Great Depression

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Great Depression

THE DEPRESSION AND INDUSTRY FINANCES
THE MOVIES OF "PRE-CODE HOLLYWOOD"
THE BATTLE OVER CONTROL AND "POST-PCA" DEPRESSION MOVIES
FURTHER READING

The Great Depression refers to that period of American history between the stock market crash of October 1929 and the US entry into World War II following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Although the United States had experienced other significant depressions before—the periods between 1839 and 1843, 1873 and 1879, and 1893 and 1896 offer three examples—the Great Depression was particularly sustained and persistent. The only major depression to take place after the movies were firmly established as an industry and popular art form in the United States, it generated considerable economic strain on the industry—especially in the early 1930s—eroding the audience and encouraging the industry to win back its audience in a variety of ways, some of which led to tensions between the industry and certain segments of American society. The film industry responded to its critics, and as the decade wore on, a resurgent national confidence in the system coincided with some shifts in the films produced by the industry.

THE DEPRESSION AND INDUSTRY FINANCES

The economic downturn of the Depression was precipitated by a rapid decline in values of stock at the New York Stock Exchange in the fall of 1929. Black Thursday (24 October) and Black Tuesday (29 October) were key moments in the collapse. Overall, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped from a high of 381 on 3 September to a low of 198 before the end of the year. The economy continued to decline through 1932, when the Dow Jones industrial average bottomed out at 41. Between 1929 and 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) assumed the presidency, consumption had plummeted 18 percent, construction by 78 percent, and investment by 98 percent. National income had been cut in half, five thousand banks had collapsed, and over nine million savings accounts evaporated. Nonfarm unemployment reached 25 percent in the United States, and most farmers were struggling to survive because of severely depressed prices for the crops they grew and livestock they raised.

Inevitably, such an economic climate hit Hollywood hard. The industry had enjoyed a period of prosperity in the 1920s, building luxurious movie palaces and, from 1927 on, cashing in on the novelty of the newly developed technology of talking films. Between 1930 and 1933, however, movie attendance dropped from around ninety million admissions per week to sixty million admissions, and average ticket prices dropped from 30 cents to around 20 cents over the same span. Industry revenues dropped from $720 million in 1929 to $480 million in 1933, while total company profits of $54.5 million in 1929 gave way to total company losses of $55.7 million in 1932.

At the time of the stock market crash the film industry was organized by a studio system, and most of the important films produced in Hollywood in the 1930s were made by five studios that owned theater chains and three smaller studios that did not. The "Big Five" that owned theaters faced particularly pronounced strains following the crash because of the investments they had made in building theaters in the 1920s. Of that group, RKO, Fox, and Paramount all went into bankruptcy or receivership in the early 1930s, Warner Bros. managed to stay afloat only by selling off nearly one-quarter of its assets, and only MGM—which had much smaller theater holdings than Paramount—continued to make a profit, although its profits dropped from $15 million in 1930 to $4.3 million in 1931. (Fox returned to stability by merging with the independent production company Twentieth-Century in 1935.)

The "Little Three" managed a bit better. Both Columbia and Universal, production companies that owned no theaters, survived in part by making low-budget "B movies"that were often shown as double features. Columbia did better from 1934, when Frank Capra's (1896–1991) It Happened One Night became a hit. Universal was in constant financial difficulty, recording small losses each year between 1932 and 1938, although the popularity of their horror films early in the decade and Deanna Durbin (b. 1921) musicals later on kept the losses from growing even higher. United Artists, essentially a distribution company for its owners, such as Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), and talented independent producers such as Samuel Goldwyn (1882–1974) and Walter Wanger (1894–1968), lost money only in 1932, although its profits in the later 1930s were very modest.

Movie exhibition was also affected by the economic downturn. One major effect was the decline of construction of new theaters following the boom of movie-palace building in the 1920s. As movie attendance began to decline significantly in the early 1930s some theater owners also began to offer giveaway programs (like "dish night") or games of chance (SCREENO, a variety of bingo, was the most popular), particularly on the traditionally slow nights of Monday and Tuesday, to get more people back into the theaters. Theater owners also sought to reduce costs by cutting staff—hiring fewer ushers, for example—or, in the bigger urban theaters, by eliminating live shows that supplemented the movie program. Some theaters turned to double features, thus boosting the demand for B movies by companies such as Monogram and Republic. The only major new expense made by many theater owners in the Depression, especially in the South and West, was the installation of air conditioning, which because of technological advances became more affordable than it had been in the 1920s. By the end of the decade attendance inched back to 1929 levels. In this improved financial environment, the giveaway programs and the games of chance began to disappear.

Indeed, the industry began to rebound after the dark years of 1932 and 1933, in part because of New Deal legislation. President Roosevelt's National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) went into effect in June 1933, and its strategy for recovery was in part to permit certain monopolistic practices by major industries, including the film industry. Even though the Supreme Court eventually struck it down in 1935, the NIRA also authorized the organization of labor unions and collective bargaining, a tendency strengthened with the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935. From 1933 on various groups of Hollywood workers sought and eventually succeeded in establishing unions recognized by the studios, including the Screen Actors Guild (recognized in 1937), the Screen Directors Guild (1939), and the Screen Writers Guild (1941). By the time the United States entered World War II, the industry was largely unionized.

The evolution of the industry through the Depression can be grasped in part through numbers. Box-office receipts bottomed out in 1933 at $480 million, gradually growing to $810 million in 1941, which slightly exceeded the $720 million receipts of 1929. Total company losses of $55.7 million in 1932 were reduced to losses of $4.9 million in 1933, after which the bottom line improved to profits of $9 million in 1934, up to $34 million in 1941. Only in 1943, however, with profits of $60.6 million, did Hollywood exceed the $54.5 million of profits in 1929. In the most general terms, after spiraling downward from 1929/1930 to 1932/1933, the economic condition of the industry reversed itself and gradually improved for the rest of the decade, even though attendance and profits did not return to 1929 levels until after World War II was well underway. The economic conditions of the Depression surely tested the movie industry.

THE MOVIES OF "PRE-CODE HOLLYWOOD"

The period from the 1929 stock market crash until the establishment of the Production Code Administration in June 1934 has been called "pre-code Hollywood." Although film historians have argued about how different pre-code films were from films made later in the decade, a solid argument can be made that there was a distinctive difference. Andrew Bergman suggests in We're in the Money that the popular cycles of pre-code Hollywood—such as gangster films, fallen-women films, backstage musicals, social-problem films, and "anarchic" comedies—were distinctly connected to the economic distress of the early 1930s and the social-psychological anxieties it produced. Robert Sklar extends this argument in Movie-Made America, labeling the early 1930s the "golden age of turbulence" and the post-code Depression films the "golden age of order." Although Richard Malt by has usefully suggested that the majority of films in pre-code Hollywood were tamer and more conventional than the films Bergman and Sklar highlight, it does seem that during the early 1930s, more so than just before and just after that period, filmmakers were more likely to make, and audiences were more likely to respond to, films that called into question dominant attitudes toward sexuality, upper-class respectability, and the institutions of law and order.

PARE LORENTZ
b. Leonard MacTaggart Lorentz, Clarksburg, West Virginia, 11 December 1905,
d. 4 March 1992

Pare Lorentz was the most influential maker of and advocate for government-sponsored documentary films in the United States during the Great Depression. After studying journalism at West Virginia Wesleyan College and the University of West Virginia, Lorentz left for New York in 1925 and adopted his father's first name, Pare. From 1927 to 1932 he reviewed films for the magazine Judge. After that, he continued to write movie reviews and essays for a variety of publications for the rest of the decade. Some of this work was collected in Lorentz on Film (1975).

In 1934 Lorentz published The Roosevelt Year: 1933, a book of photographs with accompanying text that sought to dramatize the Depression and the emergence of the New Deal. Lorentz originally had hoped to make a film, but had been unable to arrange financing. However, in June 1935 Rexford Tugwell, head of the US Resettlement Administration, hired him to make films about the plight of farmers in the Depression. The first film project focused on the Dust Bowl. Made for less than $20,000, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) demonstrated how the drought, dust storms, and market collapse forced Great Plains farmers to leave the land, then concluded with the government's plan of resettlement and soil conservation. Although the film garnered generally positive reviews, Hollywood caused difficulties for Lorentz, making it hard for him to obtain stock footage and discouraging theaters from showing a government-sponsored film that would compete with its newsreels. Lorentz's next film, The River (1938), featured footage of the devastating floods in early 1937 to depict the problems of flooding, soil erosion, and poverty in the Tennessee and Mississippi Valleys and to suggest how the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority confronted those problems through flood control, electrification, and conservation measures. More positively reviewed and widely distributed than Plow, The River received the best documentary award at the Venice Film Festival in 1938, winning over Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia.

That year President Roosevelt named Lorentz director of the US Film Service. In that capacity he oversaw the making of Joris Iven's The Power and the Land (1940) and Robert Flaherty's The Land (1940) and made one film himself, The Fight for Life (1940), an account of infant mortality, malnutrition, and child poverty in the United States that won the National Board of Review's best documentary award. Its controversial topic and critical subject matter angered many congressmen, however, and the US Film Service was eliminated when Congress refused to fund it in the spring of 1940. Lorentz's next project, a documentary on unemployment called Ecco Homo, was never made.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), The River (1938), The Fight for Life (1940)

THE BATTLE OVER CONTROL AND "POST-PCA" DEPRESSION MOVIES

The popularity and pervasiveness of the gangster films, the fallen-women films, and West's brazen comedies played a significant role in the protests by a variety of pressure groups against the movie industry between 1932 and early 1934. Among the most prominent of the protesters was the Legion of Decency, a Catholic organization that sought to pressure the movie industry to follow the guidelines of the Hollywood Production Code of 1930. The Studio Relations Committee, an industry self-regulation body, was ostensibly charged with seeing that the studios followed that code, but it did not possess adequate power to compel the studios to adhere to it. Desperately seeking to find ways to reverse the decline in attendance, the studios regularly ignored the code in many of their productions. When the Legion of Decency began to threaten a widespread national boycott of the movies early in 1934, however, the studios decided that it would be in their best interests to set up a body that would enforce the code more strictly. They did so in June 1934 by establishing the Production Code Administration (PCA) and appointing as its director Joseph Breen. From that point on, the PCA more strictly enforced the code by reviewing and making suggestions on all studio scripts before they went into production, then doing the same with all completed films before issuing a PCA certificate. Member studios agreed not to release any film before the PCA granted it a certificate.

Regular monitoring of studio films by the PCA, as well as a gradual restoration of national confidence engendered by Roosevelt's New Deal programs between 1933 and 1935, contributed to some shifts in movie cycles after 1934. For example, Warner Bros. revised the gangster formula by making the protagonist not a gangster but a law-enforcement official in G-Men (1935), starring James Cagney. It was one of the top ten highest-grossing films of 1935 and paved the way for similar films, such as Bullets or Ballots (1936), starring Edward G. Robinson as a police detective, and Marked Woman (1937), starring Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) as a crusading district attorney. The fallen-woman and Mae West films, which were either forbidden or seriously constrained by the PCA, made way for one of the most popular and accomplished genres in the late 1930s, the screwball comedy. The surprise success of Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), which was made before the PCA was established, helped establish the cycle. An unlikely comic romance about a spoiled heiress (Claudette Colbert) and a gruff and pragmatic newspaper reporter (Clark Gable), the film became the first movie to win the five major Oscars^®—for film, director, actress, actor, and screenplay (Robert Riskin)—and set the stage for a variety of successful screwball comedies. Noting the code's prohibitions against overt portrayals of sexuality, Andrew Sarris has called the genre the "sex comedy without sex," suggesting that instead of turning the female protagonists into sex objects, the screwball comedy endowed them with spontaneity, wit, vitality, and often professional achievements in the working world (p. 8). Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Gregory La Cava's (1892–1952) My Man Godfrey (1936), Leo McCarey's (1898–1969) The Awful Truth (1937), George Cukor's Holiday (1938), and two films by Howard Hawks (1896–1977), Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940), are among the many accomplished films of the genre. In their focus on a rocky but ultimately successful romance, these screwball comedies resembled the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers musicals of the middle and late 1930s—including Top Hat (1935), Swing Time (1936), and Shall We Dance (1937)—which replaced the backstage musicals popular in the early 1930s. Each of these emerging cycles—law-official crime films, screwball comedies, and romantic musicals—exhibited more confidence in the prevailing order than had many of the popular cycles of the early 1930s.

Another shift following the establishment of the PCA (and the gradual improvement of economic conditions) was the move toward more expensive, "prestige films." These films were expensive to make, but they also were most likely to appear on Variety's list of the top ten highest-grossing films in the last half of the decade. The prestige films encompass a variety of different story types, but they included adaptations of literary classics and best-selling novels, swashbuckling adventure stories, and "biopics"—biographical films about famous people. The first group included cinematic versions of Shakespeare's plays, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) and Romeo and Juliet (1936), adaptations of nineteenth-century novels, such as David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Anna Karenina (all 1935), and adaptations of twentieth-century novels such as The Informer and Mutiny on the Bounty (both 1935), Anthony Adverse (1936), Lost Horizon and The Good Earth (both 1937), the monumentally successful Gone With the Wind (1939), and the critically acclaimed Grapes of Wrath (1940). Successful costume/adventure films appeared with Captain Blood (1935) and Anthony Adverse (1936), and crested with The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). The biopics portrayed the lives of people as different as Jesse James, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison, but one particularly effective set were three films starring Paul Muni (1895–1967): The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), and Juarez (1939).

The popularity of two child stars in the middle and latter part of the decade suggests that American movies were playing a role in the reconsolidation of American culture—in restoring confidence in the system—as the country began to pull out of the Depression. From 1935 to 1938 Shirley Temple (b. 1928), thanks to the success of such films as Curly Top (1935) and The Littlest Rebel (1936), topped the Quigley Publications poll of top box-office stars in the United States. From 1939 to 1941, Mickey Rooney (b. 1920)—MGM star of the Andy Hardy series, Boys Town (1938), and "let's put on a show" musicals such as Babes in Arms (1939)—topped the list. In both cases the child actors showed vitality, resilience, and good cheer in overcoming whatever obstacles they confronted.

As the United States moved into the latter part of the decade, Hollywood, like American culture as a whole, began to exhibit a reawakened interest in defining national traditions and values. This trend emerged in part as a response to the growing international threat of fascism in Germany and Italy. The Los Angeles area, which became home to many prominent refugees from Germany, became a center of antifascist activity in the United States, led by groups such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. The movies participated in this exploration of national traditions and critique of fascism both domestic and, eventually, foreign. Fury (1937), directed by refugee Fritz Lang (1890–1976), explored the psychology of a mob action that led to lynching. Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Meet John Doe (1941) confronted a prototypically American hero with a sinister antagonist whose wealth, power, and ambition threatened to disrupt the democratic system. The historical settings of films such as Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, and Gone With the Wind (all 1939) were central to their narrative concerns. The reappearance of the "A" western in late-1930s movies such as Dodge City, Union Pacific, and Stagecoach (all 1939) also contributed to the interest in American national traditions. Other important films from the end of this period include The Grapes of Wrath (1940), which shows how the Joad family are victimized by the dust bowl and a harsh economic system, and Orson Welles's (1915–1985) audacious, probing critique of an American tycoon, Citizen Kane (1941). Although the PCA discouraged filmmakers from making films that criticized other nations—in part because it hurt foreign rentals—overtly anti-Nazi films gradually began to appear even before the United States declared war in December 1941, most notably in Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) and Chaplin's satiric attack on fascism, The Great Dictator (1940).

If one surveys American movies during the Depression in an extreme long shot, two impulses come into clear focus. One impulse, an aesthetic of movies as entertainment, which had established itself firmly during the 1920s, held that movies should enable viewers to escape from their problems for two hours. However, a counter impulse, which emerged from the distressing social and economic conditions following the stock market crash, pressured filmmakers to acknowledge and grapple with the social realities of the day. Although the latter impulse never became dominant, in part because of the industry's constant attention to the box-office potential of projects, it did lead to some of the most disturbing and powerful films of pre-code Hollywood and to the most critically acclaimed and widely discussed films later in the decade. With the American entry to World War II in December 1941, the industry officially moved out of the Depression and into a new era.