Blogs
Escaping to Hollywood
Ticket Box Line 1939With every film we've watched in class dating from the Depression, the conclusion has been that the romanticizing of the hobo lifestyle, or the bums in central park, or even issues of race, were for the benefit of the upper class--those with jobs, those making more money than ever before, those benefiting from the Depression--those able to afford entertainment. But the 1930s and 40s were the proverbial golden age of Hollywood; films made during the Depression not only have become global classics but gave us some of the most remarkable actors the industry has seen. And the glamor about which we now reminisce was made possible by one simple fact: everyone was going to the movies.
Movies, almost above all else, perpetuated the American dream, lent itself as the perfect medium through which to inspire American optimism. Not only were the fabulous stories presented on the silver screen a chance for recession-weary citizens to escape, but the stories themselves often offered some message of achieving success, or of those living successfully. The Philadelphia Story, as the picture's article above explains, starring the trinity Carey Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and Jimmy Stewart, show the clash between the socialites and the bourgeoisie--only to have the beautiful socialite and struggling writer realize they're not so different, and people are merely people. Conversely, It Happened One Night, a 1934 screwball comedy starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, documents the adventure of a young heiress running away from her father in order to marry whom she pleases. She meets along the way Gable, an unemployed reporter, and the two squabble, starve, and hitchhike their way towards New York City.
These kinds of stories certainly were meant for escape and entertainment, but they also provided a place through which Americans could live out their own dreams, and remember what tied them so inexorably to their homeland. Even those, said the films, down-and-out, aren't suffering for nothing; their suffering was merely a transition before the realization of greatness. It was a dream in itself, the exact kind a beaten society craved. As Pauline Kael defined the interest in these lighthearted escapist films, suggesting the pictures presented "Americans' idealized view of themselves--breezy, likable, sexy, gallant, and maybe just a little harebrained." And certainly always bound for something better, be it love or money or simply happiness.
It's true that there many
It's true that there many other important things going on, and of cultural significance, that we haven't discussed. Though I know no numbers I would assume that the large majority of this country had neither fields nor stocks and weren't effected in a way as visible as the hobos or the sharecroppers or the farm owners. Hence the Golden Age of Hollywood. And film noir, too. And while the realism of Steinbeck and Agee was thriving, I would argue that of even more literary significance was the development of hardboiled crime genre. Dashiell Hammett published "The Maltese Falcon" a year after the market crashed and Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep" was published the same year as "Grapes of Wrath" and the difference in styles and subject are so stark that you'd think they were written in different decades all together. I consider it a token to our literary tradition that we can celebrate these two styles at once. And it does go to show how large our country is and that what's happening to one family surely isn't happening to all of them.
You bring up a very valid
You bring up a very valid point in regard to these films. In all of the film classes I have taken, we always discuss this period in film history exactly as you describe—a period of uplifting Horatio Alger type stories meant to be hopeful and offer a means of escape. It is interesting to compare this period in Hollywood with that which followed it—film noir. Just as we now watch these films and find them unrealistic and slightly ridiculous in their uplifting and hopeful ideologies at such a desperate time, the 1940s and early 50s brought a much darker, more honest and antagonistic view to the screen. Film Noir, playing off of the angst surrounding the war and post-war disillusionment, was rooted in its cynical representations of American Society. It is interesting that the audiences and artists who followed the depression had a similar reaction to that which we have watching the films of the depression now, they desired a more honest and brutal picture of the world in the same way that we feel swindled watching the hopeful pictures portrayed in the films of the 30s.