Instructor: Walter Metz

The Great Depression and American Cinema

An Institutional Historical Approach to the Classical Hollywood Studio System

The Hollywood Star System:  The idea of the movie star had to be invented by Hollywood.

There are three major phases of development of the star system in Hollywood

1. Before 1909, there were two sorts of actors who appeared in American movies. The run-of-the-mill production would feature actors who were unknown. The films would not credit these actors, so their names were never known to the public. In addition, because early cinema relied on long shots, the faces of these actors did not generally become familiar to the public. The only exception to this was the rare, high-budget film based on a literary source. These features, such as the ones made by the Film D’Art company, typically featured actors prominent and well-known to the public from the legitimate theatre. Sarah Bernhardt would be an example of this sort, what star-historian Richard DeCordova calls an "Actor."
2. The period from 1909 until 1914 represents a transitional period, what DeCordova calls the moment of the "Picture Personality." Unlike the "Actor," the Picture Personality was not known from her past theatrical affiliation. Her fame became constructed through the films she had appeared in. This was facilitated by the increasing reliance on the close-up in Hollywood aesthetics, particularly as used by D.W. Griffith at Biograph Studios. Mary Pickford at Biograph became one of the early Picture Personalities. In addition, the studios began to market the Picture Personality’s films using her name. So, by 1912, the public began getting to know the names of the major Picture Personalities.
3. From 1914 onward, DeCodova argues, we have the full-blown emergence of the "Star." The Star differs from the Picture Pesonality in that nothing was known about the private life of the Picture Personality. For full-blown stars, studios began marketing information about their private lives (often fabricated, but nonetheless of interest to the movie-going public). The movie star began to emerge as one of the most prominent examples of American consumerism (we learned about the grandiose houses they lived in and the lavish parties they attended), and thus became an icon of the American Dream as written by an out-of-control capitalist economy.

The Star Scandals of the Early 1920s

Ultimately, this excess consumerism would backfire against the Hollywood industry. The Star also began to be associated with the underside of the consumer economy. The studios could not completely contain all the information when the Star’s otherwise fully-marketed personal life of consumption turned immoral or self-destructive.

Three important scandals rocked the film industry in the early 1920s

1. In 1920, Mary Pickford divorced her husband Owen Moore. One month later, she married Douglas Fairbanks.
2. In 1921, petite Virginia Rappe was found naked and dead in the bed of obese slapstick comedian Fatty Arkuckle.
3. In 1923, Wallace Reid was found dead of a drug overdose.

Religious groups from around the nation began calling for governmental reform of the film industry. In order to stave off such action, Hollywood created the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) in November 1921. Run by Will Hays, a Presbyterian elder, the organization’s purpose was to self-censor the industry, as a demonstration of good faith to the religious groups that Hollywood intended to fully reform itself, making governmental intervention unnecessary. The MPPDA drafted a document called "The Dont’s and Be Carefuls," a relatively weak caution about what the industry must do in the future to clean up its act.

In the early 1930s, the coming of sound re-galvanized religious groups’ protests of Hollywood’s immorality. The violence in gangster films and the sex-filled dialogue in many other genres of Hollywood films prompted the Catholic Legion of Decency to begin seriously lobbying the government to regulate the industry. This time, Will Hays takes decisive action, forming the Production Code Administration (PCA), and appoints Catholic layman Joseph Breen to be its head. Father Daniel Lord, a Jesuit Priest, under the auspices of the PCA, writes the "Production Code," a rigid document about what can and cannot happen in a Hollywood film. The Production Code stipulated: that all evil deeds must be punished by the end of the film, no scenes of passion could be directly presented, no profanity, no nudity, no "excessive or lustful kissing," etc. Because the Hollywood studios dreaded governmental regulation, the PCA was almost entirely effective. Between 1934 and the mid-1950s, no studio would release a film without the seal of approval from the PCA.

The rapid implementation of the Production Code in 1934 allows us to see how films can so quickly change due to censorship. The early sound period, from 1929-1933, witness some of the most sexually risque films in Hollywood’s history, an example of which is Mae West's She Done Him Wrong. The films from 1934 onward feature a cinema resolutely tied to an often-times absurd moral code.

A Case Study of Pre-Production Code Cinema: She Done Him Wrong as a Mae West Film

1.  Lou’s sexual double-entendres would have been deleted from the script by the PCA.

2.  The Production Code stipulates that no character can be rewarded for an immoral act. Here, Lou a) gets away with the murder of Sergei’s lover and b) gets Cary Grant despite the fact that she’s slept with every other guy in town before meeting him, and is completely unrepentant at having done so to ply diamonds out of them.

A Cultural History of American Cinema in the 1930s:  The Great Depression

One of the most significant political events of 20th century American history was the Great Depression. Set off by the stock market crash of 1929, the Depression produced significant political changes in the American tradition. The failure of the Republican President Herbert Hoover’s economic policies led to the election of the Democratic candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. Over the course of his 4 terms as President, Roosevelt’s liberal economic policies led the United States through the Depression and World War II. Roosevelt’s administration was characterized by an interventionist government, offering large-scale programs designed to better American life. Rooseveltian programs created jobs for unemployed workers (the Workers Project Administration), offered solutions to huge environmental problems (the Tennessee Valley Authority), and created a retirement safety-net for older Americans (the Social Security Act). While such programs were unprecedented in American history, the Roosevelt policies were firmly committed to capitalist ideology (Roosevelt himself came from an incredibly wealthy New York family). While the Depression resulted in socialist governments (which were then quickly overturned by right-wing counterreformations) in most other Western countries (like France and Germany), the United States experienced an almost unthinkable period of stability.

American culture was also influenced profoundly by the Depression and the Roosevelt administration’s response to it. In fact, part of the Roosevelt administration’s project of big government was to be involved in the production of American culture, including radio and film. The Roosevelt administration was responsible for an incredibly active and artistic period in the history of the American documentary.

The American government sponsored a series of documentary films to popularize the social programs of the Roosevelt administration. Many of these films were directed by Pare Lorentz. For example, Lorentz’s The River (1936) is a documentary produced by the Farm Security Administration, a wing of the American government designed to aid the struggling farmer during the years of the Dust Bowl (a massive drought which crippled the crop-producing potential of America’s heartland by literally blowing the top-soil away). Rather than just provide aid to farmers, the Roosevelt adminstration forged a massive environmental program to re-design the nation’s approach to flood control (in an attempt to preserve what fertile top-soil remained). A massive array of dams was built which effectively transformed the entire Mississippi River valley (the most famous of these projects was the Tennessee Valley Authority). Part of the administration’s strategy to provide support for these radical changes was the making of documentary movies to explain the plan to the people who were paying for it, the American tax-payers.

Roosevelt-era documentaries featured a set of strategies designed to convince their spectators of the need for these expernsive, big government programs. In this sense the documentaries are examples of propaganda in the broad sense of that term.

The films are so effective at their propagandistic project due to several aesthetic practices

1. A poetic voice-over narration which clearly lays out the necessity of the project under consideration, as well as celebrating the greatness of the American land and people.

2. An evocative use of music which rouses the emotions.

CLIP: The River (Pare Lorentz, 1936): Narrator tells us of all the great rivers in America

3. Back-lit, poetic images which celebrate the greatness of the American landscape, and the humanity of the country’s people.

CLIP: The River: Narrator tells us of the injustice of poor people living in such a great land

An Aside: The History of the Documentary Film (1894-1936)

A film like The River attests to the affinities the documentary has with the fiction film that we’ve been studying so far. That is, The River is such an effective film because it employs the very same techniques that allow the Classical Hollywood Cinema to tell an emotional story and to get us to care about its characters. This will be one of my central approaches to documentary film history this semester: I am interested in how the documentary film of any given period correlates to fiction films of that same period. I am thus asserting that the documentary film is just as "fictional" as the fiction film itself.

At the birth of cinema, in fact, there was no distinction offered between documentary and fiction films. Actualities, the name for early films relating "real life" to spectators, played inseparably with films telling fictional stories. In fact, the very term "documentary" was not even coined until 1926 (by the future great British documentarian John Grierson). Early cinema spectators would not have made the distinctions that we do between the fiction and documentary film.

An Example of an Early Cinema Actualite

CLIP: McKinley at Home (W.K.L. Dickson, Biograph Co., 1896)

So, how do we get from early cinema, where the documentary doesn’t even exist, to The River, where the documentary is clearly industrially-defined as distinct (fictional films are produced by Hollywood while documentaries are produced by the American government) yet uses to maximum effect the aesthetic practices of the Hollywood cinema?

This transition is largely the result of the work of Robert Flaherty. Originally a mineralogist, Flaherty was also an amateur cameraman. Having interacted with the Eskimos in northern Canada while working, Flaherty secured money from the Revillon Fur Company to shoot a film about their lifestyle. The resulting film, Nanook of the North, released in 1922, was a huge commercial and critical success. Nanook deliberately used the techniques of the Classical Hollywood Cinema to tell its story of the "real life" of the Eskimos. Consider how much this scene has in common with the climax of Griffith’s Way Down East (1920):

CLIP: Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922): Nanook navigates the ice floes

So, through Flaherty’s creation of what David Cook calls the "narrative documentary" we can see the development from early cinema actualities to the poetic propaganda of Roosevelt-era documentaries.

End of aside.

Hollywood Genre Films and the Depression

The documentary is not the only way in which we can track the Depression’s effect on American cinema. Various Hollywood genre films in the 1930s foreground issues of class in similar ways to the Roosevelt administration’s social policies.

1. The Literary Adaptation

One way to track this is to notice how Hollywood studios in the 1930s adapted novels linked to class-conscious narrative traditions. For example, Victor Hugo’s Romantic masterpiece about the immorality of poverty in 19th Century France was adapted by Twentieth-Century Fox in 1935.

CLIP: Les Miserables (Richard Boleslawski, Twentieth-Century Fox, 1935): Opening (the indifference of the Law to people’s hunger)

2. The Gangster Film

As Charles Eckert describes in his essay, "The Anatomy of a Proletarian Film," the gangster film, such as Marked Woman, emplots the tensions between the American Dream and the realities of living in a capitalist economy. That is, these films very often cannot overcome their central ideological contradiction: that those who refuse to follow the rules (the gangster) often have it better off than those who do (the D.A.). Marked Woman hybridizes these class concerns of the gangster film with the gender concerns of the woman’s film: the film reveals how Bette Davis is just as exploited by the film’s purported hero, the D.A., as she is by the film’s purported villain, the gangster.

CLIP: Marked Woman (Lloyd Bacon, Warner Bros., 1937): Ending (Mary into the fog)

3. The Romantic Comedy

Like the documentaries of the Roosevelt-era, the 1930s fictional films of Frank Capra offer a defense of the values of working-class Americans. For example, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town concerns Gary Cooper as Longfellow Deeds, a man who decides to give his newly-acquired corporate fortune to the starving and deserving members of the proletariat.

CLIP: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, Columbia, 1936): The trial

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This page was last updated on May 30, 2001

Questions or Comments? Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail to: metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman