Hollywood and the Great Depression: American Film, Politics and Society in the 1930s 9780748699933

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Hollywood and the Great Depression American Film, Politics and Society in the 1930s

Edited by Iwan Morgan and Philip John Davies

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Iwan Morgan and Philip John Davies, 2016 © the chapters their several authors, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9992 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9993 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1402 9 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Hollywood and the Great Depression Iwan Morgan Part I Hollywood Politics and Values 1 The Political History of Classical Hollywood: Moguls, Liberals and Radicals in the 1930s Mark Wheeler 2 Columbia Pictures and the Great Depression: A Case Study of Political Writers in Hollywood Ian Scott 3 Organisation Women and Belle Rebels: Hollywood’s Working Women in the 1930s J. E. Smyth 4 The Congressional Battle over Motion Picture Distribution, 1936–40 Catherine Jurca Part II Stars 5 Shirley Temple and Hollywood’s Colonialist Ideology Ina Rae Hark 6 Astaire and Rogers: Carefree in Roberta Peter William Evans 7 The ‘Awful Truth’ about Cary Grant Mark Glancy

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Part III Movies 8 Footlight Parade: The New Deal on Screen Harvey G. Cohen 9 Our Daily Bread: ‘Cooperation’, ‘Independence’ and Politics in Mid-1930s Cinema Brian Neve 10 Embodying the State: Federal Architecture and Masculine Transformation in Hollywood Films of the New Deal Era Anna Siomopoulos 11 ‘We’re Only Kids Now, But Someday . . .’: Hollywood Musicals and the Great Depression ‘Youth Crisis’ David Eldridge 12 Chaplin’s Modern Times and the Great Depression: The Reception of the Film in the US, France and Britain Melvyn Stokes 13 John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln: A Popular Front Hero for the Late 1930s Iwan Morgan Notes on the Contributors Index

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I.1 I.2 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1

2.2 3.1 3.2 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2 8.1 8.2 9.1

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Poster for Tugboat Annie Trailer scene in Dark Victory Louis B. Mayer, Hollywood’s most conservative mogul Donald Ogden Stewart accepting the screenplay Oscar for The Philadelphia Story Publicity still for Melvyn Douglas in 1939 Jo Swerling and Robert Riskin, co-writers of The Whole Town’s Talking, in discussion with its star, Edward G. Robinson Anne Schuyler leads Stew Smith into the library in Platinum Blonde The central casting clerk explains the difficulties of succeeding in Hollywood in A Star Is Born Overseer Jonas Wilkerson faces dismissal from Tara in Gone with the Wind Khoda Khan and his entourage in Wee Willie Winkie Virgie Cary and her ‘two dads’ in The Littlest Rebel John Kent and Princess Stephanie in the lift scene in Roberta Huck and Lizzie dance to ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ in Roberta Cary Grant as a ‘likeable rough guy’ alongside Mae West in She Done Him Wrong The debonair image of Cary Grant in The Awful Truth Chester Kent and Bea Thorn in the ‘Shanghai Lil’ dance routine in Footlight Parade The Blue Eagle formation in Footlight Parade Our Daily Bread publicity shot

11 12 33 40 43

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9.2 10.1 10.2 10.3 11.1 11.2 12.1 12.2 13.1 13.2 13.3

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Threatening a potential big-city farm buyer at the sheriff’s auction in Our Daily Bread Pendy Molloy standing on the presidential seal in her high-heeled shoes in Gabriel over the White House Senator Jefferson Smith with the Capitol dome behind him in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington Associate Justice Michael Lightcap in his Supreme Court chamber in The Talk of the Town The Youth Rally in Babes in Arms The finale of ‘God’s Country’ in Babes in Arms Poster for Modern Times The Little Tramp versus the machine in Modern Times John Ford in 1935 Abraham Lincoln stops the lynch mob breaking into the prison holding the Clay brothers in Young Mr. Lincoln Abraham Lincoln reads a letter to Mrs Clay in Young Mr. Lincoln

191 201 207 213 217 230 240 245 259 267 271

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Acknowledgements

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he editors gratefully acknowledge the efforts of our contributors to produce in timely fashion works that attest to their expertise with regard to Hollywood film of the 1930s – and to cheerfully carry out suggested revisions to the original pieces. It has been a pleasure to cooperate with them in this venture. We further acknowledge Victoria Riskin’s kind permission to use in Ian Scott’s chapter the previously unpublished photograph of her father, Robert Riskin, Jo Swerling and Edward G. Robinson discussing The Whole Town’s Talking. We additionally acknowledge that the publicity shot for Our Daily Bread in Brian Neve’s chapter appears courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Introduction: Hollywood and the Great Depression Iwan Morgan

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otwithstanding remembrance of the 1930s as a golden era of iconic movies and glamorous stars, the decade was a time of crisis and transformation for Hollywood in the face of the Great Depression. An industry that had still not come to terms with the costly advent of sound technology found itself plunged into financial meltdown in 1931–2 as movie ticket sales collapsed. By the late 1930s, however, the major film companies had consolidated their status as vertically-integrated oligopolies that dominated movie production, distribution and exhibition. The classical movie style of the late silent era, initially under threat from the limitations of early sound systems, benefited from technological improvements in filmmaking that enabled its application to new and reinvented cinematic genres. In parallel with this development, producers adapted the star system to guarantee the value of their films in a Depression-hit market. As social scientist Leo Rosten wrote in 1941, ‘Hollywood means movies and movies mean stars.’1 It also meant the Production Code, adopted by film companies in 1930 as a marketoriented and consensual guarantee of good taste and morality in their products but only rigorously enforced from 1934 onwards. One of the contributors to this volume, Ina Rae Hark, has observed elsewhere of the 1930s, ‘In perhaps no other decade did the Hollywood film industry and its product look so different at its conclusion compared to its beginning’.2 As if to signal that the film business had emerged triumphant from the Great Depression and the other challenges of the 1930s, Hollywood would enjoy what is conventionally recognised as the greatest year in its history in terms of the cinematic quality of its films in 1939. Nevertheless, the film industry’s financial health was nowhere near as robust as its output. As another movie historian, Adrienne McLean, commented, ‘[B]ased on box-office sales and studio profits, the 1930s

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was hardly a “golden age”, and, on fiscal terms, the end looks rather more like the beginning than one might have expected’.3

organisation of the volume Hollywood underwent a significant transformation in response to the crisis of the Great Depression, but not a complete one. The contributors to this book offer perspectives on the complex experience of the film industry and those working in it during the 1930s. While the volume makes no claim to being a definitive history, it aims to cast light on aspects of Hollywood politics and society, the star system, and the movies of this crucial period in the history of American cinema. The opening part reflects on Hollywood politics and values in the 1930s. Mark Wheeler analyses the rift that emerged between opponents of progressive reform, primarily the moguls, and its supporters in other branches of the industry and examines how left-liberal groups ultimately joined together in the anti-fascist Popular Front before fragmenting as a result of the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939. Ian Scott focuses on a relatively neglected sector of the film industry, the scriptwriters, to show how a team of scribes at Columbia sought to inject political meaning into this smaller studio’s movies at a time when producers were sensitive to the effect of controversial film content on box-office profits. While the Great Depression ultimately reinforced rather than subverted gender roles in the nation at large, Jennifer Smyth shows that Hollywood was more effective than any other institution in portraying a positive image of the independent working woman both on and off screen. Finally, Catherine Jurca analyses the congressional hearings of 1936–40 regarding the need for federal regulation of motion picture distribution and the related efforts of independent exhibitors and organised interest groups to challenge the monopolistic practices of the principal film companies. The second part reflects on some iconic movie performers who made the breakthrough into stardom in the 1930s. In considering the most popular star of the era, Ina Rae Hark shows how the ‘Shirley Temple formula’ – a little girl suffering uncertainty and hardship triumphs through her loving heart and indomitability – was applied to and subverted, albeit within clear limits, the ‘settler genre’ of films. In examining the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers partnership in one of their star vehicles, Roberta (RKO, 1935), Peter Evans argues that the movies featuring this carefree couple combined romantic escapism alongside poignant reminders of ordinary people’s wider lived realities in the hard times of 1930s America. Finally, Mark Glancy considers the creation of Cary Grant’s star persona – the combination of his image, the characters he

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played, and the publicity that came to form his screen identity – between his early 1930s movies and his breakthrough roles in two 1937 films, Topper (MGM) and The Awful Truth (Columbia). The final part considers a number of the era’s key movies, some now considered classics and others faded into obscurity but all significant expressions of 1930s filmmaking. Harvey Cohen illustrates how Footlight Parade (1933) identified Warner Bros with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s early reform initiatives but only created a short-lived alliance between the studio and the New Deal. Exploring the possibilities and pitfalls of independent production, Brian Neve analyses how King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread (United Artists, 1934) challenged Hollywood’s aversion to undertaking controversial projects through its vision of voluntary cooperatives that melded individual and collective interests as the solution to the Depression. Anna Siomopoulos considers three seemingly disparate movies linked by the theme of masculine transformation in relation to federal architectural embodiments of the New Deal – the White House in Gabriel over the White House (MGM, 1933), the Senate in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Columbia, 1939), and the Supreme Court in The Talk of the Town (Columbia, 1942). In his examination of MGM’s commercially successful series of Mickey Rooney–Judy Garland musicals, David Eldridge illustrates their complex combination of reassurance that kids could have fun despite the Great Depression and contemporary concern about the ‘youth crisis’ of hard times. In assessing critical reception to Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (United Artists, 1936) the only commercially successful Hollywood movie of the era to deal directly with the economic crisis, Melvyn Stokes finds that it resonated far better with reviewers in France than American and even British ones because its combination of comedy and reality was in tune with the political mood of that country’s contemporary experimentation with ‘Popular Front’ government. Finally, Iwan Morgan contends that John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (20th Century-Fox, 1939) uses its protagonist to exemplify the Hollywood Popular Front’s ideals through his commitment to social justice, identification with the common people, and strong sense of right and wrong. To set the context for these contributions, this introductory chapter offers an overview of the Hollywood film industry in the 1930s. It has three aims: to examine the financial problems of the film business during the Depression Decade; to assess the extent to which the industry transformed itself in terms of technology, output, marketing and self-regulation during this era; and to review the federal government’s changing outlook with regard to the film industry’s monopoly of trade practices over the course of the 1930s.

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hollywood’s financial problems While other economic sectors experienced swift decline with the Great Depression’s onset in the wake of the Wall Street Crash of late 1929, 1930 saw record receipts for the film industry as weekly attendance in the nation’s approximately 20,000 picture houses reached a high of 80 million. Since a movie ticket was not a luxury, Hollywood did not depend on a high level of national prosperity to generate profitable returns, but any illusion that ‘the dream factory’ would not be ‘stricken along with the steel factory’ was short-lived.4 Unemployment, which stood at 3.1 per cent of the nation’s work force in 1929 (1.5 million people), rose to 8.7 per cent (4.3 million) in 1930, to 15.8 per cent (8 million) in 1931, and to 23.5 per cent (12 million) in 1932. Film industry balance-sheets could not escape the effects of economic catastrophe on this scale. In response, the five major film companies (Fox, Loew’s-MGM, Paramount, RKO, and Warner Bros) followed the lead of other business sectors in laying off thousands of workers and cutting salaries for those still in employment to achieve draconian economies. As a consequence, their annual payroll fell precipitously from $156 million in 1930 to an estimated $50 million in 1933.5 Driven by the box office from its outset, the film industry scaled production and distribution to derive revenues from exhibition. In the case of the majors, the foundation of their profitability depended on exhibition in their own chains of urban theatres of the films they produced and distributed. Despite comprising just 20 per cent of total picture houses nationwide, chain cinemas could return more than half a movie’s production costs because they constituted 80 per cent of first-run houses and the most profitable subsequent-run ones. However, the precipitous increase in unemployment sent weekly theatre attendance plummeting to 70 million in 1931 and 55 million in 1932, with the chain houses being especially hard hit by falling receipts. The deluxe palaces, expensively equipped for sound, that film companies had acquired to exhibit their pictures at above-average ticket prices in good times, now turned into financial albatrosses round their necks.6 In rapid succession, RKO, Paramount (which posted a record $21 million loss in 1932), and Fox all called in the receivers in early 1933. A heavy investor in theatre acquisition in the early sound era, Warner Bros had to close half its picture houses, slash wages and retrench outlays to escape the same fate. The only major to stay in the black, MGM, saw profits slump from $10 million in 1930 to $1.3 million three years later. The so-called Little Three (Columbia, United Artists, and Universal) weathered the storm somewhat better than the larger

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studios because they did not have expensive production costs. Significantly, Universal, which alone owned a chain of theatres – mostly in small towns – was the only one to file for bankruptcy and emerged from receivership after selling these off in 1936.7 The financial crisis accelerated the process of separating the ownership of movie production from its management. Until the 1920s, the film industry was largely under individual or family ownership and financed almost entirely from private capital and earnings. This model became increasingly difficult to sustain as movie companies became more complex in their vertical integration. In recognition of this reality, in 1924 theatre magnate Marcus Loew put Louis B. Mayer in charge of the Hollywood operations of his various production companies now amalgamated as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Meanwhile, Wall Street firms became increasingly involved in underwriting new stock issues for film company capital expansion, initially to fund movie theatre acquisition and latterly the costly adaptation of production and exhibition to sound. In return, financial houses gained representation on the executive boards of companies in which they had made such heavy investments. Bankers promptly took full control of those that went under in 1933 with the aim of renewing profits through further cost-cutting and efficiency gains. However, they proved singularly inept at delivering products with the popular appeal to enhance exhibition revenues. As a consequence, studio management was soon transferred to salaried managers with expertise in the film business. The most notable case was Darryl F. Zanuck’s appointment as head of production at 20th Century-Fox, formed in 1935 from Fox’s merger with the newly created and more dynamic Twentieth Century Pictures. Two studios, Warner Bros and Columbia, remained family enterprises but the founding brothers of each had in effect become New Yorkbased financial managers (Harry Warner and Jack Cohn) and Hollywood-based production managers (Jack Warner and Harry Cohn). By the end of the 1930s, therefore, the moneymen back East exerted financial control over the motion picture companies but creative decisions and commercial assessments regarding movie production were left to studio executives.8 The restructuring of film companies did not alter the reality that their profits depended on exhibition rather than production and distribution. An estimated 2,500 theatres closed their doors in 1931 and 4,000 followed suit in 1932, with the independent sector of exhibition being worst hit. The total theatre workforce declined in number by a third from 1929 (130,000) to 1932 (87,000).9 Picture houses that remained in business had to cut ticket prices to attract audiences but

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the lower cost of seeing first-run movies in a chain theatre left independents little margin for reducing charges for subsequent-run showings. Other solutions became necessary for smaller exhibitors. Popcorn, candy and soft drink sales, once frowned upon as lowering the tone of theatres, became for many the difference between making money or closing down. Giveaway food prizes were also useful in attracting moviegoers for a while, but far more important in this regard were cash ones. By 1936 over 4,000 theatres operated ‘Bank Night’ and similar lotteries, which were thought to have kept more independent cinemas open than any other device.10 As further inducements for moviegoing, various short items were added to theatre programmes. These included cliff-hanger serials, better newsreel coverage, and – most notably – animated cartoons. The Disney studio launched Pluto in 1930, Goofy in 1932, and Donald Duck in 1934 to star alongside Mickey Mouse, who had debuted in 1928. Paramount unveiled Betty Boop in 1932 and Popeye in 1933. Warner Bros followed suit with Porky Pig in 1935 and Bugs Bunny in 1938. The appeal of the genre induced Walt Disney to produce the first full-length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, for distribution by RKO in 1937. Made for $1.5 million, it was Variety’s top-grossing film of 1938 and set a record rental take of $8.5 million at the conclusion of its first theatrical release. Nevertheless, this success did not set a trend for other studios to follow because full-length animated features were so costly to make.11 The marketing scheme that had greatest effect on the entire industry, however, was ‘double-billing’, effectively showing two films for the price of one. The organisation representing the main film companies, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) initially sought to outlaw the practice for fear that the consequent need to increase the quantity of movies in circulation would give smaller filmmakers a boost. The Hays Office (as MPPDA was better known – after its boss, Will Hays) reached agreement with groups representing independent exhibitors to sanction double-bills in August 1934. This was a case of bowing to reality. By now, chain theatres operating in competitive exhibition situations had become the biggest users of double-bills. According to one trade journal, the effect was to double the quantity of films required to meet market demand, necessitating the production of at least 700 new features every year.12 The re-opening of about 1,000 theatres in 1934 heralded a recovery in the movie industry. Two years later, a number of companies – notably 20th Century-Fox, MGM and Paramount – posted healthy profits, but none earned more than in 1930. Nevertheless, hopes were high that the

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industry had weathered its greatest crisis and could look forward to record profits in the near future. Caught up in this spirt of optimism, the Hays Office made the probably inflated claim that weekly ticket sales were now back at the 1930 level of 80 million. Nevertheless, the sunny uplands envisaged in 1936 turned out to be a mirage. A 1940 Gallup poll suggested that weekly attendance had averaged only 54 million in recent years.13 The sharp recession of 1937-8, the result of premature tightening of fiscal and monetary policy in Washington, DC in anticipation that full recovery was nigh, was to blame for this decline. Having fallen from the peak rate of 25 per cent of the labour force (12.8 million people) in 1933 to 14 per cent (7.7 million) in 1937, unemployment rose steeply to nearly 19 per cent (10.4 million) in the following year and was still higher than the pre-recession level at 14.5 per cent (8.1 million) in 1940. In parallel with economic stagnation, film company earnings declined in 1938 by nearly 42 per cent from the 1937 level and fell again by 11 per cent in 1939.14 The interrupted recovery had a far more profound effect on industry self-confidence than the crisis of the early 1930s. With psychological expectations of renewed good times now in tatters, film company executives grew concerned that the public no longer regarded movies as good value – particularly as most homes now had radio sets that provided free entertainment. Giving voice to a sense of doom in July 1938, Oscar Doob, Loew’s head of advertising, perceived a new ‘nationwide . . . pessimism about the movies; the dark, gloomy feeling that the movies are on the downgrade; that it is a great risk to buy a movie ticket with all the chances of not getting your money’s worth; that Hollywood is nuts; that the stars are poison; that show-business is racing to hell’. To regain public esteem for movies as a form of entertainment, the MPPDA mobilised the film companies, large and small, and independent exhibitors to fund and promote a million-dollar public-relations drive, entitled ‘Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year’. Running for the first four months of the new exhibition season (September to December 1938), the campaign took out advertisements in major newspapers in the USA and Canada, enlisted the support of governors and mayors, and coordinated local events with some 7,000 exhibitors, including prizes totalling $250,000 for a movie quiz organised around ninety-four new films publicised as ‘the finest array of productions ever released’.15 All too predictably, the hastily arranged campaign was a commercial and public-relations flop. Of the ninety-four productions that it promoted, only two would appear in Variety’s list of top-grossing movies for 1938 – Alexander’s Ragtime Band (20th Century-Fox) and Marie

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Antoinette (MGM), while another film, Boys Town (MGM) was in the 1939 list. Also featured was the winner of the 1938 Academy Award for best film and best director, Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It with You (Columbia). However, too many of the others were neither popular nor memorable, among them a goodly number of B-movies. This was hardly the cinematic fare to re-establish the centrality of moviegoing in peoples’ lives. Accordingly, the ultimate outcome of the Greatest Year fiasco was to raise doubts whether Hollywood knew any longer what the public wanted or how to market the film industry.16 It was a considerable irony, therefore, that 1939 would go down in history as Hollywood’s greatest year in terms of movie quality, but the production costs of some of the year’s iconic movies held profits down. Despite being the top box-office draw in that year, The Wizard of Oz (MGM), made for $2.8 million, did not break even on its first run.17 More importantly, however, Hollywood seemed once again to be in touch with popular tastes. Nothing demonstrated this better than Gone with the Wind (MGM), at the time both the most expensive and most profitable movie in cinematic history. Even before general release and return engagements, the first roadshow gross of $20 million from January to May 1940 far outstripped the $4.1 million production costs.18 Nevertheless, it was not until US involvement in World War II renewed national prosperity that film company balance-sheets once more showed healthy profits.

hollywood transformed Technological advances The successful movies of the late 1930s showed how far Hollywood had advanced film technology since the coming of sound in the late 1920s. The transition from silent movies had substantially increased the expense of moviemaking just when producers could ill afford additional costs. Needing to save time and money, studios engaged in continuous technological change that streamlined sound production into the form that was basically used for the remainder of the century. The other driving force in this development was the aesthetic desire to recapture the visual and narrative dynamism of the classical Hollywood style of the late silent era. With some important exceptions like All Quiet on the Western Front (Universal, 1930), which featured realistic scenes of trench warfare, the action in the majority of movies made from 1929 to 1931 was staged for the sake of sound recording. This usually resulted in a plodding pace and theatrical-style dialogue.19

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As two scholars noted, ‘Sound technology had to be made more faithful and flexible, but it also had to be integrated into the stylistic priorities of classical storytelling’.20 Synchronisation of picture and soundtrack was initially achieved through multi-camera usage that made tight framing difficult and was costly in terms of celluloid, time and large crew requirements. By the end of 1931, however, most studios had returned to single-camera filming and closer framing thanks to the development of new sound equipment, optical printers and mobile camera carriages that included cranes. Within a few years, further improvements in technology enabled the synchronisation of the background projector with the foreground camera and much enhanced recording, mixing and editing. Interest in Technicolor’s three-colour process, initially available in 1932, gathered momentum in the second half of the decade, culminating in its use in The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Thanks to this broad range of technological innovations, filmmakers succeeded in building on the visual standards of the silent cinema within the new dialogue-based medium.

Movie genres The advent of sound opened up the screen to new types of movies. Following the success of the first ‘talkie’, The Jazz Singer (Warner Bros, 1927), studios glutted the market with musicals in the next three years, but declining audiences vastly reduced the number of productions in 1931. The genre enjoyed a revival in 1933 on the strength of three backstage musicals produced by Warner Bros – 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, and Gold Diggers of 1933, each spectacularly choreographed by Busby Berkeley. This sparked a vogue for musical subgenres that reached new peaks of success in the mid-1930s in the Fred AstaireGinger Rogers series of sophisticated song-and-dance productions that did much to revive RKO’s fortunes. By the end of the decade, however, MGM had clearly established itself as the leading studio for musicals. Two of its stars, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, featured in a highly popular series of five operetta movies, with Rose Marie (1936) and Maytime (1937) making it into Variety’s list of annual top-grossing productions. MGM’s Broadway Melody series, featuring showmanship and spectacle in support of the virtuoso tap-dancing talents of Eleanor Powell, became another success. Finally, the studio developed a new and highly profitable genre of youth musicals starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. MGM also briefly had young soprano Deanna Durbin under contract but Louis B. Mayer was too late in renewing her option. Snapped up by Universal, Durbin’s immensely popular series of

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family-based musicals for that studio in the late 1930s was generally credited with reviving its fortunes.21 The coming of sound posed a particular challenge for silent-era comic stars, most of whom could not adapt to the new medium.22 With the exception of Charlie Chaplin, whose status as a producer and immense popularity abroad allowed him to make two silent classics – City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936), the comedy films of the 1930s depended on dialogue for their success. Initially, the studios recruited talent from Broadway and vaudeville, like the Marx Brothers, Eddie Cantor, and W. C. Fields, to make a cycle of comedies that were more episodic than linear in style and enabled the stars to perform their routines within a loose narrative structure. This genre gave way to sentimental comedies that prioritised rough-diamond characters, home-spun humour, and tear-jerking scenes. Two studios specialised in this field – MGM paired Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery in the smash hits Min and Bill (1930) and Tugboat Annie (1933), while Fox hit box-office gold with the Will Rogers movies State Fair (1933) and Judge Priest (1934). With Rogers’ death in 1935, Shirley Temple emerged as the mainstay of the 20th Century-Fox cycle of sentimental comedy. Other studios, mainly Columbia, Paramount and MGM, specialised in screwball comedy, the genre launched by Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (Columbia, 1934). Showcasing stars who were not comics, screwball humour flowed from dialogue, characterisation and relationships. The genre featured equally strong male and female leads in zany situations, usually in an adversarial relationship that provided the opportunity for witty repartee before love conquered all.23 Enriched by the possibilities of dialogue, ‘women’s films’ made a smooth transition from silent to sound eras. Drawing on Hollywood’s longstanding but unproven belief that women constituted the majority of moviegoers, films centring on the dilemmas of their heroines reached a peak in the 1930s.24 Initially dominant were sinful-women pictures in which the female protagonists were either unfaithful wives, vamps or gold-diggers. MGM’s ascendancy in this field was reflected in the Academy Awards for Best Actress won by Norma Shearer for The Divorcee (1930) and Helen Hayes for The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931). The cycle soon gave way to ‘maternal melodramas’ in which women sacrificed happiness for the sake of their children, as in Imitation of Life (Universal, 1934), Stella Dallas (United Artists, 1937), and The Old Maid (Warner Bros, 1939). Other subgenres included romantic comedies, romantic weepies and Cinderella rise-from-obscurity stories. The decade ended with the greatest ‘women’s film’ of all, Gone with the Wind, which focused on the vicissitudes of its heroine, Scarlett O’Hara,

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Figure I.1 Poster for Tugboat Annie (MGM, 1933), placed second in Variety’s list of top-grossing films of 1933, and featuring the top box-office star of 1932 and 1933, Marie Dressler, alongside the nearly as popular Wallace Beery.

played by Vivien Leigh. Despite this MGM success, ascendancy in women’s films passed to Warner Bros once it found the right formula to showcase Bette Davis, who brought something new to the genre through playing headstrong, intelligent, but flawed characters – exemplified by her Oscar-winning roles in Dangerous (1935) and Jezebel (1938).25 What never changed, however, was the limited role of women as directors or scriptwriters of films aimed at female audiences.26 Regardless of its association with Warner Bros, the ‘social problem’ genre had limited significance in the production strategies of the majors. Coinciding with the peak of press concern about racketeering, gangster movies like Little Caesar, The Public Enemy (both Warner Bros, 1931) and Scarface (United Artists, 1932) enjoyed a brief heyday of popularity with moviegoers, but faded as mobsters attracted fewer headlines after 1931.27 There was also a brief cycle of prison movies – the most famous being I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Warner Bros, 1932) – that highlighted the grim conditions of incarceration. As

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Figure I.2 Trailer scene in Dark Victory (Warner Bros), the fifth highest-grossing movie of 1939, featuring Bette Davis, ranked the second most successful female box-office star of the year behind Shirley Temple. B-movie actor Ronald Reagan, shown on her right, had a small part in this prestige picture.

the Depression reached its peak, Hollywood turned out movies that offered various solutions to the nation’s economic woes: Gabriel over the White House (MGM, 1933) advocated totalitarianism; Wild Boys of the Road (Warner Bros, 1933) lauded New Deal compassion as the answer to youth vagrancy; and Our Daily Bread (United Artists, 1934) saw collectivisation of land as the answer. Sensing popular hopes for renewed social order as economic conditions approved, Hollywood’s attention switched to law-enforcement movies, exemplified by the Warner Bros productions G-Men (1935) and Bullets or Ballots (1936). Although the iconic gangster of the early 1930s never returned to the screen, a movie cycle later in the decade portrayed criminality as the product of socio-economic deprivation in films like Dead End (United Artists, 1937), Angels with Dirty Faces (Warner Bros, 1938), and Boys Town (MGM, 1938). As fascism rose in Europe, some films dealt with its American variant, but negative audience response ensured they were

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few in number. Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Warner Bros, 1939), the first movie depiction of Nazis as a threat to America, also bombed at the box-office, but this did not stop supporters of the German-American Bund burning down a theatre showing it in Milwaukee.28 In essence, major studios tended to specialise in particular film genres, but each spread the market risk by making different kinds of productions every season. Horror movies were in vogue in the early 1930s. The most famous example of the genre was RKO’s King Kong (1933). Produced for $672,000, it grossed nearly $2 million on first release, a success that kept the studio going amid its financial crisis. However, Universal was the sole specialist in this field of film that became its main hope of breaking into the first-run market. Dracula and Frankenstein, both made in 1931, initiated a profitable cycle of movies for the studio that lasted until around 1935. Nevertheless, horror films were in quantitative terms the smallest genre of the 1930s, one that boomed in the early years and enjoyed a revival after Universal very profitably paired Dracula and Frankenstein on a rerun double-bill in 1938.29 Movie cycles tended to rise and fall in response to their popularity with the cinema-going public, their decline often coinciding with studios running out of ideas to sustain their freshness. Commercial calculations similarly meant that some genres popular in later decades made little impact in 1930s cinema. Private-eye movies did not get going until The Maltese Falcon (Warner Bros, 1941) became a box-office hit. MGM very successfully featured Dashiell Hammett’s Thin Man in three 1930s films but these were screwball comedies rather than detective movies, with their focus on the witty interactions of the husbandand-wife main characters played by William Powell and Myrna Loy.30 The Western was another surprising omission from the majors’ movie roster until the second half of the decade. After the expensive failure of The Big Trail (Fox, 1930), the genre was largely confined to the socalled Poverty Row studios, which churned out cheap but profitable productions, mainly for the lower half of double-bills.31 In 1936, however, Paramount began making big-budget Westerns that did well at the box-office. Encouraged by this and hoping to boost the nation’s morale with reminders of its heroic past when the war crisis loomed in Europe, Warner Bros, 20th Century-Fox and Universal sealed the genre’s return to grace with a number of major productions in 1939.32 The Western exemplified the polar opposites in Hollywood production trends in the 1930s. It made a belated entry into the ranks of prestige pictures, which were typically big-budget specials based on a pre-sold property, featuring a studio’s top stars, and often with a longer running time than the seventy to ninety minutes of the average feature.

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These productions were not confined to a single genre. According to Motion Picture Herald, they were based on four categories of property: literary classics; adaptations of Shakespeare plays; modern best-selling novels and Broadway hits; and historical subjects. From 1930 to 1933, prestige pictures made up only fourteen of the forty in Film Daily’s ten best films of the year (1930 was by far their best year in this regard), but from 1934 to 1939 they comprised around a half, a reflection of the increase in such productions. This expansion of prestige output was conventionally interpreted as Hollywood cleaning up its act in the face of pressure from the Catholic League of Decency over the moral content of its early 1930s movies, particularly those featuring ‘fallen women’ and gangsters. In reality, film companies had been reluctant to invest in the heavy cost of such movies in the depths of the Depression, but stepped up production when general economic conditions improved. Never more than a small proportion of annual movie output, prestige productions, in the words of one scholar, elicited a disproportionate amount of movie press attention as the ‘focal point of Hollywood’s cultural articulation’. As a business model, however, their benefits were less evident because only thirty of these productions featured in the total of sixty-seven in Variety’s annual list of top-grossing movies over the course of the 1930s.33 At the other end of the scale were the so-called B-movies that constituted 75 per cent of all pictures made in the decade. These totalled about half the annual productions of the vertically integrated companies but the vast majority, about 300 films a year, were made by the independent studios of ‘Poverty Row’ (notably Monogram, Republic, Mascot and Grand National). The B-movies were as vital for the big studios as for the smaller ones, however. They ensured almost continuous use of sets, stages, equipment and talent while providing the necessary supply of production that enabled exhibitors to change theatre programmes twice a week or more, thereby facilitating ticket sales. Their main characteristics were tight budgets, short shooting schedules and formulaic styles – often in the form of series movies – and limited publicity for their exhibition. Although most B-movies were intended for the lower half of a doublebill, some were more aptly characterised as ‘programmers’ that could be placed anywhere – the most notable example being 20th Century-Fox’s Charlie Chan films. The most commercially successful B-genre was the Western, but ethnic films were the most historically interesting. Usually shot in one week for no more than $15,000, movies made by AfricanAmerican companies, like Million Dollar Productions, featured all-black casts. Their challenge to Hollywood’s racial stereotyping found a market in all-black theatres in Harlem and other urban ghettoes.34

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The star system One of the most significant consequences of the coming of sound was the reinvention of the movie star to fit the new medium. Some of the top performers of the silent era, notably Great Garbo and Norma Shearer, remained popular with audiences in the sound era, but a goodly number did not, notably Clara Bow and John Gilbert. Requiring a galaxy of new stars to speak and move in more naturalistic and individualistic fashion, the film companies set about creating them, most commonly by raiding Broadway for talent. At the end of the 1930s, only some 500 of the approximately 2,000 performers working in the movies were contracted long-term to one of seven top studios (United Artists, mainly a distributor for independent producers, operated short-term contracts). Estimates of how many of these enjoyed star status vary from around ninety (though over the decade as a whole and not all at the same time) to about sixty by 1939. Despite boasting ‘more stars than there are in the heavens’, MGM had thirty at best, still far more than any other studio. A performer’s name appearing above the title in the opening credits was the ultimate indicator of star status. Nevertheless, the film industry had no sure way of creating a star because moviegoers were both judge and jury on who became one. As Jeanine Basinger observes, ‘Hollywood followed majority opinion, promoting the stars for which there was the most consistent audience agreement’.35 If there was one attribute that all stars possessed in the eyes of their fans, it was not so much physical beauty as a tangible physical presence on screen, a highly subjective appeal.36 There was, of course, another essential requirement for stardom, albeit an unspoken one – whiteness.37 The major film companies ran expensive star-focused publicity campaigns that channelled audiences into first-run houses under their virtually exclusive ownership. Able to charge the highest ticket prices, these prestige theatres could generate 50 per cent of domestic rentals for popular movies. A successful launch established the market value of the product that justified higher rental charges for later-run exhibition in independent theatres.38 This commercial strategy could cope with the decline of a few stars but not the diminished appeal of stars in general. One reason why the film industry went into a funk in 1938 was the publication of an article by Harry Brandt of the Independent Theatre Owners of America listing a substantial number of once popular performers as box-office poison.39 However, a number of those singled out as failures – including Fred Astaire, Marlene Dietrich and Katherine Hepburn – would quickly bounce back with successful movies to prove the resiliency of the star system.

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The majors jealously safeguarded their most precious assets through the option contract.40 This bound an aspiring movie performer to a particular film company for a term of seven years with predetermined salary increases over time, but allowed the studio the non-reciprocal right to review and, if desired, terminate the option at six-month intervals. Contracted performers could neither quit to join another studio nor renegotiate for more money and had to appear in pictures allocated them. They also signed over exclusive control of their image (including a change of name) and services to their employer. Dissatisfied with his tough-guy typecasting in inferior pictures, James Cagney took Warner Bros to court in 1935 in an effort to get his contract invalidated. Bette Davis followed the same route in 1936 out of frustration at being put in inferior movies to fulfil her annual quota. Both won some concessions but neither succeeded in weakening studio control over their careers. While Cagney found temporary escape through becoming an independent producer in the early 1940s, Davis stayed with Warner Bros till 1950, all the while complaining that it had turned her into ‘an assembly worker’.41 Only after serving seven years could stars negotiate new contracts – almost invariably with their home studios in an industry that frowned on big-name transfers. Performers who found their contract terminated before its full term sometimes found redemption elsewhere. Warner Bros had a particularly good record as a second-chance studio, as the careers of Bette Davis (ex-Universal) and Paul Muni (ex-Fox) exemplified.42 Others had to take their chance by freelancing, mainly for independents. By the end of the decade, this became the preferred option for some performers as the best means to get the type of roles they wanted. Their ranks included about forty featured players like Ronald Colman, Cary Grant and Frederic March. For those still bound by what one analyst called ‘star serfdom’, 43 the loan-out system offered the best opportunity to break free of home-studio constraints. The majors found it impossible to make enough prestige and A-features to keep their high-paid stars working all the time. Accordingly, they loaned out talent to another studio at a handsome fee. This practice enabled RKO, the financially weakest major, to hold on to its stable of stars, and gave Columbia and Universal the opportunity to make prestige pictures.44 At the depths of the financial crisis of 1933, the producers threatened to close the studios unless all their employees took a 50 per cent pay cut for eight weeks. They followed this up with a Code of Fair Competition, drafted under the aegis of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), to institutionalise new contractual limitations, including

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a $100,000 annual salary cap for actors. In protest, many stars joined the fledgling Screen Actors Guild (SAG) to represent the interests of their profession. SAG president Eddie Cantor lobbied Franklin D. Roosevelt, an old friend from New York days, to come to his organisation’s aid. Anxious to avert a high-profile labour dispute, the president issued an executive order to suspend the unpopular provisions. Nevertheless, the film companies refused to recognise SAG as a collective bargaining agent, even after enactment of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 mandated stronger rights for labour unions than the NRA had ever countenanced. It required the threat of an actors’ strike in May 1937 to compel studio acquiescence on this score. This victory led to agreement over minimum pay rates, guarantees of continuous employment, and rest periods for the rank-and-file. Nevertheless, the fundamental control that studios exerted over the production process and the place of actors, including the stars, in this remained unchanged.45

Self-regulation: the Production Code More significant than stars in exerting influence over movie content was the Production Code Administration (PCA), which replaced the Studio Relations Committee as the code enforcement arm of the Hays Office in 1934. The studios had agreed a form of self-censorship, the Production Code, in 1930 to ensure that state and local censorship boards passed their movies and to preempt the imposition of federal regulation. In addition to ‘Particular Applications’, the code established three ‘General Principles’ for movies: they should not lower the moral standards of moviegoers by manifesting sympathy for crime, wrongdoing and sin; they should uphold correct standards of life; and they should not ridicule law, natural or human.46 Enforcement was relatively relaxed at first, evidenced by the ‘fallen woman’ films, gangster movies and Mae West’s saucy vehicles, She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel, credited with keeping Paramount in business in 1933. To prevent future productions of this ilk, newlyappointed PCA chief Joseph Breen manufactured a crisis with the help of the Catholic Legion of Decency, which campaigned to alert clergy about Hollywood’s moral decline. With ticket sales going into freefall in some big cities – notably Philadelphia, where Cardinal Dennis Dougherty urged his flock to boycott all movies – the producers offered assurances of future adherence to the code in the summer of 1934. In reality, however, this was more a surrender to market trends than to moral pressure because the kinds of movies that had aroused condemnation were no longer popular with moviegoers.47

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Wielding the power to withhold its seal of approval from movies deemed unacceptable, the PCA henceforth insisted on vetting scripts prior to production to ensure code compliance. This still left room for negotiation with the studios as to what could be allowed into a film. In essence, Breen regarded the PCA as helping the industry to avoid falling foul not only of state-local censors but also international ones.48 Whether his organisation was responsible for the different tenor of post-1934 films from the so-called ‘pre-code’ ones was very questionable, however. In the conventional narrative of 1930s Hollywood, the pre-code movies subverted sexual mores, manifested social conscience, and engaged in anarchic comedy, while tighter enforcement of the Production Code resulted in productions that reinforced social conventions, eschewed controversial topics and kept comedy tame.49 As Thomas Doherty has demonstrated, there was certainly a discernible difference between the movies of the early 1930s and the later years.50 Nevertheless, this change was arguably far more to do with the film companies’ understanding of changing market tastes than PCA censorship. The notion that Breen was to blame for Hollywood’s increasing reluctance to tackle controversial socio-political subjects as the decade progressed is particularly unpersuasive. As profit-making enterprises, film companies had no interest in making movies that would not find an audience. This put a premium on escapism rather than depictions of unpleasant reality. One of the earliest works of film studies by Margaret Thorp offered validation that ‘audiences wanted to be cheered up when they went to the movies; they had no desire to see on the screen the squalor and misery of which there was all too much at home’.51 Seen in this context, the PCA was not an instrument of control but part of the Hollywood consensus about the inter-related cultural functions and economic needs of the film industry in the 1930s. As Richard Maltby has argued, The Production Code did not cause the lack of experimentation in Hollywood product. Rather it was a symptom of the underlying cause. The Code was a consequence of commercialism and the particular understanding of the audience and its desires that the industry’s commercialism promoted.52 Moreover, the blanket depiction of post-1934 movies as unthinkingly escapist is as unconvincing as the comparable characterisation of pre1934 films as socio-culturally subversive. Lawrence Levine, in particular, contends that many cinematic entertainments ‘were deeply grounded in

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the realities and the intricacies of the Depression’. In some cases, the most unlikely of movie characters were shown as victims of the economic crisis. In Moving Day (Disney-United Artists, 1936), Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy are evicted from their home after falling behind with the rent; and in Just Around the Corner (20th Century-Fox, 1938), Shirley Temple’s father has to work as a janitor after losing his architect’s job. Although there is a danger of reading too much into movie content, it is reasonable to see a message amongst the entertainment in many films. Politicised readings of The Wizard of Oz find support in the insistence of lyricist and co-writer Yip Harburg, an avowed socialist, that the Emerald City represented the New Deal. The populist films of Frank Capra were paeans to the common man battling the corruption of economic and political elites – and always triumphing against the odds. Whether moviegoers unthinkingly accepted such happy endings in light of the threatening situations preceding them is unproven. It may well be, as Lawrence Levine suggests, ‘that audiences were able to learn from the main thrust of the films they saw, even while they derived comfort and pleasure from the formulaic endings’.53

hollywood, the new deal and monopoly Defining its product as entertainment enabled the film industry to claim that movies lay outside the political sphere, but the concentrated market power of the large film companies became a political issue in the 1930s. In their many interactions with the federal government during the Depression Decade, the principal concern of the majors was to protect their monopoly over production, exhibition and distribution. In the interests of economic recovery, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal initially legitimised the Hollywood oligopoly but later set in motion the judicial challenge that would eventually undermine it. Amid the blitz of anti-Depression initiatives issued in FDR’s first 100 days in office, the National Industrial Recovery Act of June 1933 represented the early New Deal’s principal effort to revive economic confidence in partnership with business. Its inspiration was the conviction that government-facilitated cooperative action among trade organisations would end the cut-throat cycle of competition that trapped prices, wages and jobs in a vicious deflationary spiral. The new measure established the National Recovery Administration to oversee development of legally enforceable fair competition codes in key business sectors. In return for business acceptance of labour rights, minimum wages and maximum work hours, the new agency waived anti-trust laws in participating sectors of industry. This trade-off became the means for the

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large movie companies to consolidate their monopoly over film industry trade practices. 54 As already indicated, the Code of Fair Competition of the Motion Picture Industry, eventually signed into law in November 1933, was the subject of considerable controversy between studio bosses and the newly formed talent guilds. Of ultimately greater significance, however, was the success of the Hollywood majors in shaping its provisions to protect their domination over the movie marketplace. The industry code institutionalised the trade practices in distribution and exhibition that underwrote their oligopoly. It sanctioned block-booking of movies that gave independent exhibitors no choice over the films they would take; it enabled the majors to protect the favoured status of their chains by establishing clearance zones that advantaged first-run and early-run theatres and kept films from the independent-dominated subsequentrun sector until their newness, a movie’s main selling point, was long gone; and finally its inclusion of minimum prices in rental contracts with exhibitors prevented cut-price rivalry to the benefit of producers and distributors.55 In May 1935, as part of its judicial assault on the New Deal’s expansion of federal authority, the Supreme Court invalidated the NRA as a constitutional violation of both the separation of the powers, through its arrogation of legislative power to the executive, and the commerce clause, through its regulation of the business practices of firms engaged in interstate commerce. Despite this denouement, the monopolistic trade practices sanctioned in the now defunct Code of Fair Competition of the Motion Picture Industry survived virtually intact. In this apparent success for the majors lay the seeds of their eventual defeat, however. Frustrated in its hopes that government-business cooperation could underpin recovery, the Roosevelt administration adopted a bottom-up strategy of reform in the second half of the 1930s. Instead of seeing big business as an ally, it now viewed corporate pursuit of self-interest as a hindrance to economic renewal. Accordingly, in its second stage from 1935 to 1937, the New Deal promoted stronger rights for labour unions, higher taxes on corporations and the very wealthy, and antitrust initiatives – with the utility companies as the first target. In response to the recession of 1937–8, it shifted focus once more to undertake a moderately Keynesian fiscal policy of deficit spending to boost consumption and employment while also placing stronger emphasis on need for greater market competition to restore the economy’s wellbeing.56 It was in this third stage of evolution that the film industry’s monopolistic trade practices came within the New Deal’s crosshair.

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As part of the enhanced assault on economic concentration, Thurman Arnold, the new head of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, personally filed the US v. Paramount et al. suit in July 1938 charging the Hollywood majors with combining and colluding to exert monopolistic power over the production, distribution and exhibition of movies. Its charges replicated almost verbatim those made in vain in the face of big-studio power by independent producers and exhibitors during NRA days. The wheel also turned full circle in terms of required remedies for unfair trade practices, notably separation of film production from exhibition, abolition of block booking and termination of unfair clearance mechanisms.57 Scheduled for trial in the Southern District Court of New York in June 1940, the lawsuit was temporarily resolved with a consent decree whereby the studios agreed specific modifications in their trade practice. However, the Justice Department retained authority to reinstate it in three years’ time if compliance was unsatisfactory, which proved to be the case. When finally heard in October 1945, the suit went in favour of the government, but the appeals process delayed final resolution until the Supreme Court found against the defendants in May 1948. In stripping away the producers’ powers over exhibition, the judgment spelled the end of the classic studio system. ‘With no guarantee of exhibition’, one analyst commented, ‘fewer movies could be made . . . The 1950s was a time of bust: of caution’.58 Nevertheless, the principal consequence of the Paramount judgment was not to increase competition in the movie marketplace but to facilitate the rise of new industry leaders in place of the old ones. National theatre chains remained the principal forum for exhibition, albeit no longer under control of the majors, and these dealt almost exclusively with large distribution companies. As one scholar aptly commented, ‘Antitrust law intervened in Hollywood without success’.59

conclusion At the end of the 1930s, it appeared that the major film companies had dealt successfully with the challenges of the Great Depression. Hollywood had weathered the greatest financial crisis in its history to date. New structures of management had improved corporate efficiency. The technological challenges of adapting the classic Hollywood style to the sound era had been overcome in cost-effective fashion. Movie genres had either been adapted or invented to address both the coming of sound and the entertainment needs of Depression-weary audiences. The B-movie fulfilled the quantitative necessity for more movies to support

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the double-billing mechanism that helped ticket sales by enabling rapid turnover in exhibition. The star system had been consolidated to underwrite the market appeal of the movies that the majors produced. Hollywood had also found in the more strictly enforced Production Code a means of self-regulation that underwrote film industry commercialism through ensuring that movies were acceptable for the largest possible undifferentiated audience. The 1930s ended with a golden year in terms of the film industry’s cinematic output. If the decade also drew to a close on a disappointing financial note for the film industry, this was more the consequence of general economic conditions than the unpopularity of movies. The fullemployment economy of the war years would soon produce a boom in movie company profits. Nevertheless, this proved to be an Indian summer for the classic studio system. The Great Depression had reignited longstanding federal concern over the trade practices of the majors. The eventual break-up of their vertically integrated monopoly, the seeds for which were sown in the late New Deal, presaged greater changes and challenges for the film industry than even those endured in the 1930s. Accordingly, whatever crises it posed and whatever transformations it necessitated, the Depression decade can still be viewed historically as the high point of classic Hollywood.

notes 1. Leo Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), 328. 2. Ina Rae Hark, ‘Movies and the 1930s’, in Hark (ed.), American Cinema of the 1930s: Themes and Variations (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 1. 3. Adrienne McLean, ‘Introduction: Stardom in the 1930s’, in McLean (ed.), Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 3. 4. Andrew Bergman, We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), xxi. 5. ‘50 vs 156 million in 2 yrs’, Variety, 14 March 1933, 7. 6. Mae Huettig, ‘Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry’, in Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry, rev. edn (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 285; Joel Finler, The Hollywood Story (New York: Crown, 1988), 288. 7. Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Empire, 1930–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 13–18. 8. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Random House, 1975), 162–7; Balio, Grand Design, 21–6.

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9. ‘6,500 Dark Theatres’, Variety, 2 August 1932, 7; ‘U.S. Commerce Dept. Analysis’, Variety, 18 November 1936, 6. 10. Sklar, Movie-Made America, 169; ‘Bank Night’, New Republic, 6 May 1936, 363–5. 11. Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 12. ‘Need Twice As Many Pix’, Variety, 14 August 1934, 5. 13. Gallup Looks at the Movies: Audience Research Reports (Wilmington, DE: American Institute of Public Opinion and Scholarly Resources, 1979 [microfilm]), 140. 14. Rosten, Hollywood, 346. See too, ‘Hollywood Slump’, Time, 21 March 1938. 15. The definitive account of the campaign is Catherine Jurca, Hollywood 1938: Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year (Oakland: University of California Press, 2012) (Doob quotation, 2). 16. For the ninety-four films, see Jurca, Hollywood 1938, 227–30. In addition to the two movies on the ‘Greatest Year’ list, the other top grossing films, all released in advance of the campaign, were: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Walt Disney Productions, RKO distribution); Test Pilot (MGM); In Old Chicago (20th Century-Fox); The Hurricane (United Artists); The Adventures of Robin Hood (Warner Bros); and Love Finds Andy Hardy (MGM). 17. The other top grossers in the Variety list were: Goodbye Mr Chips (MGM); Pygmalion (MGM); Boys Town (MGM); The Old Maid (Warner Bros); and Dark Victory (Warner Bros). 18. Balio, Grand Design, 209–11, 226–7. 19. For the early sound era, see Scott Eyman, The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and The Talkie Revolution, 1926–1930 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). 20. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, ‘Technological Change and Classical Film Style’, in Balio, Grand Design, 140. 21. Andrew Sarris, ‘You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet’: The American Talking Film – History and Memory 1927–1949 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 30–67. 22. Buster Keaton, a comedy genius of the silent era, was the greatest casualty of the sound revolution. Another silent great, Harold Lloyd, made self-produced talkies with initial success, notably Welcome Danger (1929), but the further he moved away from silent technique in the 1930s, the less popular his movies became. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy arguably made the most successful adaptation to sound in the short movies and B-movie featurettes they made for various studios in the 1930s and 1940s. 23. For more extensive discussion of 1930s comedy, see Balio, Grand Design, 256–80. For screwball comedy, the only truly cinematic invention in the genre, see Sarris, ‘You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet’, 89–100. Despite its apparently unconventional scenarios, some analysts insist that the genre reinforced convention. According to Andrew Bergman, ‘Their “whackiness” cemented social classes and broken marriages; personal relations were smoothed and social discontent quieted’ (We’re in the Money, 133–4). 24. See Jeanine Basinger, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960 (New York: Knopf, 1993). For insightful analysis of Depression-era melodramas, including women’s films, see Anna Siomopoulos, Hollywood Melodrama and the New Deal: Public Daydreams (New York: Routledge, 2012).

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25. Lucy Fischer, ‘Bette Davis: Worker and Queen’, in McLean, Glamour in a Golden Age, 84–107. 26. Frances Marion was the first scriptwriter to win two Oscars – for The Big House (MGM, 1930), and The Champ (MGM, 1931), though neither were women’s pictures, while Sarah Mason shared one for Little Women (RKO, 1933). The only female director of note in the studio era, Dorothy Arzner, made six movies in the 1930s, all of them women’s pictures. 27. Richard Maltby, ‘A Short and Dangerous Life: The Gangster Film, 1930–1932’, in Giulana Muscio (ed.), Prima dei codici (Venice: Edizioni La Biennale, 1991), 159–74. 28. Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). 29. Balio, Grand Design, 298–310. 30. Bran Nicol, The Private Eye: Detectives in the Movies (London: Reaktion, 2013). 31. Exhibition was affected by the refusal of many theatres to convert their standard screens to accommodate the movie’s widescreen format. The flop relegated its lead actor, John Wayne, to nearly a decade making Poverty Row Westerns until John Ford cast him in Stagecoach (United Artists, 1939). See Marc Eliot, American Titan: Searching for John Wayne (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 39–94. 32. ‘Introduction’, in Edward Buscombe and Roberta Pearson (eds), Back In The Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western (London: BFI, 1998), 1. 33. ‘Producers Aim Classics’, Motion Picture Herald, 15 August 1936; Allen Larson, ‘1937: Movies and New Constructions of the American Star’, in Hark, American Cinema of the 1930s, 183. 34. Don Miller, ‘B’ Movies: An Informal Survey of the American Low Budget Film, 1933–1945 (Seattle: CreativeSpace, 2015); Balio, Grand Design, 342–50. 35. McLean, Glamour in a Golden Age, 6–11; Basinger, The Star Machine, 3–11 (quotation, 4). 36. The stars ranked first in the Quigley list of top annual money-makers, based on a poll of exhibitors, were not the glamour icons of the era. Marie Dressler was No. 1 in 1932–3, Will Rogers in 1934, Shirley Temple in 1935–8, and Mickey Rooney in 1939. 37. Anna May Wong, the first significant Chinese-American movie performer, was stereotyped as a ‘Dragon Lady’ or demure ‘Butterfly’. MGM passed her over for the Chinese female lead in The Good Earth (1937), a prestige picture based on Pearl Buck’s best-selling novel, in favour of German actress Luise Rainer. Five African-Americans did build successful careers in 1930s Hollywood – Louise Beavers, Hattie McDaniel, Fredi Washington, Lincoln ‘Stepin Fetchit’ Perry and William ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, but they were not stars in the conventional sense. See Graham Russell Hodges, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend, 2nd edn (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012); and Miriam Petty, Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).

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38. For an example, see Cathy Klaprat, ‘The Star as Marketing Strategy: Bette Davis in Another Light’, in Tino Balio (ed.), The American Film Industry, rev. edn (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 351–76. 39. Harry Brandt, ‘Box Office Poison’, Independent Film Journal, 3 May 1938. 40. Rosten, Hollywood, 331–2. 41. Bette Davis, The Lonely Life: An Autobiography (New York: Putnam, 1962), 157. 42. ‘H’wood 2d Chance Stars’, Variety, 24 April 1935, 3. 43. Alexander Walker, Stardom: The Hollywood Phenomenon (New York: Stein & Day, 1970), 240. 44. For its 1930s Frank Capra classics, Columbia borrowed Claudette Colbert from Paramount and Clark Gable from MGM for It Happened One Night, Gary Cooper from Paramount for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), and James Stewart from MGM for You Can’t Take It with You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). 45. Danae Clark, Negotiating Hollywood: The Cultural Politics of Actors’ Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1995), 37–63; Giulana Muscio, Hollywood’s New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 128–9. 46. See Richard Maltby, ‘The Genesis of the Production Code’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 15 (March 1995), 5–32. 47. Gregory Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics and the Movies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 170–4; David Eldridge, American Culture in the 1930s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 66–8. See too Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 48. To offer a trivial example of preempting international censorship, married couples in Hollywood movies slept in single beds to meet a requirement of the British Board of Film Censors. 49. The principal sources for this orthodoxy are Raymond Moley, The Hays Office (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1945); and Will Hays, The Memoirs of Will H. Hays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955). 50. Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 51. Margaret Thorp, America at the Movies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939), 17. 52. Richard Maltby, ‘The Production Code and the Hays Office’, in Balio, Grand Designs, 37–72 (quotation, 72). 53. Lawrence Levine, ‘Hollywood’s Washington: Film Images of National Politics During the Great Depression,’ in Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in America’s Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 231–55 (quotations, 231, 253); Eldridge, American Culture in the 1930s, 68–70. 54. For the NRA and broader anti-trust issues in the 1930s, see Ellis Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966). 55. Balio, Grand Design, 19–21. 56. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1995).

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57. For insightful review of the long history of the Paramount case, see Alexandra Gil, ‘Breaking the Studios: Antitrust and the Motion Picture Industry’, New York University Journal of Law & Liberty, 3 (April 2008), 83–123. For the New Deal’s leading trust-buster, see Wilson Miscamble, ‘Thurman Arnold Goes to Washington: A Look at Antitrust Policy in the Later New Deal’, Business History Review, 56, 1 (1982), 1–15. 58. Ethan Mordden, The Hollywood Studios: House Style in the Golden Age of the Movies (New York: Knopf, 1988), 368. 59. Gil, ‘Breaking the Studios’, 123.

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chapter 1

The Political History of Classical Hollywood: Moguls, Liberals and Radicals in the 1930s Mark Wheeler

H

ollywood’s relationship with Washington reflected the broad political trends of the Great Depression decade. Once scorned as vulgar Jewish hucksters, the studio moguls looked to achieve social recognition through political identification with the largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) Republican party establishment. For some, most notably MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, conservative convictions reinforced status concerns, as was evident in their opposition to the New Deal, the rise of labour unions, and radical causes like Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPIC) gubernatorial election crusade in 1934. This form of ‘mogul politics’ reflected the instincts of its promoters: hardness, shrewdness, autocracy and coercion. In contrast, the crisis of the Great Depression and the coming of the New Deal engendered in other segments of the film community, including directors, writers and a galaxy of stars, a significant degree of liberal political activism – and radicalism in the case of some. This chapter analyses the mogul political response to the Great Depression, assesses the significance of the EPIC campaign for film community politics, and examines the politicisation of the Hollywood workforce in response to the New Deal and the rise of fascism abroad.

mogul politics Except for Darryl Zanuck and Walt Disney, all the movie moguls (Carl Laemmle, Harry Cohn, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Joseph and Nicholas Schenck, the Warner brothers and Adolph Zukor) shared a

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common Jewish immigrant heritage.1 These men embodied the American Dream through their rise from the teeming immigrant ghettos of urban America to make fortunes in the new medium of the cinema. Having experienced the extremes of poverty, they jealously guarded their newly acquired fortunes, downplayed their Jewishness, and assimilated into mainstream society.2 While taking pride in their accumulation of riches, the Jewish moguls never forgot the pogroms that had driven their families to emigrate from Eastern Europe and were uncomfortably aware of ingrained WASP prejudice in their new homeland.3 Hollywood’s Jewishness came regularly under attack from anti-Semites like Henry Ford, the moguls found themselves barred from the exclusive country clubs and oldest business groups of their adopted Los Angeles, and their children could not gain entry into the city’s best schools. In spite of battling each other for ascendancy in the film business, the film bosses saw their real enemies as the ‘goyim of Wall Street who were constantly plotting to take over their studios’.4 Subsequently, they remained conscious of needing to achieve respectability in the eyes of the politically powerful.5 With some evident exceptions, the moguls were Republican not from any deeply held conviction but because most wealthy Americans supported the Grand Old Party (GOP). In showing attachment to ‘sound’ conservative principles, they were hopeful of deflecting any potential anti-Semitic attack. Their values were determined by self-interest – if they could acquire the requisite status through identifying with Democrats, as was the case for Jack Warner, they did so.6 The exception was Vice-President and General Manager of MGM Louis B. Mayer, ‘the man who brought the Republican Party to Hollywood and Hollywood to the Republican Party’, in the words of film historian Steven Ross.7 The hugely egotistical Mayer not only ran the industry’s most glamorous studio but also wanted acceptance from the nation’s political and social elites.8 Despite his outsider status, he cosied up to those he considered the respectable classes and spent as little time as possible with fellow filmmakers. Mayer championed conservative values based on the sanctity of order, authority, patriotism, clean living, small-town solidarity, and family. Serving in Republican Calvin Coolidge’s 1924 presidential re-election campaign as an enthusiastic, but lowly, neophyte, he established a politically valuable connection with Ida R. Koverman, Herbert Hoover’s chief political operative in California. Appointing her as his personal secretary would give Mayer access to the man widely expected to become the next GOP president. Moreover, as the secretary of the Los Angeles Republican Party Central Committee, Koverman gave him an entrée into the Southern California branch of the party.9

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To fund Hoover’s 1928 presidential ambitions, Mayer required MGM’s studio workers to contribute to his campaign coffers. More significantly, as a Californian delegate to the Republican National Convention he persuaded newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst to transfer his support from Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon to the Great Engineer. As a kingmaker, Mayer drew upon a relationship with Hearst founded on mutual self-interest wherein Mayer called Hearst ‘chief’ and Hearst named him ‘son’. After Hoover’s successful presidential election, he swelled with pride when asked to be the first overnight guest to stay at the White House. As Koverman noted to Lawrence Richey, an aide to the president-elect: Re: Louis B Mayer. Do you remember our talk about making a gesture? Why could we not include a trip to Florida [where Hoover was vacationing] for a couple of days? This is another small boy – new at the game and used to a great deal of attention. I know he would strut around like a proud pigeon.10 Unfortunately for Mayer, Hoover’s inability to prevent the nation sinking ever deeper into the Great Depression made him a one-term president. Looking to boost his ally, the mogul presented him with a national survey of business leaders’ ideas for reinvigorating the economy in 1931. However, others were deserting the sinking ship. Mayer could not rally a disillusioned Hearst to the Republican cause in the 1932 presidential campaign. Sensing a change in national mood, the press baron supported Roosevelt and cut his ties with Mayer. With defeatism seeping into Republican ranks, Mayer did everything possible to boost morale and reinvigorate Hoover’s re-election prospects. To lift the gloom hanging over the 1932 national convention, he arranged the screening of a film of Hoover, the holding of a half-hour pro-Hoover rally when the president’s name was placed in nomination, and a cascade of balloons onto the convention floor to celebrate his ally’s re-nomination. Whatever the benefits to party morale, they were very temporary, but Variety would comment that Mayer had established himself a national leader of both politics and show business, ‘the only American holding that dual honor’. Now firmly established as Hollywood’s pre-eminent political figure, he was appointed chairman of the Republican State Central Committee in September 1932. As well as making ponderous radio speeches in support of Hoover, the mogul enlisted a host of conservative MGM stars – among them Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Colleen Moore, Conrad Nagel and Anita Page (even child star Jackie Cooper was put on show) – to draw the crowds

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to Republican rallies. The climax of the political razzmatazz was a massive celebrity-led rally held on 2 November before a huge crowd at the Shrine Auditorium.11 The 1932 election was the first in history to use movie celebrities so systematically in the cause of political salesmanship. Whereas Mayer was the Republican pioneer of this new form of politics, the Democrats were also alive to its potential benefits. FDR received the backing of stars connected to other studios, including Will Rogers (Fox), Gloria Stuart (Universal) and newcomer Katherine Hepburn (RKO). Aware of the power of cinema, he assiduously courted alliances with the film industry, notably with Warner Bros. Searching for film executives to counter Mayer’s Republicanism, William Randolph Hearst was instrumental in converting the formerly pro-Hoover Jack and Harry Warner, respectively Head of Production and Chief Executive of their familyowned studio. To seal the deal, Harry (who acted as FDR’s point man to Hollywood) summoned Jack to New York to be told by Democratic luminaries Jim Farley, Joseph P. Kennedy, Al Smith and John J. Raskob: ‘There is revolution in the air and we need a change’.12 The younger Warner consequently organised a spectacular Roosevelt rally at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to which he invited almost every major star in the industry except those Mayer barred from attending. In the battle of the moguls, he was the clear winner, helping FDR to a crushing victory over Hoover by 1,324,000 to 847,900 votes in once solidly Republican California. In gratitude for this support, the new president would appoint Jack Warner chair of the Los Angeles National Recovery Administration (NRA) in 1933. Priding itself on ‘Good Citizenship and Good Pictures’, Warner Bros went on to forge a reputation as the New Deal studio. The early infatuation of its bosses with FDR was most evident in the 1933 movie Footlight Parade (see Harvey Cohen’s chapter in this volume). Although the Warners cooled somewhat on the Roosevelt administration over its promotion of collective bargaining rights for labour, their studio continued to produce movies dealing with political and social issues pertinent to the New Deal agenda. The brothers never lost their admiration for Roosevelt personally. Jack Warner would remark in his memoirs, ‘I found him a vital and enormously magnetic man and . . . we began a friendship that endured to the day he died’.13 Though in no way starstruck, FDR used the film industry to enhance his political image. It was more the case that Hollywood was in awe of him rather than vice versa. Understanding how much the moguls sought social acceptance, he was happy to give them an autographed photo or an invitation to dinner at the White House – even those

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Figure 1.1 Louis B. Mayer, Hollywood’s most conservative mogul.

who were avowedly Republican. Nevertheless, Louis B. Mayer was famously resistant to this charm strategy. Invited to the White House to meet the new president, he put a timepiece on FDR’s desk with the explanation, ‘I heard you have the ability to have a man in your hip pocket after eighteen minutes’. Exactly seventeen minutes later, Mayer stood up, said goodbye and exited the room!14 With Herbert Hoover now in the political wilderness, the MGM mogul never regained the same level of interest in presidential politics. Nevertheless, he was instrumental in leading the most blatant studio intervention in any election in American history to prevent Upton Sinclair becoming California governor in 1934.

upton sinclair and the 1934 epic campaign The muckraking author of The Jungle (1906), an exposé of Chicago’s meatpacking industry, Sinclair had long campaigned against the power and corruption of vested interests. An active socialist, he intended, among other things, to institute a graduated income tax, raise corporation taxes,

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and levy a special tax on the movie industry if elected governor of his native state of California. This made him a threat to the moguls at a time when their studio stock values had declined dramatically and only MGM had stayed out of the red. In contrast, Hollywood liberals and radicals considered the EPIC campaign as an opportunity to support social reforms. In June 1934 Will Rogers announced that Sinclair intended to seek nomination as the Democratic gubernatorial candidate. On 28 August, he swept the party’s primary to run on the EPIC platform (based on plans outlined in his 1934 book, I Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty). The ensuing crusade generated a mass movement by organising more than 2,000 chapters, undertaking a vast voter registration campaign, and publishing a daily newspaper with a peak circulation of some 2 million. It reached out to the unemployed (numbering over 700,000 in the so-called Golden State), the underprivileged and the economically insecure.15 In the eyes of California business leaders, however, the thought of having a socialist governor elected by the dispossessed was tantamount to social revolution. In these circles, EPIC’s foremost critics were the press barons and movie moguls.16 Sinclair’s problematic relations with Hollywood producers dated back to the early 1930s. After falling out with MGM over a movie project he was commissioned to write, he offended the entire studio system by attempting to secure independent funding for Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico, which he eventually presented in abridged form. The final straw was his acceptance of $25,000 from industry pioneer William Fox in 1933 to write an exposé of Hollywood’s irregular financial practices. Believing himself cheated by fellow moguls into surrendering control of his hard-up studio, Fox hoped that Sinclair’s book would help him regain what he had lost. Instead Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox damned the whole industry as being part of the illegitimate capitalist infrastructure through which ‘the wires are pulled and strings set’ by Wall Street.17 To set matters right, Sinclair advocated nationalisation of the film industry and strong federal regulation to deter the studios’ dubious forms of accounting. On the 1934 campaign trail Sinclair made film industry mistreatment of its workers a key issue. He called for the rehiring of film workers laid off amid the previous year’s financial crisis in production and for unemployed actors and technicians to have the right to rent idle studios to produce pictures of their own. For the studio bosses, including the minority of Roosevelt supporters, EPIC’s agenda was a declaration of war on their interests. The call

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went out to ‘stop Sinclair’ at all costs.18 This intervention indicated a pivotal shift in the moguls’ approach to electoral politics: It was the first campaign in which . . . [they] . . . participated primarily to protect their economic interests . . . [Initially] the social attractions of politics – the desire to be embraced by powerful men . . . overshadowed the economic ones. After the Sinclair campaign the two came into closer balance. For the moguls, the social rewards always remained strong. But from 1934 on, these needs were reinforced by economic necessity.19 The moguls claimed that Sinclair’s election would induce them to relocate their studios in Florida.20 With Louis B. Mayer and MGM production head Irving Thalberg in the lead, they propagated an anti-Sinclair line in fake newsreels and supported the staid, incumbent Republican Governor Frank F. Merriam. Meanwhile the Hearst papers declared Sinclair to be a ‘most dangerous Bolshevik beast’ who was trying to ‘Russianize’ California. Other tactics included a week-long news blackout on all EPIC activities, followed in short order by a ‘Ridicule Sinclair’ week, a ‘Distort EPIC’ week, a ‘Sidetrack Sinclair’ week, a ‘Minimise Sinclair’ week and a ‘Discredit Sinclair’ week, all of which spread falsehoods about his message.21 In tandem with this, MGM produced a series of California Election News newsreels to be shown in cinemas in the three weeks before the election. At the end of September 1934, Thalberg established a special film unit to produce these movie shorts that were scripted by MGM’s Carey Wilson, who had written the Hearst-backed Gabriel over the White House in 1933, and shot by Felix Feist Jr, a test footage director for the studio.22 In these productions, authentic-looking actors mixed with members of the public and were apparently ‘interviewed’ by the self-declared ‘impartial inquiring cameraman’ to raise concerns about the EPIC platform. Merriam’s supporters were presented as respectable members of the community who articulated the close relationship between economic prosperity and happiness. Conversely, Sinclair’s supporters were featured as itinerant lowlifes intent on flooding into California when the socialist paradise was realised. For instance, in Californian Election News No. 3 trainloads of hobos and criminals were shown migrating to the state, drawn by Sinclair’s promise of an easy life.23 In this way Thalberg skilfully played on middle-class Californians’ fear of outsiders and concern that an interventionist government would threaten their freedoms. He employed realistic-looking people to stereotype ‘differences’ between Sinclair and Merriam supporters,

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leaving no doubt with whom respectable citizens should sympathise. Some EPIC supporters found these propaganda pieces to be comical in their blatantly biased distortions. As one historian notes, however, ‘They were judging the short too much on what it said, not on what it showed . . . This was a new political medium – a visual medium . . . Forget the line of dialogue. It was the face – the visual evidence – that was important’.24 Along with these propagandist newsreels, the moguls pressurised their employees to support Merriam and help fund a war-chest of $500,000 that was deployed by Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America supremo Will Hays (formerly Postmaster-General in the Republican administration of Warren G. Harding and manager of his successful 1920 presidential campaign) to ‘stop’ Sinclair. At first studio executives made their rank-and-file workforce listen to anti-Sinclair speeches made by prominent Republicans. Subsequently, each of their employees making over $90 a week was required to contribute the equivalent of one day’s pay to the Merriam campaign. At Columbia, an enormous thermometer installed on the patio of the dining room recorded progress towards the 100 per cent mark of employee donations. Even the top writing and directing team of Robert Riskin and Frank Capra, whose films celebrated idealism, courage and integrity, were made to contribute. Communists John Howard Lawson, president of the Screen Writers Guild (SWG), and John Wexley refused to pay up, however. Studio boss Harry Cohn promptly got rid of Lawson, who was on a weekly contract, and declined to renew Wexley’s option when it came up.25 At MGM, workers received vouchers made out to Louis Mayer in place of their day’s pay. With no choice but to pay the Merriam ‘tax’, the young Billy Wilder, a recent émigré from Nazism, was left with two conflicting thoughts: ‘One was: It may not be democratic, but it’s a brilliant idea. Maybe if businessmen in Germany had deducted fifty marks from their workers to stop Hitler, Europe would be a safer place today. The other was: I fled fascism for THIS?’26 Nevertheless, the levies provoked a mini-mutiny amongst some creative personnel. Though threatened with the sack, MGM story editor Sam Marx and others made financial contributions to Sinclair’s campaign. More broadly, the fledgling Screen Writers Guild approved a resolution condemning the threats used to obtain funds. Meanwhile, a group of writers, among them Allen Rivkin, Riskin and Dorothy Parker formed the Authors League for Sinclair. As Rivkin commented, ‘We rebelled, because we felt the man had the right to a fair campaign and that we had to speak for ourselves. It was democracy in action and a rebellion against the control of the studios over our non-studio lives’.27

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Liberal movie stars shared the screenwriters’ sense of outrage. Appalled to discover that Thalberg had produced the fake newsreels, Frederic March castigated the MGM Production Head, a onetime socialist orator in his New York youth, only to be told: ‘Nothing is unfair in politics. We could sit down here and figure dirty things out all night, and every one of them would be all right in a political campaign’.28 Condescension of this kind only encouraged disobedience in actor ranks, including top stars like Will Rogers, Jean Harlow, Charlie Chaplin, Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney (who threatened to donate a whole week’s pay to Sinclair if Warner Bros compelled him to donate one day’s salary to Merriam). However, they could not match the political and financial power of the anti-EPIC forces. The day before the election, Hollywood trade papers exhorted their readers to: VOTE AGAINST UPTON SINCLAIR CAST A VOTE TO SAVE YOUR JOB VOTE TO SAVE THE MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY.29 When the ballots were counted, Sinclair’s tally of 888,000 votes was well short of Merriam’s 1,139,000. A triumphant Louis B. Mayer declared that California voters had chosen patriotism over the evils of radicalism, but this was hardly a triumph of democracy. The moguls’ alliance with the Hearst press pioneered use of opinion polls, political advertising and public relations strategies, which would become commonplace in subsequent American elections. The Hollywood Reporter exclaimed that the campaign against EPIC was ‘the most effective piece of political humdingery that has ever been effected!’30 A bitter Sinclair complained: [The moguls] have made propaganda and they have won a great victory with it, and are tremendously swelled up about it. You may be sure that never again will there be an election in California in which the great ‘Louis Be’ will not make his power felt . . . California should stand up and sing hosannas for the greatest state industry, MOTION PICTURES, and the same industry should, for itself, point to its work whenever some . . . scary legislation comes up in the various State Legislatures during the next few months.31 Ironically, the Merriam administration went on to levy a corporation tax that hit its campaign allies where it hurt most – their pockets.

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Hearst had to close several papers as a consequence. With his fellow moguls once more threatening to quit California, Mayer opened talks to relocate MGM to North Carolina. This was a prelude to a new attack being launched by the anti-EPIC allies to stem the tide of ‘socialism’ associated with such taxes and demand a residency requirement for all state welfare applicants. Doubting they could find more favourable conditions elsewhere, Merriam held firm against the studios’ anti-tax campaign. For the moguls, this was evidence that the Reds had managed to inveigle themselves into the Republican Party. Disillusioned by this outcome, Mayer retreated from public campaigning but not from politics. He turned MGM into a training ground for GOP activists who could put over the Republican anti-tax and antigovernment message better than most professional politicos could. They included Robert Montgomery, George Murphy, Adolphe Menjou, Robert Taylor and James Stewart. Mayer’s vision paid off in two ways – he established a stable of stars able and willing to serve in Republican campaigns and created a cadre of future leaders in Hollywood politics (Montgomery and Murphy were key players in the Screen Actors Guild, both serving as its chair, and the latter went on to win California’s US Senate seat in the otherwise disastrous year of 1964 for national party fortunes).32

hollywood liberals and radicals More immediately, however, Roosevelt’s popularity and reaction against the anti-EPIC campaign did much to turn Hollywood into a Democratic town. On the eve of the 1936 presidential election, one poll found movie personnel favouring FDR by six-to-one over Republican challenger Alf Landon. While Roosevelt was not the first president to associate with the film community, no predecessor had so actively courted its stars to line up in support of his public policies.33 Hollywood’s liberals were especially welcome in the White House. FDR formed particularly close ties with actors Melvyn Douglas, his wife Helen Gahagan Douglas and Will Rogers. It was his judgement that forming alliances ‘with the big names of the screen could only enhance a politician’s standing’.34 As well as campaigning for Roosevelt, Melvyn Douglas became a leader in the state Democratic Party and was the first actor to serve as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. His wife, Helen Gahagan Douglas, transferred her acting skills into political activism, serving on the advisory board of various New Deal agencies, becoming an advocate for the rural poor in California, and forging a close relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt. She would outdo her husband as a politician, serving as

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Democratic National Committeewoman from 1940 to 1944 and becoming the first woman elected to Congress on the Democratic ticket in California in 1944, but her career in politics would end with red-baiting defeat by Richard Nixon in the 1950 Senate election.35 Roosevelt’s liberalism appealed to film industry activists concerned about injustice at home and the encroachment of fascism abroad. Until his death in a flying accident in 1935, comedian Will Rogers effectively acted as Hollywood’s ‘Number One New Dealer’ through his advancement of FDR’s policies on his popular radio show. As historian Lary May remarked, On the radio he mixed the humorous advice on health and good food with words of support for ‘Franklin’s’ effort to pass social security, to levy higher income taxes on the rich, and to provide jobs through public works. In the world of foreign affairs, Rogers was also one of the first to recognise the rise of fascist threats.36 A more strategic form of politicisation occurred when Douglas and screenwriter Philip Dunne took the lead in forming the Motion Picture Democratic Committee (MPDC) to support radical Democrat Culbert Olsen in his successful 1938 campaign to become California governor. This was the forerunner of the Hollywood Democratic Committee that would promote FDR’s re-election in 1944. In that wartime campaign, film stars such as Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield and Judy Garland accompanied the president on rallies and whistle-stop tours across the country. As Life magazine commented, ‘Since the New Deal’s salad days, Tin Pan Alley has almost been as staunchly Democratic as Tammany Hall. Broadway and Hollywood have consistently expended most of their political enthusiasm on Franklin D. Roosevelt’.37 This rising tide of Hollywood liberalism reflected the migration of many New York-based writers and stage actors who had found employment in the West Coast film industry after the coming of sound. For Broadway stars the lure of salaries offered in Hollywood was irresistible. As Steven Ross observed, ‘these men and women tended to be more educated, cultured and politically engaged than those who had spent their entire career in . . . “the low brow world of motion pictures”’.38 As sound films required good dialogue, the studios also sought out Broadway-based playwrights, novelists and short-story writers. This cohort included Sidney Buchman, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Moss Hart, Sidney Howard, Lillian Hellman, George S. Kaufman and Nathanael West. Many had emerged from New York literary, liberal and socialist backgrounds, often being trained in the vernacular of

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Figure 1.2 Donald Ogden Stewart, Hollywood communist and president of the Anti-Nazi League for Defense of American Democracy, accepting the screenplay Oscar for The Philadelphia Story (MGM 1940).

Jewish street debates.39 One exception was Donald Ogden Stewart, initially an apolitical and highly paid MGM scriptwriter of classics like Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). Radicalised by the Depression and the rise of fascism, he became an obsessive Marxist and joined the Hollywood Communist Party.40 While some writers readily took the money, others complained about the philistine-like tendencies of studio executives. For instance, Irving Thalberg regarded them as factory employees who clocked in, worked for five and half days, and produced eleven pages of script per week.41 Such conditions led to the formation of the Screen Writers Guild (SWG) in 1933 and the politicisation of many writers.42 Initially, the writers’ education occurred in a Southern Californian landscape unencumbered by political machines, strong forms of partisanship and trade unions. On becoming more politically experienced, however, they

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were canny operators who adopted clearly drawn ideological positions. Several activists, like Stewart, were attracted to the Hollywood Communist Party, a small but potent force in the 1930s and led by screenwriter John Howard Lawson. More generally, such politicisation was evident in the struggles to gain studio recognition for the screen guilds and in the espousal of anti-fascism that became a rallying call for liberals and radicals alike. Established by the Communist International in 1935, the Popular Front united a coalition of groups in support of progressive causes at home and abroad. One of its principal organisations was the AntiNazi League for Defense of American Democracy (ANL) that drew support across the left-liberal political spectrum (and even from some conservatives) when formed in 1936 under the presidency of Donald Ogden Stewart. Among its backers were writers like Philip Dunne and Dudley Nichols, directors such as John Cromwell and John Ford, and film stars and actors including Gloria Stuart, Frederic March and his wife Florence Eldridge, and Melvyn and Helen Gahagan Douglas. As more Jewish refugees from Europe came to Hollywood bearing news of Nationalist atrocities in the Spanish Civil War and the Nazis’ antiSemitism, other anti-fascist groups sprang into existence under the Popular Front banner. The most notable, formed in 1937, was the Motion Picture Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain (MPAC), whose membership would peak at 15,000.43 In addition to the Jewish refugees welcomed into the film community, many of its liberal members also had witnessed at first hand the reality of fascism on trips to Europe. As a consequence, two scholars noted, Hollywood became ‘awash with “experts” in the nature, forms, and evils of fascism’.44 Appalled by the Franco uprising in Spain and the refusal of the British, French and American governments to support the Republican loyalist cause, liberals joined in efforts to provide it with political support and financial aid. The recruitment of celebrities enabled Popular Front groups to transmit an anti-fascist agenda via the nation’s media. Concurrently, the ANL mounted petitions, held public meetings, broadcast a weekly radio programme, published a bi-weekly paper and picketed the German Embassy. In 1939 it sponsored several pro-labour and Quarantine Hitler rallies while coordinating with the MPAC a ‘Save Spain’ rally at the Hollywood Legion stadium. As Philip Dunne recalled, The entertainment world closed ranks solidly . . . with anti-Nazi forces to form an international bloc of artists and intellectuals against fascism . . . Most big Hollywood parties [would include a] guest of honour who might be Andre Malraux or Ernest Hemingway, here to raise money to send ambulances to Loyalist Spain.45

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The MPAC raised funds for the Republican Loyalists by staging ‘Sticks and Stones’, a political cabaret that attacked those ‘domestic gnats’ that mobilised against the Popular Front and ‘foreign soldier ants’ who swarmed against the world’s democracies. The skits also criticised reactionaries like Congressman Martin Dies of Texas, the first Chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). An offshoot of the MPAC, the Freedom of the Screen Committee sponsored communist writer Howard Lawson’s 1938 film about the Spanish Civil War, Blockade (United Artists, 1938). By now communists had grown in importance within Hollywood’s anti-fascist circles because the party had become a lightning rod for those ‘tender comrades’ who believed that it could resolve the ills of American capitalism and fascism.46 In addition to Lawson and Stewart, the membership included fellow writers Alvah Bessie, Paul Jarrico (and wife Sylvia Gussin), Ring Lardner Jr, Budd Schulberg and Dalton Trumbo, writer-director Herbert Biberman, and actor Lionel Stander.47 According to Stewart, most of his fellow Hollywood communists were committed to the US Communist Party (CPUSA) stands on rights, decency, justice and equality rather than to its ideology, structure or hierarchy.48 In turn, Hollywood’s Popular Front organisations increasingly came under the influence of communists who assumed responsibility for their day-to-day running and were tactically astute in getting fractious issues resolved to their liking. For a while, the bonds between CPUSA members and liberal supporters remained reasonably strong as revolutionary rhetoric was played down. Each side saw mutual advantage in allying against injustice at home and fascism abroad.49 In liberal eyes, the communists were a small group that posed far less danger to democracy than Hitler’s Germany. Nevertheless, the Popular Front disintegrated with the signing of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact in August 1939 and Hitler’s subsequent invasion of Poland. This precipitated the collapse of a number of affiliated groups, notably the Anti-Nazi League and MPAC, and provoked divisions within the Motion Picture Democratic Committee.50 For liberal members of the MPDC executive, led by Philip Dunne and Melvyn Douglas, the Nazi–Soviet pact threatened to undermine anti-fascism across Europe. Conversely, Hollywood communists loyally pursued the CPUSA’s line that the European war was nothing more than an imperialist conflict between fascists and illegitimate ‘democracies’.51 To liberal consternation, the communists engineered with fellow traveller support the Executive Board’s approval by ten votes to seven of a pro-neutrality motion in October 1939. Taking

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advice from a conclave of New Dealers during a Washington visit, Douglas submitted a report calling on the MPDC to align with the Roosevelt administration on international affairs. However, a resolution to that effect went down to defeat at an Executive Board meeting of 19 December 1939 in the face of communist arguments that alliance with FDR would push the MPDC into the hands of the far right. The liberal counter-response that CPUSA had already aligned with these forces through its endorsement of isolationism had no effect. Another liberal resolution specifically repudiating CPUSA similarly got nowhere with the Board. Although, Dunne insisted on this being put to the entire membership, a meeting attended by some 300 people at the Hollywood Women’s Club on 30 January 1940 overwhelmingly rejected it.

Figure 1.3 Publicity still for Melvyn Douglas in 1939, the year he co-starred with Greta Garbo as a Soviet special envoy in Ninotchka (MGM) and battled real communists in Hollywood.

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If further proof were needed, the outcome signified that the one-time allies in the Popular Front were no longer capable of resisting common enemies because of their mutual suspicions of each other. The subject of considerable personal abuse from communists, Douglas had already resigned from the MPDC. Following the defeat of Dunne’s resolution, disillusioned liberals followed him out of the organisation in droves. Blaming the communists for the collapse of the Popular Front, Douglas concluded that they should be barred from any future liberal organisation. ‘It was a problem of trustworthiness . . . not of their being communists per se’, he declared in a speech to the California Citizens Council, a newly formed liberal group, in February 1940. ‘Their longterm goals were not mine, and they were using my goals as expedients to achieve goals in which I did not believe’.52 This determination to break with communists did not save liberals from being tarred as allies of subversives by right-wing critics. Dismayed by the anti-Franco message of Blockade, Production Code Administration (PCA) head Joseph Breen charged that the Hollywood ANL was ‘a conspiracy of left-leaning screenwriters . . . that strove to capture the screen of the United States for communistic propaganda purposes’.53 Such attacks made it inevitable that congressional conservatives in both main parties would begin targeting the Hollywood Left. Their principal investigatory instrument was the House Committee on Un-American Activities that was established in 1938 to root out subversive elements in civil society under the chairmanship of Representative Martin Dies, a right-wing Texan. An inveterate publicity-seeker, Dies got off to a bad start by naming ten-year old Shirley Temple as a communist dupe for letting her name be included in a congratulatory message to the communist-owned Ce Soir newspaper in France. He was more effective in claiming communist influence in the Federal Theatre and Writers Project that subsequently had its funding terminated by Congress in June 1939. Encouraged by this success, Dies talked of undertaking a broad investigation of communism in Hollywood, claiming in early 1940 that ‘forty-two’ prominent film community members were communists or fellow travellers. They were supposedly responsible for the ‘subtle but every effective propaganda’ in films like Fury (MGM, 1936), Blockade, and Juarez (Warner Bros, 1939). His explanation for communist influence was simple: ‘Most of the producers are Jews’.54 Dies was hurried into launching an inquiry sooner than he intended when a local ex-communist named a host of stars, including Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Melvyn Douglas and Frederic March, as CPUSA sympathisers in grand jury testimony. In contrast to what later happened in the post-war Red Scare, the producers held firm in

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defence of their employees on this occasion. When Dies arrived to conduct hearings on the West Coast, he encountered a delegation led by Paramount’s Y. Frank Freeman, President of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, bearing the message that Hollywood welcomed an impartial investigation but the industry’s 32,000 workers would not ‘yield to anyone in their true Americanism’.55 The HUAC chair got welcome publicity from having a host of stars testify before his committee, all of whom he cleared of subversive association. He then left in search of communists in the more fertile terrain of federal agencies. Emerging unscathed from the episode, James Cagney jauntily remarked, ‘It wouldn’t be economically sound for me to endorse a program that gave me just one shirt when I now have two’.56 In conflating Jewishness with communism, however, Dies revealed once again that Hollywood would have to demonstrate continually its ‘American’ values to the nation’s political elite. The industry’s tremendous popularity and Jewish complexion made it a subject of WASP suspicion for propagating alien ideas. If the moguls had earlier feared the effect of such concern on their social standing, liberals now found themselves in the firing line. Despite being in the forefront of newly emergent liberal anti-communism, Melvyn Douglas found himself exposed to particular calumny. The Jewish star underwent the indignity of a Photoplay interview published under the title: ‘Is Melvyn Douglas a Communist?’ A trenchant denial did not save him from further attacks: when FDR appointed him to head the Arts Council of the Office of Civilian Defense’s Voluntary Participation Branch in 1941, he came under conservative criticism for enjoying the ‘frills’ of the post (a sinecure of $8,000), displaying communist tendencies, and conforming to his Jewish heritage.57

conclusion Hollywood’s politicisation throughout the Depression reflected many of the trends which affected America in the inter-war era. The GOP’s ideology as the party of free enterprise strengthened mogul identification with it in the New Deal years. Nevertheless, the conservatism of most studio bosses was also an expression of their longstanding desire for acceptance by the nation’s socio-political elites. This reflected their understanding of Hollywood’s outsider status in mainstream US business and political affairs. For many WASPs, the film industry was an object of suspicion because of its apparent Jewishness. As best exemplified by Louis B. Mayer, the moguls sought to overcome such latent forms of anti-Semitism, thereby assimilating themselves into the elites who ran the country.

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With the changes inaugurated by the New Deal, however, Hollywood manifested a growing liberal sensibility. In contrast to their bosses, a host of writers, directors and stars associated themselves with its progressive reforms and campaigned for Roosevelt, who understood the benefits of such celebrity endorsement. The breech in Hollywood politics came into the open as a result of mogul efforts to defeat Upton Sinclair’s EPIC campaign. With the fascist threat becoming more evident as the 1930s progressed, film community liberals lined up with Hollywood’s communists under the flag of the Popular Front, an alliance that the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939 brought to an end. As embattled liberals sought to disentangle themselves from it, they found themselves under attack from the right for having associated with the Reds. The 1940 HUAC investigations of Hollywood constituted the first effort to purge it of left-liberal influences, a campaign that would reach a climax in the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In essence Hollywood both shaped and was itself shaped by the broad political trends of the Depression decade. The film community pioneered celebrity politics in the presidential campaigns of 1932 and 1936 and modern techniques of political communication in the 1934 anti-EPIC campaign. More particularly, the moguls, liberals and radicals shared a mutual concern to represent their contradictory values in their political activism. Consequently, Hollywood became a significant force in reflecting and informing the political debates of this turbulent era, a role it would never relinquish.

notes 1. Budd Schulberg, Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince (New York: Souvenir Press, 1981). 2. Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Doubleday, 1985). 3. Colin Shindler, Hollywood in Crisis: Cinema and American Society 1929–1939 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 61–2. 4. Ibid., 63. 5. Ronald Brownstein, The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood–Washington Connection (New York: Vintage Press, 1990), 26. 6. Shindler, Hollywood in Crisis, 63. 7. Steven J. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 52. For Mayer’s political life, see Brownstein, The Power and the Glitter, 19–47. 8. For an insightful biography, see Scott Eyman, Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005). 9. Biographical data on Koverman (1876–1954) is slight, but see Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, 58–61, 427 n 15.

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10. Brownstein, The Power and the Glitter, 21. 11. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, 68–71 (Variety quotation, 69). 12. Nancy Snow, ‘Confessions of a Hollywood Propagandist: Harry Warner, FDR and Celluloid Persuasion’, in Johanna Blakley et.al., Warners’ War: Politics, Popular Culture and Propaganda in Wartime Hollywood (Los Angeles: Norman Lear Center, 2003), 69; Jack L. Warner, with Dean Jennings, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood (New York: Random House, 1964), 215–16. 13. Brownstein, The Power and the Glitter, 93. 14. Stephen Schochet, ‘Tales of Hollywood and Politics,’ Hollywood Stories, 2010, http://www.hollywoodstories.com/pages/hollywood/h22.html. 15. Upton Sinclair, ‘End Poverty in California: The EPIC Movement’, The National Heritage, 13 October 1934, available at http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/sinclair. html. 16. Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 90. 17. Upton Sinclair, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox (Los Angeles: Upton Sinclair, 1933), xvi–xvii. 18. Upton Sinclair, ‘The Movies and Political Propaganda’, in William Perlman (ed.), The Movies on Trial: The Views and Opinions of Outstanding Screen Personalities Past and Present (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 190. 19. Brownstein, The Power and the Glitter, 42–3. 20. Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (New York: Random House, 1992), 199. 21. Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century, 118. 22. Greg Mitchell, ‘A Look inside Hollywood and the Movies: Democracy in Action: How the Studios Torpedoed Upton Sinclair’s Run for Office’, Los Angeles Times, 31 October 1993, available at: http://articles.latimes.com/1993-10-31/entertainment/ca-51476_1_upton-sinclair. 23. The Los Angeles Herald and Express published fake photo spreads of freight cars of tramps arriving in California on 26 October 1934. In reality the stills were not news photos but shots taken from the Warner Bros’ feature Wild Boys of the Road (1933). 24. Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century, 371. 25. Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St Martin’s, 1997), 708. 26. Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century, 360. 27. Greg Mitchell, ‘How Hollywood Fixed an Election’, American Film (November 1988), 30. 28. Sam Marx, Mayer and Thalberg: The Make Believe Saints (New York: 1975), 201 n. 29. Shindler, Hollywood in Crisis, 65. 30. Hollywood Reporter, cited from Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, The Politics of Upheaval 1935–36, The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. 3 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 119. 31. Sinclair, ‘The Movies and Political Propaganda’, 194–5. 32. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, 77–80. 33. Alan Schroeder, Celebrity in Chief: How Show Business took over the White House, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004), 10–16.

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34. Schroeder, Celebrity in Chief, 18. 35. Greg Mitchell, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs Helen Gahagan Douglas – Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950 (New York: Random House, 1998), 21–2. 36. Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 45. 37. ‘Political Potpourri: Broadway and Hollywood Contribute Skits and Slapstick to Enliven Democratic Campaign’, Life, 23 October 1944, 32–3. 38. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, 95. 39. Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, 85. 40. For an autobiographical account, including his later blacklisting, see Donald Ogden Stewart, By A Stroke of Luck! (London: Paddington Press, 1975). 41. Shindler, Hollywood in Crisis, 54. It was also suggested that when Mayer cut MGM wages by 50 per cent in the Hollywood financial crisis of 1933, he created more communists than Karl Marx. 42. Gerald Horne, Class Struggles in Hollywood 1930–1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds and Trade Unionists (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 43. Greg R. Rabidoux, Hollywood Politicos: Then and Now (Lanham: University Press of America, 2009), 39. 44. Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, 97. 45. Philip Dunne, Take Two: A Life in Movies and Politics, updated edn (New York: Limelight Edition, 1992), 115. 46. McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades, xv. 47. For good biographies of two Hollywood Communists, see: Gerald Horne, The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and Larry Ceplair, The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007). 48. Donald Ogden Stewart, American Film Institute Oral History Programme (December 1971), 94. 49. Brownstein, The Power and the Glitter, 67. 50. Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, 135. 51. McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades, 617–18. 52. Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, 139–53 (quotation, 149). 53. J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies and Broadcasting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 61–2. 54. Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 52–3. 55. Steven Alan Carr, Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History up to World War II, (New York: Cambridge University Press 2001), 172. 56. James Cagney, ‘Cagney’s Two-Shirt Theory on Communism’, Hollywood City News, 20 August 1940. 57. Sally Reid, ‘Is Melvyn Douglas a Communist?’ Photoplay, September 1940, 88; Hoberman and Shandler, Entertaining America, 150.

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chapter 2

Columbia Pictures and the Great Depression: A Case Study of Political Writers in Hollywood Ian Scott

If the 1930s were the American film’s golden age, much of the splendour could be credited to writers. (Bernard F. Dick)1 Before I reached my thirty-first birthday I had become a rather prominent politician in California. (Philip Dunne)2

I

n 1970 Film Comment devoted a whole edition to the work of screenwriters. This was belated recognition for a largely neglected tier of cinematic exponents. Long a champion of their cause, editor Richard Corliss would continue to be so when he became Time film critic, and he would author a definitive book on movie scribes.3 Although some film scholars would follow the trail he blazed, mostly in extended appreciations of the film industry and the odd biography, it remains something of a cliché – albeit an accurate one – that writers have never had their due in the Hollywood story. This was why Jorja Prover entitled her study of them No One Knows Their Names. Prover poses a somewhat contradictory question in her opening chapter, ‘Why another book about Hollywood writers?’, when her bibliographic sources handily point out the answer. In reality there had not hitherto even been a stream of work, let alone a deluge, on screenwriting as an art form, and still less on the people engaged in it. Prover’s seemingly schizophrenic outlook actually reflects that of the practitioners she documents. ‘While people working within the industry emphasised the importance of writing’, she observes, ‘the same individuals added a contradictory claim that screenwriting was relatively simple, requiring little unusual skill or ability.’4

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A number of scholars have reached the same conclusion as Prover that writers are ‘essential but undervalued’. Some histories of screenwriting have finally started to appear as revisionist history has gained ground in film studies. As Steven Maras points out, however, this new approach has cast the screenplay into a melting pot of structural forces – reception, technology, business – that have emphasised the predominance of the ‘system’ and how screenwriting might conceivably fit into, if not emerge from, that system.5 The neglect of screenwriters in their own right has its roots in the 1930s, a decade that saw the consolidation of the studio system, the advance of sound technology, and the proliferation of scribes who made their way out west in the hope of writing for the movies. In this era writers attempted to form a collective group, sought to have their work recognised by awards bodies, and began the first tentative steps towards documenting and preserving their art for future generations. It was also the time when writers had most to say about the industry, about politics and history, and about the society developing around them in the midst of perilous economic times. With the studio routine consolidating itself amid the Great Depression, how screenwriters fit into this constellation of circumstances, and how and why writers might add to the social considerations and political empowerment of movies is, perhaps surprisingly, a question rarely asked. How art – and in particular film – reflects society has been the subject of numerous studies. What part screenwriters played in all this has attracted less attention. The purpose of this particular chapter is to advance the process of assessing their significance and in doing so help rescue their role from undeserved obscurity.

studios, writers and the depression David Thomson’s Dickensian assertion – ‘It was the best of times, and the worst’ – essentially encapsulates appreciations of 1930s Hollywood. Identifying this dichotomy is much easier than analysing how filmmakers adapted to it and represented it on screen.6 Trouble was brewing at home and abroad as the decade dawned, and Hollywood assumed responsibility both for diverting people’s attention from the dire reality at hand and for offering hope of better days ahead. ‘In the 1930s’, confirms Thomson, ‘the movies shared in the nation’s troubles’.7 Films could whisk people away from the cares of everyday life through their capacity to entertain, or immerse them in societal strife while finding a way to offer hope and redemption in the final reel. This duality of purpose could even be played out in those self-same fantastical storylines supposedly little associated with the social-problem coterie of movies emerging during the decade. Thomson reminds us, for example, that Fay Wray’s character, Ann

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Darrow, is down and out as well as lost among the troubled masses, before the bigger issue of a giant ape confronts her in King Kong (RKO, 1933).8 As if designed to anaesthetise cinemagoers from the challenges ahead, King Kong hit theatres exactly a month after Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural address, and its larger-than-life pretensions seemed ideally suited to the task of reducing the audience’s woes, at least for the ninety minutes of its running time. Of course not all culture could resort to anything as seismic as having a huge gorilla running amok in New York so as to lessen people’s anxiety. But in the emergence of science fiction figures like Buck Rogers, of comic strip superheroes like Batman and Superman, and of ethereal angelic presences of all kinds descending from heaven to save humanity, American entertainment had a very good go. Up to 1933, cinema attendance had been falling for three years, while production costs were spiralling. Thomson rightly emphasises the coming of sound as part of the reason for increasing expenditure. The introduction of music into soundtracks was one factor in this. More significant was the cost of discovering and recompensing the legendary screen icons of the era. It was necessary to find a new generation of highly paid stars, reasons Thomson, to keep on luring audiences back to theatres. It was equally necessary to feed them dialogue. The likes of Bette Davis, James Cagney, Shirley Temple, Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant depended on screenwriting talent for their best lines.9 The best scribes would not live as long in the memory as the stars, but their ability to conceptualise, identify, reimagine and still entertain remained for too long one of the unacknowledged miracles of Hollywood’s defining age. In common with Thomson, Marc Norman and Tom Stempel have considered their undervalued contribution, while Bernard Dick, Bob Thomas and Scott Eyman are among those who have profiled some of the legendary studio heads together with a few of the writers that served them.10 However, no one has strongly equated a group of writers with an ideological template that conceived movies during the era as a testing ground for social and political commentary about the Depression, politics and American society more generally. The Hollywood studios of the 1930s turned out a cycle of distinctive political movies, characterised by a richness of writing that produced settings, characters and narratives capable of resonating with a shellshocked public. From The Washington Masquerade (MGM, 1932), proceeding through I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Warner Bros, 1932), Gabriel over the White House (MGM, 1933), Wild Boys of the Road (Warner Bros, 1933) to Fury (MGM, 1936), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Columbia, 1936), Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Warner Bros, 1939) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Columbia, 1939), a host of films tackled social dislocation and political crises at every level – local,

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national and international – from the perspective of generic comedy, melodrama and espionage tropes. The likes of Preston Sturges, Henry King, Billy Wilder and Mervyn LeRoy played an important part in this development. Leading the charge of socially conscious and politically inquisitive filmmakers, however, was Frank Capra, who was widely credited with initiating the social-problem film and tackling overt political topics in movies related to the contemporary context of the Great Depression. Capra’s series of films at Columbia Pictures in this era set a standard for Hollywood social and political inquiry that early on included The Power of the Press (1928), Platinum Blonde (1931) and Forbidden (1932) but which was really set in train by American Madness in 1932. Though the attention afforded institutional and social problems in 1930s movies should not come as a surprise, the marginalisation of cinematic interest in this area for a substantial period thereafter certainly does. The opening pages of Nancy Lynn Schwartz’s classic book, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars, the first of its kind to document the battle for writers’ recognition in the 1930s, spends its opening pages detailing the awful effects of the Great Depression on the eve of Roosevelt’s inauguration. In her assessment, ‘Hollywood churned out celluloid lethe to lull the miserable Americans into forgetfulness’. As a corollary to this, the social-issue movies of the day were explained away as a commercial convenience. Hollywood, Schwartz declared, was ‘apparently affected by the national disaster only as it could be used for content in films such as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and The Public Enemy’.11 Earlier, Andrew Bergman’s equally influential We’re in the Money had taken the ‘screwball’ comedy template to task as an ‘implosive’ device intended not to expose the fissures of society so much as bind those wounds together with ‘wackiness’.12 While it would be wrong to deny commercial considerations and social-unity purpose in Hollywood’s Depression-era movies, it would be equally incorrect to interpret these concerns as their sole motivation. Capra, Columbia and their cross-town rivals, Warners and MGM, deserve credit for taking on board topical sentiment. Moreover, it was no coincidence that the real driving force behind the ideological sensibility and critical social observation at these studios was their most prominent screenwriters, who found something of a collective voice as the 1930s wore on. In promoting the kind of subject material that interested them, these scribes wanted their studios to examine social and political issues far more forcefully and deliberately, even divisively, than is often acknowledged or was thought possible in the era of the Production Code.

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Using Columbia writers (Jo Swerling, Sidney Buchman and Robert Riskin especially) as a case study, this chapter considers how their portrayal of Great Depression-related issues reflected the politicisation of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. It suggests that the vision and doctrines of studio moguls and famous directors were not as all-encompassing as commonly believed. Swerling, Buchman and Riskin not only invented and moulded the archetypal pattern for political movies throughout Hollywood’s subsequent history but also they provided as deft an appreciation of the Great Depression’s political significance as any artistic or literary representation of it during these years.

anatomy of the screenwriter It should not come as any surprise to learn that the subtitle to Philip Dunne’s Take Two, a memoir of his time at the forefront of Hollywood screenwriting, should be called A Life in Movies and Politics [emphasis added].13 Dunne was at the heart of the controversies and crises that sprang up as a result of the anti-communist purges in post-war Hollywood. Despite these vicissitudes, his career spanned four decades dating back to the heart of the Depression, and his screenplays for the likes of The Last of the Mohicans (United Artists, 1936), Stanley and Livingstone (1939), How Green Was My Valley (1941), The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947) and David and Bathsheba (1951) (all 20th Century-Fox) won plaudits and numerous awards. Dunne was also comparatively unusual for a screenwriter in that he spent the greater part of his career with one studio: 20th Century-Fox. For twenty-five years he produced consistently entertaining and wellregarded material and progressed to being a director who adapted his own work and that of others for the screen. Dunne was in a good position, therefore, to reflect on not only the general appreciation, or lack of it, of writers in Hollywood, but also their contribution towards a more socially engaged output during the 1930s. He fought political battles initially for writers’ recognition in the industry, later for their survival amidst the tumult of the post-war Red Scare, and thereafter for their academic significance in the unfolding history of American film. He also knew the individuals engaged in this side of the film industry and worked closely with Riskin in particular in the US government’s Office of War Information from 1942 to 1945. Implicit in screenwriters’ struggles to receive greater acknowledgement was their conviction of having done sterling service for their country amid the crisis of the Great Depression. They saw themselves as having helped to get the nation through these troubled times, galvanise its population and offer hope of better days ahead – all from the relative comfort of a movie theatre.

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‘I have no wish to begrudge any director the credit he deserves’, remarked Dunne in his memoir. ‘I only deplore the fact that the Auteur Theory [which had been so prominent in film scholarship for two decades up to the point of his autobiography] enriches him in prestige while it robs the writer of the credit he has earned’.14 Contemporaneously with Richard Corliss and Film Comment, Dunne identified the critical and historical tendency to write the scribes out of the story of Hollywood. Accordingly, he became politically active, not simply in the conventional sense of sympathising with causes, but more specifically in institutionally stating and re-stating the case for broader recognition of screenwriters’ contributions to the film industry and its social outlook. The film scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s exasperated Dunne in its underplaying of their significance; and in his position, who could blame him? Even for an analyst as erudite and influential as Neal Gabler, the impact and importance of writers followed a well-established line of thinking that a number of other historians and critics had long argued. All manner of scribes, some with what he called ‘indifferent talent’, got on trains back East in the 1920s and the early 1930s and charged headlong towards Hollywood where, as Herman Mankiewicz, who would co-script Citizen Kane (1941) with Orson Welles, famously remarked to his friend, Ben Hecht, ‘your only competition is idiots’.15 Their arrival set a pattern that became part of standard accounts of this era. The writers hated Hollywood, the moguls hated writers, and the directors resented both for trying in any way to steal the credit for what they regarded as their pictures. Some writers allowed themselves to be bought off, as it were, to earn ridiculous sums of money for short periods, during which they often did very little of any note. Some tried to rail against the system, and one or two actually made a reputation and career for themselves. Gabler sees F. Scott Fitzgerald, who worked initially for MGM and later as a freelancer from 1937 until his death in 1940 (and satirised himself as a Hollywood hack through the character of Pat Hobby in a sequence of short stories published in Esquire),16 as the classic example of a famous writer who did not understand that film was not a ‘writer’s medium’. This representation insinuates what has passed into Hollywood folklore. Fitzgerald’s case found its echo in the film careers of William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, Somerset Maugham, Nathanael West, Upton Sinclair and numerous other come-to-Hollywood scribes. Many were great writers but few, if any, became great screenwriters because of the nature of the system they operated within. ‘In Hollywood’, Gabler contends, ‘writers were hired hands on a project that was not and never would be the product of a single sensibility, much less theirs’.17 In other words, writers could never be considered on a par with the auteurs, the directors who transcended the mass culture, production-line ethos of the

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film industry to turn Hollywood movies into an art form. Gabler was far from being alone in making such a judgement. In the words of Richard Fine, writers who came out to Hollywood under the illusion that it would provide a new outlet for their creative talent found themselves ‘subjected to petty interferences and . . . destroyed as artists’.18 As fellow film scholar Tino Balio notes, their demeaning relegation to the status of mere employees was not simply a case of being shabbily treated by individuals lacking in any regard for the talent they were importing. More broadly, it was the outcome of a hierarchical ‘system’ where ‘creative authority resided in the managerial class – namely, [the] producers’.19 And the story that these scholars map out has plenty of victims to cite. Hollywood writers never gained anything like the respect that their fellow scribes back East could expect. Time was almost always of the essence and production schedules demanded scripts to order, not art to emerge. Indeed what the famous writers named above signposted was a tactic some of the studios employed right from the beginning of the 1920s, no better realised than in Sam Goldwyn’s ‘Eminent Authors’ scheme – the recruitment drive to induce the East Coast’s intellectual and literary establishment, no less, to decamp to the Hollywood hills.20 The stage was thus set for a battle between screenwriters with serious intent about their fledgling craft, and the ‘names’ that had seemingly been imported by some studios for the sole benefit of adding gloss to a production. Indeed, before the agreements negotiated by the newly incorporated Screen Writers Guild in 1941, credit for contributions on pictures was scant where multiple scribes were involved at different stages in the process and lesser names could and were perceived to be ‘missing out’. As Balio surmises, in these areas of employer/employee relations and working conditions, writers made progress as the decade passed, ‘but [the studios] would have nothing to do with elevating the creative process of the screenwriter’.21 Why is this potted history important? Well, even Gabler acknowledged that some writers brought a political and social sensibility with them to Hollywood, something he called ‘street corner socialism’ lifted from out of their New York upbringing.22 Studios might have been unwilling to recognise the creative talent flowing from their writers, but their dedication to the political causes of the day was harder to ignore. It was that allegiance to causes – with the New Deal and the Spanish Civil War heading the list – and the early recognition of the Nazi threat that prompted the formation and activism of the Screen Writers Guild, of the Anti-Nazi League, and ultimately brought the Communist Party into Hollywood circles. Gabler and others, therefore, present a collection of groups and personnel that defined the interior patterns of studio-era filmmaking and politics. In effect this constellation of people helped cement the industry’s

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place in the wider American project of the twentieth century. As Lary May comments in The Big Tomorrow, the 1930s marked the beginning of an era – lasting until the 1960s – when the film industry ‘reshap[ed] nationalism and public life’.23 If, as he suggests, the country was ‘insufficiently imagined’ up until the 1930s, and popular film thus began to ‘validate the experiences’ of people from different backgrounds, places and position in a time of upheaval and turmoil, it is essential to tunnel further into that process in order to identify some of the personnel responsible for that validation.24 If we accept that the industry monolithically changed – and it did of course – was it just the usual suspects of moguls, stars and directors who did the changing, and, as Gabler asserts, only wanted to be seen to be doing the changing? If the public began to associate what went up on screen with the activities in their lives, and again evidence points to the fact that they did, this was due in no small part to the characters, dialogue and stories set in train by some of the emerging screenwriting fraternity of the period. In other words, why should screenwriters not be recognised for tapping into the zeitgeist of the times, and offering distinct, social, cultural and political critiques of American society? This case study of one studio and one small coterie of writers from that studio asserts that they did detail the period in this way and should be recognised for their enormous contribution. In the 1980s and beyond, a number of scholars emphasised the way in which different groups as well as individuals engaged with the Great Depression in general, and the New Deal especially, and how that political and social engagement informed the way Hollywood approached later wartime activities, post-war political crises, and social and cultural filmmaking more generally.25 Indeed May exemplifies much of that important work in his prologue to The Big Tomorrow, by recalling his association with one of Charlie Chaplin’s closest friends, Jerry Epstein. A long-time Chaplin collaborator and eventual fellow-victim of McCarthyism, Epstein served to emphasise for May that radicalism and the rejection of certain capitalist assumptions, which the Depression had put in jeopardy and the New Deal was supposed to be saving and preserving for future generations, was actually very much a part of the wider cultural and artistic agenda that was fundamental to the shaping of Hollywood in the 1930s. So who did that radicalising and why? From one perspective, the reason that writers are key is because first of all, they have so often been dismissed in the Hollywood story. Constantly marginalising them is a way not only of denying their value but of hiding their role in a crucial era of cinematic history. Marc Norman, author of one of the bigger overviews of screenwriters in recent memory, may be correct when he says that after World War II a new breed of writer emerged who wanted to be in Hollywood because of

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a love of movies and of writing movies. The implication of this assertion is that writers before the war, back in the 1920s and 1930s, never wanted to be there at all, a perspective that has become the default analysis of the fledgling profession. In describing the likes of Raymond Chandler ‘griping his way to a fortune at Paramount’ and William Faulkner ‘cursing Warners while he banks the checks’, Norman presents the discontented novelist-turned-screenwriter as typical of this era’s breed of film scribes, but in reality they were the exceptions.26 It was Talking Pictures, Richard Corliss’s ground-breaking book of the mid-1970s, that began the long slow process of documenting, never mind rehabilitating, the writer in movie colony accounts. In inviting noted film scholar Andrew Sarris to write a preface to that book, Corliss was of course striking up a challenge to the rise of auteur theory in America – which Sarris had pioneered by taking up the themes of European critics – and the practice of privileging the director above all else as the artistic purveyor of a film. At the very least Corliss wanted recognition for a long overlooked group. ‘It’s clear’, he said, ‘that some method of classification and evaluation is necessary to assess the contribution of that overpaid but unsung genus known as the screenwriter’.27 Corliss’s attempt to hijack the auteurist theory for deployment on behalf of screenwriters is given a nice appreciation in Ian Hamilton’s account of how his own screenwriter obsessions in the 1960s were marginalised by the cineastes’ insistence on directorial projection. By the time his book appeared in the early 1990s, there was some comfort to be had from a stellar trio of film scribes, comprising William Goldman, Paul Schrader and Robert Towne, having been finally credited as ‘bankable stars’.28 Hamilton could therefore approvingly quote Schrader’s indignant expression of pride in his profession: ‘If I wanted to be just a writer, I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a screenwriter’.29 Corliss ended up constructing a screenwriters’ pantheon of the great and the good. The author-auteurs’ category which occupied the first part of the book was every bit as contentious and subjective as Sarris’s previous list of great directors had been. The collection included an array of different scribes from around the Hollywood firmament. Several of those writers inevitably belonged to the same studio and therefore had a connection, if not a rationale, for the approach to their craft dictated by one studio routine. However, neither Corliss nor any other analysts, including Hamilton, went on to assess whether the writers and their studio had a causal connection, to each other if not the Great Depression that engulfed them. And yet Columbia Pictures offers just that kind of tantalising linkage. For nowhere on the backlots of Hollywood were screenwriters given the kind of recognition and understanding as that which came the way of the scribes at this studio.

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Of course, Columbia screenwriters were not alone in being significant contributors to the 1930s and 1940s screen assessment of the Great Depression. Indeed, as Corliss’s historical and codifying assessment tried to assert, they did not necessarily number among the most formative practitioners of the era in the 1930s. More than that, they seemed to exist in a wholly contradictory environment because Columbia’s president and production director Harry Cohn alternated between scorning and valuing them. One anecdote, recounted by biographer Bob Thomas, illustrated the former trait. Cohn was famous for doing daily rounds of the studio to make sure everyone was beavering away. One day in the early sound era, he smelled coffee brewing in a backlot hut that housed some scribes, but heard little sound. ‘Where are the writers?’ he screamed in exasperation at the inactivity. ‘You are stealing my money!’30 There were plenty of other instances of Cohn’s disdain for his screenwriters over the next thirty years. As Thomas also points out, however, the mogul had a grudging respect for a profession he often maligned. There were numerous occasions when Cohn showered them with public praise, something rarely if ever accorded to stars and directors, including the great Frank Capra. After the runaway success of Lady for a Day (1933), which garnered Academy Award nominations for Capra and writer Robert Riskin, the Columbia boss asserted in an interview with the New York Telegraph, ‘We believe here that writers are more important than either star or director’. ‘Look at Lady for a Day . . . More credit is due to Riskin for that picture than to Damon Runyon, who wrote it as a magazine story’.31 With a cast of streetwise misfits, hapless hoodlums and anxious government officials, Riskin effortlessly inserted romance, comedy and topicality into Runyon’s original tale of ‘Apple Annie’, the down-on-her-luck street seller transformed into a society lady for the benefit of her visiting, and soon to be betrothed, daughter. So successful was the formula that Columbia gave Jo Swerling the go-ahead to replicate May Robson’s matriarchal role in David Burton’s Lady by Choice (1934), with Carole Lombard co-starring.32 ‘Cohn favored writers’, confirms Bernard Dick, citing Charles MacArthur, Ben Hecht (the pair who co-wrote the screwball comedy Twentieth Century) and Donald Ogden Stewart (who co-wrote Holiday with Sidney Buchman for Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn) as some of the other accomplished practitioners occasionally plied with the mogul’s particular brand of praise. In effect Cohn’s wildly unstable persona managed to create a tension and dynamism that perpetuated creativity and no little work ethic. Columbia writers were not necessarily unique in Hollywood, but their productivity was impressive and stood up handily in comparison with any of their contemporaries. Dick, in particular credits these scribes as a retinue that ‘helped forge the Columbia signature’.33

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Figure 2.1 Jo Swerling (left) and Robert Riskin (right), co-writers of The Whole Town’s Talking (Columbia, 1935), in discussion with its star, Edward G. Robinson (centre).

Norman Krasna and Dore Schary first made their name at Columbia before moving on to MGM in the mid-1930s, where they respectively scripted hits like Fury (1936) and Boys Town (1938). However, the towering talents of Cohn’s team were Jo Swerling (his first important signing of the sound era, who wrote thirteen scripts in his first twelve

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months at the studio), Robert Riskin (who was writing dialogue addons and completing his first full script for the company within weeks of joining), and Sidney Buchman.34 Of this trio, Bob Thomas asserts that Buchman was the one Cohn could least afford to lose, a view supported by Corliss’s assessment of him as Cohn’s ‘indispensable’ writer.35 Educated at Columbia University and Oxford, he began his career as a stage director in London before getting a contract at Paramount. After finding his way to Columbia in 1934, Buchman spent his time ignoring Cohn’s outrageous outbursts and ploughing his own furrow. The movie that eventually made his reputation was the screwball comedy, Theodora Goes Wild (1936). Buchman quickly adhered to the Cohn formula of so-called ‘genre plus’ that entailed writing a conventional story in the vein of a screwball comedy or action adventure, but adding subtlety and daring to the mix. Theodora Lynn (Irene Dunne) is apparently shackled by the uptight and prudish residents of Lynnfield, but the plot reveals her to be the author of a series of racy novels that the local newspaper is about to serialise. Moving from the sleepy Connecticut town to New York in pursuit of Melvyn Douglas’s suave art editor, Michael Grant, Theodora finally begins to revel in her notoriety amidst the Big Apple’s literary folk. She discovers fashion, passion and a taste for the quotable one-liners that sees the press hang on her every word, all the while challenging the conventions of society at large. As Theodora Goes Wild illustrated, Buchman was especially adept at delineating characters who challenged conventions of all kinds. His script for Gregory La Cava’s 1935 comedy She Married her Boss was something of a rehearsal for this big hit. This portrayed Claudette Colbert’s Julia Scott at least as equal if not better than her tycoon husband (also played by Melvyn Douglas). In the conclusion of the movie, both are able to snub the capitalist ethos that dominates their lives for so much of it. They break the shackles of the department store they own/ work in by throwing bricks through its front windows at the denouement, thus giving at least a nod to Buchman’s radical political instincts. Here was ‘genre plus’ in action – screwball romance mixed with caustic social commentary. As well as a facility to placate Harry Cohn and extend their influence on the Columbia backlot, what Buchman, Swerling and Riskin especially had in common was their skill as writers in male/female, elite/ common man, employer/employee relationship (the battle of the sexes/ classes/political powerbrokers in other words) and working it into parables of society at large in the 1930s. Examples include lovestruck reporter Stew Smith (Robert Williams) cosying up to Anne Schuyler (Jean Harlow), a seemingly out-of-touch socialite in the Swerling-Riskin

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co-scripted Platinum Blonde (1931), upstanding banker Tom Dickson (Walter Huston) in the Riskin original screenplay for American Madness (1932) and any amount of characters in Buchman’s classic script for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). The latter features sassy and spirited secretary Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur), compromised yet concordant Senator Joe Paine (Claude Rains), and even drunken yet determined Washington reporter Diz Moore (Thomas Mitchell). As Bernard Dick has commented, thanks to the attention to detail on every character, major or minor, shown by Swerling, Riskin and Buchman, directors like Frank Capra and Richard Boleslawski were able to articulate a pattern of cultural and social relations and translate them on screen into a ‘blending of narratives and motifs’.36 In Dick’s words, ‘Capra was fortunate in having [his three] writers who were able to create diverse or bipolar classics. With the right collaborators, romance, social differences, political conversion, and the triumph of goodness coalesced into a myth of America’.37 To the benefit of Capra’s emergence as a great director and Columbia’s rise from being a ‘Poverty Row’ outfit, Swerling and Riskin’s ability to construct parables of society and sexuality bore fruit in so-called ‘fallen woman’ features, such as the Capra-directed Ladies of Leisure (1931), and Forbidden (1932), as well as the Nick Grinde-directed Shopworn (1932), the last two starring the incomparable Barbara Stanwyck. Combining this formula with the emerging screwball narrative, it was Swerling and Riskin’s brief writing partnership on Platinum Blonde that secured the template for Columbia’s socially reflective scripts. The film is often identified as Riskin’s entry into the studio’s canon and his emergence as the studio’s most successful writer of the 1930s. In confirmation of the Columbia team members’ rapport with each other, however, Pat McGilligan observed of the movie that ‘it is hard to identify each writer’s contribution, and Swerling could be just as funny and socially alert as Riskin’. 38 In one scene, Harlow’s Anne Schuyler leads Smith from the front door of the family mansion through a series of grand hallways and anterooms. ‘Just how far away is this library?’ Stew Smith asks deadpan, brilliantly conceiving within one line the distance – metaphorically if not literally – between the haves and have-nots of Depression-era America. Ultimately Stew rejects his new privileged life after having impulsively married Anne, symbolically gives away some of his expensive garters holding up his socks (he makes a point at the beginning of the movie of saying he never wears them) to a homeless man towards the close, and realises he truly belongs with fellow reporter Gallagher (Loretta Young). The love triangle may sentimentalise Gallagher’s attachment but it pierces through the social and class divides fracturing America at the time.

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Figure 2.2 Anne Schuyler (Jean Harlow) leads Stew Smith (Robert Williams) into the library in Platinum Blonde (Columbia, 1931).

According to Tom Stempel, ‘Perhaps the most important reason Columbia succeeded where other smaller studios did not was that the studio made a point of hiring and keeping good screenwriters’.39 This assertion confirms the premise at the heart of this chapter’s assessment; but its implicit point about loyalty also reflects how appreciative Cohn could be of his wordsmiths – as well as financially realistic in his recognition of their importance to Columbia. The value he placed on the craft of writing during the heyday of the classic studio system not only enabled a small studio like his to make a goodly number of the classic movies of the 1930s but also attested to the significance of film scribes within the Hollywood system. Stempel’s understanding of the significance of the stellar trio of Swerling, Buchman and Riskin is based as much on the construction of language, rhythm and structure of their scripts as it is on the subject matter. As he reminds us, Buchman’s most famous script, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, actually had 186 different speaking parts in it, a testament to the film’s concision and masterly control of plot and character.40 Richard Corliss adjudged Mr. Smith to be the high point in Capra’s social trilogy that also featured Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Meet John Doe (1941), both scripted by Riskin. Yet he also considered

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it a superlative continuation of the themes and issues explored by Buchman in his own social triptych that included Theodora Goes Wild and The Talk of the Town (1942).41 This was a significant acknowledgement that writers were as deserving of recognition as directors in the ranks of auteurs.

conclusion According to Marc Norman’s standard study of screenwriting, Dudley Nichols was primarily responsible for the invention of this cinematic form owing to his capacity for thinking through the process and meaning of his fledging profession. It was no coincidence in this film scholar’s assessment that when John Gassner published what was in effect the first in his collection of ‘great’ American screenplays with an eye to their literary/artistic merits, it was Nichols who co-edited and wrote the preface to The Best Plays of 1943.42 The latter’s credentials for the task were beyond doubt in light of a screenwriting resume that included classics like The Informer (1935), Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Stagecoach (1939). Nichols was seen by some contemporaries as a leftist firebrand in Hollywood’s Depression-era politics. As Norman contends, however, he espoused a relatively moderate liberal position, was supportive but rarely shocking in his union activity for the Screen Writers Guild (SWG), and his films were far more often honourable and upstanding rather than radical and incendiary.43 Nevertheless, Nichols took strong stands on behalf of his profession. In 1936 he refused the Oscar (the only one he ever received) for The Informer because the SWG was currently on strike – the first ever case of refusal. More generally, his conviction that a lone scribe could formulate a great cinematic work at a time when bands of writers were usually employed on one picture was instrumental in eventually compelling studio recognition that screenwriting was an art rather than an industrial process. In this way Nichols helped to establish the principles of the screenwriting fraternity to which the Columbia trio of Riskin, Swerling and Buchman subscribed. In their case, these beliefs served as a studio manifesto that underwrote the creation of a classic body of work that has stood the test of time. The Columbia band of writers did not wear their collective hearts on their radical sleeves, but they understood that the socio-economic changes wrought by the Great Depression required political re-evaluation. This found expression at one level in their SWG activism and support for popular front groups.44 It was also manifest in classic scripts that showed movie characters drawing on populist values to meet the challenges of

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hard times. The Depression-era movies scripted by Swerling, Riskin and Buchman gave expression to individual consciousness and characterisation rather than lofty perorations about politics, but they were a vital and formative cultural commentary on troubling times. As a consequence, these three scribes were instrumental in making Hollywood screenwriting an art form and screenwriters a valuable artistic commodity.

notes 1. Bernard F. Dick, The Merchant Prince of Poverty Row: Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 89. 2. Philip Dunne, Take Two: A Life in Movies and Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), 11. 3. Richard Corliss, Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema (New York: Penguin, 1975). 4. Jorja Prover, No One Knows Their Names: Screenwriters in Hollywood (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 11. 5. Steven Maras, Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice (London: Wallflower, 2009). Maras also outlines a useful critical history of screenwriting development in documenting the moves from biographical appreciations of leading figures (though rarely of screenwriters) towards structures and practices that formulated the classical Hollywood system (see 15–23). 6. David Thomson, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies and What They Did to Us (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 106. 7. Thomson, The Big Screen, 107. 8. Thomson, The Big Screen, 106. 9. Thomson, The Big Screen, 107. 10. Marc Norman, What Happens Next? A History of American Screenwriting (London: Aurum, 2008); Tom Stempel, Framework: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000); Dick, The Merchant Prince of Poverty Row; Scott Eyman, Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005); Bob Thomas, King Cohn: The Life and Times of Hollywood Mogul Harry Cohn (Beverly Hills: New Millennium Press, 2000). 11. Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), 5. 12. Andrew Bergman, We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 133–4. 13. Dunne, Take Two. 14. Dunne, Take Two, 47. 15. Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 322. 16. These have been published as The Pat Hobby Stories (New York: Scribner’s, 1962) [also in numerous other editions]. 17. Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, 324.

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18. Richard Fine in Hollywood and the Profession of Authorship, 1928–1940 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), 3. 19. Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–39 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 83. 20. Maras, Screenwriting, 163–6. 21. Balio, Grand Design, 85. 22. Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, 327. 23. Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1. 24. May, The Big Tomorrow, 2. 25. A brief list of titles here might include Colin Shindler, Hollywood in Crisis: Cinema and American Society, 1929–39 (London: Routledge, 1996); Brian Neve, Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (London: Routledge, 1992); Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981); Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–60 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 26. Norman, What Happens Next?, 244. 27. Corliss, Talking Pictures, xxiii. 28. Ian Hamilton, Writers in Hollywood, 1915–1951 (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1991), viii–ix. 29. Hamilton, Writers in Hollywood, ix. 30. Thomas, King Cohn, 80. 31. New York Telegraph, 19 March 1934, also quoted in Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 290. 32. Ian Scott, In Capra’s Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Robert Riskin (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 68–9. 33. Dick, The Merchant Prince of Poverty Row, 89. 34. Thomas, King Cohn, 81. 35. Corliss, Talking Pictures, 276. 36. Dick, The Merchant Prince of Poverty Row, 92. 37. Dick, The Merchant Prince of Poverty Row, 95 38. Pat McGilligan, Six Screenplays by Robert Riskin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xxiii 39. Stempel, Framework, 100. 40. Stempel, Framework, 102. 41. Corliss, Talking Pictures, 279. 42. Norman, What Happens Next?, 171–2. 43. Norman, What Happens Next?, 175. 44. Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, 107–8.

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chapter 3

Organisation Women and Belle Rebels: Hollywood’s Working Women in the 1930s J. E. Smyth

I

n 1940, Scarlett O’Hara’s saga (Gone with the Wind, Selznick International-MGM, 1939) was still making box-office records across the United States, and RKO was shooting Kitty Foyle (1940), the story of a 1930s working-class woman which became a career-transforming hit for star Ginger Rogers. Both films were the culmination of a decade’s worth of Hollywood productions about women who broke the rules, beat the odds and survived.1 Pushed between the struggles of first and second-wave feminism, the 1930s are often marginalised as an era of female empowerment for American women, and few historians would argue that the Hollywood film industry promoted and supported independent women on and off screen during the studio era.2 However, images of famous and forgotten women abounded during the Great Depression era, and popular historians and filmmakers would remember the decade as one where women represented strength, practicality and resourcefulness. Hollywood’s interest in representing women’s active roles in history and contemporary life was echoed in contemporaneous developments in academic and popular writing by the likes of Mary Beard and Edna Ferber. In line with this trend, many of the most popular films made during the 1930s were adaptations of literature authored by women and aimed at female audiences.3 Whether behind or in front of the camera, Hollywood women took an active part in creating some of the most memorable films of the ‘golden age’. As Frederick Lewis Allen commented in Since Yesterday (1940), the first popular history of the 1930s, ‘So many more women of the upper

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and middle classes were working now than had worked in the preDepression years that in their daytime costumes simplicity and practicality were in demand’.4 Though Allen’s book was full of headlining women such as political journalist and commentator Dorothy Thompson, First Lady and civil rights activist Eleanor Roosevelt, writer Pearl Buck, actress Katharine Hepburn and photographer Dorothea Lange, he argued that ordinary women’s experiences and attitudes toward work had fundamentally changed. The American woman ‘type’ of the early 1930s was alert-looking rather than bored-looking. She had a pert, uptilted nose and an agreeably intelligent expression; she appeared alive to what was going on about her, ready to make an effort to give the company a good time. She conveyed a sense of competence. This was the sort of girl who might be able to go out and get a job, help shoulder the family responsibilities when her father’s or husband’s income stopped.5 Allen stopped short of mentioning the millions of single and married women who worked, not to help deadbeat patriarchs suffering in the 1930s job market, but because they were the heads of house and enjoyed independence.6 However, audiences could see this ‘type’ played by Barbara Stanwyck (So Big, Warner Bros, 1932; Gambling Lady, Warner Bros, 1934; Annie Oakley, RKO, 1935), Bette Davis (Front Page Woman, Dangerous, both 1935; Marked Woman, 1937, all Warner Bros), Greta Garbo (Anna Christie, 1930; Queen Christina, 1933; Ninotchka, 1939, all MGM), Joan Crawford (Dance, Fools, Dance, 1931; Grand Hotel, 1932; Sadie McKee, 1934, all MGM), Ginger Rogers (Professional Sweetheart, 1933; Swing Time, 1936; Stage Door, 1937, all RKO), Ann Sothern (The Party’s Over, Columbia, 1934; There Goes My Girl, RKO, 1937; Maisie, MGM, 1939), Jean Harlow (Three Wise Girls, Columbia, 1932; Bombshell, MGM, 1933; Wife vs Secretary, MGM, 1936), Claudette Colbert (Cleopatra, Paramount, 1934; Imitation of Life, Universal, 1934; Private Worlds, Paramount, 1935), and Constance Bennett (Bought!, Warner Bros, 1931; Rockabye, RKO, 1932; Service de Luxe, Columbia, 1938). Nowhere was the image of the independent working woman promoted more effectively on and off screen than in Hollywood. This chapter will survey the career opportunities for women in Hollywood of the 1930s, while exploring the image of the working woman in the historical adaptation and Hollywood genre film. While providing an overview of women’s experience in front of and

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behind the Hollywood screen, it will address the work of actresses Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, writer Jane Murfin and editor Barbara McLean, as well as analysing the productions of A Woman Rebels (RKO, 1936), A Star Is Born (Selznick International, 1937), Kitty Foyle, and Gone with the Wind.

working for the studios Recent historiography on women in Hollywood has argued that while filmmaking offered many opportunities to women in the early silent cinema, following the rise of a new corporate managerial culture in the 1920s, women – particularly female directors – were forced out of Hollywood, ceding creative control to studio men.7 Although it is true that overall numbers of female directors declined, women’s employment remained robust in writing, editing, acting, publicity, costume and makeup design, administration, research and producing. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences began honouring work in adapted screenwriting and original stories in 1927–8, and created the category of best editing in 1934. Screenwriters Frances Marion, Sonia Levien, Frances Goodrich, Viña Delmar, Dorothy Parker, Josephine Lovett, Bess Meredith, Sarah Y. Mason, Claudine West, Elizabeth Hill, Adela Rogers St Johns, Jane Murfin and Lenore Coffee were all nominated or won Oscars between 1928 and 1939.8 Salka Viertel was responsible for Queen Christina (1933) and many of Garbo’s other projects at MGM, and Griffith-veteran Anita Loos would co-author San Francisco (MGM, 1936), one of the decade’s biggest box-office hits. Writers Lillian Hellman and Mary C. McCall, Jr were prominent in the Screen Writers Guild, and McCall would be elected its first female president in 1942. Paramount’s Anne Bauchens was one of three editors nominated for the first editing Oscar in 1934, and Barbara McLean was nominated four times during the 1930s (out of a record seven career total) for her work at 20th Century-Fox. McLean’s Fox colleague Dorothy Spencer (Stagecoach, United Artists, 1939) and MGM’s supervising editor and sometime associate producer Margaret Booth (Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935) were also nominated for their work, though Bauchens (North West Mounted Police, Paramount) would be the first woman to win the award in 1940. Far from discouraging women’s employment and career development behind the camera, the studios’ professional newsletters and publicists connected with the New York and Los Angeles papers profiled and praised their career achievements in the story and editing departments.9

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Women achieved their widest public recognition as stars, however. In 1941, Leo Rosten paid tribute to the impact of 1930s actresses Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo in influencing legions of female fans,10 and in the 1970s, new feminist film critics such as Molly Haskell drew attention to the 1930s’ generation of actresses and the range of films featuring independent and outspoken women.11 Though Shirley Temple and Ginger Rogers (with Fred Astaire) topped boxoffice exhibitors’ reports during the Depression,12 the tougher, financially independent Bette Davis and Mae West – one of the few stars to write her own scripts – also made the exhibitors’ top ten poll during the 1930s. In contrast to West, Davis had next to no control over the roles assigned to her at Warner Bros and finally refused to appear in films which offered one-dimensional and demeaning representations of women. Her very public contract dispute with the studio drew headlines in 1936, and, though her suit (waged in England) against the studio failed, it would serve as a precedent for colleague and friend Olivia de Havilland’s successful case against Warner Bros in 1943. As Davis wrote to Jack Warner, explaining her commitment to her career, I also am ambitious to become known as a great actress . . . I would be willing to take less money, if in consideration of this, you would give me my ‘rights’. You have asked me to be level headed in this matter. I feel I am extremely and hope you can agree that I am. I am more than anxious to work for you again, but not as things stand. I would be unable to do justice to my work at all – as I would feel I was coming back – not entitled to the things I sincerely believe I deserve.13 Davis articulated a serious commitment to her career as an actress and took her public image and responsibility to her audience very seriously. In 1937, she was asked to represent Hollywood actresses in an edited collection of professional essays on working in the Hollywood motion picture industry, Nancy Naumberg’s We Make the Movies (a volume to which Anne Bauchens also contributed an essay on film editing).14 Davis’s much discussed Yankee practicality is apparent in her half-joking introduction: ‘If the studio weather department will hold back the artificial fog of glamour for a while . . . we are just plain workers here . . . and we are your [the audience’s] humble servants’.15 Still burning from her dispute with the studios over poor story material, she explains the preeminent importance of story quality and the counterproductive structure of the star system which forces stars to play poor parts or ‘refuse’. She outlines the twelve to fourteen-hour days involved in shooting where she gets ‘dog-tired’, but

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also reveals ‘endless hours must be spent in reading’ about historical characters she plays, ‘until I know them so well I couldn’t possibly do anything inconsistent with their characterization’. Davis states flatly that far from seeing herself as some special artist, she is ‘extremely workman-like’, and pays tribute not only to the paying audience for supporting her work, but to the anonymous ‘women in the workroom’ who receive ‘no credit for the final product’ but are unflaggingly loyal to their stars and their work standards.16 Davis’s well organised, clear outline of the collaborative filmmaking process and her own approach to her work is in stark contrast to Paul Muni’s more elaborate, ‘arty’ approach which highlights the actor’s social importance in shaping minds. As he concluded, “[P]erhaps the actor can reach people and influence them so that they will go forth with a new strength and a new vision in combatting the evils of our own society’.17 One can almost hear Davis spitting ‘Bunk’ in the background.

the women who made hollywood: A STAR IS BORN

Davis’s articulation of women’s professionalism, practicality and artistry in Hollywood was echoed, often in a less academic fashion, in the dozens of popular movie magazines, which, in addition to covering a day in the life of an actress and her most recent film projects, profiled fashion choices, current romance, and home-related categories. But, bearing in mind Frederick Lewis Allen’s comments on the 1930s new woman, were Hollywood’s films about the industry itself also promoting professional women who worked for more than just helping unemployed patriarchs, fathers and husbands? Davis’s comments were published concurrently with the release of A Star Is Born, arguably the era’s seminal film about the movie industry. David O. Selznick’s production of A Star Is Born is indebted to What Price Hollywood? (1932), written by Adela Rogers St Johns and Jane Murfin, about a Brown Derby waitress who becomes a star and has to fight for her career after her mentor kills himself in her Hollywood home. While a producer reminds her that the public can make or break a star on a whim, Mary Evans (Constance Bennett) responds defiantly, ‘Well, they’re not going to break me without a fight. I’ve worked too hard to get where I am’.18 The St Johns–Murfin version resonated with the biographies of a number of major male and female stars who faced the erasure of their careers at the end of the silent era, including Selznick’s colleague and friend from Paramount, Clara Bow. Yet Mary was more durable, just like Jean Harlow’s star-crossed character in Bombshell (1933), and Esther

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Blodgett/Vicki Lester in A Star Is Born. In all three of these films, actresses survive career highs and lows, while male filmmakers, particularly in What Price Hollywood? and A Star Is Born, fail to recover and commit suicide. As Robert Sklar and I have discussed elsewhere, the 1937 version of A Star Is Born foregrounds the history of women working for the studios and portrays women’s work as a positive and empowering force.19 Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell and Robert Carson’s story, emphasised by intertitles, develops the theme of a new brand of female ‘pioneer’ colonising the West and finding her ‘El Dorado’ in Hollywood. Esther was born in Fillmore, North Dakota, the granddaughter of a more oldfashioned pioneer who came West in ‘a prairie schooner’, and Libby the studio press agent (Lionel Stander) uses her real frontier/log cabin roots to construct an all-American heroine for public consumption. Historian Hilary Hallett has explored Hollywood publicity departments’ use of ‘frontier’ metaphors to characterise women’s liberating experience in Hollywood during the early silent period.20 The Star Is Born script self-consciously builds upon these past and present historical contexts, linking Hollywood’s past and future to women’s work and Vicki Lester’s career as a major new star. But unlike most recent scholarly studies of the studio era, which focus on male director auteurs and female stars, Selznick’s film looks at women’s employment in the studios across the board, from stars to secretaries. Audiences see some of the ‘invisible’ but ‘loyal’ women to whom Bette Davis paid tribute in We Make the Movies. Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester’s career as successful actress is the focus of the film narrative, but audiences also see her as an unemployed extra and waitress. There are also studio executive secretaries, beauticians, script girls, caterers, and wardrobe women – not mute, but with lines and sometimes directing sardonic looks at know-it-all producers. Although female writers, such as A Star Is Born screenwriter Dorothy Parker, are not seen at work, she, like Lillian Hellman and others in the writers’ department, knew that Hollywood’s definition of women’s work was decades ahead of the rest of the country. Selznick’s Hollywood films about the industry, far from being fairy-tale creations of a ‘dream factory’, self-consciously engage with a variety of historical contexts.21 A Star Is Born might even be termed an ‘autobiopic’ as much as an industry snapshot of the Hollywood workplace in 1936-7. For example, as movie reviewer Charles Schneider wrote in 1937, ‘Lest there be those who would snicker up their sleeves at the “rank impossibility” of the Cinderella plot of A Star is Born, the highly recommended film at Loew’s State, let it be

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Figure 3.1 The central casting clerk (Peggy Wood), surrounded by female telephone operators, explains the difficulties of succeeding in Hollywood to Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester (Janet Gaynor) in A Star Is Born (Selznick International, 1937).

known that the picture nearly parallels the life story of its star, Janet Gaynor’.22 Another critic pointed out: For seven years, Janet Gaynor was one of the top-ranking box-office favourites. That is a remarkable record in Hollywood, second only to that of Mary Pickford’s. It was no surprise to anyone when, in 1936, she finally dropped to 24th place. 20th Century-Fox told her bluntly that she could not expect continued stardom, demoted her to the status of a featured player. Miss Gaynor pluckily refused a new contract and went over to Selznick International. At one point in A Star Is Born, the producer who gives her a contract is made to say: ‘Miss Blodgett, my whole organization thinks I’ve gone a little nuts to sign you. You see, all the experts seem to think that your type is a little mild for present-day taste.’ This is really the voice of Producer David O. Selznick crowing over his rival, Mr. Darryl Zanuck of 20th Century-Fox. For Mr. Selznick is willing to bet, and with good reason, that A Star Is Born will re-establish Miss Gaynor as a first-rank star.23

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Gaynor, like Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow, had once been that ‘one in a 100,000’ unknown bit player who wanted to be a star. Like Esther/Vicki, Gaynor beat the odds, and unlike her protagonist’s husband, ex-star Norman Maine (Frederic March), she had a success and career boost from the film and was nominated for another Academy Award.

zanuck, selznick and the promotion of women Despite failing to promote Gaynor, Darryl F. Zanuck was known for supporting two of the most prominent female editors in the industry: Dorothy Spencer, who cut most of John Ford’s Westerns; and Barbara ‘Bobbie’ McLean, the most nominated editor in Hollywood during the 1930s. McLean, far from simply transcribing a director’s wishes, worked closely with Zanuck on dozens of the studios’ top projects at a time when directors did not normally cut their own pictures. She was on the set, calling for retakes and protection shots and assembling the rough cut as she went, and was one of the few people capable of getting the dictatorial Zanuck to change his mind. Zanuck’s studio was often known as ‘19th Century-Fox’, due to its reliance on historical material, and though a lot of the biopics focused on men, Sonia Levien wrote quite a lot of them. And while Tom Schatz and Rudy Behlmer have corrected mainstream historiographic dependence on director auteurs in studio-era Hollywood, refocusing attention on producers such as Zanuck, Irving Thalberg and Hal Wallis, much of our understanding of the moguls was scripted and edited by women. Dorothy Hechtlinger was Darryl F. Zanuck’s chief secretary until 1943, when Molly Mandeville took over. Screenwriter and agent Frederica Maas was a close friend of Hechtlinger’s and remembered: When I was an agent for Edward Small, performing my daily rounds of the studios, Dorothy’s offices, adjacent to those of Darryl Zanuck, always held out a big welcome mat to this unhappy agent. Over steaming cups of coffee brewed in her office, we exchanged confidences, impressions, and opinions about the not-so-glamorous film industry we have both been a part of for some many years. Zanuck was the manipulator, Dorothy his good Girl Friday, his right hand, the perfect foil for his diabolical creativity. She had no set working hours, and neither did he. Her time was adjusted to his time, even if it ran late into night hours and sometimes even into dawn . . .24

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Dorothy and later Molly Mandeville would take down Zanuck’s notes as best they could in shorthand, edit and send them out as his famous story and production memos. In these memoirs, Zanuck is witty, tough, insightful, brutal and profane. So our understanding of Zanuck, his tone, organisation, and outrageous sense of humour are all mediated through Hechtlinger and later Mandeville. David O. Selznick was a major force in shaping women’s history on and off screen during the 1930s. Though he did not hire What Price Hollywood? writer Jane Murfin to write the script of Gone with the Wind, he had been instrumental in promoting her career while working at RKO with associate producer Pandro ‘Pan’ Berman. Selznick and Berman were responsible for turning Katharine Hepburn into a star and in setting up her Academy Award-winning turn in the women’s Broadway-breakthrough film Morning Glory (RKO, 1933). Murfin contributed to the script for Little Women (RKO, 1933; Wanda Tuchock and Sarah Y. Mason also worked on the script), which starred Hepburn in a definitive early role as Josephine (‘Jo’) March, a liberated nineteenthcentury woman who works as a teacher and writer. Hepburn is regarded today, with Bette Davis, as one of the iconic women of the twentieth century, and although late in life she denied being a ‘feminist’, her life and early work in the 1930s defined her as the voice of the early sound era’s educated working woman. Graduate of the women’s college Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania and an outspoken liberal who had listened to Emmeline Pankhurst and Emma Goldman in her suffragette mother’s parlour as a young girl, Hepburn wore trousers, worked with Hollywood’s top female director Dorothy Arzner on Christopher Strong (RKO, 1933), refused to play the Hollywood publicity game, but played a crossdressing young woman in Sylvia Scarlett (RKO, 1936), and flaunted her political affiliations – as when appearing alongside other prominent women such as Edna Ferber at Hyde Park as a guest of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.25 In in the late 1930s, Hepburn was famously labelled ‘Box Office Poison’ along with a list of other actresses who played strong female roles, including Marlene Dietrich, Dolores Del Rio, Luise Rainier, Mae West, Joan Crawford, Kay Francis and Greta Garbo.26 One of the roles that contributed to her ambivalent status was A Woman Rebels (RKO, 1936), a manifestation of Hollywood’s overlooked commitment to the liberated woman.

katharine hepburn’s early career rebellion A Woman Rebels was one of three RKO films edited by Hepburn’s close friend, Jane Loring, who would go on to be a screenwriter and associate producer at MGM with Pandro Berman. Loring’s work as the film’s

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cutter is uncredited, as was the work of story editor Marjorie Dudley, who was instrumental in promoting the novel as ‘an excellent vehicle for Hepburn’.27 Netta Syrett’s The Portrait of a Rebel (1930) narrated the life of Pamela Thistlewaite, a pioneering journalist and advocate of women’s suffrage in England who had an illegitimate child, passed it off as her niece, and fell in love with married and unmarried men before discarding them in the interests of the women’s movement. Dudley was ecstatic about the property, writing of Pamela’s crusades in journalism: ‘She becomes the rage. Her bookshop is a smart salon. It is Bohemia. It is a secure haven of the enlightened female and the advanced male. It is here that the New Woman is discussed, and that suffrage is launched’.28 Here, it seemed, was an opportunity to look in depth at a woman who flouted social and political convention on a big scale, providing a role model for future generations of women. A Woman Rebels was part of a three-decade trend in studio reliance on women’s historical fiction as prestige story material. During the 1930s, arguably the height of Hollywood’s interest in historical topics, producers purchased a wide variety of material for their historical films, ranging from popular biographies and history to best sellers and widely-read articles in major journals like The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal. Even more interesting is the number of women involved in the production of these screen texts. In the 1930s, Hollywood bought the work of writers such as Edna Ferber (Cimarron, RKO, 1931; So Big, Warner Bros, 1932; Show Boat, Universal, 1936; Come and Get It, Goldwyn Productions/United Artists, 1936), Fannie Hurst (Imitation of Life, Universal, 1934, and 1959; and Back Street, Universal, 1931, and 1941), Elizabeth Madox Roberts (The Great Meadow, MGM, 1931), Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence, RKO, 1934), Rachel Field (All This and Heaven Too, Warner Bros, 1940) and Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind). However, a surprising number of women worked as top-earning screenwriters throughout the silent and early sound eras, notably Lillian Hellman (The Dark Angel, United Artists, 1935), Anita Loos (San Francisco), Frances Marion (Camille, MGM, 1937), Mary C. McCall, Jr (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Warner Bros, 1935; Craig’s Wife, Columbia 1936; and Maisie, MGM, 1939) and Jeannie Macpherson (The Plainsman, Paramount, 1936). RKO developed Netta Syrett’s novel, but assigned the job of outlining and drafting the preliminary treatments to men. Larry Bachmann, veteran John Twist, Allan Scott, Anthony Veiller and Ernest Vajda worked on the script, though in an initial production memo by Cliff Reid to production executive Merian C. Cooper, Claudine West, Sarah Mason (Little Women) and Jane Murfin were all suggested as writers,

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with Bette Davis mentioned as a possibility to play Hepburn’s illegitimate daughter who carries women’s liberation into the next generation. As Reid wrote, ‘It is my opinion that in this story we have an opportunity, with the proper treatment, to bring about a picture that could be comparable to Little Women. Its wide appeal to women, together with its foreign market value, is exceptional’.29 Yet Pam Thistlewaite was no quaint and tomboyish Jo March. She gets a job on the Ladies Weekly Companion and shakes things up with an editorial headed, ‘THE NEW WOMEN! A Woman is Queen of England! But no woman is allowed to have an intelligent profession’. Later she gives major lectures on women’s rights and the screenwriter Ernst Vajda was at pains not to belittle the suffragettes: ‘Note: This is not a comic suffragette meeting. None of the women present is dressed in the exaggerated suffragette style. They are serious, eager, fine ladies’.30 Vajda’s scripted speech for Pamela is unprecedented in its commitment to women’s equal rights: The position of women in the world must be changed. Women must be better educated! Why should women of brains and intelligence be condemned to an idle, useless existence? Why shouldn’t the professions be thrown open to properly qualified women who wish to practice them? A woman today is not admitted to the bar – to the hospitals – to a physician’s profession . . . It will be changed. Our enemies say that we, the new women, represent the height of recklessness, daring, and audacity. They say we are in defiance of all accepted conventions and proprieties of the world we live in. Let them say so. We, the pioneers of a new freedom, will go ahead on our own road, scorned, ridiculed, ostracized, but with the vision of a different world ahead of us. In our vision, we see a happier world, a changed world, changed by the help, the brains, and the intelligence of the new woman: free lord of herself, and equal with men in everything.”31 This was either too extreme – or too lengthy – for RKO, and the scene was cut, replaced by a montage of press headlines. Curiously, the cutting continuity would end on the faintly humorous comment of Pam Thistlewaite’s husband, played by Herbert Marshall, ‘These modern women are so weak – aren’t they?’, thereby removing the final lines of the script, ‘I hope you have packed all those speeches of yours, because I imagine the women in America are having their troubles too’. Scripted connections between the British and American women’s movement (and extra-textual connections between Katharine Hepburn, Hepburn’s mother Kit Houghton and

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Pam Thistlewaite) were too controversial for the studio. But A Woman Rebels does succeed in flouting Production Code guidelines on adultery, and Pamela remains a crusading feminist of the last century. However, the film was not popular, losing over $200,000 at the box office.32 Perhaps the modern women in the audience did not like reminders of their comparative inadequacy! After playing Pamela, Hepburn returned to the screen as a series of spoiled, wilful heiresses who did not have to work (Stage Door, 1937; Bringing Up Baby, 1938 (both RKO); Holiday, Columbia, 1938; and The Philadelphia Story, MGM, 1940). The first two won plaudits from the critics but were not the box-office hits that RKO expected. When the studio next offered her what was effectively a B-movie, Hepburn bought out her contract for $75,000. Holiday, made for Columbia, was another critical success that did not light up the box office. Hepburn finally engineered her own comeback by starring in the Broadway production of The Philadelphia Story, acquiring the film rights from writer Philip Barry and selling these to MGM on condition of playing the lead in the 1940 movie.

rko’s history of the twentieth-century working woman: KITTY FOYLE Hepburn worked at RKO alongside Ginger Rogers from 1932 to 1938 and they even engaged in a rocky collaboration on Stage Door. While Hepburn played queens of literature (Little Women) and history (Mary of Scotland, 1936), however, Rogers more often was assigned anonymous working girls early in her career. But those anonymous working girls of the 1930s eventually had the historical treatment in Kitty Foyle. When adapting Kitty Foyle in 1939–40 (subtitled as the ‘natural history of the American woman’), RKO’s Dalton Trumbo wrote a suffrage ‘prologue’, and was not as careful as A Woman Rebels writer Ernst Vajda about caricaturing all suffragettes as unattractive spinsters. As he describes them at a suffrage rally, They are very grim. Most of them are old and hatchet-faced. Some of them are fat, others are inordinately skinny. They wear suits, still quite close to the pavement but shorter than in our previous scene. Gone are the flamboyant plumed hats of the past. Now they wear businesslike, hideous ones. Many of them wear spectacles.33 Yet his heroine is not a demeaning stereotype: though silent (to conform with the 1900-20 time period), she is an attractive wife and mother who joins the movement after having children, and goes back to work – travelling by streetcar – after marriage.

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Yet, in contrast to Hepburn’s Pam Thistlewaite, working-class Irish Kitty, who aborts her child-out-of-wedlock in the novel and has a stillbirth on screen, is not a crusader for women’s rights, and climbs her corporate ladder steadily, her eyes on dates, free dinners and romance. In an early draft, Kitty’s childhood friend Molly says that she won’t get married after high school (‘I’m going to finish college and then I’m going to get a job and lead my own life. Men are so bossy, don’t you think?’),34 but this was cut from Trumbo’s subsequent drafts. Another writer, Robert Ardrey, had an even more provocative take on women’s work, as when he planned an exchange between Kitty and Molly about the lack of time modern women have to dream in the workplace: Talk about the pioneer woman of the covered wagon, at least she knew where she was going. Look at the modern woman of the covered typewriter. She doesn’t even know what she wants. You know what we are, Molly? We’re sharecroppers, that’s all. We’re sharecroppers in the dust bowl of business.35 This was not the first time Hollywood or even a character played by Ginger Rogers acknowledged the impact of the Depression on working women. As Jean Maitland (Rogers) remarked in Stage Door (1937), for actresses ‘There’s always a Depression on’. Yet, in RKO’s final cut, Kitty does indeed seem ‘weak’ in comparison to Hepburn’s nineteenth-century crusader Pam; and in her work as a cosmetic executive, she is slightly unpleasant in her willing manipulation of women (made more insidious by Christopher Morley and two other men writing the novel and scripts). Executives reading the galleys were bewildered that a man had written the book, yet Kitty’s comments, transcribed by studio writer Robert Ardrey, articulate Hollywood’s complicated construction of women’s discourse: ‘I make my living now by trading on women’s herd instincts, and I can see how useful it is for them to think they’re exercising their own choices when actually they’re simply falling in line with what some smart person has doped out for them’.36 Christopher Morley’s choice of first-person narration for Kitty Foyle created an elaborate confidence trick, manipulating the established market for women’s history, film, and literature, while anchoring it firmly to a script written by men.

subverting the myths of women’s work in GONE WITH THE WIND

Morley also made capital out of Gone with the Wind, making his heroine Irish-American like Scarlett O’Hara. Though Kitty’s father has to give up plans to send her to college, he praises the girl who will go out

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tirelessly hunting for a job to support herself: ‘You’ve got good Irish eyes, Kitty. They’re looking into the future. But the Main Line – they haven’t even caught up with the present!’37 Scarlett O’Hara – like her originator, Margaret Mitchell – also faced these challenges (Mitchell had to abandon her college career at Smith after her mother died). To a certain extent, antebellum Scarlett would have resonated with Hepburn’s collection of unconventional nineteenth-century heroines, but however many women were shown working on Hollywood screens, few were actually seen getting their hands dirty. The only precedent for Scarlett’s look of emaciation, sweat and deprivation amid the challenges of Civil War and Reconstruction was Bette Davis’s harrowing performance as Mildred in Of Human Bondage (1934), in which she effected the first of many transformations of her glamorous looks in the interests of screen realism (she would shave her pate for her 1939 role in Elizabeth and Essex). The performance was too controversial for the mostly male Academy committee to nominate her for Best Actress, but Norma Shearer and other actresses organised the first write-in campaign to recognise Davis’s impact on women’s screen acting. By 1939–40, Vivien Leigh’s performance did not need such tactics. Although Gone with the Wind and the Warner Bros southern spinoff Jezebel (1938, starring Bette Davis) offered interesting moments of cinematic deconstruction of race and gender expectations, Margaret Mitchell’s historical novel (based on the work of female diarists and Civil War historians) and the screen adaptation fundamentally challenged the historiography of the Civil War and Reconstruction and southern women’s roles in destabilising those discourses.38 The novel and film also address the issue of working women on a number of levels, and it was no coincidence that Margaret Mitchell, a new working woman of the 1920s who retained her maiden name in all of her writing and publicity, conceived her heroine successfully managing a lumber mill in the Reconstruction era. Off screen, however, David O. Selznick’s production featured far fewer women in the crew. While scenarist Barbara Keon, technical advisor Susan Myrick and Technicolor supervisor Natalie Kalmus received screen credit, researcher Lillian Deighton, assistant story editor Franclien Macconnell, script developer Kay Brown, wardrobe supervisor Marion Dabney and countless stand-ins and stuntwomen were uncredited. Though Selznick often hired at least one female screenwriter to develop properties at Paramount, MGM, RKO and later Selznick International, only male ones worked on Gone with the Wind. Among these, Oliver Garrett, Ben Hecht, Jo Swerling, John van Druten and F. Scott Fitzgerald did not receive screen credit – a fate more often reserved for

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women. It might reasonably be claimed, however, that the movie was scripted by one woman and significantly shaped by a number of others. Mitchell’s text was the fundamental historical template upon which Selznick based his Civil War and Reconstruction history. Acclaimed Broadway playwright Sidney Howard, the only credited scriptwriter, was told in no uncertain terms to keep close to the book’s text. ‘I urge you very strongly indeed’, Selznick warned, ‘against making minor changes . . . I have learned to avoid trying to improve on success’.39 Wherever possible, he directed his male writers to simply use Mitchell’s dialogue, while asking Barbara Keon and Franclien Macconnell to find the best original dialogue, eliminate unnecessary characters and scenes, and cut down on Rhett Butler’s dialogue.40 Even more curious is the film’s construction of the plantation and southern belle tropes familiar to audiences and readers of this genre. Though Catherine Clinton and Drew Gilpin Faust have pointed out the transformation of the white plantation-class women’s experience due to wartime societal disruptions, the historiography on antebellum plantation life and gender roles is based on a stable white patriarchy, which Susan Courtney has linked to the conservative production design and narrative style of Hollywood cinema.41 Women only managed large plantations when men were away in the army, and their occasional work as nurses, war department and postal employees was moot upon men’s return in 1865. Yet in the opening sequences of Gone with the Wind, Scarlett’s family life is defined in starkly different ways. Her irresponsible Irish father Gerald (Thomas Mitchell) is seen gallivanting on his white horse and is scolded by his daughter (played by Vivien Leigh) for his carelessness while she fixes his cravat. He is not seen ordering ‘quitting time’ on the plantation; instead, Sam (Everett Brown), the black foreman, has this task. And when the white overseer Jonas Wilkerson (Victor Jory) asks what he should start ploughing the next day, he does not consult Gerald but instead approaches Mrs O’Hara, who has just returned from her work nursing the poor white women in the plantation community. Complete with black bag and business-like black dress, Barbara O’Neil’s Ellen O’Hara is in contrast to her gaily dressed husband, who sits waiting for her by the fireside, a whiskey rather than needlework at his side. The script, cinematography, and mise en scène further destabilise gender expectations, for the camera follows Ellen, just as it will follow her assertive daughter Scarlett, through war, deprivation, murder and success. She tells Gerald that Wilkerson must be dismissed and whispers the reason (his affair with a white-trash girl and her pregnancy); Gerald is as delighted by this piece of juicy gossip as a young girl, but is

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Figure 3.2 Overseer Jonas Wilkerson (Victor Jory) goes to Ellen O’Hara (Barbara O’Neil) to get orders for the next day, but instead faces dismissal from Tara in Gone with the Wind (MGM, 1939).

silenced by the quiet dignity of Ellen, whose authoritative movements dictate the camera’s attention. Scarlett’s famous bad behaviour with Ashley at the barbecue the next day might never have happened had Ellen happened to attend the social engagement with her husband and children. Instead, as Gerald informs his host John Wilkes, ‘She’s after seeing accounts with the overseer’.42 Though scholars have pointed out Mammy’s (Hattie McDaniel) motherly relationship with Scarlett, and her maternal authority to teach Scarlett to be a lady and a white lady,43 Scarlett’s real mother, Ellen, is fulfilling the supposed patriarchal role as plantation administrator. In 1864, after the fall of Atlanta, Scarlett will take charge of her family comprised of Melanie Wilkes (Olivia de Havilland), nephew Beau (Mickey Kuhn) and maid Prissy (Thelma ‘Butterfly’ McQueen). Once confronted with her mother’s death, she assumes the role as head of family. She redefines women’s work out of necessity, and picks cotton, hoes, totes water, and works harder than any black field hand did during her mother’s tenure on the plantation (in one film at least, black

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and white men and women work alongside each other in 1864 Georgia). But Scarlett also kills a union cavalryman in defence of her home, and remains unpunished for it, in the face of Production Code restrictions on people ‘getting away with murder’.44 In doing so, as I have noted elsewhere, Scarlett begins to physically resemble the women of colour on the plantation, wearing clothes of the same fabric and style as Mammy and Prissy and staring back bleakly at the camera, sunburned, sweaty, with frizzy haired. Her dishevelled and racially ambiguous image also resonates with images by Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White of America’s Depression-era women, adding a Civil War version of the 1930s migrant mother. Scarlett’s work does not end there. Although she marries into the Atlanta store business owned by Frank Kennedy (Carroll Nye) after the war, she takes charge of it, cancels credit, calls in debts, and expands to buy a lumber mill worked by the cheap labour of white convicts. With the enterprise a commercial success, she is shown directing male workers to hang a large sign to mark this and then quickly, without missing a beat, setting up a deal with a man on the street. Though fans of the film love to drone on about her romance with Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), she shows absolutely no affection for him and only a calm and contented love for Ashley (Leslie Howard) when her business is booming. Quite simply, Scarlett is happiest when she is succeeding in her chosen field of work and making money. She is only truly unhappy after becoming Rhett Butler’s spoilt wife. The representation of a working woman in the nineteenth-century South has its limits, however. Scarlett’s unladylike habits are punished when a black man and a poor white man attempt to rob and rape her as she drives unescorted through Shantytown and on the road. The intervention of Sam, once the black plantation patriarch, saves her. However the Ku Klux Klan ‘avenges’ her off screen in a raid that results in Frank’s death and Scarlett’s public condemnation (largely instigated by older white southern women). Mitchell argued that there was quite a lot of 1920s new woman in Scarlett, while historian Thomas Pauly and other cultural critics have seen the novel as an allegory of the Great Depression. 45 Nevertheless, Mitchell’s heroine is more than a pre-flapper or a metaphor for indomitable Americans during two periods of ideological and financial crisis. Though Tara McPherson has compared Scarlett’s working-class Irish father with his daughter’s own ethnic iconoclasm,46 Scarlett may be her mother’s daughter after all. If A Star Is Born, A Woman Rebels, Kitty Foyle and Gone with the Wind have anything in common, it is an awareness of generations of women working in front and behind the scenes to effect change. Women’s history was rendered through a

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surprising number of historical fictions based usually on composites of real women like Scarlett’s prototype, the now-forgotten Georgia war heroine and writer Eliza Frances Andrews, and Vicki Lester’s shadowy sisters Clara Bow and Janet Gaynor.47 The celluloid working-women heroines who featured in 1930s movies served a dual purpose: they were products of the sometimes invisible labour of women in the film industry and of the legions of female audience members whose movieticket purchases contributed to the evolving cycle of women’s creative work in Hollywood.

notes 1. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (New York: MacMillan, 1936); Christopher Morley, Kitty Foyle (New York: Lippincott, 1939). 2. See, for example, Colin Schindler’s brief and dismissive summary of ‘liberated’ women in Hollywood in Crisis: Cinema and American Society, 1929–1939 (London: Routledge, 1996), 97. 3. Mary Beard, On Understanding Women (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1931); Mary Beard, America Through Women’s Eyes (New York: Macmillan, 1933); Beard with Ann J. Lane (eds), Making Women’s History: The Essential Mary Ritter Beard (New York: Feminist Press at City University New York, 2000); Julie des Jardins, Women and the Historical Profession in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Edna Ferber, Cimarron (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1929) and They Brought Their Women: A Book of Short Stories (New York: Doubleday, 1935); J. E. Smyth, ‘Hollywood as Historian, 1929–1945’, in Roy Grundmann, Cynthia Lucia and Art Simon (eds), The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, vol. 2, (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 361–76. 4. Frederick Lewis Allen, Since Yesterday (New York: Harper & Row, 1940), chapter 6, ‘A Change of Climate’. 5. Ibid. 6. Between 1930 and 1940, women made up a third of the US workforce and overall women’s employment rose from 11 to 13 million. See Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne, 1982). 7. Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Mark Garrett Cooper, Universal Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010). 8. Frances Marion would also write How to Write and Sell Film Stories (New York: Covici-Friede, 1937) for widespread public consumption. 9. J. E. Smyth, ‘Female Editors in Studio-Era Hollywood: Rethinking Feminist “Frontiers” and the Constraints of the Archives’, in Kristin Hole, Dijana Jeleca, Ann Kaplan and Patrice Petro (eds), The Routledge Companion to Gender and Cinema (London: Routledge, 2016). 10. Leo Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), 362. 11. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974).

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12. Martin Quigley, ‘Quigley’s Annual Top Ten MoneyMakers Poll’ has Temple at number one in 1935, 1936, 1937 and 1938 and Fred Astaire and Rogers at four, three and seven for years 1935, 1936 and 1937. See International Motion Picture Almanac (New York: Quigley Publications, 1930–40). 13. Bette Davis to Jack Warner, 21 June 1936, in Rudy Behlmer (ed.), Inside Warner Bros, 1935–1951 (New York, Viking, 1985), 27–8. 14. Nancy Naumberg (ed.), We Make the Movies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937). 15. Bette Davis, ‘The Actress Plays Her Part’, in Naumberg We Make the Movies, 117–31 (quotation, 117). 16. Ibid., 120, 122, 121. 17. Paul Muni, ‘The Actor Plays His Part’, in ibid., 131–42 (quotation, 142). 18. Jane Murfin, Gene Fowler et al., What Price Hollywood? [1932], (New York: Frederick Ungar, no date), 81. 19. J. E. Smyth, ‘Hollywood “Takes One More Look”: Early Histories of Hollywood and the Fallen Star Biography, 1932–1937’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 26 (June 2006): 179–201; J. E. Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema from Cimarron to Citizen Kane (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 251–78; Robert Sklar, ‘Hollywood About Hollywood: Genre as Historiography’, in J. E. Smyth (ed.), Hollywood and the American Historical Film (London: Palgrave, 2012), 71–93. 20. Hilary Hallett, Go West, Young Women!: The Rise of Early Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 21. David O. Selznick, quoted in Rudy Behlmer (ed.), Memo from David O. Selznick (New York: Viking, 1972), 96. 22. Unmarked press clipping, Scrapbook 1D, Janet Gaynor Collection, Boston University. 23. Ibid. 24. Frederica Maas, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 237. 25. 1940 press photo with Ferber and Hepburn at Hyde Park supporting FDR’s third term, box 2, folder 11, Edna Ferber Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. 26. Harry Brandt, ‘Box Office Poison’, Independent Film Journal, 3 May 1938. 27. Marjorie Dudley, A Woman Rebels, synopsis, 30 June 1933, 11 pp., RKO S393, Collection 3, UCLA. 28. Ibid. 29. Cliff Reid to Merian C. Cooper, 12 January 1934, RKO S393, Collection 3, UCLA. 30. Ernest Vajda, A Woman Rebels, 16 March 1936, script, 202 pp., 125, RKO S393, Collection 3, UCLA. 31. Ibid., 127–8. 32. Richard Jewel, ‘RKO Film Grosses: 1931–1951’, Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television XIV, 1 (1994): 57. 33. Trumbo, Kitty Foyle, 13 August 1940, box 1, folder 20, Milton E. Pickman Papers, UCLA. 34. Trumbo, Kitty Foyle, first draft continuity, 1 June 1940, RKO Collection 3, box 719, UCLA.

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35. Robert Ardrey, Kitty Foyle, 17 February 1940, 12. Box 720, RKO Collection 3, UCLA. 36. Notes on Kitty Foyle, 3 February 1940, box 720, RKO Collection 3, UCLA. 37. Ibid., 63. 38. See Mitchell to S. V. Benet, 9 July 1936, in Richard Harwell (ed.), Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 1936–1949 (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 36. 39. Selznick to Howard, 6 January 1937, in Memo, 145. 40. Selznick to Macconnell, 5 December 1938, in Memo, 177–8. 41. Drew G. Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress (New York: Random House, 1984); and Susan Courtney, ‘Ripping the Portieres at the Seams: Lessons from Streetcar on Gone with the Wind’, in Smyth, Hollywood and the American Historical Film, 49–70. 42. Sidney Howard, Gone with the Wind (New York: Collier Books, 1980), 76. 43. Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 44. Selznick considered Scarlett’s killing scene ‘one of the most exciting and dramatic scenes in the book’ and wanted it preserved in the script (Selznick to Howard, 6 January 1937, in Memo, 147). 45. Thomas Pauly, ‘Gone with the Wind and The Grapes of Wrath as Hollywood Histories of the Great Depression’, Journal of Popular Film 3, 3 (1974), 202–18. 46. McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie, passim. 47. Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema, 147–8, 272–5.

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chapter 4

The Congressional Battle over Motion Picture Distribution, 1936–40 Catherine Jurca

I

‘ t has frequently been said that “everybody in this country has two businesses, his own and motion pictures”’, US Congressman John Costello (D-CA) observed to colleagues on 2 May 1940. He invoked this axiom, as film industry representatives and supporters often did, in order to refute it: ‘This may be quite true of the products, personalities, and publicity of Hollywood and of the local theater, but the actual business operation of the industry itself, how it operates and why it operates that way is little understood by those not actively engaged in the business’.1 Costello’s comments were designed not to convince his colleagues to learn more about the industry’s business but rather to persuade them to mind their own. His admonition came near the end of a long and fervent effort to pass federal legislation to regulate certain trade practices within the industry, in particular the relationship between the major distributors of motion pictures, who were also the producers of the vast majority of movies and owners of the nation’s largest and most opulent theatres, and the thousands of independent exhibitors who depended upon access to their films. He spoke before the last of several congressional hearings on a bill that had, in various forms, been read, referred, reported, delayed and even, occasionally, voted on since 1927. Senate Bill 280, more commonly known as the Neely Bill for its sponsor, Matthew Neely (D-WV), had passed the Senate in 1939 but like its many predecessors had failed to reach the floor of the House for a vote. In 1940 the bill was finally withdrawn. That same year the Department of Justice and the five major film companies – Paramount, Loew’s (MGM), 20th Century-Fox,

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Warner Bros, and RKO – agreed on a consent decree that brought an end to a separate federal action against the industry, an anti-trust lawsuit filed in 1938. Four years later the anti-trust lawsuit was reinstated, leading to the Supreme Court’s Paramount Decision of 1948 that ultimately dismantled the vertically integrated film companies by divorcing production and distribution from exhibition. At that point the business of motion pictures was transformed for good. If ‘everybody’ felt like motion pictures were their business, it was merely the measure of their success and ubiquity and, as a consequence, of the enormous social and cultural influence attributed to them by the 1930s, especially in the wake of the publicity surrounding the Payne Fund Studies, a controversial body of research into the effects of movies, on the young in particular.2 The proposed legislation was in part an effort to manage that influence by regulating how films were licensed for exhibition and, less directly, how they were made available to patrons. In the absence of federal censorship, which would have controlled movies at the source of production, the intimate relationship between the ‘products’ and ‘personalities’ of Hollywood films and the practices by which they were offered to audiences could not simply be wished away. The various bills, and the hearings on them, in which film industry executives, exhibitors, reformers, congressmen and others discussed the problems with ‘the movies’ as a business and as a social and cultural force, are a testament to this fact. This essay focuses on the four hearings that took place during 1936–40, which produced some 2,000 pages of printed testimony on bills to regulate motion picture distribution.3 Insofar as the hearings have been considered in any detail by scholars, it has been primarily for what historian David Horowitz called the ‘alliance of convenience’ between independent exhibitors and organised reform groups, who together fought the ‘Big Eight’ film companies, albeit with different motives.4 Exhibitors sought to protect themselves from monopolistic trade practices that harmed their bottom line, while reformers strove to protect family audiences from the immoral films that these practices inflicted on neighbourhood and small-town theatres. This alliance is an important part of the story, but it has eclipsed the degree of dissent within these groups, and how this dissent shaped the representation of these trade practices and even the fate of the bills. Moreover, the hearings present a rare opportunity to listen directly to exhibitors and industry executives on the workings of distribution, which has been by far the most neglected branch of the industry, despite being continually controversial in the 1930s and at the heart of the industry’s monopolistic practices. As one scholar noted, ‘The major combination among

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the eight distributors was on the output side, the licensing of films to exhibitors’.5 This essay seeks to bring into view what Representative Costello called the ‘unseen and unsung’ business of distribution, and to consider how the material problem of getting commercial entertainment from the scene of production to thousands of theatres nationwide impacted the way various elements within the film industry represented its practices, as well as its products, to Congress and to themselves.6 The bills sought to prohibit two trade practices deemed to be discriminatory, because theatres owned by the major companies were exempted from them, as well as ‘contrary to public policy’: compulsory block-booking, by which independent exhibitors had to license films in groups, as much as a studio’s entire annual output at a time, to get any films at all; and blind selling, by which they had to license these blocks in advance without knowing exactly what they were getting.7 Distributors speculatively promoted titles and stars to exhibitors in product announcement books and trade advertisements, but they committed themselves to supplying nothing in particular. Abram Myers, legal counsel for Allied States Association of Motion Pictures Exhibitors, which represented independents and pressed hard for legislation throughout the 1930s, offered evidence to demonstrate that there was ‘absolutely no contract identification of pictures’ – no titles, stories or stars, nothing but a number and price allocation.8 Under penalties of up to one year in jail and a $5,000 fine, the proposed legislation prohibited distributors from forcing exhibitors to lease more pictures than they wanted and, in order to end blind selling, required them to provide a synopsis of every feature film before it was offered for lease. The principal stated goal of the bills was not to liberate the victimised exhibitor from discriminatory business practices but rather to help the victimised public: ‘The primary purpose . . . is to establish community freedom in the selection of motion-picture films’.9 Exhibitors who could not choose the films they played – who did not even know what films they had licensed – could not be held accountable for them, reformers argued. ‘Community freedom’ meant that residents could pressure independent exhibitors, who primarily owned neighbourhood and small-town theatres that catered to the so-called ‘family trade’, not to show immoral pictures.10 Reformer proponents of the bills such as Katherine Van Etten Lyford, Executive Secretary of the Massachusetts Civic League, likewise referred to the principle of ‘home rule’, a term that invoked decisions made both locally, not by outsiders in Hollywood, and with the family in mind.11 The principal advocates for the right to community freedom and home rule were female representatives of civic, women’s and religious groups who claimed to speak for broad swathes of the public in their quest for better screen fare.

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Opponents such as Charles Pettijohn, attorney for the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), the industry trade organisation, gave it yet another name: he called ‘community freedom’ a form of ‘pressure censorship’.12 Ed Kuykendahl, an independent exhibitor and president of the Motion Picture Theatre Owners of America (MPTOA), a rival of Allied States that included exhibitors affiliated with the major companies as well as independents and opposed the bill, complained that such groups wanted to replace the ‘free choice’ of ‘the public’ with ‘restricted choice among only those pictures which these organizations think the people should be allowed to see’.13 Opponents of the legislation noted the obvious: the community already selected its entertainment freely, and its choice was expressed at the box office. Even congressmen noted the difficulty of measuring its desires by anything but box-office results. Elmer Ryan (D-MN) speculated that the public groups might not speak for the public at all but had, as ‘organized minorities’, appointed themselves spokespersons for it.14 Far from fostering community choice, they aspired to make entertainment choices on its behalf. ‘A secondary purpose’ of the bill was to protect independents from unfair trade practices.15 The freedom at stake was really the exhibitor’s. ‘This is supposed to be a free country, and we certainly should be allowed to run our business our own way’, an exhibitor from Bemidji, Minnesota wrote.16 Nathan Yamins, an exhibitor and president of Allied States who, like Kuykendahl, Pettijohn, and Myers, repeatedly spoke at these hearings, clarified that although exhibitors and public groups were on the same side, their interests differed. Block-booking ‘forces an exhibitor to buy mediocre or poor pictures. I do not mean bad, morally, but mediocre, poor pictures in order to get the good pictures that he wants. That is economic waste’.17 Although some independent exhibitors expressed concern about ‘morally objectionable pictures’ – one spoke of wanting ‘to face [his] patrons with a clear conscience’ – numerous speakers for and against the bills noted that to exhibitors, a ‘good’ picture was simply one that patrons wanted to see.18 In other words, their problem was with unpopular rather than immoral films. The ‘alliance of convenience’ between independent exhibitors and the organised reform groups could not overcome a fundamental problem: there was no correlation between the popularity of a picture and its moral tone, and the bill did nothing to guarantee that exhibitors would stop showing films just because they were rejected by ‘any committee of women’.19 Opponents of legislation never missed an opportunity to point out that independent exhibitors had clamoured to show the two smash hits – She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel – that Mae West, the scourge of reformers, had made for Paramount in 1933, with the latter being the studio’s most licensed film (11,558 played contracts) of the

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year.20 At the other end of the spectrum was George Arliss. At the 1936 hearings, exhibitors repudiated the British actor because their audiences did. For a handful of speakers, popular rejection of his worthy, high-class pictures was justification for opposing the bill. Mrs Samuel A. Ellsworth, Executive Secretary of the Worcester (MA) Motion Picture Review Board, observed: ‘it happens that W[orcester] does not appreciate the Arliss pictures, therefore we would never see these pictures unless the managers had them in their so-called block’.21 Compulsory block-booking and blind selling ensured the screening of poor pictures – whether measured by their unpopularity with patrons, their quality, or their morals – but they also helped to ensure the screening of ‘good’ pictures, meaning ‘socially valuable pictures’ that moviegoers did not always want to see.22 The problem proponents faced may have been less that independent exhibitors and reformers had different goals for the legislation than that opinions within these groups were hardly uniform, with the consequence that no one outside the major companies could claim to speak with one voice. Women like Ellsworth thought that prohibiting block-booking and blind selling would eliminate Arliss and such films as The Story of Louis Pasteur (Warner Bros, 1936) from the field, a point of view industry executives were quick to endorse, while others, like Katherine Van Etten Lyford, argued that the bill would instead purge theatres of films like Klondike Annie (Paramount, 1936), a raunchy Mae West vehicle. Both had a point. Patterns of exhibition would certainly change; independent exhibitors would be freer to cater to their patrons’ desires as well as more liable to pressure from local organisations. The bill would help and the bill would hurt, and each position provided legislators with grounds for supporting or opposing, depending on how they were predisposed to vote. Catholic groups were split as well. At the 1936 House hearing, Agnes Regan, speaking for the National Council of Catholic Women, which favoured the bill, squared off against Joseph Daly, Executive Secretary of the National Legion of Decency, which had been created by the US Catholic Bishops Committee to ‘campaign for wholesome motion pictures’ and opposed it.23 While the National Council of Catholic Women represented about 1 million members, Daly countered that only his group could ‘speak authoritatively for the 22,000,000 Catholics in the United States on matters involving the morality of motion pictures’.24 The question of which of these handful of individuals was authorised to speak on behalf of millions of people, which of them was truly representative, featured extensively in the proceedings. In 1939 for example, Lyford produced telegrams from organisation leaders to prove that some of the speakers who opposed the bill, including Ellsworth, were not there in any official capacity, despite claiming membership of various parent-teacher groups, review boards and federations of women’s clubs. They were not, in other

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words, even speaking on behalf of ‘organized minorities’; these ‘deluded women’ represented only themselves.25 Even so, the chorus of voices, primarily women’s, who spoke, sent telegrams and mailed pre-printed postcards both for and against, claiming to know what millions wanted or needed from the movies was deafening, and what they had in common was an ambition to control what movies people could see.26 Thus in 1940 when Mrs Daniel Shaver tearfully described to the House committee her recent experience opening a theatre in Shavertown, Pennsylvania – her difficulty negotiating for the films she wanted, the requirement that she lease unwanted shorts to get any features, the money she owed – Luther Patrick (D-AL) told her: ‘you are worth a dozen of these professional crusaders who come in and take charge of things’.27 Shaver was one of only a handful of female exhibitors to testify at the hearings. If she was one of the most effective witnesses for the legislation, it was because she came across as a powerless and sympathetic woman begging Congress for help, a naive underdog in the clutches of Hollywood’s monopolistic machinery, rather than a bossy know-it-all presuming to tell Congress what was best for the country. Many other independents spoke of their personal experience in the exhibition hierarchy. They talked about being forced to play films their patrons did not like, whether of the Arliss or West stamp, and being unable to lease individual films patrons asked to see, such as Little Women (RKO, 1933). They noted requirements that some films play on weekends to maximise distributor profits without regard for audience preferences. They pointed out that even when allowed to cancel a certain number of pictures bought in a block, usually 10 per cent, distributors employed various stratagems to prevent them from doing so. Paramount, for example, offered a 20 per cent cancellation in 1939–40 if exhibitors took all of the pictures it released, but it then leased a maximum of forty-seven (out of fifty-two) films to any theatre to avoid fulfilling that obligation.28 When exhibitors did succeed in cancelling a film, distributors routinely allocated it to the lowest-priced bracket of pictures on the contract, which never had titles assigned in advance, no matter how big the budget or what other exhibitors had paid. Although the public-interest question in some of these complaints was at times hard to discern, the testimony was forceful in identifying actual rather than theoretical harm, with economic consequences for exhibitors, and it pinpointed concrete problems that trade practice legislation could address. Nevertheless, some independent exhibitors voiced strong opposition to the legislation. What made their testimony so remarkable, and on one level so persuasive, is that they were by no means apologists for the major companies, whose practices they criticised vociferously. A representative of the Theater Owners of Oregon described his members as ‘quite bitter’

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about ‘the unfair trade practices that have grown up in the industry’.29 Even Ed Kuykendahl, whose organisation included studio-affiliated theatres, announced that ‘there are a number of trade practices . . . that we as practical business men and theater owners do not like’.30 Some exhibitors spoke of functional cancellation policies that allowed them to reject pictures they did not want to screen, and a few defended the system by observing that the money earned on box-office successes made up for that lost on failures. Some operated theatre chains, or controlled exhibition within a locality, and they often leveraged more advantageous deals from distributors than their less well situated peers. For the latter, defences of the current system were often based not on how well things worked but on the fear that the proposed remedy would be worse than the disease. This was more than a case of risk aversion and a preference for the devil you know. The 1940 hearings in particular witnessed an outpouring of testimony, both written and in person, from independent exhibitors across the country, owners of single theatres as well as chains, who noted over and over that what they needed even more than lots of good pictures was a continuous supply of films. This was imperative for independents. While owners of the major affiliated theatres usually ran each feature film for one week, longer if it was successful, independent theatres usually changed programmes more frequently, two to four times per week and sometimes more often than that. Exhibitors testified who needed upwards of 300 films a year. Independents demanded the ability to buy films in blocks because only steady access to product gave the small exhibitor stability. The Neely Bill was thus denounced by exhibitors as ‘an untried experiment’ that risked upending an industry ‘too vital to be subjected to unconsidered experimentation’.31 Buying films one or two at a time from eight different major companies as well as independent distributors with whom some of them did business (often to secure cheap Westerns) was inconceivable to independents, who would have had no time for the other tasks involved in running a theatre. Block-booking had developed as a way to stabilise the industry for producers and distributors: it created a guaranteed market for films regardless of merit, enabling them to secure financing for production; it made for more efficient use of expensive physical plant and human resources under contract; and it usurped screen time that might otherwise have gone to independent producers.32 In the hearings, block-booking often came across as a mutually advantageous distribution system – a guaranteed market was just another way of saying a guaranteed supply. The Neely Bill only outlawed compulsory block-booking. In other words, it prohibited making the purchase of any film contingent upon the purchase of another, as exhibitor proponents of the bill, who also

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depended upon a steady supply of films, pointed out loudly and often. It did not prevent exhibitors from buying films in groups. But it was not clear in practice how that would work. Fox President Sidney Kent and George Schaefer, who testified first as a United Artists executive and later as President of RKO, repeatedly defended block-booking as a non-compulsory means of wholesaling. From their perspective, it produced discounts for exhibitors and hence lower ticket prices for audiences. Along with other industry representatives, both warned that wholesaling films in groups would have to stop if the bill were passed. It would be impossible to determine at what point the unit price differential between leasing multiple films versus leasing a single film crossed the line from encouragement for a volume sale to coercion to buy the group. To avoid violating the law, they declared that distributors would have to lease films one at a time. The bill would not, by this logic, liberate exhibitors to choose their own films so much as bog them down in endless negotiations, one picture at a time, which would simultaneously make each picture more expensive to lease. Opponents argued that distribution costs would rise dramatically and ticket prices would have to increase as well. Anything that might make films more expensive was hard to square with the public interest. It was not in the interest of exhibitors either, and the implicit threat of increased rentals was not lost on them. They said over and over that it would be impossible to continue their business if they had to lease films singly and prices went up. After announcing that compulsory blockbooking and blind selling existed, and ‘we do not like it’, Rotus Harvey, an independent from San Francisco and member of the MPTOA, went on to note the problem with the Neely Bill: it had nothing ‘that would force a producer to sell me the pictures I want at a price I could afford to pay’.33 While sceptics may have doubted the claims of some of the highest-paid men in the country that their industry would collapse if the bill were passed, it was harder to discount the many independents who acknowledged the very real problems the bill tried to address but still worried that it would hurt more than help them. The other reason producers and distributors gave for why they could only sell films one at a time had to do with the bill’s requirement of a ‘complete and true synopsis’ for each film, as well as an account of the method of treating ‘scenes depicting vice, crime, or suggestive of sexual passion’.34 In both 1936 hearings industry executives paid little attention to the synopsis provision in their oral testimony (although some producers submitted telegrams in which they protested), but by 1939 it became their main objection. They pounced on the ‘complete and true’ provision, which Kent claimed could only mean ‘all’ and

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‘without deviation’ before describing how the vagaries of film production made it impossible to furnish such a document, at least before the film was in the can.35 Jason Joy, also from Fox, provided excruciating accounts of the endless process of developing the story and scripts of The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939) and Maryland (1940), which faced further changes once they were in production.36 Industry representatives pointed to the importance of film previews, which often led to rewriting and reshooting, with whole scenes added or deleted, before the film was finally ready for release. The creative art would languish if filmmakers avoided improvements to protect themselves from prison time, fines and lawsuits from disgruntled exhibitors waving a misleading synopsis in their faces. An added wrinkle was the provision regarding the treatment of potentially objectionable scenes. How exactly did one anticipate the look on an actor’s face as he uttered a line? Or the precise inflection with which Mae West would invite someone to ‘Come up and see me sometime’?37 The only possible outcome of the synopsis provision, industry representatives insisted, would be to sell films not only one at a time but after they had been completed, so that exhibitors could see for themselves what they were getting. In 1940 the bill’s language changed from a ‘complete and true synopsis’ to ‘an accurate synopsis of the contents’, with ‘a general outline of the story and descriptions of the principal characters’, in an effort to foil interpretations of the provision as being so rigid that compliance was impossible.38 But the technical difficulties of meeting the bill’s requirements, at the risk of criminal prosecution no less, were the strongest arguments the industry had, and they did not yield. And their case was made for them by many independent exhibitors who were themselves rather desperate, getting by at present but frightened of the uncertainty the bill would bring to an enterprise whose workings they at least understood, even if they were not always fair. And although independents vehemently disagreed with one another about whether the bill would change the selling policies of films to the degree claimed, which must have made it easier for legislators to preserve the status quo, there was no difference of opinion on the fundamental point that for their businesses to thrive, exhibitors had to be able to lease films in groups. In the end the film industry relied on two contradictory arguments to make its case for block-booking and blind selling: its business really operated just like any other, and its business was utterly exceptional. ‘In the case of a few left over unused pictures [because exhibitors often had to pay for more films than they could screen] – let us call them remnants. What business does not have

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remnants and left-overs which represent a certain loss but which are a part of every commercial retail operation where anticipated buying is necessary?’ one exhibitor asked.39 ‘Motion pictures represent a cross section of human beings. They are not made like Ford cars over a line’, Sidney Kent asserted, but just because they were produced differently did not mean they could not be sold the same way.40 Schaefer pointed out that Ford would only give an ‘agency’ (dealership) to someone who agreed to order a certain number of cars to sell.41 Ford block-booked cars in advance of production just as Hollywood block-booked films. Advance bulk sales involved the same ‘principle . . . used in hundreds of lines of business in this country where the factory output is sold’. 42 Despite repeatedly insisting on the universality of wholesaling and the legitimacy of block-booking as an efficient method of distributing ‘factory output’ to retailer-exhibitors, studio representatives argued just as often that it was impossible to think of films as the products of a factory. Typical sales practices were contrasted with the remarkable properties of the thing the industry produced, which, they held, was scarcely a thing at all. Mary Pickford, whose own irregular production program for United Artists underscored her point, submitted written testimony that, pictures cannot be made by ‘mass production’ or on a schedule . . . Soap, shoes, and automobiles can be produced by mass production because each cake of soap, each pair of shoes, and each automobile are very much like the others . . . Pictures must all be different.43 Each movie was singular and hand-crafted, unique because uniquely difficult to make, but also not so much a physical object as a constellation of immaterial resources. According to George Schaefer, Motion pictures are not made strictly to specifications such as those to which drugs or food, or bricks and mortar are made. They are creations which are an intangible blend of careful thinking, imagination, artistic sense, and a combination of qualities generally referred to as showmanship.44 In Charles Pettijohn’s words, ‘The raw material of our pictures are artistry, literature, talent, color, sound. Such elements cannot be poured into a vat and mixed to produce cakes of entertainment’.45 These accounts simultaneously express pride in the difficult and unpredictable process of filmmaking and a certain longing for a simpler, more easily reproducible material object.

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Congressman Costello picked up on this language in his defence of the industry before the final hearings. ‘Motion pictures are as intangible as the shadow on a wall, a voice in the air’. The physical object is not really the article in which the industry deals, but is merely the mechanical means of conveying the motion picture itself from the studio to the numerous theaters. It is what is recorded upon the film, the wholly intangible dramatic and musical entertainment . . . This popular entertainment is the product of imagination, of talent, of many skilled technicians and arts and crafts, of long and painstaking effort in the studio. It is not machine made, nor the product of mass production. Each motion picture is specially designed and individually created by itself.46 Here the reels of film disappear in favour of ‘the motion picture itself’: the insubstantial traces of artistry that are the ‘magic’ of the movies. What brings the reels back is the process of moving this immaterial thing called entertainment from the scene of production to the audience. This ‘is not accomplished by any magic but by a commercial operation that functions with efficiency, speed and precision’ to bring movies to theatres ‘at a price within the reach of all’.47 Or as Pettijohn put it a few weeks later, in a version of the case he made in other hearings, the great challenge the film industry faced was ‘the physical task of distributing 25,000 to 30,000 miles of film every day to 16,500 theatres located in 9,187 cities, towns, villages, and hamlets’.48 Production is talent and showmanship. Theatres project shadows. Only in distribution is film irreducibly material, cakes of entertainment that get passed around over and over again, that are repeatedly bought but never sold. The ‘genius of the system’, to paraphrase Thomas Schatz, was not the messy, chaotic, inefficient process of production, which was made to sound like an enormous headache for everyone involved, but the welloiled machinery of motion picture distribution.49 At least that was the story distributors and their allies told. The idea of distribution as a streamlined process was belied by the accounts of exhibitors as to how it actually worked on the ground. Perhaps the most interesting lesson of the hearings was that the signed contract was frequently a starting point for further negotiations, compromises and adjustments. Indeed, the difference between angry independents who felt that the system failed them and dissatisfied independents who felt it worked may have been less about the contract each signed than how it was enforced. In a notable example from the 1936 House Hearings, Stanley Sumner of the University Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an opponent of the bill, testified that he signed contracts for 300 pictures a year, of which he was

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able to cancel approximately 30 per cent. Congressman Samuel Pettengill (D-IN), the sponsor of the House bill, asked him: ‘You would favor all theater proprietors having the same freedom to reject one third of the pictures that you claim for yourself, would you not?’ ‘Well, circumstances alter conditions’, Sumner answered.50 But Sumner was unable or unwilling to state what special circumstances yielded such a privileged position (although one may assume that testifying against the bill did nothing to alter them). He acknowledged that he had no formal contractual right to anything like this percentage of cancellations; indeed, some of his contracts included no cancellation provision at all. By way of explanation: ‘my relations with the distributors are such that they have always been willing to, shall we say, play along with me . . . Every theater operation is a peculiar one; a peculiar individual condition in the operation of theaters’. After a sour Pettengill congratulated him on the ‘splendid relationship’ that resulted in his getting a ‘release . . . from contracts at your own request’, Mr Sumner weakly replied, ‘I can understand that that statement seems very strange’. He did add that sometimes he had to pay full price or half for the films he rejected. It was all worked out through ‘common sense’.51 The key to Sumner’s favourable treatment was his ‘peculiar individual condition’, whatever that may have been, rather than the smooth workings of a modern, rationalised distribution process. 52 Before stating that he ‘will not give’ a 20–30 per cent cancellation to remove pictures that exhibitors ‘do not want to show’, 20th Century-Fox’s Sidney Kent pointed to the ‘thousands of adjustments that are made in this industry every year’, quite apart from cancellations written into contracts.53 In other words, the generous cancellation provisions sought by most of the exhibitors opposing the bill were unnecessary because in effect they took place informally all the time. Many other exhibitors gave similar accounts of distributor flexibility and reasonableness. Morton Thalhimer, the President of the MPTOA of Virginia, stated that in the event of poor pictures, ‘it is the custom in the trade that adjustments are given’, sometimes ‘immediately after the playing of an unsuccessful picture’ and sometimes at the end of the season, after all the pictures had been played.54 Others also spoke of a general ability to work things out with sympathetic distributors; they claimed, like Sumner, to have no problem receiving adequate adjustments and cancellations, regardless of what they were legally entitled to. Some of the most interesting evidence presented at the hearings were letters to and from distributors, submitted by exhibitors who did not enjoy the same freedom to violate contracts. Mrs Shaver, the Shavertown, PA theatre owner who cut such a forlorn figure in her testimony, documented how distributors bullied her into submitting to their terms as she tried to negotiate with them. She wanted to pay for Paramount shorts as she screened them, but weekly payments were exacted, meaning she paid for

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films she couldn’t show. Universal withheld a film she desperately wanted until she had paid for every last film on the 1938–9 contract that she didn’t want. She wrote to Loew’s to reject I Take This Woman (MGM 1940) under the cancellation provision of her contract, but her contact there cheerfully refused: ‘As this picture has picked up in every situation and is doing an outstanding business, would request you to arrange your date and forward to us as soon as possible, along with your date on Earl of Chicago [MGM, 1940], which we have not yet received’.55 Ben Ashe, an independent in Minneapolis, received similar replies from Universal when he attempted at least twice to cancel Tower of London (1939) on the grounds that ‘it is the most horribly brutal and revolting picture I have ever seen’. A distribution manager responded, ‘Inasmuch as this picture is doing outstanding box-office business everywhere we cannot accept the statement in your letter . . . as a basis for canceling this picture’. Claiming it would be easy to ‘name three popular, successful, current releases that are a great deal more gruesome than this picture’,56 he insisted that Ashe book the film before being able to get the James Stewart–Marlene Dietrich hit Western, Destry Rides Again (1939). Here is the relationship between distributors and exhibitor in situ. This correspondence points to distributors who cared nothing about the exhibitor’s local audience and its preferences because their outlook focused on how films performed ‘everywhere’. Whether or not they got adjustments, exhibitors found themselves parleying individually with distributors long after the contracts had been signed. In an era when regular long-distance calls to distribution exchanges would have been prohibitive, the volume of mail from Shaver suggests that the objects passed most often between distributors and many independent exhibitors were paper not films. She not only wrote to try to renegotiate various aspects of her deals but also as part of the ordinary business of running the theatre, such as sorting out screening dates, which depended on both a film’s general release and when it began working its way down to subsequent-run theatres. Films were bought ‘wholesale’, but they were delivered one or, at most, two at a time. This process involved multiple distributors, none of whom coordinated with the others and all of whom preferred their pictures to be shown on the most advantageous dates. The sense one gets from the hearings is that little about the distribution process was mechanical. Whether an exhibitor enjoyed special privileges or not, the business of leasing and screening motion pictures was an endless series of negotiations, of dates requested, denied, and changed, and of adjustments made or not given, case by case. Just as films were made individually, not on an assembly line, the process of distribution came down to ‘peculiar individual condition[s]’ as well.

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The last hearings took place in May 1940. By then the Production Code had been around for ten years, its enforcement mechanisms for six. Even reformers who supported the bill mostly acknowledged that films had on the whole improved by 1936, making ‘community freedom’ less urgent than it might have once seemed. In the absence of common cause among independents, the Neely bill could look too much like a narrow intervention into arcane trade practices better settled by the parties involved. Independent exhibitors used it as leverage to demand voluntary reforms. At the request of the House Subcommittee in 1936, MPTOA president Ed Kuykendahl submitted a memo for a proposed conference between exhibitor and distributor representatives to remedy unfair trade practices without recourse to legislation. Desiderata included removal of restrictions on cancellations, greater cancellation percentages, limits on the number of mandated weekend playdates, and several other reforms.57 Negotiations faltered but resumed two years later in response to the anti-trust lawsuit and renewed efforts at passing legislation. Both MPTOA and Allied States participated, but to Allied’s chagrin, opponents cited the attempts at self-regulation as reason to vote against the Neely bill at the hearings.58 While a favourable decision on the bill would have been very welcome to unhappy independents, the best chance for redress was the anti-trust lawsuit. With the appointment of Thurman Arnold as head of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division in 1938, both staff and funding increased significantly, and ‘the movies’ was one of many industries to fall within its sights.59 But the hopes of independent exhibitors were dashed when the Roosevelt administration backed away from aggressive prosecution of the film industry. The 1940 consent decree did bring changes to trade practices – blocks were limited to five pictures, and distributors had to offer trade showings before licensing films – but both policies proved unpopular with exhibitors. As I have suggested, even exhibitors who lived near a distribution exchange were too busy running a theatre to sit around watching movies all day. They also complained that poor films could just as easily be tucked into blocks of five as of fifty. Although the anti-trust lawsuit was eventually reinstated, and the US Supreme Court upheld divorcement of film production and distribution from exhibition in the Paramount Decision of 1948, divorcement ultimately arrived too late to help many independent exhibitors who had sought protection from monopolistic practices in the 1930s. The wartime boom in attendance and revenues had already given way to the post-war bust.60 In the short term, the 1940 compromise on the lawsuit enabled the federal government to appease the major film companies in preparation for the coming war. The film industry’s value to any war effort

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was not at all lost on its spokesmen at the final congressional hearing, which took place six months before the consent decree was announced. Almost the last words of some 2,000 pages of printed testimony from the hearings alerted the government to what was at stake in disrupting film industry operations at a pivotal moment in the nation’s fortunes. Apropos of nothing that was ostensibly relevant to public discussions of distribution and its effects upon families, communities and independent exhibitors, Charles Pettijohn testified to the industry’s patriotism: God forbid that it shall happen, but if our country is ever attacked you will find us all on the same side, and our trade problems will fade into insignificance and you will find that the motion-picture industry will and can mobilize within 24 hours when and if our country calls.61 The war would make the film industry a partner in the government’s activities, and the government was at last ready, for a while at least, to let it be one.

notes 1. Congressional Record, 76th Congress, 3rd session, vol. 86, part 15 (hereafter CR), (2 May 1940), 2627. 2. The Payne Fund Studies were celebrated by reformers, who saw the research as proof of the movies’ deleterious effects on minors, and reviled by industry executives and other critics, who denounced them as shoddy pseudo-science. Both positions were articulated at length during the Congressional hearings, especially in 1936. See Garth Jowett, Ian Jarvie and Kathryn Fuller, Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3. Before 1936, Senator Smith Brookhart (R-IA) and Congressmen Wright Patman (D-TX), Emanuel Celler (D-NY) and Francis Culkin (R-NY) each introduced multiple bills to regulate the film industry. Some focused exclusively on distribution; others sought also to regulate film content. The hearings on which I focus were on bills introduced by Neely in the Senate and Samuel Pettengill (D-IN) in the House beginning in 1935. The only other hearings to be printed in the 1930s were on H.R. (House of Representatives) 6097 and 8686, introduced by Patman in 1933 and 1934, respectively. Each focused on controlling film content, called few witnesses, and lasted only two hours. 4. See David A. Horowitz, ‘An Alliance of Convenience: Independent Exhibitors and Purity Crusaders Battle Hollywood, 1920–1940’, The Historian 59 (March 1997): 553–72, and Giuliana Muscio, Hollywood’s New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 129–37. The ‘Big Eight’ refers to the five majors and the three ‘minor’ film companies, Columbia, Universal and United Artists. 5. Michael Conant, Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry: Economic and Legal Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 48.

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6. CR, 2628. 7. The identical language is found in S. (Senate) 3012, S. 153, and S. 280, all introduced between 1935–1939 by Neely. 8. Anti ‘Block-Booking’ and ‘Blind Selling’ in the Leasing of Motion-Picture Films, Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate Commerce (hereafter Hearings 3), US Senate, 76th Congress, 1st session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939), 156. United Artists was the exception to this rule, as it handled a smaller number of pictures from a handful of high-quality independent producers. Other hearing titles cited in this essay are: Compulsory Block-Booking and Blind Selling in the Motion-Picture Industry, Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate Commerce (hereafter Hearings 1), US Senate, 74th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1938); Hearing before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce on Bills to Prohibit and to Prevent the Trade Practices Known as ‘Compulsory Block-Booking’ and ‘Blind Selling’ in the Leasing of Motion Picture Films in Interstate and Foreign Commerce (hereafter Hearings 2), US House of Representatives, 74th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1936); Motion-Picture Films (Compulsory Block Booking and Blind Selling), Hearing before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce (hereafter Hearings 4), US House of Representatives, 76th Congress, 3rd Session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940). The 1936 Senate hearings were printed in 1938. 9. ‘To Prohibit and to Prevent the Trade Practices Known as “Compulsory BlockBooking” and “Blind Selling” of Motion-Picture Films in Interstate and Foreign Commerce’, 76th Congress, 1st session, Report no. 2378 (1939), 1. The same language occurs in reports from 1936 and 1938. 10. Hearings 1: 26. 11. Hearings 1: 107. 12. Hearings 4: 524. 13. Hearings 3: 354. 14. Hearings 4: 26. 15. ‘To Prohibit and to Prevent’, 1. 16. Hearings 1: 50. 17. Hearings 2: 115. 18. Hearings 1: 48, 49. 19. Hearings 1: 207. 20. Hearings 1: 130, 151. 21. Hearings 1: 186. 22. Hearings 1: 179. 23. The Catholic hierarchy declined to interfere with industry trade practices in exchange for more robust Production Code enforcement beginning in 1934. See Richard Maltby, ‘The Production Code and the Hays Office’, in Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (1993; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 37–72. 24. Hearings 2: 156, 226–7. 25. Hearings 3: 533. 26. Preprinted postcards sent by various organisations are found in Records of the US Senate, 76th Congress, Papers Relating to Specific Bills and Resolutions, Box no. 7, Senate Bill 280 folder, The Center for Legislative Archives, Washington, DC.

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102 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

Hearings 4: 216. Hearings 4: 427. Hearings 4: 705, 761. Hearings 2: 349. Hearings 3: 364, 392. See Conant, Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry, 79. Hearings 4: 754. Hearings 1: 2. Hearings 3: 194. Hearings 3: 322–6; Hearings 4: 605–8. Hearings 4: 124. Hearings 4: 2. Hearings 2: 362. Hearings 2: 244. Hearings 2: 283. Hearings 2: 237. Hearings 2: 337. Hearings 3: 249. Hearings 1: 127. CR, 2627. CR, 2628. Hearings 4: 462. Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Pantheon, 1988). For Schatz, the ‘genius’ was the producer who brought order to the tumult described here. Hearings 2: 221. Hearings 2: 222. The reasons for Sumner’s favourable treatment are mysterious. Of the eight theatres in town, M & P, a Paramount-affiliated chain, ran the Central Square in Cambridge and the Harvard in North Cambridge. The others were apparently independent, so he would not have been in an especially dominant position vis-àvis the majors. See Film Daily Yearbook, ed. Jack Alicoate (New York: Film Daily, 1936), 901, 990. Hearings 2: 246, 239. Hearings 2: 399. Hearings 4: 266. Hearings 4: 409. Hearings 2: 459–61. See Allied States, ‘Report of the Negotiating Committee’, 15 June 1939, 4, Senate Bill 280 folder. See Neil Fligstein, The Transformation of Corporate Control (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 167–9. See Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (1997; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 326–8; and Balio, Grand Design, 36. Hearings 4: 1071.

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chapter 5

Shirley Temple and Hollywood’s Colonialist Ideology Ina Rae Hark

D

uring the 1930s the ‘empire film’ genre enjoyed considerable popularity. Between the American sound version of British novelist A. E. W. Mason’s The Four Feathers (Paramount, 1929) and the British remake (distributor United Artists, 1939), US audiences saw many tales of European or white North American soldiers squaring off against non-white indigenous peoples in colonial Africa and Asia. Examples of the genre include The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Paramount, 1935), The Charge of the Light Brigade (Warner Bros, 1936), Wee Willie Winkie (20th Century-Fox, 1937), Beau Geste (Paramount, 1939) and Gunga Din (RKO, 1939). The plots of these movies overlapped similarly structured ones of the Western. That Americans could embrace the narrative pleasures of imperial troops engaging (South Asian) Indians as easily as those of the US Cavalry engaging (Native American) ‘Indians’, despite the nation’s origin in armed revolt against Britain, is a paradox of ‘settler colonialism’. Settler cinemas, according to Peter Limbrick, reflect the conflicted ideologies of ‘the white settlers who became dominant in these places, never displaced by decolonization movements, [and] have formed their identities in relation to each other, to land, and to indigenous presence, inflected always and to differing degrees by the traces of a British imperial past’.1 Alan Lawson cites Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘double inscription’, in which the colonial subject always oscillates between the poles of ‘mother’ and ‘other’, to posit settler cultures as a ‘Second World’ whose narratives demonstrate that ‘the settler subject-position is both postimperial and postcolonial; it has colonized and has been colonized: it must speak of and against both its own oppressiveness and its own

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oppression’.2 For American culture, including the colonising culture of Hollywood, relations to the Other are especially vexed. Not only did European settlers dispossess and wage war upon the indigenous population but they, like several other cultures of the New World, imported and enslaved non-indigenous Africans to exploit for uncompensated labour. In addition, the United States eventually mimicked the imperial European powers after the Spanish–American War, alibied as an intervention on behalf of Cubans denied self-determination by Spain. It assumed colonial authority over former Spanish territories in Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam and, in a separate initiative, annexed the Hawaiian Islands. Despite this history, the imperialist alignments of 1930s Hollywood films vis-à-vis people of colour routinely stand beside celebrations of the American commitment to democracy and liberty. This double inscription also surfaces in those films of this era that starred Shirley Temple. A genre unto themselves, they usually followed the ‘Shirley Temple formula’, codified after her earliest successes by 20th Century-Fox where she was under contract from 1934 through 1940. Shirley,3 often wholly or partially orphaned, suffers uncertainty and hardship but through her loving heart and indomitable spirit wins through to convert most of the cast into her doting extended family. In Ann DuCille’s assessment, the ‘perfect blond curls and snow white skin’ make her ‘the very sign of whiteness, its privilege and hegemonic power’.4 Nevertheless, Temple’s characters also have affinity with people of colour and sometimes a slippage of identity in regards to their cultures. As a surge of twenty-first-century scholarship about Temple by the likes of Kristen Hatch, Gaylyn Studlar, John Kasson, and Ara Osterweil5 has demonstrated, this is one of many liminal positions Shirley occupies. She is both child and adult, the pinnacle of girlhood who takes on roles originally gendered for boys, the pure Victorian daughter who enables the redemption of failed men, and the erotically configured nymphet who provokes their pedophiliac gaze. ‘The star’s amazing liminality’, Studlar notes, gives her the ‘ability to absorb and negotiate a host of cultural contradictions and paradoxes’.6

it takes a regiment Temple brought this star image to a number of her 20th Century-Fox films, set in the nineteenth century, that highlight the inherent contradictions of settler cinema. She’s a dependent of the imperial military in the The Little Princess (1939), directed by Walter Lang, and the aforementioned Wee Willie Winkie, directed by John Ford; a ward of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) who lost her parents to an attack by

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indigenous Blackfeet in Susannah of the Mounties (1939), directed by Walter Lang; and a child or grandchild of Confederate soldiers in The Littlest Rebel (1935) and The Little Colonel (1935), both movies directed by David Butler. Shirley’s relationships to non-white indigenous cultures and to enslaved Africans parallel issues of settler cinemas generally. Two narrative moves typical of the Shirley Temple formula have the potential to subvert tropes of settler cinema. First, Shirley sought to transform all men into fathers but of a kind not totally concomitant with the dictates of patriarchy. In her films the father must provide domestic security for the child; he must serve as a source of values and a model of good behaviour, without becoming a rigid disciplinarian; and he should open his heart to be both chaste lover and enthusiastic playmate. At the same time, he should not be the sort of man who seeks to destroy his enemies in battle or exact deadly revenge for even the most serious wrongs. The encounter between settler and indigene, no matter how nuanced, usually pivots on violent confrontation, especially in 1930s Hollywood. But, as John Kasson notes, ‘Shirley’s central task was emotional healing. She mended the rifts of estranged lovers, family members, old-fashioned and modern ways, warring peoples, and clashing cultures’.7 Thus, the particular sort of paternity Shirley instilled in the men she moulded differed substantially from the patriarchal masculinity and paternalism characteristic of the imperialist project. The Shirley Temple screen character is an amalgamation of spunk, determination, cuteness, affection, an unerring moral compass, a precocious talent for song and dance, and a shameless skill at manipulation. Its energies overwhelmingly target adult men in the celluloid narratives, just as the studio directed its promotional strategies and marketing at that male demographic. Often publicists recounted how crusty real-life directors of Temple fell under her spell just as did the characters in the film they were shooting. This defining characteristic of the little girl as man-magnet has generated the central debate of recent Shirley Temple scholarship. As delineated by Kristen Hatch, the crux of the matter was that Temple’s film career: stood at the juncture of two very different paradigms of childhood. It was built upon the fairly stable conception of the white child’s innocence as transformative, capable not only of deflecting adult sexuality but of transforming adults for the better. However, it risked being undone by an emergent discourse of pedophilia that framed men’s interest in child stars as sexual, a discourse that gained traction with the ascendance of Freud’s theories of sexuality and the unconscious in the post-war period.8

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In other words, did placing a child in scenarios that would have been undeniably sexual if played out by an adult woman, neutralise their erotic charge or turn the child into an erotic object? This chapter draws on the arguments of Pamela Robertson Wojcik that Shirley’s frequent resemblance to the urban streetwalker can be read as parodying the fallen woman, deflecting sexuality by teasing it,9 and of Gaylyn Studlar that ‘the whole point of Temple’s films is their textual attempt to construct the love between a little girl and a man (a father, a grandfather, a father-in-the making) as being of a different order than that of pedophilia’.10 Graham Greene may have discerned in Wee Willie Winkie a figure of ‘dimpled depravity’ with ‘agile studio eyes’ making a vamp’s come-on to respectable middle-aged men in complete disavowal of the impulses she stirred in them. But even if he were right – and he probably was – Shirley’s diegetic flirtations result in men laying down their arms. Greene himself noted that the ‘safety curtain of story and dialogue’11 comes down between male audience members’ desires and their consciousness of them. Whatever passing pedophilia Shirley might arouse in such spectators, in the end her characters within the films are safe as houses. Her techniques may resemble those of adult seductresses but her goals are to seduce men into becoming platonic, not incestuous, parents. Narratively Shirley homes in on men either because she is fatherless and needs fostering or because the fathers, grandfathers and guardians, biological or adoptive, lack some paternal ability that she can reinstate. Her accumulated daddies and rescue projects often exceed the one male parent an orphan requires. Fraternising with the civilian aviators who were her deceased father’s colleagues in Bright Eyes (Fox, 1934), ‘Shirley is lifted or caressed by at least fifteen men’.12 Indeed, as well as acquiring a number of besotted admirers among the featured players, Shirley often becomes the focus of entire troops of them. This is especially true in the colonialist films where she is embedded in military settings. Their message is clear: ‘It takes a regiment to raise a child’. If military cadres stand in loco parentis to fatherless Shirley, in colonialist films they often assume that position in regard to the indigenous populations over whom they exert imperialist discipline. Europeans justified occupation and control of non-white indigenes on the grounds that their cultures were primitive and needed a strong, guiding hand. Such paternalism, even when well-intentioned, ‘objectionably treats its targets like children’.13 Indeed, the US government encouraged Native Americans to view the president as the ‘Great White Father’; in India, Ruth Watts says, ‘most Western women reformers, despite

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their insistence on “global sisterhood,” were more likely to behave like mothers towards ignorant daughters in the unequal situation of colonial relationships’.14 Because the young girls Temple portrays in these films form close attachments to adult Indians, First Nations people and African Americans, 20th Century-Fox seems to equate them with her immaturity; her presence, in this view, would justify paternalism within and without the diegesis. But if Shirley is literally a child here, she is also in every other sense the only adult in the room. Studlar argues that ‘Temple’s films offered escape into a potent cultural fantasy in which the adult world is no match for the power of the child who transcends age, sex, and gender and sometimes race’.15 Protecting white women and children from depraved, indigenous others justifies colonial military actions in many empire and settler films. Shirley, on the other hand, routinely saves adult male soldiers from the dangers their militaristic ideologies have put them in. And she does it not by treating indigenes as naughty children (or as demonised foes to be slaughtered) but by bringing them along to act as equal, rational, adult partners to their colonial counterparts. Making war is the truly childish activity in Shirley-land. Real grown-ups make peace.

colonisers and indigenes: WEE and SUSANNAH OF THE MOUNTIES

WILLIE WINKIE

In the John Ford-directed Wee Willie Winkie Temple plays Priscilla Williams, an American girl who arrives with her widowed mother Joyce (June Lang) at a British garrison in Raj Pore, on India’s northwest frontier, to find a home with her paternal grandfather, Colonel Williams (C. Aubrey Smith), the regimental commander. Her efforts to integrate into this alien environment face additional obstacles because Khoda Khan (Cesar Romero), an Afghan tribal chief, is leading an armed insurgency in the area. Looking out the window as her train approaches the fort, Priscilla asks her mother to explain why, although they are in India, she sees no Indians, that is, the Native Americans familiar from the country of her birth. Her mother explains, ‘These are the real Indians; the ones back home were called Indians by mistake’. Priscilla then expresses confusion over why her English grandfather should live in India. Here we see both parallels and disconnects between American settler hegemony over its indigenous peoples and British imperial rule over India’s. Priscilla will eventually fully embrace her imperialist paternal legacy but not before transforming it.

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She accomplishes the transformation incrementally, by reconfiguring four men so that they fulfill various aspects of ideal Shirley Temple fatherhood. First she must find someone to wed her mother. No sooner does she set eyes on the handsome Lieutenant Brandes (Michael Whalen), whom she nicknames ‘Coppy’, due to his auburn hair, than she gives him a coquettish smile, a tilt of the head, and aims him squarely at Joyce. This penchant for nicknaming reflects Priscilla’s determination to redefine people as she sees them. In Brandes’ case, the chosen soubriquet demonstrates the accuracy of her perceptions – his tendency toward reckless and passionate behaviour confirms a stereotype for redheads. Her second father, Sergeant Donald MacDuff (Victor McLaglen), affords Priscilla the opportunity to escape the constricted life marked out for women and girls on the base by drilling and fraternising with the members of the regiment. MacDuff dubs her Wee Willie Winkie, after the Scottish nursery rhyme, because they both agree that the name Priscilla does not quite fit a soldier. He subsequently employs various subterfuges to redirect a uniform and a puppy claimed by the drummer boy Mott to Winkie, further cementing her qualifications as a member of the regiment despite her gender. On the other hand, their official uniform being a kilt, which Priscilla calls a ‘funny little petticoat’ not usually worn by men, makes her gender transformation less extreme. Priscilla’s other two paternal targets present more serious challenges. Her grandfather belongs to a recurrent type in Temple films: the embittered old man who has cut himself off from human affections. Colonel Williams is a martinet, inspiring loyalty but no love in his men. He upholds patriarchal views of women and paternalistic ones of indigenes, tut-tutting that the insurgents should simply follow the Queen’s enlightened views for creating a prosperous India in keeping with imperialist goals. The Winkie script hints that he was estranged from his son. ‘I’d have sent for you years ago if I’d known you were destitute’, he tells Joyce. He thus represents the symbolic Law of the Father while having utterly failed at being a real one. Although the indomitable Shirley charm wins him over, his reinvention cannot be complete until he becomes a proper moral exemplar for her, in part by learning to treat Khoda Khan as his equal, a full fellow member of the Priscilla daddy club. Unlike her grandfather, Khan recognises Priscilla’s pure heart and respect for all immediately when she returns a prized talisman that has fallen to the ground as he struggles with the Indian police who take him captive. She insists that his ‘nice eyes’ and good manners contradict the British view of him as a dangerous outlaw. Indeed, she seems

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to have a bit of a crush, either the innocent adoration of a little girl for a dashing father figure or a junior version of the attraction Hollywood posits Western women may develop for the exoticised Other, depending where one stands on the matter of Shirley’s ‘dimpled depravity’. Until the imperialist/indigene conflict itself undergoes transformation, however, Priscilla’s remaking of these four men is counterproductive. The colonel’s duplicitous servant Mohammet Dihn (Willie Fung), a spy for the insurgents, uses Priscilla’s visits with the imprisoned Khan to communicate with him, part of a plot to free him that also succeeds because Coppy abandons his sentry post to take Joyce to a dance. In pursuit of the rebels, the regiment suffers casualties and Priscilla’s beloved Sergeant MacDuff returns mortally wounded. The distraught little girl determines to go to Khan’s mountain stronghold to ask him why, in essence, one man who loves her had to kill another, her grandfather having failed to provide a satisfactory answer. Dihn takes her there, knowing that the troop’s inevitable rescue mission will subject them to deadly ambush. That the massacre does not take place and peace prevails may owe something to Priscilla’s ability to seek understanding rather than revenge for MacDuff’s death. But her previous attempts at peace-making have run up against the ingrained ideological opposition between imperialist and indigene. She cannot imagine how either group would be content with a constant state of being ‘mad at’ each other and watching their friends die during hostilities. Yet both the colonel and Khan insist that the situation is unfixable. Khan tells her, ‘Between your people and mine, little one, there can be only war’. Her grandfather has likewise claimed that ‘If we don’t shoot Khoda Khan, Khoda Khan will shoot us’. A happy conclusion only comes about because the colonel walks alone into Khan’s camp as a loving grandfather rather than the commander of imperial forces. They jointly put Priscilla to bed and then agree to talk. In a way, Khan takes the place of Williams’s estranged son in shared parental protection of ‘Winkie’, thus allowing the colonel to maintain a paternalist attitude toward the indigene, but one purged of infantilising tendencies. The film then cuts to a ceremonial troop manoeuvre at the fort, staged for a visiting Khan and his men, who sit with the Raj Pore ladies. The lacuna is essential, because any realistic unification of occupier and occupied can exist only as fantasy. Even the fantasy reveals a troubling subtext, since the rebels are intercut into a sequence showcasing imperial power. Although the scene plays out like one of the big production numbers we might find in another sort of Temple film, it shows the rebels not only entertained but also contained – and tamed.

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Figure 5.1 Khoda Khan (Cesar Romero) and his entourage at Raj Pore in Wee Willie Winkie (20th Century-Fox, 1937).

Two years later Susannah of the Mounties imported the Wee Willie Winkie scenario into a settler colonialist nation . ‘Different imperial frontiers, same Shirley Temple?’ asks Richard A. Voeltz.16 The answer is yes, but the switch to a frontier much closer to that of the US – and a narrative similar to the plots of many a cavalry versus Native Americans Hollywood Western – changes the stakes in subtle ways. Whereas American-born Priscilla was culturally distant from both the British occupiers and the indigenous inhabitants, thus allowing her to evaluate each without being blinded by the prejudices of the other, Susannah, her foster family of Mounties and the indigenous Blackfeet with whom they come into conflict are all native to Canada and must resolve conflicts based on competing claims to its territory. Perhaps because of these higher stakes, the film is more violent than any of Shirley’s other colonialist tales. Blackfeet kill civilians and threaten Susannah’s rescuer ‘Monty’ Montague (Randolph Scott) with burning at the stake. A white railroad executive has four Blackfeet beaten. At the outset of the film the construction of the Canadian Pacific railroad disrupts an era of respectful coexistence between the indigenes and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) garrison within

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their territory. The Blackfeet, a title card informs the audience, ‘resent’ this intrusion. Soon a raid on the railroad camp to steal horses and a massacre of a wagon train that only Susannah survives inflame the situation. Blackfoot chief Big Eagle (Maurice Moscovitch), however, promises to hand over those responsible for trial by Canadian authorities, and RCMP Supt Standing promises in turn to sign a treaty formalising the rights of the First Nations tribes to their lands. The agreement falls apart but not because of the cultural, economic and ideological differences among the two peoples as a whole. Instead, individual malfeasance is to blame: the rogue actions of the warrior Wolf Pelt (Victor Jory) and the bluster of the railroad man, Harlan Chambers (Lester Matthews), who without authority tells the Blackfeet he will summon the Army to exterminate the indigenes. This gives Wolf Pelt the leverage to instigate an uprising by all the tribes in the area. Susannah must, of course, step in to save Monty and prevent allout war. To do so she must integrate into the indigenous society in ways not seen in other films. Although she has every reason to hate and fear the Blackfeet, she overcomes these feelings to strike up a friendship with Big Eagle’s adolescent son, Little Chief (Martin Good Rider), who eventually makes her his blood brother and inducts her into the tribe as Golden Hawk. Filling the Khoda Khan role, Little Chief differs from him in ways attributable to the eleven-year-old Temple being on the brink of puberty in Susannah. The secondary plotline, which traces Susannah’s jealousy over Monty’s courtship of Standing’s daughter Vicky (Margaret Lockwood), makes clear that the girl sees him not as a substitute father but as a potential boyfriend. This acknowledgment that Susannah experiences sexual attraction necessitates an age-appropriate indigenous friend rather than the suave, adult Khan. The film also plays her relationship with the Blackfoot boy for laughs, as she chafes at his insistence of the superiority of braves to squaws. Regrettably much of the humour derives from paternalistic condescension. Monty explains that the whites are ‘more grown up than [the Blackfeet] are’, so Susannah must make allowances. She also hesitates to join the tribe until assured that she will remain a ‘paleface’, that is, not forfeit her white privilege. Nevertheless, the two do bond and that bond proves crucial to averting disaster. Having witnessed the encounter between Chambers and Wolf Pelt, they confront Big Eagle with the truth. The malefactors get their comeuppance and Golden Hawk is made a party to the treaty because, in the patronising pidgin the indigenes speak even among themselves, ‘Little Golden Hawk show white man and Indian how to live as brothers’.

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queen and country:

THE LITTLE PRINCESS

Sara Crewe, Temple’s character in The Little Princess, is another daughter of the regiment, even more so than Priscilla or Susannah. She is born into it, to a British father serving in India and his soon absent wife. No sooner does Captain Crewe (Ian Hunter) leave his posting in India, the only home country Sara knows, than his regiment is called up to battle the Boers in South Africa. This leaves Sara alone in the seat of empire, but to her the most foreign of countries, as a pupil in the elite London girls’ school run by the snobbish, greedy and cruel Miss Minchin (Mary Nash). Her doting father has spoiled her with all manner of material possessions, including an ermine-collared coat and a pony. His wealth and status as a member of the nobility ease Sara’s way, leading the other students to dub her ‘the little princess’. This changes abruptly when her father is reported killed during the siege of Mafeking and revealed to be a pauper because the Boers have seized the gold and diamond mines from which he derives his income. Miss Minchin allows the girl to remain but only as an exploited servant, bullied, starved and housed in a freezing garret with no coal for her stove. The Little Princess follows the typical Temple narrative for dealing with its heroine’s distress. Although Miss Minchin and the mean rich girls of her seminary scorn Sara once her fortune vanishes, she acquires the usual substitute fathers: the dashing riding instructor Geoffrey Hamilton (Richard Greene), the disinherited grandson of the cantankerous Lord Wickham (Miles Mander), who owns the house that abuts the school; Miss Minchin’s brother Bertie (Arthur Treacher), a former music hall star; and Ram Dass (played by Khoda Khan’s portrayer, Cesar Romero), Wickham’s servant who observes Sara’s maltreatment and persuades his employer to send over food, clothing and fuel in order to alleviate it. Because Sara, whether princess or pauper, is democratic in her friendships, she also wins the affection of her teacher Rose (Anita Louise), a foundling whom Miss Minchin exploits, and the little Cockney maid Becky (Sybil Jason). Yet the inevitable happy ending feels somewhat hollow. Sara neither persuades the secretly married Geoffrey and Rose to adopt her nor moves in with Lord Wickham and Ram Dass. She does not want a new father; she spends most of the film pining for and then scouring the hospital wards for the missing Captain Crewe, whom she refuses to believe is dead. He is still alive, in fact, but he’s a broken man, suffering a head injury and, as far as we know, still bankrupt. None other than Queen Victoria (Beryl Mercer), visiting the wounded soldiers, helps facilitate his reunion with Sara and both proudly salute her in the closing shot.

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Yet the Queen is a frail, aged and melancholy figure. The film less effectively celebrates her empire than it reveals its moral shortcomings and the high cost exacted for holding on to it. Miss Minchin’s snobbery, avariciousness and class-worship foreground the social inequities of the home country. Gone also is any rationalisation for empire as a civilising force. Although oblique, the references to Captain Crewe’s mining interests lay bare the primacy of resource acquisition in the colonialist project. (Moves to bring the gold and diamonds from the Afrikaner Transvaal region under British hegemony had sparked the Boer insurgency.) Scenes of troops marching off to war surrounded by cheering crowds waving the Union Jack contrast with scenes of their broken bodies in the wards or on London streets. Celebrations that ‘Mafeking is relieved’ fall short of those for all-out victory. With Sara far from the battlefield, the usual peacemaking function of the Shirley character is absent. Wee Willie Winkie and Susannah of the Mounties strictly demarcate colonials from indigenes; the line begins to blur here. Addressing Ram Dass in Hindustani, to his great surprise, Sara explains that she has lived in India ‘all my life’. Although Priscilla Williams’ mother (and the audience) see the absurdity in Priscilla wondering whether the very British Colonel Williams is Indian, Sara Crewe has a much stronger claim to that identity. Indeed a stereoscopic picture viewer she receives for her birthday comes with depictions of ‘your native India’, as Miss Minchin puts it. Sara’s sudden descent into servitude also mimics the revised status of indigenes like Ram Dass who suddenly find themselves compelled to serve the needs of foreign occupiers. Likewise the conflict in South Africa involves not British imperial forces and indigenes, but settlers from two European countries warring over who can appropriate the wealth of the native Africans completely effaced in the Boer War discourses of The Little Princess. Captain Crewe rather employs the condescending, infantilising rhetoric often used to describe insurgent indigenes in talking about the Afrikaners, who are up to ‘nonsense’ and need to be taught to behave. To be sure, Sara’s or the Afrikaners’ claims to Indian or South African nationality are of a different order than that of indigenous, non-white inhabitants. Alan Lawson points out that for settler colonialists ‘the suppression or effacement of the Indigene, and the concomitant indigenization of the settler’ is a move of displacement, not of making common cause against European colonial authorities.17 Nevertheless the move to displace their claims onto Shirley that we see in this film recurs in her two narratives about the Southern slave-holding class during and after the Civil War.

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displacing the colonial subject: REBEL and THE LITTLE COLONEL

THE LITTLEST

The Temple film, for all its commendable subversion of the violent racism of the empire or settler film, does not disturb the fundamental colonialist bias of 1930s Hollywood. Laudable peace-making nevertheless neutralises the threat of armed revolt, a valuable tool for expelling the invaders from indigenous lands. Shirley may seek to end conflict but she also identifies as a ‘good soldier’ in her colonialist tales: she dresses in military uniforms, performs drills, salutes, discusses battle tactics and receives honourary commissions. The rapprochement between the occupying colonial troops and the indigenous insurgents never reaches the point at which the imperial forces think that they should just go home. As Ruth Watts observes, ‘the most liberal of white Europeans . . . accept with little resistance, indeed, even as an obligation, their right to rule other countries’.18 Despite defining itself in opposition to the Britain against which it revolted, the US also adopts this mindset, especially when non-white indigenes are involved. So, where is the second half of the mother/Other double inscription? Where will we find endorsement of the need for occupied peoples to revolt against their oppressors, as the American colonists did when they revolted against Great Britain, rather than compromise liberty for peace? Here we see the inherent paradox of American settler colonialism and its cinema: 20th Century-Fox would not likely have put our little miss peacemaker on George Washington’s lap so that he could lay down arms and have a tête-à-tête with Earl Cornwallis. Americans would probably not wish that the Boston Tea Party had been a conciliatory social event rather than an act of insurrectionist vandalism. The sorts of fathers Shirley manufactures in these films are incompatible with the Founding Fathers the nation actually had. In the 1930s endorsing such popular insurrections required a delicate balancing act. The anxieties of the historical moment, issues of race, and even of the box office, circumscribed the subject matter available to endorse, literally or by analogy, the events of 1776 and thereafter. The economic desperation brought about by the Great Depression had led to anti-government protests such as the confrontation between the Bonus Marchers and the US Army in the nation’s capital in July 1932. Some political leaders worried about all-out violent revolt, fears that often melded with those of communism as established by the Bolshevik Revolution. When 1930s Hollywood

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wished to valorise armed resistance by oppressed people, to create parallels with the American struggle for independence, it turned almost entirely to historical settings, as in the Warner Bros ‘Merrie England’ films. These insurrectionists were moreover predominantly white, especially if the tyrants they opposed were white. That white rulers and non-white subjects should arrive at peaceful coexistence occasionally emerged as a message, as it does in the two Temple films just discussed. But few films of the 1930s advocated violent revolution by people of colour against white colonial powers. Even today, there has been no major Hollywood film depicting Toussaint L’Ouverture’s successful revolt in Haiti, despite its inherent cinematic appeal. Americans’ history of genocide against Native people and enslavement of Africans does not incline its mainstream popular culture toward fantasies of violent overthrow of white hegemony by people of colour. The actual American Revolution presented an option for cinematic scenarios that did not involve contemporary social unrest or, for the most part, racial politics. During the silent era a number of features and shorts were set during that time. Sound cinema tackled the Colonial era primarily through so-called ‘Pennsylvania Westerns’, settler-indigene conflicts taking place along the eighteenth-century rather than nineteenth-century frontier. Yet it has long been a Hollywood truism that Colonial-era narratives are box office disappointments. No film centring on the struggle for independence has ever achieved classic status, either by popular or critical metrics. D. W. Griffith’s America (United Artists, 1924) still commands some interest, but only because of its director. Hollywood instead substitutes the Civil War, the conflict portrayed in Griffith’s landmark The Birth of a Nation (Epoch, 1915), for the revolution that actually birthed the nation. Its narrative accommodates the settler-colonialist double inscription well. As the nation-state seeks to preserve itself against a threat of dissolution from an army of rebellious subjects, those rebels in turn see themselves as in just revolt against a distant power that threatens its economic self-determination. White Americans make up the combatants on both sides; even though the fate of oppressed, imported Africans sparks the conflict, the storytelling largely displaces them. It is their Southern enslavers who ironically stand in for the American colonists struggling for independence from Britain. This perhaps explains Hollywood films’ affinity for the Southern point of view when depicting the Civil War, from Birth to the blockbuster that brought the 1930s to a close, Gone with the Wind.19 At the same time, Abraham Lincoln, a tyrannical King George to Southern eyes,

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stands nationally as a liberator and unifier, especially in the 1930s, where cinematic invocations of him are everywhere. If the Shirley Temple formula creates tensions with the empire film’s underlying assumptions, it fits comfortably within those of the Civil War film. The Lincoln celebrated in 1930s Hollywood cinema is the healer who planned to treat the rebellious South mercifully in defeat. When Temple’s Rebel character Virgie sits on honest Abe’s lap seeking pardon for her Confederate biological father and her Union acquired one, they are perfectly simpatico. Shirley’s peace-making efforts between colonialists and indigenes in empire films imply that it is the natives who must compromise. Despite the moral, as well as military, superiority of the Northern side, her Civil War and Reconstruction films insist on greater parity. Race undoubtedly plays a part in this asymmetry. Had enslaved blacks launched an armed insurrection against their masters, one doubts that emancipation would have followed. Nor would Hollywood decades later have equivocated about the need to quell their rebellion, as it implicitly does in the case of Confederate rebels. In addition, most Civil War dramas prior to World War II treat Emancipation as a side issue, effacing the African American perspective. Certainly The Littlest Rebel and The Little Colonel do. The former film comes closest of any of Temple’s to having Shirley replicate the experience of a colonised indigene. Virgie Cary’s life as a pampered young Southern belle turns topsy-turvy when war breaks out: her father enlists, her mother dies of fever, Union soldiers occupy her town and take over her plantation home for their headquarters, leaving her in the care of the few African-Americans who place loyalty to the former slave-owners above their own emancipation. Virgie at one point adopts blackface for protection, because to these Union occupiers white rebels have displaced subjugated non-white indigenes as objects of imperialist ire. Rescue comes, as it always does for Shirley, in the form of a newly minted father. Union Colonel Morrison (Jack Holt) takes to her immediately, saying that she reminds him of his own daughter. The Blue–Gray détente extends to Captain Cary (John Boles) when they encounter each other during his surreptitious visit home. Together they concoct a plan to get Cary and Virgie through the Union lines to safety with her aunt in Richmond. As is the case in Wee Willie Winkie, however, peace-making without the assent of the man in command of the occupying army is hazardous. Their ruse discovered, Morrison and Cary end up condemned to death as spy and traitor. Thus the necessity of the petition to Lincoln, who makes everything right.

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Figure 5.2 Virgie Cary (Shirley Temple) and her ‘two dads’, Captain Cary (John Boles) on the left and Colonel Morrison (Jack Holt) on the right, in The Littlest Rebel (20th Century-Fox, 1935).

Another father figure cares for Virgie when her soldier-daddies are occupied on the battlefield or sitting in prison. Uncle Billy, the devoted family servant, tends to her quotidian needs and engineers the trip to Washington to meet with President Lincoln (Frank McGlynn, Sr). Played by Temple’s four-time co-star, tap-dancing partner and off-screen friend, the great Bill Robinson, ‘Uncle Billy is smart, brave, resolute, and loyal, the only one of Virgie’s three father figures who does not make a mess of efforts to protect her’.20 Yet the script renders him incoherent when questioned about the Yankees’ dedication to freeing the slaves and treats emancipation itself as an annoying distraction from the plight of the Carys. Lincoln at least offers his hand to Uncle Billy and thanks him for his efforts on Virgie’s behalf. The film pushes him aside in its final image of Virgie smiling between her two white fathers. Like The Littlest Rebel, The Little Colonel features Shirley effecting reconciliation between North and South. This time she charms (but also shames) her diehard Confederate grandfather Colonel Lloyd (Lionel Barrymore) into accepting after six years the marriage between his daughter Elizabeth (Evelyn Venable) and the Yankee with the unfortunate surname Sherman whom she wed, resulting in Lloyd’s banishing

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her from his life. But if Rebel describes Virgie’s loss of her place of comfort and security within the Southern aristocracy, Colonel ascribes Lloyd Sherman’s straitened circumstances to her Northern heritage. Looking for a game they can both enjoy, grandfather and granddaughter settle on staging a battle using toy Union and Confederate soldiers.21 To her delight he assigns her the Northern Army; how can she lose commanding the winning side? This of course enrages Colonel Lloyd, nor is he mollified when she generously offers to let him play the Union while she takes over the ‘Johnny Rebs’. The colonel wants the impossible – namely, for the Confederate Army to erase its historic defeat. The film more or less grants him his wish. A generation after the Civil War has ended, Colonel Lloyd’s old Kentucky home is indistinguishable from an antebellum plantation. African-American servants scurry to perform his bidding and endure verbal and physical abuse. There is still an overseer’s house with a resident overseer. Feckless Jack Sherman (Jack Lodge) is useless in providing for or protecting his wife and child. He has let swindlers take all his money in exchange for a faked gold claim, returning to the cottage Elizabeth inherited from her mother weakened by a chronic fever. Reclaiming her colonialist patriarch is the only way little Lloyd can save the family. When a deus ex machina renders Sherman’s supposedly worthless land a lucrative right of way for the Union Pacific Railroad instead, the swindlers try to seize the deed at gunpoint. Riding to the rescue, Colonel Lloyd shoots one and delivers both to the sheriff. Basking in little Lloyd’s admiring gaze, he then extends the hand of friendship to her father. The film concludes with a Technicolor sequence of the united family, dressed in expensive Southern finery, hosting a party for their neighbours on the plantation lawn as black musicians play ‘Dixie’ and the big and little colonels exchange salutes.22 As in Rebel, Shirley’s impoverished circumstances coincide with a non-family social milieu almost entirely African-American. Her only playmates, May Lily (Avonie Jackson) and Henry Clay (Nyanza Potts), are black children who live on her grandfather’s estate. Her mother’s housekeeper, Beck (Hattie McDaniel), and the colonel’s butler, Walker, serve as surrogate parents, taking her to a riverside baptism where she is the only white present. Although Bill Robinson plays Walker, he never becomes her primary guardian and protector, as Uncle Billy does for long stretches of time. Moreover, none of these African-American companions offer her any help in saving her parents from the ruffians. The final party sequence cements ‘the racial schizophrenia of the text’.23 May Lily and Henry Clay attend, wearing their best church clothes, but they share a table with Lloyd’s dog. Nevertheless, an affinity for blackness is inseparable from Temple’s star image.24

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As Ara Osterweil concludes, ‘Temple’s characters can always be black, when it suits them, protects them, or is simply more fun than being white, and must never be black when it means suffering the social, emotional, economic and political consequences of inhabiting a racist society’.25 Extended to all the communities of colour with whom Shirley interacts in her colonialist films, this double inscription has negative and positive potentialities. At least Shirley’s embrace of their cultures and reflection to a lesser degree of their sufferings under imperial masters disrupts an unquestioning acceptance of colonialism that informs the films (and the industry) more generally. That her white privilege accords her an escape hatch and an implied superiority to these cultures of colour renders that disruption negligible.

epilogue: ambassador shirley temple black As a reward for her fundraising activities for the Republican Party, Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush appointed Shirley Temple Black to ambassadorships to Ghana and Czechoslovakia respectively. The first appointment, in 1976, raised eyebrows in the diplomatic community. What did a former child star know about international affairs? She confounded expectations by proving to be a committed, effective and quite grown-up envoy. When Temple Black died in 2014, obituaries presented this second career as a paradox for someone so identified with the curly-haired moppet who sang ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop’. Typifying this perspective, Joshua Keating headlined her ‘unlikely diplomatic career’.26 Yet anyone familiar with Temple’s colonialist films would know that blurring the lines between her screen persona and her diplomatic mission could only help, not hurt: ‘Even though the Czech president in power when she arrived was no reformer, Black told The New York Times that they had bonded over her films (he knew her as “Shirleyka”)’.27 From the 1930s till today Shirley seems far more likely to make peace than any real-life diplomat. Kristen Hatch cites a 1941 New York Times Magazine article in which ‘one of her fans “thought she could make the Chinese and Japanese see eye to eye” and another “has been urging her to get together with Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt and make them patch things up”’.28 In 2011 Richard Voeltz muses, ‘If only we had little Shirley to deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan today’.29 Could she bring Israelis and Palestinians together? Would she charm Putin into behaving? The fantasy is so powerful that, in retrospect, it would have been unthinkable for a president not to appoint Shirley Temple Black an ambassador.

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Her two postings, dissimilar in many ways, shared a recent history of struggle to regain self-determination. Ghana, a British colony, had in 1957 become the first African nation to achieve independence. Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution reversed the crushing of the Prague Spring and brought about post-Soviet democracy and peace on Temple Black’s ambassadorial watch. She described her time in both nations as ‘the best jobs of my whole life’.30 Both battles for freedom would make great movies; in the 1930s – and I daresay today – Hollywood would only foreground the latter.

notes 1. Peter Limbrick, Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 6. 2. Alan Lawson, ‘Comparative Studies and Postcolonial “Settler” Cultures’, AustralianCanadian Studies, 10.2 (1992), 153. 3. As a naming convention in this chapter, I refer to the actress as Temple or Shirley Temple, her characters in aggregate as Shirley, and characters in specific films by their character’s name. 4. Ann DuCille, ‘The Shirley Temple of My Familiar’, Transition, 73 (1997), 13. 5. Gaylyn Studlar, Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013); Kristen Hatch, Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015); John Kasson, The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (New York: Norton, 2014); Ara Osterweil, ‘Reconstructing Shirley: Pedophilia and Interracial Romance in Hollywood’s Age of Innocence’, Camera Obscura, 24 (September 2009), 1–39. 6. Studlar, Precocious, 87. 7. Kasson, Little Girl, 2–3. 8. Hatch, Performance, 7. 9. Pamela Robertson Wojcik, ‘Shirley Temple as Streetwalker’, paper presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Chicago, 7 March 2013. 10. Studlar, Precocious, 65. 11. Graham Greene, The Graham Greene Film Reader, David Parkinson (ed.) (New York: Applause, 1993), 234. 12. Kasson, Little Girl, 85. 13. Christian Coons and Michael Weber, Paternalism: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 12. 14. Ruth Watts, ‘Breaking the Boundaries of Victorian Imperialism or Extending a Reformed “Paternalism”: Mary Carpenter and India’, History of Education, 29 (September 2000), 446. 15. Studlar, Precocious, 8. 16. Richard A. Voeltz, ‘Wee Willie Winkie (1937) and Susannah of the Mounties (1939): Different Imperial Frontiers, Same Shirley Temple?’, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities , 3.4, (2011), 624.

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hollywood’s colonialist ideology 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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Lawson, ‘Postcolonial’, 158. Watts, ‘Breaking,’ 452–3. Gone with the Wind, film, directed by Victor Fleming (MGM, 1939). Ina Rae Hark, ‘1935: Movies and the Resistance to Tyranny’, in Hark (ed.), American Cinema of the 1930s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 161. The film attributes Lloyd Sherman’s obsession with military manoeuvres and tactics to a genetic inheritance from the colonel (along with his stubbornness and bad temper.) She receives her own appointment as colonel from a US cavalry troop she has won over during a short stay at a fort on the Western Frontier. This oddly extraneous scene reminds the audience of US colonialism, the seizure of Native American lands, and perhaps suggests the Southern view of Union invaders as imperialist occupiers while naturalising the white South’s importation and exploitation of Africans. Osterweil’s ‘Reconstructing Shirley’ brilliantly reads The Little Colonel against Birth of a Nation. Ibid., 19. Scholars and journalists alike often remark upon the paradox of Temple becoming Black, through marriage to the very white, rich businessman Charles Alden Black. See for example DuCille, ‘My Familiar’, 16 (‘Despite the irony of her married name, Shirley Temple can never be black’) and Marian Christy, ‘Shirley Temple Black – Dimpled Chief of Protocol’, Palm Beach Daily News, 2 September 1976, 4 (‘They beat their drums for the woman named Black, who wasn’t black, but fell exuberantly into the black African lifestyle’). Osterweil, ‘Reconstructing’, 30. Joshua Keating, ‘Shirley Temple Black’s Unlikely Diplomatic Career’, Slate, 11 February 2014, available at: www.slate.com/blogs/. Uri Friedman, ‘Shirley Temple: Actress, Ambassador, African Chief’, The Atlantic, 11 February 2014, available at www.theatlantic.com. Hatch, Performance, 69. Voeltz, ‘Imperial Frontier’, 629. Friedman, ‘Shirley Temple’.

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chapter 6

Astaire and Rogers: Carefree in Roberta Peter William Evans

T

he romantic musicals that paired Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the mid-1930s did much to rescue the financially troubled RKO studio from the bankruptcy it had declared in the depths of the Great Depression. From The Gay Divorcee (1934) to Swing Time (1936) the six movies in which they starred all made handsome profits. The most lucrative of these, Top Hat, broke box-office records at Radio City, taking $350,000 in its first three weeks, and was the second-highest grossing film of 1935.1 In the respected Quigley poll of Hollywood’s top box-office stars, Astaire and Rogers ranked fourth in 1935, third in 1936, and seventh in 1937 (all years when Shirley Temple was at number one).2 Among the first to blend musical duets and solos into the unfolding relationships of the principal characters, the Astaire/Rogers films mediate notions of selfhood, sexuality and national identity. The glamour and charm of the central couple, the dazzling décor, and the brilliance of the song and dance routines projected the wish-fulfilment fantasies of Depression-audiences. In some of their best films – The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Swing Time and Shall We Dance – the couple’s personification of wide-ranging questions of self and society is nuanced by the contribution of the comic secondary character players such as Helen Broderick, Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Erik Rhodes and Victor Moore, who refine the ideology of individual or national identity and, especially, of romantic love through badinage, displays of affection and comic turns. Honouring a tradition found in stage as well as film comedy that gently mocks the high-flown fantasies of the lovers, the secondary characters in the Astaire/Rogers films sometimes additionally

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gesture to the hardships of the Depression, as when in Swing Time the famished ‘Pop’ (Victor Moore) wolfs the club sandwich brought for her lunch by Mabel (Helen Broderick), or when, in the same film, the Dance Academy director (Eric Blore) threatens everyone with the sack if they do not step up to the mark. Described by Arlene Croce as a ‘key film’, and by John Mueller as the film that established Astaire and Rogers as a team,3 Roberta features none of the comic secondary performers found in the aforementioned films. It is, furthermore, an especially revealing film from the point of view of its indirect Depression-induced meditations on memory, nostalgia and both national and individual identity. In a film where Irene Dunne received top billing, the Astaire–Rogers partnership is really part of the subplot (the main plot concerns the romance between the Randolph Scott’s John Kent and Dunne’s Princess Stephanie), thereby allowing it to provide the commentary, above all through song and dance, that in other films is provided by the likes of Blore, Rhodes, Horton and Brady on the romantic and other concerns of the lead characters. The plot follows the fortunes of John Kent, a one-time star football player at Harvard, on a trip to Paris with a swing band, The Indianians, led by his friend Huck Haines (Fred Astaire). John is there to visit his Aunt Roberta (Helen Westley), owner of the chic ‘Roberta’ fashion house, Huck to play a nightclub engagement. However, when the owner of the nightclub discovers he has actually booked a band from Indiana rather than ‘real’ Red Indians as anticipated, he cancels their contract. The band manages to find alternative employment at the Café Russe through an old flame of Huck’s, Lizzie (Ginger Rogers), posing as the Polish Countess Scharwenka. John meets Stephanie, an exiled Russian princess working at ‘Roberta’, but their blossoming romance is temporarily halted when, with the death of his aunt and inheritance of her fashion house, a former gold-digging girlfriend, Sophie (Claire Dodd), flies over to Paris to wheedle her way back into his affection. Their reunion is abruptly ended when he discovers her true intentions. John and Stephanie are paired off at the end, and Huck and Lizzie are reunited, now as a romantic, as well as a professional singing and dancing, couple. Inspired by Alice Duer Miller’s novel Gowns by Roberta (1933), Roberta was one of only two Astaire/Rogers RKO musicals – the other was The Gay Divorcee – carved out of a stage original (also produced in 1933). Pandro S. Berman, a top producer at RKO at this time, bought the rights for $65,000 and commissioned Jane Murfin, Sam Mintz, Glenn Tryon and Allan Scott to transform the book from operetta to

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musical comedy. Much of the original score was also jettisoned and new songs written. While most of the music by Jerome Kern was given new lyrics by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, Otto Harbach’s lyrics for ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ were left intact. Roberta has ten musical interludes. The first is the arrival in France of The Indianians, the all-male band led by Huck. Hoping to impress the café owner, they play ‘Back Home in Indiana’, to no avail, as he only wants Red Indians. The number’s vaudevillian ingenuity – as Huck pretends to play the organ on the band members’ gloved hands that, joined together, look like a keyboard – highlights not only Huck’s playing of the fake instrument but also the bravura performance of a moustachioed vocalist.4 The second musical interlude, featuring ‘Let’s Begin’, sees Huck accompanied by the vocalist with the bass voice. Wearing a woman’s blonde wig, he now follows his low notes with falsetto ones, a change of octave that introduces the characteristic frissons of sexual ambiguity found in most of the Astaire/Rogers films. Their contract not honoured, the band has followed John Kent to Paris to look for his rich aunt. As they sing and play, Huck recognises up on a balcony his old flame, Lizzie. The pastiche of sentimental love songs becomes a prelude for the games of love between John and Stephanie, and Huck and Lizzie/ Scharwenka: Now that you’ve got me going What you gonna do? Is it up to me, or is it up to you? What kind of game is this we’ve begun? Was it done just for fun? Stephanie is revealed for who she really is, and Scharwenka as Lizzie, an American song and dance girl posing as European aristocracy. In keeping with the intermittently bitter-sweet mood of the film, the third musical interlude is the melancholy Russian ballad sung by Irene Dunne to the elderly Roberta. This alternating pattern continues, as the song is followed by Scharwenka’s lively, headstrong ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle’, followed in turn by Stephanie’s nostalgic, slowpaced ‘Yesterdays’, the lullaby for Roberta, whose death signals the finale of a successful businesswoman’s career as well as mourning the passing of a way of life, that of a pre-Soviet Russia, represented by Stephanie and her exiled entourage. The song and all the Russian elements of the film would have appealed to large sections of America’s

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Russian émigrés, especially at a time of increased Russian immigration in the mid-1930s to the United States amid escalated fears of a war between the Soviet Union and the West. For some in the audience, memories of pre-Soviet Russia would have been fresh. Others might have been gripped by what Alison Landberg terms ‘prosthetic memory’, here, even in a Depression, and even though not undervaluing the benefits of the immigrants’ new national allegiances, the idealised evocation of the former Imperial homeland.5 The feelings of nostalgia to which these scenes give rise are likely to be, in Svetlana Boym’s terms, ‘reflexive’ (that is, the cherishing of ‘shattered fragments of memory’), rather than ‘restorative’ (a desire for return to a former way of life).6 For the next musical interlude, the sixth in the film, the mood changes again as Huck is allowed a solo opportunity to display his skill at the keyboard before being compelled in ‘I Won’t Dance’ to reverse his decision not to dance. The number is an antidote to the collapsed askew relationship between John and the snooty mercenary girlfriend who has followed him to Paris on learning of his inheritance. The lyrics of ‘I Won’t Dance’ mark another Astaire/Rogers moment of wavering commitment. In Flying Down to Rio (1933), the pair’s first screen appearance, the Astaire character sang of music making him do the things he never should do, of being pulled dangerously out of himself. In Roberta, dancing means for the control-freak Astaire, the perfectionist choreographer and dancer, a paradoxical loss of selfcontrol (‘I know that music leads the way to romance’), an anxiety treated lightly in other Astaire/Rogers films, as in Top Hat through Jerry Travers’s (Astaire’s) solo dance, ‘No Strings’. In Roberta, Huck knows that if he dances with Scharwenka, he will eventually forfeit his independence, a fate that naturally befalls him here as in every other Astaire/Rogers film. The pattern of jaunty/moody in the ten musical interludes culminates in the crescendo of four musical numbers threaded together towards the end of the film. These feature two of the most beautiful songs in the entire Astaire/Rogers series: ‘Lovely to Look at’, music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Otto Harbach and Dorothy Fields (the song that inspired the title for the MGM remake of Roberta in 1952, directed by Mervyn LeRoy); and ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ (followed by a short and ironic reprise danced by Huck and Lizzie right at the very end of ‘I Won’t Dance’, confirming that no one is immune to love). ‘Lovely to Look at’ is sung by Stephanie, and by Huck and Lizzie; ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ is sung by Stephanie, and danced by Huck and Lizzie.

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‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, a Kern-Harbach composition, made the hit parade in 1934 in four versions: Bob Lawrence’s vocal for Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, Tamara’s for Leo Reisman’s orchestra, Jerry Cooper’s for Emil Coleman’s orchestra, and Ruth Etting’s version. An elegy for lost love, the song may also have unlocked in contemporary audiences, through its lyrics of loss and betrayal, broader Depressionrelated anxieties. Conflicted love is a transferred metaphor for crumbling social and national certainties, of nostalgia for former days free of doubt, unrest and precariousness. The song crystallises the film’s inter-related treatment of personal and wider concerns. The ‘tender trap’ of love is figuratively brought to our attention through the device of a faulty lift at the Roberta fashion house, in which John finds himself stuck twice. Going up in the lift to see his aunt, he gets locked between floors. Stephanie hears his calls for help but, as he tries to clamber out of the lift, she pushes him back in, shutting the grilled door on him, as it were imprisoning him again, and claiming he risks injury if he tries to crawl out unaided. She instructs her cousin, the doorman Ladislaw, a fellow Russian émigré, to help. Touched by Ladislaw, who becomes for a moment a sort of fashion house Cupid, the lift magically starts to work again, as if obeying the diktat of a higher law rather than one governed by mere mechanics, and John climbs out, thanking Stephanie with the words ‘Gee, you saved my life. I am ever so much obliged to you’. The lift’s mechanical failure may well be a joke about the effect of the Great Depression on the smooth running of the economy, but the language of danger and rescue, complemented by the visual imagery of entrapment, is readable as an extended metaphor for love. In The Merry Widow (Ernst Lubitsch, 1934), the Jeanette MacDonaldMaurice Chevalier musical made by MGM only one year before Roberta, the celebratory love songs are balanced by the film’s sobering final moments where the lovers are married to each other in a prison cell. In Roberta, the lift is the cell’s equivalent, a motif repeated at the end of the film when, after ordeals of misunderstanding and separation, the pair meet up again to affirm their devotion. On the second occasion, both characters find themselves in the prison of love: first, John, stuck and liberated, as if magically, again by Ladislaw-Cupid, and then Stephanie, shot in a way that makes her too seem imprisoned. When in their final, reconciliatory scene together, John tells Stephanie that he loves her, they kiss on either side of the lift’s grille in a way that makes them appear to be on different sides of the bars of a prison cell.

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Figure 6.1 John Kent (Randolph Scott) and Princess Stephanie (Irene Dunne) in the lift scene in Roberta (RKO, 1935).

In these scenes where affirmation is enfolded with doubt, the lovers’ predicament anticipates Dr Lehmann’s (Fritz Feld) opinion in RKO’s Bringing up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) that ‘the love impulse in man frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict’. The complexity of the love-hatred in the couple formed by Stephanie and John becomes further modified if the screen persona of Randolph Scott (often cast in Western roles) is read not only as the epitome of the all-American hero but also as someone who could be coded as gay. Scott was reputed to have a homosexual relationship with Cary Grant with whom he lived for much of the 1930s. As Mark Glancy has argued, the publicity shots of the pair together, mostly in domestic or athletic situations, would have appealed to various audiences in different ways.7 Nevertheless, the homosexual as well as homosocial resonances attributable to Scott through the Grant association are not negligible when one considers the abundance of such innuendo in the Astaire/Rogers films, especially through the use of the secondary characters. The more explicit jokes and doubles entendres of the Astaire/Rogers screenplays were

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routinely censored by Joseph Breen at the Production Code Administration Office. And yet, much risqué material survived, as in the Top Hat scene where Jerry (Astaire) and Horace (Edward Everett Horton) are reluctant to give up their shared bridal suite, or in Shall We Dance, when Jeffrey (Horton) excitedly tells Petrov (Astaire) ‘We’re going to have a baby!’ Such cases draw attention to a queer subtext in these films that, at the very least, helps unsettle notions of sexuality and orientation. In Roberta, the scenes involving John and Stephanie belong to the film’s elaborate portrayal of love’s emergence from aggression, of reason defeated by unreason. The misunderstandings that lead to the mutual antagonism of Stephanie and John, bookended by these images of entrapment in the lift, may well flow into the gay subtext. The tensions between John and Stephanie are mirrored – but without the gay subtext – by Lizzie’s ‘I’ll be Hard to Handle’ and Huck’s ‘I Won’t Dance’, momentary but sharp reminders of the hazards of love. In Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, Hero claims ‘Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps’. In ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, blindness creates the traps of love. Inspired by a Russian proverb – ‘When your heart’s on fire smoke gets in your eyes’ – the song is introduced through Irene Dunne. Its second appearance showcases Astaire and Rogers in one of their most beautiful pas de deux. ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ varies the more usual pattern in Astaire/Rogers films where the dance follows their own sung version of the song. In Roberta, the danced duet follows Irene Dunne’s vocal. The film exploits the song’s popularity by using it both diegetically and non-diegetically. Its first non-diegetic version, played orchestrally and without the lyrics, accompanies the credits. The melody eventually gives way to ‘Lovely to Look at’, another of the film’s key songs, and one that acts as a bridge between the sung and danced versions of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, before reaffirming the song’s centrality for the final moments of the credit title sequence. The diegetic versions of the song provide two of the darker tributes to love in a film where the tone elsewhere is characteristically light. The lyrics cast a shadow over the song’s wordless danced version. At a soirée given in her honour at the Café Russe, the exiled Russian princess, wearing a tiara and full-length heavy satin cloak with a fur collar, arrives to the accompaniment of the Imperial Russian anthem. A group of balalaika-playing musicians strum up and persuade her to sing ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. Irene Dunne, the recipient of five Academy Award nominations, was a huge star in the 1930s. For various reasons, she is largely overlooked in the history of the Hollywood golden age – the lack of a directorial muse who completely understood what to

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Figure 6.2 Huck (Fred Astaire) and Lizzie (Ginger Rogers) dance to ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ in Roberta.

do with her on screen, a relatively early retirement from screen acting in the early 1950s, and an ability to play across genres without getting identified with any particular kind of role.8 Described as someone with an ‘aura of breeding’, Dunne belonged with Greer Garson and Norma Shearer, for example, to that group of female stars considered ladylike.9 She made a name for herself as the ‘queen of the weepies’ when cast in melodramas like Back Street (Universal, 1932), Magnificent Obsession (Universal, 1935) and Love Affair (RKO, 1939).10 Dunne also proved adept at screwball comedy, most notably in Theodora Goes Wild (Columbia, 1936) and The Awful Truth (Columbia, 1937), for both of which she won Oscar nominations. In the latter, she effectively plays two roles to foil the efforts of her feckless ex-husband (Cary Grant) to court a snooty society lady, one as a more or less straightforward screwball heroine, the other as a fake, blowsy vulgarian sister guaranteed to alienate the socialite’s entire family. Underplayed in Roberta, her screwball potential flourishes when scheming with Huck to trick Sophie into buying the dress guaranteed to scandalise her fiancé. As Irene Dunne was also an accomplished singer, her own soprano voice

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was used to excellent effect in Roberta as well as in other films, such as Show Boat (Universal, 1936), where her soulful delivery of ‘Only Make Believe’ follows the pattern set in her earlier songs, like ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. Dunne’s first complete rendition of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ is delivered in an uncut close-up, followed at its conclusion by a mediumshot showing her surrounded by fellow diners and musicians. In a subsequent close-shot, she reprises the song, only this time after a brief interruption during which she is subjected to graceless accusations by John Kent, the man she loves, that lead her to break down sobbing on the song’s last line. Sung operatically, with an ethnically defined orchestral backing and to an audience of aristocratic Russian émigrés, the song acts as a kind of prelude for its danced reappearance by Astaire and Rogers, who Americanise it by pulling it away from its operatic Russian roots. In keeping with the transatlantic theme common to several Astaire/Rogers films like The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat and Shall We Dance, the reconciliation of European and American values is extolled, even though ultimately in all these films America’s cultural and political hegemony remains intact. In Roberta, the Russian princess is, after all, Irene Dunne, an American, so the rugged Yankee football-star hero played by Randolph Scott – whose speech abounds with American slang expressions like ‘Gee, you look swell’ – is matched, ideologically, not with difference but with sameness. Irene Dunne’s Princess Stephanie represents in this sense a mirror image of Ginger Rogers’s Lizzie: Stephanie’s role as a Russian princess is reflected in Lizzie’s as an American pretending to be a European aristocrat, Madame Scharwenka. To stress their affinity further, Stephanie and Lizzie are both applauded by an appreciative audience: the former by her fellow Russian exiles, the latter by the café patrons. In Roberta, as elsewhere in the Astaire/Rogers cycle, applause often carries more than literal significance. In Top Hat, for instance, the hearty clapping of the London Thackeray Gentlemen’s Club for Fred Astaire’s routine in the ‘Top Hat’ number conveys stuffy Old World approval of American values as conveyed through New World song and dance forms. As Astaire kills off his clones, the number is a comic, musical expression of triumphant American individualism. The rhyming applause for Stephanie and Lizzie in Roberta celebrates not just their musical skills, but also the American present and Russian past. The links between Stephanie and Lizzie, between America and preSoviet Russia, extend to costume. Both are dressed in fur: Stephanie’s fur collar is matched by Lizzie’s waist-length fur coat. Both wear tiaras: Stephanie’s placed regally on top of her head like a coronet, Lizzie’s more

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discreetly pressed down on her coiffure like a graceful hair band. In the words of the song, both are ‘lovely to look at’, but each radiates with more than physical beauty: despite her tears at John’s cruel jibes, Stephanie has enough spirit to refute his insinuations, while Lizzie had informed everyone in another of her numbers that she will be ‘hard to handle’. Lizzie’s skills at comedy and play-acting, as Madame Scharwenka, release Ginger Rogers’s plebeian assertiveness, as well as her sexual magnetism. The appearance of Astaire and Rogers in the ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ number epitomises Katharine Hepburn’s famous aphorism that Rogers gave Astaire sex, while Astaire gave Rogers class. Subduing momentarily his own average Joe persona – allowed expression in, say, his role as a rank-and-file sailor in Follow the Fleet (RKO, 1936) – Astaire, abandoning now his earlier rakish, straw-boater-wearing look, is dressed in ‘classy’ white tie and tails; Rogers, not here the clowning Madame Scharwenka, is sexy in her black, low-cut, heavy, figure-hugging satin gown, adorned with elegant diamond brooch at her bust and diamond bracelets on each wrist. In her autobiography, Ginger Rogers comments on audience reception of the dress designed by Bernard Newman: For the ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ number, he created a long black satin dress, with a wonderful piece of faux jewelry on the chest. Men always commented on that gown; indeed, I never met a man who didn’t like that dress. The song ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ was a number I loved. It was romantic as well as ideal for dancing.11 The number was also a personal favourite of Astaire’s.12 As the pair dance, the elegiac undertones of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, earlier transmitted by Irene Dunne’s emotive delivery, now reverberate in its mute version. Even though now not vocalised, the lyrics haunt the dance. Darkness is rarely a feature of the Astaire/Rogers films, but its occasional intrusion points not only to the inbuilt insecurities of love in even the most solid relationships but also at the uncertainties of the times. The deaths in Roberta of the salon owner and, in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (RKO, 1939), Vernon’s fatal air crash, as well as numbers like ‘Never Gonna Dance’ in Swing Time, or, in Roberta, ‘I Won’t Dance’, ‘I’ll Be Hard to Handle’, and, especially, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, warn of unhappiness, impermanence and loss, and seem especially poignant in the economically and socially brittle climate of late 1930s America. Huck’s hymn to Lizzie’s beauty leads smoothly from his version of ‘Lovely to Look at’, a song of pure romance that invites comparisons

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with his ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ in Swing Time, into ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, played lento by the orchestra to create a moody atmosphere. Astaire and Rogers look at each other – through her look, as Sue Rickard argues, ‘legitimating Astaire’s masculinity’; through his, acknowledging Rogers as his true complement and partner.13 In addition to any gender-related questions concerning looking raised by both ‘Lovely to Look At’ and ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, the songs gloss traditional links between love and blindness. Love may be blind, but here, through Huck’s eyes, we look at Lizzie’s loveliness. Astaire’s face is flooded with tenderness and again demonstrates the rapport between the couple as they sing or dance in solos or duets in mutual recognition and awareness of each other. The success of the Astaire/Rogers films is down to the happy pairing of the stars, the reliance on their skills as dancers and singers, their responsiveness to each other, and their affinity through difference: Fred, the sprightly, precision-perfect dancer, spare to the point almost of anorexia, not much to look at, his reedy voice little better than the man in the street’s; Ginger, grounded, beautiful, defiant; and both touched by humour as well as gracefulness, seemingly at ease in a world of uncertainty and menace. While less than generous in his assessment of Ginger Rogers, Graham Greene was one of a group of contemporary writers who touched on some of the qualities of what Lorenz Hart in a famous song, ‘Up on Your Toes’, referred to as Astaire’s status as a ‘rare male’: It needs an effort of mind to remember that Mr Fred Astaire was not invented by a film director and drawn by a film draughtsman. He is the nearest we are ever likely to get to a human Mickey, near enough for many critics to have noted the resemblance. If one needs to assign human qualities to this light, quick, humorous cartoon, they are the same as the early Mickey’s: a touch of pathos, the sense of a courageous and impromptu intelligence, a capacity for getting into awkward situations.14 In ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, these qualities are on parade, where pathos is mixed with tenderness, and where Huck’s ardour is not of the menacing but of the gentle, courteous kind. The skills, elegance and spark of affinity of the couple demand of their stars a relationship characterised, additionally, by equality, negotiation and respect. As always in the Hollywood musical, the number poetically reformulates the narrative’s prose. Unlike other numbers, though, such as ‘Isn’t This a Lovely Day to be Caught in the Rain?’ in Top Hat, ‘Night

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and Day’ in The Gay Divorcee, or ‘A Fine Romance’ in Swing Time, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ here does not preface the Astaire character’s pursuit of Rogers. Rather it is a musical example of Stanley Cavell’s screwball-related concept of ‘remarriage’ in 1930s and 1940s romantic comedy.15 The delight in each other that Kathleen Riley refers to in a discussion of Astaire’s relationship with his sister Adele is transferred to his pairing with Rogers.16 The Astaire and Rogers characters, Huck and Lizzie, as if also representing their fictional precursors Fred Ayres and Honey Hale in Flying Down to Rio, and Guy Holden and Mimi Glossop in The Gay Divorcee, revel in their rediscovery of each other. In resuming their partnership, they reclaim the missing part that makes them whole, enacting a modern version of Plato’s notion of two-sided creatures originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces, that once severed are perpetually in search of each other: Whenever one of them [. . .] has the good fortune to encounter his own or actual other half, the affection and kinship and love combined inspire in him an emotion which is quite overwhelming, and such a pair practically refuse ever to be separated even for a moment.17 Hannah Hyam describes the relationship between Astaire and Rogers in Roberta as ‘a new aspect of complementarity’, while Edward Gallafent considers their dance an expression of the couple’s attainment of a ‘precise rapport’.18 Astaire leads but, as the number unfolds in a public space, the spectacle becomes an affirmation simultaneously of this couple’s love for each other and a projection of a community’s apprehensive fantasies, a kind of mise en abyme of the film’s wider concerns. Astaire holds Rogers, almost solemnly, as they slowly approach the dance floor, to the orchestra’s playing of the melody that accompanies the verses. The slow orchestration creates an atmosphere of romance blended with poignancy. The dancers’ dialogue through movement follows the cadences and rhythms of the music but, as its form is imbued with content, so the unheard words as well as the heard melody determine the steps and gestures of the dancers. Locked together for ‘They asked me how I knew/ My true love was true’, they break from each other on the following verse, ‘I of course replied’ but, even while apart for ‘Something here inside/ Cannot be denied’, their moves duplicate each other in what John Mueller would call ‘sequential imitation’,19 now fusing the couple together, now separating them to affirm the elliptical selflessness of love. This pattern of alternating breaks and holds reflects the lyrics’ theme of the ebb and flow of love and, ultimately, the

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precarious ferment of all human relationships. Apprehension of love’s inbuilt fragility makes all the more ardent their desire for a restored embrace. The melody behind the verses ‘They said someday you’ll find/ All who love are blind./ When your heart’s on fire/ You must realise/ Smoke gets in your eyes’ provides a complementary requiem for transient desire. The change of key from the main verse’s E flat to the bridge verse’s B major (‘So I chaffed them and I gaily laughed / To think they could doubt my love’), and its full-blooded, predominantly brassled orchestration conveying its theme of loss, register once more the uncoupling of the pair, temporarily split by uncontrollable external forces that fail to prevent them from defiantly finding each other again for ‘Yet today my love has flown away/ I am without my love’. The emphasis in the lyrics on loss and separation comes precisely as the lovers clasp each other most firmly in an embrace that challenges the song’s warnings of pain and loss. As the melody reminds the audience of the words ‘Yet today my love has flown away/ I am without my love’, the dancers affirm their devotion through resumed physical contact. Astaire gently cradles with his hand Rogers’ golden head now resting on his shoulder, mixing passion with tenderness as they foxtrot towards the camera. They break free for the next two verses, ‘Now laughing friends deride/ Tears I cannot hide’, and the orchestration – with piano momentarily prominent – assumes a sprightlier tempo, seemingly to offset the feelings of loss carried by the lyrics. The light heartedness, though, briefly vanishes and, in keeping with the bittersweet meanings of the song, the dancers alternate holds and breaks for the remainder of the number, until they leap up the stairs in a final flourish of elation and togetherness, affirming their love as they languidly walk in step offstage, arm in arm on the last line, ‘Smoke gets in your eyes’. In all the ‘carefree’ atmosphere of the film, the dual-structured number ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ – both in its sung version by Stephanie/ Irene Dunne, and in its danced reprise by Huck and Lizzie/Astaire and Rogers – gives the narrative moments of emotional depth. Unlike ‘Never Gonna Dance’ in Swing Time, which refers directly to the Depression – ‘Though I’m left without a penny/ The wolf was discreet, he left me my feet . . ./’20 – or the line in Top Hat where Dale/Ginger Rogers mentions the dole,21 ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ refers more obliquely to troubled times. The potential for loss, and the internal/ external threats to love that intensify ardour, so elegantly conveyed by the performance of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, resonate beyond the private ordeals of the romantic couple into the public domain of the

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Depression audience both off screen and on screen, at Roberta’s salon and at the Café Russe. Relegated to secondary character importance for most of the film, Astaire and Rogers have the last word (and dance) in Roberta. Their musicals have become a byword for the triumph of elegant courtship through song and dance. Yet, as they step out of the narrative into a ritualised future of several more partnerships in their RKO screen lives, the memory of love placed in danger, of the trouble-strewn path trodden by John and Stephanie on their way to a happy outcome, of the refusals and confessions about being hard to handle by Lizzie and Huck, are not totally dimmed by the utopian atmosphere of the film’s closure. The ordeals of love have additionally been for contemporary audiences not just an escape mechanism but also perhaps a poignant reminder of the wider lived realities in the hard times of 1930s America.

notes 1. According to one estimate, the figures for Astaire–Rogers film grosses and budgets were respectively: The Gay Divorcee (1934) $1.8 million and $520,000; Roberta (1935) $2.3 million and $610,000; Top Hat (1935) $3.2 million and $609,000; Follow the Fleet (1936) $2.7 million and $747,000; Swing Time (1936) $2.6 million and $886,000; and Shall We Dance (1937) $2.1 billion and $991,000. The last two films in their 1930s partnership were the least popular of the cycle and the most expensive to make: Carefree (1938) grossed $1.7 million on a budget of $1.25 million, and the comparable figures for The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939) were $1.8 and $1.2 million. See Richard Jewell, ‘RKO Film Grosses: 1931–1951’, Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, 14, 1 (1994), 37–49. 2. Martin Quigley, ‘Quigley’s Annual Top Ten MoneyMakers Poll’. See International Motion Picture Almanac (New York: Quigley Publications, 1930–40). 3. Arlene Croce, The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (New York: Vintage, 1972), 46; John Mueller, Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films (New York: Wings Books, 1991), 65. 4. Mueller, Astaire Dancing, 68. 5. Alison Landberg, Prosthetic Memory; The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 6. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 7. Mark Glancy, ‘Picturing a Gay Romance in the 1930s; Cary Grant, Randolph Scott and the Allure of Bachelors’ Hall’, unpublished paper in author’s possession. 8. Ina Rae Hark, ‘Introduction: Movies and the 1930s’, in Hark (ed.), American Cinema of the 1930s: Themes and Variations (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 16–18. For similar discussion, see Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine (New York: Vintage, 2007), 341–55. 9. Ronald Bergan, ‘Irene Dunne’, The Guardian, 6 September 1990. 10. ‘Irene Dunne’, The Daily Telegraph, 6 September 1990. 11. Ginger Rogers, Ginger. My Story (London: Hodder Headline, 1992), 171.

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12. Fred Astaire, Steps in Time (New York: Da Capo, 1981, originally published 1959), 205. 13. Sue Rickard, ‘Movies in Disguise; Negotiating Censorship and Patriarchy through the Dances of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’, in R. Lawson-Peebles (ed.), Approaches to the American Musical (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1996), 82. 14. Graham Greene, ‘Follow the Fleet/The Peace Film’, in Greene, The Pleasure Dome. The Collected Film Criticism, 1935–40, ed. John Russell Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 67. 15. Stanley Cavell, The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 16. Kathleen Riley, The Astaires; Fred and Adele (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 70. 17. Plato, The Symposium, trans. by W. Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), 67. 18. Hannah Hyam, Fred and Ginger. The Astaire–Rogers Partnership, 1934–1938 (Brighton: Pen Press, 2007), 64; Edward Gallafent, Astaire and Rogers (Moffat: Cameron and Hollis, 2000), 30. 19. Mueller, Astaire Dancing, 64. 20. Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, Blue Skies and Silver Linings; Aspects of the Hollywood Musical (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 110. 21. Peter William Evans, Top Hat (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 3.

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chapter 7

The ‘Awful Truth’ about Cary Grant Mark Glancy

O

ver the course of a screen career that spanned more than thirty years, Cary Grant made seventy-two feature films and established a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most glamorous stars. His image as an urbane, debonair man-about-town appealed to audiences across many decades, and he remains an icon of sophistication and elegance to twenty-first-century movie fans. In 1975, nearly ten years after Grant’s retirement from movies, film critic Pauline Kael wrote a lengthy and admiring essay on him for the New Yorker. ‘[T]he man from dream city’, in her assessment represented, ‘a subtle fantasy of worldly grace . . . so gallant and gentlemanly and charming that every woman longed to be his date’ and ‘men wanted to be him’.1 Another prominent critic, David Thomson, simultaneously declared Grant to have been ‘the best and most important actor in the history of cinema’.2 Praise of this order was particularly remarkable given the widespread assumption during the years that Grant was active in films that he simply ‘played himself’ on screen. This helps to explain why he never won the Academy Award for ‘best actor’, and only received an ‘honorary’ Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in retirement in 1970. Since then, Grant has been the subject of more than a dozen biographies, many scholarly studies and innumerable film seasons, retrospectives and DVD ‘boxed sets’. The continuing interest in him and praise for his performances mark him as one of the most admired and respected stars of Hollywood’s studio era. This chapter is not concerned with the peak years of Cary Grant’s stardom from the late 1930s to the 1960s. Rather, it investigates his lesser-known early years in Hollywood, and how he finally made a breakthrough in two screwball comedies released in 1937, Topper (independently-made and distributed by MGM) and The Awful Truth

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(Columbia). At issue is the creation of Grant’s star persona – the combination of his image, the characters he played, and the publicity surrounding him that came to form his public identity.3 Investigating this star persona therefore involves analysis of his film roles, the reams of publicity materials that promoted him to the cinema-going public, and, as far as possible, audience responses in the form of popularity rankings and box-office results. This is not a biographical study, but some commentary on Grant’s actual identity is nonetheless important. A star’s persona inevitably corresponds to contemporaneous norms of class, gender and nationality, so Grant’s working-class English background made it particularly challenging for him to establish a persona that appealed to American audiences. It is important also to consider performance technique, especially in his breakthrough films, as this too has a bearing on audiences’ understanding and appreciation of the star. These lines of inquiry are pursued here primarily through analysis of Grant’s many early films, and documents found in Cary Grant’s collected papers, as well as other film industry archives.4 There was little in his youth and early career to indicate that he would ultimately become one of Hollywood’s most sophisticated stars. He was born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England, in 1904, to an unhappy, poor, working-class family.5 His father was employed as a factory worker, but the family’s struggles and instability are apparent in the fact that they moved rental abode five times by the time that he was fourteen years old. Following his mother’s commitment to a ‘lunatic asylum’ when he was eleven, Grant did not see or hear from her again until in his thirties. Expelled from school aged fourteen, he went to work with an acrobatic troupe, Bob Pender’s Nippy Nine, which was based in London and toured British music halls. In 1920, the troupe was engaged to play in a revue at New York City’s largest vaudeville theatre, the Hippodrome, and afterwards ‘Archie’ Leach (as he was billed) decided to remain in the United States. With other breakaway members of Pender’s troupe, he toured the American vaudeville circuit from coast to coast, and also performed as the ‘straight man’ in a comic duo. He spent at least five years in vaudeville without achieving fame, which makes it all the more remarkable that the Broadway producer Arthur Hammerstein signed him to a four-year contract in 1927. This was a major career breakthrough for someone with no training as an actor or singer, and it was unusual for performers to make the leap from vaudeville to what was then termed ‘legitimate’ theatre. However, Archie Leach was an extraordinarily handsome young man. Standing six feet and two inches tall, with an athletic physique, wavy

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black hair, a gleaming smile and a dimpled chin, he was the very image of a matinee idol. Hammerstein set out to make him one, casting him in co-starring roles in a succession of Broadway and touring musicals. Critics almost always commented on his appearance. Some likened him to John Barrymore, who was then considered the finest and most handsome of all actors. Others noted that he was an elegant dresser with, in the words of one, an ‘aristocratic way of wearing clothes’. Praise of this kind was usually accompanied by less enthusiastic appraisals of his ability as a performer, however.6 Recognising his new player’s limitations, Hammerstein made it a contractual requirement that he take lessons from a ‘vocal instructor’ during his first Broadway season (1927–8).7 It is not clear whether these were speech or singing lessons, but over the next two years Archie Leach received critical pannings on both counts. He moved away from musicals as soon as he could, but his speaking voice was another matter. It would eventually become one of the most distinctive voices ever heard in films: full of charm and nuance, but thoroughly transatlantic and almost impossible to place. During this phase of his career, by contrast, his voice was still a work in progress that drew disparaging references from the critics. Comments about his Cockney accent and a ‘vaudeville quality’ to his performance indicate that vestiges of his working-class background remained apparent.8 Certainly in his first screen appearance, in the short film Singapore Sue (1931), he demonstrated little of the vocal elegance and physical grace for which he would later be renowned. He was awkward and unconvincing in the role of a rough and ready, loud-mouthed American sailor. The film, shot at Paramount’s Astoria Studios in New York, was effectively a screen test that failed. Many years later, Cary Grant recalled that he was aware of his limitations as a performer in these early years and struggled to develop a breezy, debonair manner that would suit the roles he played on stage. Near the end of his career, he cited Noel Coward, particularly in the role of Elyot in Private Lives that was staged on Broadway in 1931, as a key influence.9 Coward, too, was a self-made man. Born in London into a lower middle-class family, he assumed the speech and manners of the upper classes, and became an icon of so-called ‘café society’.10 As a playwright, he glamorised but also ridiculed the upper classes in comedies such as Private Lives. As an actor, his trademark combination of refined manners and an insouciant attitude represented a reinvention of the English gentleman as polished and self-assured but also playful and unstuffy. This offered a role model to Archie Leach – another English upstart striving to achieve sophistication and poise – and while neither

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Archie Leach nor Cary Grant would ever be as clipped and brittle as Coward, imitating Coward brought Leach a step closer to becoming Cary Grant. With the collapse of ticket sales on Broadway following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing economic meltdown, Archie Leach set off for pastures new in Hollywood. The film industry was not immune to the Great Depression, but movie ticket sales did not fall off so quickly and each of the major film studios was still making fifty or so films per year. Through friendships forged on Broadway, Leach secured another screen test with Paramount, doing sufficiently well on this occasion to be signed up to a five-year contract in the autumn of 1931. Becoming a ‘featured player’ at one of Hollywood’s ‘Big Five’ studios was another significant career breakthrough, and a much needed one. Although many writers have claimed otherwise, his theatrical line of work was hardly on an upward trajectory, as evidenced by the decline in his weekly salary in 1930 and his having to spend two months of 1931 playing summer stock in St Louis.11 The fact that his stage career brought no fame or following is clear in Paramount’s insistence that he adopt a new name. His cinematic moniker suggests some of the uncertainty about his screen image. He chose ‘Cary’ himself – it was the name of the last character he played on Broadway and he liked it – but the studio insisted that this refined first name should be combined with the more masculine and solid-sounding surname of ‘Grant’.12 Eventually, the contrast between the two would work in his favour in signifying the different facets of his star persona, but there is little evidence from his early career at Paramount that the studio realised this, or that it was interested in developing a new and unique screen image for him. Through both film roles and publicity materials, up-and-coming stars were situated in relation to established social types and to the top stars of the day. However, Grant was not easily placed within the masculine types popular in the films of the early 1930s. Despite his nationality, he did not fit with Hollywood’s idea of an Englishman. As represented by the likes of Clive Brook, Ronald Colman and Leslie Howard, Hollywood’s Englishmen spoke with refined accents and inhabited drawing rooms and gentlemen’s clubs. Grant’s workingclass origins and the years he had spent in the USA meant that this persona did not suit him. Similarly, he was never likely to be a plainspoken, rugged, Western hero akin to Will Rogers or Paramount’s own Gary Cooper and Randolph Scott. Grant’s dapper style meant that he was more suited to becoming one of the ‘art deco dandies’ who populated screwball comedies and

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sophisticated musicals. As the film historian Drew Todd has argued, these characters were essentially classless but perfectly at home on ocean liners, in penthouses and in swanky nightclubs. In the depths of the Great Depression, their social mobility ‘made luxury and leisure seem accessible’ and ‘made modernity seem sophisticated and fun’.13 Despite Grant’s sense of style, however, he did not quite fit alongside leading Hollywood dandies such as Fred Astaire, Herbert Marshall and Robert Montgomery. They were sleeker and slighter, while his height and physique gave him a strong and solid screen presence. Accordingly, Paramount decided that he should belong to another new type: the gritty, tough ‘dangerous men’.14 This screen persona arose partly in response to the arrival of ‘talking pictures’ in the late 1920s and the ensuing need for men with forceful, masculine voices. The popularity of this type was also enhanced by the Depression. Stars such as James Cagney, Clark Gable, George Raft, Edward G. Robinson and Spencer Tracy played gangsters, lorry drivers, reporters, detectives and boxers who were determined to get ahead at any cost. Their rough and ready resoluteness seemed to reassure American audiences that the country could survive hard times.15 Clark Gable, who was under contract to MGM from 1930, quickly became the leading male star of the decade.16 Paramount was not subtle in defining Grant in Gable’s image. One of his earliest publicity profiles bluntly categorises him described as being ‘the same type as Clark Gable – another likeable rough guy of the screen’.17 Yet while Gable combined charm and virility with apparent ease, Grant at this point in his career had neither the confidence nor the performance skills to play a ‘likeable rough guy’. In his first feature film, This is the Night (1932), he has a co-starring role as a humourless American athlete who is forced to compete for his wife’s affections with an older, more worldly, dandyish suitor played by Roland Young. The more established star, Young has all the best lines in the film, but even taking this into account, Grant’s limited range as a screen actor is all too apparent. He speaks with little inflection, his facial expressions are rigid, and his body language is stiff. His discomfort in front of the camera is almost palpable, and not least because he repeatedly falls back on a single gesture, placing his hands in his trouser pockets in nearly every scene. This straining to appear casual was the hallmark of his early film career. Paramount cast him in a succession of American ‘likeable rough guy’ roles, usually playing the love interest of a more established leading lady. Most notably, he was the gangster who makes a ‘fallen woman’ of Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932), and the man Mae West

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tries to lure into her bedroom in She Done Him Wrong (1933). ‘Why don’t you come up some time and see me?’, she famously asks him, but he is the one man in the film who can resist her. He co-starred with West again in I’m No Angel (1933), but in other films he was secondbilled to lesser stars such as Joan Bennett, Kay Francis, Myrna Loy and Loretta Young. He is a naval officer who breaks the heart of a Japanese geisha in Madame Butterfly (1932); an attorney who horsewhips a man for blackmailing his fiancée in The Woman Accused (1933); a racketeer in Gambling Ship (1933); a daring aviator in Wings in the Dark (1935); and a streetwise detective in Big Brown Eyes (1936). Most of these films are unremarkable and his bland roles could have been played by almost any leading man. If Grant achieved some distinction at this point in his career, it was due to his transatlantic accent (which was not explained or referred to in these films) and his impeccable dress sense (it is notable that he was began appearing in print advertisements for men’s fashions in 1934).18 It is also apparent that making five or six films each year allowed him to develop his skills as a screen actor. Even if the films were routine, his ability and confidence as a performer steadily grew.

Figure 7.1 Cary Grant as a ‘likeable rough guy’ alongside Mae West in She Done Him Wrong (Paramount, 1933).

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By his own admission, Grant ‘begged’ Paramount to let him play light comedy – a genre that would allow his well-dressed, gentlemanly persona to come to the fore – but the studio was resistant to his pleas.19 One exception, the comedy Ladies Should Listen (1934), is weighed down by a weak script but nevertheless shows that Grant could be looser and more expressive in a comic mode. This movie’s brief running time of sixty-two minutes indicates that it was made for the bottom half of double bills. Another minor film, The Last Outpost (1935), is notable as the first film in which Grant plays an English character, a moustached army officer stationed in Kurdistan no less, but it was hastily made in the wake of Gary Cooper’s great success in the popular imperial adventure film, Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935). At this time, too, Paramount increasingly loaned Grant to other studios, a sure sign that it was losing interest in him. Nevertheless, this practice provided two of his most interesting early films. In The Amazing Adventure (1936) Grant gives a confident performance as a London millionaire who gives up his wealth for a year of ordinary living, but his accent and demeanour seem jarringly out of place in this independently made British film that was distributed in America by United Artists. He is much more at home in RKO’s Sylvia Scarlett (1936). Director George Cukor recalled casting Grant in the expectation that his experiences in music hall would inform his performance as ‘a rather shady character – a cheap theatrical fellow’.20 Playing a hard-bitten Cockney trickster brought out a new depth and range in Grant’s acting, and he received the best reviews of his career so far.21 However, the film itself was a disaster. Even the critics who admired his performance panned this charming, oddball comedy and poured scorn on its star, Katharine Hepburn, who was labelled ‘box office poison’ in its wake.22 A star persona is created as much through publicity as through films, and throughout this period, Paramount ensured that Grant received an ample amount, especially in the fan magazines. The 1930s were a ‘golden age’ for such publications with a dozen titles in the USA alone selling a combined total of over 4 million copies per month.23 These magazines were not about films as much as they were about film stars. They catered to film fans’ interest in the off-screen lives of stars, offering glamour portraits as well as supposedly candid photographs of them, along with interviews, biographies and gossip. Much of this was manufactured by studio publicists, and although it was not all untrue, it was made to fit with or enhance the star persona. Accordingly, while many of the articles about Grant acknowledged that his real name was Archie Leach and that he had been born in Bristol, his working-class origins were concealed, and information about his upbringing was changed

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to suit an American interest in the English upper classes. For example, he was portrayed as belonging to a wealthy family with a long and distinguished theatrical tradition, having an elite public school education, and engaging in his family’s theatrical eccentricities to explain his career as an acrobat.24 Remarkably, many articles also highlighted Grant’s relationship with his fellow Paramount star, Randolph Scott. Grant and Scott really did live together for several years, sharing a beachfront home that served as an attractive backdrop for a succession of fan-magazine features. Proclaiming the stars to be ‘Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors’, these articles showed them lifting weights, swimming, running on the beach, eating meals and relaxing together.25 From a modern perspective, the images appear to represent a gay marriage, but in the 1930s this was not likely to have been so readily assumed. In film-fan culture, Hollywood was often represented as ‘the most racy, risqué and unconventional place in the country’, and magazine readers saw their fantasies projected and their desires reflected in the ‘bohemian’ lives of film stars, according to the film historian Brett L. Abrams.26 An array of different fantasies may have been on offer in the profiles of Grant and Scott. Some readers may have read between the lines to assume that the stars were gay. Some single women may have liked to imagine that Grant and Scott were eligible bachelors – still available to marry. Some men may have envied their independence and apparent life of leisure. Almost anyone could admire their friendship, wealth and health. This publicity did little to boost the standing of either star, however. By 1937, after five years under contract to Paramount, audiences certainly would have been familiar with Grant, but evidently were not intrigued by him. Far from rising in the annual polls of Hollywood’s most popular stars, he languished at the bottom of a ranking that included over 100 names.27 Paramount had failed to mould a coherent image for him. He was an English actor who played American characters; a ‘rough guy’ akin to Clark Gable who was second-billed to glamorous leading ladies; an actor from a distinguished theatrical family who now made run-of-the-mill Hollywood films; and an ‘eligible bachelor’ whose highly publicised marriage to Virginia Cherrill, a minor star, in 1934 ended acrimoniously within a year. Richard Dyer has argued that the meaning and appeal of the most successful stars can be understood through the concept of ‘structured polysemy’; that is, the star embodies a multiplicity of meanings that appear to resolve contradictions within a society’s dominant ideology, or, exceptionally, that the star embodies meanings that expose contradictions within the dominant ideology and

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are thereby subversive.28 In this period, however, Grant offers a case of unstructured polysemy – a star with many diverse characteristics which did not cohere or resonate with audiences in a compelling way. Indeed, he made so little impact, and so few memorable films, that if he had retired from the screen at this time, he would in all likelihood have been quickly and quietly forgotten. Grant’s fortunes changed when his contract ended in 1937. Leaving Paramount, he chose not to sign an exclusive agreement with any other studio. This was a risky move. Although many stars complained about studio contracts, few were willing to give up the career backing and stability these provided. Grant, however, saw that at least a few other stars – including Ronald Colman, Irene Dunne and Barbara Stanwyck – had benefited from freelancing and he was determined to try it too.29 Hence, he became master of his own career, and chose a comedy as his first post-Paramount film. Topper concerns a carefree couple, George and Marion Kirby, who return as ghosts following a fatal automobile accident to haunt a repressed Wall Street banker in hopes of loosening him up. It proved to be a critical and commercial success.30 In several respects, though, it was not an ideal assignment for Grant. It was made by the independent producer Hal Roach, and no one could have imagined that going from Paramount to Hal Roach’s small studio represented a move up the career ladder. Constance Bennett, playing the female ghost, was top-billed in the credits and had far more screen time than Grant. The title of the film referred not to Grant’s male ghost character, but to the banker Cosmo Topper, played by Roland Young. Worse, Grant was again competing with Young for the affections of his wife. As in This Is the Night, the story suggests that the older, less dashing Young is somehow more attractive than his rival. If Topper was not a step forward for Grant in terms of prestige, billing or centrality, it nevertheless allowed him to demonstrate his propensity for comedy, and especially for the zany, chaotic, madcap humour of screwball. Although set in the sophisticated, leisurely world of high society, screwball comedies centre on couples who kindle, or in some cases rekindle, their romance through verbal sparring as well as playful, childish adventures and gags. Hence, these films offered Grant the opportunity to bring together the two major strands of his career: his sophisticated appearance and the low comedy skills he had developed in his music hall and vaudeville days. The comic pratfalls, high jinks and double-takes he performed on stage for so many years fit well within the slapstick humour of the screwball world, but he

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demonstrated a broader physical dexterity as well. Indeed, from the very first scene of Topper – in which Grant sits atop a gleaming convertible car and blithely steers it with his feet – there is a sense that, as a performer, screwball comedy has liberated him. Playing the comic ‘straight man’, as he had in vaudeville, was a key aspect of Grant’s screwball persona. This was a genre that featured formidable leading ladies playing intelligent, outspoken, confident and somewhat eccentric women. Grant was their ‘straight man’ because he was the calmer, dignified, rational character, who struggles to maintain control as he becomes involved in the women’s schemes and misadventures. Ultimately, his sense of decorum and poise is pushed to the limits and beyond, and the denouement almost always involved him losing his dignity as well as his sartorial elegance. He would be robbed of his clothing, or have his clothes ruined, in film after film. In this respect, he was quite unlike the ‘art deco dandies’ who populated other screwball comedies. His social confidence and good dress sense were not merely appropriate to the film’s smart settings – they were mobilised (and undermined) for comic purposes. If Topper does not represent the first full bloom of the Cary Grant star persona, it is partly because a significant portion of the film concerns Marion Kirby’s flirtation with Cosmo Topper. The implication that she is bored with husband George is inescapable. After Topper, Grant would be the object of desire for stars such as Irene Dunne, Katherine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell, and if there was any notion that they might be interested in someone else, it was clear that they were either trying to fool Grant or themselves. Another factor that marks Topper as a transitional film, rather than the film that established Grant’s star image, is George Kirby’s wealth. Like Grant’s later characters, Kirby is not enthralled by money. When he attends an early-morning meeting of a bank’s board of directors, he is clearly bored by the proceedings. Still wearing a tuxedo from the previous evening’s whirl of parties and nightclubs, he gradually sinks in his chair and allows one of his feet to rest on the table. He hums distractedly to himself and mocks the chairman’s recitation of a stream of financial figures. Bankers were an easy target for comedy during the Great Depression, and George Kirby’s playful childishness is a badge of egalitarianism that sets him apart from them. Nevertheless, his tuxedo, his louche lifestyle, his carefree ways and his place on the board of directors all suggest a life of privilege. In later films, Grant’s characters may be wealthy, but they are self-made men with a purpose

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in life beyond nightclubs and parties. No trace of a privileged position in life would remain. His next film, The Awful Truth, marked the arrival of Cary Grant as a distinctive screen personality.31 Now recognised as one of the finest screwball comedies ever made, it was based on a play that had been filmed twice before, in 1925 and 1929. The basic story remained the same across all versions.32 A wealthy husband accuses his wife of adultery and they divorce, but gradually they realise that they still love each other and reconcile in the end. In 1937 the film was made by Columbia Pictures, then one of the lesser Hollywood studios. Most of its films were made for neighbourhood cinemas, or the bottom half of double-bills, but each year the studio turned out a small number of prestige pictures.33 In February 1937 Cary Grant signed a non-exclusive contract to make four films over two years for Columbia, with stipulations that ensured these would be quality productions.34 He was eager to work with Columbia newcomer, the producer-director Leo McCarey, who had already put the script for The Awful Truth remake in development. Grant agreed to star in the film unaware that McCarey, whose best work had been with the Marx Brothers, believed improvisation was the key to great comedy.35 McCarey paid little attention to the original play, and maintained only one element of Vina Delmar’s new script. Where previous versions of the story were concerned only with the wife’s faithfulness, the new version was more modern for placing equal emphasis on the issue of the husband’s fidelity to his wife.36 Grant’s co-stars on the film, Irene Dunne and Ralph Bellamy, later recalled that McCarey arrived on set each morning with story ideas or lines of dialogue written on scraps of paper. He would ask the cast to try these ideas out and build scenes by running through them over and over again, acting out lines himself and urging the actors to be creative, an approach entirely unfamiliar to Grant.37 In the factory-like atmosphere of Paramount, executives kept a close eye on shooting schedules and the amount of footage achieved each day, and actors were expected to arrive on set with their lines memorised. Very uncomfortable with McCarey’s freewheeling style, Grant vainly asked Columbia boss Harry Cohn to let him leave the production. Nor would the mogul rein in the offbeat director. 38 Improvisation turned out to be good for Grant. In The Awful Truth, he is funnier, and his performance more subtle and nuanced, than ever before. Furthermore, McCarey’s influence proved crucial not only in terms of technique but also in establishing a comic

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persona that Grant would develop for the rest of his career. It was often observed that the two looked alike: they were both tall, dark, good-looking men in their thirties, who dressed well and had an air of urbane sophistication. McCarey also had an ‘infectious zaniness’ – a mischievous, light-hearted, flirtatious manner – that Grant mimicked for the role of Jerry Warriner in The Awful Truth. Attuned to the idea that his star was playing a version of him, the director identified strongly with this portrayal and later said that the film ‘told – in a way – the story of my life’.39 In McCarey’s hands, therefore, The Awful Truth became a celebration of the director’s own man-about-town good looks and debonair character, and, by extension, an on-screen celebration of Cary Grant. Although Irene Dunne is the film’s top-billed star, Grant’s Warriner is the film’s focal point. The first scene, set in a locker room in a New York City athletic club, shows him shirtless and worrying that his wife might not believe that he has spent the previous week in Florida if he does not return home with a tan. Hence, from the

Figure 7.2 The debonair image of Cary Grant in The Awful Truth (Columbia, 1937).

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outset, Grant’s appearance is established as a matter of interest and importance, and, in his shirtless state, the audience is encouraged to see him as the film’s sex symbol. He is subsequently seen in a succession of perfectly tailored suits, a tuxedo, and top hat and tails, always looking impeccably well presented. In keeping with this dashingly confident persona, his character has a wry, sly or witty retort for every occasion. Adopting McCarey’s mannerisms, Grant suddenly seemed more American in manner. He still had a transatlantic accent, but his new air of casual, light-hearted informality was more modern and classless than any previous character he had played, British or American. His voice is best characterised from this point onward not in terms of nationality but of irony. He invests even the simplest dialogue with mischievous layers of meaning. For example, when Jerry finds that, while he was supposedly in Florida, wife Lucy has also been away overnight with her voice instructor, Armand Duvalle (Alexander D’Arcy), he maintains a façade of nonchalance as long as he can. As he politely pours a glass of eggnog for Duvalle, his wife insists on her innocence and says, ‘You can’t have a happy married life if you’re always suspicious of one another’. Grant then turns to Duvalle and offers him ‘a little nutmeg’ with such sharp emphasis on ‘nut’ that we know he finds their story absurd and is seething with jealousy. It is a small moment, early in the film, but one of many instances in which Grant’s delivery is perfectly pitched to add humour or meaning to otherwise routine dialogue. There is also a new self-consciousness in Grant’s performance, seen through the playfulness of his eyes that encourages audiences to follow him and to read his thoughts as they are revealed through small but significant expressions and movements. This approach suited the performative nature of screwball comedy, with its emphasis on gags, disguises and deceits. Throughout The Awful Truth, Jerry and Lucy embarrass one another and themselves in attempts to convince each other that they are not in love and that they can be happy with the new partners they have chosen. Beneath Jerry’s politeness, smiles and sharp irony, however, there is occasionally a touch of menace. When Lucy wins custody of the couple’s dog, Mr Smith (Asta), he insists on visitation rights and on his first visit he finds Lucy flirting with her new neighbour, Daniel Leeson (Ralph Bellamy). Rather than retreating, Jerry insists on going ahead with the visit, taking the opportunity to play noisily with the dog. In a scene that was not in the original play or in Vina Delmar’s script, the two perform a kind of duet, with Jerry on piano and Mr Smith barking along in

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time, while Lucy seethes and Leeson looks puzzled. This is a piece of pure vaudeville, and a delight to watch, but Jerry’s rictus-like grin throughout the raucous entertainment suggests some malice beneath it all. When Lucy suggests to Leeson that they leave for drinks elsewhere, he smiles at them as they depart, but as soon as their backs are turned his upper lip curls with hostility. Grant performs this as a very slight gesture, but it is unmistakable. It works here to register the depth of his feelings for Lucy, but it also signals a darker side to his star persona that would emerge in his later films (notably those with director Alfred Hitchcock). Much of the film’s comedy is derived from the unsuitability of Jerry and Lucy’s prospective new partners. Delmar’s script indicates that Daniel Leeson was originally set to be a stuffy Englishman, with a mother who resembles ‘the dowager Queen Mary’.40 But it is likely that, when Grant was cast as Jerry, McCarey decided that his romantic rival should not be an exaggeratedly English character. With Ralph Bellamy cast in the role instead, Leeson became a nouveau riche oil man from Oklahoma, whose simpleminded boisterousness provided a much sharper contrast with Grant’s debonair Jerry. Similarly, Jerry’s fiancée is a socialite, Barbara Vance (Molly Lamont), whose humourless personality contrasts with Dunne’s vivacious Lucy. Desperate to sabotage the relationship, Lucy attends a drinks party at the Vance home. There, amid the socially prominent guests gathered in a formal parlour, she pretends to be her estranged husband’s sister. Her adoption of the accent and demeanour of a tacky nightclub performer cuts through the social pretensions of the highly embarrassed Jerry. Moreover, when Jerry claims that their ‘father’ was at Princeton University, Lucy chides him that ‘Dad’ was actually the college gardener who ‘kept the grounds looking great’, a revelation that produces scowls of disapproval from the Vances and their guests. While the new partners provide humorous contrasts, they are also useful for placing the Warriners in social terms. Jerry and Lucy may be wealthy, but they are neither the vulgar Leesons nor the snooty Vances. In occupying a middle ground between these two extremes, they are made to seem normal and to have an ordinary social ease. This ‘everyday’ quality was new for Grant, as was the suggestion that beneath his polish, his family background may have been a humble one, but both qualities became fixtures in his screen persona. In the film, the ‘awful truth’ is of course that Jerry and Lucy still love one another, but cannot admit this. Their reconciliation finally occurs on the eve of their divorce becoming final. Lucy leads Jerry to a cabin in

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Connecticut, knowing that they will have to spend the night in adjoining bedrooms and hoping that this will inspire romance. Yet Jerry is not quite in a position to be seductive. He wears a borrowed nightshirt, which makes him look boyish and unconfident for the first time in the film. He moves back and forth between his room and Lucy’s, trying to find the right excuse to join her in bed. As Andrew Klevan has pointed out, many of the shots in this scene are from the perspective of Lucy’s bedroom, looking at Jerry.41 The effect is to suggest that Jerry’s place is in Lucy’s bed, and also to see Jerry from her approximate (although not exact) point of view. This makes for a neat symmetry with the first scene in the athletic club, in which Jerry was presented shirtless for the audience’s pleasure. Now accompanied by shots of Dunne looking decidedly sultry in her double bed, the view of Jerry suggests that marriage – or at least marriage to Cary Grant – can include long-lasting sexual desire and fulfilment. Critics and audiences loved The Awful Truth.42 Irene Dunne received an Academy Award nomination as ‘best actress in a leading role’, Ralph Bellamy was nominated for ‘best actor in a supporting role’, and Leo McCarey actually won the ‘best director’ award for 1937. Remarkably, Grant was the only of the film’s four principal players not to be nominated. Some speculate that this was because it was widely known in Hollywood that Grant tried to extricate himself from the production.43 However, critics also assumed that Grant was playing himself in The Awful Truth in a role ‘cut precisely to his measure’, as one put it.44 However frustrating this must have been for Grant, it was also a sign that the star persona created in The Awful Truth was a powerful one. Cary Grant now embodied a host of contradictory yet compelling traits. He was unlike Clark Gable and the other ‘dangerous men’ in being not only modern and masculine but also sophisticated and elegant. He was a gentleman but was too gregarious to be confined to drawing rooms. He was a sex symbol but one with an abiding love of his wife. He demonstrated a form of social confidence that was instructive to viewers who might want to emulate him, but his charm was also intriguingly superficial. In comedies, much of the humour derived from testing its limits and finding its breaking point, while later thrillers would explore what might lie beneath the charming surface. In the late 1930s, when the economy was over the worst of the Great Depression but full recovery was not yet at hand, Cary Grant cut a reassuring figure. He affirmed a new ideal of the American male: a consumer who cares about fashion and appearance, a leisurely figure

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who enjoys urban life, and a husband worthy of companionate marriage. He also reaffirmed older ideals of class mobility and the immigrant experience. Once he was free of Paramount’s publicity machine, Archie Leach’s childhood was no longer reinvented as wealthy and idyllic. He spoke more frankly about his youthful experiences as an acrobat, and his struggles to earn a living when he first came to the USA.45 He also used his films, and especially improvised moments in his films, to remind audiences of his true identity. In Holiday (1938), while attending a party at a swanky Park Avenue apartment, he suddenly puts on a Cockney accent and performs an acrobatic somersault with Katherine Hepburn. In His Girl Friday (1940), when confronted with a sheriff who threatens to put him in jail, he says, ‘the last person who said that to me was Archie Leach just before he cut his throat’. In Gunga Din (1940) he plays a Cockney soldier, and the character was renamed Archie at his request. This was unusual. Of course many of the studio era’s stars had adopted names – John Wayne was really Marion Morrison, Mickey Rooney was Joe Yule, Carole Lombard was Jane Peters – but none was so keen to remind audiences of their true origins. To the chagrin of the many directors with whom Grant worked after McCarey, he always insisted on some measure of improvisation on the set. As his star power grew, he increasingly demanded script approval, and approval of his directors and his co-stars, before he would sign a contract.46 He read scripts not to memorise them, but to edit and rewrite them.47 The control he asserted over his career, and the success that this brought him, was surely an inspiration to other stars (freelancing increasingly became the norm in the 1940s and thereafter). He also took many risks. His star persona would not remain exactly the same but was moulded and reshaped to suit different genres and changing times. His biggest hit of the war years, for example, was the action-drama Destination Tokyo (Warner Bros, 1943), in which he plays a submarine captain characterised by devotion to his wife, calm professionalism in battle, and a perfectly pressed uniform. The uniform is of course nearly in tatters at the climax of the film and his calm could not withstand attack. In the post-war comedy Room for One More (Warner Bros, 1952) he is a happily married suburban family man, but find himself harried by the soon-to-be adopted children that his wife (Betsy Drake) brings home. It was in the thrillers that he made with Hitchcock, and especially North by Northwest (MGM, 1959), that he appeared most suave and was put through the most gruelling ordeals. Cary Grant

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made sophistication and elegance more casual, and certainly more democratic, by revealing that his debonair persona was a façade that was put on and could be cast off. The awful truth about his star persona was that audiences loved him not just for his perfection but also for seeing him robbed of it.

notes 1. Pauline Kael, ‘The Man from Dream City’, New Yorker, 14 July 1975, 52–9. 2. David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975), 351–2. 3. Martin Shingler, Star Studies: A Critical Guide (London: Palgrave Macmillan/ British Film Institute, 2012), 121–6. 4. The Cary Grant Papers are held as a special collection at the Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California [hereafter CGP/Herrick]. 5. Grant himself characterises his family and childhood this way in the first of a threepart series of autobiographical articles he wrote for the Ladies Home Journal. See Cary Grant, ‘Archie Leach’, Ladies Home Journal, 80: 1 (January–February 1963), 50–3. The series continues in the March and April issues. 6. Among Grant’s collected papers are twenty-three oversized scrapbooks filled with critical reviews, news items and publicity. The reviews from his period on Broadway are in Scrapbook 1, CGP/Herrick. 7. Arthur Hammerstein to Archie Leach, 12 January 1928, file 108, CGP/Herrick. 8. Scrapbook 1, CGP/Herrick 9. Cary Grant, ‘Archie Leach’, Ladies Home Journal, 80: 3 (April 1963), 86–7. 10. This comparison is made in Alexander Walker, ‘It’s Only a Movie, Ingrid’: Encounters on and off Screen, (London: Headline, 1988), 73. 11. The pay cut, from $400 to $275 per week, is discussed in a letter from Schubert Theatre Corp. to Archie Leach, 6 November 1930, file 116; the information on St Louis is from the clippings in Scrapbook 1; both CGP/Herrick. 12. Grant discussed the name change in the one-man show he performed in the early 1980s. Articles reporting on these shows are held in ‘Clippings File’, file 116, CGP/ Herrick. 13. Drew Todd, ‘Decadent Heroes: Dandyism and Masculinity in Art Deco Hollywood’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 32 (Winter 2005), 168–81. 14. See Mick Lasalle, Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2002). 15. The popularity of these stars was discussed in these terms in a contemporaneous article in a fan magazine. See Charles Grayson, ‘They’ve Battled the Depression – That’s Why They’re Stars Now!’, Motion Picture, January 1933, 53, 80. 16. Christine Becker, ‘Clark Gable: The King of Hollywood’, in Adrienne L. McLean (ed.), Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 245–66. 17. John Paddy Carstairs, ‘He’s Grand – and He’s Grant’, Film Pictorial, December 1932, 20.

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18. See Photoplay, November 1934, 111. 19. Quoted in Roger Carroll, ‘Catching up with Cary (Grant)’, Motion Picture, February 1941, 21 and 53. 20. Cukor is quoted in Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It? Conversations with Legendary Film Directors (New York: Ballantine, 1997), 448–9. 21. Reviews of Sylvia Scarlett are held in Scrapbook 5, CGP/Herrick. 22. Charles Keil, ‘Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn: Domesticated Mavericks’, in Sean Griffin (ed.), What Dreams Were Made of: Movie Stars of the 1940s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 192–216 [quotation, 194]. 23. Anthony Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators and Gossip Mongers (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2010), 122. 24. See, for example, Harry B. Blair, ‘Once an Acrobat’, The New Movie Magazine, March 1934, 42 and 82. Many of the clippings from 1930s fan magazines in Cary Grant’s scrapbooks offer stories along these lines (see especially Scrapbook 6, CGP/Herrick). 25. See, for example, Ben Maddox, ‘They Keep Bachelor’s Hall’, Silver Screen, March 1933, 20–1; J. Eugene Chrisman, ‘We Can’t Afford a Hollywood Marriage!’, Hollywood, October 1933, 27; Esther Meade, ‘Still Pals’, Modern Screen, September 1934, 48; Maude Cheatham, ‘Movie Bachelors at Home’, Screenland, January 1936, 30–1; and [Anonymous], ‘Batching I’, Modern Screen, September 1937, 50–1. The first three articles appear in Scrapbook 2, while the last two are in Scrapbook 5, CGP/Herrick. 26. Brett L. Abrams, Hollywood Bohemians: Transgressive Sexuality and the Selling of the Movieland Dream (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 3–4. 27. The annual polls of ‘Money Making Stars’ are printed in the almanacs published by the Motion Picture Herald. See, for example, Terry Ramsaye (ed.), The 1938–39 International Motion Picture Herald Almanac (New York: Quigley, 1939), 812. 28. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979), 38. 29. Tom Kemper, Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 72, 125. 30. Topper clippings, Scrapbook 6, CGP/Herrick. 31. Writer-director Garson Kanin asserted this when interviewed for Nancy Nelson, Evenings With Cary Grant (New York: Kensington, 1991), 98. 32. Jane M. Greene, ‘The Road to Reno: The Awful Truth and the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage’, Film History, 13: 4 (2001), 337–58. 33. Bernard F. Dick, ‘From the Brothers Cohn to Sony Corp.’, in Bernard F. Dick (ed.), Columbia Pictures: Portrait of a Studio (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 2–64 [quotation, 3–4]. 34. Contract between Columbia Pictures and Cary Grant, 4 February1937, Cary Grant legal file, Warner Bros Archives, University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, Los Angeles, California. 35. Wes D. Gehring, Leo McCarey: From Marx to McCarthy (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005), 152. 36. Vina Delmar, The Awful Truth: Final Draft [script], is held in Collection 073, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, California [hereafter Young/UCLA]. 37. Ralph Bellamy, When the Smoke Hits the Fan (New York: Doubleday, 1979), 130. Dunne is quoted in Wes D. Gehring, Irene Dunne: First Lady of Hollywood (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2006), 82.

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the ‘awful truth’ about cary grant 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

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Leo McCarey discusses this in Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It?, 413–14. Gehring, Leo McCarey, 159–60. Vina Delmar, The Awful Truth: Final Draft, Young/UCLA. Andrew Klevan, Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (London and New York: Wallflower, 2005), 35. The Awful Truth clippings, Scrapbook 8, CGP/Herrick. Gehring, Irene Dunne, 88. Hollywood Reporter, 6 October 1937, The Awful Truth clippings, Scrapbook 8, CGP/Herrick. See, for example, the interview Grant gave to Bosley Crowther, ‘Modesty and Mr Grant’, New York Times, 4 December 1938. ‘Contracts and Agreements’, file 521, CGP/Herrick. This statement is based on the scripts in Grant’s papers, which are heavily annotated.

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chapter 8

Footlight Parade: The New Deal on Screen Harvey G. Cohen

W

hen Footlight Parade went before the cameras during the summer of 1933, the Warner Bros ‘Great Depression musicals’ template was already established, but it represents the highlight of this series. Busby Berkeley was comfortably ensconced at Warners with a crew he could trust and who understood his eccentric approach to staging dance numbers. The studio executives, while concerned about costs, mostly stayed out of his way.1 And for the first time in the series, a real movie star had climbed on board. Propelled by James Cagney in the lead role, Footlight Parade sports a modern, breakneck pace, as the characters fight for artistic and financial survival in the midst of economic and cultural dislocation, conditions not far removed from those that many Americans were facing during the Great Depression. Furthermore, Footlight Parade echoed the optimism and energy generated during the initial months of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. Immediately upon attaining office, the new administration attacked the problems underlying the Great Depression by securing congressional enactment of an unprecedented quantity of substantive legislation during its first 100 days. The strong and speedy start made by FDR’s New Deal programme inspired hopes that better times were nigh. Part of what makes the film so powerful and singular is its resistance to the usual conventions, both of its own time and the decades that followed. Very little in Footlight Parade is done by rote. As well as viscerally representing the mood of many Americans during the Great Depression, it epitomises the Warner Bros film ethos of championing the underdog struggling to get ahead in the face of amassed power, something the Warners themselves had needed to do during their ultimately successful quest to make their studio one of the majors in the

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1920s.2 Footlight is more gritty, grimy and realistic, and quicker-paced than the typical musical – even the Warner Bros ones that preceded it. The people who populate the movie are often desperate, sometimes profane (at least by Hollywood standards), and concerned with survival. Most of the best numbers are saved for the end of the film, instead of being doled out steadily throughout. Nobody breaks into song unless it is part of a real stage number; in the world of Footlight, no orchestra arises dreamily out of nowhere to accompany a character in a fanciful romantic moment. In this time of economic ruin and crushed dreams for millions, Footlight Parade offered reassurance and hope, without climbing upon a soapbox and without sacrificing laughs or entertainment. It is the musical that most encapsulates the struggles of the Great Depression, and most represented the Warner brothers’ support for the Roosevelt administration during its nascent months. In the 1932 presidential campaign, Harry and Jack Warner were among Roosevelt’s most important advocates and fundraisers, masterminding a campaign fundraiser at the Los Angeles Coliseum that attracted at least 60,000 spectators, featured dozens of movie stars, and garnered national newspaper headlines. During the first half of 1933, as Roosevelt came to office, their ads featured numerous examples of New Deal imagery and slogans, such as ‘inaugurating a NEW DEAL in ENTERTAINMENT!’3 The months preceding the production of Footlight in 1933 were tense ones for Hollywood and its labour market. The immediate source of strain was the insistence of the major studios that the industry’s economic survival required temporary eight-week wage cuts for all employees, beginning on 7 March 1933, but discontent with the producers had been building for years. Though wage cuts were not unprecedented, they had never previously been applied to the entire industry at once. The signs of improvement in film company finances three months after their implementation, craft union avoidance of them, and the refusal of the Warners and Louis B. Mayer to accept any reduction in their own executive salaries, helped foment a sense of injustice that played a part in the establishment of the Screen Actors Guild and the Screen Writers Guild. Hollywood’s workers sought more protection for their jobs and livelihoods, and actors, writers and other workers engaged in the industry began demanding pay and conditions commensurate with the boxoffice returns that their efforts helped to make possible.4 The two main stars of Footlight Parade, James Cagney and Joan Blondell, were made to order for the more realistic productions that Darryl F. Zanuck sought during his term as Head of Production at Warner Bros, which ended as Footlight was heading into production.5

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Neither was a relaxed or easy-going actor. Instead, both were energetic performers specialising in playing characters desperately ensconced in a struggle to better themselves and liable to take big risks to do so. The parts they took on usually projected an inner strength that each possessed in real life. Cagney’s pug nose and tough-guy visage and Blondell’s ‘chipmunk cheeks’ (her own description) were also far removed from the kind of smooth, perfected look associated with glamorous stars. In standing out from the Hollywood norm, they captured the attention of the movie-watching public, both at the time and down the ages, and were well matched to the New Deal-like themes present in Footlight Parade. For Cagney, Footlight represented an especially risky and important project in his career.6 After a rough childhood in various insalubrious New York City neighbourhoods and a decade-long vaudeville and stage career, which included a stint starting up a dance school with his wife Billie, he began acting for the Warner Bros studio at the age of thirty-one in 1930. His roles as working-class toughs with occasional sociopathic streaks in films such as The Public Enemy (1931) earned him instant fame. As was usually the case in the Hollywood star-making machinery, the studio cast its exclusively-signed star in similar roles in most of the fifteen movies that he made for it from 1930 to 1933. Under the restrictive multi-year contracts most actors signed at the outset of their Hollywood careers, studios exercised the prerogative of repetitive typecasting as the basis of their commercial strategy. These contracts not only put a long-term freeze on compensation paid newcomers, irrespective of whether they turned out to be a hit with the public, but also did not allow them latitude. The studio, at least on paper and in the great majority of cases in practice, possessed ultimate autonomy to place an actor in the productions they thought would be the most profitable, not the ones that expanded or challenged his or her ability. If an actor struck box-office gold in a certain kind of role, it was one he or she had to repeat until audiences burned out on the typecast individual. The long-term career of most actors was not an issue that counted for much in studio calculations. Only a select few enjoyed prolonged stardom and those that did so could exact higher salaries for as long as they were guaranteed money-makers for the studio. Could some of this antipathetic relationship between actors and the studios be reflected in Footlight Parade’s tense portrayal of labour relations? In December 1933 Warners issued an edict barring their screenwriters from showing scripts to actors while still in the writing stage, ‘because of actor interference on yarns which resulted in numerous stories being botched up’, according to Variety.7 Writers sometimes

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consulted with actors appearing in their movies in the hope that the scripts would benefit from getting more of the performers’ feel for their parts. James Cagney’s relationship with left-leaning John Bright, who worked on five of his 1931–2 movies including his breakthrough film, The Public Enemy, may well have inspired the Warner Bros prohibition on writers consulting actors. It certainly represented another instance of the studio exerting control over the careers of actors and how they were presented, denying them as much creative autonomy as possible. Within the Hollywood labour system, it made economic sense to lock actors into a supposedly iron-clad low-paying salary at the start of their careers. Although film is often seen as an art form in the present day, motion picture executives rarely countenanced such a perspective in the 1930s. With such high fixed costs, profit had to come first for them. Studios certainly turned out well-crafted, well-acted pictures, but with an eye to the current box office rather than the edification of future movie lovers. In the Hollywood of the 1930s, no one really foresaw the longevity of the studio product’s appeal nor that film fans would pay for decades to come to watch the performances in this era by stars like Cagney. From the producers’ viewpoint, actors were an evanescent asset to be taken full advantage of before their appeal faded, at which point there were always fresh reserves of talent that could be called up for box-office duty. As artists who wished to enjoy a lengthy and lucrative career, actors did not want to be relegated to such a limited fate, of course. By making his screen singing-and-dancing debut in Footlight Parade, Cagney was testing whether he could propel himself out of the snarling toughguy straitjacket in which Warners had previously constrained him. He was making a bid to be viewed as a rare figure in the studio system by succeeding in two different genres as the foundation for a long-term, multi-faceted career in movies. Warners showed an unusual degree of caution for the publicity-hungry industry while rolling out Cagney’s singing and dancing film debut. ‘There is some secrecy surrounding the event insofar as the timbre of Cagney’s crooning voice’, Daily Variety reported concerning a live radio preview of Cagney’s main vocal performance from Footlight Parade. ‘Nobody knows whether the toughster is a basso or a tenor.’8 The screenwriter James Seymour, chosen by Zanuck to work on the earlier Warner Bros Great Depression musicals, continued in this role with Footlight, aided by Manuel Seff. They maintained the tone already set by other entries in the series released earlier in 1933 (42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933), and improved upon it. In an introductory note to the shooting script, Seymour and Seff outlined their modus operandi,

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which helps explain much of the success and continuing relevance of Footlight Parade: This picture depends on tempo! Scenes have been made intentionally brief and staccato . . . there must be no slow fade away scenes . . . quick cuts and wipe-offs must give the effect achieved on the stage by black outs . . . the dialogue must be rapid fire . . . except, of course, in contrasting quiet scenes of romance. If any scene lacks incident or drags it must be cut. The picture must have the pace of a production dance number punched up with a minimum of dialogue.9 Lloyd Bacon, whom Zanuck chose to direct 42nd Street when Mervyn LeRoy took sick, also helmed the non-musical majority of Footlight Parade. The fast ‘tempo’ called for in Footlight matched Bacon’s aesthetic. ‘I see that the public gets action’, commented Bacon decades later. ‘Some others may use motion pictures as a vehicle for psychological study. I haven’t that patience’.10 The filming of Footlight Parade took place between 19 June and 5 August 1933. As happened with the production schedule for Gold Diggers of 1933, an ambitious concluding musical sequence for Footlight went before the cameras at the last minute, after all other principal photography ceased, between 31 August and 15 September.11 Less than three weeks later, the film premiered in New York. Footlight Parade opens with musical-theatre producer Chester Kent (Cagney) being informed by his producers Al Frazer (Arthur Hohl) and Silas Gould (Guy Kibbee) that his musicals are no longer supported by the public: ‘People aren’t paying for shows anymore. Talking pictures, that’s what they want’. Gould is pleased with this new economic situation and buys up movie houses because ‘they deliver the show in tin cans and we got nothing to worry about’. Kent mentions that some movie theatres still feature ‘prologue’, short live musical numbers before the main screening, but Frazer and Gould insist that these are too expensive and also on the way out. However, Kent sells them on the idea that if they produce musical prologues and tour them around the country instead of just playing them in one Manhattan theatre, they will create an economy of scale, and make money with the enhanced market for prologues. And Kent will be able to keep doing the job he loves, creating musicals, but now on a national level. As his scheme of touring national prologue companies becomes a reality, Kent/Cagney charges through the frame, a blur of kinetic energy and machine-gun dialogue, dispatching quick solutions for

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problems that emerge on a minute-by-minute basis, hoping that the sleepless pace he maintains does not land him in ‘the laughing academy’. One can feel the effort of the cinematographer tracking him as Cagney bolts quickly through room after room, the camera going through walls to match his lead, an example of the ‘action’ filmmaking that Bacon specialised in. Cagney plays a workaholic obsessed with creating original and exciting prologues, pulling an all-nighter in his office thinking up new routines, since Frazer and Gould’s purchasing of new movie houses forces him to initiate three new prologues per week for his ever-expanding company. However, his competitor, Gladstone Prologues, keeps stealing his concepts for routines: ‘I slave day and night, worry about ideas, and Gladstone steals them, he’s been doing it for months’. Kent and his loyal personal secretary and confidante Nan (Joan Blondell) are slowly realising they harbour a Gladstone spy in their company. Even worse for Kent is that he is also being cheated by his own company. Frazer and Gould, his supposed partners, fashion a separate phony earnings statement for him so that he will not know that ‘profits are going up all the time’. Even the accountant netted a ‘century note’ in this clandestine deal, but Kent, supposedly a full partner whose ideas have brought in the profits, sees no profits. Footlight Parade is a film about labour, and the lack of respect and profits accruing to those who do the main intellectual and creative work. It was not coincidental that the picture was written and shot shortly after that issue flared up in Hollywood like never before. Events in the film come to a head when Kent’s company is offered ‘the chance of a lifetime’, competing with Gladstone for a contract with George Apolinaris (Paul Porcasi), who owns forty deluxe movie houses. Gladstone will preview three of their new longer prologues for audiences in Apolinaris’s theatres the next Sunday, after three of Kent’s new offerings preview the night before. The company that wins the greatest audience approval will secure the contract. Desperate to win, Kent is not sure if Frazer and Gould can provide the support he needs. ‘Every time I get a great idea, you let Gladstone steal it!’, he loudly complains to Gould. Kent comes up with a radical idea to solve his spy problem: he will miraculously assemble three prologues with just three days’ preparation that ‘will stand [Apolinaris] on his ear’, and will foil Gladstone’s espionage by locking all his employees in the building until the premiere of the new prologues. ‘It can’t be done’, declares Gould. ‘Give me absolute authority until Saturday night and I’ll do it’, hotly replies Kent. ‘You got it’, his partners chirp in

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return. ‘It’s done’, Kent shouts, stalking off with his usual speedy brio, raring to start work immediately. In the next scene, Kent outlines the situation to his company of dancers and singers, belting out his words with urgency, like a general rallying troops during a time of crisis. It is a speech reminiscent of Warner Baxter’s emphatic rant to the ingénue unexpectedly promoted to star (Ruby Keeler) in 42nd Street, but Kent’s words are more directly evocative of the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s approach to selling Americans on the New Deal: Now this is the way we’re going to do it. Nobody leaves here until Saturday night. You’ll eat here and sleep here. Live three whole days right here in the studio . . . this is war, a blockade. Anybody comes in, stays in. Now this is your last chance to get out. Well? Anybody wanna go? [the company say ‘no’ in unison] All right, thanks. This is a large order, three prologues in three nights. We’re gonna work your heads off. Curse you and break your hearts. But by Saturday night we’ll have what we want. Many characters in Footlight Parade, including his partners and employees, tell Kent that his audacious three-day plan is doomed to fail; as Roosevelt took office, he heard similar sentiments from some quarters of the country. Many felt that the economic problems had gone on for too long and were too deeply ingrained to resolve. Roosevelt provided a steady charge from the opposite direction, emphasising optimism and government solutions. During the famous first 100 days of his administration, the Congress passed more than a dozen major pieces of Roosevelt-designed legislation which redefined the responsibility and relationship between the federal government and its citizens. This unequalled (then or now) onslaught of laws reformed banking on a national basis, providing additional security and insuring depositors against losses; it reformed the stock market; it provided millions of government-funded jobs improving the country, giving millions a steady if small paycheck and some dignity; it provided government refinancing for the many underwater home and farm mortgages; it repealed the prohibition of alcohol, providing a valuable new source of taxes and some relief from stress for US citizens.12 Footlight Parade implicitly makes the same kind of argument: that a strong, visionary and outspoken leader armed with new ideas, who insists that problems can be solved, goals achieved, money earned and jobs saved can and will succeed – if people will follow his well-considered plan and work hard.

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When Nan employs a clever ruse to reveal Fraser and Gould’s embezzlement, Kent excoriates his cheating of his partners and storms out, breaking the blockade, insisting the show is over, and putting the Apolinaris contract in jeopardy. After driving around town with Nan in a cab, he cools down a bit, and gets a new inspiration for a waterfall-themed number. Kent returns to the building to inform the exiting players that the show is back on. He then has a spirited exchange with Fraser and Gould, which serves as yet another example of how Kent’s character resembles President Roosevelt: GOULD: What about that ‘accounting mistake’? KENT: Mistake, your Aunt Fannie. FRASER: We’re giving you a new deal. KENT [with a combination of threat and triumph]: Yeah, and I’m the dealer! This is an irresistibly acted moment from Cagney that demonstrates how the economic crisis is even more central in Footlight Parade than in previous Warner Bros Great Depression musicals. The trio of musical numbers that close the film, mostly directed and created by Busby Berkeley, also symbolise an optimistic strain of the New Deal, as dancers mesh together to create something larger and more impressive than themselves. Berkeley’s routines contain ‘a New Deal spirit: deemphasis of star power, [a] certain melting pot idea’, argued film scholar Martin Rubin. In another example of this, one of the prologue units rehearsing in the film is preparing a prosperity-themed number. Kent accuses the dancers of ‘dying on your feet’, and the dancers retort by blaming the sulky yet humorous choreographer played by Warner stock player Frank McHugh: ‘How can we look prosperity when he’s got depression all over that pan of his?’ Finally, the frenzied period of lockdown and preparation comes to a close, and the three new prologues are premiered in one night for Apolinaris. They are shown consecutively in the film, with short interludes during which we see the chorus girls running in scanty costumes toward stage doors and changing their clothes on a bus accompanied by wailing police escort so they can make it to all three theatres on time. The three extended sequences, including perhaps choreographer Busby Berkeley’s finest work ‘By A Waterfall’, head into a realm of pure fantasy and spectacle, leaving the aura of the Great Depression behind. The sets and scenarios Berkeley fashioned were so spectacular and original that, just as in the film Footlight

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Parade, Warner Bros posted guards at the soundstage doors where the number was filmed, making sure that no other studios would pirate Berkeley’s ideas.13 Berkeley’s final Footlight number is ‘Shanghai Lil’, a madcap melange of both progressive and stereotypical sensibilities, a sequence that could only have passed muster before the Production Code went into full effect in 1934. This takes place in a dissolute bar in China where an international crowd of barflies, flappers in net stockings and garters, prostitutes and US Navy sailors – like the one Kent plays – coexist in an alcoholic and nicotine haze. Cagney/Kent’s tuxedo-clad character surveys the bar’s patrons searching for his Shanghai Lil, aggressively fending off the advances of other women who show interest in him. Soon after, the camera pans across a gallery of diverse characters discussing the relationship between Kent’s character and Shanghai Lil. These include a French Foreign Legion officer, a black African soldier, a British regular and a Jew from Palestine. There is a worldliness to these personages rarely seen in 1930s Hollywood: two white women surround the black African and one speaks to him as an equal and touches him – an action rare and respectful for the period. A Chinese couple at the end of the bar is also portrayed more respectfully than usual for a Hollywood production. When a drunk and dishevelled sailor pronounces Shanghai Lil ‘anybody’s gal’, Kent’s character socks the inebriate on the jaw and a bar-wide melee results. When the brawl clears, he has changed back into a sailor suit and finally finds Shanghai Lil, a meeting they celebrate by dancing with gusto upon the bartop and a tabletop. While co-star Ruby Keeler, who plays dancer-turned secretary-turned dancer-again Bea Thorn (and featured in both previous Great Depression musicals of 1933), seems to retain a stand-in for the close-up of her dance solo, Cagney handles his steps with an impressive grace and fluidity, his whole body from his shoulders to his feet swinging with the beat. Berkeley was impressed, but considering Cagney’s years of hoofing on Manhattan stages during the 1920s, perhaps he should not have been. ‘He could learn whatever you gave him very quickly’, Berkeley later remarked. ‘You could count on him to be prepared. And expert mimic that he was, he could pick up on the most subtle inflections of movement’.14 Before Cagney and Keeler can finish their dancing, a trumpet sounds and the Kent character’s unit is called to vacate the area. The American sailors march outside the bar, allowing Berkeley to show off his military choreography expertise as Cagney and his fellow Navy brethren parade in formation, twirling their guns with drill team precision.

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Figure 8.1 Chester Kent (James Cagney) and Bea Thorn (Ruby Keeler) in the ‘Shanghai Lil’ dance routine in Footlight Parade (Warner Bros, 1933).

At this point, a loud patriotic horn-led fanfare plays on the soundtrack for the first and only time in Footlight Parade. The US Navy personnel and ‘Asian’ women hold up small signs to the camera perched directly above them. When aligned together, these signs generate a graphic of the American flag. Immediately thereafter, those in the centre of the flag turn their signs over to reveal a large portrait of FDR superimposed upon the flag. The sailors and women then fold up their signs, and with the camera still providing an overview from the ceiling, quickly rearrange themselves into the Blue Eagle, the key symbol of the early New Deal. When the pattern of the eagle is achieved, including the trademark lightning bolts in its claw, rifles are fired in salute. A theatre owner in Dante, Virginia informed the Motion Picture Herald that ‘when they formed President Roosevelt’s picture the audience applauded’.15 The Blue Eagle served as the emblem of Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration (NRA), the most significant programme of the first Hundred Days that sought a large-scale reorganisation of the economy in order to combat the Depression.16 With the NRA,

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The Blue Eagle formation in Footlight Parade.

Roosevelt attempted to prime the pump of consumer spending and jobs on a nationwide scale. Through the establishment of national production agreements, it sought the voluntary cooperation of business to set maximum weekly hours for employees (usually thirty to forty), in order that more Americans could earn paychecks and a minimum wage ($12–13 per week). The agency also helped leaders of major industries, including motion pictures, to draw up an NRA code that set prices, production quotas and other rules for their sector. These voluntary regulations aimed to stop ‘unfair competition and disastrous overproduction’, according to Roosevelt, and ensure that as many companies and employees as possible remained active and working. The hope was that instilling a sense of togetherness between business and workers, whereby each would make some sacrifice for the common good, would break the vicious circle of economic decline and put the country back on the road to prosperity, but lasting unity proved elusive. Section 7(a) of the enabling legislation became the most controversial provision of every NRA code in providing for the first time a federally guaranteed right for workers to organise themselves and bargain collectively through

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representatives of their choice instead of company unions that were hitherto common. This inaugurated a golden age for the American labour movement, but it soon encountered stiff business resistance, not least from the notoriously anti-union Hollywood movie moguls. The Blue Eagle formation accompanied by patriotic music in Footlight Parade served as an extraordinarily public banner placed in the Warner Bros shop window, seen by millions around the country and the globe. Other Warner feature films, such as Wild Boys of the Road (1933), featured the insignia in subtle ways in the background of key scenes. Most, if not all, of the studio’s films from March 1933 and throughout the year feature the Blue Eagle at their start or close, or both. During spring 1933, however, as the Footlight script was being written, the Warner brothers were basking in the election victory of their chosen presidential candidate and the early momentum of his legislative agenda. The scene of Roosevelt’s face and policies being so baldly celebrated in the Shanghai Lil sequence was unprecedented in a Hollywood feature. The end of Footlight Parade features requited love onstage and backstage. By the close of ‘Shanghai Lil’, Keeler as Lil has donned a US Navy uniform so she can join Kent’s character on the ‘great big steamboat across the sea’. In the theatre after the ‘Shanghai Lil’ finale, the crowd cheers loud and long, and Apolinaris happily signs the contract with Frazer and Gould. And Kent/Cagney and Nan/Blondell finally and dramatically declare their romantic love for each other backstage in the dark after the stage lights have gone out. Both Roosevelt and Footlight Parade made the case that by following a smart plan from a charismatic visionary leader, crisis can be averted and success realised. The Depression can be dealt with, the movie seems to intimate, but it will entail much hard work over a long period of time with no guarantee of success. In its eccentric Berkeleyesque way, the military imagery at the end of the film fits, not only in its rededication to the American dream (a similar patriotic aura also infuses the concluding ‘Forgotten Man’ number in Gold Diggers of 1933), but also in the sense that what Kent and his loyal associates undergo is a kind of war, or at least an intense struggle. They fight against dishonest management and disloyal employees, on behalf of those who work within musical theatre and who provide its craft, those who know how to attract and thrill an audience. And of course, they are engaged in the struggle against the Depression itself, both in the film and thematically, for the film audience. Footlight Parade, at heart, is about labour, supplying good and bad examples of its practice. As the film went before the cameras, no one could be certain if Roosevelt’s New

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Deal would deliver on its ambitious initial promise, but the public was evidently ready for a film that could deliver a story skilfully combining fun and realism while echoing a Rooseveltian approach in attempting to save a theatre company. Footlight Parade became a big hit, earning over $2.4 million internationally (over $40 million in today’s dollars), making Warner Bros a significant profit over its production budget of $459,760, according to studio files.17 These attributes of Footlight Parade align it with key trends in 1930s popular culture. In cultural historian Lawrence W. Levine’s assessment, Americans during the Great Depression tended not to blame outside forces for their economic plight, even though plausible arguments could be made against, for example, stock brokerage companies that allowed clients to buy with only 10 per cent of a stock’s price paid upfront, or banks that too hastily foreclosed on farms. According to him, Americans instead manifested a ‘tendency to internalize the responsibility for one’s position which often led to feelings of shame’. They blamed themselves for their misfortunes, often apologising when forced by circumstances to seek economic aid. As Levine notes, this prevalent worldview, with its corollary insistence on ‘personal responsibility’ and refusal to fail under dire circumstances, was a principal motif in many of the most popular cultural productions of the decade. As evidence, he points to Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind (1936), which dominated fiction sales for two years and became the film boxoffice champion of the decade. The main character Scarlett O’Hara, as well as the country during the Civil War, faced a situation of scary upheaval not unlike the Great Depression, and no one knew how life would continue when the national crisis passed, or if the crisis would pass at all. Levine found similar currents of ‘enduring values’ enabling ‘triumph over adversity’ across a wide spectrum of popular Depressionera culture. His brief list includes radio shows starring Will Rogers and the fictional characters Amos ’n’ Andy, Disney’s Oscar-winning 1933 Three Little Pigs cartoon short (‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?’), and the perennial non-fiction bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People (1937) that stressed personal conduct as a key tenet of business success.18 To that list of 1930s culture could also be added the bittersweet yet swinging music of Duke Ellington, John Steinbeck’s brutalised yet relentlessly forward-moving Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath, and of course Chester Kent and his stage company in Footlight Parade (as well as many other Warner social realist films of the period). These novels, films and musical and radio productions supplied entertainment, but did not deliver a simple escapism. They provided inspiration and

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wisdom, and even though their realism arrived in sometimes disturbing form, audiences embraced them, probably because they related to the public’s situation without insulting them, and because these cultural works represented the kind of character audiences hoped they would exhibit themselves if facing such catastrophe. Promoters stressed the sexier portions of the film in their marketing, with content often going beyond what the film and its plot featured. For example, a story in Warners’ pressbook about the ‘By a Waterfall’ number describes the chorus girls as ‘nymphs’ performing ‘nude’, which they clearly were not in the film. In a photo that did not derive from the film, co-star Guy Kibbee observes a young blond woman with a $10 bill emerging from the slit in her dress, hiked up well above her knee. There existed no doubt as to what angle Warner exploited in selling the film. The ‘Great Depression musicals’ is how film enthusiasts and scholars often label these films now, and Depression-related themes are present and repetitive within the films themselves, but they were not used as a sales point for these films when released. The reviews for Footlight Parade following its New York City premiere on 5 October 1933 usually landed on one end of the scale or the other, extremely good or extremely bad, a historically typical reaction for a film that pushed at the borders of mainstream filmmaking.19 Richard Watts, Jr, the film critic for the New York Herald-Tribune, aside from wishing that the musical numbers were more evenly distributed rather than piled on at the end, raved about the film, thought it better than series predecessors, and was the only New York critic besides Variety to mention the New Deal imagery: The new Warner musical show is elaborate, fantastically elegant in its musical numbers, slightly less tuneful and considerably more disrobed than its predecessors, well acted and pretty certain to be a smashing economic success . . . Marching marines somehow or other turn into N.R.A. emblems, and a picture of President Roosevelt flashes on the screen. For a combination of imaginative extravagance and less than impeccable taste I recommend ‘Shanghai Lil’ to you . . . ‘Footlight Parade’ is a lively cinema pipe dream. The strongly negative reviews are surprising, compared with how the film is viewed today. Some critics appear surprised by the sharper satire and dialogue as well as the brisker pace of Footlight compared to previous Great Depression musicals. They may have been taken aback by the sight of screen tough guy James Cagney dancing and singing,

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which the Los Angeles Times pronounced a ‘novelty of no slight merit’. Doubtless, some felt that too much realism had been inserted into a musical, a complaint regularly levelled at Stephen Sondheim’s musicals in the past half-century. In any case, as reported by Variety, Footlight Parade did excellent business nationwide. Noting this success in order to attract exhibitors, an October 1933 Warner Bros ad labelled the movie as ‘Sizing up the New Deal’, making this one of the last overt connections between the studio and the Roosevelt administration. In Newark, Jersey City, Pittsburgh, New Haven, Memphis, Brooklyn, Denver and Los Angeles, boxoffice proceeds were anywhere between 10 and 45 per cent higher than for previous Warner Great Depression musicals. 20 In Hollywood, the film’s West Coast premiere inspired a Warner-sponsored parade from its Sunset Boulevard studio to its flagship cinema on Hollywood Boulevard, featuring an orchestra conducted by various famous bandleaders and accompanied by ‘Hollywood beauties’. The major stars in the film were in attendance, with Dick Powell (who co-starred in the movie) serving as the master of ceremonies.21 In his unequalled book on pre-Code cinema, historian Thomas Doherty devotes a chapter to the ‘preachment yarns’ issued by Hollywood during this period. Films such as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and The Cabin in the Cotton (both made by Warner Bros in 1932) portrayed how society supposedly was drifting tragically in the wrong direction. These films ‘express the anguish of the dispossessed and fearful, but they have no idea how to alleviate the symptoms of what seems a terminal case’, observe Doherty. ‘Despite their billing, the preachment yarns do not so much administer a cure as watch helplessly while the patient howls in pain’.22 In contrast, Footlight Parade represents what could be called an ‘anti-preachment yarn’. Though one can sense the howling wind of the Great Depression outside the Frazer and Gould rehearsal studios, and see it in the threadbare surroundings in which the movie usually resides, the film offers a plan and a solution to the predicaments presented. The main characters succeed in their mission to do the work they love and defeat the scheming, immoral forces standing in their way. It is a more political film than previously acknowledged. And while numerous other 1930s Warner Bros releases reflect great cynicism, Footlight Parade combines hard-won optimism with a surprising realism in a striking, and I would argue, inspiring, balance. A historical category that Doherty finds among pre-Code films that accurately fits Footlight Parade is the ‘dictator craze’ that surfaced during 1933 as Roosevelt began his presidency. Films such as Fox’s The Power

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and the Glory, Warners’ Employees’ Entrance and MGM’s Gabriel over the White House showcased Hollywood visions of ‘benevolent dictatorship’ in the fields of business and politics, as fascism took hold in Germany and Italy.23 With his blockade of the Frazer and Gould studio, Chester Kent could fit within Doherty’s rubric. The disappointment over the perceived lack of action taken by Roosevelt’s predecessor Herbert Hoover and the depths of misery caused by the Great Depression probably were behind the rash of movies with this theme. Yet, Kent’s brief totalitarian manoeuvre has far different ramifications to those portrayed in other ‘dictator’ movies. His stint of martial law is fixed at just seventy-two hours, harms no one except through exhaustion, provides beds and plenty of food and coffee for the entrapped dancers and singers, and ultimately saves the company and dozens of jobs. The dictators in the other films behave quite differently: in Power, hundreds are killed in a labour massacre, and in Gabriel, a divinely inspired president arrogantly bypasses the US Constitution in declaring himself an unchallengeable Mussolini-like dictator to pass whatever laws he deems necessary to get the country out of the Great Depression. Kent’s transgressions are nowhere near as serious or significant, but his example also demonstrates how Hollywood filmmakers during 1933 recognised the yearning for strong leadership around the world that figures like Roosevelt and Hitler ultimately provided. Footlight Parade makes the case that seemingly intractable problems can be solved if the right people are in charge, while Gabriel depicts the political process as too hopelessly hidebound and corrupt to solve the nation’s problems unless God or a similar voice of Providence steps in to influence events. The former’s idealistic Rooseveltian perspective is far removed from the latter’s cynical, almost fascistic mindset. Both movies are important, however, in their illustration of significant but contrasting strains of thought during the Great Depression. Perhaps these kinds of differences from its contemporary competition, musical and otherwise, represent one reason for the almost forgotten status of Footlight Parade in the twenty-first century, despite its financial success and the crackling modern pace and subject matter that still excite audiences. Probably the most immediate comparison to the Warner Bros Great Depression musicals, as a series of musicals that captured the public attention during the 1930s, can be found in the nine RKO musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in 1933–9. The Astaire/Rogers musicals provide an intriguing contrast. They unfold in various glamorous international spots and sport immaculately designed high-ceilinged art deco sets. Their characters usually exist in upper-class environments far from any reference to the economic calamities of the day. The music backing the films’ songs often arrives

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out of thin air with no orchestra visible on screen, and an appealing privacy sans audience between Fred and Ginger’s characters reigns in many of the best dance sequences in the series. Astaire and Rogers usually preside over a dream world on film, while the Great Depression musicals are typically situated in the real world, even if Berkeley’s dance sequences test the metaphysical bounds of on-stage reality. Dirty backstage areas form Footlight Parade’s milieu, adorned with sweaty performers and shouting staff, semi-desperate people looking for their break and hoping to earn a meagre crust from their talent during difficult times. Love is earned by Kent and Nan with perseverance, trust and respect, whereas in the Astaire/Rogers films, the romances are difficult to feel or understand emotionally, especially since the convoluted and preposterous plots keep placing various obstacles and epic misunderstandings in their path – instead of providing the blueprint for a believable, mutually supportive relationship. The Rogers-played female characters are nowhere near as smart or capable as Nan in Footlight or the struggling actresses in Gold Diggers of 1933. In the RKO films, they are often either just married or about to be hitched, with Astaire having to convince them to switch affections to him at the (supposedly suspenseful, more often irritating and predictable) last moment. Sometimes it feels frustrating enduring the dialogue sections of these movies while waiting for Astaire and Rogers’ immaculate and joyous dance routines to return. These consistently show Keeler and Cagney for the second-rate, although highly likeable, musical performers they were. Whereas Astaire’s characters often have to decide between romantic and economic success at the end of his films, Kent and Nan enjoy both, because they put in the hard work and apply their ingenuity together. One often does not quite understand the attraction between the lovers in the on-screen Astaire/Rogers romances, until we view the perfect way in which they mesh together on the dance floor. In Footlight Parade, we feel Kent and Nan’s bond throughout the film, within their conversations and how they treat each other, long before they acknowledge their relationship and kiss backstage as an audience roars at the close of the film. Although some shades of darkness and reality exist in a few Hollywood musicals released before 1960, the dominant model followed the Astaire/Rogers dream world example, particularly the Arthur Freedproduced MGM classics that defined the musical genre. This was decidedly not the case for the Warner Bros Great Depression musicals. As the worst years of the Depression faded, perhaps escapism trumped Zanuckian realism, perhaps the market moved on (just as Zanuck himself did, going on to 20th Century-Fox), or perhaps the Warners’ dissatisfaction with the Roosevelt administration’s liberal policies quickly

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soured them on musicals that reflected Rooseveltian idealism and referenced tough realities and current politics. Certainly their marketing dispensed with New Deal imagery after Footlights Parade. The later Great Depression musicals, such as Wonder Bar, Twenty Million Sweethearts, Dames (all 1934) and, most notably, Gold Diggers of 1935, changed significantly in tone, theme and quality. In the summer of 1933, however, the Warner Bros sense of social realism, the Warner brothers’ political advocacy, and the performances of brilliant actors, directors, choreographers and screenwriters combined to create Footlight Parade, a simultaneously charming and inspiring politically-charged document of the New Deal that encompasses much of the energy and idealism surrounding Roosevelt’s initial 100 days in the White House. Thereafter, the political and cultural landscape underwent significant change. Fearful that New Deal statism would undermine free enterprise, business mobilised a more concerted and effective resistance to it. The failure of Roosevelt’s programmes to generate economic recovery offered further grist to his opponents as the Depression decade wore on. The Hollywood studio heads were among the first to turn against them in the latter half of 1933 owing to resentment of NRA policies that required both workers and bosses to make sacrifices for the common economic good, something that the likes of Harry and Jack Warner refused to countenance. For one brief shining musical moment, by contrast, studio chiefs and their employees were all singing from the same pro-New Deal piece of sheet music, and Footlight Parade may be the best document we have to illustrate that.

notes 1. Patrick Brion and Rene Gilson, ‘A Style of Spectacle: Interview with Busby Berkeley’, Cahiers du Cinema in English 2 (1966), 32; Michael Freedland, The Warner Brothers (London: Harrap. 1983), 67–9; William Meyer, Warner Brothers Directors: The HardBoiled, the Comic and the Weepers (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1978), 32; Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 148–53; Tony Thomas and Jim Terry, with Busby Berkeley, The Busby Berkeley Book (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), 15–27; Busby Berkeley’s Kaleidoscopic Eyes, documentary featured in Dames DVD (Warner Bros, 2006). 2. Freedland, The Warner Brothers, 20; Clive Hirschhorn, The Warner Bros Story (London: Octopus Books, 1979), 1–22; Leonard Mosley, Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Last Tycoon (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 98–102; Susan Orlean, ‘The Dog Star: Rin-Tin-Tin and the Making of Warner Bros’, The New Yorker, 29 August 2011, 34–9; Schatz, The Genius of the System, 61–2; [uncited author], ‘Warner Bros’, Fortune, December 1937, 111.

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3. ‘42nd Street’, Motion Picture Herald, 11 March 1933; 42nd Street advertisement, file 679 (1933), Warner Brothers Archives/University of Southern California [henceforth WBA/USC]. Another example: Warner Bros multi-page advertisement, ‘Announcing the National Recovery Code for the Motion Picture Industry’ [featuring the Blue Eagle NRA insignia], Variety, 8 August 1933. 4. Rudy Behlmer (ed.), Inside Warner Bros 1935–1951 (New York: Viking, 1985), 10–11, 53; Laurence W. Beilenson, ‘NRA: Blue Eagles, Sick Chickens’, Variety, 25 October 1983; Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community 1930–1960 (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1980), 1–3, 19–20; Danae Clark, ‘Acting in Hollywood’s Best Interest: Representations of Actors’ Labor during the National Recovery Administration’, Journal of Film and Video 17:4 (Winter 1990), 3–19; Edwin Schallert, ‘Studios Taking it Standing up’, Los Angeles Times, 9 March 1933; Edwin Schallert, ‘Will the Money Crisis Make or Break Hollywood?’, Los Angeles Times, 12 March 1933 [front-page top story of the day]; [uncited author], ‘Film Workers Accept Pay Cut’, Los Angeles Times, 8 March 1933; [uncited author], ‘Film Pay Cut May Hit Snag’, Los Angeles Times [front-page article], 10 March 1933; [uncited author], ‘Industry Meets Dollar Crisis with 25 and 50% Salary Cuts’, Motion Picture Herald, 11 March 1933; The Analyst, ‘Value of Film Securities Soars $140,000,000 under “New Deal”’, Motion Picture Herald, 10 June 1933; [uncited author], ‘13 Weeks Warner Net Operating Loss Is only Half of Same Period Last Year’, Motion Picture Herald, 29 July 1933. 5. This section on Zanuck’s drive to promote a ‘cinema of realism’ at Warner Bros is based on the following sources: Mel Gussow, Don’t Say Yes until I Finish Talking: A Biography of Darryl F. Zanuck (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 50; Mosley, Zanuck, 157–63; Nick Roddick, A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Bros in the 1930s (London: BFI, 1983), 20–8. 6. For Cagney’s early career, see James Cagney, Cagney (New York: Doubleday, 1976); Doug Warren, James Cagney: The Authorized Biography (New York: St Martin’s, 1983); Patrick McGilligan, Cagney: The Actor as Auteur (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1975); Robert Sklar, City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 7. [Uncited author], ‘Warners Draw Line on All Actors Muddling with Scriveners at Work’, Variety, 19 December 1933. 8. [Uncited author], ‘Tuffy Cagney Croons: “Shanghai Lil” Unlooses Flood of Song’, Daily Variety, 20 September 1933. Just for the record, Cagney, in a non-starring role, does about ten seconds of graceful incidental dancing while impressing a female friend in the 1930 Warner Bros film Other Men’s Women, just prior to his breakout role in The Public Enemy. He also danced with co-star Loretta Young in a nightclub competition in the 1932 production, Taxi!. 9. Darryl Zanuck to Hal Wallis, inter-office communication, 10 April 1933, in Footlight Parade Story – Memos & Correspondence file (2570); Footlight Parade Story – Temporary Script ‘Last Part; Copy With Lord’s Changes’ file (2170); Footlight Parade Story – Temporary Script file (2170). All from WBA/USC. 10. Meyer, Warner Brothers Directors, 15–18. 11. Footlight Parade Production – Daily Progress Reports file (1448), WBA/USC. 12. For discussion, see Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007); and Anthony Badger, FDR: The First Hundred Days (New York: Hill & Wang, 2008).

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13. Footlight Parade Publicity – Pressbook file (681), WBA/USC; [uncited author], ‘In the Cutting Room: Advance Outlines of Productions nearing Completion’ [column], Motion Picture Herald, 8 July 1933. 14. McGilligan, Cagney, 76. 15. J. C. Daret, ‘What the Picture Did for Me’ [column], Motion Picture Herald, 7 April 1934. 16. This section on the policies and promotion of the National Recovery Administration is based on the following sources: David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 151–2, 177–89; Arthur Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), chapter 7; and Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), especially chapter 5. 17. Footlight Parade Weekly Production Cost and Budget documents, from Footlight Parade Story – Memos & Correspondence file (2570), WBA/USC. For international financial figures, see Robert S. Birchard, ‘A Song and Dance Spectacular’, American Cinematographer, 86 (November 2005), 10. 18. Lawrence W. Levine, ‘American Culture and the Great Depression’, Yale Review 74 (January 1985), 196–223. 19. The remarks made about the reviews for Footlight Parade are based on the collected reviews found in Footlight Parade Publicity – Press Clippings file (681), WBA/USC. Several unidentified reviews in this folder share the same divided quality between extreme criticism and extreme praise. Also, see Footlight Parade review from Variety, ibid; Norbert Lusk, ‘The Bowery and Footlight Parade Smash Hits of New York Show’, Los Angeles Times, 15 October 1933; Edwin Schallert, ‘“Footlight Parade” Spectacular Picture’, Los Angeles Times, 10 November 1933. 20. [Uncited authors], ‘Sock Opening for “Footlight Parade”’, and Footlight Parade and Warner Bros advertisements, Motion Picture Herald, 14 October 1933 (interestingly, an ad for Universal Pictures in the 28 October 1933 edition of Motion Picture Herald uses the ‘New Deal’ label to publicise its upcoming slate of films too); ‘“Footlight” Rates Top Musical Coin, Beats Former WB Girly-Girlies in 80% of Bookings to date’, Variety, 21 November 1933. See also: [uncited author], ‘Warner-First National in National Gross Analysis of Released New-Season Pix’, Variety, 21 November 1933. In some cities, however, Footlight Parade underperformed in its first week compared to 42nd and Gold. It did a combined $35,000 in Los Angeles and Hollywood; in the same theatres, 42nd pulled in $57,000. In Philadelphia, 42nd won out, by $19,000 to $15,000; and in Portland OR, Gold’s first week drew in $12,000 versus $3,500 for Footlight (all numbers in this paragraph are rounded). 21. Edwin Schallert, ‘Feminine Leads Present New Film Problem; News and Gossip of Studio and Theaters’, and [uncited author], ‘Gala Film Event Due at Warner’, both from Los Angeles Times, 8 November 1933. 22. Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), chapter 3 (quotation, 53). 23. Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, 70–7.

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chapter 9

Our Daily Bread: ‘Cooperation’, ‘Independence’ and Politics in Mid-1930s Cinema Brian Neve*

K

ing Vidor’s Our Daily Bread was released in the United States in 1934 and seen around much of the world in the subsequent two years. It has received attention as an unusual cinematic product of its times, a depiction of desperate economic problems and of the difficulty of addressing them by cooperative means. The film had its origins in Vidor’s desire, as a successful MGM director, to experiment and break free of what he described, in a September 1934 New Theatre article, as ‘rubber stamp movies’. After unsuccessful attempts to work with MGM and RKO, Vidor made Our Daily Bread independently, with distribution by United Artists. This chapter revisits and explores the film’s production history, its ideological and aesthetic motifs, and its exhibition and reception in the United States and beyond, not least its apparent failure at the domestic box office. Mark Glancy and John Sedgwick, in their survey of American cinema-going in the mid-1930s, refer to Vidor’s film as ‘uniquely unpopular’ and as ‘among the lowest grossing films in almost every city it played’. Drawing also on an intriguing publicity still of Vidor and some cast members on location, I explore the relationship between the film and those then advocating various forms of cooperative activity as a response to the Depression, including the California Cooperative League, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration and Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign for the state governorship.1 The director of eleven films for MGM in the second half of the 1920s, the thirty-six-year old Vidor signed a new contract with the studio in 1930. His huge silent-era successes had been The Big Parade

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(1925) and The Crowd (1928), with the latter questioning the viability of an individual’s dream of success and upward mobility without endorsing any collective class agency. Vidor’s willingness to experiment, both in terms of theme and aesthetics, also gained him a following in the newly emergent periodicals dealing with the medium of talking pictures. Friendly with Sergei Eisenstein during the Soviet director’s frustrating stay at Paramount in 1930, he had hosted a showing of the latter’s silent film about collectivisation, The General Line (The Old and the New), at his home.2 Before his new contract Vidor had risked his salary on some personal projects, notably Hallelujah in 1929, filmed on location in the South and using an all-black cast. His 1934 New Theatre piece called for a more fragmented industry that would better encourage ‘individual expression’, adding that, ‘Pictures would be better if they were not controlled by big business’. Coming from a Christian Science family background, Vidor recalled in his autobiography that he ‘always felt the impulse to use the motion-picture screen as an expression of hope and faith, to make films presenting positive ideas and ideals rather than negative themes’. 3 By Vidor’s own account, the idea for Our Daily Bread had its origins in a piece that he came across in an edition of Reader’s Digest in June 1932. The condensed article, by a Duke University academic, was entitled ‘An Agricultural Army’, and had originally been published in April. It argued for the bringing together of ‘unemployed men and unemployed acres’ and discussed contemporary efforts to form cooperative communities, some of them using barter or scrip as a means of exchange. The article suggested that the unemployed man’s ‘only lawful recourse is to return to the life of the pioneer and produce his food from the soil’. Such was his interest in it that he travelled to discuss the contents with the author.4 Self-help organisations of the unemployed had sprung up in 1931 and 1932. Groups organised the bartering of services and goods and facilitated the exchange of labour for surplus foods. The self-help cooperative movement in California was the largest in the nation, and one of its strands was associated with Upton Sinclair’s September 1933 switch to the Democratic Party, his gubernatorial campaign, and his publication in October of a utopian campaign pamphlet, I Governor of California, And How I Ended Poverty, subtitled A True Story of the Future.5 Sinclair, the muckraking novelist and long-time socialist (he was fifty-five in 1933), had briefly worked for Irving Thalberg at MGM in 1932, the same year that the studio released a film version of his Prohibition novel, The Wet Parade. He had also helped raise funds for Eisenstein’s ill-fated Mexican film in 1931, although their relationship subsequently soured (Sol Lesser’s

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Hollywood cut of the film, Thunder over Mexico, was premiered in New York in September 1933). The contemporary interest in cooperative schemes influenced the early New Deal offensive against unemployment and poverty. There was much ‘back to the land’ debate, and the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 provided funds for the establishment of ‘subsistence homesteads’. The new President also supported the Wagner-Lewis Relief Act of 1933 permitting the federal government to make grants to self-help cooperatives for production purposes. There are pictures by Dorothea Lange and Willard Van Dyke capturing contemporary West Coast cooperatives, designed for the unemployed. An early such ‘land colony’, sponsored by the Federal Emergency Relief Agency, was formed in February 1934, in Woodlake, in Vidor’s native Texas. It was the subject of a ten-minute promotional documentary, The New Frontier (released in early 1934 and directed by H. P. McLure), a ‘Federal Emergency Relief Administration Picture’ that embodied early New Deal propaganda in support of a government aided and managed solution to joblessness. The urban unemployed, especially those with trades and professional qualifications, were resettled as part of a new community that was to sustain itself by working on the land. This film, with its rather flat commentary, prefigured the later New Deal documentaries, the best known made by Pare Lorentz, who accompanied Vidor on his summer 1934 trip to Europe, before the US release of Our Daily Bread.6 Vidor wrote an initial seventy-five-page treatment and presented it first to Irving Thalberg for consideration. The story contained the key elements of the final film, notably the struggle of a new rural community, acting as an ‘agricultural army’ to overcome major economic challenges (including drought). Yet at this stage the story included a wider, national context, with a revolutionary figure and the success of the enterprise being recognised by the federal government. Thalberg, facing difficult times even at MGM, felt that this was not an appropriate project for the studio, so Vidor turned instead to RKO, where he had worked on Bird of Paradise (1932) on location in Hawaii, loaned out by Louis B. Mayer to his son-in-law David O. Selznick. With the support of RKO production head Merian C. Cooper (co-director of King Kong), a financial arrangement was drawn up in August 1933 for the film to be made, with Elizabeth Hill (recently married to Vidor) working on a screenplay. Nevertheless, there was continuing debate within the financially troubled studio on the project’s financial viability. In February 1934 RKO’s New York executives decided that the film was insufficiently attractive as a commercial prospect.7

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Independent production was now the sole remaining option. Charlie Chaplin (close to Vidor at the time, and one of the founders of United Artists) offered assistance in securing a distribution agreement with the company. United Artists (UA) was then handling the product of Goldwyn, Disney (notably the huge 1933 hit, The Three Little Pigs), and Twentieth Century Pictures, formed in 1933 by UA chairman Joseph Schenck and former Warner Bros executive Darryl F. Zanuck. The sole member of the eight majors not to produce films directly, it also broke ranks with the other studios in rejecting block booking to rent each film individually. The distribution arrangement with UA, together with Our Daily Bread’s limited budget, was always likely to limit the film’s circulation.8 The negotiation and signing of the agreement between Vidor and UA lasted several months and required Schenck’s personal approval of the story. A first draft contract was prepared in February (then involving Astor Productions), but subsequent agreements, including the last in April 1934 (after shooting had begun), were between UA and the director’s newly formed independent company, Viking Productions. The memorandum of agreement referred to a planned ‘photoplay’ to be completed and delivered to UA by Vidor, to be based on his own original story, tentatively entitled ‘Daily Bread’. The agreement called for the supply (by 1 September) of 100 prints for distribution in the United States and Canada, and a further fifty prints for distribution in foreign territories. Viking authorised UA to deliver the film to ‘the theatres owned, operated or controlled by the United Artists Theatre Circuit or which are serviced through the medium of the so-called United Artists Theatre Circuit franchise’. Formed by UA producers Joseph Schenck, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Sam Goldwyn in 1926, the United Artists Theatre Circuit had a ten-year franchise to exhibit UA pictures (except Chaplin’s). Only in Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles did it own houses outright; elsewhere it had purchased interests in theatres, including the Rialto in New York. The contract was signed on the 25 April by Vidor (as President of Viking), Elizabeth Hill (as Secretary) and Joseph M. Schenk, President of United Artists.9 Vidor had advanced $89,000 of his own money before the Bank of America agreed to lend Viking up to $125,000 conditional on his willingness to mortgage his remaining assets. A security agreement, dated 26 April 1934, was signed by Viking Productions (‘the borrower’), the Bank of America National Trust and Savings Association (‘the bank’) and Vidor. The loan seems to have been fully repaid by November 1935, although the payment from UA to Viking did not cover a further sum for Vidor’s original story and his services as director. The total negative cost of Our Daily Bread amounted to $146,000, covered by the extended Bank of America loan. A final distribution deal with United Artists was agreed at the beginning of May.10

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The ‘Our Daily Bread’ title was registered with the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association in February but for a time consideration was given to two alternatives, ‘Mother Earth’ and ‘Harvest’. The publication of an unrelated novel also called Our Daily Bread led to a delay while copyright issues were investigated. A short synopsis of Vidor’s story was published as a booklet in October by UA in Wardour Street London, in order to guarantee worldwide copyright protection. Vidor hired Joseph Mankiewicz in March 1934 for $3,000 to contribute additional writing and dialogue to Hill’s screenplay. The farm scenes were shot on a disused golf course adjacent to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 160-acre ranch in Tarzana, and interiors were shot at the so-called Goldwyn studio in West Hollywood. Production began at the beginning of April 1934 and concluded in early May, after thirty-eight days of principal photography. Tents were used for dressing rooms, Vidor stayed on site in a trailer, and accounts suggest that the film was made in its own distinctively communal spirit.11 The film’s links with the ideas and social movements of the time are indicated by a location still held by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Television Research (WCFTR). It shows Vidor with several cast members (notably Karen Morley and Barbara Pepper), and a magazine is prominently displayed. Vidor holds a copy prominently, while Morley has a copy on her lap and the man sitting next to her, almost certainly journal editor Lowell Coate, holds several copies. The publication is the March 1934 edition of The Pacific Cooperator, self-styled on the cover as a Journal of Education in Cooperation. Prominent on the front cover is a list of contents including articles by Upton Sinclair on his End Poverty in California (or EPIC) Plan, and libertarian Charles T. Sprading on the ‘Principles of Cooperation’.12 The journal was edited by a sociologist, Lowell H. Coate (1889–1973), then Educational Secretary of the California Cooperative League (CCL), which Sprading served as president. Originally formed in 1913, this organisation was affiliated with the Cooperative League of the USA and the International Cooperative Alliance. Seemingly showing Coate paying a visit to Our Daily Bread’s location shooting, the image signifies Vidor’s current interest in cooperative ideas. The publication reflects the practical and theoretical interest at the time in various forms of community organisation, especially in California, based on self-help and the exchange of labour for goods and services. Most of the contributors were connected to the CCL and some to libertarian publishing companies. Another contributor, Oscar Cooley, expressed the fear that voluntary cooperation would give way to what he called ‘the Washington steam roller’.13

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Figure 9.1 Our Daily Bread (United Artists, 1934) publicity shot, taken on location. King Vidor is top left; sitting down are Barbara Pepper (second to the left), and Karen Morley (far right). The picture seems to mark the publication of The Pacific Cooperator (March 1934). Photo courtesy of Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Pacific Cooperator stressed cooperation as a voluntary and essentially non-political process, but some cooperative enthusiasts were willing to exploit the early New Deal’s sympathy for their cause. In contrast, Upton Sinclair’s take on cooperation stressed production for use rather than profit, emphasising the problem of idle land and empty factories and envisaging a key role for the state in acquiring unoccupied land and getting the unemployed back to work. Sinclair (1878–1968), author of the renowned muckraking exposé of the Chicago meatpacking industry, The Jungle (1906), had run an unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in California in the 1920s as a socialist. Convinced that only the major parties could make a difference, he re-registered himself as a Democrat in 1933 to launch his EPIC campaign. He discussed contemporary schemes, including the so-called Ohio Plan, a form of unemployment insurance adopted first in that state in late 1932, as ‘pure EPIC’.14

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The location still shows how these ideas had captured Vidor’s imagination at the time. Editing of Our Daily Bread began in June and the film (in a slightly longer cut) was first screened at the Century of Progress World Fair in Chicago in July. By late September, when the film was delivered to United Artists after some time on the shelf, Sinclair’s version of the cooperative idea loomed even larger with the beginning of his campaign for the California governorship. The End Poverty in California pamphlet went through ten editions, while the campaign newspaper EPIC News reached a circulation of 2 million and 2,000 EPIC clubs were formed by the time of the election. After a much publicised if non-committal meeting with the President in Hyde Park in early September, Sinclair made national headlines and featured on the cover of Time magazine on 22 October 1934. Fearful of his plans to tax corporations and the wealthy, the film companies, William Randolph Heart’s media empire and other business organised and funded a campaign to undermine his appeal and put Republican incumbent Frank Merriam back in Sacramento. Recently arrived from Austria, MGM scriptwriter Billy Wilder remembered the Hollywood moguls seeing Sinclair as ‘a most dangerous Bolshevik beast’. Somewhat ironically in those pre-Popular Front days the Communist Party fielded its own candidate against Sinclair, but a good number of its rank-and-file did support the EPIC campaign.15 The official release date for Our Daily Bread was 28 September 1934. The following evening President Roosevelt viewed and was briefed on the film at the White House16. Its commercial opening was at the Rialto Theatre in New York, in a two-week run from 30 September to 13 October. The first week’s gross was recorded as $18,000, falling to $10,000 in the second and final week. Vidor’s next film, The Wedding Night, made for Sam Goldwyn Productions, distributed by United Artists, and starring Gary Cooper, grossed $32,000 at the same New York theatre in its first week in March 1935. Arthur Mayer, Managing Director of the Rialto, called Our Daily Bread ‘the surprise sensation of the year’ in a double-page Motion Picture Herald advertisement. On the other hand, he later told Andre Sennwald of the New York Times that it was ‘a tragic failure’ in box-office terms, and ‘met a cold and hostile reception from the exhibitors’. Added to these remarks was the somewhat ambiguous rider that theatres ‘are barred from it’.17 Certainly there is sparse evidence of Our Daily Bread getting runs in the main metropolitan houses where grosses were regularly reported in the trade press. The only records in the weekly Motion Picture Herald charts are of four days in Denver (ending 6 October, grossing $700), and

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single weeks in Boston (ending 27 October, $10,000), Minneapolis (ending 3 November, $2,000), Buffalo NY (ending 26 January 1935, $3,000), Hollywood (ending 2 February, $4,000), and Seattle (ending 9 February, $3,650). There are also references to a short run in Pittsburgh, and three-day engagements in smaller cities and towns. The Motion Picture Herald’s weekly ‘What the Picture Did for Me’ feature, labelled as a service of the exhibitor for the exhibitor, provides some information on how theatre managers regarded the film. One man in Clatskanie, Oregon, called it ‘one sweet picture for small town exhibitors and patrons’, and reported ‘Business fine and patrons pleased’. Several other managers agreed that it was a ‘good small town picture’.18 Our Daily Bread was only released in California in late January 1935, nearly three months after Sinclair’s defeat. When finally playing in Los Angeles, it became a rather sad rallying point for defeated EPIC supporters, with Sinclair himself introducing the film for a week of showings.19 Sinclair later argued that United Artists ‘held up’ the California release because ‘they were afraid this might help EPIC’. The studios certainly feared Sinclair’s taxation plans and there were some scare stories that the film industry could even migrate to New York or Florida in the event of Merriam’s defeat. Unlikely as this was, the wellconnected Joseph Schenck – close to his brother Nicholas Schenck at MGM – spoke in Miami on the likely financial costs to California if Sinclair won. The highly effective business and film industry campaign against Sinclair, including three concocted ‘newsreels’ made on Thalberg’s orders, has been well documented.20 It is a strange coincidence that both Sinclair and Vidor wrote seeking some kind of White House endorsement, Sinclair for his Democratic Party campaign, and Vidor, frustrated by UA’s caution, for his film. Vidor’s letter added that he was a ‘great admirer’ of the President. Neither man received the reply that he wanted.21 An elaborate colour poster of the time includes text that draws attention to ‘KING VIDOR’s EPIC OF A MILLION HEARTS’. With Vidor having control over publicity, the use of ‘epic’ may have been standard Hollywood language employed on this occasion as an oblique reference to the popularity of Sinclair’s book and plan.22 The press-book for Our Daily Bread quotes a glowing review from the Hollywood Reporter: ‘It is true that the Russians have been doing this kind of picture for some years, but Vidor is the first one to make it a thoroughly American human document’. There were numerous ideas for themed ‘spirit of 34’ parades to promote the film, as well as suggestions for ‘tie-ups’ with Ford motor cars, ‘buy cotton’ sales, and local shops. Among those

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cited as endorsing the film were McCall’s magazine; editor and publisher of Liberty magazine Bernarr Macfadden; and Senator Dr Royal S. Copeland (D-NY). Exhibitors were also urged to place ads near to press stories that chimed with the film, in particular the ‘thrilling scenes of tillers of the soil in revolt against mortgage foreclosure!’ As well as looking to exploit contemporary issues, publicity material also played on the old-time religion theme of ‘serpent enters Eden’ (a reference to the ‘city woman’ character, Sally, played by Barbara Pepper).23 The titles included the line ‘Inspired by Headlines of Today’, referring directly to the pre-Code tradition of early sound pictures, especially at Warner Bros. Linking Our Daily Bread to his earlier hit, The Crowd, Vidor again used a central couple, and gave them the same names, John and Mary Sims (although in the new film they were played by Tom Keene and Karen Morley). Behind with the rent and with little prospect of Tom finding renewed employment when each job opportunity attracts 100 or more applicants, they take a kindly uncle up on his tip concerning an abandoned farm, a motif of luck or unexpected charity that was characteristic of pre-Code cinema.24 We see the Sims arriving at the 160-acre farm and forming an alliance with a dispossessed farmer (Chris Larsen, of Swedish immigrant stock, played by John T. Qualen) who is on the way to California. Between them they have the idea of ‘a sort of cooperative community, where money isn’t so important’. Signs are put up, advertising for the unemployed to come and join them, particularly those with trades and crafts to offer. Families arrive, favours are exchanged, and everyone works to plant the corn that will hopefully bring them individual and collective returns. An early discussion among the group favours strong leadership. There is scorn for both ‘socialistic’ principles, and a speaker who intones pompously about a ‘democratic covenant’. Instead Chris, the ‘common man’ farmer, makes a decisive intervention, pointing out that the big task at hand demands a ‘big boss’. Qualen, Canadian-born, of Norwegian descent, had played in Vidor’s earlier Street Scene, a 1931 Samuel Goldwyn production, and was later memorable in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (20th Century-Fox, 1940) as Muley, the character who testifies to the loss of his farm. Although the men reject any precise ideology or election system, John Sims’s leadership role is nonetheless endorsed by acclamation. Sims himself (Tom Keene, previously known for B-picture Westerns) is hardly a natural leader, but he operates throughout as an owner-boss, appealing for a mandate from the community and often acting in concert with Chris Larsen. In his initial speech to the men, he talks of the ‘colonists’ and invokes both Captain John Smith and the inhabitants of the Mayflower as inspiring their venture.

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Prominent figures in this new community are a stonemason (Bud Rae) and a carpenter (Frank, played by Henry Hall), who demonstrate a key principle of the project when they agree to cooperate by offering each other the benefits of their respective skills. There are military and religious (or at least pantheistic) motifs. After their initial meeting the men march to work to the strains of ‘We’re in the Army Now’ (a shot that seems to echo some newsreel film of the young men of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps programme marching to work with their shovels in 1933). The white-haired carpenter blesses the land, hands aloft, and there is a montage of work, as the men begin tilling the soil with ploughs, horses and a motorcycle. Both scenes, accompanied by Alfred Newman’s music, are effective – more so than many of the dialogue scenes – in suggesting the dynamic and indeed blessed (and emotionally triumphant) nature of the new enterprise.25 The plot revolves around a series of crises for the enterprise, problems that are eventually resolved by luck or ingenuity. One member, Louie (Addison Richards), an escaped convict, responds to a financial crisis by giving himself up to the authorities so that the cooperative can use the $500 reward to tide them over. Vidor noted that this motif, of the escaped convict who sacrifices his freedom for the sake of the collective, was suggested by his friend at the time, Charlie Chaplin. The next crisis (discussed below) is prompted by the decision of the bank that owns the farm to put it up for auction. Finally a drought – spelled out in documentary montage and with a screen caption – again threatens the collective enterprise. John Sims’ lack of confidence in his ability to deal with this final crisis is reflected by his dalliance with Sally, the peroxide blonde who arrives from the city (an echo of the city vamp in F. W. Murnau’s 1927 Fox-produced Sunrise, a film admired by Vidor). The scene that engages most sharply with the experiences of the time relates to the sheriff’s auction, where several cooperative members essentially threaten (if discreetly) potential big-city buyers, so ensuring that the farm can remain the property of the colony. The stonemason grabs a bowler-hatted figure just as he is about to bid, while another ‘colonist’ is briefly seen raising a coil of rope in evident suggestion of a noose into the eye-line of another smartly dressed bidder. In the resulting absence of bids the auctioneer protests that ‘the mortgage alone is worth $4,000 and the property is worth four times that much’. Prompted by the watching Chris Larsen, one of the colonists bids $1.75, and then another, $1.85. It is pointed out that the auction has to go ahead once there are two bids, and with the intimidation preventing realistic offers, the farm (and the whole scheme) is saved.

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Figure 9.2 Threatening a potential big-city farm buyer at the sheriff’s auction, a key crisis for the cooperative in Our Daily Bread.

This scene is prominent in the official synopsis of Vidor’s story, published as a three-page booklet by United Artists at the time. It recounts the decision by the bank holding the farm’s mortgage to arrange a ‘Sheriff’s sale’, and how the men surmounted this obstacle by emulating ‘the embattled Iowa farmers who recently obtained clear titles to their encumbered fields for a few cents’. This is a direct reference to contemporary cases of the blocking of farm auctions, a practice that involved the obstruction of bidders and the intimidation of potential buyers. A first-hand account of such a practice had appeared in an issue of The Nation in March 1933, referring explicitly to a number of protests, and even to the use of ropes as props designed to suggest a possible (if generally unused) threat of violence. The reviewer for the Communist Party-associated New Masses was impressed by the scene, seeing it as alone showing the real conflict between the local political authorities and ‘the organised workers who “buy” back the land’.26 The resolution of the final crisis, the drought, is related to John Sims’ own crisis of confidence as leader, and the strains that this places on his marriage to Mary (Morley). Unable to come up with solutions, he

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leaves the farm with the vampish city woman Sally, a newcomer to the community and a character that Vidor admitted was something of a concession to box-office considerations. Driving away from the farm with her, Sims sees an apparition of Louie (in prison clothes) on the dark road. He immediately stops, but then hears the sounds of a pumping station (the scene of a longer sequence cut from the final print) and realises that there is a local source of water that can be diverted to provide irrigation for the crops. Abandoning Sally, Sims returns on foot to the camp where he successfully appeals for renewed support from those disillusioned by his desertion. This prefaces the concluding scenes of coordinated, collective action, for Vidor a labour of love and a love of labour. Although a dramatic finale, two film scholars rightly suggest that a more qualified and tentative ending might have been more appropriate in view of the farm’s prolonged series of problems and the continuing issue of finding a sustainable market for the corn. What follows is the celebrated sequence of the men and women working to clear a path, fell trees that are in the way and dig a ditch. The choreographed sequence, shot silent with the use of a metronome, is followed by the diversion of the water in a seemingly miraculous ascent and descent of hills towards the farm. The arrival of the water – Vidor himself appears as one of the diggers – produces near-orgiastic revelry on the farm (in a different aesthetic register from Eisenstein’s The General Line). The project is saved, and a closing shot shows the harvesting of the crops, with John, Mary and Chris on a wagon in the foreground. The collective resolution is mixed with the sense of a rejuvenated marriage, the latter being consistent with the new censorship regime operated since July 1934 by the Production Code Administration.27 It is this climax to the film that attracted attention at the time and remains memorable. Several critics, sympathetic or not, inferred the influence of Russian films seen in the United States. One point of reference was The Earth Thirsts (1930, 1932 in the US), in which Soviet heroes, civil engineers of the state, exploit the meagre water supply for the benefit of the peasantry amid much popular rejoicing. Another was Victor Turin’s Turksib (1929), a documentary about the building of the Turkestan-Siberian railway. Mainstream critics, particularly in New York, were positive. To Andre Sennwald in the New York Times, it was a ‘brilliant declaration of faith in the importance of the cinema as a social instrument’. The response of critics on the left was often divided and sometimes hostile. In The Nation, William Troy saw the film as ‘unusually ambitious both in conception and in scale of execution’, but felt that it was confused in its attempt to reconcile the collective with the larger pattern of capitalist society. The New

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Masses critic found ‘an underdeveloped political understanding’, but saw ‘a faith in the success of cooperation and unity of the workers’, something seen as a move forward from the politics of The Crowd. In the left-wing Film Front an anonymous critic attacked the use of Russian cinematic style to express ‘reactionary ideas about the place of workers in capitalistic society’. Robert Stebbins, film critic of New Theatre (later known as Sidney Meyers, he was to work on People of the Cumberland for Frontier Films in 1937), went so far as to discuss the ‘unmistakably fascist direction’ of the film.28 This interpretation relates rather unfairly to the emphasis on strong leadership, and perhaps to the auction scene discussed above. Our Daily Bread won first prize in the 1935 Venice Film Festival, second prize in the annual film exhibition in Moscow, and also a League of Nations gold medal ‘for its contribution to humanity’. Special screenings, sponsored by the League of Nations Committee, took place in European capitals. United Artists’ records document the showings around the world, in the Argentine, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and New Zealand. In February 1935 Noticias Graficas, a Buenos Aires publication, adjudged the film ‘Un Magnifico Poema’. French reviews were positive: Pierre Wolff of Paris-Soir considered it a ‘triumph’, while another notice discussed the film’s sensitivity to ‘la terre, les hommes, le rythme de la vie’.29 In Germany in 1936 (as Ben Urwand’s recent and problematically titled book tells us) the film ran for fifty-four days in Berlin and was well received by Nazi commentators who were impressed by what they saw as its effectively light-hearted endorsement of their own ‘leader principle’. Our Daily Bread was screened for Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Goering on 17 July 1936, with Goebbels describing it in his diary as a ‘nice American film’.30 Released in January 1935 under the title Miracle of Life, Vidor’s movie had limited prospects in Great Britain owing to its somewhat esoteric subject matter and lack of known stars. Although reviewers generally praised its important theme and dramatic climax, the Monthly Film Bulletin criticised the acting as poor and questioned the appearance of ‘a quite unnecessary blonde siren’. Another commentator complemented Vidor on his ‘magnificent job’ but feared the picture might be ‘far above the head of the untutored patron’. In similar vein, Kine Weekly noted the ‘arresting showmanship’, albeit on a story that was ‘well off the beaten track’.31 In a letter to agency director Harry Hopkins, Federal Emergency Relief Administration chief investigator and former journalist Lorena Hickok quoted Walter Locke, a reporter closely acquainted with some of the Ohio cooperative experiments, as saying: ‘It’s hard to fit an American into any

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cooperative enterprise. He’s too individualistic’.32 Working from broadly individualistic premises, albeit reflecting the interest in various forms of cooperation at the time, it was hard for Vidor to express a fully convincing vision of contemporary experiments, still less to show them as sustainable solutions to the Great Depression. By the middle of the 1930s the interest in cooperation had peaked, both in White House circles and outside. The influence of Resettlement Administrator Rexford G. Tugwell, an economist with little sympathy for communitarian experiments, was one indication of the shift in thinking. Meanwhile Upton Sinclair’s retreat from direct political engagement in 1936 removed his powerful voice from support for the cooperative movement in the country at large.33 For all its lack of stars and production values, Our Daily Bread reflected an important strand of thinking and practice of the time, notably the interest in ‘back to the land’ notions and cooperative solutions to both unemployment and the cost of relief. The montage sequences and the concern with rhythm and tempo revealed Vidor’s awareness of both world cinema and his own cinematic invention. Vidor was remembered by Karen Morley as a ‘conservative man’, and Our Daily Bread is consistent with that assessment. It is true that Vidor moved in liberal circles in the mid-1930s, notably as founding president of the Screen Directors Guild in December 1935. However, for all its interest in the conditions for work and sustenance, Vidor’s film canon has a persistently individualist ethos. His cooperative vision in Our Daily Bread puts emphasis on both the individual and the community but allocates no role for the state. Vidor’s own wartime production, American Romance (1944), the third part of his cycle of ‘war, wheat and steel’, also integrates a motif of cooperation – the central protagonist’s rise to corporate success begins with a cooperative project to build and market a new automobile – with a story of individual success. Accordingly leftists such as Screen Writers Guild co-founder Maurice Rapf could admire him, at least prior to his involvement with the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals during the post-war Hollywood Red Scare.34 Vidor’s film is, in Alistair Cooke’s contemporary judgement, a ‘sentimental’ story, but one that was and still is unusual, with its thematic and aesthetic residues of a broader international cinema movement, and its powerful and poetic climax.35 It reflects the possibilities and limits of independent production at a time of transition, between the desperation of the early Great Depression years and the consolidation of New Deal authority. It also captures something of Vidor’s particular response to times of ideological flux, in particular his concern for the unemployed, his belief in their potential for leadership, and in cooperation as a possible solution.

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notes * The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of David K. Frasier, Lilly Library, Indiana University, and Mary Huelsbeck, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison. 1. Mark Glancy and John Sedgwick, ‘Cinemagoing in the US in the Mid-1930s: a Study Based on the Variety Dataset’, in Steve Neale (ed.), The Classical Hollywood Reader (New York: Routledge, 2012), 187; Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon, King Vidor, American (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 148–64; David H. Shepard, ‘Sowing against the Wind: Independent Production in the Studio Era’, (1984), 10 p., King Vidor production file, Core Collection, Margaret Herrick Library-Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences [MHL-AMPAS], Beverly Hills, CA. 2. Ivor Montagu, With Eisenstein in Hollywood (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 85. 3. King Vidor, ‘Rubber Stamp Movies’, New Theatre, vol. 1, issue 8 (September 1934), 12; B. G. Braver-Mann, ‘Vidor and Evasion’, Experimental Cinema, vol. 1, part 3 (1931), 26–9; Vidor, A Tree is a Tree: An Autobiography (Hollywood: Samuel French, 1981), 78–9. 4. Malcolm McDermott, ‘An Agricultural Army’, Readers Digest, vol. 21, no. 122 (June 1932), 95–7. The piece was a condensed version of an article in South Atlantic Quarterly, April 1932. The Vidor quotation is from ‘The Independence of Mr Vidor’, New York Times, 29 July 1934. 5. Clark Kerr, ‘Productive Enterprises of the Unemployed, 1931–1938’, doctoral dissertation, University of California (May 1939), vol. 1. On Sinclair, see Anthony Arthur, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair (New York: Random House, 2006); Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair, American Rebel (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975). 6. ‘Personalities and Activities in the Self-Help Cooperatives of California’, photographs from the exhibition, 1933–4, Bancroft Library, University of CaliforniaBerkeley, at pdf.oac.cdlib.org/pdf/Berkeley/Bancroft/p1905_17139_cubanc.pdf (accessed 29 October 2015). The Federal Emergency Relief Administration project is discussed in Michael G. Wade, ‘Back to the Land: The Woodlake Community, 1933–1943’, East Texas Historical Journal, 21 (Winter 1985), 6–10. 7. Shepard, ‘Sowing against the Wind’; Durgnat and Simmon, King Vidor, 152. 8. On block booking and UA, see Tino Balio, United Artists, The Company Built by the Stars (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1976), 116. 9. UA 4A Muller Box 16, Folder 10, United Artists Collection, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR). 10. UA 2A O’Brien Box 181, Folder 11, United Artists Collection, (WCFTR); H. J. Muller to Paul D. O’Brien, 6 December 1935, UA collection, WCFTR. 11. Vidor to Mankiewicz, 2 March 1934, in Mankiewicz special collection, MHLAMPAS; Vidor, DGA Oral History, 1988: 144–5; American Film Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Feature Films, 1931–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1586–8. 12. The copy of this edition of The Pacific Cooperator: A Journal of Education in Cooperation (March 1934) is held in the Upton Sinclair collection, Lilly Library, Indiana University. The still, reproduced in David Shepard’s short 1983 film prologue to the Our Daily Bread DVD, is held in WCTFR.

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13. Oscar Cooley, ‘The Roosevelt Order’, The Pacific Cooperator, March 1934, 12–13. 14. Sinclair, The EPIC Plan for California (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934), 32; Kenneth Davis, FDR, The New Deal Years, 1933–1937: A History (New York: Random House, 1986), 445–6. 15. Robert McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Times Books, 1993), 236; Harris, Upton Sinclair 305 (Wilder quotation); Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 89–94. For the best treatment of the EPIC campaign, see Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (New York: Random House, 1992). 16. See http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/daybyday/daylog/september-29th-1934/. 17. Motion Picture Herald (MPH), 1 October 1934; New York Times, 4 November 1934. 18. MPH, 15 December 1934, 22 December 1934, 5 January 1935. Box-office figures are taken from the weekly records in MPH, 1 September 1934 to March 1935. 19. Variety, 29 January 1935, 6, 8. 20. Hollywood Reporter, 17 September 1934; MPH, 13 October 1934; Leo C. Rosten, Hollywood: The Movie Colony, The Movie Makers (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1941), 135–6; Scott Eyman, Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer (London: Robson Books, 2005), 200–4; Mark A. Vieira, Irving Thalberg, Boy Wonder to Producer Prince (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 263–6; ‘Films and Politics’, New York Times, 4 November 1934; Upton Sinclair, ‘The Movies and Political Propaganda’, in William J. Periman (ed.), The Movies on Trial (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 189–95; and Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 168. 21. Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century, 417; Davis, FDR, 425. 22. Poster Collection, Vidor Production File, MHL-AMPAS. 23. Pressbook, Our Daily Bread, microfiche, Reuben Library, British Film Institute, London. 24. Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 53. 25. A 1933 newsreel shot of this kind, of men in single file, on the brow of a hill, is reproduced in the Ken Burns documentary series, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (PBS, 2014), episode 5, ‘The Rising Road’. 26. King Vidor, Our Daily Bread, a three-page synopsis of the motion picture, United Artists Corporation, London, 1934, United Artists collection, 2A, Box 181, Folder 11, WCFTR. The rope motif is suggested in a contemporary report: see Ferner Nuhn, ‘’The Farmer Learns Direct Action’, The Nation 136, 8 March 1933, 254–6. See too, Rodney Karr, ‘Farmer Rebels in Plymouth Country, Iowa, 1932–1933’, Annals of Iowa 47 (1985), 637–45. 27. The opening titles include a reference to the film being awarded Production Seal No. 59. There is no paperwork on the issuing of the film’s seal in the PCA collection, MHL-AMPAS. 28. New York Times, 3 October 1934; Variety, 9 October 1934; Peter Ellis, ‘Let’s Build a Ditch!’, New Masses, 16 October 1934, 30; Film Form, vol. 1 (December 1934), 7; William Troy, ‘Films: Collectivism, More or Less’, The Nation, 139, 24 October 1934; Robert Stebbins, ‘Ungrateful for Gift Horses’, New Theatre, 1/10, November 1934, 22–3.

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29. Clippings in King Vidor Collection, Box 11, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California Los Angeles. 30. Ben Urwand, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013); Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels (Munich: Saur, 1993–2006), I: 3, 134 (I thank Dirk Alt for this citation). 31. Monthly Film Bulletin, 1/ 12 (1934), 117; F. S. Jennings, (unidentified periodical), 2 January 1935; Kine Weekly, 3 January 1935 (clippings, Miracle of Life, BFI Library). 32. Hickok to Hopkins, 28 May 1934, in Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley (eds), One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 259. Hickok also commented, ‘It’s probably too early to tell whether the self-help cooperatives offer any solution to the problem’ (ibid., 257). 33. On Tugwell, see James Tice Moore, ‘Depression Images: Subsistence Homesteads, “Production-for-Use,” and King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread’, Midwest Quarterly, 26/1 (1984), 33. 34. Morley interview, in ‘We have a Plan’, episode 3 of the Blackside/PBS series, The Great Depression (1993). The episode was produced, directed and co-written by Lyn Goldfarb. The documentary, currently (January 2015) available at http://youtube. com/watch?V=613cShzauDgk, gives an excellent account of the campaign against Sinclair. On Rapf, information from Joanna E. Rapf, Montreal, March 2015. 35. Alistair Cooke, ‘A Talk with King Vidor, The Rhythm of the Workers’, The Observer, 12 August 1934.

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chapter 10

Embodying the State: Federal Architecture and Masculine Transformation in Hollywood Films of the New Deal Era Anna Siomopoulos

D

uring the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programme vastly expanded the reach and size of the federal government in combating the Great Depression through ‘relief, reform, and recovery’. The public works projects undertaken by a host of new agencies, most notably the Public Works Administration (PWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), constituted its most direct assault on unemployment. Between 1933 and 1939 over two-thirds of federal emergency expenditures went toward funding these construction enterprises. The PWA focused on financing huge projects, like New York City’s Triborough Bridge and the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state, constructed by private firms. In contrast, the WPA directly employed unskilled relief labour to build smaller projects that included 480 airports, 78,000 bridges and nearly 40,000 public buildings.1 According to historian Robert Leighninger, the New Deal’s public works agencies had an enormous and largely unrecognized role in defining the public space we now use. In a short period of ten years, . . . [they] built facilities in practically every community in the country. Most are still providing service half a century later. It is time we recognized this legacy and attempted to comprehend its relationship to our contemporary situation.2

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As this observation implies, Hollywood cinema of the 1930s made little to no effort to implant these material and architectural representations of expanded federal governance in the nation’s conscience. Instead, it repeatedly chose to put on display the national monuments and public buildings of Washington, DC. Rather than celebrate federal constructions that had sprouted across the nation in such a short time, Hollywood focused on recognisable and venerable institutions to symbolise the new relationship between the citizen and the national government. Three films in particular used iconic public buildings as more than just settings for unrelated action: Gregory La Cava’s Gabriel over the White House (Cosmopolitan/MGM, 1933), Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Columbia, 1939) and George Stevens’ The Talk of the Town (Columbia, 1942). In these three films, the public edifices of the three branches of the US government – executive, legislative and judicial – become places of personal transformations, as the three male protagonists each experience private realisations that help them take on new public roles as, respectively, president, senator and Supreme Court justice. While an angel visits President Hammond (Walter Huston) in the White House in Gabriel over the White House, Senator Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) has a very public breakdown in the Capitol in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Professor Michael Lightcap (Ronald Colman) ends his hermetic, scholarly existence by donning a judicial robe in the Supreme Court building at the end of The Talk of the Town. Most interestingly, in all three films, there is an unusual reversal of the typical Hollywood romantic plot, in that none ends with the expected scene of romantic coupling whose trajectory was established at the start of each. In Gabriel over the White House, President Judson Hammond does not wind up with Pendy Molloy (Karen Morley), his apparent love interest at the outset of the movie; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington ends with the titular character not in the arms of Clarissa Saunders (Jean Arthur), but passed out on the Senate floor; and, in The Talk of the Town, Professor Lightcap tells his potential love interest, Miss Nora Shelley (again, Jean Arthur), that she would be better off returning to her small-town life than living with a man whose attentions were totally focused on matters of national importance. In all three films, the couple highlighted early on recedes into the background, as the federal building in which the protagonist now presides takes on more visual prominence and thematic importance. In the process, American male identity becomes defined less by private, heterosexual coupling than by public involvement in an expanded Rooseveltian-inspired government.

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GABRIEL OVER THE WHITE HOUSE

Produced by Walter Wanger, financed by media magnate William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures, and distributed by MetroGoldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Gabriel over the White House portrayed a new, quasi-authoritarian model of the American presidency as the answer to the Great Depression, organised crime and international instability. The film’s production coincided with what historian Jordan Schwarz calls the ‘interregnum of despair’ between President Herbert Hoover’s election defeat on 8 November 1932 and the inauguration of FDR as his successor on 4 March 1933. In this vacuum of executive authority, the economic crisis worsened to culminate in a severe banking crisis by the time the new president took office. The national mood, Roosevelt biographer Kenneth Davis commented, ‘had running through it a broad streak of messianic authoritarianism . . . a longing for the Leader, the Messiah in whom a passionate communal faith could be invested and who would take responsibility for everything’.3 Having helped to engineer FDR’s nomination by the Democratic National Convention in July 1932, Hearst hoped that he would emulate the fictional President Hammond’s dramatic expansion of executive powers with the intent of solving the nation’s problems. The film went on exhibition on 31 March 1933, when the Roosevelt presidency was less than a month old – and just a week after new German Chancellor Adolf Hitler was granted supposedly temporary plenary power to act without parliamentary consent and constitutional limitation. After Hearst arranged a pre-release screening of the film for FDR, the president-elect wrote to him, ‘I think it is an intensely interesting picture and should do much to help’.4 Once in office, Roosevelt would display strong leadership in securing congressional enactment of sixteen major pieces of legislation in his first 100 days, but he never showed any inclination towards following the fictional Judson Hammond’s authoritarian lead. One of the central questions asked by the film is whether the White House is primarily a private home or a public building, a place of personal consumption or a command centre for conducting affairs of state. The answer that the film repeatedly gives is that the White House should serve the greater concerns of the American people, and not the private interests of the president. At first, however, the new president sees it as a place for hobnobbing with cronies and the self-indulgent passing of time rather than the nervecentre for tackling the nation’s problems.5 In the initial scene of the movie, the White House is the location of an inauguration party,

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where the president glad-hands with members of the omniscient but unnamed political machine that got him elected. He shows particular gratitude to campaign manager Jasper Brooks (Arthur Byron), whose reward is appointment as Secretary of State. Spelling out the machine’s intention that Hammond will be a do-nothing president, Brooks remarks, ‘By the time [the people] realize you are not going to keep your campaign promises, your term will be over’. In essence, therefore, his White House tenure was supposed to be nothing more than a sinecure. A symbolic image of the conflict between the private and public functions of the White House occurs with the arrival of Pendy Molloy, who is shown standing in high heels on the presidential seal in the foyer. The intrusion of the female/personal into the male/public realm of political leadership is further driven home when presidential aide Hartley Beekman (Franchot Tone) is annoyed to find one of Pendy’s hairpins on the same seal.6 Pendy repeatedly gets in the way of White House business in the early part of the movie. On her first entrance into the press room,

Figure 10.1 Pendy Molloy (Karen Morley) standing on the presidential seal in her high-heeled shoes in Gabriel over the White House (Cosmopolitan Pictures, 1933).

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the discombobulated reporters speechlessly and slowly turn to look at her. One asks whether she is Hammond’s personal or confidential secretary, a descriptor hinting at a romantic liaison; another suggests that she may make the White House a home for the bachelor president; and a third wonders whether she can convince her boss to repeal Prohibition. These comments convey the idea that the president’s love interest can permanently alter not only the functioning of the White House, but also the laws of the land. 7 Both Pendy and the president’s nephew Jimmy Vetter (Dickie Moore) are portrayed as illegitimate private intrusions in the public affairs of the White House because of the way that they share similarities with the movie’s principal villain, the gangster kingpin Nick Diamond (C. Henry Gordon), a politically well-connected Al Capone-like figure. When the mobster visits the White House, there is a shot of his shoes on the presidential seal almost identical to the earlier shot of Pendy’s high heels. Similarly, Jimmy declares a preference in an early scene for becoming a gangster rather than an officer in the US military. Gabriel over the White House exemplifies the way that Hollywood represented the gangster as the kind of immoral consumer that FDR identified as the cause of the Depression and the greatest hindrance to economic recovery. Though anxious to stimulate consumption as a means to end the Great Depression, Roosevelt drew a distinction between the beneficial kind of consumption done in the name of the family, the nation and the general welfare, and the bad kind of consumption driven by greed, self-interest and class concerns.8 In Gregory La Cava’s film, the traditional and subdued décor of the White House is contrasted with the extravagant and exaggerated art deco design of Diamond’s private penthouse apartment. Diamond’s immoral approach to consumption is further conveyed by the way he commodifies the White House and its contents when visiting the president. Showing a lack of respect for the national monument as a place where America’s needs are addressed, Diamond remarks to Hammond that it’s ‘a nice place you have here’, and then taps his cane on a chair in one of the President’s meeting rooms. The misuse of the White House is further suggested when a journalist says that members of the press corps had better not anger Hammond or else they will have to find another place to sleep. Clearly, many characters featured in the early part of the movie regard it as providing a roof over their heads, instead of an institution in the service of larger public needs. In another example of personal

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relationships trumping public concerns, the president orchestrates a treasure hunt for his nephew, who searches for marshmallows in the Oval Office. While this self-indulgent game goes on, the leader of the self-styled ‘army of the unemployed’, John Bronson (David Landau) is heard giving a speech on the radio about the desperate living conditions of millions of Americans, thousands of whom are homeless. The turning point in the film comes when Hammond has a neardeath experience following an automobile accident while out joyriding. The White House, hitherto misused by the president, becomes the setting for his spiritual and moral re-awakening to its purpose. Fluttering drapes and a change of lighting in his bedroom suggest divine intervention as the Archangel Gabriel takes over his spirit. When Hammond emerges from his coma, he loses interest in his own personal consumption, such as the detective magazines that he had previously asked the US Air Force to fly in from New York every week. Gone is the reckless, overgrown teenager who got into an accident because he was driving too fast. In his place is a mature, committed and bold leader who takes on the solemn expression of Abraham Lincoln. Henceforth, the film symbolically links Hammond to Lincoln through frequent shots of Lincoln’s bust in the Oval Office. The fact that Walter Huston had played the title role in D. W. Griffith’s recent biopic Abraham Lincoln (United Artists, 1930) may well have given this transformation added resonance in the eyes of movie audiences. The Lincoln-like Hammond distances himself from the hedonistic pleasures of his previous White House existence to concentrate on the public business of presidential leadership. Never seen again in the movie with his nephew, he also redefines his relationship with Pendy in purely professional terms by addressing her as Miss Molloy and by making clear his displeasure when she attempts to hold his hand. Having once described the White House to his African-American butler as ‘a nice place’, words identical to those of Diamond during his White House visit, Hammond never again refers to it as anything other than a place for conducting important national and international affairs. He also manifests contempt for the frivolous consumption of others. When Diamond claims that the illegal liquor he sells is considered ‘hospitality . . . on a silver tray in Park Avenue’, the president responds that ‘four million men were forced to accept the hospitality of the [US] government’ during the Great War. This remark epitomises the contrast between the immorality of selfish consumption and the bare bones

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lodging and provisions that were the soldiers’ dubious compensation for public service. Most importantly, the spiritually renewed president uses the White House as the command centre from which to direct anti-Depression initiatives. Previously, Hammond had insisted that resolving the economic crisis was beyond the scope of the federal government’s constitutional powers, an outlook that is clearly intended to identify him with the contemporary understanding of Hoover Republicanism. Almost anticipating FDR’s early outburst of activism, he now proposes wide-ranging job-creation, financial and welfare measures to restore the economy, and vows to end bootlegging because of its moral and economic damage to the country. When his machine-dominated Cabinet objects to this display of resolve, Hammond gets rid of it, and when Congress baulks at the cost of his proposals, he suspends it out of conviction that the national crisis is too grave for time-wasting negotiation with the legislature. In marked contrast to Herbert Hoover’s decision to drive the Bonus Army out of Washington in the summer of 1932, the newly energised president goes on to make common cause with the leader of the ‘army of the unemployed’. Gabriel constantly frames Hammond’s battle with Diamond over bootlegging as the ultimate test of the justness of his cause. During his White House visit, the mobster mocks the bust of Lincoln but is made to look small in comparison with the icons of American history that surround him. Diamond’s consequent declaration of war on the president for cracking down on bootlegging culminates in his order to assassinate Hammond in a drive-by shooting that only succeeds in leaving Pendy Molloy wounded in the White House lobby.9 The presidential response is both resolute and ruthless. With Beekman now transformed without explanation into the commander of an Army-style police unit, the mobster and his gang are relentlessly hunted down, tried in a kangaroo court and executed by firing squad. Their end takes place not in the grounds of the White House they have besmirched, but in Battery Park, New York City, with the Statue of Liberty in the background – presumably as a warning that those who come to live in freedom in America have to obey its laws. With the main exemplar of domestic selfishness eliminated, Hammond turns his attention to deal with the exponents of international self-interest. In the somewhat unrelated third act of the movie, he brings world leaders to Washington to remind them of their responsibility to pay Great War reparations and to eschew an arms race that could lead to renewed conflict. To manifest America’s superiority in

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new aeroplane technology, Hammond arranges for his fellow heads of government to observe an air attack that rapidly blows some antiquated US Navy ships out of the water. Cowed by this demonstration of power, they rapidly agree to accept his Washington covenant with its guarantees of ‘peace in our time’. Film scholar John Pitney contends that this portrayal of Hammond’s dedication to world peace acts as a counterpoint to the seemingly fascist implications of his domestic policy. It also ties in with Abraham Lincoln’s desire for peace and reconciliation after the Civil War. A weak and pale Hammond ceremoniously uses Lincoln’s pen to sign the international treaty in the White House. Moments later, he dies just as he is achieving his greatest success, another parallel with Lincoln. Just before he expires, there is an affectionate but brief exchange with Pendy, signalling a momentary return to his prior identity. To leave no doubt that Hammond has become, and will be remembered as, a great leader, dedicated to the public responsibilities of his office, the final shot of the film shows the exterior of the White House with mourners observing an American flag flying at half-mast in honour of the deceased president. MR . SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON

Produced and directed by Frank Capra, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was originally intended as a sequel to his screwball comedy, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Columbia, 1936), but Gary Cooper was unavailable from Paramount to reprise his role as Longfellow Deeds.10 In Capra’s eyes, however, MGM’s James Stewart was equally good for the lead: ‘I knew he would make a hell of a Mr Smith . . . He looked like the country kid, the idealist’.11 As this remark suggests, the movie essentially deals with a wide-eyed innocent’s transformation into political manhood through a rite of passage in the gladiatorial forum of the US Senate. Capra’s ostentatious support for Republican presidential candidates who ran against FDR cautions us against interpreting his 1930s movies as paeans to the New Deal. Nevertheless, his recognition that American democracy needed overhauling if it was to survive is evident in his key works. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was made at a time when the Roosevelt administration was engaged in trust-busting attacks on concentrations of economic power as part of its recovery strategy. The film paralleled the New Deal in its animus against anti-democratic concentrations of political power in the form of boss-controlled machines. It was, in the words of film

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scholar Ray Carney, ‘both the most yearningly optimistic and most shockingly topical and politically realistic of all of Capra’s work’. Mr. Smith was far less optimistic than Mr. Deeds in terms of the capacity of common-man heroes to resist the forces of corruption.12 Nevertheless, Capra was clear in his own mind about the purpose of the movie, later remarking, ‘The more uncertain are the people of the world, the more their hard-won freedoms are scattered and lost in the winds of chance, the more they need a ringing statement of America’s democratic ideals’.13 Like Judson Hammond in Gabriel over the White House, Jefferson Smith was put in office by a political machine, in this case run by homestate boss ‘Big’ Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold), who expects him to be a harmless do-nothing, albeit an unwitting one. In contrast to the earlier movie’s message that private life and public service are fundamentally incompatible, however, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington suggests that women may help men to achieve public priorities. It also concludes that women do not really obstruct public goals, as their attraction is no match for the draw of public service, or for the appeal of the buildings in which such service takes place. On arrival by train in Washington, DC, Smith is greeted by a bevy of attractive young women, one of whom seems to hold a particular charm for him. She is Susan Paine (Astrid Allwyn), the glamorous daughter of his state’s senior senator, Joe Paine (Claude Rains). Nevertheless, this female display of seductive appeal does not induce in him the trance-like state that he experiences at the sight of the Capitol dome. From this point on, the monuments and buildings that symbolise American history and democracy hold far greater allure than any woman for Smith. In contrast to Gabriel’s allusive references to Abraham Lincoln, historical representations have a physical manifestation that gives them a key role in the Smith narrative. The siren’s call of the congressional building leads the newly arrived senator into an excruciatingly long montage tour of the sights of Washington, DC, including the Supreme Court building, the White House, the statues of founding fathers Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, the Washington Monument, the District of Columbia War Memorial, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery, and the Lincoln Memorial. This sightseeing tour so engrosses Smith that he fails to return in time to fulfill his official Senate duties on his first day in office. Even after Smith has met his secretary, Clarissa Saunders, the woman who falls for him, he repeatedly finds his attention and gaze

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Figure 10.2 Senator Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) with the Capitol dome behind him in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Columbia, 1939).

diverted by the Capitol dome. When dictating to Saunders in his Senate office and again when they are riding together in a car, he is entranced by the sight of this monument – particularly, in the latter instance, when it is lit up against the Washington skyline. While riding round the nation’s capital with Saunders, he mistakes a movie house for a national monument, an error that reveals a tendency to imbue all architecture with public, national and historical significance. In another montage, the callow senator confronts the reporters who have taken advantage of his trusting nature to make him look like a fool on the front pages of the DC newspapers. In the background is not the woman who believes in him, as we might expect in a romantic comedy of the period, but the many monuments in which he invests his faith and desire. Capra’s film implies that there is a natural trajectory for a male to follow in the journey from boyhood to manhood. This journey proceeds from country to city, from outdoors to indoors, and from family

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home to Capitol building. Smith describes this path of self-development while filibustering on the Senate floor in support of his plan for a boys’ camp, which somewhat resembles FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps – except that it embodies private voluntarism in being financed through the nickel-and-dime contributions of beneficiaries. An outdoor camp, Smith declares, will build a boy’s body and mind so that he might one day sit behind a desk in the Senate and have the fortitude to do the public’s bidding, rather than just ‘decorate a chair’. Smith’s personal odyssey from the Boy Ranger headquarters at his mother’s home to his office in the Senate building is the inspiration for this vision. Saunders serves as a surrogate parent helping in Smith’s journey of discovery. After acquainting Smith with the Senate, she confesses to feeling like a mother ‘taking her son to the first day of school’. At the climax of the movie, she feeds him information on Senate filibuster rules while he is engaged in his oratorical marathon, somewhat akin to a mother helping a child who has forgotten his lines in the school play. In light of this maternal concern, the romance between Saunders and Smith never seems to get off the ground. Moreover, Saunders is not glamorous in the manner of Susan Paine. On quitting the employ of Senator Paine, her initial boss, she gives up the hope of ever buying the new wardrobe that might make her look more alluring. At the same time, Saunders ridicules her rival for Smith’s affection as nothing more than a pretty face by making fun of the idea that Susan Paine might ever, as First Lady, have a newspaper column in the manner of Eleanor Roosevelt’s My Day. As played by the likeable but unsexy Jean Arthur, Saunders looks less like a typical screen goddess than like one of the working mothers frequently depicted in New Deal art as being engaged in the difficult and exhausting cause of helping to rebuild the nation.14 Jefferson Smith never loses his physical control around Saunders the way that he does around the attractive Susan Paine, for example dropping his hat and bumping into a table at the Paine household. Yet even Susan Paine does not have the effect on him that the buildings of public service do. His greatest weak-in-the-knees moment happens at the end of the film, when he collapses on the Senate floor in a passionate, quasiorgasmic expression of emotion for the building and all that it represents. As in Gabriel, when low-angle shots on Jud Hammond in the White House make him seem larger than life, similar shots on Jefferson Smith in the specially reconstructed Senate chamber in the concluding scenes of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington make him appear equal to his historical and architectural surroundings.

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Smith is in a battle for his political life because the planned boys’ camp is to be located on land that Boss Taylor has earmarked for a pork-barrel dam that his ally, the supposedly upstanding but actually dishonest Senator Paine, has hidden within a federal appropriations bill. In a bid to discredit him, the forces of corruption spread accusations that Smith is the one involved in graft, a ploy intended to get him expelled from the Senate. The filibuster is meant to buy time for Smith’s message of innocence to get through to his home state, but Taylor’s control of the media means it has no chance of success. The cart-loads of telegrams and letters that are finally brought into the Senate chamber are not the hoped-for declarations of support from ordinary voters but expressions of condemnation churned out by the machine. At this stage, Smith collapses exhausted and broken on the Senate floor after so many hours of non-stop speaking. Meant to be his saviour, his voice has become a hoarse, barely intelligible rasp.15 At the apparent moment of Smith’s defeat, however, Paine is so stricken with shame at his plight that he admits his guilt after an off-screen suicide attempt in the Senate cloakroom. This ending substitutes for the romantic resolution of the couple that in Mr. Smith never in fact happens. With Smith still collapsed on the floor of the Senate chamber, Saunders can only hoot her joy from the galleries above. The final shot of the film brings home the centrality of the Senate to the narrative. After vainly trying to restore order amidst the celebrations of Smith’s victory, the President of the Senate (Harry Carey) finally gives up and begins chewing a stick of gum. Having shown some sympathy for Smith while administering the rules of the filibuster from his seat above the chamber, he now sits back with a contented grin on his face. The Senate after all has restored itself as the bastion of American democracy through the efforts of its common-man hero. THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Another of Columbia’s prestige pictures, The Talk of the Town, is a romantic comedy featuring freelance actors Cary Grant and Ronald Colman in their respective roles of labour activist Leopold Dilg and legal scholar Michael Lightfoot in competition for the affections of Jean Arthur’s Nora Shelley. Despite being made in the first year of US involvement in World War II, the film may also be interpreted as a commentary on an issue of central importance to the late New Deal – namely, the relationship between law, justice and politics. The first

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major Hollywood production to feature a Supreme Court justice as a protagonist, the film portrays the transformation of Lightcap from a theoretical legal scholar to a judge engaged in the far more challenging task of dispensing practical justice in the nation’s foremost court. In FDR’s first term, the Supreme Court had struck down many New Deal initiatives as an unconstitutional expansion of federal authority. Once re-elected, the president attempted to make the judicial branch more amenable to activist government through packing it with new justices. In 1937 he proposed a bill that authorised appointment of one additional justice for every current Supreme Court member over seventy years old – ostensibly on the grounds that its business had become too onerous for the ‘nine old men’. This turned out to be a tactical miscalculation, as it enabled Roosevelt’s conservative enemies in both parties to accuse him of dictatorial tendencies that threatened to undermine the constitutional separation of powers. Despite defeat in the battle to enact the judiciary bill, the president was successful in his broader goal of ending judicial obstructionism against the New Deal. Fearful that continued opposition to a popular president might undermine its legitimacy, the Supreme Court changed course with regard to the socio-economic initiatives of the New Deal. In addition, the voluntary retirement of its conservative older members gave FDR the opportunity to create a liberal judiciary. The appointment of eight new justices between August 1937 and July 1941 realigned the nation’s highest judicial body in support of Roosevelt’s belief in a ‘living Constitution’ that addressed America’s changing needs. It was in this context that The Talk of the Town focused on Lightcap’s elevation to the Supreme Court.16 The Talk of the Town makes a distinction between the superior men who run the country from majestic buildings without the help of women and the average men who marry women and live with them in comfortable if chaotic homes. The superior man may learn from the average man, who may help the superior man to grow and mature, but only so that the superior man might better lead the nation once he has been ensconced in one of the command centres of public power. A woman may appear in the mix, a diversion to keep the homosocial relationship from turning homosexual, as Lightcap seems to have deep emotional relationships, bordering on the romantic, with both Dilg and his African-American valet, Tilney (Rex Ingram). This sexual ambiguity provides an underlying rationale for Lightcap’s masculine exertions of power near the end of the film, displays that signify his readiness to lead.

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Made at a time when the Supreme Court was tentatively beginning to consider civil rights cases, The Talk of the Town tends to reinforce conventional racial stereotypes in the Lightcap-Tilney relationship.17 The valet has a more significant role than any AfricanAmerican character in Gabriel over the White House (for example, the obsequious White House butler) or in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (whether the far-from-obsequious station porters or the reverential African-American visitor to the Lincoln monument). Tilney expresses emotions that Lightcap is unable to express but does so in the interests of the status quo rather than social change. In one particularly odd scene, Tilney sheds tears over Lightcap’s decision to shave off his beard as a signal of impending departure from the ivory tower to practise a jurisprudence based in real-world experiences. Tilney in this scene is feminised through his expression of emotions that are beyond Lightfoot, who is thereby made to look more masculine by comparison. Of course, Lightcap’s relationship with Miss Shelley is also central in understanding the gender dynamics of the film. The Talk of the Town establishes early on that women are inferior beings who will stand in the way of a great man’s achievements. On his first appearance in the film, the eminent professor asserts that a woman’s mind becomes deranged by marriage. In a foreshadowing of what might happen if he were ever to tie the matrimonial knot, Nora Shelley shows her incapacity to meet Lightcap’s hope that Sweetbrook, the home he rents from her, will provide a peaceful place to write his book on legal theory. He finds his intellectual pursuits repeatedly disrupted by domestic events, such as unexpected visitors, furniture delivery and, most importantly, the disruptive presence of Leopold Dilg. Sweetbrook, in all of its messy reality, becomes a metaphor for the nation; Dilg sums up Lightcap’s lack of concern for actual instances of injustice by saying, ‘You don’t live in this country; you just take a room in it’. A labour activist framed for arson and murder by a corrupt local industrialist, Dilg escapes from the prison where he was being held for trial and takes refuge in Nora Shelley’s house. Refusing to hand a former schoolmate over to police, Nora passes him off as the gardener to explain his presence to Lightcap. Together, the two of them bring the hitherto cloistered scholar out of his academic reveries and into the real world. As the film progresses, Lightcap, whose name suggests that the academic’s mortar board is a far from weighty burden, comes to see Dilg as an intellectual foil and a partner in his favourite pastime of

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chess. At the same time, Lightcap develops romantic feelings for Nora, despite his intentions to the contrary. As Lightcap becomes more involved in personal relationships because of his two new friends, he shows greater interest in the events occurring around him, and the spaces that he explores begin to include not just the room in Nora’s home, but also the house itself, the garden outside, the nearby town and, finally, on becoming Supreme Court associate justice, the nation. As the circumference of his experience expands, Lightcap becomes less of a child and more an adult male. He is transformed from a self-described ‘babe in the woods’ to an aggressive man who punches out Dilg in front of Nora near the end of the film. By then Lightcap has discovered the supposed gardener’s real identity and has been informed of his own nomination to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Despite persuading Dilg to give himself up, Lightcap is no longer willing to let the law take its course. In one of the film’s more unbelievable twists, he turns detective to unearth evidence of his friend’s innocence. In the course of his investigation, he commits obstruction of justice, assault and kidnapping, but all in the cause of true justice. The amateur sleuth discovers that the man supposedly killed in the factory fire that Dilg is accused of starting is hiding out in Boston and is in cahoots with the crooked industrialist who is the real arsonist. After a gunpoint abduction, Lightcap forces the conspirator to accompany him to the courthouse where Dilg’s trial is going badly. In court, the professor-jurist fires off a shot to command attention, an action representing the quite sexist assumption that masculine aggression is necessary in the realm of the law. The final scenes of the film begin with a shot of the Supreme Court building, which has replaced Sweetbrook as Lightcap’s new home. Extreme long-shots make Nora look small in the Supreme Court corridors and, again, in Lightcap’s Supreme Court chamber, which is much more spacious than Sweetbrook. Tilney here acts like his wife: he fixes Lightcap’s judicial robes and tells him that he looks wonderful, which elicits the response that ‘you mustn’t be absurd’. Although a romantic resolution is at first suggested when Lightcap confesses to Nora that he has more happiness than a man deserves, it quickly becomes apparent that he is speaking about his judicial appointment. The chair that it is his lifelong dream to sit in is the Supreme Court bench, not one in Sweetbrook’s parlour, and the landscape that inspires him is not Nora’s garden but the view of the Capitol that he has from his judicial chambers.

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Figure 10.3 Associate Justice Michael Lightcap (Ronald Colman) with Nora Shelley (Jean Arthur) in his Supreme Court chamber, with the Capitol in the background, in The Talk of the Town.

The Talk of the Town is the only one of the three films under review that ends with a romantic union – not that of Lightcap and Nora but of Nora and Dilg, who kiss just before leaving the Supreme Court to return to the small cottage of Sweetbrook. There, we are led to believe, Dilg will continue his work fighting for better labour conditions, while his friend Lightcap will use Dilg’s experiences to improve dispensation of justice from the nation’s highest bench.

conclusion With their visual and narrative focus on the most recognisable and powerful public buildings in the nation, Gabriel over the White House, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and The Talk of the Town helped to legitimise the project of public works, perhaps the central enterprise of the New Deal. Stock footage of the famous government buildings stand out and give all three films a kind of historical weight that they would

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otherwise lack. For the New Deal, remaking the physical landscape was a way to remake the political landscape, but not necessarily in the name of gender equality. As many historians have pointed out, public works revealed the gendered and racial boundaries of the welfare state in that they supported economic sectors – the construction industry and building trades – long noted as bastions of white male employment and discrimination against women and African-Americans, two groups consistently identified with each other in all three of these films as the carers of the primary white male political figures.18 As men in these films work to rebuild the nation in edifices that are supposed to be icons of American democracy, women at worst obstruct the public functions of these buildings with their private concerns and, at best, assist men in achieving some public goals, before essentially being asked to remove themselves from the premises.

notes 1. Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933–1956 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1. See also Lois Craig, The Federal Presence: Architecture, Politics, and Symbols in US Government Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and Patrick D. Reagan, Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890–1943 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). 2. Robert Leighninger, ‘Cultural Infrastructure: The Legacy of New Deal Public Space’, Journal of Architectural Education, 49, 4 (1996), 226–36 (quotation, 227). For a more detailed discussion, see Robert Leighninger, Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007). 3. Jordan Schwarz, The Interregnum of Despair: Hoover, Congress, and the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970); Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933–1937 (New York: Random House, 1986), 38. 4. Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 185. 5. The likely model the filmmakers had in mind for this incarnation of Hammond was Republican Warren Harding, America’s president from 1921 to 1923. 6. In its representation of Pendy Molloy, the film anticipated FDR’s relationship with his private secretary Marguerite Le Hand. See Hazel Rowley, Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 140, 194. 7. Contracted to MGM, Karen Morley had previously played a gangster’s moll on loan-out in Scarface (United Artists, 1932) and the vampish wife of a politician in The Washington Masquerade (MGM, 1932). Politicised by the Depression, she quit MGM out of dissatisfaction with the roles she was given after completion of Gabriel over the White House. Her first freelance role was in King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread (1934), the focus of Brian Neve’s chapter in this volume. She

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8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

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would later become a victim of the Hollywood blacklist. See Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 85, 96–7, 196. For further discussion, see Anna Siomopoulos, Hollywood Melodramas and the New Deal: Public Daydreams (New York: Routledge, 2012), 23–5. This was arguably the most controversial scene in the movie. In light of the attempted assassination of FDR by impoverished immigrant Giuseppe Zingara in Miami on 15 February 1933, Production Code officials tried in vain to get the scene cut, and the fracas resulted in the original release date being put back by two months. The film was also reduced in length from 100 minutes to eighty-six minutes on the insistence of Louis B. Mayer, whose intervention resulted in some Hammond speeches and several scenes involving the gangster kingpin being cut. See Ian Scott, American Politics in Hollywood Film, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 52. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was one of the select number of prestige pictures that Columbia made each year with actors on loan from other studios. Mark Vieira, Majestic Hollywood: The Greatest Films of 1939 (New York: Running Press, 2013), 164. Raymond Carney, American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 300. See also Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 408–9. Vieira, Majestic Hollywood, 164. See Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). To achieve this effect, James Stewart had a doctor on set to administer dichloride of mercury into his throat. Jeff Shesol, Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs The Supreme Court (New York: Norton, 2010); James Simon, FDR and Chief Justice Hughes: The President, the Supreme Court, and the Epic Battle over the New Deal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012). Risa Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada (1938) was the first challenge to school segregation since Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism, 15.

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chapter 11

‘We’re Only Kids Now, But Someday . . .’: Hollywood Musicals and the Great Depression ‘Youth Crisis’ David Eldridge

F

earful of threats to their homes and their futures, and angry that the older generation dismiss them as ‘excess baggage’, young people take to the streets en masse. They look to one of their own to lead the way. He electrifies them with a ‘rising war cry’ that will herald the arrival of youth and teach the nation to ‘respect us’. They march through the town, their ranks swelling further with teenagers who are drawn out of their homes. Paying no heed to private property, they cross through front yards, stealing as they go to fashion the detritus of suburbia into improvised torches and clubs. Darkness descends, the torches blaze, and even more youngsters respond to the cry of a young woman who exhorts ‘all you sons and daughters, we gotta fight!’ They lay claim to a global revolutionary heritage, invoking both George Washington and the call of the Marseillaise for the ‘enfants de la Patrie’ to arise – at which point their leader again takes command. With the torches casting long, eerie shadows, he rouses the mob into an explosive frenzy, as strains of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries enhance his dramatic rhetoric: ‘What do we die for? Why were we born?’ The juvenile hordes become ‘hysterical with their enthusiasm’ at his promises of a ‘new dawn’ and a ‘place in the sun’ in which they will all have a stake. ‘To arms! To arms!’ they yell, and march on civic buildings to start a massive bonfire. It becomes an anarchic frenzy. They throw not only their torches onto the fire,

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Figure 11.1

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The Youth Rally in Babes in Arms (MGM, 1939).

but ‘childish things’ that are immolated to symbolise that they have indeed ‘grown up’. As his followers now dance madly around this raging pyre, the leader and his three lieutenants rise above the crowd, ascending steps to extend their arms skyward in a triumphant salute.1 And cut, incongruously, to Mickey Rooney, later the same evening, busy jotting down ideas for a musical extravaganza that will showcase the entertaining talents of the very same kids who have just been on the rampage. For the scene of explosive adolescent anger comes not from any propaganda film about Nazi Youth, like Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will (1935); nor from a portent of what fascism might be like on American shores, such as Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here; nor even from one of Hollywood’s ‘social problem’ films about America’s Depression-era ‘youth crisis’, such as Wild Boys of the Road (Warner Bros, 1933). Rather it comes from one of the most successful musicals of the decade, Metro-GoldwynMayer’s Babes in Arms (1939), something which makes the sequence all the more remarkable. As Harvey Cohen’s chapter in this volume affirms, a number of 1930s musicals were surprisingly direct and realistic in their engagement with

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the Depression – especially the 1933 Warner Bros trio of 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade. The studio quite openly aligned these productions with the ambitions of the New Deal, as signified by the representations of both President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the National Recovery Administration’s Blue Eagle symbol that appeared in the Busby Berkeley-choreographed finale of Footlight Parade. Berkeley also injected political commitment into his ‘Remember My Forgotten Man’ number in Gold Diggers of 1933, casting 150 extras as Great War veterans forced to beg for work and stand in breadlines, images inspired by the real protests of the Bonus Marchers of 1932. These performative elements mirrored social realism in the narratives, particularly Gold Diggers’ representation of Broadway chorus girls, for whom selling their bodies (to audiences, theatrical producers and rich ‘sugar daddies’) had become the only available form of ‘escape from hunger and insecurity’.2 Whether focusing on Great Depression-related issues or offering escape from them, like the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers RKO productions and the Jeanette MacDonald–Nelson Eddy MGM productions later in the decade, the Hollywood musicals of the 1930s focused on the adult world – rather than the plight of America’s youth that Babes in Arms was to highlight. When depicting children, the genre usually sought to reassure audiences that the Depression was not entirely destroying the innocence and happiness of the young. Such a sentiment was especially evident in the films of Shirley Temple, produced at 20th Century-Fox. The top box-office attraction annually from 1935 through 1938, Temple’s ‘dimple-cheeked, curly topped’ persona offered a stark contrast to the documentary work of Farm Security Administration photographers, such as Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange, who repeatedly confronted the public with images of children so distressed and exhausted by poverty that they had been drained of all the natural exuberance of youth. For all that Temple’s characters suffered, being frequently abandoned, orphaned or impoverished, she never lost her exuberance. What shone through in all of her films was her resilience, pluck and consistently sunny disposition in the face of circumstances that would have traumatised any real child (as in the startling opening of Poor Little Rich Girl (1936) when her nanny is killed in an automobile accident). Even Roosevelt himself celebrated the qualities of ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, commending the fact that ‘when the spirit of the people is lower than at any time during this Depression, it is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles’.3

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Hollywood was certainly well aware of the real troubles from which Temple offered distraction. In 1934 sociologist Thomas Minehan documented the grim realities experienced by over a quarter of a million young Americans who had become vagrants, leaving their homes and riding the rails when their impoverished parents could no longer support them.4 Director William Wellman had brought the deterioration and despair of such youngsters to the screen the year before in Wild Boys of the Road. This movie and others like Dead End (Samuel Goldwyn Productions/United Artists, 1937), which centred on the lives of juvenile delinquents in a poor New York City neighbourhood, delivered the message that ‘poverty and hopelessness could turn good kids into bad’. They dramatised the contemporary fear that in denying young Americans the ‘elements of a protected childhood’, the Depression’s social costs might persist for generations to come.5 However, this anxiety was generally confined, in Hollywood’s output at least, to the realm of social dramas, thereby making its appearance in Babes in Arms all the more intriguing. Indeed one might assume that by the time of that movie’s release in 1939, the United States had moved on from the ‘fervent years’ when fears about children on the verge of starvation and the visible spectre of a army of ‘roving boys and girls’ had gripped the country.6 Yet Babes in Arms confronted audiences not only with visions of such an angry army of youth, but with young Americans facing impoverishment, the damaging consequences of crumbling parental authority, the threat of being taken into care, and incipient delinquency. It also spawned three other musicals – Strike up the Band (1940), Babes on Broadway (1941) and Girl Crazy (1943) – each of which raised further aspects of the ‘youth crisis’ that so exercised politicians, educators, sociologists and the media throughout the Great Depression.

babes in crisis The critical neglect of this short series of musicals is itself surprising. Each of them paired Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. Although only eighteen years old when Babes in Arms was released, Rooney was already MGM’s ‘most valuable property’. His displacement of Shirley Temple as number one box-office attraction in the United States in 1939 should in itself compel scholars to consider the significance of these films as representations of young America.7 Judy Garland, of course, remains so highly regarded that Fred Astaire’s

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description of her as ‘the greatest entertainer who ever lived’ encounters little dissent.8 Babes in Arms and its successors were also the first productions of the unit led by lyricist-turned-producer Arthur Freed, which went on to create some of Hollywood’s most acclaimed musicals for MGM, including Meet Me in St Louis (1944), An American in Paris (1951), and Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Moreover, they were directed by the ‘daddy of musicals’ himself, Busby Berkeley, whom Freed had persuaded to sign with MGM.9 Freed’s strategy was to combine the energy and appeal of the studio’s popular Andy Hardy series (which also starred Rooney), with the formula of the backstage musical with which Berkeley had been so famously associated at Warners – and the idea paid off handsomely.10 Produced for just $750,000, Babes in Arms grossed a total of $3,335,000 (proving far more profitable than the more celebrated The Wizard of Oz, released in the same year). Strike up the Band, which grossed $3,494,000, was the studio’s most profitable film of 1940. Both Babes on Broadway and Girl Crazy did even better business, with respective grosses of $3,859,000 and $3,771,000.11 In fact, the ‘Babes’ musicals (sometimes referred to by film historians as ‘backyard’ or ‘summer stock’ musicals) were so well loved and influential at the time that they generated the ‘hey kids, let’s put on a show!’ cliché that has dogged the genre ever since. Their decidedly formulaic approach made for good box office but may well be one reason why film scholars have paid them little heed. Each one ‘concerns the efforts of a group of youngsters, led by the Mickey Rooney character, to break into showbiz’. Musical numbers are passed off as ‘rehearsals’ in which a variety of young performers are given the chance to display their talents. Despite encountering repeated setbacks, the young performers always succeed in the end in putting on a spectacular show which ‘wins of the approval of the adult world’.12 However, that repetitive formula appears to have distracted commentators from considering what actually motivates the large group of youngsters to put on a show in the first place – which in each case revolved around the real problems experienced by contemporary American youth.13 In Girl Crazy the kids stage a gala rodeo show when their college is threatened with closure due to falling enrolments. This was a significant change to the scenario of the original 1930 Gershwin musical on which the film was based, which had seen wiseacre New Yorkers, led by a rich playboy, transform a Wild West dude ranch into a speakeasy. Freed’s screenwriters transferred the action to a Wyoming

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college that is struggling to maintain its state funding, creating a situation of much greater relevance to adolescent audiences who had been schooled during the Depression. The film’s Cody College was defined in scripts as an essential lifeline for poorer, rural youngsters who come ‘because the tuition’s practically nothing’.14 Why it is now in decline is not made clear, but the situation reflected the reality of over 20,000 schools that had closed due to rural poverty, according to the National Education Association in 1934.15 Indeed, at its nadir, the Great Depression came close to crippling the country’s education system because mass unemployment left many states with insufficient tax revenues to support it. In May 1932 Chicago’s school boards had run out of money to pay teachers’ salaries, ‘signalling the onset of a national school crisis’.16 Young Americans also quit education in large numbers because they ‘had to find jobs to support their families’.17 As a consequence of the hard times, an estimated 80,000 students dropped out of colleges during the 1932–3 academic year, while some 3 million children between the ages of seven and seventeen left school prematurely.18 Of course, by the time of Girl Crazy’s release in 1943, the crisis had passed for most educational institutions, in large measure due to the New Deal’s interventions. Cody was precisely the kind of institution that the Roosevelt administration had protected, first by providing federal emergency funds to prevent some 4,000 schools closing in America’s poorest states, and then through the National Youth Administration (NYA) which provided grants to help Depression-squeezed young people to stay in education.19 Cody is said to offer its less fortunate students the opportunity to ‘live on what they make’, which is how the NYA also sought to resolve the situation, channelling aid to over 26,000 institutions to create part-time workstudy jobs for more than 600,000 college students on low incomes (as well as 1.5 million high school students).20 Although by 1939 college enrolments of 1.3 million exceeded pre-Depression levels, continued pressure on government by organisations such as the American Students Union (ASU) and American Youth Congress (AYC) to increase the NYA’s ‘student wage’ so that ‘no youths would be forced to drop out of school because of insufficient funds’ ensured that the situation presented in Girl Crazy still had currency.21 The central problem in Babes on Broadway is one of youth unemployment. A perennial issue for young hopefuls in New York’s theatrical world, it had much wider resonance after a decade when joblessness had disproportionately affected adolescents, whose

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unemployment rate was generally twice that of adults. Adolescent boys who had to compete for wage work with older jobseekers had the toughest time. This is something that Tommy Williams (Rooney’s character) acknowledges in the film when resigning himself to the simple fact that ‘there aren’t enough jobs to go around. Not only for us, but for people who have been in the theatre for twenty years’.22 Even as late as 1940, when the economy was picking up, the US Children’s Bureau estimated that 3.9 million Americans aged fifteen to twenty-five were still looking for a job.23 The movie also raises a secondary concern about contemporary youth, when Tommy’s friends stage their show to help raise funds for a New York settlement house. On one level, the stretched resources of the home reflect how the Depression had brought ‘a new wave of neglected children’ to the doorsteps of institutes and orphanages that took in over 100,000 young Americans who were ‘impoverished, abused or abandoned’.24 On another level, the intention to use the funds to send the children to the country for the summer chimes with the solutions that many New Dealers advocated for alleviating the ‘youth problem’. The Civilian Conservation Corps, probably the most popular of FDR’s many programmes with the public, was primarily established to employ outof-work young men (from ages sixteen through twenty-three) from families on relief. Also significant in its founding was the belief that exposure to nature and the country’s ‘pioneer heritage’ would stop unemployed youths becoming alienated and turning to delinquency and crime. FDR himself specifically championed the advantages of ‘healthful and natural living’ available in the country as a way of countering the ‘concentration of distress in the cities’ and thus ‘conserving’ American youth.25 Of the four films, Strike up the Band was least concerned with problems directly attributable to the Great Depression. An early draft of the screenplay would have seen Rooney’s widowed mother lose her job, thus jeopardising her son’s chance to get into college.26 Even without that subplot, however, its depiction of how Rooney’s character, Jimmy Connors, transformed his high school marching band into a ‘hopping’ jazz band still engaged with anxieties about young America and its ‘swing craze’. By the late 1930s big bands led by musicians like Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Chick Webb and, most notably, Benny Goodman carried swing music to radio airwaves and dancehalls across the United States. However, the craze among boys and girls for ‘jitterbugging’ dance forms like the Dartmouth Dip and the Suzie-Q caused some older Americans

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to fear that swing was ‘an immoral contagion spread by insidious rhythms’. Swing music also exacerbated concerns over a widening generation gap; its devotees regarded it as ‘the voice of youth striving to be heard in this fast-moving world’, while critics damned its ‘cannibalistic rhythmic orgies’ that would ‘woo our youth along the primrose path to hell’.27 Although Strike up the Band works to defend and validate swing as a legitimate form of youth culture, many parents of the ‘jitterbugs’ certainly ‘looked upon the antics of their offspring with incomprehension and mistrust’. This is something the film acknowledges when Jimmy’s musical enthusiasm conflicts with his mother’s more cautious desire for him to follow his father and become a doctor.28 It was Babes in Arms, however, that presented the ‘youth crisis’ in the darkest terms, for in this movie ‘putting on a show’ has to solve a slew of problems that all had their basis in the Great Depression’s harsh realities. As was the case in the original 1936 stage musical by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart on which the film was loosely based, the ‘Babes’ are the progeny of former vaudeville stars whose careers have hit the skids. The difficulties faced by such vaudevillians were not specific to the Depression per se. The success of sound-features films in the late 1920s had put a ‘death grip on vaudeville’, as headliner Sophie Tucker put it. However, the economic collapse wiped away the last vestiges of this form of popular entertainment, and by 1932 two-thirds of the playhouses on Broadway were closed.29 Like his fellow performers, Mickey’s father, Joe Moran, cannot reverse the decline, and without reliable work, he cannot keep up the mortgage payments on the family home in Seaport, Long Island, bought during the boom years. One of the things that directly spurs the film’s children into action is the discovery that they have only a month or so before the banks foreclose and ‘out we go’ – a highly emotive prospect when, at the height of the crisis in 1933, about 1,000 home loans had been placed in foreclosure every day.30 The destructive effect on individuals is embodied in Joe’s despair at having wasted ‘the best years of a lifetime learning something’ he now ‘can’t cash in on enough to buy food’. Theatrical producer Harold Shumlin recalled seeing men of the theatre reduced to selling apples in Times Square – ‘[they] had lost their jobs, lost their homes, lost their families. And worse than anything else, lost belief in themselves’.31 This is certainly true of Joe, who feels he has been ‘tossed in the ditch, [while] the parade goes on’, and bitterly comes to believe

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he ‘is through. We’re all through!’ When Mickey chastises his father for having given up, Joe lashes out in frustration and strikes his son across the face – emblematic of the ‘tensions’ that ‘swirled in a family world turned upside down’ when many men could ‘no longer perform their customary role as the family breadwinner’.32 With so many male breadwinners thrown out of work, sociologists expressed concern that the Great Depression had generated a psychological crisis among men. Babes in Arms depicts just such a crisis, and for a moment even leads us to think that Joe may have abandoned his family, in line with the ‘rising frequency of husbands deserting their wives and children’ when unemployment undermined their authority.33 Joe’s loss of income and self-respect directly threatens the security of his children, Mickey and Molly. With all the vaudevillian parents deemed ‘no longer capable of providing for their children’, the city’s Welfare Society determines that they need to be taken into care and sent to a ‘state work school’, and at his lowest ebb, Joe actually agrees that this might be the best solution, even if it breaks up the family.34 Even if this prospect is presented negatively, the Head of the Welfare Society, Miss Steele, is well motivated: ‘I’m not going to let innocent children be victims of society’, she tells Judge Black. ‘Their parents have no income, we don’t even know if those youngsters eat regularly. We know they stay away from school half the time; they’re undisciplined; they haven’t a chance in the world to learn an occupation that will support them’. This is a speech that encapsulates a range of real concerns about impoverished youth. Joe recognises that he cannot afford to pay for his children’s schooling, but Mickey admits to the judge that he had already ‘quit school’, peddling his songs to help support his family’s income. The spectre of delinquency is also present in the fact that Mickey is before the judge in the first place because he got into a fight and wrecked a local store. Even Joe fears that his son might become a ‘tramp’ (one of the transient youths that Thomas Minehan documented) if he does not learn a ‘real’ trade, or if something is not done to protect him. Miss Steele’s concern accords with much of the adult discourse about the ‘youth crisis’, particularly the fear that ‘the Depression was denying the essential education and training . . . that the younger generation would need if it was to lead America in the future’.35 The situation in Babes in Arms also exacerbates a generational divide, especially when Joe conceives of an ‘old timers’ tour in an

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effort to revive the fortunes of the vaudevillians, but provokes the anger of the young by refusing to involve them. Mickey starts to see his father as an out-of-touch ‘has-been’, whereas youth has its finger on the public pulse. It is, however, the counter-anxiety about America’s youth being compelled to ‘grow up fast’ that dominates the film.36 An early scene in which Mickey and Patsy (Judy Garland’s character) reveal that they feel the pressure to ‘make a lotta dough for our families’ reflects the findings of social studies that children were assuming ‘more adult-like roles in family management’ as the Great Depression eroded parental authority.37 With parent-child relations orthodoxy turned on its head by hard times, the pair dream of making enough money so that ‘our folks can take it easy’ and ‘we’ll worry about the bills’. Many children were indeed called upon to contribute to meagre family incomes by finding some form of work. As Robert Cohen observes in his analysis of letters written by children to Eleanor Roosevelt, the consequence was that many of the era’s youngsters seemed prematurely ‘adultlike’ and ‘distant’ from the ‘play and frivolity we associate with youth’. Voicing this sense of loss, one teenage girl wrote to the First Lady that she had ‘been denied the good times’ of a protected childhood. ‘When I reached the age of ten’, she dejectedly commented, ‘I was told that my playing days were over, and they were’.38 Like Eleanor Roosevelt, the film’s Judge Black believes that it is ‘not fair for you youngsters to be carrying grownup burdens’. Yet with the future security of many families dependent on the success of the show, those heavy burdens remain unrelieved. The potentially damaging consequences of being forced to ‘grow up fast’ are also highlighted in the characterisation of ‘Baby Rose’, a motion-picture child star apparently patterned on Shirley Temple. Having lived a ‘completely adult life’ due to her ‘out-of-proportion success’ at a very early age, she now approaches everything with a ‘veneer of false sophistication’ that alienates her peers.39 Moreover, she parallels Joe Moran in her determination to make a ‘comeback’ and refuses to ‘let them tell me that I’m through’, suggesting how she already possesses the mental outlook that is crippling the older generation. By giving expression to all of these anxieties in his over-the-top production of the title song, in which the youth of Seaport take to the street, Busby Berkeley makes audiences feel the high passions that young people’s fears and frustrations could generate.40 The authority of the older generation who ‘think they must direct us’ is

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expressly rejected (the chorus adamant that their ‘oppressors’ have ‘Got no chance!’). The theme of youth growing up fast is particularly pronounced. The lyrics of ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ are changed to ‘Babes in Arms Are Growing Up’. The throwing of yellow baskets and mulberry bush branches symbolise rejection of nursery rhymes (‘Itisket, Itasket, who wants a yellow basket?’ sing a bunch of rebellious girls). ‘Play day is done!’, yells Patsy, embracing this prospect far more enthusiastically than the young girl who had written to Eleanor Roosevelt. Indeed, this transition to adulthood is startlingly militant. With the title of ‘Babes in Arms’, lyricist Lorenz Hart conjured images both of infants being held by their mothers and of children carrying guns. When the youngsters themselves reject the label in favour of ‘Babes in Armour’, it is the latter association that is reinforced.41 The filmmakers’ decision to equip the children with blazing torches makes the ‘rising war cry’ much more brazen than it had been on stage. With the resources to cast over 200 children, Berkeley could create an even more intimidating ‘army’ – very much like the ‘army of boys on the loose’, ‘impatient of any attempt to restrict their freedoms’, whom some adult commentators feared ‘mayhap be our retribution’.42 When the juvenile leader, Don (Douglas McPhail), decries the way that adults ‘treat us like they thought we were a menace to the nation’, Berkeley’s imagery does little to suggest they are not. In fact, the way in which Berkeley staged ‘Babes in Arms’ invoked one of the national nightmares of the 1930s – the fear that if youth did not become ‘integrated’ into mainstream American society and if their Great Depression-bred discontent was not defused, then there was ‘power enough in this group for a revolution’.43 ‘If we neglect them, if we fail to make them a part of our social and economic life’, warned Charles Taussig, the chair of the National Youth Administration, ‘we need not be surprised if they blast from our feet the very foundations of our society’.44 Such acute apprehension was informed by the shock of seeing just how popular anti-democratic ideas had become among the disaffected young people of Europe. Offering ‘psychological status, certainty and power’ to Germany’s alienated youth, the Nazis had exploited their resentments with the rallying cry of ‘Make Way, You Old Ones’, to attract more than 2 million members by the end of 1933, rising to over 5 million by 1936.45 Many American observers, both within and outside government, were hugely anxious that it was ‘upon the backs of disillusioned young people that strides towards dictatorship’ had been made.46

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‘The German situation is ever before us’, wrote Maxine Davis in her 1936 account of The Lost Generation, a concern that Babes in Arms clearly shares.47 In the main departure from the way in which the title number was staged in Rodgers and Hart’s original, it shows Don whipping the crowd into a frenzy, demanding to know, ‘What do we cheer for? What are we here for? What do we die for? Why do we mourn?’, and deliberately underscored this demagogic oration with Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. Script directions specifically identified that it should have ‘the dramatic qualities of a scene from a Wagnerian opera’, reinforcing parallels between Berkeley’s images of torch-wielding youngsters and Riefenstahl’s depictions of Hitler’s supporters in Nuremberg in The Triumph of the Will.48 There is even an uncanny echo of the Hitler Youth anthem, ‘Our Flag Flutters before Us’, (Vorwarts! Vorwarts!), in the mob’s exultant declaration, ‘It’s a new day, our flag’s unfurled/ Come on – let’s tell it to the world’.49 Thus Don fleetingly becomes the very kind of ‘self-appointed piper’ whom Davis and others feared might arise in America ‘to lead our youth to God knows where’.’50

the utopian solution of putting on a show Despite their connection to the perceived youth crisis of the 1930s, the MGM musicals under discussion were promoted first and foremost as family entertainment, of course. This was why they so quickly moved to contain even the most nightmarish of spectacles. In this, the backyard musicals again shared more common ground with the decade’s ‘social problem’ films than surface appearances would suggest. As critics have often noted, social problem films alerted audiences to the suffering of others and made them feel as if they were ‘bearing witness’ to important issues of the day, but they ‘rarely concluded with any form of radical social critique that might challenge the status quo’. The problems that on-screen characters experience – whether poverty, homelessness, unemployment, wrongful imprisonment or racial prejudice – are almost always individualised and thus ‘audience outrage is ultimately soothed with the promise of an easy private solution’ that does not necessitate any fundamental social change.51 These musicals about youth follow the same pattern; the key difference being that because the ‘easy solution’ always takes the form of ‘putting on a show’, they seem so much more unrealistic. Salvation for Cody College in Girl Crazy comes not from the NYA but from the gala rodeo celebration devised by Rooney’s character,

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Danny Churchill, to put Cody ‘on the map’ and generate enough new applications to stave off closure. Strike up the Band reassures potentially anxious adults that swing music could prevent, not cause, juvenile delinquency, when real-life bandleader Paul Whiteman delivers the clunker of a homily that if one could only teach that ‘little fellow on the street to blow a horn, he will never blow a safe!’ In Babes in Arms, the success of the final show put on by Mickey and his friends results in a new job for Joe Moran and the healing of the generational rift. This comes to pass when Broadway producer Harry Maddox hires him to help teach the ‘babes’ about true showmanship, thereby also restoring his self-esteem and belief in the value of his skills. The show-within-a-show is itself called ‘Babes in Arms’, but self-consciously shares none of the anomie or threatening tone of the earlier title number. In fact, the extravagant production number which launches Mickey’s show (and which closes the film) is a staunch riposte to all those who feared this was a lost generation, with the celebratory song of ‘God’s Country’ making it abundantly clear that the spirit of youth remained intact and loyal to the democratic values of the United States. Contemporary commentators had expressed contrary opinions on the subject of youth’s patriotism. Minehan’s conviction that the young hobos he encountered possessed ‘not a shred’ of it underlay his warning that ‘to them, their country means nothing as an entity’.52 Davis disagreed, yet feared young people’s naivety could lead to their patriotism being exploited by a home-grown Hitler.53 ‘God’s Country’ dismisses both concerns. The United States ‘as an entity’ clearly means a lot to the youthful chorus, who glorify their nation as a place where ‘grass is greener, timber taller, mountains bigger and troubles smaller’. However, their love of homeland is definitely not exploitable by would-be dictators, for they also celebrate the fact that they’ve ‘got no Duce, got no Fuhrer’, for America is a country where ‘freedom [is] greater’ and ‘ev’ryman is his own dictator’. Far from being a ‘menace’, the young Americans who before marched in anger now march with a very different attitude, which assures audiences they are fully ‘integrated’ into the democratic system. ‘Here we go a marching, a bunch of happy residents’, they sing. ‘Here we go a marching, the nation’s future presidents’. Although ‘utopian’ and exaggerated to almost camp effect, the transformation that occurs between ‘Babes in Arms’ and ‘God’s Country’ does possess roots in a reality that lyricist Yip Harburg, himself a socialist, appeared to recognise. ‘God’s Country’ revisions

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the earlier bonfire sequence, suggesting that these youngsters are less like the Hitler Youth and more akin to the substantial youth movement that had arisen in the United States itself in the second half of the decade. By the late 1930s, the American Youth Congress (AYC) claimed to represent 4.5 million young Americans, bringing together dozens of national organisations and local groups, from the National Intercollegiate Christian Council to the Young Communist League, from the Student League for Industrial Democracy to the Southern Negro Youth Congress.54 If it were not for the proto-fascist tones created by ‘Babes in Armour’, the parade led by Don, Mickey and Patsy in the movie would bear resemblance to the Youth Pilgrimage for Jobs and Education organised by the AYC in February 1937 to pressure Congress into expanding federal aid ‘to the millions of young Americans hurt by the Great Depression’.55 Marching 3,000- strong down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, waving banners and ‘chanting their demands’, those on the pilgrimage even sang like the ‘Babes’, setting their slogan ‘American youth is on the march for jobs and education’ to the tune of ‘Yankee Doodle’.56 The patriotism of ‘God’s Country’ is also in accord with the creed adopted in July 1939 as the ‘organizing document of the Youth Congress’, by which its young adherents pledged allegiance to ‘the American ideal which is the democratic way of life’.57 Indeed, Harburg’s lyrics seem well aware of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of American Youth’, which the AYC had issued symbolically on 4 July 1936 to dedicate its members to ‘work for the unity of my generation and [to] place that united strength at the service of my country’. As AYC members celebrated their nation’s natural resources (‘We look at this country of ours . . . We have roamed its roads; we have camped in its mountains and forests; we have smelled its rich earth . . . We love it dearly’), so too do the youth of ‘God’s Country’ love the Rocky Mountains, its tall timber, ‘its highways [and] its alleys’. Even the fields that the politicised youth of the AYC claimed to have ‘tended’ find their counterpart in the ‘fields of cotton, wheat and barley’ that Mickey Moran honours in song.58 The number also recognises the affinity between the AYC and the White House, especially Eleanor Roosevelt (this affinity lasted until 1940, when members of the Young Communist League grabbed power within the organisation). Outspoken in her defence of the student movement and with great empathy towards ‘the problems of 21,000,000 young people’, the First Lady often used her newspaper columns to counter adult anxieties with expressions of ‘great

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Figure 11.2

The finale of ‘God’s Country’ in Babes in Arms.

confidence in the wisdom, the idealism, and the honesty’ of American youth.59 Thus when Rooney and Garland perform affectionate impersonations of Franklin and Eleanor at the climax of ‘God’s Country’, it can be read as cultural affirmation of the relationship that had been forged under the New Deal. Acknowledging this is not to deny the cultural, political and social conservatism of these films, however. Culturally, they were fundamentally self-reflexive celebrations of popular entertainment itself, a characteristic that, Jane Feuer suggests, was practically ‘institutionalized at MGM’.60 On its simplest level, Babes in Arms sees Mickey extolling the ability of entertainers to provide relief from the world’s miseries, promising the judge that while he and his friends may only be ‘kids now’, someday ‘we’re gonna be the guys that make you laugh and cry, and maybe think life’s got a little stardust rubbed on its dirty little pan’. However, the so-called backyard musicals take the supposed transformative powers of entertainment to the extreme when the very act of ‘putting on a show’ boosts college enrolments, challenges prejudice against youth culture, solves youth unemployment, puts parents to work as well, and provides the disadvantaged

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children of a settlement house with the opportunities that hard times would have denied to them. According to ‘God’s Country’, popular entertainment was even a bulwark against fascism, as Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer and the Marx Brothers are all name-checked in the lyrics as if they were the reason why America had ‘got no Fuhrer’. The fact that these film stars were all under contract to MGM was hardly coincidental. This repeated emphasis on the power of popular culture in turn engenders the film’s political conservatism, made evident when diplomats and lobbyists approach Rooney-as-FDR and Garland-as-Eleanor at the culmination of ‘God’s Country’. Each raises pressing issues of international disputes, domestic relief, social security and discrimination, but the response they receive is simple: ‘Just dance!’ The entertainment imperative thus apparently negates consideration of any other solutions, even when the narratives possessed parallels to real-world efforts to address the difficulties caused by the Great Depression. In an outlook shared by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), for instance, Tommy’s answer to the lack of work opportunities in Babes on Broadway is to create them. ‘If there aren’t enough jobs, we gotta make a job!’ he asserts. In the context of its Broadway setting, this remark seems particularly pertinent to the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project, which sought to ‘make jobs’ for thousands of unemployed theatre professionals. However, it is always the case that youthful initiative and private benefactors, rather than government largesse, are what saves the day in these movies.61 Indeed, the state tends to be presented negatively. Despite the governor of Wyoming being a reasonable man in Girl Crazy, government regulations on enrolments are what really threaten Cody College’s future. In Babes in Arms, moreover, Miss Steele may express wellmeant concerns, but the casting of Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz) ensures that audiences are hostile to her determination to send the children to a ‘state work school’. Moreover, almost all references to the social consciousness of the real youth movement are neutered. In reality, the National Student League and the AYC had organised anti-war ‘student strikes’ in campuses across the country since 1934.62 In ‘God’s Country’, however, those political energies were reduced to an ineffectual rhyme, calling for ‘good neighbours’ to hang up ‘your sabres’. Moreover, aspects of the progressive liberalism of the nation’s politicised youth that featured in the original stage play of Babes in Arms were jettisoned in a particularly egregious manner. Rodgers and

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Hart had included a significant racial subplot wherein Lee Calhoun, the son of the production’s financial backer, refuses to allow two young African-American dancers to perform because he ‘can’t stand those little darkies’. However, Val (the character that became Mickey Moran) takes a stand closely resembling the AYC’s commitment to ‘eliminating racism, intolerance and segregation’. He condemns Lee’s ‘nasty prejudices’, punching the segregationist to the floor even though it costs him the show.63 Not only did the filmmakers cut this element entirely, but they replaced it with the spectacle of Rooney and Garland in blackface makeup performing an ‘old fashioned’ minstrel show.64 Youth’s real activism and hunger for social reform is railroaded even further when the finale depicts the arrayed mass of young Americans telling the audience not to complain, but to ‘count your blessings for this wond’rous land we live in’. Yet a counterweight to this conservatism does remain, inherent in the very formula of the backstage musical that Busby Berkeley had helped to perfect at the start of the decade. Berkeley could be perceived as reactionary in many ways. As Susan Sontag originally noted, the kaleidoscopic arrangements of chorus girls turned into abstract patterns of unfurling flowers and spinning stars, which characterised the ‘Berkeleyesque’ during the director’s time at Warner Bros, had much in common with contemporary fascist aesthetics.65 His skill in ‘orchestrating group masses in precise formations’ could seem ‘dehumanizing’ and quasi-fascist in its ‘regimentation and submersion of the individual into the group’.66 According to Berkeley biographer Jeffrey Spivak, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was an admirer of his work.67 However, Martin Rubin has argued that intrinsic to the Berkeleyesque effects was the balance he struck between the collective and the individual – for though the individual performer (such as Ruby Keeler in Dames, made in 1934) becomes part of the ‘mass’ for a while in the production numbers, she nevertheless ‘returns intact’ at the end, and ‘somehow redefined by the experience of having been dissolved into the group’. For Rubin, this ‘balancing act’ between individualistic freedoms and collective endeavour was more attuned to the New Deal than to fascism, with both the choreography and narratives of Berkeley’s musicals resonating with the New Deal’s populist idea that the crisis could be survived if everyone pulled together.68 As a variation on the backstage formula, the ‘Babes’ musicals similarly praise the collective endeavour of youth (in contrast to Shirley Temple’s films which stressed her individual resilience and talent). The narratives repeatedly stress this. In Strike up the Band, for instance,

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Jimmy is given the chance to pursue his own ambition of becoming a member of Whiteman’s jazz band. However, his mother ‘reminds him that to grab individual opportunity amounts to running out on the other fellows’ whose dreams are tied to them collectively winning a national radio contest.69 Berkeley’s staging emphatically reinforces this in presenting audiences with hundreds of young performers who only achieve their goals when they work as a group. Yet his choreography represented a notable departure from his previous style. In the ‘Babes in Arms’ number, Berkeley practically rejects the formal and rigid designs of masses directed with military precision that associated his earlier work with that of Leni Riefenstahl. Despite the references to being ‘on the march’, his representation of rampaging youth is far more anarchic than regimented, almost as if suggesting that this is what fascism really looked like. Rather than submerging individuals into the collective, ‘God’s Country’ presents us with a far more American vision of the collective, as the flag-waving makes plain. The number still features elements which are obviously ‘Berkeleyesque’: the monumental scale is there in a set that replicated the United States Capitol building, and the director’s trademark of girls moving in flowing formations is also present. However, the girls are no longer abstracted into impersonal patterns, and the most notable ‘effect’ in which they are put sees them sitting in unison on the steps of the Capitol, tuning their radios to one of Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats. One moment of explicit regimentation occurs, but the nine boys who march down the steps are parodies of ‘babes in arms’ – dressed in bearskin hats and wielding batons, they are more than toddlers still wearing their diapers. Berkeley subverts himself further when one of the boys fails to follow the choreography and forgets the direction in which he is supposed to head. The star status of Rooney and Garland also ensures that their individual performances are not fully absorbed into the group, but even the ‘mass’ of young performers is far more individualised than the Berkeleyesque had previously allowed. In fact, twenty youngsters each step out of the chorus to deliver individual lines, thus producing something that feels much more ‘democratic’ than audiences might have expected from Berkeley in celebrating the collective as a ‘community’ rather than a ‘mass’. Contemporary reviewers did observe that one of the reasons youthful audiences ‘flocked’ to see these four musicals was that, no matter how ‘slick’ the stories, they nevertheless possessed ‘some real basis, some relationship to the lives’ of America’s ‘young people’.70 With ‘utopian solutions’ to real issues being dependent on the success

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of the shows the kids put on, however, the one aspect of the youth crisis that these films could not ‘slickly’ resolve was the anxiety about children and adolescents growing up too fast. On the contrary, the films seemed to increase the pressure (just as MGM’s expectations overwhelmed Garland in reality). Babes in Arms ties the success of Mickey’s production to far more than basic financial security, when Maddox insists that they need to pull it off in order to inspire ‘every kid in America who thinks he hasn’t a chance. Every kid whom a lot of wiseacres are telling that there isn’t an American Dream anymore’. Thus, on the shoulders of the young characters is placed responsibility for the revival of the American Dream itself. Of course, Hollywood’s happy endings ensured that despite all obstacles the shows were always a success. Rather than alleviating the pressure on youth, this outcome implicitly assured adult audiences that America’s youth was indeed able to recognise that their responsibilities extended beyond self-gain and that they would make good through collective action. This was the idealised vision that the Roosevelt administration sought to nurture – of once-alienated youth who, if given the support and opportunities that the Great Depression appeared to threaten, would one day be ‘in a position to exert a leadership for democracy that otherwise would have been impossible’.71 At the same time, the inherent virtue of the MGM youth musical format was that these children were shown ‘at play’, singing and dancing as they took on those responsibilities. This offered the ultimate reassurance that the nation’s young were still capable of having fun as well, despite the ‘spirit testing dilemmas and sacrifices’ of the Depression decade.72

notes 1. Descriptive details taken from ‘Introduction for the Babes in Arms number’ by Roger Edens, 13 June 1939, in Babes in Arms, Turner/MGM Script Collection, 173-f. B-56, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (MHL-AMPAS). 2. Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York: Norton, 2010), 235. 3. Quoted in George Custen, Twentieth Century’s Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 199. See also David Eldridge, American Culture in the 1930s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 61–5. 4. Thomas Minehan, Boy and Girl Tramps of America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1934).

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5. Kriste Lindenmeyer, The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2005), 176; Robert Cohen, ‘Great Depression and the New Deal’, in Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society (New York: Macmillan, 2004), online edition at http://www.faqs.org/childhood/ Fa-Gr/Great-Depression-and-New-Deal.html. 6. Lindenmeyer, Greatest Generation, 82. 7. Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 280. 8. Adele Rogers St Johns, Some Are Born Great (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 46. 9. Berkeley directed the first three, but was in charge of only the finale of Girl Crazy after difficulties working with Garland and a dramatic falling out with Roger Edens. See Jeffrey Spivak, Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 195–6. 10. Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (London: Faber, 1998), 265. 11. Data from the Eddie Mannix Ledger of MGM Finances, reprinted in ‘Appendix’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 12.3 (1992), 9–10. 12. Martin Rubin, Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 144. 13. Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (London: Macmillan, 1982) includes discussion of the ‘Opera vs Swing’ number of Babes in Arms. The use of blackface minstrelsy in Babes in Arms has been the subject of analysis in Arthur Knight, Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Steven Cohan, Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value and the MGM Musical (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Otherwise, most commentaries on Babes in Arms are dismissive, concerned primarily with how little of the original Rodgers and Hart stage musical remained in MGM’s adaptation which is described as being ‘filmed with typical backward Hollywood thinking’, in Thomas Hischak, Oxford Companion to the American Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 42. 14. ‘Temporary Complete Screenplay by William Ludwig’, 12 October 1942, Girl Crazy Turner/MGM Script Collection, 1023-f.G-281, MHL-AMPAS. 15. Robert Cohen (ed.), Dear Mrs Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 91. 16. Lindenmeyer, Greatest Generation, 123. 17. Russell Freedman, Children of the Great Depression (New York: Clarion Books, 2005), 31. 18. Cohen, Dear Mrs Roosevelt, 7. 19. Ibid., 9. 20. Paula Fass, ‘Children and the New Deal’, in Paula Fass and Mary Ann Mason (eds), Childhood in America (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 267. The NYA’s emphasis on providing work-study jobs that offered vocational training also resonates in Cody’s curriculum of practical skills in mining and agriculture, with students pursuing ambitions of become mining engineers or building bridges.

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21. Robert Cohen, When The Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement, 1929–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 189. 22. Lindenmeyer, Greatest Generation, 47. 23. Ibid., 109. 24. Ibid., 41–2. 25. Quoted in Neil Maher, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 29. 26. ‘Treatment of “Good News”’ by John Monks, Jr, and Fred Finklehoffe, 7 September 1939, Strike Up the Band, Turner/MGM Script Collection, 2820-f.S-2692, MHLAMPAS. 27. Lewis Erenberg, Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 37–8. 28. J. Frederick MacDonald, ‘Hot Jazz, The Jitterbug, and Misunderstanding: The Generation Gap in Swing, 1935–1945’, Popular Music and Society, 2.1 (1972), 43. 29. Sophie Tucker, Some of These Days (1945), quoted in John Kenrick, ‘A History of the Musical’, at http://www.musicals101.com/vaude4.htm; Eldridge, American Culture in the 1930s, 31. 30. William Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 53. 31. Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 381. 32. Cohen, Dear Mrs Roosevelt, 19. 33. Lindenmeyer, Greatest Generation, 29. 34. ‘Temporary complete screenplay by Jack McGowan’, 28 November 1938, Babes in Arms Turner/MGM Script Collection, 173-f.B-46, MHL-AMPAS. 35. Cohen, Dear Mrs Roosevelt, 7. 36. Freedman, Children of the Great Depression, 41. 37. Robert Cohen, ‘Great Depression and the New Deal’, at http://www.faqs.org/ childhood/Fa-Gr/Great-Depression-and-New-Deal.html. 38. Cohen, Dear Mrs Roosevelt, 20. 39. Character notes in ‘Complete OK screenplay by John Meehan, March 23, 1939 through June 7’, Babes in Arms Turner/MGM Script Collection, 173-f.B-54, AMPAS. 40. For discussion of the original stage production of Babes in Arms, see Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 66. 41. For more on Hart’s wordplay, see Most, Making Americans, 94. 42. Survey Graphic of September 1933, quoted in Lindenmeyer, Greatest Generation, 93; Hilda Worthington Smith, quoted in Richard E. Reiman, The New Deal and American Youth (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 81; Maxine Davis, The Lost Generation: A Portrait of American Youth Today (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 371. 43. John Lang, quoted in Reiman, The New Deal and American Youth, 104.

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44. Reiman, The New Deal and American Youth, 131. 45. Michael Kater, Hitler Youth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 10. 46. Thomas Neblett, president of the National Student Federation, quoted in Reiman, The New Deal and American Youth, 136. 47. Davis, The Lost Generation, 365. 48. ‘Introduction for the Babes in Arms number, June 13, 1939’, Babes in Arms, Turner/MGM Script Collection, 173-f.B-56, MHL-AMPAS. 49. For use of the Hitler Youth’s marching song in contemporary Nazi propaganda, see Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 160. 50. Davis, The Lost Generation, 371. 51. Amanda Ann Klein, ‘Realism, Censorship and the Social Promise of Dead End’, in William Bray and R. Barton Palmer (eds), Modern American Drama on Screen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 10–11. See also Charles Mayland, ‘The Social Problem Film’, in Wes Ghering (ed.), Handbook of American Film Genres (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988), 306–7. 52. Minehan, Boy and Girl Tramps, 165. 53. Davis, The Lost Generation, 370. 54. Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young, 189–90. 55. Ibid., 189. 56. Ibid., 188, 235. 57. Ibid., 227. The text of the creed is reproduced in a Survey Graphic article entitled ‘Youth Finds Its Own Answers’, accessible at http://newdeal.feri.org/ survey/39b11.htm. 58. Robert Cohen has made available a copy of this Declaration at http://newdeal.feri. org/texts/757.htm. 59. Quoted in Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young, 229. 60. Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 50. 61. Harry Hopkins saw the New Deal’s support for youth as essential in permitting ‘financially embarrassed young men and women to develop their talents’. The children of Seaport need precisely that support, but receive it in Babes in Arms first from Judge Black, who buys tickets, and then from Maddox who enables them to finally stage their show. 62. See chapter 4 of Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young. 63. ‘Synopsis of Babes in Arms [stage production] reviewed by Sidney Phillips, April 15, 1937, Babes in Arms, Turner/MGM Script Collection, 173-f.B-39, MHLAMPAS; Most, Making Americans, 85. 64. Their ‘blacking up’ to perform was repeated in the finale of Babes on Broadway. 65. Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, New York Review of Books, 6 February 1975. 66. Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark, 239–40. 67. Spivak, Buzz, 147. 68. Martin Rubin, ‘The Crowd, the Collective, and the Chorus: Busby Berkeley and the New Deal’, in John Belton (ed.), Movies and Mass Culture (New York: Continuum, 1996), 78.

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69. This particular point was noted in the censorship file on Strike up the Band in the Motion Picture Association of America, Production Code Administration Records Collection, MHL-AMPAS. 70. Review of Strike up the Band, Los Angeles Times, 14 October 1940, 10. 71. Harry Hopkins, quoted in Reiman, The New Deal and American Youth, 74. 72. Review of Babes on Broadway, Variety, 3 December 1941.

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chapter 12

Chaplin’s Modern Times and the Great Depression: The Reception of the Film in the US, France and Britain Melvyn Stokes

C

harlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (United Artists), released in the United States in 1936, was the only film dealing in a direct way with the impact of the Great Depression to have emerged from within the Hollywood system and to have been widely viewed by popular audiences during the mid-1930s. It made plain that many people in America were poor, unemployed and hungry, and that there were major inequalities in society in general. It confronted the effects of the Depression in a way unique at the time for its realism. As social critic Kyle Crichton, the pseudonym of left-wing writer Robert Forsythe, commented in the New Masses on the film’s release: I came away stunned at the thought that such a film had been made and was being distributed. It’s what we have dreamed about and never really expected to see . . . To anyone who has studied the set-up, financial and ideological, of Hollywood, Modern Times is not so much a fine motion picture as an historical event.1 In this chapter I analyse how Modern Times was received by critics in the United States, Britain and France. The political situations of the three countries were very different of course when the film was released in 1936: in the United States, a liberal president in the person

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Poster for Modern Times (United Artists, 1936).

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of Franklin D. Roosevelt was coming up for re-election; in the United Kingdom, a National Government under Stanley Baldwin relied on the Conservative Party for the bulk of its support; and France was about to head in a leftward direction with the election of its first ‘Popular Front’ government. But all of them were experiencing the effects of the Great Depression, and what makes looking at the differences (and sometimes parallels) in the film’s reception easier is that − unusually for a Chaplin film − it came out in all three countries at much the same time. It was first shown in New York on 5 February 1936, in London on 11 February, and in Paris on 13 March.

the us reception Among American critics generally, reviewers split into conservatives or left-wingers. Conservatives denied that the film had political implications, minimised the extent of such implications, or simply declined to discuss them. Kate Cameron of the New York Daily News typified membership of the first group. ‘It had been hinted’, she wrote, that Chaplin had gone serious on us and that he had a message of serious social import to deliver to the world in Modern Times. No such thing has happened, thank goodness . . . There is nothing of real significance in Chaplin’s work except his earnest desire, and his great ability, to entertain.2 Among the minimisers, Frank S. Nugent of the New York Times commented, Rumour said that Modern Times was preoccupied with social themes, that Chaplin − being something of a liberal himself − had decided to dramatize the class struggle, that no less an authority than Shumyatsky, head of the Soviet film industry, had counseled him about the ending and that Chaplin, accepting that advice, had made significant changes . . . We should prefer to describe Modern Times as the story of the little clown, temporarily caught up in the cogs of an industry geared to mass production, spun through a three-ring circus and out into a world as remote from industrial and class problems as a comedy can make it.3 Similarly, Otis Ferguson in the New Republic argued that Chaplin had confused the issue with shots such as the introduction to the

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film, claiming Modern Times as ‘a story of industry, of individual enterprise − humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness’. In reality, Ferguson insisted, ‘Chaplin is a comedian; he may start off with an idea, but almost directly he is back to type again, the happy hobo and blithe unregenerate, a little sad, a little droll’.4 The decliners included Harrison’s Reports and Variety. Harrison’s Reports, a cinema trade publication, simply observed that the film gave Chaplin’s tramp persona a modern background, and reported without any comment the fact that ‘he suffers a nervous breakdown owing to the mechanical factory work that he does’. ‘Abel’ [a pseudonym] in Variety noted, ‘Whatever sociological meanings some will elect to read into Modern Times, there’s no denying that as a cinematic entertainment it’s wholesomely funny’.5 Left-wing reviewers of the film also seemed to divide into three groups: those who defended it as a radical critique of society, but felt the film was not focused enough in its form or content; those who liked Chaplin’s attempted social critique, but felt in ideological terms he should have gone further; and those who appreciated that, as a Hollywood filmmaker, Chaplin had already gone about as far as he could. Exemplifying the first group, Richard Watts, Jr remarked in the New York Herald Tribune, ‘The people I disagree with most heartily are those who insist that Modern Times is merely rough-and-ready farce and that we who see a certain sociological interest and significance in some of it are bleak fellows who insist on seeking sermons in stones’. Despite conceding that ‘its suggestion of ideas is intermittent and rather vague’, he insisted that ‘they are definitely Left Wing in their sympathy and interest’.6 Among the second group, Charmion von Wiegand of New Theater magazine praised Chaplin for dealing ‘with the fundamental problems of our times’ on screen but argued that he could not do so thoroughly enough because his main character was ‘still the optimistic, lovable Charlie − the clown’. Wiegand was grateful that Chaplin had made his work more socially realistic, but wished he had been more explicit in his radical critique of society.7 A few weeks later, in an article in the Partisan Review, Edward Newhouse articulated the ideas of the third group in responding specifically to Wiegand’s comments. For Chaplin to become a real revolutionary, he asserted, would not only be fine but miraculous, and I don’t think he will ever make it . . . Chaplin has had his chances to learn about the revolution and there is no evidence he took much advantage of

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them. For all that, we must look at Modern Times as something that came out of Hollywood. That is what makes Chaplin great and his picture a tremendous achievement.8 A major problem with Modern Times is that it is not a simple, uncomplicated text in political terms. There are moments when Charlie seems to share bourgeois values. He sits in prison reading a newspaper, with headlines such as ‘Strikes and Riots: Breadlines Broken by Unruly Mobs’, and shakes his head in disapproval. The house Charlie and the gamin[e]9 dream about is really very similar to the one he parodies, with the husband and wife kissing outside as the man goes off to work. The final intertitle of the film, as the two set out on the road together at the end, is pure Horatio Alger: ‘Buck up − never say die. We’ll get along’. Charlie is not really a revolutionary: he goes to prison because he politely picks up a red flag that has fallen to the ground, with the result that the police think he is the leader of the demonstration. Charlie is also deeply respectful to authority: he foils, however inadvertently, a prison revolt. There is also, as Charles J. Maland remarks, ‘subtle criticism of unions throughout the film, particularly when a strike is called immediately after a factory has reopened and Charlie has obtained a job that would enable him and the gamin[e] to have some means of support’.10 On the other hand, as Robert Forsythe pointed out: For the first time an American film was daring to challenge the superiority of an industrial civilization based on the creed of men who sit at flat-topped desks and press buttons demanding more and more speed from tortured employees. There were cops beating demonstrators and shooting down the unemployed (specifically the father of the waif who is later picked up by Chaplin), there is a belt-line which operates at such a pace that men go insane, there is the heart-breaking scene of the helpless couple trying to squeeze out happiness in a little home of their own (a shack in a Hooverville).11

reception in britain When we come to look at the film’s reception in Europe, of course, there were no real Hoovervilles although there were the issues created by mass unemployment, a growing trend toward mass production, and a number of industrial strikes. Almost all British critics, unlike

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their counterparts in the United States, understood that Modern Times was both comedy and social satire at the same time. The only reviewer who apparently did not see the film as a satirical critique of society was Seton Margrave of the Daily Mail. ‘The foreword announcing the theme as “Humanity crusading in search of happiness”’, Margrave insisted, ‘need deceive no one. In no time at all the film settles down to its job of being a smashing comedy’.12 Critics of other newspapers, while recognising that the film was a satire, assessed it differently. Hannen Swaffer in the left-leaning Daily Herald thought the satire indicted the organisation of modern society (though he also rather curiously pointed out that the owner of the factory where Charlie works was as much a victim as Charlie himself).13 The Times, equally oddly since it was an Establishment newspaper, described the film as ‘a satire on modern civilisation’ that was ‘not determined enough’.14 Campbell Dixon, in the Daily Telegraph, declared that the first third of the picture, ‘which . . . satirises our mechanisation of thought and industry’, was ‘simply superb’.15 Ian Coster in the London Evening Standard considered it ‘not a vicious biting satire’ but nonetheless ‘a protest against factories where men are forced to become machines, against an age of plenty in which children starve, against unemployment’.16 The critic of the Sunday Express thought it an ‘unforced, never vicious satire which lacerates what it touches all the more because it does so with a laugh’.17 A. T. Borthwick in the News Chronicle, less convinced, declared the comedy a success, but cautiously observed, ‘Whether his satire is as deep as he evidently intended, you will decide for yourselves’.18 The understanding that Modern Times was a satire went all the way across the political spectrum. Curiously, liking or disliking that satire was not something that seemed to be related to the political stance taken by particular newspapers. As noted, the Times critic believed it should have gone further while the reviewer of the leftwing Reynolds’s Illustrated News thought ‘the sociological satire . . . too extravagant to hit the mark’ (ironically an article in the very same issue of this newspaper pointed out that British girls in the garment industry were being subjected to even worse production-line conditions than Chaplin’s Tramp, with many suffering hysterics and nervous breakdowns as a result of the pressure).19 Almost immediately, newspapers did begin to give a political resonance to Chaplin’s picture, but this was mainly through cartoons rather than film reviews. The Evening Standard, for example, pictured ‘The Other Fellow with a Funny Moustache’ (Adolf Hitler) operating machines like those in

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Figure 12.2 The Little Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) versus the machine in Modern Times.

the Modern Times factory, but the ones in the cartoon are mass-producing armaments. The Daily Mail used the moment in the second factory sequence of Modern Times where the machinery breaks down to emphasise the futility of League of Nations sanctions against Italy over Abyssinia.20 Of the British reviews, three stand out for their analysis of Modern Times: those by Caroline Lejeune in The Observer,21 Sydney W. Carroll in The Sunday Times,22 and J. L. S. in the Daily Worker.23 Lejeune hated the film. ‘Charlie’, she wrote, has made, deliberately, a picture of beliefs. They are, I am afraid, rather chaotic beliefs, their thesis a bit muddled, but they are, so far as they go, unquestionably honest . . . Chaplin, who comes from the people, and has now plenty of time and money to think about the people, has taken the people’s cause emphatically and deliberately in hand.

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But, to Lejeune, the film loses wit by the very zeal with which it strains towards humanity. Charlie, the Clown, was in his way the symbol and consoler of the people; Chaplin, the reformer, has lost touch with the common people, and produced what is little more than a gallant but uncomprehending blunder on the left. In essence, Lejeune, writing in what was then an independent Tory paper, criticised Chaplin for making his Tramp a polemical figure, and dismissed this as a mistake that did the political left itself no good. Where Lejeune was censorious, actor, drama critic and theatre manager Sydney W. Carroll, reviewing Modern Times for The Sunday Times, was enthusiastic, highly subjective and even emotional in describing his response to the movie. Chaplin’s film, he wrote, had stirred me to hysterical, irresistible, ridiculous laughter. It had also made my blood boil with indignation. It had choked me to sobs. Here is a film that makes entertainment out of the under-dog. It forces hilarity from the suffering and endurance of the masses. It extracts laughter from poverty, from starvation, from children driven by want to theft. It mixes buffoonery with mind-stifling mechanical routine, and marries insanity to clowning. In making Modern Times Chaplin has achieved something much more than a comic film; he has made a stern arraignment of our so-called civilisation. Carroll was clearly uncertain about how to respond to the film in personal terms. He recalled laughing at everything ‘and felt ashamed of myself the moment after’. In the end, he came up with the suggestion that ‘all the revenue that will accrue from it should be devoted to the relief of the poor’. Of course, while Chaplin may have been moving to the left when he made Modern Times, he was still a filmmaker working for profit − and not, as Carroll proposed, for charity. Perhaps the most interesting review of all was in the communist Daily Worker. J. L. S. thought the movie took Chaplin ‘to new heights as a clown’ but it was also ‘a revealing document of Chaplin the man − the millionaire who, alone among the celluloid gods in their Hollywood ivory towers, has kept at least one foot on the ground and retained some contact with the class from which he sprung’. Yet J. L. S. took Chaplin to task for not seeing the logic of his growing critique of capitalism,

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symbolised by the automatic feeding machine that gets out of hand. Chaplin’s inspiration, he declared, stops short because . . . though he is conscious of the sufferings of less fortunate humanity, [he] dares not do more than suggest a militant message. He gives no hint of realising the potential nobility of labour under an intelligently run industrial system. That ‘intelligently run industrial system’, of course, was communism. One of the great ironies of J. L. S.’s review was that, the day before, The Daily Worker had hailed 1936 as the beginning of Stakhanov’s year in the Soviet Union.24 With his immense and fabled productivity, of course, Stakhanov the miner and the Soviet workers obliged to follow his example were just as oppressed by the industrial system as Chaplin’s Tramp, always under pressure to labour harder and faster.25 With the exception of the Daily Worker, the critics in the main British newspapers do not seem to have adopted a straightforward political line in response to Chaplin’s film. It may be that critics’ reception of Modern Times was slightly skewed by the fact that Chaplin, of course, was British, although a long-time resident of the United States. But it is still relatively striking that his satire on industrial life during the Depression won plaudits from both sides of the political spectrum, even if it does not seem to have had any connection with British politics in the broader sense. The French experience was rather different, however.

reception in france From the moment his early films arrived in Paris in the grim first winter of World War I, the French had taken Chaplin to their hearts. ‘Charlot’ [Little Charlie] as he was affectionately known in France had become an iconic symbol. Newspapers and the cinema trade press reported endless news items about him, many exaggerated, others entirely fictional. ‘There are few men’, wrote Henri Coutant of Ciné-Journal, ‘about whom has been published so contradictory information as on Charlot’.26 Those contradictions would continue for many years. In 1921, when Chaplin visited France for the first time as a major international star, they provided the basis for a dispute over his political loyalties. So great was Chaplin’s reputation that attempts were made by French newspapers to claim him

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as a supporter of their own political position. On 19 September 1921, the increasingly conservative Le Journal published what was almost certainly a fake ‘interview’ with Chaplin in which the latter supposedly criticised the Russian Bolsheviks.27 Two days later, L’Humanité, the official newspaper of the French Communist Party (PCF), claimed that Chaplin was actually a supporter of Bolshevism because he was a financial supporter of Max Eastman’s ‘communist journal’ in New York.28 In practice, it is far from clear that Chaplin had much interest in politics before the 1930s. During his world tour (January 1931 to June 1932) he showed considerable interest in the pump-priming ideas of Major C. H. Douglas as a means of ending the Great Depression. Douglas had made his name in the 1920s as an advocate of ‘Social Credit’ (a national dividend to distribute money equally to citizens above their earnings) and ‘Just Price’ (a price-adjustment mechanism to control inflation) as a means to bring purchasing power in line with production. After hearing Chaplin discuss his ideas in Berlin, Albert Einstein hailed the star as an ‘economist’ rather than a comedian. Chaplin returned to the US with a complex scheme for ending the Great Depression and soon became a supporter of the New Deal when it was launched by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.29 But in the same month as Roosevelt’s inauguration (March 1933), he began work on what would become Modern Times, his own commentary on the world of factory labour, unions, strikes and the unemployment created by the Depression. As Henri Jeanson commented in Le Canard Enchaîné after the premiere in Paris, ‘the war inspired . . . [Chaplin] to a sublime film: Shoulder Arms . . . The crisis, the unemployment, the misery, the injustice and the folly [of recent years] have inspired him to this realistic extravaganza: Modern Times’.30 The relevance of Modern Times to contemporary issues and problems appeared particularly acute in France because the film’s arrival there coincided with a major period of political unrest. A month after its Paris premiere, left-wing parties won a decisive victory in elections to the National Assembly and early June saw the inauguration of Léon Blum as the head of a Popular Front government that included socialists, communists and radicals. Of more direct relevance to Modern Times was the great wave of strikes that began in May and continued throughout the summer. A high proportion of these strikes, as Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly demonstrate, occurred in large mechanised factories involving assembly-line workers − exactly the kind of factory shown in Modern Times, where Charlot is driven insane by the regimentation and endless repetition of the same task.31 As Goffredo Fofi

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notes, the film itself was regarded by many workers in France as a ‘revolt’ and welcomed with ‘frenetic applause’.32 With its exposure of both the methods of American mass production and the consequences of the Great Depression, many French reviewers regarded Modern Times as supportive of the left. For Emile Vuillermoz of the newspaper Le Temps, indeed, it was a continuation of the stance adopted in earlier films. Chaplin had ‘only ever treated in his life just a single subject . . . Modern Times follows the logic of The Kid or The Circus . . . like the other films of Charlie Chaplin [it is] a silent indictment of the egotism of humanity and social injustice’.33 Le Matin observed that the film ‘shows . . . the tumultuous and hard life of the poor’.34 Jean Marguet of Le Petit Parisien hailed it as a satirical film that made people think much ‘more because of his jokes than many authors of so-called social dramas with their insipid and fine-sounding windbags’.35 In some left-wing circles, however, the film proved something of a disappointment. Charles Jouet, critic of the socialist newspaper Le Populaire, cautioned spectators not to anticipate ‘a series of profound or straightforwardly sociological inspirations’ and emphasised that ‘the problem of mechanization’ had only been superficially dealt with.36 Paul Gordeaux pointed out in L’Echo de Paris that even though ‘the Soviets have been able to welcome this work enthusiastically as a propaganda film, Modern Times has nothing subversive about it’.37 Other commentators pointed to the conservative aspects of the film noted above. The reviewer for the cinema trade journal La Cinématographie Française, for example, drew attention to the fact that when a revolt breaks out in the prison where he is detained, Charlot is ‘instinctively . . . on the side of law and order’ and, if only by chance, helps in the arrest of the ringleaders.38 There was also one imaginative attempt by right-winger François Vinneuil (the pseudonym of Lucien Rebatet, later a strong supporter of fascism and the Vichy regime) to appropriate Modern Times and turn it into a critique of Russian communism. Writing in the nationalistic L’Action Française, Vinneuil interpreted the film as ‘a satire . . . on a society enslaved by materialism, of which Soviet Russia represents the barbarous apogee’. When he picks up the red flag accidentally dropped by one of the demonstrators (the act that will lead to his incarceration) Charlot acted only as an unwilling dupe − like many real dupes, Vinneuil sarcastically commented, who had espoused communism. Most of all, he argued, the film protested against the takeover of human society by what he termed ‘social automatisms’, such as the regulated world of factory work. The society represented in Modern Times, Vinneuil

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insisted, was closer to that ‘of Stalin, of his five million informers and of comrade Stakhanov [the Soviet miner]’ than it was to that produced by Western capitalism.39 As in the United States and Britain, some critics chose primarily to discuss the film’s aesthetics. Raymond Lange of film magazine Pour Vous spoke for several when he compared Modern Times to a collection of individual hors d’oeuvres, delicious in themselves but with nothing to tie them together.40 Chaplin himself, though he saw nothing wrong with this, seems to have agreed. A few days before the release of the film in France, he set sail on a boat for Honolulu, with French polymath Jean Cocteau as a fellow-passenger. The diverse parts of Modern Times, he told Cocteau, ‘existed in their own right. I could show them separately, one by one, like my early one-reelers’.41 There was a strong sense of relief from many French critics that, five years after the release of his last film City Lights, Chaplin had returned largely unchanged. ‘The Charlot of the little comedies before the war has not grown old’, wrote René Lehman in L’Intransigeant, ‘. . . he is still . . . the eternal vagabond, the humble and tormented toy of fate, a poor little man delivered into the human jungle . . ., clumsy but inspired, a simpleton but devoid of hate’.42 Yet other reviewers thought it eccentric that Modern Times had not been made as a talking picture. ‘There is hardly a case more curious’, wrote Emile Vuillermoz,

than that of Charlie Chaplin, calmly refusing to take account of the technical revolutions of our studios and following his task as a silent film-maker with heroic indomitability. His latest film proves to us that he has abandoned none of the elements of . . . what we call ‘cinema before the war.’ We feel very clearly his willingness to die at his post defending a formula he has created.43 Vuillermoz was wrong, as it happened. Modern Times would be Chaplin’s final ‘silent’ picture. Moreover, as several critics pointed out, although Chaplin did not in fact speak in Modern Times, his voice was heard for the first time cinematographically, singing gibberish to what Le Figaro explained was ‘a song that is well known in France and which was all the rage here a few years ago: Je cherche après Titine [sung] by Léo Danide[r]ff’.44 Chaplin’s version, observed La Cinématographie Française, was composed of ‘words without sense, without coherence, idiotic to read, but so madly funny in the mouth’.45 French influence on Modern Times, as the most knowledgeable critics realised, was not confined to Chaplin’s nonsense song. The

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reviewer for La Cinématographie Française commented that Modern Times ‘bears, in two or three places, the light and sketchy influence of Réne Clair’.46 In reality, Chaplin’s debt to Clair’s 1931 filmic portrait of modern industrial culture, À Nous la Liberté, was, in the words of Pierre Billard, ‘more important, more explicit, more spectacular, [and] more varied’ than this.47 Many scenes in Modern Times − from the sequence of workers on an assembly line onwards48 − were clearly derived from Clair’s film of half a decade earlier. So obvious were the parallels that his production company, the Société Française des Films Sonores Tobis, claimed damages of 1.2 million francs in a plagiarism suit against Chaplin.49 Clair himself refused to support the suit: many of his own films had scenes that effectively plagiarised the work of Chaplin, whom he regarded as a genius. ‘I sold you the rights to À Nous la Liberté’, he advised Tobis, ‘and you have the right to protect your property. But I do not wish to have any part of it. The whole world of cinema has learned lessons from Chaplin. . . . I admire him very much and if he has been inspired by my film, I consider that a great honor for me’.50

conclusion In the early years of the Great Depression, argues Terry Christensen, Hollywood produced a series of movies focused on the economic situation that were ‘questioning and pessimistic, torn between group solidarity and strong leadership as possible solutions to the crisis of the Depression’.51 At Warner Bros, in particular, Darryl Zanuck was mainly responsible for producing a series of social exposés: of business ethics (The Match King, 1932), the exploitation of Southern sharecroppers (The Cabin in the Cotton, 1932), and the penal system in the South (I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 1932). By the middle years of the 1930s, however, the combination of the declining market appeal of such movies and the introduction of Joseph Breen’s Production Code Administration in 1934, the output of the movie industry had become much blander. Henceforth, according to Robert Sklar, ‘most of the important moneymaking pictures . . . had little to do with contemporary life’.52 Hollywood movies of the mid to late 1930s primarily offered ‘entertainment’ that promised escape from the problems of the Great Depression. ‘Nothing’, Thomas H. Pauly argues, ‘could have been further from the bread lines and the deprivation photographed by Dorothea Lange than the social comedies of Lubitsch, the slapstick of the Marx brothers, and the polished dance routines of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’.53

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It is against this kind of background that Modern Times was released. ‘What makes Modern Times decidedly different from Chaplin’s three previous films [The Gold Rush, 1925; The Circus, 1928; City Lights, 1931]’, notes Charles J. Maland, ‘are the political references and social realism that keep intruding into Charlie [the Little Tramp]’s world’.54 It was this confusing juxtaposition of comedy and the realities of the Great Depression (unemployment, Hoovervilles, social protests, strikes, poverty and hunger) that appears to have baffled American reviewers and encouraged them to react to the movie along broadly political lines. Conservative critics ignored, minimised or declined to discuss the social and economic aspects of the film. Writers who were more leftwing insisted that it offered a radical − if not particularly dominant or sustained − critique of American society during the Depression era, that it was constrained by its format as a comedy from going far enough, or that it was a courageous and original film that went as far as possible in challenging Hollywood conventions of the era. In Chaplin’s native Britain, almost all critics accepted that Modern Times was both a comedy and a social satire. With the exception of the communist Daily Worker, however, they did not adopt a straightforward political or ideological line. Some reviewers, indeed, did the opposite of what might have been expected in political terms: the critic of the left-leaning Reynolds’s Illustrated News thought the satire too extreme to be credible while that of the right-wing Times argued it had not gone far enough. The reviewers of the two heavyweight right-of-centre Sunday papers offered diametrically opposed views: Caroline Lejeune in The Observer dismissed it as a confused and confusing piece of left-wing propaganda, Sydney W. Carroll in The Sunday Times hailed it as a powerful indictment of modern society. In France, Modern Times appeared to have more direct relevance than it did in the US and UK since its release immediately preceded the election of a left-wing ‘Popular Front’ government and a period of sustained industrial action. French reviewers, themselves writing from different political perspectives, by and large saw the film as supportive of the left. Yet some left-wing writers − like their counterparts in the US and Britain − expressed disappointment that its critique was not taken much further. There was also an awareness on the part of some critics that the film appeared in places to endorse conservative values (and one ingenious right-wing reviewer endeavoured to appropriate it as a piece of anti-Stalinist propaganda). French critics generally welcomed the return of the Little Tramp for the first time in half a decade, but at least one (Vuillermoz) criticised Chaplin’s decision not to make the

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film as a talking picture, and others found it disjointed and episodic. Yet there was also a certain amount of pride expressed in the French origins of parts of the film: the music for Charlot’s nonsense song and the sequences critics recognised as ‘borrowed’ from À Nous la Liberté, René Clair’s earlier satire on modernisation and mass production. The differing reception of Modern Times in the three countries under review tends to reinforce scepticism as to whether Hollywood films were part of some uni-directional current of ‘Americanisation’. It supports the findings of an earlier volume coedited by the present author that audiences and critics outside the United States reacted to such films very much in the light of local circumstance and as a reflection of their own social, cultural and political identities and preoccupations.55 Modern Times was a complex transnational text. Made by an Englishman who had resided for more than two decades in Hollywood, it reflected ideas Chaplin had worked out during his world tour of 1931–2. Filmed after the establishment of the Production Code Administration in 1934, however, it satisfied Hollywood’s own self-regulatory system by including a number of contradictions and obfuscations – something little understood by French film critics, in particular. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that Chaplin’s ‘Little Tramp’, in what no one at the time realised would be his last film appearance, could be interpreted within differing national contexts as a victim of industrialisation and the Great Depression, as an (inadvertent) radical, as a defender of order, and as the ultimate survivor.

notes 1. Robert Forsythe, ‘Modern Times’, New Masses, 18 February 1936, reprinted in Stanley Kauffmann with Bruce Henstell, American Film Criticism: From the Beginnings to Citizen Kane (New York: Liveright, 1972), 330–1. 2. Quoted in Charles J. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 155. 3. Frank S. Nugent, ‘Heralding the Return, after an Undue Absence, of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times’, New York Times, 6 February 1936, in The New York Times Film Reviews 1913–1968, Vol. 2, 1932–1938 (New York: New York Times and Arno Press, 1970), n. p. 4. Otis Ferguson, ‘Modern Times’, New Republic, 19 February 1936, reprinted in Kauffmann with Henstell, American Film Criticism, 333. 5. ‘Modern Times with Charlie Chaplin’, 15 February 1936, in Harrison’s Reports and Film Reviews, 1935–1937, Vol. 6: A Movie World Reference Book (Hollywood, CA: Hollywood Film Archive, 1994), n. p.; Abel, ‘Modern Times’, 12 February 1936, in Variety Film Reviews, Vol. 5, 1934–1937 (New York and London: Garland, 1983), n. p. 6. Herald Tribune, 16 February 1936, quoted in Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, 155–6.

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7. Charmion von Wiegand, ‘Little Man, What Now?’ New Theater, 3 (March 1936), 36, cited in Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, 156. 8. Edward Newhouse, ‘Charlie’s Critics’, Partisan Review, 3 (March 1936), 26, cited in Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, 156. Robert Forsythe’s New Masses review, cited above at note 1, had elements of groups one and three. He argued that ‘Chaplin’s methods are too kindly for great satire’ while making critical social commentary through a film comedy was itself difficult: ‘You can’t be jocular about such things as starvation and unemployment’, he observed. Yet Forsythe also pointed out that ‘with the [Hollywood] distributive machinery in the hands of the most reactionary forces in the country there is no possibility of honesty dealing with current ideas’. See its reproduction in Kauffmann with Henstell, American Film Criticism, 329, 331. 9. In the film, Chaplin constantly referred to the role played by Paulette Goddard as ‘the gamin’. Gamin is the male form of the French term meaning a kid in the sense of child; the female form is gamine. 10. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, 154. 11. Forsythe, ‘Modern Times’, in Kauffmann with Henstell, American Film Criticism, 329. 12. Seton Margrave, ‘Fast and Furious Fun in Modern Times − Chaplin More Brilliant than Ever’, Daily Mail, 12 February 1936, 6. 13. Hannen Swaffer, ‘Chaplin’s New Film Makes You Laugh till You Think’, Daily Herald, 12 February 1936, 4. 14. ‘Mr Chaplin’s New Film’, The Times, 12 February 1936, 12. 15. Campbell Dixon, ‘New Triumph by Chaplin’, Daily Telegraph, 12 February 1936, 6. 16. Ian Coster, ‘Chaplin’s Satire on the Mechanical Age’, Evening Standard [London], 11 February 1936, 19. 17. ‘Modern Times’, Sunday Express, 16 February 1936, 20. 18. A. T. Borthwick, ‘Chaplin’s Voice Triumph’, News Chronicle, 12 February 1936, 3. 19. Hubert Waring, ‘Chaplin the Supreme Master’, Reynolds’s Illustrated News, 16 February 1936, 22; ‘“That Devil the Conveyer Belt” − Girls Collapse in Hysteria’, ibid., 9. 20. Low, ‘The Other Fellow with a Funny Moustache’ [cartoon], Evening Standard, 14 February 1936, 10; Poy, ‘Modern Times’, Daily Mail, 11 February 1936, 12. 21. C. A. Lejeune, ‘Blunder on the Left’, The Observer, 16 February 1936, 14. 22. Sydney W. Carroll, ‘Chaplin on the Stump − Man and Machine’, The Sunday Times, 16 February 1936, 6. 23. J. L. S., ‘“Modern Times”: Chaplin on a World Gone Mad’, Daily Worker, 12 February 1936, 1, 8. 24. R. F. Andrews, ‘In the Soviet Union Stakhanov’s Year Begins’, Daily Worker, 11 February 1936, 7. 25. The Stakhanovite movement, started during the second Soviet five-year plan in 1935, was a new stage of socialist competition that took its name from Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov, who had mined 102 tons of coal in less than six hours (fourteen times his quota) on 31 August 1935. In 1936 the Communist Party introduced Stakhanovite competitions within factories and plants to increase output in different industries. See Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov, Stalinism as a Way of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 161.

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26. H[enri] C[outant], ‘À propos de Charlot’, Ciné-Journal, 547, 7 February 1920, 17–18. This translation from French and all others, unless indicated otherwise, is my own. 27. Max Massot, ‘Charlot est à Paris − ses projets, ses impressions et ses idées’, Le Journal, 19 September 1921, 1. 28. ‘Charlot bolchevik’, L’Humanité, 21 September 1921, 1. 29. David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (London: Grafton, 1992), 456–8; Kenneth S. Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and His Times (London: Aurum, 2002), 347–8. 30. Henri Jeanson, ‘Les Temps Modernes − Silence! Voici Charlie Chaplin’, Le Canard Enchaîné, 18 March 1936, 1. 31. Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France 1830–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 127–8, 132, 136. 32. Goffredo Fofi, ‘The Cinema of the Popular Front in France (1934–38)’, Screen, 13, 4 (Winter 1972–3), 10–11. 33. Emile Vuillermoz, ‘Le Cinéma-Chronique − Les Temps Modernes’, Le Temps, 21 March 1936, 5. 34. ‘Demain, au théâtre Marigny − Modern Times’, Le Matin, 13 March 1936, 4. 35. Jean Marguet, ‘La Critique − Les Temps Modernes’, Le Petit Parisien, 21 March 1936, 6. 36. Charles Jouet, ‘Cinéma − Les Temps Modernes’, Le Populaire, 20 March 1936, 4. 37. Paul Gordeaux, ‘Le Cinéma − les Films de la Semaine − Temps Modernes’, L’Echo de Paris, 20 March 1936, 4. 38. X, ‘Les Temps Modernes − Tragi-comédie sonore’, La Cinématographie Française, 907, 21 March 1936, 12. 39. François Vinneuil, ‘Les Spectacles – L’Écran de la Semaine’, L’Action Française, 20 March 1936, 4. 40. Raymond Lange, ‘Charlot For Ever − Réflexions sur “Temps Modernes”’, Pour Vous, 383, 12 March 1936, 2. 41. Jean Cocteau, My Contemporaries, trans. and ed. by Margaret Crosland (Philadelphia: Chilton Book Company, 1968), 86. 42. René Lehman, ‘Cinéma − Les films nouveaux. Marigny. − Les Temps Modernes’, L’Intransigeant, 15 March 1936, 9. 43. Vuillermoz, ‘Le Cinéma – Chronique − Les Temps Modernes’. 44. ‘Le Cinéma: Les Films que nous verrons − À propos des Temps Modernes’, Le Figaro, 12 March 1936, 5. First released in 1917, the song had lyrics by Marcel Bertal, Louis Mauban and Henri Lemonnier. 45. ‘La Chanson de Charlie Chaplin en Temps Modernes’, La Cinématographie Française, 912, 25 April 1936, 20. 46. X, ‘Les Temps Modernes − Tragi-comédie sonore’. 47. Pierre Billard, Le mystère de René Clair (Paris: Plon, 1998), 185. 48. See Marguet, ‘La Critique − Les Temps Modernes’. 49. Billard, Le mystère René Clair, 187. Georges Sadoul suggests that this prosecution was ordered by Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels (Tobis was a subsidiary of the German studio Universumfilm Aktiengesellschaft (UFA). Sadoul, Vie de Charlot: Charles Spencer Chaplin, ses films et son temps (Paris: Lherminier, 1978), 118–21, 245.

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50. David Robinson, ‘Clair, Chaplin et l’affaire Les Temps Modernes/À Nous la Liberté’, in Noël Herpe and Emmanuelle Toulet (eds), René Clair ou le Cinéma à la lettre (Paris: Association Française de Recherche sur L’histoire du Cinéma, 2000), 194. 51. Terry Christensen, Reel Politics: American Political Movies from ‘Birth of a Nation’ to ‘Platoon’ (New York: Blackwell, 1987), 43. 52. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage, 1994), 189. 53. Thomas H. Pauly, ‘Gone With the Wind and The Grapes of Wrath as Hollywood Histories of the Depression’, Journal of Popular Film, 3 (Summer 1974), 204. 54. Maland, Chaplin and American Culture, 150. 55. Richard Maltby and Melvyn Stokes (eds), Hollywood Abroad: Audiences and Cultural Exchange (London: BFI Publishing, 2004).

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chapter 13

John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln: A Popular Front Hero for the Late 1930s Iwan Morgan

Y

oung Mr. Lincoln was the middle film in the informal American trilogy, also featuring Stagecoach and Drums along the Mohawk, that John Ford made in his personal annus mirabilis of 1939. It is only ‘a slight exaggeration’, biographer Joseph McBride comments, to say that this was the year in which the famed director ‘discovered America’.1 Stagecoach (United Artists), the first of the productions, is set on the post-Civil War western frontier, Young Mr. Lincoln in 1830s Illinois, and the last to be made, Drums along the Mohawk, in Revolutionary War-era upper New York state (both the latter were 20th Century-Fox productions). Their filming coincided with the high point of Ford’s identification with the Popular Front, whose ideals are evident in each one. Arguably the most interesting of the three in this regard is Young Mr. Lincoln for its treatment of an American icon as a common-man hero before his rise to greatness. This chapter assesses how the movie can be interpreted in relation to John Ford’s involvement with the Popular Front phase of Depression-era politics. Ford’s politics over the course of his life were, to say the least, transient, inconsistent and contradictory. A New Deal liberal and internationalist in the 1930s, he became to all intents and purposes a conservative nationalist in later life. This former devotee of FDR supported right-wing Republican Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, became a very public admirer of Richard Nixon

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(who presented him with the Medal of Freedom in 1973), and was a diehard supporter of the Vietnam War. Contrary to his leftist politics in the Depression decade, he was a founder member in 1944 of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a right-wing organisation that supplied information about suspected communists to investigative bodies during the Hollywood Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s (a period when he served as executive committee member). Paradoxically, Ford made some of his most racially progressive movies – Sergeant Rutledge (1960), Two Rode Together (1961), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964) – at a time when his political views were reaching their conservative peak.2 For some film historians, this underscored the importance of not viewing Ford’s American history films with their characteristically multi-layered nuances through the prism of his convoluted politics. In their assessment, Ford’s political contradictions and periodic violations of his best ideals were an important element in powering his creativity.3 Taken as a whole, Ford’s oeuvres on American history manifest the duality that informed his understanding of the past. No other Hollywood director believed so much in mythic America – the exceptional nation of democracy, liberty and equality – nor saw so clearly its deficiencies. In biographer Scott Eyman’s assessment, a good case can be made that as far as movies are concerned, America’s sense of itself largely derives from two filmmakers, Frank Capra and John Ford. Of this duo, he claims, ‘it was John Ford who told the truth’.4 Nevertheless, the consistent tension between myth and reality in Ford’s cinematic representation of the American past does not negate the distinctiveness imbued by Popular Front ideals in his Americana movies of 1939. The Great Depression awoke in the hitherto apolitical Ford his Irish heritage of Democratic party allegiance, labour militancy and rebellion. A New Deal enthusiast, he also played a leading role in efforts to organise the film industry to resist producer-imposed paycuts and secure improved conditions of employment as one of the twelve founders of the Screen Directors Guild at a meeting on 23 December 1935.5 In the late 1930s, however, his activism extended to participation in Popular Front bodies formed by a coalition of liberals, radicals and communists to defend the New Deal against resurgent conservatism at home and to oppose the rise of fascism abroad. The Spanish Civil War, in which his nephew Bob fought in the International Brigade, had a profound effect on Ford’s outlook. Though a Catholic, he broke with the church’s support for General

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Figure 13.1

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John Ford in 1935.

Franco’s fascist revolt in helping to found the Motion Pictures Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain. In July 1937, after meeting Ernest Hemingway when the writer came to Hollywood seeking financial support for the loyalists, Ford donated an ambulance to the cause. While disavowing communism as leading to despotism, he proclaimed shortly afterwards in a letter addressed to Bob Ford, ‘Politically I am a definite socialistic democrat – always left’. Early the following year, he became vice-president of the newly formed Motion Picture Democratic Committee, a Popular Front organisation that lobbied for civil rights and civil liberties legislation and supported left-liberal candidates for political office. Of all the leftoriented groups, however, Ford was most publically associated with the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. On 30 January 1938 he was one of several speakers addressing its rally, ‘The Nazi Menace in America’, called to mark the fifth anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s accession to the German chancellorship. At a time when public opinion was predominantly isolationist, Ford regarded war between the

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democracies and the fascist powers as inevitable and was keen to help America prepare for this. A Naval Reserve enlistee since 1934, he also assisted US Naval Intelligence in an unofficial capacity in 1939–41 by providing information on Japanese activities in Mexico gathered during his yachting trips down the Pacific coast.6 The Popular Front employed patriotic rhetoric as a means of strengthening the unity of its diverse coalition in support of fundamental democratic principles. Ford’s cinematic trilogy of 1939 clearly reflects this in using the cultural mythology of the American past to affirm the left-liberal public ideology of the present. Stagecoach can be seen as a New Deal movie in the sense that a socially disparate group of travellers form a democratic community to get through a crisis – in this case making it to safety in the face of marauding Apaches. The only exception to the ethos of unity is the crooked banker, Henry Gatewood, who serves as an allegory for contemporary Roosevelt-hating big-business Republicans. While declaiming the values of individualism, the need for business-friendly tax policies and limited government, he carries a valise containing a mining company’s payroll embezzled from his bank.7 Drums on the Mohawk similarly celebrates communal unity shown by frontier pioneers, both in helping each other build farms in the wilderness and forming a militia to defeat the Indian threat. In its case, the villain is a Tory agent seeking to drive them out of the American Eden, an obvious allegory to the present-day threat of fascism. The film ends with the new United States flag being raised above the settler fort to celebrate victory in the War of Independence and hailed by all its defenders regardless of class or race, all to the tune of ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’.8 Stagecoach was scripted by frequent Ford collaborator Dudley Nichols, another Popular Front supporter and someone deeply involved in Hollywood labour politics as president of the Screen Writers Guild in 1937-8.9 The other two movies were written by Lamar Trotti, a progressive-minded Southerner of strong moral conviction – Charlie Chaplin referred to him as having ‘warm sympathy for his fellow man’ – even if he was not someone so immersed in Popular Front politics in the manner of Ford and Nichols.10 Young Mr. Lincoln was not adapted from a short story (Stagecoach) or novel (Drums along the Mohawk). With the enthusiastic backing of 20th Century-Fox president Darryl F. Zanuck, Trotti drew on his own extensive historical knowledge to compose an original screenplay, rather than one based on a historical biography, to examine what he considered the real Lincoln at a particular time in his development.11

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Young Mr. Lincoln was a movie that consciously avoided focus on the mythologised Civil War president, manifest in the public memorialisation of the Lincoln Monument (consecrated in 1922) and the carved visage on Mount Rushmore (completed in 1937). It was also deliberately different from Robert Sherwood’s 1938 play, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, which was made into a RKO film directed by John Cromwell in 1940. There was a contradiction at the heart of both play and film: Sherwood insisted on sticking closely to known history, notably as presented in Carl Sandburg’s two-volume biography of Lincoln, but he consciously represented his protagonist as the nineteenth-century embodiment of Franklin D. Roosevelt. For this reason, his oeuvre fundamentally portrays a didactic Lincoln rather than the real one. The play did at least humanise its subject’s evolving personal story in some scenes, but actor Raymond Massey (who played Lincoln in the Broadway and Hollywood versions) was frustrated that the movie became more of ‘a documentary, a procession of episodes’.12 By contrast, film historian J. E. Smyth remarks, In abandoning the standard structure of the historical film, one which relegated filmmaking to the reproduction of written history with images, Young Mr Lincoln’s film-makers were not liberating film from history in order to promote a universal myth; they were examining the difference between the real, ‘historical’ Lincoln and the myth of American consciousness.13 The Lincoln of the Trotti-scripted Ford movie is quite different from the one hitherto portrayed on screen. There were two predominant motifs in previous cinematic representations stretching from the silent era into the first decade of sound. One emphasised Lincoln’s mercy, compassion and humanity amid the slaughter of the Civil War. Examples include one-reelers Abraham Lincoln’s Clemency (Pathé Films, 1910) and The Seventh Son (Vitagraph, 1912) and Of Human Hearts (MGM, 1938). Other films portrayed Lincoln as the voice of national reconciliation in the wake of sectional conflict. Examples include Lieutenant Grey of the Confederacy (Selig Polyscope, 1911), The Toll of War (Bison, 1913), and most significantly the D. W. Griffith films, The Birth of a Nation (David W. Griffith Corp., 1915) and Abraham Lincoln (United Artists, 1930). In the 1930s a third approach emerged that evoked Lincoln’s image or words as a means of expressing faith in the American democratic experiment during its worst crisis since the Civil War. As discussed by Anna Siomopoulos

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in her chapter for this volume, his presence is constantly invoked in Gregory La Cava’s paean to strong executive leadership as the solution to the Great Depression, Gabriel over the White House (MGM, 1933), while Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Columbia 1939) uses the Lincoln Monument as the symbol of the democratic spirit that inspires Senator Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) to challenge political corruption.14 A passionate Lincoln scholar, John Ford reserved a special place in his heart for the sixteenth president. Following their extended interviews in the 1960s, director Peter Bogdanovich commented that when he discussed Lincoln ‘there was such an extraordinary sense of intimacy in his tone . . . that somehow it was no longer a director speaking of a great President, but a man talking about his friend’. 15 This outlook doubtless derived in large part from his Irish-American upbringing as John Feeney in Portland, Maine. Public memorialisation of the Civil War was a formative part of his boyhood and youth in the 1890s and early years of the new century. For Irish-Americans, once the targets of antebellum nativism, there was also a sense that their kinsmen’s service in the conflict had sealed the entire group’s citizenship rights. Many viewed Lincoln as a fellow martyr alongside those killed while fighting for the Union in the famed Irish Brigade at bloody battles like Fredericksburg and Gettysburg.16 In 1914 the twenty-year old John Feeney had gone out looking for work opportunities in Hollywood where older brother Frank had already established himself as an actor and director under the name of Francis Ford. Adopting Frank’s new surname to improve his own employment prospects, John Ford started off as a labourer in the new Universal studios but, with fraternal help, soon advanced to stuntman, actor, cameraman and assistant director in those pre-union days when job jurisdictions were fluid.17 Francis Ford had made his name as an actor in part through his portrayals of Lincoln, whom he played in at least seven movies made from 1912 through 1915. The Civil War president was also important in John Ford’s movie ascent. Commencing his own directorial career in 1917, the younger Ford eventually established himself as a leading filmmaker with the blockbuster silent epic of westward expansion, The Iron Horse (Fox, 1924). This lionised Lincoln (played by Charles Edward Bull) as a national reconciliator for promoting a transcontinental railroad that would bind the East to the West and in so doing serve as an agency of sectional healing for the North and South (an intertitle in the film stresses that the construction crews were mainly Civil War veterans from both sides

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now working peacefully together). Lincoln (played by Frank McGlynn) also features briefly in the same reconciliatory persona in Ford’s The Prisoner of Shark Island (20th Century-Fox, 1936), which dealt with the imprisonment of Dr Samuel Mudd for alleged involvement in the assassination conspiracy. In this, the president’s dedication to harmonious reunion is represented by his request for a Union band to play Dixie amid scenes of celebration in Washington, DC over final victory in the war. The actor whom Zanuck and Ford both wanted as the lead in Young Mr. Lincoln thought the role was beyond him. ‘Lincoln to me was a god’, Henry Fonda recalled thinking. At a meeting with the director, however, he found himself bludgeoned into submission by Ford’s profanity-strewn argument about the Lincoln to be featured in the film: ‘You think you’d be playing the goddam Great Emancipator, huh? He’s [just] a goddam [expletive deleted] jake-legged lawyer in Springfield, for Christ’s sake’.18 The movie was the first of their three Depression-era collaborations, the others being Drums along the Mohawk and The Grapes of Wrath (20th Century-Fox, 1940). Although John Wayne was the star most closely associated with Ford after World War II, Fonda was the archetypal face of the director’s Popular Front-era movies in which he projected liberal humanity, dedication to justice and austere integrity that drew on knowing right from wrong.19 The Ford movie is bookended by marble representations of Lincoln that serve to contrast the common man and the icon. Right after the opening credits, the first and final stanzas of Rosemary Benet’s poem ‘Nancy Hanks’ appear as if engraved on a monument. In this, the ghost of the beloved mother who died when Lincoln was a boy asks a series of simple, human questions about what has happened to ‘Abe’.20 The final shot of the movie shows the Lincoln Monument. Anyone seeing the movie knows Lincoln’s history but the Benet poem is a reminder that it was not predestined. Later, a key scene showing Lincoln at the graveside of his dead sweetheart Anne Rutledge reinforces this message. Unsure whether to stay in New Salem, the locus of the first third of the movie, or leave to pursue a career in law, as Anne wanted, he lets the drop of a stick decide – if it falls towards him, he remains; if towards her headstone, as happens, he moves on. ‘Wonder if I couldda tipped it your way just a little’, he asks conspiratorially as faint strains of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ are heard. In essence, therefore, Lincoln has chosen his destiny of his free will.

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In a further rejection of iconography, Young Mr. Lincoln’s first sequence is centred not on the near-mythic log cabin but on his unsuccessful first campaign for election to the Illinois General Assembly in 1832. A rather shabbily dressed, coatless and diffident candidate standing on the porch of his New Salem store, nervously unsure what to do with his hands, is introduced as a fellow member of the ‘incorruptible’ Whig party by another office-seeker, the bombastic John T. Stuart done up in his finery. He declares that he is ‘plain Abraham Lincoln’ whose politics are ‘short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance’ – support for a National Bank, internal improvements and high protective tariffs. Despite the cinematic Lincoln’s personalisation of this agenda, it perfectly encapsulates the essence of Henry Clay’s pro-business Whig vision of the American System to promote rapid economic modernisation and industrial growth in opposition to the more laissez-faire and anti-federal ideas of the Democrats. Whatever its meaning in 1832, however, Lincoln’s words clearly identify him as a supporter of activist government to boost the economy – and therefore in tune with the New Deal – to the cinemagoers of 1939.21 Once the day’s politicking is done, Lincoln helps an itinerant pioneer family wanting flannel from his store but lacking money to buy it. The mother offers a barrel of old books in the back of their covered waggon as barter. Willingly making the trade, Lincoln is delighted to find that he has become the owner of Blackstone’s Commentaries. Teaching himself the law from these texts opens up the chance of becoming an attorney, the career that lays the foundations for his eventual one in politics. Published in four volumes between 1765 and 1769, Sir William Blackstone’s treatise aimed to create a succinct, readable and understandable account of the English common law tradition. Its influence quickly extended across the Atlantic where common law was being spread into frontier areas and it was impractical for lawyers and judges to carry around large libraries containing usable precedents. The sole reference for most American jurists from the late colonial to the antebellum eras, Blackstone’s vision of English law as a force to protect people, their liberty and their property was fundamentally adopted as the basis of constitutional and legal thought in the young republic.22 Lincoln grasps the Commentaries’ fundamental meaning when studying them in Eden-like surroundings on the bank of the Sangamon River: ‘The right to acquire and hold property . . . the right to life and reputation . . . and the wrongs are a violation of those rights . . . That’s all there is to it – right and wrong.’23 Anodyne

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as these words may appear, they can be interpreted as a declaration of Popular Front faith in American democratic principles of justice and equal rights for all. After the largely episodic New Salem sequences, the remainder of the movie is set in Springfield in 1837, where Lincoln has set up in legal practice with John T. Stuart. Henceforth he is almost always shown in dark suit, waistcoat and necktie, attire suitable for his profession – and often sporting a stovepipe hat. Nevertheless, his identification with the common people rather than local elites is continuously emphasised. The first Springfield scene shows him riding into town on a mule because he does not have the wherewithal for a horse. The mule also serves for contemporary audiences as a near allegory for the donkey symbol of the Democratic party (the movie shrouds Lincoln’s later Republican affiliation). As a further twist, Stephen Douglas (Milburn Stone), Lincoln’s eventual Democratic opponent in the 1858 Illinois Senate election and 1860 presidential election, is presented as the well-heeled and well-connected leader of the local political organisation (whose partisan identity is never mentioned), and in one scene is shown being driven through Springfield in a plush, horse-drawn carriage. Despite his move up the social scale, Lincoln is not ashamed to demonstrate the manual labouring skills he had acquired in youth working his father’s farm in Indiana. He wins the Independence Day rail-splitting contest dressed in his lawyer’s outfit except for his jacket. Later, similarly garbed but with buckskin boots as a symbol of his frontier background, he chops wood outside the log cabin of widow Abigail Clay, whose sons he is defending against a murder charge. Finally, unable to afford a servant – and by implication needing none, Lincoln cleans his own shoes and cuts his own hair before attending an upper-crust party given by relatives of his future wife, Mary Todd (Marjorie Weaver). The middle section of the movie perfectly encapsulates Ford’s celebration of the American past and awareness of its dark side. The simple pleasures of small-town Independence Day include a piebaking contest (in which Lincoln as judge cannot decide between the apple and the peach pies), the rail-splitting contest and a tug-of war (in which Lincoln ensures his team’s victory through cheating – another example of the filmmaker’s insistence on de-perfecting him). Offering a pageant of American history, a military march-past culminates in the appearance of War of 1812 veterans and ultimately three survivors from the War of Independence, whose frailty requires them to ride in a carriage. Regarding the latter, Lincoln is the first

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in the watching crowd to remove his hat in recognition of the debt the nation owes those who fought to found it in the name of liberty. The scene implicitly links his own future role as commander-in-chief to the nation’s past conflicts, but with the critical difference that the troops he will send into battle will fight their fellow countrymen. Among the crowds enjoying the festivities are the Clay family, mother Abigail (Alice Brady), elder son Matt (Richard Cromwell) with wife Sarah (Arleen Whelan) and child, and younger son Adam (Eddie Quillan), with fiancée Carrie-Sue (Dorris Bowdon). Sarah becomes the object of unwanted attention from loutish Scrub White (Fred Kohler, Jr) and J. Palmer Cass (Ward Bond). Later that night in a glade outside town, Matt, Adam and Scrub get into a fight that ends with the latter trying to draw his pistol, being wrestled by both brothers, and left prone on the ground. Palmer Cass then appears, examines Scrub, and shouts that his friend has been knifed through the heart. The Clay boys are arrested and taken off to jail, each believing that the other has committed the murder but unwilling to say so. When the watching Lincoln approaches their mother, she asks who he is, getting the reply: ‘Why, I’m your lawyer ma’am’. Although neither recall their previous meeting, she is the pioneer woman from whom Lincoln got the law books that have now put him in a position to save her sons. A drink-fuelled mob, some of them riff-raff but others respectable citizens, soon gathers with the intent of breaking into the jail and lynching the brothers. Lincoln intervenes, spreading himself in front of the jail door that the mob is attacking with a battering ram. Through a combination of physical menace (‘I can lick any man here hands down’), humour and moral suasion (‘when men start taking the law into their own hands, they’re just apt . . . to start hanging somebody who’s not a murderer’), he gets the would-be lynchers to let the law take its course. The lynch-mob scene has clear ties to the politics of the late 1930s. Young Mr. Lincoln was made when the struggle for racial justice was gaining in significance as a cause for left-liberal groups. At its heart was the campaign to attain an anti-lynch bill that would make the crime a federal offence, a more effective deterrent than state-local law against mob violence. The number of recorded lynchings in the 1930s continued the decline that had become evident in the previous decade, but the proportion of black victims had grown. In 1910–19, there had been 622 lynchings, with all but fifty-three victims being African-American. In 1924–9, the respective statistics were 100 and eleven; in 1930–5, 103 and eight; and in 1936–40,

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Figure 13.2 Abraham Lincoln (Henry Fonda) stops the lynch mob breaking into the prison holding the Clay brothers (John Ford’s brother, Francis, in the coonskin cap on the right) in Young Mr. Lincoln (20th Century-Fox, 1939).

thirty and two.24 The various causes for this fall-off included the growing distaste of Southern elites, particularly women’s groups and newspapers, for racial violence, the increasing urbanisation of the South, and better law enforcement at state level. Also very significant was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) campaign demanding punishment of lynchers. This organisation was instrumental in securing House of Representatives approval of a federal lynch law in 1937, but the measure was filibustered to death in the Senate where Southern influence was disproportionately strong.25 Although lynching was a potent political issue in the 1930s, the Production Code’s prohibition of scenes likely to provoke anger and controversy made it difficult for Hollywood movies to depict the crime – and impossible for films to show black victims. Paradoxically, Production Code Administration (PCA) head Joseph Breen had sanctioned vigilante lynchings in at least two films, Barbary

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Coast (United Artists, 1935) and Frisco Kid (Warner Bros, 1935) because the victims in both were killers beyond the reach of the law in 1850 Gold Rush-era San Francisco. In these cases, he privileged Production Code insistence that criminals should get their just deserts. However, the Jersey City NAACP chapter launched a national publicity protest that the two movies legitimised lynching in principle.26 Thereafter the PCA became more vigilant in cracking down on films dealing with lynching. Only two of note were made in the remainder of the 1930s: Fury (MGM, 1936) and They Won’t Forget (Warner Bros, 1937), both featuring innocent white victims. Breen allowed these films to go ahead on condition that there should be some form of retribution for those responsible.27 In the case of Young Mr. Lincoln, he sanctioned the lynch-mob scene because the rule of law prevailed but insisted after initial script review that the attack on the jail should be curtailed in screen time and wanted the shouts of the mob toned down.28 This was not Ford’s first brush with censorship of lynch scenes. As Tag Gallagher has noted, he ‘is virtually the only film-maker to concern himself with racism before it became commercially fashionable to do so, [but] is virtually the only film-maker whom critics attack as racist’.29 In the case of African-Americans, negative perspectives of Ford’s racial representations are largely based on three movies – Judge Priest (Fox, 1934), Steamboat Round the Bend (20th Century-Fox, 1935), and The Sun Shines Bright (Argosy Pictures-Republic, 1953) – that show blacks as happy, work-shy and unambitious in the post-Reconstruction South. Each features Stepin Fetchit (real name Lincoln Perry), the only really successful black movie star of the classic studio era but one whom the NAACP damned for perpetuating stereotypes of his race as shiftless, lazy and half-witted. Revisionist analysis, however, sees him as satirising Uncle Tomism through exaggeration.30 It should also be noted that in all three Ford films, his character is treated as a pal by the lead white character, particularly in Judge Priest (played by Will Rogers), long before such inter-racial friendships were common on screen. Most significantly, in a scene that Fox insisted on cutting, Judge Priest saved the Stepin Fetchit character from being strung up, in the process delivering an anti-lynching speech, co-scripted by Dudley Nichols and Lamar Trotti, that Ford described as ‘one of the most scorching things you ever heard’. According to Fetchit, the reason that Ford remade Judge Priest as The Sun Shines Bright was that twenty years later he could feature Priest (now played by

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Charles Winninger) saving a black youth unjustly accused of rape from the mob.31 There is no Stepin Fetchit in Young Mr. Lincoln, of course. In fact, African-Americans only appear twice in the movie and in intentionally ironic juxtaposition – one carries a banner in the Independence Day parade, while the others are servants at the big-house party that Lincoln attends. The only reference to slavery is when Lincoln tells Abigail Clay that his family left Kentucky, his state of birth, because ‘with all the slaves coming in, white folks had a hard time making a living’ (the main reason in reality was that his father had lost a number of land-claim disputes). In a famous critique, the editors of Cahiers du Cinéma claimed that the absence of direct reference to the conflict over slavery and the Civil War made the movie into an unconscious exercise in myth-making that served the dominant capitalist ideologies of Hollywood and American politics in the late 1930s.32 This analysis reveals far more about the limited understanding of American history on the part of French Marxists at the end of the 1960s than it does about Ford’s film. Lincoln’s brief statement about slavery neatly encapsulates the idea of ‘free labour, free soil, and free men’ that historian Eric Foner has identified as the core ideology of the Republican party that formed in the 1850s.33 Moreover, the Clay brothers can be seen as surrogates for African Americans who had lived with the threat of lynching as a form of racial control ever since Emancipation – a reality not confined to the South. Both Ford and Trotti (who produced and scripted The Ox-Bow Incident, one of the most powerful cinematic indictments of lynching, for 20th Century-Fox in 1943) were doubtless aware of the Springfield, Illinois race riot of August 1908, in which white mobs strung up the bodies of two slain blacks, an atrocity that precipitated the formation of the NAACP the following year. More recently, in neighbouring Indiana, another state where Lincoln once lived, two blacks were lynched in Marion in August 1930. The widely circulated, horrific photograph of their dangling bodies inspired New York teacher and Communist Party member Abel Meeropol to write the song ‘Strange Fruit’ that was recorded and made famous by Billie Holliday in 1939.34 The climactic scenes of the movie concern the murder trial where the callow Lincoln faces experienced state attorney John Felder (Donald Meek, in a quite different role to the kindly whisky drummer he played in Stagecoach), someone he suspects of wanting to convict the Clays as a springboard to run for Congress. The presence of Stephen Douglas, who

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is on several occasions seen giving the prosecutor confidential advice, suggests that the local political organisation is putting its electoral interests ahead of the search for justice. Meanwhile there seems little hope of the jury finding for the defence – most of them appear certain of the Clays’ guilt and at least two were part of the lynch mob, including jug-swigging loafer Sam Boone (Francis Ford).35 In selecting the jury, Lincoln accepts only those he trusts as telling the truth, even while they admit animus against his clients. All in all, the court is far from being an advert for American justice. Even Lincoln shows little lofty dignity or legal brilliance as defence attorney, relying instead on folksy humour and efforts to belittle prosecution witnesses. As the trial progresses, the prosecution is seemingly willing to show mercy in the belief that only one son wielded the knife that killed Scrub. As the closest witness to the fight, Abigail Clay is called to the stand to be asked which of her sons is the murderer, a question she is unwilling to answer despite hectoring by the prosecutor. Her anguished refusal to save one son at the expense of the other is brilliantly acted by Alice Brady, who was mortally ill with cancer when the movie was being made. Her trial scene was later described by a film scholar as ‘one of the profoundest manifestations of humanity’s frightened bafflement before an inexplicable universe ever recorded by the camera’.36 Faced with her silence, Felder declares that she can by law be compelled to speak. Outraged by this, Lincoln interjects, ‘I may not know much about the law, but I know what’s right and what’s wrong’. This remark prefaces a paean to Mrs Clay as ‘[j]ust a simple country woman’, typical of the many mothers who say little but do much to ensure their family’s wellbeing. The scene aligns Lincoln with the cause of justice for the common folk for whom the law can be a terrifying and incomprehensible mechanism, which only the powerful can use to their advantage. This ties back to Mrs Clay’s remark when Lincoln is seeking information to prepare his case: ‘We don’t know nothing about lawyers and that kind of thing’. Although Lincoln’s intercession saves Mrs Clay from having to testify, the state produces another witness to the murder. Though further away than her from the brawl, J. Palmer Cass claims to have seen exactly what happened because it was a ‘moon bright’ night and identifies Matt as the murderer. At this point the trial is adjourned to the following day. Calling Cass back to the stand, Lincoln cannot get him to change his testimony that a ‘moon bright’ night allowed him clear view of the murder, but he has sprung a trap on the overconfident witness. He produces an almanac (actually given him by Mrs Clay to write notes when visiting her cabin before the trial) that shows the moon

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Figure 13.3 Abraham Lincoln reads a letter from her imprisoned son to the illiterate ‘simple country woman’, Mrs Clay (Alice Brady) on the front porch of her rural log cabin with Sarah (Arleen Whelan) and Carrie Sue (Dorris Bowdon) to her left and right in Young. Mr Lincoln.

was nowhere near full on Independence Day, so Cass could never have seen what he claimed. In a Perry Mason-like denouement, the defence attorney then gets Cass to admit his own culpability for the killing after falling out with Scrub White. The jury, a body of citizens that saves an innocent person from the impersonal machinations of the law in a later Henry Fonda movie (Twelve Angry Men, United Artists, 1957, directed by Sidney Lumet), has no role to play in pronouncing the Clays’ innocence. That outcome in the 1939 film is entirely due to what one scholar terms the ‘charismatic authority’ of the cinematic Lincoln.37 This success transforms the common-man Lincoln into an uncommon one. He leaves the courtroom to find Mary Todd and Stephen Douglas waiting in an adjoining corridor to congratulate him. The latter’s promise never again to underestimate him elicits a response suggesting Lincoln’s awareness that they are destined to be future rivals for political office: ‘I don’t think we’d better underestimate either of us from here on in, Steve’. As he leaves the court house, the unseen crowd

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greets him as a hero, a further indication that he can never again be ‘plain Abraham Lincoln’, the self-description in the movie’s opening scene. The final break with his common-man past is his goodbye to the Clays. In the much earlier scene outside their log cabin, Lincoln had effectively adopted the family in remarking that Abigail Clay was like his own mother, Rachel like his now dead sister, and Carrie Sue like his lost love, Anne Rutledge. Now, however, he has become their saviour to whom tribute is owed in the form of his lawyer’s fees. Lincoln cannot return with the Clays to their forest home that reminded him of his own roots, nor does he go back to town. Instead, walking alone to the top of a hill just as a storm begins, he gazes with a look of self-realisation into the distance as the thunder peals ever louder and the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ plays on the soundtrack (the first music to be heard since the start of the trial).38 An allegory for Lincoln seeing into his own future as Civil War leader, the scene can also be interpreted as symbolising the gathering storm of war in Europe that would break out soon after the release of the movie. It then quickly gives way to the final shot of the Lincoln Monument. It was more or less inevitable that the movie was received as a historical rather than a political film. Only one reviewer sensed that its theme was ‘timely and almost topical in its reaffirmance of the democratic principles that govern American civil liberties’. In audience terms, it rather predictably did best in small towns in the North and worst in the South. The big-city clientele also found its focus on the past unappealing, with a Detroit cinema manager remarking that ‘movie goers just stay away from history pictures’.39 The leisurely pace of the movie and its lack of a romance between lead characters were further harmful to its prospects. Of Ford’s three 1939 movies, it reaped the smallest returns, while Drums along the Mohawk – the slightest in cinematic terms – did best at the box-office because it had spectacular action, love interest and Technicolor (Ford’s first such movie). The following year, Abe Lincoln in Illinois would make an outright loss for RKO, replicating the fate of D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln ten years earlier. This made filmmakers leery of further theatrically-released biopics of the sixteenth president until Timur Bekmambetov’s fantasy, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Bazelevs Company/Tim Burton Productions/Dune Entertainment) and Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Lincoln (DreamWorks/Twentieth Century/Reliance) appeared in 2012. By the time the last of Ford’s Americana trilogy was released, the Popular Front had disintegrated as a result of the Nazi–Soviet Pact agreed in August 1939. Whether this played any part in his decision to shift cinematic focus in the next two years is unclear, but he moved

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away from exploring America’s past in the four films made for 20th Century-Fox. The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Long Voyage Home (1940) and Tobacco Road (1941) all had a contemporary setting, while How Green Was My Valley (1941) examined the travails of a lateVictorian mining community in Wales. The Grapes of Wrath can be seen as Ford’s most political film in that it deals with the economic effects of the Dustbowl, the exploitation of the uprooted Okies, and the need for a union to organise migrant agricultural workers. Nevertheless, Tad Gallagher argues that it can also be considered as a transitional movie that is not only a modern sequel to the Americana trilogy of 1939 but also part of a ‘social-consciousness trilogy’, also featuring Tobacco Road and How Green Was My Valley, which explores the disintegration of ‘a family, a culture, and part of the earth, due to economic oppression by the larger world outside’. Even The Long Voyage Home has parallels in the sense that it focuses ‘on an endless quest for a non-existent home’.40 Like many of Ford’s movies, Young Mr. Lincoln can also be viewed at different levels in its exploration of history and myth, destiny and loss, but Popular Front ideals are also fundamental to a holistic understanding of it. Like the other films in the 1939 trilogy, it attests to faith in American democratic traditions and their relevance to the present, and in the company of Stagecoach it recognises the nation’s failure to live up to these (Drums along the Mohawk exceptionally does not dwell on this reality – doubtless because of its concern with a foreign threat). In focusing on Abraham Lincoln as a common man capable of greatness rather than the one engrained in historical mythology, Ford and his collaborators were creating a Popular Front hero for the late 1930s. Their Lincoln’s determination to secure justice for the oppressed, emotional identification with the people without losing sight of their shortcomings, and strong sense of right and wrong resonated with the cause of American progressivism at home and abroad in this troubled era.

notes 1. Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford: A Life (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), 269. 2. These were post-classic studio era independent productions, two of which were distributed by Warner Bros, and the other (Two Rode Together) by Columbia. 3. Joseph McBride, ‘The Convoluted Politics of John Ford’, Los Angeles Times Magazine, 3 June 2001, http://article.latimes.com/; Kent Jones, ‘Intolerance’, filmcomment, May/June 2013, at http://www.filmcomment.com. The Jones article was a rebuttal to highly critical comments by Quentin Tarantino that Ford’s racism was evident in his

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4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

Western movies. ‘I hate him’, the director of Django Unchained (Weinstein Company/ Columbia, 2012) remarked in conversation with Louis Gates Jr, ‘It really is people like that that kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else’s humanity’. See ‘Tarantino “Unchained”, Part I: “Django” Trilogy?’, The Root, 23 December 2012, at http://www.theroot.com/. For a less convincing argument that Ford remained basically apolitical throughout his life, see Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 338–43. Scott Eyman, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 21. The others were: Frank Borzage; Lloyd Corrigan; William K. Howard; Gregory La Cava; Rowland Lee; Lewis Milestone; Eddie Sutherland; Frank Tuttle; King Vidor (who hosted the gathering at his home); Richard Wallace; and William Wellman. The organisation was incorporated in January 1936 with seventy-five members. McBride, Searching for John Ford, 270–7 (quotation, 271). For the Popular Front in 1930s Hollywood, see Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Industry, 1930–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), especially chapter 4. For discussion, see Leland Pogue, ‘That Past, This Present: Historicizing John Ford, 1939’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), John Ford’s Stagecoach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 82–112. John O’Connor, ‘A Reaffirmation of American Ideals: Drums Along the Mohawk’, in John O’Connor and Martin Jackson (eds), American History, American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (New York: Ungar, 1979), 97–120. Nichols had also scripted The Hurricane, essentially a movie about colonial oppression, injustice and racism that Ford directed for Goldwyn Productions in 1937. ‘Lamar Trotti (1900–1952)’, New Georgia Encyclopaedia, at http://newgeorgiaencyclopaedia.org/. Zanuck to Ford, 3 December 1938, in Rudy Behlmer (ed.), Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck: The Golden Years at Twentieth Century-Fox (New York: Grove, 1993), 22–3. David Turley, ‘A Usable Life: Popular Representations of Abraham Lincoln’, in David Ellis (ed.), Imitating Art: Essays in Biography (London: Pluto Press, 1993), 61; Raymond Massey, A Hundred Different Lives: An Autobiography (London: Robson, 1979), 253–4. The Sandburg biographies are Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1926, 1939). J. E. Smyth, ‘Young Mr Lincoln: Between Myth and History in 1939’, Rethinking History, 7, 2 (2003), 193–214 (quotation, 200). Tony Pipolo, ‘Hero or Demagogue? Images of Abraham Lincoln in American Film’, Cineaste, 35 (2009), 14–21; Melvyn Stokes, ‘Abraham Lincoln and the Movies’, American Nineteenth Century History, 12: 2 (2010), esp. 204–16; and Melvyn Stokes, ‘D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln’, in Iwan Morgan (ed.), Presidents in the Movies: American History and Politics on Screen (New York: Palgrave 2011), 45–64. Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 20. Christian Samito, Becoming American under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans and the Politics of Citizenship in the American Civil War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). Memory mythologised the past in this

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

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32.

33.

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case, but that does not detract from its influence: as loyal Democrats, most Irish Americans had opposed Lincoln’s election in 1860; those who served in the Union Army often did so reluctantly; and only a minority were enlisted in the Irish Brigade. See David Gleeson, ‘“Faugh a Ballagh!” (Clear the Way): The Irish and the American Civil War’, in Iwan Morgan and Philip Davies (eds), Reconfiguring the Union: Civil War Transformations (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 143–62. Gallagher, John Ford, 6–17. Mike Steen, ‘Henry Fonda’, in Hollywood Speaks: An Oral History (New York: Putnam, 1974), 40. For insightful discussion of Wayne and Fonda’s screen personae, see Eyman, Print The Legend, 222, 340. Rosemary Benet, ‘Nancy Hanks’, in Rosemary and Stephen Benet, A Book of Americans (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933), 65. Lincoln’s first stump speech, delivered on 9 March 1832, was considerably longer and rather more complex. The text can be viewed at http://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/lincoln/first-campaign-statement-march-9-1832/. Significantly, too, he ran as a National Republican, rather than a Whig – a name not adopted until 1833, but using the proper designation would have muddied the political imagery being conveyed by the film. Daniel Boorstin, The Mysterious Science of the Law: An Essay on Blackstone’s Commentaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For interesting commentary, see Virginia Wright Wexman, ‘“Right and Wrong: That’s [Not] All There Is to It!”: Young Mr Lincoln and American Law’, Cinema Journal, 44 (2005), 20–34. ‘Lynchings: By Year and Race’, at http://law2.umkcedu/faculty. Michael Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Robert Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980). Ellen Scott, Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 152–6. Matthew Bernstein, Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and Television (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 60–117. Breen to Jason Joy, 31 January 1939, ‘Young Mr Lincoln’ File, Motion Picture Association of America: Production Code Administration Records, Margaret Herrick Library. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Gallagher, John Ford, 341. Gallagher, John Ford, 66–7 n; Joseph McBride, ‘Stepin Fetchit Talks Back’, Film Quarterly (Summer 1971), 20–6; Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 286–8. Gallagher, John Ford, 103; McBride, Searching for John Ford, 211–12. The Stepin Fetchit character also joins with the Will Rogers character to outwit an angry mob of whites in Steamboat round the Bend. Editors of Cahiers du Cinéma, ‘Young Mr Lincoln: texte collectif’, 223 (August 197), available in translated version from Screen, 13 (Autumn 1972), 5–44 at http://faculty.washington.edu/ebehler/glossary/cahiersjohnford.html. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Fee Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

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34. Roberta Senechal, The Sociogenesis of a Race Riot: Springfield, Illinois, in 1908 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); James Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York: St Martin’s, 2000). 35. Francis Ford’s career had gone into decline in the 1920s. He would end up as one of John Ford’s stock company, appearing in twenty-nine of his movies, usually playing a fool-character, described by one historian as a ‘Boudu-like coonskin wino’, who represents ‘the Fordian idyllic human being, irresponsible and innocent in a nature supremely simple’. See Gallagher, John Ford, 126 n, 294. 36. Dewitt Bodeen, ‘Alice Brady’, Films in Review (November 1966), 555–73. 37. Wexman, ‘Right and Wrong’, 27. 38. Trotti had initially written a script showing Lincoln talking to God and being shown his future, but Zanuck eliminated this as being overly mystic. See Smyth, ‘Young Mr Lincoln’, 208. 39. Stokes, ‘Abraham Lincoln and the Movies’, 218. 40. Gallagher, John Ford, 198, 182.

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Notes on the Contributors

Harvey G. Cohen was formerly assistant professor of film studies at the University of Maryland and is presently senior lecturer in Culture and Creative Industries at King’s College London. He has written widely on American music and films, including Duke Ellington’s America (2010), and he is presently completing a book on the Great Depression musicals. Philip John Davies is director of the Eccles Centre for North American Studies at the British Library. He has written widely on the relationship between American politics and culture, including: Representing and Imagining America (editor, 1996); and American Film and Politics from Reagan to Bush Jr (co-editor, 2002). He has also been engaged in numerous co-edited collaborations with Iwan Morgan, most recently From Sit-Ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s (2012) and Reconfiguring the Union: Civil War Transformations (2013). A former chair of the British Association of American Studies, he is presently the chair of the European Association of American Studies. David Eldridge is senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Hull, where he teaches American history and cinema. He is the author of Hollywood’s History Films (2006) and American Culture in the 1930s (Edinburgh University Press, 2008). His work has also appeared in numerous scholarly journals and edited collections. Peter William Evans is emeritus professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of numerous books on Hollywood, British and Spanish cinema, including: Affairs to Remember: The Hollywood Comedy of the Sexes (co-author, 1993); Top Hat (2010); and, for the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series, Written on the Wind (2013). Mark Glancy is reader in Film History at Queen Mary University of London. His publications include When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood ‘British’ Film, 1939–1945 (1999); The 39 Steps: A British Film Guide (2003);

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and The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches (co-editor, 2007). He holds an Arts & Humanities Research Council grant to study UK reception of Hollywood movies, the subject of his monograph, Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain from the 1920s to the Present (2014). Ina Rae Hark is professor emeritus of English at University of South Carolina. A prolific author, her books include: American Cinema of the 1930s: Themes and Variations (editor, 2007); Star Trek (2008); and Deadwood (2012). Catherine Jurca is professor of English at California Institute of Technology. In addition to many journal articles and book chapters, she is the author of two critically acclaimed monographs: White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (2001); Hollywood 1938: Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year (2012). Iwan Morgan is professor of US Studies and Commonwealth Fund Professor of American History at University College London. A specialist on the presidency, his publications include: Nixon (2002); The Age of Deficits: Presidents and Unbalanced Budgets from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush (2009), winner of the Richard E. Neustadt Book Prize; and (as editor) Presidents in the Movies: American History and Politics on Screen (2011). His latest book is Reagan: American Icon (2016). He is a former chair of the Historians of the Twentieth Century United States, co-founder of the American Presidency Network and a British Association of American Studies Honorary Fellow. Brian Neve was formerly reader and is presently honorary fellow in Politics at the University of Bath. His scholarly work has a particular interest in the relationship between US politics and film. Among his numerous publications are: Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (1992); Elia Kazan: The Cinema of an American Outsider (2008); ‘Un-American Hollywood:’ Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (co-editor, 2007); and, most recently, The Many Lives of Cy Endfield: Film Noir, the Blacklist, and ‘Zulu’ (2015). Ian Scott is senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester. His publications include: In Capra’s Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Robert Riskin (2006); From Pinewood to Hollywood: British Filmmakers in American Cinema, 1910–1969 (2010); and American Politics in Hollywood Film, 2nd edn (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). He has also written extensively on Hollywood screenwriters, trans-nationalism and the classic studio era in recent journal articles. Anna Siomopoulos holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and is associate professor of English and media studies at Bentley University. In addition to publishing widely on film subjects in scholarly journals, she is the author of Hollywood Melodramas and the New Deal: Public Daydreams (2012).

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J. E. Smyth received her PhD in film studies in 2005 from Yale University and is presently associate professor of History and Comparative American Studies at the University of Warwick. Her books include Reconstructing American Historical Cinema from Cimarron to Citizen Kane (2006), winner of the International Association of Media Historians’ Prize in Media and History; Edna Ferber’s Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race and History (2009), AAP PROSE award winner for Media and Cultural Studies; Hollywood and the American Historical Film (editor, 2012); and Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance (2014). Melvyn Stokes is professor of Film History at University College London. He is the author of D. W. Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation:’ A History of the ‘Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time’ (2007); and Gilda (2010) for the BFI Film Classics series. He has edited or co-edited ten books on American history or American film history, including four on Hollywood’s audiences for the British Film Institute. He is director of the Arts & Humanities Research Council project on ‘Cultural Memory of British Cinema-going in the 1960s’ and is president of SERCIA, a European association of film scholars. He has recently completed American History through Hollywood Film: From the Revolution to the 1960s (2013) and Charlot: How the French Discovered, Wrote About, Defended and Resurrected Charlie Chaplin (2015). Mark Wheeler is professor of Political Communications at London Metropolitan University. His works include: Hollywood: Politics and Society (2006); and Celebrity Politics (2013). He has also published numerous peer-reviewed articles and contributed chapters to many edited volumes on film-related subjects.

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Index

Note: italic denotes figure

20th Century-Fox, 6, 14, 97 screenwriters, 53–4 Shirley Temple at, 106, 109, 218 Zanuck at, 5, 72, 73–4, 260 42nd Street, 9, 165, 218 Abraham Lincoln, 203, 261, 272 Academy Awards, 10, 63, 68, 139 advertising see publicity African-Americans acceptance of colonialism in portrayals of, 119, 120–1 companies and theatres owned by, 14 in Gone with the Wind, 79, 80–2 in Hallelujah, 182 perspective effaced, 115, 117, 118, 232 stereotypical roles for, 211, 212, 214, 268–9 see also racial violence; slavery agriculture, and cooperatives, 181–97 Allen, Frederick Lewis, 66–7 Allied States Association of Motion Pictures Exhibition, 88, 89, 99 American Madness, 52, 61 American Revolution, 117–18 American Youth Congress (AYC), 229–30, 231 Andy Hardy series, 220

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ANL (Anti-Nazi League for Defense of American Democracy), 40, 41, 44, 55, 259 anti-semitism, 30, 41, 44, 45 antitrust law, 5–6, 86–100 architecture, federal, 198–215 Ardrey, Robert, 78 Arliss, George, 90 Arthur, Jean, 199, 208, 209, 211, 213 Astaire, Fred, 2, 9, 15, 131, 134, 219–20 Astaire/Rogers films, 124–37, 176–7, 218 auteur theory, 54–5, 57, 73 Authors League for Sinclair, 36 Awful Truth, The, 3, 131, 149–53 Babes musicals, 216–34 Bacon, Lloyd, 165, 166 Balio, Tina, 55 banking Crash (1929), 4, 142 crisis (1933), 200, 223 reform, 167 see also Wall Street Bauchens, Anne, 68, 69 Beery, Wallace, 10, 11, 31–2 Berkeley, Busby at MGM, 220, 225–7, 233 at Warner Bros, 9, 161, 168–9, 177, 218, 232

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index Berman, Pandro S., 74, 125 Big Parade, The, 181–2 Birth of a Nation, The, 117, 261 Blockade, 42, 44 block-booking and blind selling, 20, 88–100, 184 Blondell, Joan, 162–3 Blore, Eric, 124, 125 B-movies, 6, 8, 13, 14, 21–2, 145 Bogart, Humphrey, 39 Bonus Marchers/Army, 116, 204, 218 Bow, Clara, 70, 83 Boys Town, 8, 12, 59 Breen, Joseph, 17, 18, 44, 130, 267–8 Bringing Up Baby, 63, 77, 129 British films and media, 105, 145, 193, 243–7, 252 Broadway theatre, 10, 15, 39, 77, 80, 140–2, 223 Buchman, Sidney, 58, 60–4 Cabin in the Cotton, 175, 251 Cagney, James, 16, 37, 161–78 California Cooperative League, 181, 185 Cantor, Eddie, 10, 17 Capra, Frank, 8, 10, 19, 36 social/political themes, 52, 58, 61, 62, 199, 205–9, 262 cartoons, 6, 19, 173, 184 censorship, 14, 17–18, 89, 90, 130, 267–8; see also Production Code chain cinemas, 4, 6, 21, 92 Chaplin, Charlie, 3, 10, 37, 56, 184, 190, 239–53, 245 Charlie Chan films, 14 children, 87, 105–21, 218; see also youth City Lights, 10, 250, 252 Civil War films, 116–21; see also Gone with the Wind; Lincoln, Abraham Civilian Conservation Corps, 190, 222 Clair, Réne, 251 Cohn, Harry, 5, 29, 36, 58, 60, 149 collective action/collectivisation, 12, 182, 233, 234; see also cooperatives

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Colman, Ronald, 16, 142, 147, 199, 209–13 colonialist ideology, 105–22 Columbia Pictures, 2, 4–5, 10, 16, 36, 49–65, 149–53 comedies Chaplin in, 3, 10, 239–53 sentimental and romantic, 10, 105–21, 135 see also screwball comedies commercialism, Hollywood’s, 17–19, 164; see also publicity communism, communists, 40–6, 55, 116, 191, 246–7, 248; see also New Masses; Popular Front; Red Scare Congress, and distribution, 86–100 conservatives, conservatism in Babes musicals, 230–2 Ford’s identification with, 257–8 on Modern Times, 241–2, 244, 245–6 moguls and stars, 30–2, 45 Cooke, Alistair, 194 Cooper, Gary, 145, 187 cooperatives, 3, 181–97 Corliss, Richard, 49, 54, 57, 62–3 Costello, John, 86, 88, 96 costumes and costume designers, 68, 132–3 Coward, Noel, 141–2 Crichton, Kyle, 239, 243 crime, organised, 200, 202, 204; see also gangster genre Crowd, The, 182, 189, 193 Cukor, George, 145 Dark Victory, 12 Davis, Bette, 11, 12, 16, 69–70, 76, 79 Davis, Maxine, 227, 228 de Havilland, Olivia, 69 Dead End, 12, 219 Delmar, Vina, 149, 152 deluxe palaces, 4, 15 Democrats, 29, 30, 32, 33–9 Dick, Bernard F., 49, 51, 58, 61 ‘dictator’ films, 175–6

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282

index

Dies, Martin, 42, 44–5 Dietrich, Marlene, 15, 143 directors as auteurs in Hollywood, 54–5, 57, 73 women as, 68, 74 Disney productions, 6, 19, 173, 184 distribution/distributors, regulation, 21, 86–100 documentaries, 183, 218 Doherty, Thomas, 18, 175–6 double-bills see B-movies Douglas, Helen Gahagan, 38–9, 41 Douglas, Melvyn, 38, 41, 42–4, 43, 45, 60 Dressler, Marie, 10, 11 Drums along the Mohawk, 257, 260, 272 Dunne, Irene, 125, 126, 129, 130–3, 136, 147 at Columbia Pictures, 148, 149, 150, 153 Dunne, Philip, 39, 41, 42–4, 49, 53–4 Durbin, Deanna, 9–10 Dyer, Richard, 146–7 editors, women as, 68, 73, 79, 80 education, crisis in, 221, 224 Eisenstein, Sergei, 34, 182 elections, US, 32, 39, 46 empire genre, 2, 105–22 End Poverty in California (EPIC), 29, 33–8, 185, 186–8 Epstein, Jerry, 56 exhibition of films, regulation, 86–100 Eyman, Scott, 51, 258 ‘fallen woman’ genre, 14, 61, 108, 143 fascism, 12–13, 36, 39, 41–2, 231 feminism, 66, 69, 76–7 Fields, Dorothy, 126, 127 Film Comment (magazine), 49, 54 financial problems, Hollywood’s, 4–8, 162, 164 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 54

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Flying Down to Rio, 127, 135 Fonda, Henry, 263, 267, 271 Footlight Parade, 3, 9, 32, 161–78, 170, 171, 218 Forbidden, 52, 61 Ford, Francis, 262, 267 Ford, Henry, 30 Ford, John, 41, 73, 257–73, 259; see also Grapes of Wrath, The; Wee Willie Winkie Forsythe, Robert, 239, 243 Fox, William, 34 Fox Film, 4, 10, 13 France, French critics on Modern Times, 247–53 Popular Front in, 3, 241, 248, 252 Freed, Arthur, 220 freelancing, 16, 147, 154 Fury, 44, 51, 59, 268 Gable, Clark, 143 Gabler, Neal, 54–6 Gabriel over the White House, 3, 35, 51, 176, 199–205, 262 Gallagher, Tag, 268, 273 gangster genre, 12, 14; see also crime, organised Garbo, Greta, 15, 43, 68, 69 Garland, Judy, 3, 9, 39 Astaire on, 219–20 in Babes in Arms, 230, 232, 233, 234 Gay Divorcee, The, 124, 125, 132, 135 Gaynor, Janet, 72–3, 83 Girl Crazy, 219, 220–1, 227–8, 231 ‘God’s Country’ (song), 228–31, 233 Goebbels, Joseph, 193, 232 Gold Diggers of 1933, 9, 164, 165, 172, 177, 218 Gold Diggers of 1935, 178 Goldwyn, Samuel, 29, 184 Gone with the Wind, 8, 9, 10–11, 66, 78–83, 117 Gone with the Wind (novel), 173

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index Grant, Cary, 139–55 in comedies, 2–3, 58, 131, 139–40, 147–55, 150, 209–15 at Paramount and move to freelancing, 16, 142–7, 144 personal/early life and career, 129, 140–2 Grapes of Wrath, The, 173, 189, 263, 273 Greene, Graham, 134 Griffith, D. W., 117, 261, 272 guilds Screen Actors (SAG), 17, 162 Screen Directors, 194 Screen Writers (SWG), 36, 38, 40, 55, 63, 260 Gunga Din, 105, 154 Hallelujah, 182 Hamilton, Ian, 57 Hammerstein, Arthur, 140–1 Harbach, Otto, 126, 127 Harburg, Yip, 19, 228–30, 231 Harlow, Jean, 60–2, 70, 73 Hart, Lorenz, 134, 223, 226 Hatch, Kristen, 106, 107, 121 Hays, Will, 6, 36 Hays Office, 7, 17; see also Production Code Hearst, William Randolph, 31, 32, 37–8, 187, 200 Hecht, Ben, 54, 58, 79 Hechtlinger, Dorothy, 73–4 Hellman, Lillian, 68, 71, 75 Hepburn, Katherine, 15, 32, 67, 74–7 on Astaire and Rogers, 133 Grant and, 145, 148, 154 Hill, Elizabeth, 68, 183, 185 Hitler, Adolf, 42, 193, 200, 227 Holiday, 77, 154 Hollywood Reporter (magazine), 37, 188 homosexuality, 129–30, 146, 210 Hoover, Herbert, 30–2, 176, 200, 204 horror movies, 13

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Horton, Edward Everett, 124, 125, 130 House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), 42, 44–5, 46 Howard Lawson, John, 36, 41, 42 Huston, Walter, 61, 199, 203 I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 11, 52, 175, 251 I’m No Angel, 89–90, 144 imperialism, 105–22 independent film production, 2, 3, 6, 13, 14, 15, 61 and industry code, 20 Our Daily Bread, 184–97 independent theatres/exhibitors, 15, 86–100 indigenous people, and imperialism, 105–22 individualism, 132, 194, 227, 232, 260 industrialisation, satires on, 239–53 Informer, The, 63 Jazz Singer, The, 9 Jews, Jewishness, 30, 41, 44, 45 Jory, Victor, 80, 81, 113 journals, 182, 185–6 Judge Priest, 10, 268 Jungle, The (Sinclair), 33, 186 Kasson, John, 107 Keeler, Ruby, 169, 170, 172 Kent, Sidney, 93–4, 95, 97 Kern, Jerome, 126, 127 King Kong (1933), 13, 51 Kitty Foyle, 77–9 Koverman, Ida R., 30, 31 Kuykendahl, Ed, 89, 92, 99 La Cava, Gregory, 199, 262 labour relations, 16–17, 19–20, 32, 162–4 land schemes see agriculture Lang, Walter, 106, 107 Lange, Dorothy, 67, 82, 183, 218, 251 law-enforcement movies, 12

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284

index

Lawson, Alan, 105–6 Lawson, Howard, 42 leadership FDR’s, 176, 200 as movie theme, 189, 193, 201, 251, 262 Leigh, Vivien, 11, 79 Leighninger, Robert, 198 Lejeune, Caroline, on Modern Times, 245–6, 252 Levien, Sonia, 68, 73 Levine, Lawrence, 19–20, 173 liberalism, 38–46, 231–2; see also New Deal Liberty (magazine), 189 licensing of films, 87–100 Life (magazine), 39 Limbrick, Peter, 105 Lincoln, Abraham, 117–18, 203, 205, 261–73 literary classics/adaptations, 14, 66 Little Colonel, The, 118, 119–21 Little Princess, The, 114–15 Little Women, 74 Littlest Rebel, The, 118–21 Loew, Marcus, 5, 98; see also MGM Lombard, Carole, 73, 154 Loos, Anita, 68, 75 Lyford, Katherine Van Etten, 88, 90–1 lynching, in films, 266–8, 269 Maas, Frederick, 73–4 MacDonald, Jeanette, 9, 128, 218 magazines, publicity and, 70, 145–6, 187, 188–9 Maland, Charles J., on Modern Times, 243, 252 Mandeville, Molly, 73–4 March, Frederic, 41, 44 Marx Brothers, 10, 231, 251 masculinity, transformation as film theme, 199–215 mass production, 95, 239–53

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May, Lary, 39, 56 Mayer, Louis B., 9, 29, 30–3, 33, 37, 38, 162 McCarey, Leo, 149–51, 153 McCarthyism see Red Scare McLean, Barbara, 68, 73 Merriam, Frank F., 35–6, 37–8, 187 MGM finances, 4, 6 movie genres, 9, 10, 11, 13, 200, 216–34 political alliances, 31–2, 34, 35–7 screenwriters, 34, 52, 54, 59 stars and star system, 15, 143 Vidor at, 181–2 see also Mayer, Louis B. Minehan, Thomas, 219, 228 Mitchell, Margaret, Gone with the Wind, 78–83 Modern Times, 3, 10, 239–53 moguls, 29–33, 34–8 monopolistic trade practices, and regulation, 20–1, 87–8, 94–5, 99 Morley, Karen, 186, 199, 201 Motion Picture Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain (MPAC), 41–2 Motion Picture Democratic Committee (MPDC), 39, 42–4, 259 Motion Picture Herald (trade paper), 14, 170, 187–8 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), 6, 185; see also Hays Office Motion Picture Theatre Owners of America (MPTOA), 89, 93, 97, 99 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 51, 62, 205, 206 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 3, 51, 61, 62, 199, 205–9, 262 Mueller, John, 125, 135 Muni, Paul, 16, 70 Murfin, Jane, 70, 74, 125

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index musicals, 9–10 Astaire/Rogers, 124–37 ‘Babes’ (backyard), 216–34 Depression (backstage), 161–78, 217–18 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 267, 269 National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), 19, 183 National Recovery Administration (NRA), 16–17, 19, 20, 32, 170–2, 171, 178, 218 National Youth Administration (NYA), 221, 226 Naumberg, Nancy, 69–70 Nazis, Nazism, 13, 36, 41, 217, 226–7 Nazi–Soviet pact (1939), 2, 42, 46, 272 Neely Bill, 86, 92–3, 99 New Deal film industry and, 32, 56, 161–78, 205, 218, 232–3 initiatives, 12, 19–21, 183, 210, 221–2 and public works, 198–9, 214 see also National Recovery Administration (NRA); Popular Front; Roosevelt, Franklin D. New Masses (newspaper), 191, 192–3, 239 New Theater (magazine), 182, 242 New York Herald-Tribune, 174, 242 New York liberalism/socialism, 39–40, 55 New York Times, 121, 192, 241 newspapers see press; specific names newsreels, 6, 35–7, 188, 190 Nichols, Dudley, 63, 260 Norman, Marc, 51, 56–7, 63 North by Northwest, 154–5 operetta movies, 9 Oscars see Academy Awards Osterweil, Ara, 106, 121 Our Daily Bread, 181–97

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Pacific Cooperator, The (journal), 185–6 Paramount, 4, 6, 17 block-booking and blind selling at, 89, 91, 97–8 Cary Grant at, 142–7 comedies, 10 HUAC and, 45 Westerns, 13 Paramount suit (US v. Paramount et al.), 21, 87, 99 Parker, Dorothy, 36, 71 paternalism/patriarchy, in Temple films, 105–21 Payne Fund Studies, 87 Perry, Lincoln (Stepin Fetchit), 268 Pettengill, Samuel, 97 Pettijohn, Charles, 89, 95, 100 Philadelphia Story, The, 40, 77 Pickford, Mary, 72, 95, 184 Platinum Blonde, 52, 61, 62 Plato, 135 political movies, 49–65, 175, 273 Popular Front, 2, 41–2, 44, 46, 63 Ford’s American trilogy and, 257–73 France elects, 3, 241, 248 Poverty Row, studios, 13, 14, 61 press, 11, 14, 31, 139; see also specific names of newspapers press barons, 34; see also Hearst, William Randolph prestige pictures, 13–14, 16, 90 prestige theatres, 4, 15 producers, 55, 73; see also moguls Production Code, 17–19, 22, 44, 130, 192, 251 and Footlight Parade, 169 guidelines on adultery, 77 and Neely Bill, 99 on racial violence in film, 267–8 propaganda, 35–7, 44, 183, 217, 232, 252 Prover, Jorja, 49–50 Public Enemy, The, 11, 52, 163, 164

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286

index

public interest groups, and regulation, 87–100 public works, New Deal projects, 39, 198–9, 213–14 publicity about Grant, 129, 140, 142–3, 145–6 images and posters, 11, 43, 186, 188, 240 magazines and trade papers, 70, 145–6, 187, 188–9 star-focused, 15, 140, 142

Roosevelt, Franklin D. (also FDR), 3, 51, 218 character and leadership of, 32, 176, 200 and film industry alliances, 17, 32–3, 38–9, 43, 45, 46, 188 and film industry regulation, 99 supports self-help cooperatives, 183 see also Lincoln, Abraham; New Deal Ross, Steven, 39 Rubin, Martin, 168, 232 Russian film themes, 126–7, 132–3, 192

Qualen, John T., 189 racial violence, 266–8, 269; see also Nazis, Nazism; slavery radicalism, 38–46, 56; see also communism, communists radio shows/entertainment, 7, 39, 173–4 Reagan, Ronald, 12 realism, 174, 175, 177, 239, 242, 251–2 Red Scare, 46, 53, 194, 258 reform groups, and regulation, 87–100 regulation of trade practices, 86–100 religious groups, and trade regulation, 88, 90 Republicanism, 29–33, 205 Riefenstahl, Leni, 217, 227, 233 Riskin, Robert, 36, 53, 58, 59, 60–4 RKO, 4, 6, 9, 66, 93 Astaire/Rogers films, 124–37, 176–7 rejects Our Daily Bread, 183 star system, 16 working women at, 74–8 Roach, Hal, 147 Roberta, 124–37 Robinson, Bill (Bojangles), 119, 120 Robinson, Edward G., 39, 59 Rogers, Ginger, 9, 66, 69, 77–8, 131, 133; see also Astaire/Rogers films Rogers, Will, 10, 34, 37, 38, 39, 173, 268 Romero, Cesar, 109, 112, 114–15 Rooney, Mickey, 3, 9, 154, 216–34 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 38, 67, 208, 225, 229–30

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Sarris, Andrew, 57 Scarlett O’Hara, 78–83 Schaefer, George, 93, 95 Schatz, Thomas, 73, 96 Schenck, Joseph, 29, 184, 188 schools crisis, 221 Schwartz, Nancy Lynn, 52 science fiction films, 51 Scott, Randolph, 125, 129, 132, 146 Screen Actors Guild (SAG), 17, 162 Screen Directors Guild, 194 screenwriters, 49–65, 260 and Great Depression musicals, 163–5 labour relations, 54–5, 163–4 political alliances, 36, 39–42, 44 and social/political content, 52 women as, 68, 70, 74, 75, 79, 95, 125, 183 screwball comedies, 10, 13, 52, 60–1 Grant in, 131, 139–40, 147–55 Seff, Manuel, 164–5 Selznick, David O., 70, 72, 74, 80, 183 Senate, in Mr. Smith, 208–9 settler films, 2, 105–22 sexuality themes, 106–9, 113, 126, 130, 174 Seymour, James, 164–5 Shakespeare, William, 14, 130 Shall We Dance, 124, 130, 132 Shaver, Mrs Daniel, 91, 97–8 Shearer, Norma, 15, 69, 79, 131

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index short films, 97–8; see also B-movies silent movie era, 1, 10, 181–2, 262 stars of, 15, 70, 71 see also City Lights; Modern Times Sinclair, Upton, 29, 33–8, 54, 185, 186–8, 194 slavery, 106, 107, 117, 118, 119, 269 ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ (song), 126, 127–8, 130–6 social problem/issue films, 11–12, 32, 52–3, 60–3, 217, 227; see also youth social security, 39, 186 socialists, 19, 55, 186, 228, 242–3, 244, 249, 259 sound technology, 8–9, 10, 51 Soviet Union, 192, 247 Spanish Civil War, 41–2, 258–9 Stage Door, 77, 78 stage theatre see Broadway theatre Stagecoach, 63, 257, 260, 273 Stanwyck, Barbara, 61, 67, 147 Star is Born, A, 70–3 stars, star system, 15–17, 31–2, 45, 51, 69–70, 146 Stempel, Tom, 51, 62 Stewart, Donald Ogden, 40, 41, 42, 58 Stewart, James, 199, 205–9, 207 Strike up the Band, 219, 220, 222–3, 228 studio system, 16, 21, 69, 147, 164 Studlar, Gaylyn, 106, 108 suffragettes, 74, 75, 76–7 Supreme Court, in The Talk of the Town, 209–14 Susannah of the Mounties, 107, 112–13, 115 Swerling, Jo, 53, 58, 59–64 swing music, 222–3, 228 Swing Time, 124, 125, 134, 135, 136 Talk of the Town, The, 3, 199, 209–14 Technicolor, 9, 272 Temple, Shirley (later Temple Black), 10, 19, 44, 119

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childhood sexuality themes and, 106–9, 113 colonialist ideology and, 2, 105–21 diplomatic career, 121–2 as top box office star, 69, 124, 218 Thalberg, Irving, 35, 40, 73, 183, 188 Theodora Goes Wild, 60, 63, 131 Thomas, Bob, 51, 58, 60 Thomson, David, 50–1, 139 Three Little Pigs, The, 173, 184 thrillers, Grant in, 153, 154–5 Time (magazine), 49, 187 Top Hat, 124, 127, 130, 132, 134, 136 Topper, 3, 139, 147–8 Trotti, Lamar, 260, 269 Trumbo, Dalton, 77 Tugboat Annie, 10, 11 Twentieth Century Pictures, 5, 184 typecasting, 16, 163–4 unions, 20, 29, 172, 221, 243, 248, 273; see also guilds United Artists (UA), 15, 93, 181, 184 Universal, 4–5, 9–10, 13, 16, 98 Vajda, Ernst, 76 Variety (magazine), 6, 7–8, 11, 14, 163, 175, 242 vaudeville, 10, 140, 147, 163, 223 Vidor, King, Our Daily Bread, 181–97 Viking Productions, 184 Voeltz, Richard A., 112, 121 Wall Street, 4, 5, 30, 34 Crash (1929), 4, 142 Warner, Harry, 5, 29, 32, 162 Warner, Jack, 5, 29, 30, 32, 69, 162 Warner Bros finances, 4–6 movie genres, 3, 9, 11, 12, 13, 161–78, 218 political alliances, 32, 37, 162 social/political content, 52, 173–4 star system, 16, 69 Zanuck at, 251

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Watts, Jr, Richard, 174, 242 Watts, Ruth, 116 Wayne, John, 154, 263 Wee Willie Winkie, 105, 106, 108, 109–12, 115, 118 welfare state, 38, 39, 186, 214, 231 West, Mae, 69, 89–90, 143, 144 Westerns, 13, 14, 73, 117 What Price Hollywood, 70–1, 74 White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP), 29, 45 White House, 33, 200–5 Wild Boys of the Road, 12, 172, 217, 219 Wilder, Billy, 36, 52, 187 Wizard of Oz, The, 8, 9, 19, 220, 231 Woman Rebels, A, 74–7 women, as public interest advocates, 88–9, 90–1

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women, working, 66–83, 208 independents, 97–8 as portrayed in films, 70–83 at the studios, 68–70, 73–8, 95, 183, 184 ‘women’s films’, 2, 10–11, 78–83 women’s movement see feminism Works Progress Administration (WPA), 198 World War II, 8, 56–7 writers see screenwriters Young, Roland, 143, 147 Young Mr. Lincoln, 257–73 youth, crisis and movement (US), 12, 172, 216–34 Zanuck, Darryl F., 5, 29, 162, 184 at 20th Century-Fox, 72, 73–4, 260 realism and, 177, 251

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