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MOVIES

Hollywood in the 1930s

Movie critics are nearly unanimous in declaring the Depression era to be the most important in the history of film. Technical advances, the seemingly limitless amount of available money, and a pool of talent fed by writers and actors from New York, as well as directors and technicians from overseas, all contributed to make the 1930s the golden era in Hollywood cinema. In 1932 the improvement of three-color Technicolor from the two-color process invented in 1926 enabled studios to create "A pictures" that looked markedly different from the B movies churned out in quantity and helped to stratify the production system, though black-and-white movies were still common throughout the 1930s. Many of the decade's most talented writers, including such noted fiction writers as William Faulkner, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett, and playwrights Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets, headed west. As the decade wore on, many of the brightest stars from Europe sought in Hollywood a refuge from fascism. All of these factors, combined with the desperate desire to escape a life that seemed at times insurmountably difficult, drew eighty-five million Americans a week to movie theaters, there to be swept away by glamorous musicals, screwball comedies, and fantastic tales of adventure.

The Studio System

The continued growth and stability of the film industry in a time of economic uncertainty made it attractive to banks and established corporations. Studios ran their own chains of movie theaters, in addition to producing and distributing films. Each studio was guided by production executives such as Jack Warner at Warner Bros. or Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox, men who worked with an annual budget dictated by the New York office to create a year's worth of entertainment. These executives were micromanagers: they not only coordinated plant operations and conducted contract negotiations, but they also developed stories and scripts, screened dailies, and supervised editing. Moreover, each studio employed a stable of stars, directors, producers, set designers, and technicians, which insured that their products would have a distinctive stamp. For example, during the 1930s Warner Bros. became known for its socially conscious films, including Heroes For Saie (1932), Wild Boys of the Road (1933), I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), and the antilynching films They Wont Forget (1937) and Fury (1936). Paramount was known for its stylish, witty, elegant movies and its beautiful sets and costumes. Cecil B. DeMille directed such lush, sensual films as his 1934 Cleopatra for this studio; Ernst Lubitsch contributed such signature pieces as Design for Living (1933) and the Marlene Dietrich vehicle Angel (1937). Rouben Mamoulian contributed such works as his 1932 version of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, If Paramount aimed for a sophisticated audience, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M-G-M), the richest and most productive of the studios, was known for targeting its films at middle-American audiences. Among M-G-M's successful productions were the Andy Hardy movies, starring Mickey Rooney, and the William Powell-Myrna Loy Thin Man series of six movies, which included The Thin Man (1934), After the Thin Man (1936), and Another Thin Man (1939). Universal was famous for horror, with such productions as James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff, and The Invisible Man (1933) with Claude Rains. Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) was an example of the terror the Universal artists could evoke.

Molls, Gunslingers, and T-Men

What can account for the incredible popularity of gangster movies during the Depression? In the early 1930s several factors combined to create an atmosphere in which audiences across America flocked to theaters to see the dozens of new gangland pictures. First of all, Prohibition enabled gangsters like Chicago's Al Capone to reap enormous profits by supplying the American public with the alcoholic beverages legally denied them—a service many Americans appreciated. Second, citizens who had become unemployed, or who had lost their property through bank foreclosures, often found themselves admiring the exploits of those 1930s crooks—Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, and Bonnie and Clyde among them—who fought the system. Although the introduction of the Production Code in 1934 forced studios to pay lip service at least to the notion that crime does not pay, gangsters continued to die in blazes of glory throughout the 1930s, Warner Bros. was the king of the crime flick, with such productions as Doorway to Hell (1930) with Lew Ayres, Little Caesar (1930) with Edward G. Robinson and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Public Enemy (1931) with James Cagney and Jean Harlow, The Finger Points (1931) with Richard Barthelmess and Fay Wray, G-Men (1935) with James Cagney and Ann Dvorak, and Petrified Forest (1936) with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis; M-G-M produced a series of films based on their hit Dead End (1937), featuring Joel McCrea and Sylvia Sidney, including Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), starring Humphrey Bogart and Cagney, Paramount produced City Streets (1931) with Gary Cooper and Sidney; M-G-M's The Last Gangster (1937) with Robinson and James Stewart gave audiences Robinson at his snarling best. United Artists weighed in with such offerings as You Only Live Once (1937) with Henry Fonda and Sidney.

Lavish Musicals

Top Broadway dance director Busby Berkeley, lured by Samuel Goldwyn to Hollywood in 1930, provided Depression audiences with some of the most memorably overblown dance numbers in the history of the movies. Berkeley's dance numbers, seen in such films as Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Stars Over Broadway (1934), and Varsity Show (1937), as well as the movies he directed himself, such as Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935) and Stage Struck (1936), were sensuous extravaganzas, in which dozens of dancers moved in rhythmic patterns— snowflakes, expanding stars, and so forth. These numbers were filmed as inventively as they were choreographed—using diagonal angles, rhythmic cutting, and what has become known as the "Berkeley top shot"—from directly above the action. In contrast, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, paired in 1933, created ten films together, all of them notable for their gracefully elegant dance numbers. Flying Down to Rio (1933), Top Hat (1935), Swing Time (1936), and Shall We Dance (1937) were among the most memorable of these grand productions.

The B Movie

Of course, not all Hollywood movies were star-studded extravaganzas. One feature of the well-stratified studio system was the ability to crank out seemingly endless numbers of B movies, also known as "low-budget" or "cheapie movies." Although some studios released an average of a feature each week, most of these were not top-of-the-line productions. Add in the three hundred or so films made each year by B studios or independents, and it becomes apparent that approximately three-quarters of the films made during the 1930s were B films. B movies, aimed at filling out the double bills that were an established feature of 1930s movie-going, were produced quickly—often in as little as a week—and utilized actors of dubious box-office appeal. These low-budget movies were rented to exhibitors for correspondingly low fees and thus rarely lost money for studios. Occasionally, a B movie would cross over to A-picture status and score an unexpected success—a case in point would be the 1938 medical drama A Man to Remember, which took place at the funeral of a beloved small-town doctor. This, however, was the exception rather than the rule. Some writers and directors seized the chance to make stylistic experiments in a low-pressure, low-stake's venue where there was little to lose. Moreover, B movies could target smaller audiences than A movies.

African American Cinema

"Race movies," as they were known, had their roots in the late 1910s, when black-owned production companies such as the Lincoln Company and the Douglass Film Company created movies whose strong black characters provided a counterbalance to the stereotypes being purveyed by major production companies. The advent of sound film, which few black production companies could afford, and the onset of the Depression changed the way black films were produced: the white director Dudley Murphy, for example, in 1933 directed black actor Paul Robeson in The Emperor Jones, based on the Eugene O'Neill play and featuring a prologue by DuBose Heyward, author of Porgy. Many "race movies" of the 1930s were Hollywood studio—produced, white-directed shorts in which jazz music and jazz musicians played a prominent role: among the artists who performed in these shorts were the Mills Brothers, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, Eubie Blake, and Cab Calloway. Typical of this genre was Barbershop Blues (1932), a movie depicting the camaraderie in a black barbershop and featuring the dancing of the Nicholas Brothers to the music of Claude Hopkins's band. New black stars appeared during the Depression, including Bill Robinson, Clarence Muse, Hattie McDaniel, and Louise Beavers. However, most black roles in white movies were still stereotyped portrayals: the most glaring example of this would be the 1939 hit Gone With the Windy with its eye-rolling slaves. Progress, no matter how minor, could be seen in such films as Mae West's I'm No Angel(1933), in which mistress and servant were seen to have risen together from poverty, and in which the maid, played by Beavers, was seen to have aspirations for success.

The Screwball Comedy

In such pictures as W. S. Dyke's The Thin Man (1934), strong female stars paired off with their male counterparts—in this case, Myrna Loy with William Powell—in relationships that were egalitarian and marked by barbed, witty repartee. With hits such as Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, and Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century (1934), featuring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, the cycle was firmly launched: studios would for the next four years produce scores of these comedies. With their roots in slapstick, and coated with an urbane gloss, screwball comedies such as Leo McCarey's 1937 The Awful Truth, for which the director won an Oscar, allowed its stars, Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, to escape rigid gender roles as they, playing a divorcing and, ultimately, remarrying couple, teased and tormented one another through a range of hilariously uncomfortable situations.