Before there were movie houses, music halls provided similarly popular entertainment. Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935) opens with a visit to arowdy music hall (at which the obstreperous patrons keep asking Mr. Memory to tell them Mae West's age) and ends at the considerably more upscale Palladium. We also catch a glimpse of music hall performance in The Winslow Boy (1948), among other instances. Jean Renoir particularly liked actors who came from the music halls. When Le Corbusier sent some of his watercolors made at the music hall to a friend in 1926, he told him to look at them quickly: ‘The music hall is a transient thing, fast […] it's not about framing them [the drawings]. They’re only worth seeing quickly, like at the cinema’.

Hollywood films frequently featured nightclub performances, the glamorous, upscale cousin of the music hall and likewise a venue that allowed for a degree of fluidity between performers and audience: the dance floor was used both by professional performers and guests. From Charlie Chaplin to Jacques Tati, some of the great figures of early film traced their origins to live and popular performance practices, including not only the music hall but also the circus, performance practices to which improvisation and independence from text came naturally.