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We at Best Movies by Farr want to share a story of success plucked from adversity: the story of Hollywood’s response to the Great Depression, and how the movie business managed to survive by providing solace and escape to a hurting nation.
At the time of the 1929 crash, Hollywood was already in transition: Sound was here to stay, but still in its early stages. There’d been huge investments made to convert shooting sets and theatres to sound. Movie careers had ended — and been launched — overnight.
Hollywood urgently needed to recoup their conversion investment, and market this new form, even as the country faced unprecedented hardship. They had to catch up with their new technology fast, creating a cinema of sight and sound, images and words.
Fortunately the industry had some key advantages: first, they were the major source of popular entertainment, with 65% of the population going to the movies each week. (For reference, by the year 2000, that percentage had fallen to 27%.) The only competition to movies then was radio-theatre, too, but it was more expensive.
The studio system was also in place, so all the major players had stars, directors, writers and producers under contract; they even owned the theatres themselves. All this gave the studios speed, flexibility, and most important, control.
It was also relatively cheap to see a movie then – 10-25 cents. Hollywood’s strategy: for that dime or quarter, give the public more than ever. With every visit to the theatre, a viewer would get a string of entertainment: newsreels, cartoons, “B” pictures/serials, and finally, the “A” pictures.
For “A” productions, the studios wanted intelligent stories – often literary adaptations – and glamorous stars, both to attract a desirable demographic and add prestige to the industry. The studios hired the best writers and actors from the Broadway stage. They then perfected a sophisticated marketing and publicity machine around these new stars. They programmed their lives, cultivated their images, and tracked their popularity.
“A” pictures spanned a variety of genres, but it was the comedies that provided crucial escape for weary, anxious audiences. There were several consistent threads in Depression-era comedies: the public wanted to laugh at the rich, so wealthy characters were often either stuffy or buffoonish, reflecting the populist sentiments of the New Deal.
That said, it was the rich the public wanted to see portrayed. They enjoyed drinking in the rarefied atmosphere of the upper classes; it reassured them that real wealth still existed.
Thus was born the screwball comedy.
Any discussion of the beloved screwball must begin with 1934’s “It Happened One Night”, which was made at Columbia, one of the lesser Poverty Row studios, its director a young up-and-comer named Frank Capra.
Back then, studios loaned out their stars for hefty fees, and MGM offered up rising star Clark Gable. Gable didn’t want to do it, and neither did his co-star Claudette Colbert. Both were certain they were making a turkey. Both were dead wrong.
Gable plays a down-on-his-luck reporter who stumbles onto a big scoop when he meets a runaway heiress (Colbert). But will romance complicate his plans? Happy ending: both Gable and Colbert won their only competitive Oscars for this, and the film itself was the first ever to sweep the Oscars in all major categories.
“My Man Godfrey” (1936) may be the screwball comedy with the most overt social message. The urbane William Powell plays Godfrey, a hobo picked up at the city dump by daffy heiress Carole Lombard as part of a society ball scavenger hunt. How will Godfrey, who is not what he seems, parlay this situation into something that benefits all those other forgotten men living at the city dump?
Not everyone realizes that urbane leading man Cary Grant actually built his career on screwball comedy. 1937 was a pivotal year for him, as the public discovered his comic talent in Leo McCarey’s hit, “The Awful Truth.” Cary and Irene Dunne play a married couple who impulsively separate and spend the rest of the film trying to get back together.
Two other unmissable Grant screwballs with Katharine Hepburn in heiress mode: Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby” (1938), and George Cukor’s “The Philadelphia Story” (1940).
Finally, writer/director Preston Sturges placed his own delirious stamp on the screwball with 1941’s “The Lady Eve”, with Henry Fonda the nerdy heir to a beer fortune who gets tangled up with sultry con woman Barbara Stanwyck on board a luxury liner.
Our entry into World War 2 just months later spelled the end of an era. Later, in the more cynical, sober post-war world, the dominance of the movie industry started to decline when the studios were forced to give up ownership of their theaters in 1948.
At the same time, a funny box started turning up as furniture in everyone’s living room, broadcasting a free new phenomenon called television. Thus began the gradual sunset of what is commonly known as Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Still, it’s important to remember that back in their heyday, the movies helped see a dispirited country through hard times. With clouds appearing on our economic horizon once again, these timeless titles, all available to stream on Amazon Prime, can serve the same purpose now.
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