The Sneak Song-and-Dance: Musical Scenes in Non-Musicals

David Lynch, the Coens and Richard Kelly have all done their best Busby Berkeley impression.

“Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery”

Mike Myers seemed to know he was hitting comedic pay dirt with 1997′s “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” — only a supremely confident man would open his spy spoof with a tweety, twirly, swinging ’60s London musical sequence. Donning terrible teeth and an equally unsightly blue pinstriped suit, Myers cruises down a London street, grooving to the bossa nova beat of the soundtrack (a Quincy Jones instrumental number called “Soul Bossa Nova” that Meyers and other canucks probably first heard as the theme song for a ’70s Canadian game show called “Definition”). Austin Powers is, of course, irresistible, and so it isn’t long before the birds and bobbies are joining in. Myers works in tributes to films of the era such as “Blow Up” and “A Hard Day’s Night,” then leads a killer street frug before hopping into his Bentley with Mimi Rogers. The off-the-cuff, unabashed silliness of this sequence sets the tone for the film, though Myers never quite matched it with the increasingly self-conscious, labored, cameo-laden, meta-musical sequences he inserted into subsequent Austin Powers films.

“Bringing Up Baby”

Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn are arguably engaged in a complicated two-step throughout “Bringing Up Baby,” but they only actually break into song the once. Trying to coax Baby, a full-grown tiger, down from a tree, Susan Vance (Hepburn) entreats David Huxley (Grant) to join her in singing the tiger’s favorite song, “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.” Hawks brings his essential themes — the mysteries of basic, animalistic human connection and our paradoxically human instincts to civilize and control them — to bear in even this silly goof of a scene. Susan and David don’t just sing the song, they attempt a rather impressive harmony, one that is thwarted first by the dog in Susan’s arms, who begins howling along, and then Baby the tiger, who adds a painful caterwaul to the mix. Susan and David are doing their orderly best to pull things together, but messy nature keeps undermining them. The anomalous song number is more often slipped into a non-musical film as a token performance; more common in classical Hollywood — see Dean Martin’s number in “Rio Bravo,” Audrey Hepburn crooning “Moon River” in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and Marilyn Monroe purring “Kiss Me” along to the band in “Niagara” — you still see it occasionally. Most recently, Penélope Cruz lip-synched to Estrella Morente in “Volver” and Gwyneth Paltrow did her best Peggy Lee impression as the nightclub singer Kitty Dean in “Infamous.”

“Magnolia”

Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 opus links the storylines of a number of lonely Angelenos, and although the hailstorm of frogs was probably his most forceful meta-textual moment, it was Anderson’s quiet musical sequence that made the bigger impact. Each of “Magnolia”‘s characters have reached the point of mental and/or physical exhaustion when Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up” begins to play on the soundtrack. Rather than unfolding as a standard musical montage, however, Anderson’s characters begin to sing along to the soundtrack, and he cuts from one to the next, each character alone and ensconced in their respective, private, miserable spheres, yet united in a melancholy sing-a-long. Anderson captures the paradox of the perfect pop song — the most successful, the most populist are those everyone can claim as their own — and with the choice of “Wise Up” (with Mann’s lyrics like “It’s not what you thought, when you first began it/You got what you want, now you can hardly stand it though”), he subtly elides the moment of epiphanic transformation or directorial judgment that many directors would feel compelled to formulate for such overwhelmingly, toxically self-involved characters. One by one, they rebuke themselves, and each other.

More non-musical musical moments: The “Time After Time” scene in “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion”; the unsettling use of “Singin’ in the Rain” in “A Clockwork Orange”; Adam Sandler’s rousing “Back to School” in “Billy Madison”; Marjane Satrapi’s triumphant rendition of “Eye of the Tiger” in “Persepolis”; Britt Ekland’s slappy dance in the original “Wicker Man”; and the sunny “Always Look On the Bright Side of Life” in “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.”

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