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

Chaplin’s Modern Times confronted the effects of the Great Depression in a way unique for its socio-economic realism at the time of its mid-1930s making. In examining reception of the movie in the US, UK and France, this essay debunks notions that Hollywood movies were part of some uni-directional current of ‘Americanisation.’ It suggests instead that the differing national receptions reflected local circumstances and their own social, cultural and political identities and preoccupations. A complex transnational text, Hard Times was made by a Hollywood-based Englishman influenced by ideas developed on his world tour of 1931-32. Chaplin’s ‘Little Tramp,’ making what would prove his last film appearance, could therefore be interpreted with differing national contexts as a victim of industrialisation and the Great Depression, an inadvertent radical, a defender of order, or the ultimate survivor.

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

This chapter analyses how Hollywood focused on recognizable and venerable architectural representations of federal institutions to symbolise the new relationship that had developed between the citizenry and the national government under the aegis of the New Deal. Through case studies of three films respectively featuring the executive, legislative and judicial edifices of the national state – Gabriel over the White House (1933), Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and The Talk of the Town (1942) – become sites of masculine transformations, as the three male protagonists each experience private revelations that help them take on new roles as president, senator and Supreme Court Justice respectively. Though each contains a romantic sub-plot, none of the movies ends with the expected scene of romantic coupling whose trajectory was established in the early scenes. Accordingly the male leads become defined less by private heterosexuality than by public involvement in the Roosveltian state.

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

This chapter revisits and explores the production history of director King Vidor’s independently made movie, Our Daily Bread (1934), its ideological and aesthetic motifs, and its exhibition and reception in the United States and beyond, not least its apparent failure at the box office. It further considers the relationship between the film and contemporary advocacy of cooperative activity as a response to the Great Depression, notably by the California Cooperative League, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign for the state governorship. It also assesses the movie in relation to Vidor’s own cooperative vision through its emphasis on individuals and community as a solution to the Great Depression and the significant absence of the state in this agency.

Astaire and Rogers: Carefree in Roberta

This chapter challenges the conventional notion that the song and dance musicals that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made for MGM in the 1930s epitomized Hollywood escapist fare in the Depression decade. Through a close reading of one of their movies, Roberta (1935), it shows how this could be seen as romantic nonsense at one level and as a poignant reminder of ordinary people’s wider lived realities in hard times at another. It analyses, in particular, how the dual rendering of ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ in song by the Irene Dunne character and in dance by the Astaire and Rogers characters gives the narrative moments of emotional depth by stressing the potential for loss. This lifts the film beyond the private ordeals of the romantic couples involved in its on-off love plots into the public domain of the Depression audience both on screen in the salon and nightclub sequences and off screen in the case of moviegoers.

The Congressional Battle over Motion Picture Distribution, 1936–40

Using largely un-researched congressional records, this chapter examines the four hearings held between 1936 and 1940 on trade practices in distribution, notably block-booking and blind selling, which underwrote an effective big-studio monopoly. It examines how the material problem of getting commercial entertainment from the scene of production to thousands of theatres nationwide impacted on the way various elements in the film industry, notably the big studios and independent exhibitors, represented its practices, as well as its products, both to Congress and to themselves. Although the studios were able to frustrate legislative efforts to challenge their interests, this only ensured that the Justice Department would seek legal redress through the courts. The coming of World War II briefly suspended New Deal efforts to strengthen federal regulation of the film business but the seeds were sewn by the end of the 1930s for the US v Paramount et al Supreme Court decision that did much to undermine studio power by requiring separation of the ownership of production and exhibition of films.

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

This analyses the largely neglected and underestimated role of screen writers in 1930s Hollywood, an era when the art of movie writing actually made great strides as an art form. It considers the significance of three Columbia writers – Sidney Buchman, Robert Riskin, and Jo Swerling, why they were able to flourish at this small studio with the support of mogul Harry Cohn, and their role in the making of Frank Capra’s populist classics – notably Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939). It examines how these scribes responded to the Great Depression not only by becoming active in the newly-formed Screen Writers Guild but also in writing scripts that injected populist values into the Capra movies as well as seemingly non-political comedy films like Platinum Blonde (1931) and Theodora Goes Wild (1935).

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

This chapter locates John Ford’s 1939 movie, Young Mr Lincoln, in relation to his contemporary involvement with the Hollywood Popular Front collaboration of liberals and communists in support of social justice at home and anti-fascism abroad. Like many of the director’s film, it can be viewed at different levels in its exploration of history and myth, but Popular Front sentiments are fundamental to its holistic understanding. Its fictional representation of a youthful Abraham Lincoln’s successful defence of two brothers wrongly placed on a murder charge in 1837 Illinois is an allegory for current concerns. Ford’s presentation of him as a common man capable of greatness, concerned to ensure social justice for the oppressed, identifying emotionally with ordinary people without losing sight of their shortcomings, and possessing a strong sense of right and wrong resonated with the cause of American progressivism at home and abroad in this troubled era.

Footlight Parade: The New Deal on Screen

This chapters shows how the Warner Bros. movie, Footlight Parade, part of a trilogy of Great Depression made in 1933 and also featuring 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, epitomised the studio’s support for Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and the New Deal programme of the first Hundred Days. It also marked James Cagney’s break from being typecast as a gangster to present him as a FDR-figure overcoming a crisis. The chapter further explores how Jack and Harry Warner forsook FDR shortly after the filming of Footlight Parade to join other moguls in opposition to the National Recovery Administration’s efforts to promote the interests of organized labour. Thereafter the pro-New Deal message in the studio’s productions became muted and it reverted to escapism in its post-1933 musicals.

Shirley Temple and Hollywood’s Colonialist Ideology

This chapter shows how the ‘Shirley Temple formula,’ namely how a little girl suffering uncertainty and hardship triumphs through her loving heart and indomitability, was applied to and subverted within limits the ‘settler genre’ of movies she made for twentieth Century Fox in the 1930s: Wee Willie Winkie, Susannah of the Mounties, The Little Princess, The Littlest Rebel, and The Little Colonel. In these movies Temple’s character can appear non-white when it suits her or is more fun, but never when it means suffering the consequences of racism. In essence, therefore, the little Shirley’s embrace of native cultures in her colonial films diverges somewhat from the unquestioning acceptance of colonialism in the Hollywood industry of the 1930s. At the same time, the privilege of her whiteness affords an escape hatch when needed and an implied superiority to the cultures of colour that renders her disruption negligible.

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

This explores the rift between opponents of progressive reforms associated with the New Deal (mainly the studio moguls) and its supporters in other branches of the film industry. It assesses the significance of the establishment of craft guilds to represent actors, writers, and directors. It offers a detailed analysis of how studio chiefs played a key role in defeating Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign to become governor of California in 1934. It explores the anti-fascist Popular Front alliance formed between liberals and communists in the second half of the 1930s, how this prompted congressional investigation that prefigured the 1940s Red Scare, and the collapse of left-liberal unity with the establishment of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939. It also an assessment of mogul Louis B. Mayer and actor Melvyn Douglas as representatives of conservative and liberal Hollywood.