Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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102 Chapter 6
This situation eventually drives the highly moralistic George to desperation,
until, on a snowy night at the town bridge, he is saved from suicide by a re-
markable angel named Clarence Oddbody (Henry Travers), who is on earthly
assignment—it so happens—to earn back his wings. George’s nightmare about
Pottersville is erased in an ending that many critics have critiqued as naïve, but
it is an ending that still holds up dramatically.
It’s a Wonderful Life was essentially rediscovered in the mid-1970s, lend-
ing itself to many interpretations about the movie’s vision of post–World War
II America: the country’s loss of innocence, the nature of a changing society,
and explanations of the movie as an anticorporate parable exposing the false-
hoods behind many American institutions. This was the first film for Capra
and Stewart after both had just completed their military service in the Second
World War with distinction. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times reported that Cap-
ra’s first movie after the war was to be one in which the director announced
that he intended “to tell us just why ‘life is wonderful,’ no matter how futile
it may seem superficially.” The movie’s abiding point of view is made clearest
when George’s brother Harry, briefly home on leave from war duty, raises a
toast to George, surrounded by his wife and four children. “To my brother
George,” he says, “ the richest man in town.”
The screenplay by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett was based
loosely on a seasonal Christmas book by Philip Van Doren Stern entitled The
Greatest Gift. RKO already held the rights to the book, so Capra’s affiliation
with the studio smoothed the way for his company using the book as a basis
for the screenplay. Writing about Capra’s first Hollywood feature after the
war, the New York Times’s Crowther noted:
Any film made by Mr. Capra is as richly characteristic as they come. It is
also a concrete expression of his own intellectual attitude, since he works
closely with his writers. . . . Though the movie might have been a sticky,
sentimental sermon, and the hero might have seemed like a disillusioned
Boy Scout, it didn’t turn out that way with Capra in charge. Against a
gentle background of small-town portraits, the ace director has fashioned a
full score of winning, tender scenes.
As a later article by critic Michael Sragow in 1979 asserted:
For a film that places a premium on simplicity, its technique is exceedingly
busy. . . . This probably won’t surprise anyone who has slogged through
Capra’s autobiography The Name above the Title, where we learn that the
thread running through his professional life isn’t a vision of America or
some personal code of behavior at all, but, rather, his own technical cu-
riosity, ebullience, and drive. Despite his famous Horatio Alger approach
Postwar Triumphs and Reversals 103
to story-telling, these are the qualities that really distinguish all his movies,
even this more heartfelt one.
As Capra had written in that autobiography: “With my accelerator pushed to
the firewall, all that I was and all that I knew went into making It’s a Wonderful
Life. The pace was that of a four-month non-stop orgasm.”
Interestingly, of these two movies of 1946, the one made in the more re-
alist aesthetic, The Best Years of Our Lives, did much better at the box office. It’s
a Wonderful Life was perceived to hearken back to the established escapism of
Classic Hollywood. Both movies were produced in a quasi-independent way,
outside the major studios proper, but both were distributed by RKO. Wyler’s
The Best Years of Our Lives was a huge money earner, with over $10 million
in North American rental revenues. By contrast, Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life
barely earned $3.3 million, falling half a million dollars short of its production
costs of nearly $3.8 million. Right after World War II, Capra had cofounded
the company that produced it, Liberty Films, with Wyler, George Stevens,
and Samuel J. Briskin. In 1947, the company had to declare bankruptcy. In its
day, It’s a Wonderful Life was a significant failure.
In an eventual but improbable quirk of fate, and with a turn toward
redemption worthy of any of the most hopeful scripts Frank Capra had ever
brought to the screen, It’s a Wonderful Life became a Christmastime favorite
on television in the United States when in 1973 the broadcast networks dis-
covered that its copyright had lapsed and that the movie could be exhibited
in any format for free. During the last three decades of the twentieth century,
the movie earned its way into the hearts of Americans of all ages.
In the movie industry, the fictional small town of Bedford Falls has
become a modern codeword for the best values of community. For many
movie professionals, It’s a Wonderful Life’s value is iconic. In the 1990s,
director Ed Zwick and producer Marshall Herskovitz named their film
production company “Bedford Falls.” Steven Spielberg once told an inter-
viewer that he always took a copy of the movie with him on his film loca-
tions: “I show it to the cast and crew, and I tell them, ‘This is the kind of
picture I hope we can make.’”
A SOCIAL ISSUE MOVIE
Some Hollywood observers found it ironic that it was producer Darryl F. Za-
nuck—practically the only major Hollywood studio executive, producer, or
mogul at the time who wasn’t Jewish—who chose Laura Z. Hobson’s novel
Gentleman’s Agreement, with its theme about anti-Semitism, for adaptation to
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the screen. The voters of the Academy nonetheless were willing to award the
Best Picture Oscar for 1947 to Zanuck’s Gentleman’s Agreement. Starring Greg-
ory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, John Garfield, Celeste Holm, and Anne Revere,
the film was directed by Elia Kazan as a Twentieth Century-Fox release.
In a 1947 interview in Cosmopolitan, the novel’s author offered:
What did I do with the book? I think a woman who wrote to me put it in
two wonderful sentences. She says: “Villains aren’t really frightening. It is
the millions of nice people who do, and allow, villainous things.” I think
that is the gist of what I was trying to say.
According to Kazan, several studio bosses tried to convince Zanuck,
through the screenplay writer for the movie, Moss Hart, not to even make the
film. His own agent advised Peck against taking a role in the movie, but Peck
did so in spite of the warning. Dialogue in the film referred specifically to the
bigotry of both a U.S. senator and a congressman from Mississippi by name,
as well as to the leader of the Christian Nationalist Crusade. Zanuck checked
with attorneys before the movie was released, assayed the likelihood of lawsuits
against it, and proceeded. He figured that these men wouldn’t dare sue, and that
no court was likely to uphold their cases even if they did. The Crusade leader,
after losing on a request for a restraining order to keep the movie from being
shown in his hometown, did sue, but as expected, the case was dismissed.
Still, some industry observers saw risk in the production and for those
who were associated with it. That in 1951 Kazan, Garfield, and Revere were
all called before the House Un-American Activities Committee for testimony
about the Communist Party affiliations of some of their friends and acquain-
tances in the motion picture industry left some observers believing that they
were called primarily because of their association with Gentleman’s Agreement
at the request of the two prominent politicians who are mentioned in the
movie’s script.
This, too, was very much a producer’s film, in this case being the pet
project of Darryl F. Zanuck, who throughout most of his career had con-
sidered himself to be a Hollywood producer of a different breed. The Hol-
lywood establishment itself was disinclined to talk about Zanuck in the same
sentence with the acknowledged greats of the producing profession like Irving
Thalberg, Samuel Goldwyn, or David O. Selznick. Zanuck had grown up in
Wahoo, Nebraska, and Selznick once said of Zanuck that he resembled “an
ear of corn that only a maniac would eat.” Selznick’s wife, Irene, who was
MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer’s daughter, was even more blunt: “Thank God,
he’s a Gentile,” she said, “otherwise he’d give Jews a bad name.” In an era in
Postwar Triumphs and Reversals 105
which a sense of ethnic and religious identity was still evident and powerful
throughout the United States, the Hollywood community showed that it was
hardly different from most of the country.
Zanuck stood out for several reasons, but, even more importantly, he
stood out because, dating back to the earliest movies he produced, so many of
them were characterized by the boldness of his signature. His tabloid-inspired
films, such as The Public Enemy (1931) and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
(1932), and his later serious fare, like the movie version of The Grapes of Wrath
(1940), were considered hard-edged social criticism by Hollywood’s elite.
Gentleman’s Agreement took on what was considered to be a tough topic
for the period, but the movie’s sentiments seemed oddly cloaked and stifled.
The movie’s story is about a journalist who investigates anti-Semitism by
posing as a Jew. Doing so, he discovers deep-seated discrimination. It was an
edgy film about a serious topic, but Hollywood screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr.
sarcastically interpreted its underlying theme as: “You should never be mean
to a Jew, because he might turn out to be a Gentile.” Peck’s character does
write an article, entitled “I Was a Jew for Six Months,” hence presenting the
movie’s viewers with a tongue-in-cheek irony about anti-Semitism.
Gentleman’s Agreement may be seen as a significant movie, honored in its
time by the motion picture establishment, but it must also be recognized as a
movie that has not aged well, perhaps because its equivocations were so typical
of the common attitudes toward race, ethnicity, and religion in the era. The
movie’s timidity toward its subject, after all, was like the Hollywood movie
industry’s own historic social contract of the Classic Era: that controversial
subjects should be avoided or glossed over in order to satisfy the higher goal
of serving the mass public.
Most of the Jewish producers and moguls in Hollywood at the time
would have preferred that Zanuck’s project had not been made at all. They
feared an angry movie about this topic would result in some kind of backlash
from non-Jewish audiences. After all, Warner Bros. had turned to Zanuck
in his early career at the studio to be their producer on The Jazz Singer, the
1927 movie about a Jewish cantor’s son who performs minstrel numbers
on stage in blackface, even though the Warner brothers themselves were
important figures in the Los Angeles Jewish community and the primary
financial backers in the building of the Wilshire Boulevard Synagogue. Yet
they entrusted The Jazz Singer to the production hands of a lapsed Meth-
odist from Nebraska. An observer of Hollywood might conclude that the
movie industry was able to provide a mainstream popular movie about anti-
Semitism to American audiences right after World War II only because a
non-Jewish producer insisted on doing it.
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1948
Variety’s review of John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948 read:
Humphrey Bogart at his best in a Hard-Bitten, Straight-Shooting Por-
trayal. . . . An oldtime prospector outwits and outlives two hardy young
adventurers . . . [but] the lure of gold again proves man’s undoing.
For an exhibitor’s campaign, the trade journal recommended:
Concentrate the selling campaign on Humphrey Bogart, who plays a dirty,
unshaven character, and Walter Huston whose garrulous characterization is
outstanding. Play down the absence of love interest, but use photos of Tim
Holt and Bruce Bennett, both young and romantic looking.
An adaptation from a novel, with the screenplay by Robert Rossen, this
Warner Bros. film was under the production supervision of veteran Henry
Blanke.
Contemporary critic James Agee called The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
“one of the most visually alive and beautiful movies I have ever seen. [It] is
one of the best things Hollywood has done since it learned to talk.” Agee,
who was writing regularly for Life at the time, thought that composer Max
Steiner’s score was abysmally inappropriate to the movie. That claim was
perceived as unfounded by the reviewing critic for the Hollywood Quarterly,
however, who retorted that Agee’s critique of the movie’s music was entirely
lacking in specifics.
John Huston won Oscars for the screenplay and as Best Director, while
his father, Walter Huston, earned an Academy Award as Best Supporting
Actor for his role in the movie. John Huston credited producer Blanke as
his “champion and mentor.” Blanke had produced Huston’s first feature as a
director, The Maltese Falcon, and had encouraged Huston’s career as a screen-
writer at Warner Bros. and his elevation to directing.
The Academy Award for Best Picture of 1948 went to a screen version
of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that was produced in England by one of the stalwarts
of British cinema, Arthur Rank, for his Two Cities Production Company.
Rank’s American partner was Universal, working through its subsidiary
Universal-International, and it was Universal that actually provided the major-
ity of funding for the film. Paying attention to Universal’s investment were
the movie’s associate producer, Phil C. Samuel, and Anthony Bushnell, who
earned the credit of assistant producer. Hamlet starred Laurence Olivier, who
also directed the film.
Postwar Triumphs and Reversals 107
The project was indicative of new factors in postwar Hollywood film-
making that would take on increasing importance over the next several
decades. The first element that was new was a Hollywood studio investing
in a movie actually produced outside the United States. This was a practice
that occurred sporadically through the 1950s, becoming far more prominent
toward the end of that decade, to the point that it became known as “run-
away production” when by the late 1950s and 1960s the practice seemed so
common that it was perceived to endanger Hollywood to its very core. The
matter, however, was more complex. The interest in funding films that were
produced outside the United States marked the beginning of an economic
trend that eventually came to characterize doing global business in many areas
of investment, manufacturing, and enterprise. Over time, this practice would
come to be known as “outsourcing.”
In the aftermath of World War II, many business factors favored Hol-
lywood investments overseas. Hollywood’s exportation of movies and its
development of subsidiaries abroad for the distribution and exhibition of its
movies grew rapidly in non-Communist countries. Around the globe, as earn-
ings from their foreign subsidiaries increased, Hollywood companies shifted
their business strategies. Factors such as currency exchange rates, protective
tariffs, and taxes made it wise for these companies to invest their earnings from
the distribution and exhibition abroad into actual motion picture production
where those monies had been earned. Western Europe’s postwar recovery was
shaky, and a great number of talented screen artists and film production crew
members were available to hire cheaply. As an aesthetic of screen realism took
hold in Hollywood following the war, the settings of movies, especially if they
were historic, lent themselves to filming on location in Great Britain, northern
Europe, or the Mediterranean countries. Labor costs were considerably less
expensive in Europe than in Southern California.
Interestingly, although the aesthetic of movie realism was spreading in
Hollywood, filming in color, rather than in black-and-white, was making only
modest gains. Hamlet was filmed in black-and-white. Olivier insisted it be in
black-and-white to permit its director of photography, Desmond Dickenson,
to use deep-focus techniques to achieve “a more majestic, more poetic image,
in keeping with the verse.” The art direction was by Roger K. Furse, with sets
by Carmen Dillon, and their achievements were recognized with an Oscar.
Furse also claimed an Oscar for Costume Design.
In the immediate postwar period, there was a certain perceived cultural
cachet to utilizing talented European actors and craftspeople that was justified
on the basis of perception and image rather than the bottom line. Hollywood
understood marketability well. The most widely read weekly family magazine
in the United States at the time, Life, devoted its cover and its lead feature
108 Chapter 6
story to Hamlet’s star and director, Sir Laurence Olivier. The article began
by emphasizing that for three hundred years scholars had been arguing over
the correct interpretation of the true character of Hamlet, and that in him
Shakespeare had created the greatest part for an actor ever written. Universal’s
nationwide press kit for movie theater owners emphasized that the difference
between a run of Hamlet that did well at the box office and a run that did
extraordinary or record business was how well the movie was marketed to
high school and college audiences. In many places, movie theaters arranged
with school administrators to schedule special morning or early afternoon
screenings of Hamlet so that entire classes (sometimes, entire schools) could go
together to see the movie with their teachers.
Universal’s marketing of this prestige movie version of Hamlet in 1948
actually marked an exceptional push by the distributor to exploit the tie-ins to
the film, through promotions for hardcover books, paperback books, a Hamlet
record album consisting entirely of a reading of the lines of Olivier and his
fellow cast made available by RCA-Victor record company, and evenings at
local movies theaters as a social event, so specialty shops and department stores
could promote dresses for women going to an evening of Hamlet. Universal
was marketing the idea that Olivier’s screen version of Hamlet was a screen
classic well before the movie actually premiered.
The play, which in its original staging was four hours long, was cut to
two and a half hours by Olivier’s reworking of it for the movie script. The
movie premiered in London, and British critics and audiences were enthusias-
tic. In the United States, the same was the case. The movie reviewer for the
New Yorker not only lavished praise on the film but also noted conspicuously
his thanks to Olivier for cutting out from his script entirely “such nuisances as
Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern and the second gravedigger.” Time’s review of
the movie, in an edition that featured a cover photo of eighteen-year-old Jean
Simmons, who played Ophelia, began:
The question used to be: Can Shakespeare’s plays be made into successful
movies? With his film production of Henry V, Sir Laurence Olivier settled
that question once and for all. But Henry raised another question that it
could not answer: Can the screen cope with Shakespeare at his best? Olivier
undertook to answer that one, too. U.S. audiences now will see the result.
The answer is yes.
During its run in the United States, critics repeatedly described the
cast of Hamlet as superb. Writing in the Saturday Review, critic John Mason
Brown was absolutely ecstatic about what he labeled as a movie produced “at
Denham-near-London for Hollywood-on-the-Pacific” as the best picture
ever made. At the New York Times, Bosley Crowther’s review hailed Hamlet
Postwar Triumphs and Reversals 109
as “a hit, a very palpable hit,” while the tabloid New York Daily News reviewer
ranked it as superb with the elusive and coveted designation of four stars. Still,
a few critics described the film as being essentially a “photographed play,”
including Mary McCarthy, writing in the Partisan Review, who nevertheless
immediately pointed out that there was nothing inferior or less entertaining
about the movie because of that fact.
In its release in the United States alone, Hamlet, which had cost $2 mil-
lion to produce, earned in excess of $3 million in revenue. It was acclaimed
outside the English-speaking world, as well. Hamlet won the grand prize for
1948 at the first of the great International Film Festivals in Venice, Italy. Clas-
sic tragedy could work on-screen for Hollywood, with a stellar British cast,
and a prestige design team. American critics liked the movie, as did American
audiences, and Hollywood’s film establishment recognized those results by be-
stowing its highest award of merit, the Best Picture for 1948, to this movie.
THE END OF CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD
The year 1948 can be taken as the point at which the true era of Classic Hol-
lywood ended. What marked that end was not a particular movie, but rather a
decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that year. The Court’s verdict came in a
case that the Justice Department had initiated against the vertically integrated
Hollywood companies in the late 1930s. While the case was against all five
major Hollywood studios that were vertically integrated, the government at-
torneys filing the brief had named Paramount first, so the 1948 Supreme Court
ruling is commonly known as the “Paramount Decision.” The other defendants
in the case were Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros., MGM, and RKO.
The historic structure that had begun in the early 1920s, with one movie
company simultaneously making, distributing, and showing movies in its own
theaters, had provided the economic foundation on which Classic Hollywood
was built. The Supreme Court’s decision mandated that all these companies
divest themselves of the movie theaters they owned, so that they would no
longer be active in the exhibition sector of the movie business.
The Court also outlawed two common practices of the vertically inte-
grated Hollywood system: block booking and blind booking. Since the five verti-
cally integrated companies all were distributors of movies for rent to theaters
across the country that were owned by others, they commonly required movie
theater owners and independent theater chains to rent the movies they were
distributing in a block. This meant that in order to get a highly desired movie
title from a major Hollywood company, the renter would have to pay for
lesser titles along with it as an entire package or not be able to rent the movie
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at all. This was “block booking,” and it was ruled illegal. Sometimes, a major
Hollywood distributor would not even specifically name all the titles that a
theater owner would have to rent to complete a package, but would simply
describe movies in general terms so that the distributor could later select a
specific title. This was called “blind booking,” and it, too, was banned by the
Paramount Decision.
In selling off their movie theaters, the major Hollywood companies com-
plied with the Court’s order in differing ways and to varying degrees. Several
major Hollywood studios resisted selling off their theaters for as long as pos-
sible. Others sold their theaters quickly. The bottom line, however, was that,
after 1948, the business foundation of the Classic Hollywood studio system
had been altered permanently.
A HOME APPLIANCE BECOMES COMPETITION
The other factor facing Hollywood movies by 1948 was not connected to
an event like a court decision. Although still in its infancy in 1948, broadcast
television in the United States existed from coast to coast and soon would be
pervasive. Its spread had an enormous impact on the decline of the audience
for motion pictures and on the major Hollywood studios. The most immedi-
ate effect would be on the exhibition sector of the movie business, but over
time it would impact the sorts of movies Hollywood made and for what audi-
ence they made them.
Classic Hollywood had made, distributed, and exhibited movies to ap-
peal to a very broad American audience. Classic Hollywood regarded “anyone
from eight to eighty” as its audience. In the Classic Era, Hollywood largely
tried to make movies that every generation admired simultaneously for their
surface polish and professionalism. The Production Code that governed the
content of Hollywood movies from the early 1930s onward was intended to
make an outing to the movies reliably comfortable for grandparents, parents,
and children alike.
Beginning in 1948, Classic Hollywood started to unravel. For the next
two and a half decades, the motion picture industry in the United States was
in transition. All of the major studios survived through the second half of
the twentieth century, with the sole exception of RKO, which went out of
business in 1958. What a major studio was and how it operated, however,
changed. Independent production took on a new importance, and the mean-
ing of “independent” in the movie world would go through many changes.
In this prolonged period of transition, Hollywood had to reinvent itself.
As with all such reinvention, there were plenty of problems. Between the end
Postwar Triumphs and Reversals 111
of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1970s, what changed most dramatically
was the audience for movies, which meant that the movies made to appeal
most reliably to that audience would have to change as well. Hollywood mov-
ies would be made with different stories, in different styles, and addressed to
the different tastes of new audiences.
Simultaneously, many vestiges of Classic Hollywood survived intact and
influences of Classic Hollywood persisted in every aspect of moviemaking.
The long shadow of Classic Hollywood would cast itself over movies made in
the United States throughout the remainder of the twentieth century and into
the twenty-first. Even with the arrival of a “new Hollywood,” which is dated
to 1975, Classic Hollywood would never be forgotten.
SUMMARY
With the war over and soldiers returning to the United States from their ser-
vice overseas, 1946 marked the peak year for weekly attendance at movies in
the United States. Hollywood production shifted from many of its wartime
stories and themes toward producing more movies that dealt with veterans
returning from war, as well as with social problems in a more realist aesthetic.
For several reasons, economic cooperation and the coproduction of movies
with Great Britain was favorable for Hollywood. The most important factors
for Hollywood soon after World War II, however, had little to do with the
actual making of movies.
Strictly speaking, the most important events for Hollywood came in
1948. The first was a decision by the Supreme Court that declared the vertical
integration of the five most prominent Hollywood companies to be monopo-
listic and in violation of the law. The second was the appearance of network
broadcast television as a consumer commodity. The end of vertical integration
meant the demise of the business core of Classic Hollywood. From 1948 on,
the major Hollywood studios faced an uncertain future that would eventually
force them to reinvent themselves. The advent of nationwide broadcast tele-
vision soon would mean that the mass audiences that jammed movie theaters
in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s would be finding similar entertainment far less
expensively on the small screen at home.