1930s: the Hollywood Studio System
The two most important influences on film in the 1930s were the introduction of sound and the Great Depression. These arrived almost simultaneously: a key year in the international development of sound, 1929, was also the year of the catastrophic Wall Street Crash and the onset of a world-wide economic crisis.
The United States and the Studio System
The enormous popularity of sound with cinema audiences, who were eager to escape the trauma of the Crash, cushioned the film industry from the worst effects of the Depression. Wall Street quickly woke up to the fact that the film industry, traditionally regarded as highly unpredictable and speculative, was (almost uniquely) thriving amidst the economic ruins of the early 1930s. This, combined with the need for enormous capital investment that introducing sound required, ultimately put Hollywood into the hands of two financial groups, controlled by the multimillionaires Morgan (as head of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and its subsidiary Western Electric) and Rockefeller (controlling Radio Corporation of America through Chase National Bank). By 1936, the year Carl Laemmle sold his stock in Universal, none of the pioneering film executives were in financial control of the companies they founded.
The Impact of Sound
Soon, representatives of Western Electric, RCA and associated financing groups were shaping policy on the boards of motion-picture companies. They appointed the sound experts who dominated all artistic decision making through 1929 and 1930 when cinema returned to the ‘canned theatre’ style of pre-Griffiths’ days. With quality sound reproduction as the main priority, noisy cameras were immobilised in sound-proof booths and actors similarly fixed to the spot by the need to remain within a critical distance of concealed microphones. Production methods anticipated the early days of live, broadcast television with three cameras filming the action simultaneously in order to evade the problems of editing sound. As with early television, there was a tendency to simply film successful plays almost as they had been performed on Broadway. Many of the leading novelists and dramatists of the day were hired, and screenwriters accustomed to thinking in terms of telling a story visually were now asked to write speeches. The lack of movement of the ‘filmed plays’ of 1929 and 1930 was exacerbated by the new, industry-wide change in film speed from 16 frames per second (the silent era standard) to, a comparatively sluggish, 24 frames per second required for the synchronisation of sound and image. Sound also put an end to the hiring of foreign talent, as the language barrier was considered a serious impediment to the direction of English language ‘talkies’.
These, and other setbacks that the introduction of sound brought about were, nevertheless, only temporary. Competition between the studios meant that, unlike the abortive attempts to introduce colour (zealously monopolised by Technicolour) in the same year, sound technology and artistic control of the medium were quickly improved. The Frenchman René Clare made highly influential musical-comedies that broke every primitive convention of sound films. He was one of the first directors to experiment extensively with post-synchronisation, including the use of sound effects for comic purposes. He was, therefore, able to film a large part of his features employing all the movement and technique associated with silent pictures. Aside from René Clare, other directors who pushed the medium forward with innovative films include Rouben Mamoulian (‘Applause’ 1929, ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ 1932), Lewis Milestone (‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ 1930), King Vidor (‘Hallelujah’ 1929) and Ernst Lubitsch (‘The Love Parade’ 1929). Technical improvements, including the use of multiple and directional microphones, booms, elementary sound mixing and sound proofed ‘blimps’ which allowed the cameras to move again, gave filmmakers far more creative scope. Within a few years much of the technical flair that characterised the end of the silent era could now be found in the best sound films, which balanced the need for movement and visual interest with the distinct requirements of sound to exploit the full artistic potential that the new medium offered.
The Studio System
The thirties were dominated by the studio system of production, especially in the United States where most film making personnel, including the major stars, writers, directors were under contract (see chapter Studio System). Million dollar film productions became commonplace as the studios realised that it was usually more profitable to release one expensive film than two cheaper films. Nevertheless, cheap ‘B-movies’ (particularly Westerns) were produced to cater for the demand for double features which came to be taken for granted by audiences, live theatre and vaudeville shows having been given up with the coming of sound. As the Depression worsened exhibitors also offered cash prize competitions, like Bingo, or free gifts for women (such as glasses and china) as part of the programme, to entice audiences to attend regularly.
The studio system usually saw the production of films within the confines of the giant studio sound stages in Hollywood . Each studio became associated with a particular style and genre: Warner Brothers with gangster films and Busby Berkley musicals, MGM with lavish, star-studded productions; The Walt Disney Company with high quality cartoon shorts and features; Paramount with romances (Marlene Dietrich and Joseph von Sternberg worked here) and the anarchic comedies of the Marx Brothers. Frank Capra’s screwball comedies came out of the Columbia studios, Universal became most closely associated with the horror film genre (see chapter Horror Films) and RKO (a major studio at this time) was responsible for King Kong and the elegant Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals.
Hollywood and the Depression
For the first years of the Depression there was virtually no cinematic exploration of the economic crisis, which had deepened to become the worst in modern history. Outside the comedy genre (where Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and a few others reflected the grim hardships of the street) films continued to emphasise spectacle, sophistication and sex, despite the death of the ‘jazz age’. Musicals, typically, traced the rise of unknown vaudeville performers to Broadway stardom, but in 1933 with unemployment at 25% (up from from 3% in 1925) the public grew tired of the Hollywood staple of rags to riches and for the first time the film industry felt the effects of the nation’s poverty. In this year there were at least 200,000 people wandering through the country seeking food, clothing, shelter and a job. ‘Hobo jungles’ (unemployment refugee camps) sprang up near railroads as people travelled the country by freight train looking for work. Enormous shanty towns could be found outside many cities, where people lived in shacks built from flattened tin cans and old crates or rusting car bodies, and ate from soup kitchens and garbage cans. These makeshift slums, some of which stretched for miles, were sarcastically termed ‘Hoovervilles’ after President Hoover who blocked every effort to deal with the crisis, as he believed industry could best solve the problem without government interference. The election of President Roosevelt in 1933 and the launch of his New Deal was enthusiastically supported by the film industry who had seen 5,000 of the 16,000 cinemas closed, with luxury theatres particularly hard hit. ‘Pep talks’ began to appear in the musicals, as the studios tried to cheer on a totally dispirited public.
The studios initially responded to the changing public mood with a new, violent realism. A stream of gangster films typified by ‘Little Caesar’ (1930) ‘The Public Enemy’ (1931) and ‘Scarface’ (1932) exposed the underworld against a setting of pool halls, smoke filled bars and grimy American cities that were unmistakably of the prohibition period. Actors like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson became popular anti-heroes. These gangsters were shown as tough men from the street who supplied alcohol to a thirsty nation, bribed crooked politicians and took what they wanted by sheer force. There was a peculiar indifference to the causes of criminal behaviour and more than a hint of admiration in these portraits of naked power. However, public disgust with the rising tide of crime and corruption in America reached a peak in 1932 following a series of spectacular gangland killings and the kidnapping of the Lindberg’s baby. The new Democrat administration forced the repeal of the Prohibition laws which had done so much to strengthen the criminal underworld (in much the same way as the illegal status of drugs can be said to breed crime today). The newly formed ‘Legion of Decency’ was one of several organisation that called for an end to the ‘glorification’ of criminal activity on the screen and the gangster theme became rarer until its revival in 1937 when films such as ‘The Petrified Forest’ (1937) and ‘Angels with Dirty Faces’ (1938) took a more denunciatory and moral stance on the subject.
While films of the 1930s were generally ‘pro-capital’, rather than ‘pro-labour’ (strikes were always associated with gangland rackets for instance) a more progressive spirit in American society (echoing the early Woodrow Wilson era of the 1910s) was reflected in the cinema. The cycle of realistic gangster films ran concurrently with newspaper melodramas such as ‘The Front Page’ and ‘Big News’ (both 1931) which shared some of their fast paced dialogue and editing. These films exposed the ruthlessness and irresponsibility of popular journalism and how the public were cynically manipulated by big business through their control of newspapers. The circulation wars shown in these newspaper films were shown, at root, to be ‘socially irresponsible’. This concern, which mirrored the mood of the country and the campaigns of the Roosevelt administration, became a major motif in films of the 1930s. Moral and ethical questions, an anathema to audiences in the previous decade, were now addressed in features on big business, politics, farming, the medical and legal professions and prisons. ‘I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang’ (1932) produced a tremendous public outcry on the barbaric treatment of prisoners, and Fritz Lang’s ‘Fury’ (1937), which condemned lynching and the legal vengeance of execution was a box office success.
Progressive concerns regarding the abuse of power, political and social corruption, economic discrepancies and the rights of marginal groups were now, at least obliquely, addressed. In the Oscar-winning ‘ Cimarron ’ (1931) the tale of an American pioneer and entrepreneur, the powerful hero is a fearless champion of Indian rights. In ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ (1935) the audience’s sympathies are clearly meant to lie with the mutineers against Captain Bligh’s cruel authority. ‘The Life of Louis Pasteur’ (1936) was, ‘an allegory of the battle for progress’ (Jacobs) which pitted reason and scientific responsibility against the ignorance of vested interest. The decade drew to a close with the making of John Ford’s adaptation of Steinbeck’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ (1940). This film is, in a sense, the ultimate achievement of the progressive spirit of the decade, examining the tragedy of the Great Depression and its effect on the farming community with penetrating realism.
It is, of course, easy to overstate the ‘search for moral norms’ as a distinguishing quality of the cinema in the thirties. Hollywood continued to produce ‘entertainment’ and the fact that social enquiry informed a number of these pictures is a testament to the relevancy of such themes to audiences outside the studios and less to any deep-rooted humanitarianism amongst film producers. In fact, against the current of popular feeling businessmen, and even bankers, were usually shown in films of the period as honest, hardworking and fair-minded, qualities epitomised in the performances of Spencer Tracey.
Hollywood’s most common message for audiences in the Depression was a morale-boosting one, which came in many forms: fantasy dance sequences (as exemplified by Busby Berkeley’s highly abstract motion studies of the female body); zany and sometimes surreal comedy (W.C.Fields, the Marx Brothers); and manic, violent cartoons (the Popeye, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck of this decade show little mercy). At the height of the Depression, Walt Disney’s 1933 cartoon ‘The Three Little Pigs’ struck a chord with its theme tune ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf’. The message of not giving up hope and sticking together in the face of the ‘Big Bad Wolf’ of poverty, hunger and homelessness, set the whole nation whistling to keep up its spirits. According to Jacobs (1967): ‘This helped to turn the tide of pessimism toward optimism and strengthened the hope that co-ordinated action would pull the country out of its slump.’
Indeed, according to the studio censor Will Hays:
‘no medium has contributed more than the films to the maintenance of the national morale during a period featured by revolutions, riot and political turmoil in other countries. It has been the mission of the screen, without ignoring the serious social problems of the day, to reflect aspiration, achievement, optimism and kindly humour in its entertainment. Historians of the future will not ignore the interesting and significant fact that the movies literally laughed the big bad wolf of depression out of the public.’ (Terlin 1935)
Sex, Marriage and War
Laughter was also a key element in representations of sex and marriage in the thirties. Many of the stars of the twenties had lost their appeal, either through changing public taste, age, or because, like the romantic lead John Gilbert, their voice did not ‘fit’ the public’s idea of what they should sound like. By 1933 only ten of the silent film stars were thought to have maintained their box office value, while many previously popular formulas, such as the exotic and escapist sexual drama, were rejected as stale and dated. With new stars emerging, such as Mae West and Jean Harlow, sex became less neurotic and tragic in its consequences. They brushed aside the notion of sex as sinful and made it more fun, something to be celebrated, or at least enjoyed without guilt. Mae West was particularly uninhibited and irreverent in her treatment of love. She made sex funny, eyeing a man from head to foot and making all the moves. ‘Come up and see me sometime.’ is one of her most famous, and more respectable quotes. As the power of the Hay’s Office increased throughout the thirties, her brand of sexuality came under attack and, like the cartoon dancer Betty Boop whose skirt grew longer, Mae West’s films suffered savage and often idiotic cutting under the increasingly rigid ‘Hay’s Code’.
As the decade progressed, intimacy, companionship and good humour were qualities promoted by Hollywood , all, where possible, within the confines of marriage. The neurotic vampires of the twenties were superceded by confident, intelligent women. In the screwball comedies of the late 1930s, Katherine Hepburn was typical of the unconventional, self-mocking heroine who plays, mocks and wallops her partner with tom-boy energy. The prospect of sex was more likely to result in farce or slap-stick violence than tormented passion. Cary Grant’s look of surprised incredulity (‘The Awful Truth’ 1937, ‘Bringing Up Baby’ 1938) sums up the playful sense of the ridiculous that ran through such ‘screwball’ humour.
Finally, as before the First World War, the shifting attitudes to war in films during the thirties served as a barometer of America ’s readiness for conflict. The powerful anti-war statement of ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ (1930) summed up the revulsion of war that characterised films of the first half of the decade. By the end of the decade, however, a more militaristic note was being struck. The titles ‘Come On, Marines’, ‘Here Comes the Navy’ and ‘A Call to Arms’ are typical of the enlistment propaganda that began to fill the screens. The world-wide Depression that persisted through the thirties, led to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe and provoked the Japanese invasion of China . Indeed, the economic debacle was, ironically, only brought to an end by government-led military production for the Second World War. Once again, the major industrial powers were to try their strength in appalling destruction and, once again, in each nation motion pictures would raise the war banner for its citizens to follow.