A

1939: HOLLYWOOD'S GOLDEN YEAR

Popular Movies

Although the 1930s were generally a very strong decade for the American film industry, 1939 was an extraordinary year, even by Depression standards. This was a year in which two of the American Film Institute's ten most popular films of all time were released—Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, both directed by Victor Fleming—and in which the country was treated to William Wyler's memorable adaptation of Wuthering Heights, to Greta Garbo's first comic role (in Ernst Lubitsch's humorous treatment of Soviets in Paris, Ninotchka), and to Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland's sentimental showbiz comedy Babes in Arms.

Americana, Hollywood Style

As Europe teetered on the brink of war, Hollywood regaled American audiences in 1939 with increasingly idealized visions of American life, including director John Ford's account of early pioneer life, Drums Along the Mohawk, his Abraham Lincoln biography, Young Mr. Lincoln, and his epic Western (Ford's first since 1926), Stagecoach. With a simplicity of vision, Ford's films pitted good against evil. Drums Along the Mohawk featured strong, courageous settlers battling filthy, terrifying Indians. Stagecoach, starring John Wayne, Claire Trevor, and John Carradine, was set amidst the grandeur of the American West and showed the strength of a disparate group of Americans banding together to overcome difficulties. Young Mr. Lincoln, with Henry Fonda in the starring role, was one of many movie biographies, or biopics, popular in the 1930s. Ford's film emphasized Lincoln's ties to family and community and was noteworthy for its warm, idyllic qualities rather than its authenticity. The Frank Capra movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington provided audiences with an even more heartwarming view of American politics, as they watched Jimmy Stewart, the naive but idealistic junior senator, do battle against cynicism and corruption—and win.

Sweeping Epics

The gracious life made possible by slavery was the theme of the incomparably nostalgic Gone With the Wind, starring Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, and Leslie Howard. The most expensive picture (and one of the longest) produced up until that point, Gone With the Wind was a much-ballyhooed adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1936 novel, which had itself broken all publication records (fifty thousand copies sold in a day, a million in six months, two million in a year). Audiences thrilled to the movie's portrayal of rascally Yankees; chivalric Confederates; chaste southern belles; shiftless, eye-rolling slaves; sweeping panoramas of plantation existence—and, of course, tempestuous love scenes between scheming, spirited Scarlett O'Hara and dashing Rhett Butler, scenes that culminated in a touching, romantic episode of conjugal rape. Film historians acclaim Gone With the Wind as a high point in Hollywood filmmaking, as one of the screen's great romantic sagas, and the ten Academy Awards it received provide contemporary confirmation of this judgment.

Gunga Din

Gone With the Wind may have been the most famous of epics produced that year, but it was not the only one. George Stevens's Gunga Din, based on the Rudyard Kipling poem and starring Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Joan Fontaine, offered a rousing view of the derring-do of late-nineteenth-century British troops subduing a native uprising in India.

Shirley Temple's Finest Film

The Little Princess could be described as the young actress's swan song. Although Temple would continue to make pictures, she would never recapture the phenomenal popularity that had been hers during the 1930s. A whole industry had been created around her; she was the most popular child actress of all time, and Shirley Temple dresses, coloring books, and dolls sold briskly. (The drink which bore her name, a combination of ginger ale and maraschino cherry juice, also enjoyed popularity among the younger set). Throughout the decade she charmed moviegoers with her plucky appearances in milieus ranging from the world of the racetrack (Little Miss Marker, 1934) to a post-Civil War southern household (The Little Colonel, 1935) to a hotel for vaudevillians (Little Miss Broadway, 1938). In addition, she brought children's classics to life, such as The Poor Little Rich Girl (1936), Heidi (1937), and Susannah of the Mounties (1939). It was in this spirit that she was to inhabit Kate Douglas Wiggin's classic Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938) in a role first played by Mary Pickford in the 1917 movie of the same title. By this point Temple was eleven and teetering on the brink of puberty, the hormonal tragedy that was to destroy her lisping, baby-faced appeal to audiences.