1930s International Developments
The early sound era did not produce any unique national styles of equal importance to the developments in France , Germany and the Soviet Union in the twenties. Nevertheless, while Hollywood continued to dominate the world market in motion picture entertainment, several countries developed successful film industries. In a pattern which has been repeated until the present day, these industries generally catered to the particular tastes of domestic audiences, with occasional, though rarely sustained, international breakthroughs.
Antonia Lant (1996) describes how British working class audiences generally preferred American-made films (particularly comedies and horror films) to British ones which they found too ‘posh-talking’ and slower in pace. Despite this preference, three new areas of sound film production established a degree of box-offce success: the suspense cinema of Alfred Hitchcock; the musical comedies of Gracie Field, George Formby and Will Hay; and prestige epics or historical films best remembered in the work of director/producer Alexander Korda.
The Hungarian-born Korda worked in Hollywood in the twenties but detested it, later comparing it to Stalin’s Siberian gulags. Blacklisted by the studios for a row with First National he set up his own production company in Britain called London Films and made a surprise international hit ‘The Private Life of Henry Vlll’, staring Charles Laughton, on a modest budget. Korda then raised enough money to build Britain ’s largest film studio at Denham and went on to produce such successes as ‘Things to Come’ (1935), ‘The Four Feathers’ (1939) and ‘The Thief of Bagdad’ (1940). ‘The Four Feathers’, directed by Alexander’s brother Zoltan Korda, is a tale of a ‘coward’ who is shamed by his wife and friends to fight for the Empire in Sudan . This was a typical British Imperialist narrative. The film was made with British government approval and co-operation and on the recommendations of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC). The BBFC, as Lants (1996) points out, consistently rejected film scripts critical of British Imperial ventures:
‘References to the impact on the Empire of war and independence movements were omitted from the films, as were the tensions and struggles between classes, races and sexes that Empire entailed.’
Despite the success of ‘The Four Feathers’ and other Korda films, London Films remained under-financed and overextended and Korda’s box-office failures resulted in the collapse of his company in 1938, although with American financing he continued to produce films with an international appeal such as ‘The Third Man’ (1949) and Richard lll (1955) (Kemp 1996). The high quality and lavish production values to be found in London Films’ best work set the standard for future British production.
The other notable development in British filmmaking in the thirties is in the area of documentary which, as in Germany and the Soviet Union was usually developed with social and political motives (see Documentary). The German and Soviet film industries which had enjoyed fame and recognition in the twenties went into sharp decline under their respective totalitarian regimes. Throughout the world audiences were hungry for sound films in their native tongues and several countries were able to equip themselves to supply them. Screen adaptations of national classical literature and popular best sellers became the dominant trend throughout Europe .
In India national culture was reflected in the influence of Indian theatrical traditions on Hindi (and Urdu) sound productions, which began in 1931. These films had a mixture of components including music and dance alongside drama within a single performance, a convention passed down in commercial cinema to the present day. There was also, according to Muni Kabir (1991) a move away from the devotional and mythological themes of India’s silent era towards contemporary Indian life and social problems (see Indian Cinema)..
In Japan , sound put an end to the popularity of ‘benshi’, live performers who narrated and played vocal parts for the large number of domestically-produced silent films of the twenties. The 1930s are regarded by many film historians as ‘the golden age’ of Japanese cinema. Classical Hollywood narrative forms were imitated to tell distinctively Japanese stories, particularly histories (including hundreds of sword-fight movies) and contemporary tales including ‘nonsense’ comedies (with Harold Lloyd a popular influence), social criticism, ‘mother-films’ and ‘salaryman’ films about the life of office workers. Bordwell (1993) explains how these conventional narratives contrasted with a rambling and fragmentary approach to narrative form in Japanese fiction, thus testifying to the importance of Hollywood ’s influence. The sometimes highly conventional stories and classical narration were, however, enlivened by many striking innovations: long digressional cutaways used to enhance mood or stir associations, violations of classical editing (breaking the 180 degree line of action), the use of wide angle lenses and deep space (anticipating the work of Orson Welles) and greater use of location shooting. Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu are regarded as the most important directors of this period (see Bordwell (1993), Cook (1996), Nowell-Smith (1996) for details).
Other countries around the world were not generally in a position to produce the volume of films that could be found in Europe, India and Japan . Australia averaged around five features a year during the thirties, its small industry protected by an ‘Empire quota’ which gave it limited protection from foreign competition and access to British screens. Bill Routt (1996) suggests that melodramas and ‘back-block’ farces - comedies of stereotyped rural families ‘making a go’ of farming were popular with Australian audiences and were moderately successful in Britain . As Routt (1996) remarks:
‘For half a century Australian films remained resolutely, not to say obsessively, populist. Nothing like an ‘art cinema’ existed in Australia during these years. Nor was there a serious Australian cinema of contemporary social issues until after the Second World War.’
Finally, the experience of Latin America is typical of how the United States maintained its grip over international markets. Hollywood began producing factory-made Spanish language versions of selected productions in California . Brazil , Mexico and Argentina were three countries that produced a limited number of films (often musicals) for a domestic audience. As Chanan (1996) observes, whenever these national cinemas attempted projects for a more international audience they came up against the enduring problem of distribution which remained, and remains, almost wholly U.S. controlled.