As stated by the English professor and film historian John Belton, “In cinema, genre is a term used to designate various categories or cinematographic productions. Major film genres include types of films such as musicals, comedies, action and adventure films, westerns, detective and detective films, melodramas, science fiction and horror films, gangster films, and war films” (123). Throughout this course we have studied most of these genres. We recently took a look at the development of silent film melodramas (a drama accompanied by music). At the end of the 1920s the advent of sound took place which transformed melodramas into “sound” ones (with speech and singing). With singing comes dancing; musicals were on the rise. In this article I will discuss the elements of the musical film genre and how it changed and how these films became extremely popular during the Great Depression. Operettas carry musical numbers around in an unrealistic way. For example, in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Snow White is talking to one of the dwarfs right before she starts the song to finish telling her story. Astaire-Rogers musicals, such as Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938), might also be called screwball musicals. These films are similar and share many elements of screwball comedies, including romantic and sexual issues. One character's desire for another is shown through song and dance rather than slapstick comedy. Martin Rubin points out that the different forms of the musical did not replace each other, but continued to coexist alongside each other. He argues that the movement toward integration, while clearly a dominant trend in musicals, had its limits. The total integration of story and number threatens to destroy the crucial gap that gives the musical number the affective power to captivate the audience (Belton