> I have memories of brief spool-box shots in two western movies. ...

What a fascinating topic.  Hollywood has always dealt with history
in a mostly superficial way, and history is always subservient to
the practical demands of telling a story that will make money, i.e.,
a film's story must be appealing to the broadest segment of society,
so it must deal in the most common clichés.

I am not a Hollywood scholar, but the history of film can be
subdivided into several eras: Incunabular, Silent Era, 'Thirties
(Westerns, Slapstick, Ziegfeld), 'Fifties (Noir, Westerns), 'Sixties
and 'Seventies (Realism), FX, Digital.  Each era is in no small part
dictated by the technology (and the clichés) of the day.

Whenever one sees a film made in the technological era of the present
moment, it seems authentic and real, and seems like Hollywood has
finally captured the reality of the past--or even the reality of the
present.  A current example of this is the impact of special effects.

When the original Star Wars film came out there were more than a few
oohs and aahs from the critics and the general public about how
realistic the film was -- at least, compared with the clumsy modeling
of the past (I wonder if filmgoers in the thirties thought that King
Kong was amazingly realistic).  Never mind that spaceships make no
sound waves in the void of space.  The current allure of technology is
digitization and high-definition television and film.  The next era
will be the Holographic which will make 3-D look like, well, King Kong,
perhaps.

The truth of Hollywood is that it uses whatever devices create the
illusion of the past without worrying too much about the scholarly
concerns of historians in regard to accuracy.  So, if a player piano
is used in a Western saloon scene, it really says more about the era in
which the film was made rather than the era it allegedly depicts, and
it is the effect that the filmmaker wants to conjure up that really
counts in their practical viewpoint.

The cliché of the player piano is "honky-tonk" music -- out-of-tune,
loud, brassy; something that competes with and complements a noisy,
inattentive audience who demands it as a background chorus to its
social interaction.  Perhaps it is cheaper to have a player piano in
a scene than to hire a film extra -- no paycheck involved!

Also, there is the cliché of the Gay Nineties, which has just about
completely died out of the culture by now, but its staying power lasted
nearly a century, and I think that the honky-tonk piano harkens back to
that cultural era.  One could argue that it harkens to both cultural
eras at once, that it evokes the view of the 1890's as seen from the
1920's with the intellectually lazy application of the modern
technology at hand.

Just yesterday, I was involved in a discussion about no-man's-land
islands -- literal islands -- where people congregated to drink,
dance, and presumably fornicate at some point.  They were often built
on islands, or otherwise physically isolated from the communities.
I presume this was to keep away the sheriff or anti-liquor enforcers,
or the judging eyes of the churchgoing members of society.

There must have been some fondness for the illicit (Well, duh!) that
always runs through society, and I think that the piano-and-saloon
cliché found in films recalls that sentiment for the Silent-Era viewer,
that it is also nostalgia for a time recently past when people felt
less constricted by the demands of an industrial and urbanizing
society.

Mark Ritzenhein