1920s The USA
Hollywood’s Domination of World Markets
The 1920s saw the domination of the international film market by Hollywood . Where ‘art’ cinema and film technique was being developed to a high standard around the world, the international commercial successes were, for the most part, American. By the mid-twenties Britain and Italy ’s efforts to compete with Hollywood imports had failed. Cecil Hepworth produced a series of ambitious, distinctly British films that made use of the picturesque English countryside (as it was then) around his studio in Walton-on-Thames. Yet, as in Italy , even quite large budget films could not compete with Hollywood ’s lively, glamorous and increasingly ‘risque’ films. In terms of world-wide developments only Japan (producing more films than any other country) and India were able to satisfy their domestic audience with distinctly national brands of cinema.
The commercial success of the Hollywood studios can, in part, be attributed to their keen eye for what was popular with audiences and their voracious appetite for new talent, at any cost, and from any country. While films such as Murnau’s ‘Last Laugh’ failed dismally at the U.S. box office and ‘The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari’ was booed off the screen at New York’s Capitol Theatre, studio executives recognised the talent and technical artistry of German and other foreign filmmakers, and brought them to Hollywood on generous contracts. This served (and continues to serve) the double purpose of raising the studio’s technical and stylistic standards and, rather astutely, ensuring that no other national cinema ever reached a position where they posed a threat to America ’s domination of the international market. Even Sergei Eisenstein, ideologically and stylistically the complete antithesis of Hollywood , worked under contract for Paramount in 1930. His experience (his ideas were rejected, his films commandeered and butchered) was typical of that of many of the emigre directors whose careers were sometimes made, but more often broken by a commercial ‘factory’ system of film production.
The ‘Jazz Age’ and Screen Morality
In some respects the importation of European talent in the 1920s was also in keeping with the shift in morals in the United States in the post war era. With the realisation that the ‘victory’ of the First World War was an empty honour and the war itself no more than ‘a business manoeuvre’, Americans turned against the liberals (such as Woodrow Wilson) whose lack of resolution, in spite of election promises, had forced them into the conflict. Extreme conservatism, reflected in the introduction of Prohibition and a ‘Red scare’ was, paradoxically, accompanied by a contempt for tradition, political cynicism and a fascination with wild living:
‘Sexual promiscuity, faithlessness in marriage, divorce, bad manners, the hip flask, and general cynicism became popular as millions of people attempted to escape from responsibilities of all kinds.’ (Jacobs 1967)
With the notable exception of Chaplin’s films, the working man all but disappeared from the screen in the 1920s. He was replaced instead by decadent representatives of the leisured class. Lotharios such as Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks were known not only as great actors, but as great lovers. The innocent maidens and faithful wives of Griffith ’s era were superceded by ‘flappers’ with bobbed hair, short skirts, mocking, independent attitudes and sexually promiscuous lifestyles. These bold, boy-like women were typified by Clara Bow, Joan Crawford and the German-Jewish actress Louise Brooks. Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri (Polish)and Greta Garbo (Swedish) were prototypes of more mature, elegant and refined heroines, who were, nevertheless, equally restless and sexual.
Screen villains were also ‘gigolos’. Erich von Stroheim, ‘the man you love to hate’ made a number of films both in front of, and behind the camera, in which bored or neglected wives were seduced by dashing, handsome homebreakers. Stroheim’s creative genius as director of serious works such as ‘Greed’ (1924) (an attack on the rampant materialism of the period) flopped by comparison to his lighter tales of sexual dalliance. $troheim as his name was advertised by the studios, eventually became identified as too expensive and uncompromising, particularly in his treatment of sexual behaviour and he was forced to return to the Continent to find work.
By contrast, the Hollywood career of the German director Ernst Lubitsch thrived upon his deft, usually implied, exploration of sexual relationships. His ‘naughty twinkle of sophisticated Continental wit’ was known as the ‘Lubitsch touch’ and helped to clearly identify every film he made. Other foreign directors fared less well. F.W Murnau, Josef von Sternberg and Victor Seastrom were amongst the most gifted individuals who, while influencing other directors around them, found their talent and vitality crushed in the profit-centred, industrial machinery of the studios. As Knight (1957) explains, the artistry they brought was viewed by the studios’ front office,
‘in terms of camera angles, tricky lighting and specially constructed settings, a technique that was applied to a story rather than being an outgrowth of the story itself. They set their expensive importees to work on formula films, and were naively astonished to discover that the pictures they turned out were neither artistic nor, in many cases, commercially successful.’
Probably the most commercially successful director of this period was Cecil B. DeMille. While his films are often regarded as being of little artistic value, he was a brilliant showman who knew how to move with the times. He was the very first director to make a film in Hollywood (hiring a barn to shoot a western called ‘The Squaw Man’ in 1914) and he was also one of the first Americans to produce feature-length pictures, which were known for their high production values and ‘dazzling’ technical effects. During the war he made patriotic, anti-German productions, but sensing the public’s war weariness in 1919 he switched to making films for middle-class audiences that mirrored the post-war changes in manners and morals. These films featured sex, sensation, expensive clothes and furniture and the loosening of marriage bonds showing, in the words of a contemporary reviewer: ‘wild youth at its wildest and the younger generation on a rampage.’ (Seldes 1924) Sensing another change in the public mood De Mille’s titillating insights into ‘decadent’ high society life (in which adultery was presented as a frivolous, even attractive pastime) were replaced by moralistic religious epics ‘The Ten Commandments’ (1923), ‘King of Kings’ (1927) and ‘The Sign of the Cross’ (1932) which were morally righteous whilst showing plenty of scantily clad sinners.
The Hays Office and the Arrival of Sound
The ‘excesses’ of Hollywood in the ‘roaring twenties’, both on-screen and off, finally provoked a moral backlash that grew in intensity throughout the decade and held the industry in a stranglehold throughout the thirties. This took the concrete forms of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), otherwise known as the Hays Office. Will Hays, a Republican politician and postmaster general was appointed by the main studios to draw up guidelines for the industry, to prevent threatened government censorship and cinema boycotts by powerful religious groups, such as the Catholic ‘Legion of Decency’. The effort to ‘clean up’ Hollywood was usually skin deep and the effects of Hays’ increasingly restrictive ‘codes’ was to punish the work of serious directors such as Stroheim, and encourage childish mentality of the kind displayed in De Mille’s religious sermons. As Kenneth Anger notes, contemporaries complained that:
‘Photoplays which deal with life are now banned while claptrap receives a benediction provided it has a blatantly moral ending and serves up its sex appeal with hypocritical disapproval.’
The last, and most significant development in the 1920s was the arrival of sound. By the mid-twenties a few systems were ready for demonstration but the first ‘sound’ film to create a sensation was ‘The Jazz Singer’ (1927), silent for much of its length in a few scenes the popular entertainer Al Jolson sang and spoke in synchronous sound. The audience stood on their chairs and cheered when they heard Jolson’s natural, intimate voice: ‘Come on, Ma ! Listen to this…’ Warners, the company that made the Jazz Singer was saved from bankruptcy and the studios signed the ‘Big Five Agreement’ pledging to adopt whichever sound system proved the most successful, which by 1928 was Western Electric’s sound-on-film technology. The effect of the introduction of sound, a process completed within a few short years, was that many of the techniques perfected in camera movement and editing were swept away. Cameras were suddenly rooted to the spot in clumsy sound proof boxes and cinema returned immediately to its theatrical origins, paralysed by the need for singing and talking. As Variety magazine said in 1929:
‘Sound didn’t do anything more to the industry than turn it upside down and shake the entire bag of tricks from its pockets.’ (Brooks 1998)