Classical Hollywood, 1928–1946 Arthur Nolletti Jr. The eighteen-year period from 1928 through 1946, which began a year before the Great Depression and ended with the aftermath of World War II, was a time of trauma and uncertainty for American society, as well as for American cinema. The stock market crash of October 1929 was followed by a decade of dire hardship that left millions out of work. In 1933 newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt initiated a series of federal acts and programs to get the economy back on its feet. At first, some Hollywood producers thought their business was “Depression-proof,” but falling theater attendance and rising costs soon plunged the industry into crisis.1 On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and America went to war. As the film historian Richard B. Jewell has noted, Hollywood’s commitment to the war effort “stretched far beyond the creation of patriotic, morale-boosting movies.”2 This commitment included making public service shorts and training films and selling war bonds. Major stars including Clark Gable, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart joined the armed forces. Other stars also made important contributions, such as traveling overseas to entertain the troops.3 Like other industries, Hollywood was forced to make sacrifices. Severe restrictions on film stock reduced the number of films being produced by 37 percent.4 However, as the war continued and the economy surged, theater attendance increased and box office revenues rose. In 1946 grosses reached an all-time high of $1.7 billion, but this boom was short-lived. Popularly referred to as “The Golden Age of Hollywood,” this period represented a unique coming together of talent, technical expertise, and financial and organizational conditions, without which the studio system could not have existed. During these years, the studio system consolidated itself as an industry, genres rose to prominence, and sound film superseded silent film. Sound film brought a new dimension to film: “acoustic verisimilitude.”5 The result was the emergence of an acting mode that has been labeled “the Hollywood studio style.”6 This style is often erroneously regarded as one in which performers simply played themselves or behaved as they would in everyday life. More accurately, this role-centered (character) approach to acting was “a kind of prism through which character is refracted”7 and in which an actor took conscious control of his or her instrument to necessarily color a performance.8 It was naturalistic in that it put on the screen what seemed to be ordinary conversation and behavior, it sought to make technique invisible, and it endowed character types with individual traits and mannerisms. Yet it also embraced theatrical (or nonrealistic) acting in genres that called for heightened dramatic rhetoric, most notably comedy, musicals, and horror. There were various forms of theatricality, among them ostentatious performances and formal staging,9 as well as voiceover narration and self-referential performance. Fundamentally, performance is a creative act that depends on the actor’s skill and powers of imagination, but it also is influenced by industry practices behind the silver screen. The first part of this chapter examines the relationship between film acting in the studio era and the following offscreen influences: the signature genres of individual studios, studio contracts, actor preparation and training, the star system, and the Production Code. The remainder of the chapter offers a close analysis of the performances of Herbert Marshall, Kay Francis, and Miriam Hopkins in Ernst Lubitsch’s sophisticated comedy Trouble in Paradise (1932); Ginger Rogers in George Stevens’s musical Swing Time (1936); Beulah Bondi in Leo McCarey’s family melodrama Make Way for Tomorrow (1937); and Fred MacMurray in Billy Wilder’s film noir Double Indemnity (1944). Here the focus is on three interrelated elements: (1) what Richard Dyer calls “performance signs,”10 that is, the choices an actor makes in terms of voice, intonation, gesture, body posture, body movements, and facial expressions; (2) formal cinematic elements that help structure performance, such as framing, editing, and shot size (close-up, medium, and long shots); and (3) essential forms that realism/naturalism and theatricality/nonrealism take in the above performances and genres. What emerges from the interplay of these elements is the film’s meaning and signification. Studios, Signature Genres, and Acting Styles During the Golden Age of Hollywood, the leading studios—the Big Five, also known as “the Majors” (MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century–Fox, and RKO), and the Little Three, or “the Minors” (Universal, Columbia, and United Artists)—made genres the core of commercial production. Genres were standardized enough to satisfy moviegoers’ expectations, yet, in keeping with changing fashions and attitudes, sufficiently different to give old formulas new vitality and relevance. Just as individual studios were identified with specific genres, so too were certain actors. In fact, genres played a central role in determining acting styles. MGM, the biggest, most prosperous studio, boasted that it had “more stars than there are in heaven.” This boast was only slightly hyperbolic, given its roster of players, which included perennial favorites Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Marie Dressler, Spencer Tracy, Jean Harlow, Mickey Rooney, Greta Garbo, Greer Garson, Norma Shearer, Katharine Hepburn, and Judy Garland, all of whom excelled in at least one of the studio’s signature genres. Hence Tracy and Hepburn in the comedy Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942), Garson in the melodrama Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942), Garland in the musical Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944), and Garbo in the adaptation of the play Anna Christie (Clarence Brown, 1930). Unlike MGM, Warner Bros. made frugality its mantra. It had two signature genres: the backstage musical and the gangster film. The former included the prototypical 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933) with Ruby Keeler as an unknown who becomes an overnight success, and Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933), which opens with Ginger Rogers and a line of coin-covered chorus girls singing “We’re in the Money.” The gangster film brought a new realism to the screen in such films as Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931) and The Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931). Taken from newspaper headlines and modeled on real-life gangsters John Dillinger and Al Capone, these films were lean, taut, and fast-paced, and made stars of Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney. Determined “to be somebody,” their small-time hoodlums struck a chord with Depression audiences, who felt the system was stacked against them. Paramount cultivated a number of signature genres. In the 1930s, directors Josef von Sternberg and Ernst Lubitsch gave the studio a decidedly “European” flavor—sophisticated, naughty, faintly decadent. In his series of exotic melodramas with Marlene Dietrich, beginning with The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel, 1930), Sternberg had the actress strike languorous poses, intone her dialogue enigmatically, and even look at a lamp as if she couldn’t live without it. By contrast, Lubitsch’s comedies of manners, such as Trouble in Paradise (1932), required actors to have polish, style, and a flair for dialogue. During the war, the studio set its sights on more identifiably American types. Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour delighted audiences in a series of highly profitable “Road” comedies, beginning with The Road to Singapore (Victor Schertzinger, 1940); Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake brought their special brand of somnambulism to film noir in This Gun for Hire (Frank Tuttle, 1942) and The Glass Key (Stuart Heisler, 1942); and Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert, and Joel McCrea, among others, invested director Preston Sturges’s satires on American mores, such as The Lady Eve (1941), with crack timing, fun, and feeling. Another mainstay of the studio was Cecil B. DeMille. As he had done since the silent period, he made lavish historical epics such as The Sign of the Cross (1932) and Cleopatra (1934), which showcased larger-than-life performances from such stars as Charles Laughton, Claudette Colbert, and Fredric March. RKO produced the landmark fantasy King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) and Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), one of the most influential films of all time. However, its staple genres were literary and stage adaptations, among them Little Women (George Cukor, 1933) with Katharine Hepburn as Louisa May Alcott’s headstrong, independent heroine, and Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers musicals, the studio’s consistently biggest moneymakers. Twentieth Century–Fox had two superstars: curly-haired moppet Shirley Temple and sunny song-and-dance specialist Betty Grable. Virtually a genre in her own right, Temple was a beacon of hope during the Depression. The country’s number-one star from 1935 through 1938, she was indefatigably plucky and eternally optimistic, and in films such as Wee Willie Winkie (John Ford, 1937) sang and danced her way into the hearts of even the most cantankerous characters. Audiences loved her. If Temple was largely responsible for keeping the studio solvent in the 1930s, in the 1940s that task fell to Betty Grable, who ranked among Hollywood’s top stars throughout the decade.11 Grable made over twenty highly popular Technicolor musicals, but her most memorable “role” took place offscreen. She was the favorite pin-up of servicemen overseas, her studio-insured million-dollar legs prominently on display. Of the minor studios, Universal’s signature genre was the horror film, which was primarily indebted to German Expressionism for its visual look, basic story line, and acting style. In the studio’s most famous horror film, Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), Boris Karloff remained human and pathetic, even when he was terrifying, as the monster created by overweening science. Denied the possibility of speech and despite the monster’s grotesque appearance, with his deformed skull and deep-socketed eyes, Karloff managed to convey a wide range of expression. In accordance with Expressionist acting, he reduced a whole complex of thought and action to single, often abrupt gestures, and “exteriorized emotions and psychic reactions in the most extreme manner,”12 stretching out his arms as the monster struggled to walk, a gesture that was less a threat than a protest at cruel fate. Columbia’s signature genre was the series of New Deal and screwball comedies that Frank Capra made throughout the 1930s. These included It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), which borrowed versatile stars, including James Stewart, Gary Cooper, and Barbara Stanwyck, from other studios. This series aside, the studio mainly relied on low-budget fare, B-westerns, and Three Stooges comedies until the appearance of its own major star in the 1940s, love goddess Rita Hayworth. Unlike the other studios, United Artists was primarily a distribution company for the films of independent producers. One of its most important releases was the classic western Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939), which not only revitalized the genre but made a star of a struggling young actor named John Wayne.
APA (American Psychological Assoc.)
Springer, C., & Levinson, J. R. (2015). Acting. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
MLA (Modern Language Assoc.)
Springer, Claudia and Julie R. Levinson. Acting. Rutgers University Press, 2015. Behind the Silver Screen. EBSCOhost.