A Resounding Success
One of cinema history’s great ironies comes from the 1927 Warner Brothers film The Jazz Singer, in which Al Jolson spoke the first words of ‘natural’ synchronized dialogue on film. As a showman trained in vaudeville, he engaged the audience both on the set and in the theaters before launching into the film’s next musical number, bantering the improvised line: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothing yet…” He could hardly have been more prophetic.
The following year, Warner Brothers continued to exploit audiences’ fascination with dialogue and released the first all-talkie, Lights of New York, which was a box office success despite being a critical failure (Cook 213). Still, the message was clear: synchronized sound was the way of the future. Warner Brothers never made another silent film, and the other studios were racing to catch up. By the end of 1928, all of the major studios were converting their production facilities and theaters to be wired for sound.
Meanwhile, Herbert Hoover was elected president in a landslide victory. Respected economists speculated a bright future for the stock market. It was an era of ignorant optimism. Just as much of the rest of the country enjoyed a false prosperity built on credit, the studios paid for the complete overhaul of their industry through extensive financing, much of it provided by the Morgan and Rockefeller Groups. If the people wanted talkies, the studios were happy to oblige, and the banks, of course, were happy to charge interest. It was a golden age indeed. David Cook estimates the cost of conversion at about $300 million, not adjusted for inflation (213).
Vertical Integration
In May of 1929, the first Academy Awards were held to trumpet the artistry and technical achievements of the cinema that had been accomplished in the past two years. Charlie Chaplin won an honorary award “for versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing” (oscars.com). Just as the medium was coming into its own as an art form, according to Tino Balio, the industry was also becoming a mature oligopoly, dominated by five major studios: Loew’s (who owned MGM), Paramount, Warner Brothers, Fox, and RKO, as well as three minors: Universal, Columbia and United Artists. The fundamental difference between the Big Five and the Little Three is that the Big Five also owned chains of movie theaters, which accounted for approximately 70% of the box office receipts (Balio 213).
With the exception of first-run metropolitan markets, most of the theater chains that the studios owned operated in different parts of the country. However, as the consumer demand for films typically exceeded the output of any one studio, it was common practice for the studios to lease screens in the theaters of their rivals. This was also how the Little Three found an audience. Through this arrangement, when a movie performed well at the box office, the Big Five all made money from exhibition, no matter who produced it. Whereas at the studio level, each of the majors and minors attempted to differentiate their products in terms of aesthetics and genre, exhibition involved a far more complex network of corporate cooperation.
An A-class film would typically screen in the first-run metropolitan movie palaces of the studio that produced it. After that, it would play at the other studios’ first-run theaters until finally, it would reach the second-run and rural markets. During the conversion to sound, the studios also had to work together in order to agree upon standards. This is not the last time they would collude in pursuit of common interests. They settled on Vitaphone, a technology developed by Electrical Research Products, Inc. (ERPI), which was a subsidiary of Western Electric. RCA, producer of one of the competing technologies, the Photophone, responded by creating its own integrated film corporation, RKO (Wasko 48).
American Institutions
When the market crashed, the movies at first seemed to be recession-proof. People were still enamored with the talking pictures in spite of the bankruptcy and collapse of institutions all around them. However, by 1931, as the novelty of synchronized sound wore off and the state of the economy continued to decline, ticket sales plummeted. Warner Brothers had seen a $14.5 million profit in 1929 and by 1931, they were taking a loss of $8 million. Fox made $10 million in 1930 and were $4 million dollars in the red the following year. RKO took in $3.4 million in profit in 1930 and then lost $5.7 million the following year. Paramount made $6.3 million in 1931, and within a year, they were claiming a loss of $21 million. Only Loew’s managed to remain profitable throughout the Depression, though they, too, saw a decline in ticket sales. In 1930, they made $15 million profit and in 1933, they only made $4.3 million (Balio 1993, 15).
Although the studios themselves were based out of Hollywood, their executive offices were still in New York. When investment firms underwrote the conversion to sound, they placed representatives on the boards of directors of each of the major studios to oversee fiscal matters. When the studios could no longer pay their debts, several of these banker/board members were promoted to top management positions at the various studios.
RKO was the first of the studios to go into receivership, followed soon after by Paramount, Fox and Universal. Through this arrangement, banks took control of these studios and forced them to reorganize. Harley C. Clark, the former president of a Chicago holding company that “owned or controlled more than fifty gas and electric companies in the United States and Great Britain,” was appointed new president of Fox in 1930, a position that he held for about a year. After demonstrating his ineptitude at running a motion picture studio, he was replaced by Edward R. Tinker of Chase Bank, who also served in this position for about a year. He was then replaced by Sidney Kent, who was the former head of distribution at Paramount. Kent was responsible for the merger of 20th Century Pictures and Fox Film Corporation in 1935 (Balio 1993, 23).
Paramount’s board of directors also appointed a prominent banker to a management position at the studio during their financial crisis. John Hertz of Lehmann Brothers was appointed chairman of Paramount’s finance committee in 1931. He stepped down in 1933 after losing the company millions of dollars. When Paramount went into receivership in 1935, the new board of directors was made up of mostly bankers. John Otterson of ERPI, the company that held the patents to the technology used for synchronized sound, was named CEO of Paramount that same year. He lasted for about a year before being replaced by theater chain owner Barney Balaban in 1936. Otterson helped Paramount get their finances in order, but he proved himself unable to efficiently run a major motion picture studio (Balio 1993, 24).
Paramount and Fox were clear of debts in 1935. Meanwhile, Universal was out of receivership the following year, and RKO was not out of the red until 1940 (Balio 1993, 30). However, the finance industry’s foothold in Hollywood remained. According to Janet Wasko:
In summary, then, integration, stability, and expansion (especially theater expansion and construction) finally legitimized the film industry and attracted bankers; the conversion to sound and the depression-proof industry myth intensified banker participation; the overextension and the depression, which finally hit the industry in 1931, solidified financial control and further concentrated capital and power within the industry (52).
Wasko also notes that during this period (and in the years since), films seldom challenged the status quo. She argues that this was because the studios — and the bankers who were now integrated within their ranks — sought to appeal to as many people as possible. According to Wasko, “films were designed, for the most part, to provide entertainment to a mass audience. Standardized formulas and widely accepted themes, later discussed by numerous Hollywood observers, were methods of insuring such an audience” (94).
While I agree that certain formulas of film narratives found vast popularity during this period, I do not share Wasko’s opinion that the motives behind these decisions were purely profit-driven. Rather, when looked at collectively, most of the films of this era not only reinforced the status quo, but they also promoted certain ideologies that were designed to minimize class tensions, thereby alleviating much of the public animosity directed toward the capitalists who were understood to be the primary cause of the Great Depression.
During this period, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), known colloquially as the Hays Office, was one of the key mediators between the film industry and the viewing public. Although most noted for their role in censoring film content to appease special-interest groups like the Catholic Legion of Decency, the MPPDA also ensured that left-leaning political content was also removed from films, particularly after the creation of the Production Code Administration in 1934, which was headed by Joseph Breen. According to Gregory D. Black in Hollywood Censored, “Each time a studio submitted a script [to the MPPDA] with social or political implications, the code was invoked to tone down screen preachments. Breen coined the term ‘industry policy’ for dealing with those films that, while technically within the moral confines of the code, were adjudged ‘dangerous’ to the well-being of the industry… because they dealt with politically sensitive topics” (245). William Hays and Joseph Breen were clearly allies of the banking industry (and capitalism in general) and made sure that any film that received the PCA seal of approval did not present these institutions in a negative light.
During the Great Depression, there were six dominant modes of films; I will examine each in more detail in the pages that follow and discuss how these films reinforced the status quo and perpetuated certain ideologies, specifically those that relate to class antagonisms. These modes, ranked in order of relative production costs, duration of popularity and box office performance, are: 1.) prestige pictures, 2.) musicals, 3.) the woman’s film, 4.) comedy, 5.) social problem films, and 6.) horror films (Balio, 1993, 179). With each type of film, I will include pertinent examples based on critical reception and box office revenues that support my claims.
Prestige Pictures
Tino Balio defines a prestige picture not as a genre, but as a typically “big-budget special based on a pre-sold property… tailored for top stars” (179). The Motion Picture Herald further identified the four types of properties from which prestige pictures were adapted: 1.) nineteenth-century European literature, 2.) Shakespearean plays, 3.) best-selling novels and hit broadway plays, and 4.) biographical and historical subjects. Whereas most A-list films were carried by one or two top stars, prestige pictures often had several. In addition to the cost of casting, the productions themselves were often far more expensive than other types of film. Typically, a prestige picture cost between $1 million and $4 million. Examples included: Grand Hotel (1932), Rasputin and the Emperors (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), Little Women (1933), Romeo and Juliet (1936), and Gone with the Wind (1939), the last of which was, at the time, the most expensive film ever produced, at a cost of $4.1 million. As opposed to other A-pictures, which screened continuously during the first run, these films were often shown twice-a-day to patrons in higher-priced, reserved seats at the grand, metropolitan movie palaces.
Prestige pictures were often marketed as cultural events, aimed primarily at the upper class but offering opportunities for the working poor to temporarily transcend their class in the anonymity of a darkened theater. Prestige pictures seldom dealt with contemporary issues, instead transporting their audiences to another time and place. It is a common oversimplification to say that these films provided an escape from the quotidian realities of the Great Depression, but there is nonetheless some validity to this notion, particularly with this type of movie. Prestige pictures became even more common after the PCA, motivated by the Catholic Legion of Decency, led the industry to launch its ‘Better Pictures Campaign’ in 1934. The ‘classic’ texts that the industry drew upon as its source material for these films lent an aura of artistic credibility to an industry that was desperately trying to rebrand its reputation. However, because these films also cost considerably more than their counterparts to produce and therefore required more marketing to help recoup these costs, they also changed the standard business practices of Hollywood, foreshadowing the ‘blockbuster’ model of today.
Musicals
Musicals were the most obvious mode of film to develop with the advent of synchronized sound and proved to be extremely popular, particularly for the first half of the 1930s. Although prestige pictures accounted for more of studios budgets and revenue, in terms of sheer numbers, there were more musicals produced during this period than other mode of film. Prominent examples include: The Love Parade (1929), The Hollywood Review of 1929 (1929), King of Jazz (1930), The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), Love Me Tonight (1932), and the immensely popular Gold Diggers series (1932, 1933, 1935 and 1937), which were among the dozens of films of this period choreographed (and often directed) by Busby Berkeley. Although the stories typically played a secondary role to the musical numbers in these films, the plots were often more or less variations of the Cinderella story, where a poor chorus girl is given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a star. As such, musicals of this era treated class as something to be overcome through determination and luck, perpetuating the myth of the American Dream at a time when social realities would seem to prove otherwise.
The "Woman’s Film"
Balio describes the ‘woman’s film’ as “a type of motion picture that revolves around an adult female protagonist and is designed to appeal mostly to a female audience” (1993, 235). Based on that description, there is obviously significant overlap between this mode of film and that of the musical or prestige picture. Andrew Bergman further classifies this mode into ‘women of the streets’ films, often otherwise referred to as ‘fallen woman’ films, often centering on issues of prostitution, and ‘women of the world’ films, such as those starring Mae West, which featured a strong female protagonist who lived life on her own terms. Many of the films of Dorothy Arzner and Ernst Lubitsch would also fall under this second category. In the case of the ‘fallen woman’ films, the underlying message was not that it was the institution of capitalism that was broken, but rather, the institutions of society in which capitalism operated. Self-determination and rugged individualism still applied, but a woman sometimes had to work outside of the law in order to maintain her independence. In many ways, this is parallel to the themes of the gangster movies that were also very popular at the time, which I will discuss shortly.
Comedies
Andrew Bergman notes that there were two dominant modes of comedy in the 1930s: the anarchist comedy, such as the films of the Marx Brothers, and the ‘screwball’ comedies of Frank Capra and Howard Hawks. On the surface, many Marx Brothers films seemed aimed at deflating class pretensions and offering commentary on the moral bankruptcy of wealthy Americans, but one could also argue that these films merely offered catharsis, where these class tensions were represented on screen long enough to laugh at, but without any sustained social critique. In this sense, they offered somewhat of a ‘steam valve’ for class tensions to be defused.
In a similar respect, although the screwball comedies of Capra, Hawks and others typically featured a cross-class romance — either between a wealthy woman and a working-class man or vise versa — any class tensions raised during the film were almost always resolved by the end, thus reinforcing the myth of the classless society. Films like It Happened One Night (1934), My Man Godfrey (1936) or Bringing Up Baby (1938) all superficially address class tensions but then resolve them cleanly by the film’s conclusion.
Social Problem Films
One might think that films of the ‘social problem’ mode would be the most likely to actually engage in critical discourse surrounding issues of class and inequality in American society, but the truth is that most of these films hardly said anything at all. Most of these films were produced by Warner Brothers, and it was well known that Jack Warner maintained close ties to President Roosevelt throughout his presidency. As such, many of the films that Warner Brothers produced during this period reflected an endorsement of New Deal policies. Films like I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and Black Fury (1935) addressed topical concerns (chain gangs and labor disputes, respectively), but due to changes that were forced by the PCA, these films only condemned individual actions and not the institutions themselves, as had originally been intended in the screenplays.
Gangster movies may also be included in the ‘social problems’ mode of film. At the beginning of the decade, films like The Public Enemy (1931) and Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932) enjoyed wide audience appeal. These films were, much like the ‘fallen woman’ movies, stories of rugged individualism and entrepreneurship surviving and succeeding in spite of the inability of our public institutions to maintain the promise of the American Dream. If a self-made man could not succeed within the institutions of our society, then he would have to do it outside the law. However, pressure from the PCA and other groups, as well as the popularity of President Roosevelt and his policies, led to a stark thematic shift in these types of films. That is, after 1934, the hero of these films was no longer the gangster, but the government agent tasked with bringing these criminals to justice.
Horror Films
American horror films really came into their own for the first time in the 1930s. Often heavily inspired by German expressionism of the previous decade, films like King Kong (1933), Frankenstein (1931) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) all seemed to have exploited audiences’ anxieties about modernity. As such, issues of class are secondary in these films, but as Andrew Bergman notes, there is a ‘back to the earth’ mentality that is pervasive in these movies, each celebrating, in their own ways, the agrarian over the urban. As Tino Balio notes, nearly half of the A-class horror films produced during this period were of the mad-scientist variety (1993, 298). Admittedly, issues of class are not typically as integral to the plots of horror films as they were in other modes, but an argument can certainly be made that these movies reinforce earlier divisions of urban versus rural life that was very much a part of the American discourse throughout the nineteenth century.
Resistance and Transgression
Certainly, not all Hollywood films produced during the Great Depression promoted a capitalist ideology or presented the illusion of a classless society, but a vast majority of them in fact did. With that said, certain studios and filmmakers, particularly those who were free from any restrictive financial obligations to the banking industry, were able to make films that challenged the status quo and the censorship of the PCA, thereby presenting a counter-narrative to the illusions that were being perpetuated by mainstream Hollywood.
Charlie Chaplin, for example, as co-owner of United Artists, produced and distributed his films himself, and because of the enormous clout that he wielded in the industry, he was even able to circumvent many of the PCA’s censorship guidelines. His 1936 classic, Modern Times, is a commentary on the dehumanization of industrialized wage labor in which he willingly violates numerous categories of the production code. City Lights, made in 1931, is fundamentally about the class divisions that keep people apart, whether in friendship or romance. As Chaplin had virtually no one to answer to beside himself, he more or less made the films that he wanted to make, and in doing so, he challenged the class relations as they existed in Depression-era America. It should also be noted that many of the ‘social problem’ films discussed earlier were often originally intended to be more of an indictment of the issues they address, but because of the influence of Jospeh Breen and Will Hays, the underlying messages in many of these films were lost to censorship, leaving them essentially declawed.
If a person’s only knowledge of the Great Depression was to come from the films made during this era, that person would hardly think there was an economic crisis at all. All indications on the silver screen pointed to a society that was free of significant class tensions, where upward mobility and the American Dream were every bit as attainable as they had been in decades past. This, of course, was a fictitious narrative, projected by individuals who maintained positions of enormous power over the masses. By consciously shaping the ideologies represented on screen, bankers either directly (as CEOs of studios) or indirectly (as board members and by controlling patent rights on film technology) transformed the pervasive public distrust of their industry into a celebration of their supposed benevolence. By the beginning of World War II, through the manipulation of public sentiment through cinematic representations, not only was banking a far more respected institution than it had been at the beginning of the Great Depression, but people seemed perfectly willing to forgive these men who destroyed the economy.
Furthermore, as this decade marks one of the most important formative periods of the film industry — a time in which not only was the studio system fully realized, but also, the public’s idea of what a film can and should look like was also formed during this period. As such, a study of this era in film history and the institutional dynamics that shaped what made it to the screen is extremely important, not just as a historiography, but because the implications remain with us today.
Works Cited
Balio, Tino. The American Film Industry. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1976. Print.
Balio, Tino. Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930-1939.
New York: Scribner, 1993. Print.
Bergman, Andrew. We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films. Chicago: I.R.
Dee, 1992. Print.
Black, Gregory D. Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print.
Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. Print.
Hanson, Philip. This Side of Despair: How the Movies and American Life Intersected
during the Great Depression. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2008. Print.
Hark, Ina Rae. American Cinema of the 1930s: Themes and Variations. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2007. Print.
