborrowed massively from a long (pre-cinema) tradition of European and American operettas. Methods are a combination of those used by the fairytale and the romantic comedy. In the early sound years (1929--1934) the sexual energy driving the plot is clearly acknowledged (sex as sex...
