HISTORY105 - Movies in the USA: Part 1

I’ve always liked movies.  I don’t watch anything on television these days except for sports and movies and I still enjoy a theater movie once in a while.  After a little digging recently, I found out that I didn’t know much about the early days of movies or their history through today.  So, I’m going to write about the history of movies. 

 

This is a big subject - so I’m focusing on movie history in the USA, except for inventions in Europe that contributed greatly to the development of movies.   I’m also going to do this in two parts:  After a short introduction, Part 1 will cover the early years of movies, 1830 to 1910; the silent years, 1910 to 1927; and the sound era through the end of World War II.  Part 2 will cover the post-World-War II trends; the transition to the 21^st century; the status of movies today; and finally, a look at the future of movies.

I will list my principal sources at the end of Part 2.

 

Introduction

Movies (alternatively called motion pictures, films, or cinema) are the illusion of movement by the recording and subsequent rapid projection of many still photographic pictures on a screen.  The illusion of films is based on the optical phenomena known as persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon.  The first of these causes the human brain to retain images cast upon the retina of the eye for a fraction of a second beyond their disappearance from the field of sight, while the latter creates apparent movement between images when they succeed one another rapidly.  Together these phenomena permit the succession of still frames on a film strip to represent continuous movement when projected at the proper speed. 

Originally a product of 19^th-century scientific endeavor, movies have become a medium of mass entertainment and communication, and today are a multi-billion-dollar industry.

However, competition, first with television, and later with video streaming from the internet, has significantly changed how movies are delivered.

 

Early Years:  1830 - 1910

Origins. Before the invention of photography, a variety of optical toys exploited the illusion of movement effect by mounting successive drawings of things in motion on the face of a twirling disk (c. 1832) or inside a rotating drum (c. 1834). 

Cranking this rotating drum made the figure in the drawing appear to dance.

Then, in 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a French painter, perfected the positive photographic process known as daguerreotype, and that same year the English scientist William Henry Fox Talbot successfully demonstrated a negative photographic process that allowed unlimited positive prints to be produced from each negative.  As photography was refined over the next few decades, it became possible to replace the drawings in the early optical toys and devices with individually posed (phase of motion) photographs, a practice that was widely and popularly carried out.

There would be no true motion pictures, however, until live action could be photographed spontaneously and simultaneously.  This required a reduction in exposure time from the hour or so necessary for the pioneer photographic processes to the one-hundredth (and, ultimately, one-thousandth) of a second achieved in 1870.  It also required the development of series photography by the British American photographer Eadweard Muybridge.

Muybridge believed that at some point in its gallop, a horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at the same time.  Conventions of 19^th-century illustration suggested otherwise, and the movement itself occurred too rapidly for perception by the naked eye.  In 1877, Muybridge set up 12 cameras along a Sacramento racecourse, with wires stretched across the track to operate their shutters.  As a horse galloped down the track, its hooves tripped each shutter individually to expose successive photograph of the gallop; one  of the photos showed all four hooves off the ground at the same time,  confirming Muybridge’s belief.  When Muybridge later mounted these images on a rotating disk and projected them on a screen through a magic lantern (early projection device), they produced a “moving picture” of the horse at full gallop as it had actually occurred in life.

Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of a running horse.

The French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey took the first series photographs with a single instrument in 1882.  His camera could take 12 consecutive frames a second, with all the frames recorded on the same picture.  Using these pictures, he studied the motion of horses, birds, dogs, sheep, donkeys, elephants, fish, microscopic creatures, mollusks, insects, and reptiles. 

Muybridge and Marey conducted their work as scientific inquiry - not for entertainment purposes.  They both extended existing technologies to probe and analyze events that occurred beyond the threshold of human perception.

In 1887, in Newark, New Jersey, an Episcopalian minister named Hannibal Goodwin developed the idea of using celluloid as a base for photographic emulsions.  The inventor and industrialist George Eastman began manufacturing celluloid roll film in 1889 at his plant in Rochester, New York.  This event was crucial to the development of movies: series photography such as Marey’s could employ glass plates or paper strip film because it recorded events of short duration in a relatively small number of images, but movies would inevitably find its subjects in longer, more complicated events, requiring thousands of images, and therefore just the kind of flexible but durable recording medium represented by celluloid.   It remained for someone to combine the principles embodied in the apparatuses of Muybridge and Marey with celluloid strip film to arrive at a viable motion-picture camera.

Edison and the Lumière Brothers. American inventor and businessman Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, and it quickly became the most popular home-entertainment device of the century.  Seeking to provide a visual accompaniment to the phonograph, Edison commissioned William Dickson, a young laboratory assistant, to invent a motion-picture camera in 1888.  Building upon the work of Muybridge and Marey, Dickson’s motion-picture camera produced regular motion of the film strip through the camera, and employed an evenly perforated celluloid film strip to ensure precise synchronization between the film strip and the shutter. 

Edison had Dickson design a type of peep-show viewing device called the Kinetoscope, in which a continuous 47-foot film loop ran on spools between an incandescent lamp and a shutter for individual viewing.  Starting in 1894, Kinetoscopes were marketed commercially through the firm of Raff and Gammon for $250 to $300 apiece.  The Edison Company supplied films for the Kinetoscopes that Raff and Gammon were installing in penny arcades, hotel lobbies, amusement parks, and other such semipublic places. 

Thomas Edison’s lab developed an early motion-picture camera and the Kinetoscope, a device for individual film viewing.

The syndicate of Maguire and Baucus acquired the foreign rights to the Kinetoscope in 1894, and began to market the machines.  It was a Kinetoscope exhibition in Paris that inspired the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, to invent in 1895 the first commercially viable projector.

Edison’s films initially featured subjects such as circus or vaudeville acts that could be taken into a small studio to perform before an inert camera, while early Lumière films were mainly documentary views, or “actualities,” shot outdoors on location.  In both cases, however, the films themselves were composed of a single unedited shot, emphasizing lifelike movement; they contained little or no narrative content.

By 1896, Edison had developed his own projector, the Vitascope, had brought projection to the United States, and established the format for American film exhibition for the next several years.

During this time, which has been characterized as the “novelty period,” emphasis fell on the projection device itself, and films achieved their main popularity as self-contained vaudeville attractions.  These films, whether they were Edison-style theatrical variety shorts, or Lumière-style actualities, were perceived by their original audiences not as motion pictures in the modern sense of the term, but as “animated photographs” or “living pictures.”

During the novelty period, production companies leased a complete film service of projector, operator, and shorts to the vaudeville market as a single, self-contained package.  Starting about 1897, however, manufacturers began to sell both projectors and films to itinerant exhibitors, who traveled with their programs from one temporary location (vaudeville theaters, fairgrounds, circus tents, lyceums) to another, as the novelty of their films wore off at a given site.  This gave the exhibitors a large measure of control over early film form, since they were responsible for arranging the one-shot films purchased from the producers into audience-pleasing programs. 

By encouraging the practice of traveling exhibitions, the American producers’ policy of outright sales inhibited the development of permanent film theaters in the United States until nearly a decade after their appearance in Europe, where England and France had taken an early lead in both production and exhibition.

Méliès and Porter. The shift away from films as animated photographs to films as stories, or narratives, began to take place about the turn of the century and is most evident in the work of the French filmmaker Georges Méliès.   By 1902, he had produced the influential 30-scene narrative Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon).  Adapted from a novel by Jules Verne, it was nearly one reel in length (about 825 feet, or 14 minutes).  The first film to achieve international distribution, A Trip to the Moon was an enormous popular success. 

Edwin S. Porter, a freelance projectionist and engineer, joined the Edison Company in 1900.  For the next few years, he served as director-cameraman for much of Edison’s film output, starting with simple one-shot films and short multi-scene narratives based on political cartoons and contemporary events.

Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, 1903, is widely acknowledged to be the first narrative film to achieve continuity of action.  The industry’s first spectacular box-office success, The Great Train Robbery is credited with establishing the realistic narrative.  (See a video of the film at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In3mRDX0uqk)

 

The Great Train Robbery established the complete story narrative in films.

Early Growth of the Film Industry. The popularity of The Great Train Robbery encouraged investors and led to the establishment of the first permanent film theaters across the U.S.  With exponential growth, the number of permanent film theaters in the United States grew from a mere handful in 1904 to between 8,000 and 10,000 by 1908.  Running about 12 minutes, the film also helped to boost standard film length toward one reel.

Permanent theaters showed approximately an hour’s worth of films for an admission price of 5 to 10 cents.  Originally identified with working-class audiences, theaters appealed increasingly to the middle class as the decade wore on, and they became associated with the rising popularity of the story film. 

By 1908, there were about 20 motion-picture production companies operating in the United States. These companies formed the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), pooling the 16 most significant U.S. patents for motion-picture technology and entering into an exclusive contract with the Eastman Kodak Company for the supply of raw film stock.

The MPPC helped to stabilize the American film industry during a period of unprecedented growth and change by standardizing exhibition practice, increasing the efficiency of distribution, and regularizing pricing in all three sectors. 

The Silent Years:  1910 - 1927

Pre-World War I American Cinema.  Multiple-reel films achieved public acceptance with the smashing success of the three-and-one-half-reel The Loves of Queen Elizabeth, imported in 1912, which starred Sarah Bernhardt.  In 1912 Enrico Guazzoni’s nine-reel Italian super-spectacle Quo Vadis?  (Whither Are You Going?) was road-shown in legitimate theaters across the U.S. at a top admission price of one dollar.  The feature craze was on!

The entire American film industry soon reorganized itself around the economics of the multiple-reel film; the effects of this restructuring did much to give movies their characteristic modern form.

Producers increased their budgets to provide high technical quality and elaborate productions.  The new viewers also had a more refined sense of comfort, which exhibitors quickly accommodated by replacing their storefronts with large, elegantly appointed new theaters in the major urban centers.  Known as “dream palaces” because of the fantastic luxuriance of their interiors, these houses had to show features rather than a program of shorts to attract large audiences at premium prices.  By 1916, there were more than 21,000 movie theaters in the United States. 

A lavish movie theater of the 1910s.

In August 1912, the U.S. Justice Department sued the MPPC for “restraint of trade” in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.  Delayed by countersuits and by World War I, the government’s case was eventually won, and the MPPC formally dissolved in 1918, although it hadn’t been operational since 1914.

The rise and fall of the MPPC was concurrent with the industry’s move to southern California from its primarily Eastern U.S. roots.  It was clear that what producers required was a new industrial center - one with a temperate climate, a variety of scenery, and access to acting talent.  The American film industry selected a Los Angeles suburb (originally a small industrial town) called Hollywood.  Attractions included the temperate climate required for year-round filming; a wide range of topography within a 50-mile radius of Hollywood, including mountains, valleys, forests, lakes, islands, seacoast, and desert; the status of Los Angeles as a professional theatrical center; the existence of a low tax base; and the presence of cheap and plentiful labor and land.  This latter factor enabled the newly arrived production companies to buy up tens of thousands of acres of prime real estate on which to locate their studios, standing sets, and backlots.  By 1915, approximately 15,000 workers were employed by the motion-picture industry in Hollywood, and more than 60% of American movie production was centered there.  

D. W. Griffith was the first director to complete a motion picture in Hollywood- In Old California was a 17-minute short melodrama about the Mexican era of California, made in 1910.  From there, Griffith began experimenting with longer films until he successfully produced the first feature-length film in 1915, using twelve full reels of film, entitled Birth of a Nation.  While this film was controversial in its own time, and even more problematic by today’s standards of equality and condemnation of racism and racial injustice, it also opened the industry to feature-length films and showcased exciting technical aspects of what filmmakers could achieve, such as close-ups, cross-cutting, fadeouts, and dramatic lighting.  Most importantly, Griffith’s feature film proved America’s place as a leader in the most innovative filmmaking techniques. 

Poster for The Birth of a Nation film.

Post-World War I American Cinema.  During the 1920s in the United States, motion-picture production, distribution, and exhibition became a major national industry, and movies perhaps the major national obsession.  The salaries of movie stars reached monumental proportions; filmmaking practices and narrative formulas were standardized to accommodate mass production; and Wall Street began to invest heavily in every branch of the business. 

The growing industry was organized according to the studio system, where the head of the studio functioned as the central authority over multiple production units, each headed by a director who was required to shoot an assigned film according to a detailed continuity script.  Every project was carefully budgeted and tightly scheduled.  This central producer system was the prototype for the studio system of the 1920s, and, with some modification, it prevailed as the dominant mode of Hollywood production for the next 40 years.

Virtually all the major film genres evolved and were codified during the 1920s, but none was more characteristic of the period than the slapstick comedy.  This form was originated by Mack Sennett, who, at his Keystone Studios, produced countless one- and two-reel shorts and features whose narrative logic was subordinated to fantastic, purely visual humor.  A mixture of circus, vaudeville, burlesque, pantomime, and the chase, Sennett’s Keystone comedies created a world of inspired madness and mayhem, and they employed the talents of such future stars as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon.  After these performers achieved fame, many of them left Keystone, often to form their own production companies, a practice still possible in the early 1920s.

The “Big Four” of silent comedy:  Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon.

 

Chaplin, for example, who had developed the persona of the “Little Tramp” at Keystone, went on to direct and star in a series of shorts produced by Essanay in 1915 (including The Tramp) and Mutual between 1916 and 1917 (including The Vagabond).  In 1917, he was offered an eight-film contract with First National that enabled him to establish his own studio.  He directed his first feature there in 1921, the semiautobiographical The Kid, but most of his First National films were two-reelers. 

In 1919, Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, the four most popular and powerful film artists of the time, jointly formed the United Artists Corporation to produce and distribute their own films - and thereby retain artistic and financial control.  Chaplin directed three silent features for United Artists, including his great comic epic The Gold Rush, 1925.  

Buster Keaton possessed a kind of comic talent very different from Chaplin’s, but both men were wonderfully subtle actors with a keen sense of the tragic often contained within the comic, and both were major directors of their period.  In 1919, Keaton formed his own production company, where over the next four years he made 20 shorts.  A Keaton trademark was the “trajectory gag,” in which perfect timing of acting, directing, and editing propels his film character through a geometric progression of complicated sight gags that seem impossibly dangerous but are still dramatically logical.  Such routines inform all of Keaton’s major features, including his masterpieces The General, 1927, and Steamboat Bill, Jr., 1928. 

Working at the Hal Roach Studios, Lloyd cultivated the persona of an earnest, sweet-tempered boy-next-door.  He specialized in a variant of Keystone mayhem known as the “comedy of thrills,” in which - as in Lloyd’s most famous features, Safety Last!, 1923, and The Freshman, 1925 - an innocent protagonist finds himself placed in physical danger.  

Langdon traded on a childlike, even babylike, image in such popular features as The Strong Man, 1926, and Long Pants, 1927 - both directed by Frank Capra.  

Important but lesser silent comics were the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and Roscoe Arbuckle.  Laurel and Hardy also worked for Roach, making 27 silent two-reelers. Their comic characters were basically grown-up children whose relationship was sometimes disturbingly sadomasochistic. 

Roscoe Conkling "Fatty" Arbuckle’s talent was limited, but his persona affected the course of American film history in a quite unexpected way.  Arbuckle was at the center of the most damaging scandal to affect American motion pictures during the silent era.  In September 1921, the comedian and several friends hosted a weekend party in a San Francisco hotel.  During the party a young actress named Virginia Rappe became ill, and she later died in a hospital of peritonitis.  Press reports of the event as a drunken orgy inflamed public opinion.  Eventually indicted for manslaughter, Arbuckle was tried three times and eventually acquitted.  But Arbuckle’s career as an actor was ruined, and he was banned from the screen for more than a decade.  

Fatty Arbuckle was at the center of the most damaging scandal during the silent era. 

To stave off increasing efforts by state and local governments to censor films, the Hollywood studios formed a new, stronger trade association, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America; later renamed the Motion Picture Association of America.  They also hired a conservative politician, U.S. Postmaster General Will H. Hays, as its head. The Hays Office, as the association became popularly known, advocated industry self-regulation as an alternative to governmental interference, and it succeeded in preventing the expansion of censorship efforts.  Hays promulgated a series of documents that attempted to regulate various forms of criminal and immoral behavior depicted in movies.   A principle termed “compensating values,” recognized that popular entertainment had always told stories of lawbreaking and social transgression, but it held that law and morality should always triumph in a film.

The leading practitioner of the compensating values formula was the flamboyant director Cecil B. DeMille.  When the Hays Office was established, DeMille turned to the sex- and violence-drenched religious spectacles that made him an international figure, notably The Ten Commandments, 1923.  Also popular during the 1920s, were the swashbuckling exploits of Douglas Fairbanks, whose lavish adventure spectacles, including Robin Hood, 1922, and The Thief of Bagdad, 1924, thrilled a generation.

The most enigmatic and unconventional figure working in Hollywood at the time, however, was without a doubt the Viennese émigré Erich von Stroheim.  His first three films constitute an obsessive trilogy of adultery; each features a sexual triangle in which an American wife is seduced by a Prussian army officer.  Even though all three films were enormously popular, the great sums Stroheim was spending on the extravagant production design and costuming of his projects brought him into conflict with his Universal producers, and he was replaced.

During the 1920s, the American film industry transformed from a  “no-hold-barred” entrepreneurial enterprise into an industry that had no tolerance for creative difference.  Stroheim’s situation was not unique; many singular artists, including Griffith, Sennett, Chaplin, and Keaton, found it difficult to survive as filmmakers under the rigidly standardized studio system that had been established by the end of the decade. 

 

The Sound Era Through World War II

Introduction of Sound.  By the time the feature had become the dominant film form in the U.S., producers regularly commissioned orchestral scores to accompany prestigious productions, and virtually all films were accompanied by cue sheets suggesting appropriate musical selections for performance during exhibition.

Actual recorded sound became possible only after Lee De Forest’s perfection in 1907 of a vacuum tube that magnified sound and drove it through speakers so that it could be heard by a large audience.  Between 1923 and 1927, he made more than 1,000 synchronized sound shorts for release to specially wired theaters.  The public was widely interested in these films, but the major Hollywood producers, to whom De Forest vainly tried to sell his system, were not: they viewed “talking pictures” as an expensive novelty with little potential return.

In 1925, Western Electric, the manufacturing subsidiary of American Telephone & Telegraph Company, perfected a sophisticated sound-on-disc system called Vitaphone, which De Forest attempted to market to Hollywood.  Like De Forest, he was rebuffed by the major studios, but Warner Brothers, then a minor studio in the midst of aggressive expansion, bought both the sound system and the right to sublease it to other producers.  The studio planned to use Vitaphone to provide synchronized orchestral accompaniment for all Warner Brothers films, thereby enhancing their marketability to second- and third-run exhibitors who could not afford to hire live orchestral accompaniment.   Warner Brothers debuted the system on August 6, 1926, with Don Juan, a lavish costume drama starring John Barrymore, directed by Aanl Crosland, and featuring a score performed by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.  The response was enthusiastic; Warner Brothers announced that all its films for 1927 would be released with synchronized musical accompaniment and then turned immediately to the production of its groundbreaking second Vitaphone feature. 

The Jazz Singer,1927, starring Al Jolson, also directed by Crosland, included not only popular songs, but   incidental dialogue in addition to the orchestral score; its phenomenal success as the first sound movie virtually ensured the industry’s conversion to sound.

Poster for the world’s first movie with sound, The Jazz Singer, 1927.

 

Competition in sound systems led to a sound-on-film system that eventually prevailed over sound-on-disc because it enabled image and sound to be recorded simultaneously in the same (photographic) medium, ensuring their precise and automatic synchronization.

The wholesale conversion to sound took place in fewer than 15 months, between late 1927 and 1929, and the profits of the major companies increased during that period by as much as 600%.  Although the transition was fast, orderly, and profitable, it was also enormously expensive.  The industrial system, as it had evolved for the previous three decades, needed to be completely overhauled; studios and theaters had to be totally reequipped and creative personnel retrained or fired.   

There were many technical problems, including standardizing equipment, poorly performing early microphones, and editing film containing recorded sound.  Most of these technical problems were resolved by 1933.

The technological development that most liberated the sound film, however, was the practice known variously as postsynchronization, rerecording, or dubbing, in which image and sound are printed on separate pieces of film so that they can be manipulated independently.  Postsynchronization enabled filmmakers to edit images freely again.  Because the overwhelming emphasis of the period from 1928 to 1931 had been on obtaining high-quality sound in production, however, the idea that the sound track could be modified after it was recorded took a while to catch on.  

In 1933, however, technology was introduced that allowed filmmakers to mix separately recorded tracks for background music, sound effects, and synchronized dialogue.  By the late 1930s, postsynchronization and multiple-channel mixing had become standard industry procedure.

Other changes wrought by sound were more purely human.  Directors, for example, could no longer literally direct their performers while the cameras were rolling and sound was being recorded.  Actors and actresses were suddenly required to have pleasant voices, memorize their lines, and to act without the assistance of mood music or the director’s shouted instructions through long dialogue takes.  

Many actors found that they could not learn lines; others tried and were defeated by heavy foreign accents or voices that did not match their screen images.  Numerous silent stars were supplanted during the transitional sound period by stage actors or film actors with stage experience.

Sound also created new genres and renovated old ones.  The realism it permitted inspired the emergence of tough, socially pertinent films with urban settings, including gangster films that highlighted gunfire and vernacular speech.  The public’s fascination with speech also accounted for the new popularity of historical biographies, or “biopics.”  In the realm of comedy, pure slapstick could not, and did not survive, predicated as it was on purely visual humor.  It was replaced by equally vital - but ultimately less bizarre and abstract - sound comedies.  The horror-fantasy genre was also greatly enhanced by sound, which permitted the addition of eerie sound effects.

One significant genre whose emergence was obviously contingent upon sound was the musical.  Versions of Broadway musicals were among the first sound films made.  By the early 1930s, the movie musical had developed to become perhaps the major American genre of the decade.  

Introduction of Color. Photographic color entered the movies at approximately the same time as sound. As with sound, various color effects had been used in films since the invention of the medium, including hand-coloring of films frame by frame. 

By the early 1920s, nearly all U.S. features included at least one colored sequence; but after 1927, when it was discovered that tinting film stock interfered with the transmission of recorded sound, this practice was abandoned, leaving the market open to new systems of color photography.

In 1932, Technicolor Corporation introduced a three-color dye-transfer process that made it possible to mass-produce sturdy, high-quality prints onto a single strip of film, that included all three primary colors.

For the next 25 years, almost every color film made was produced by using Technicolor’s three-color system.  Although the quality of the system was excellent, there were drawbacks.  The bulk of the camera made location shooting difficult.  Furthermore, Technicolor’s virtual monopoly gave it indirect control of the production companies, which were required to rent - at high rates - equipment, crew, consultants, and laboratory services from Technicolor every time they used the system.  

The Wizard of Oz, 1939, was not the first movie in color, but it revolutionized the use of color in film and set a precedent for future movies.

 

The Hollywood Studio System.  If the coming of sound changed the aesthetic dynamics of the filmmaking process, it altered the economic structure of the industry even more, precipitating some of the largest mergers in motion-picture history.

By 1930, 95% of all American movie production was concentrated in the hands of only eight studios which controlled production, distribution, and exhibition.  The five major studios were MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century-Fox, and RKO.  The minor studios were Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and United Artists.

At the very bottom of the film industry hierarchy were a score of poorly capitalized studios, such as Republic, Monogram, and Grand National, that produced cheap formulaic hour-long “B movies” for the second half of double bills.  The double feature, an attraction introduced in the early 1930s to counter the Depression-era box-office slump, was the standard form of exhibition for about 15 years.  At their peak, the B-film studios produced 40-50 movies per year, and provided a training ground for such stars as John Wayne.  The films were made as quickly as possible, and directors functioned as their own producers, with complete authority over their projects’ minuscule budgets.

Distribution was conducted at both a national and an international level: since about 1925, foreign rentals had accounted for half of all American feature revenues, and they would continue to do so for the next two decades.  Exhibition was controlled through the major studios’ ownership of 2,600 first-run theaters, which represented 16% of the national total, but generated three-fourths of the revenue.  

An important aspect of the studio system was the Production Code, which was implemented in 1934 in response to pressure from the Legion of Decency and public protest against the graphic violence and sexual suggestiveness of some sound films (the urban gangster films, for example, and the films of Mae West).  The Production Code dictated the content of American movies, without exception, for the next 20 years.

The Production Code was monumentally repressive, forbidding the depiction on-screen of clearly-specified aspects of almost everything germane to the experience of normal human adults, including violence, sex, drug addiction, profanity, racial epithets, excessive drinking, and cruelty to children or animals.  Noncompliance with the Code’s restrictions brought a fine of $25,000, but the studios were so eager to please that the fine was never levied in the 22-year lifetime of the Code.

Between 1930 and the end of World War II, the studio system produced more than 7,500 features, every stage of which, from conception through exhibition, was carefully controlled.  Among these assembly-line productions are some of the most important American films ever made, the work of gifted directors who managed to transcend the mechanistic nature of the system to produce work of unique personal vision.  Those directors included Josef von Sternberg, whose exotically stylized films starring Marlene Dietrich, Shanghai Express, 1932, and The Scarlet Empress, 1934, constitute a kind of painting with light; John Ford, whose vision of history as moral truth produced such mythic works as Stagecoach, 1939, Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939, The Grapes of Wrath, 1940, and My Darling Clementine, 1946; Howard Hawks, a master of genres and the architect of a tough, functional “American” style of narrative exemplified in his films Scarface, 1932, and The Big Sleep, 1946; British émigré Alfred Hitchcock, whose films appealed to the popular audience as suspense melodramas, including Rebecca, 1940, Suspicion, 1941, Shadow of a Doubt, 1943, and Notorious, 1946; and Frank Capra, whose cheerful screwball comedies, It Happened One Night, 1934, and populist fantasies of good will, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939, sometimes gave way to darker warnings against losing faith and integrity, e.g., It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946.  Other significant directors with less-consistent thematic or visual styles were William Wyler, Wuthering Heights, 1939, and The Little Foxes, 1941; George Cukor, Camille, 1936, and The Philadelphia Story, 1940; Leo McCarey, The Awful Truth, 1937, and Going My Way, 1944; Preston Sturges, Sullivan’s Travels, 1941, and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, 1944; and George Stevens, Gunga Din, 1939, and Woman of the Year, 1942.

The most extraordinary film to emerge from the studio system, however, was Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, 1941, whose controversial theme and experimental technique combined to make it a classic. The quasi-biographical film examines the life and legacy of Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles, a composite character based on American media barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. 

Citizen Kane, 1941, on several occasions, has been voted the best movie all time.

 Special World War II Movies. During the U.S. involvement in World War II, the Hollywood film industry cooperated closely with the government to support its war-aims information campaign.  Following the declaration of war on Japan, the government created a Bureau of Motion Picture Affairs to coordinate the production of entertainment features with patriotic, morale-boosting themes and messages about the “American way of life,” the nature of the enemy and the allies, civilian responsibility on the home front, and the fighting forces themselves. 

In addition to commercial features, several Hollywood directors produced documentaries for government and military agencies.  Among the best-known of these films, which were designed to explain the war to both servicemen and civilians, are Frank Capra’s seven-part series Why We Fight, 1942–44; John Ford’s The Battle of Midway,1942; William Wyler’s The Memphis Belle, 1944; and John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro, 1944. 

 

        See my next blog, The History of Movies in the USA: Part 2