Pre-Code Hollywood - Hollywood During The Great Depression

Hollywood During The Great Depression

The Great Depression presented a unique time for film making in the United States. The economic disaster brought on by the Stock Market crash of 1929 changed American values and beliefs in various ways. American exceptionalism and traditional concepts of personal achievement, self-reliance, and the overcoming of odds lost great currency. Due to the constant empty economic reassurances from politicians in the early years of the depression, the American public developed an increasingly jaded attitude. The cynicism, challenging of traditional beliefs, and political controversy of Hollywood films during this period mirrored the attitudes of many of their patrons. Also gone was the carefree and adventurous lifestyle of the 1920s. "After two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the war", F. Scott Fitzgerald commented in 1931.

In the sense noted by Fitzgerald, understanding the moral climate of the early 1930s is complex. Although films experienced an unprecedented level of freedom, and dared to portray things that would be kept hidden for decades later, many in America looked upon the stock market crash as a product of the excesses of the previous decade. In looking back upon the 1920s, events were increasingly often seen as occurring in prelude to the market crash. In Dance, Fools, Dance (1931), lurid party scenes featuring 1920s flappers are played to excess and looked at in amazement and a sense of moral disgust. Joan Crawford ultimately reforms her ways and is saved; less fortunate is William Bakewell, who continues on his careless path, which ultimately leads to his self-destruction.

For the film Rain or Shine (1930), Milton Ager and Jack Yellin composed the song "Happy Days Are Here Again". The song was repeated sarcastically by characters in several films such as Under 18 (1932) and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1933). Less comical was the picture of the United States' future presented in Heroes for Sale (1933) where a hobo looks into a depressing night and proclaims, "It's the end of America." Heroes for Sale was directed by prolific Pre-Code director William Wellman and featured silent film star Richard Barthelmess as a World War I veteran cast onto the streets with a morphine addiction from his hospital stay. In Wild Boys of the Road (1933), the young man played by Frankie Darrow leads a group of dispossessed juvenile drifters who frequently brawl with the police. Such gangs were common; around 250,000 youths traveled the country hopping trains or hitchhiking in search of better economic circumstances in the early 1930s.

Complicating matters for the studios, the advent of sound film in 1927 required an immense expenditure in high-priced new equipment such as sound stages, recording booths, cameras, movie-theater sound systems, etc., not to mention the new-found artistic complications of producing in a radically altered medium. The studios were in a difficult financial position even before the market crash as the sound conversion process and some risky purchases of theater chains had pushed their finances near the breaking point. These economic circumstances led to a loss of nearly half of the weekly attendance numbers and closure of almost a third of the country's theaters in the first few years of the depression. Even so, 60 million Americans were still going to see films every week.

Apart from the economic realities of the conversion to sound, were the artistic considerations. Early sound films were often noted for being too verbose. In 1930, Carl Laemmle criticized the wall-to-wall banter of sound pictures, and director Ernst Lubitsch wondered what the camera was intended for if characters were going to narrate all the onscreen action. The film industry also withstood competition from the home radio, and often characters in films went to great lengths to belittle the medium. The film industry was not above using the new medium to broadcast commercials for its projects however, and occasionally turned radio stars into short feature performers to take advantage of their built-in following.

Seething beneath the surface of American life in the Depression was the fear of the angry mob, portrayed in panicked hysteria in films such as Gabriel Over the White House (1933), The Mayor of Hell (1933), and American Madness (1932). Massive wide shots of angry hordes, comprising sometimes hundreds of men, rush into action in terrifyingly efficient uniformity. Groups of agitated men either standing in breadlines, loitering in hobo camps, or marching the streets in protest became a prevalent sight during the Great Depression. The Bonus Army protests of World War I veterans on the U.S. capital in Washington, D.C., on which Hoover unleashed a brutal crackdown, prompted many of the Hollywood depictions. Although social issues were examined more directly in the Pre-Code era, Hollywood still largely ignored the Great Depression, as many films sought to ameliorate patrons, rather than incite them.

Will Hays remarked in 1932:

The function of motion pictures is to ENTERTAIN.... This we must keep before us at all times and we must realize constantly the fatality of ever permitting our concern with social values to lead us into the realm of propaganda ... the American motion picture...owes no civic obligation greater than the honest presentment of clean entertainment and maintains that in supplying effective entertainment, free of propaganda, we serve a high and self-sufficing purpose.