Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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middle-class American’s attitude toward the public portrayal of sexuality in
the mid-1930s. As American culture changed, though, such attitudes became
less of a consensus, and by the mid-1960s the Code widely was perceived to
be badly out of date.
With regard to pictorial representations of violence, the Hollywood
Production Code always opted toward the less brutal and less lethal dramatic
solution. On-screen, crime could be portrayed, of course, but, if so, it must
be punished. On at least one issue, the Production Code appears to have been
well ahead of the American cultural curve: intentional negative references to
race and ethnicity were taboo.
CHARLIE CHAPLIN AND CITY LIGHTS
City Lights (1931) might be called Charlie Chaplin’s last silent film, for in it
he avoided dialogue speech, but he nonetheless composed a musical score and
used exceptionally elaborate sound effects for the movie. Being essentially a si-
lent movie released when synchronous sound movies had become the standard
expectation for audiences worldwide, Chaplin relied on the established appeal
of the Little Tramp as its central character. This was a calculated gamble on
Chaplin’s part since the Tramp was a stock figure derived from vaudeville and
music hall traditions and, therefore, was considered by many to be better-suited
to the conventions of silent movie comedy. Substantial numbers of movie in-
dustry experts and movie critics thought that Chaplin would fail in bringing the
Tramp into the age of synchronous sound motion pictures.
The story of City Lights is about the Tramp falling in love with a blind
flower girl who mistakes him for a rich man. In order to secure an operation
for her that can be performed only in Vienna, the Tramp takes on one menial
job after another, even trying amateur boxing, to earn money. However, it’s
only when by chance he encounters an intoxicated millionaire, who drunk-
enly gives him a substantial amount of money, that the Tramp gets enough
money together for the operation. This apparent success, however, is quickly
reversed. The millionaire’s home has been robbed at nearly the same time,
and—the millionaire having forgotten his gift to the Tramp when he was
drunk—the Tramp immediately becomes the prime suspect for the robbery
and is sent to prison for theft.
City Lights succeeded with the public even though the movie itself was
based on visual sequences much like all of Chaplin’s screen triumphs of the
silent era proper: the opening scene of a public statue being dedicated, in
which drapery is raised to reveal the Tramp asleep in the statue’s lap; the
Tramp accidentally swallowing a whistle; his fighting in a boxing match; the
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revelation at the end when the blind flower girl discovers the true identity of
her benefactor. The actual production work on City Lights quickly became
Hollywood legend. The directorial demands of the perfectionist Chaplin for
retakes were said to break all-time records. Chaplin’s relationship with his
costar, Virginia Cherrill, vacillated from coolly professional to downright icy.
At one point, Chaplin fired her from the production, only to hire her back
three weeks later at twice the salary. He also fired Henry Clive from his role as
the millionaire and replaced him with Harry Myers. In spite of this turbulent
production process, City Lights was a solid moneymaker.
Although City Lights was essentially a silent film, Chaplin was at the
same time clever enough to satirize recorded speech in it, beginning with the
incomprehensible gibberish of the politician’s dedication speech for the statue
in the opening scene. In addition, while contemporary critics identified several
of the scenes—the Tramp acting coquettish in hope of softening his boxing
opponent, who goes behind a screen and removes his pants; the Tramp and
the millionaire waking up in bed together after a night of partying—as vintage
Chaplinesque comedy bits, some later academic film critics drew attention to
them as homosexual subtexts.
After the movie’s premiere run, Chaplin followed true to form and ed-
ited City Lights based on his perception and interpretation of the responses to
the movie by its first audiences. He finally put the movie into general release
in early 1931, distributing it himself, which was practically unheard-of in
Hollywood at the time. But precisely because he did the distributing of the
movie himself, rather than through one of the major Hollywood companies,
Chaplin managed to earn worldwide profits in excess of $5 million. He had
done what skeptics considered impossible: completing a successful and popular
silent film over three years after the demise of the silent movies. Moreover, he
had succeeded at the box office in the midst of the global economic depression
of the early 1930s.
City Lights demonstrated that mass audiences could respond favorably
to a movie that cut against the grain of mainstream Hollywood production
in 1931. Chaplin demonstrated that an independent moviemaker could still
succeed at a time when the Hollywood studio system had to rely on all its
business acumen, cautious fiscal strategies, and efforts to control production
costs, just to survive.
RELIABLE FARE
During the first few years of the 1930s, the Best Picture Oscars were awarded
by the Academy to pictures considered to be reliable studio favorites. In those
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rough economic times of the Great Depression, and when Oscar choices were
voted on by a membership that was dominated by employees loyal to the
Hollywood big studios, big studio motion pictures with big budgets and high
hopes predictably triumphed.
Cimarron, for example, the most lavish production yet undertaken by the
newest of the major Hollywood companies—the vertically integrated RKO,
founded by Boston financier Joseph Kennedy and RCA (Radio Corporation
of America) chief executive David Sarnoff—was the Academy’s Best Picture
choice for 1930/31. Even with its chain of movie theaters, including the
flagship Radio City Music Hall in New York City, RKO was struggling fi-
nancially. Launched only in 1928, a year before the Depression began in late
1929, RKO was hit especially hard by the abrupt downturn in the nation’s
economy. Nonetheless, the relatively new studio was willing to invest what at
the time was a movie industry record of $125,000 just to obtain the rights to
adapt the Edna Ferber novel Cimarron to the screen.
Cimarron was based on the true story of Thomas Ferguson, a pioneer
politician and newspaper publisher, and was set during the late nineteenth-
century land rush in the Oklahoma Territory. In a fashion typical of all of
Ferber’s novels, the screenplay by Howard Estabrook followed a formula
that found the main character, Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix), becoming
increasingly irresponsible in his business affairs, even as he remained socially
charming. As his grip on practical matters slipped, his political and journalistic
responsibilities gradually fell into the conscientious hands of his wife Sabra
(Irene Dunne). As a classic Ferber heroine, Sabra stood tall, ably asserting her
independence just as clearly as she demonstrated her sense of effectiveness and
duty as her husband’s capacities declined. Throughout her career as a novelist,
Ferber revisited this theme of women who took over serious public responsi-
bilities from the failed, aging, or infirm men in their lives.
With its production budgeted at $1.4 million, Cimarron was an expensive
movie for its day, but one in which the production expense paid off with
audiences. The “land rush” scene at the very beginning of the movie, for ex-
ample, creates just the kind of pandemonium and mass action for which Clas-
sic Hollywood screen direction became famous. Directed by Wesley Ruggles,
with Edward Cronjager as its director of photography, Cimarron filled the
screen with accomplished action scenes while still maintaining a sharply fo-
cused dramatic vision. That famous opening scene, filmed on location near
Bakersfield, California, required five thousand extras, a team of twenty-eight
camera operators, twenty-seven camera assistants, and six still photographers,
all under Cronjager’s supervision. The sequence is a fine example of directorial
virtuosity being understood as command over the geography of visual action
on-screen and the pacing of the action itself.
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Although, as a western, Cimarron may be considered a genre film, it also
had the characteristics of an epic family saga. Basing a film adaptation on a
popular, best-selling novel like Ferber’s was considered one of the safest in-
vestments by Classic Hollywood. Nearly any such an adaptation to the screen
was assumed by the studio to have excellent prospects for gaining a substantial
“presold” audience of moviegoers who had read the novel and liked it.
The following year’s Best Picture, for 1931/32, Grand Hotel was another
presold property based on an international best-seller. Unlike Cimarron, it was
not treated primarily as a genre film. MGM’s famed production head, Irving
Thalberg, decided to use it as a “star vehicle” for an array of major talents on
contract to the studio. Under Louis B. Mayer, who held the title of first vice
president and general manager, and Irving Thalberg, vice president and su-
pervisor of production, in the early 1930s, MGM provided the leading model
of glamour, professionalism, and profitability to the rest of the motion picture
industry. The studio’s art director, Cedric Gibbons, and its earliest sound en-
gineer, Douglas Shearer, were typical of the accomplished craft professionals
at the studio. Mayer and Thalberg followed a tough labor policy in general,
and MGM rode through the worst years of the Great Depression of the early
1930s in the best financial shape of any Hollywood company.
Numerous individual movies bore Thalberg’s personal imprint as a super-
vising producer, including Foolish Wives, The Big Parade, Ben-Hur, The Crowd,
Hallelujah, Annie Christie, Mutiny on the Bounty, A Night at the Opera, and Romeo
and Juliet. Each of these movies could be called a “producer’s film,” based on
the way it was conceived, nurtured, and edited for final release to the theaters
by Thalberg’s steady hand. So influential was Thalberg—both because of the
supervisory system he had created and for the unparalleled position of power
he held at MGM—that a “Thalberg film” was synonymous with an MGM
film for nearly a decade and a half. Nonetheless, Thalberg rarely was credited
on any of the movies he worked on, no matter how large his role. Someone
watching MGM movies from the era and diligently reading the credits from
them would have had no idea of Thalberg’s influence and importance.
No movie from the early 1930s was more characteristically an MGM
masterpiece with a “Thalbergian” touch than Grand Hotel. Based on a 1929
novel by German author Vicki Baum, MGM acquired the rights to this prop-
erty through its representative in New York City, Robert Ruben, for a cash
investment of only $15,000. Quickly put onto Broadway in a stage play ver-
sion, this property was then further developed from the stage version for the
screen at the studio. As a distinctive MGM movie, Grand Hotel was developed
to fit the studio’s reputation for high-end gloss and stylish grandeur. Gibbons,
the legendary MGM art director who supervised the overall production design
for all of MGM’s films for more than three decades and whose name appeared
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in the credits of more than 1,500 movies, built a lobby and reception area for
a glamorous Berlin hotel as its central set and added a couple of hotel rooms
to the design. He saw to it that the space, besides looking elegant, was highly
functional in service of camera placement and movement. The lobby as a set
was open enough to permit a variety of overhead shots.
Directed by Edmund Goulding, with William Daniels as the movie’s di-
rector of photography, the entire story of Grand Hotel takes place in a limited
space consisting totally of interior scenes, requiring no exterior or location
filming, and the movie’s action occurs over a period of just twenty-four hours.
The advantages for cost-efficiency and the preservation of high production
values were facilitated by this production design and served especially well for
the early era of synchronous sound production.
Much of the success of this movie, however, was about casting: Greta
Garbo as Grusinskaya, a Russian ballerina who is aging alone and whose career
is waning; John Barrymore as Baron Felix von Geigern, charming and likable,
who falls in love with Grusinskaya but is pressed into thievery because he
is sorely in need of money; Wallace Beery as the heavy-handed industrialist
Preysing; Joan Bennett as his secretary Flaemmchen, whom he wants to make
his mistress; Lionel Barrymore as Kringelein, a humble employee of Preysing
who has come to Berlin to live out his last days, believing that he is dying; and
Lewis Stone and Jean Hersholt in their supporting roles of Dr. Ollenschlag and
Senf, respectively. The plot connects these characters as the action transpires
through a day and a night in the life of a posh metropolitan hotel.
Grand Hotel was a success with audiences and critics alike. The quality of
the performances and the tightly woven, interconnected stories hold up well.
As critic Kevin Thomas pointed out in a 1991 essay published as notes to the
Los Angeles Conservancy’s “Best Remaining Seats” revival of the movie for
the big screen: “There is nothing dated about these performances. Grand Hotel
is . . . one of those happy instances when art and entertainment are one.”
By contrast, the following year’s Best Picture selection, a 1933 Fox
production entitled Cavalcade, has not fared well in the eyes of subsequent
generations. Featuring what was thought at the time to be an entirely British
cast, the film nonetheless was made entirely in Hollywood. The sole Ameri-
can in a major role was young Margaret Lindsay (playing Edith Harris), who
had convinced her employers at Fox that she was British, although actually
she had been born in Dubuque, Iowa. With Winfield Sheehan as the movie’s
producer at Fox, the screenplay for Cavalcade was written by Reginald Berke-
ley, based on a successful Broadway play written by Noel Coward, and was
directed by Frank Lloyd.
This saga of a British family, the Marryots, from New Year’s Eve 1899 to
1932, spans the lives of the family patriarch, Robert, and his wife, Jane, who
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confront the tragedies of losing their son Edward and their daughter-in-law in
the sinking of the Titanic, followed by the death of their son Joseph in World
War I. This family melodrama explores the sentiments around loss and change
over the decades, and does so in a way consistent with that Anglophile appeal
in American culture that celebrates the idea of British emotional reserve and
steadfastness of will.
As a Fox film, Cavalcade was produced in that studio’s pioneering sound-
on-film technique, which had been accepted as the industry’s standard for
synchronous sound motion picture production by 1932. Yet this technical fact
meant little in terms of the studio’s financial health and did nothing to assure
Fox’s profitability in the early 1930s. After the stock market crash of October
1929, followed by Fox losing an antitrust decision to the U.S. government
over the company’s attempted acquisition of a chain of movie theaters from
Loews, the studio was reeling financially.
When Cavalcade was released and won the Academy’s Best Picture Oscar,
Fox’s business future indeed looked precarious. The studio’s salvation came
in 1935 through a merger with a smaller motion picture production company
called Twentieth Century Pictures that had been started recently by Joseph M.
Schenck, who left his position as chairman of the board at United Artists, and
Darryl F. Zanuck, who quit his position as a producer at Warner Bros. With
Schenck as president and Zanuck as vice president in charge of production,
the newly merged Twentieth Century-Fox quickly developed a signature style
of sharp, high-gloss cinematography in its black-and-white features and its
musicals in color that assured the studio’s return to profitability.
A HOLLYWOOD ICON
Based on a story by Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper, the screenplay for
King Kong (1933) gripped its audiences and established the ape King Kong as a
Hollywood icon. With a screenplay written by James Creelan and Ruth Rose,
the movie was coproduced at RKO by Cooper, who also directed it, and
Ernest Schoedsack. Credit for cinematography went to the team of Edward
Lindon, J. O. Taylor, and Verne Walker. Its special effects, considered daring
at the time, were provided by studio supervisors Willis O’Brien and E. B.
Gibson, in conjunction with the team of model builders consisting of Marcel
Delgado, Fred Reefe, Orville Goldner, and Carroll L. Shepphird. King Kong’s
art direction was credited to Caroll Clark and Al Harman.
King Kong begins in New York City as film producer Carl Denham
(Robert Armstrong) befriends the stunning Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), offering
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her wealth, fame, and exotic travel as a movie star. Subsequently, a group of
his filmmakers land on an unexplored island where they capture an enormous
ape and take him to New York City. Not long after his arrival in the city, the
ape escapes. What starts off as a film-within-a-film turns into a spectacle that
pulls out all the stops.
The movie’s many animation sequences were pioneering. Moviegoers
in 1933 were simply amazed when the giant gorilla gathered up lead actress
Wray into the palm of his hand and carried her away. Stop-motion photog-
raphy captured the climb and subsequent fall of King Kong from the Empire
State Building.
This “classic” celluloid retelling of the fable of “Beauty and the Beast”
became one of the most beloved of all fantasy films. In 1933, film commenta-
tor Lloyd Arthur Ashbuck wrote of King Kong: “So great is its impact that I
venture to predict that it will not be forgotten in 1960.” It would become,
he believed, “part of American folklore.” Indeed, a successful remake was
produced in 1977 as a high-concept blockbuster, and nearly thirty years after
that, a $300 million version of King Kong with advanced computerized effects
and digital imaging was released in 2005.
The fledgling RKO was still ailing financially, struggling on the verge
of bankruptcy, when the movie went into production at the depths of the
Depression. Thus, production costs were held at $500,000, a modest invest-
ment that paid off royally. As Sid Grauman, the owner of a famous Hollywood
movie theater where the film premiered, exclaimed: “I never saw greater en-
thusiasm for any picture in my experience of presenting premieres . . . where
applause was so frequent and spontaneous. [The] audience applauded at least
twenty times.” Grauman’s observations of his Hollywood audiences described
responses to the movie that were duplicated nationwide. From its premiere,
King Kong was a hit everywhere.
King Kong grossed earnings of $2 million at a time when an admission to
a movie theater cost nearly seven times the price of a loaf of bread! The great
ape, roaring his defiance at the attacking airplanes as he makes his final stand
atop the Empire State Building, took a place right along with Paul Bunyan and
Johnny Appleseed in the pantheon of American folk legends. The only other
Hollywood movie of the Classic Era that equals King Kong as an enduring cult
favorite with audiences is Casablanca. Turner Home Entertainment, which
acquired RKO’s film library, promoted its video release of King Kong in 1993
with a $5 million campaign.
The original King Kong was released in the year by which nearly all
of the early practical problems with synchronous sound production had
been resolved. Unidirectional microphones, whose placement on a set had
limited physical action in dialogue scenes, had been replaced. The new mi-
Early Synchronous Sound 39
crophones—which recorded clear sound in different positions and from dif-
ferent angles—were mounted on a boom pole that permitted an operator to
constantly move the boom and position the attached microphone for accurate
recording. Better insulation for camera bodies deadened the noise of the gears,
just as the simple decision to mount rubber wheels on camera dollies permitted
greater camera movement without any extraneous noise interfering with the
sound recording. Sound was important in King Kong, with a track consisting of
sound effects by Murray Spivack and music composed by Max Steiner, whose
later scores for movies included Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, The Big Sleep,
Key Largo, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
FRANK CAPRA, ROBERT RISKIN,
AND THE SCREWBALL COMEDY
For the first half-dozen years that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences selected a Best Picture annually, the choices encompassed a di-
versity of movie types: two war movies, a musical, a western, an ensemble
chamber drama that served as a star vehicle, and a family melodrama set in
Great Britain that covered three decades. To add one more movie genre to
this list, Academy members selected as Best Picture for 1934 a comedy. In-
deed, it was a movie that defined an entire subgenre that came to be called
the “screwball comedy.”
The movie was It Happened One Night, directed by Frank Capra and
based on a clever piece of screenwriting by Robert Riskin. The movie’s two
stars, however, were reported to have neither liked nor respected the project.
As was fairly common in the studio era, both Clark Gable and Claudette Col-
bert were “loaned” to Columbia for this production by their studio contrac-
tors, MGM and Paramount, respectively, for sizable fees. Gable was forced
into accepting this assignment to play in a comedy that he was not interested
in as a “punishment” by MGM’s Louis B. Mayer who was peeved with the
star. By contrast, Colbert was paid double her normal Paramount salary for It
Happened One Night, but still is on record as having said that she thought it was
the worst picture she ever made. Ironically, Hollywood studio executives and
insiders at the time generally agreed that it was “froth” or “trivia,” with a great
many of them adding that It Happened One Night had no real dramatic suspense
and no real heart! Nonetheless, the moviegoers of 1934 absolutely adored this
low-budget comedy, and subsequent generations have consistently applauded
its wit and charm, quoted its memorable lines, and cited its classic scenes.
As a newspaper reporter facing unemployment, Peter Heard (Gable)
stumbles upon a supersensational story in a Miami bus station. A runaway
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heiress, Ellie Andrews (Colbert), is fleeing her father, who opposes her mar-
riage to a cad named King Wesley. In defiance of her father, she is headed
north on a Greyhound bus to join Wesley in New York City. Peter boards
the same bus, cleverly makes her acquaintance, and inveigles himself with
her until they become traveling companions on the odyssey northward,
even though they apparently dislike one another. Their trip consists of one
comic incident after another, and—as they endure the tribulations of their
trek—they fall in love. That love, however, isn’t acknowledged by either
of them until the very end of the movie, which wraps up neatly when Ellie
impulsively flees her wedding to Wesley and elopes with Peter to a hasty
marriage before a justice of the peace.
It Happened One Night is considered a prototype of the screwball comedy,
defined as a romantic comedy in which the couple “meet cute” in some un-
expected way, dislike one another at first, and are divided from one another
in ways that seem irrevocable (in this case, by the chasm of money and social
class), yet struggle back and forth toward between rejecting and then finally
accepting their love for each other. It is a successful formula played out often
in Hollywood movies from its point of origin in the mid-1930s throughout
the twentieth century. Along with the earliest examples of screwball comedies
from the mid- and late 1930s, for example, the genre was updated cleverly in
the late 1960s for the youth-culture audiences with The Graduate (1968) and
continued into the Internet age with You’ve Got Mail (1998).
It Happened One Night began the extraordinarily productive collaboration
between screenwriter Riskin and director Capra that created Broadway Bill
(1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can’t Take It with You (1938), and
Meet John Doe (1941). Such collaborations between distinctive talents—be-
tween a director and a screenwriter, or between a director and a director of
photography, or between a director and a screen actor—are a repetitive occur-
rence throughout Hollywood history. A pairing that is as singularly successful
as Riskin and Capra, however, is rare. Although moviemaking is always a
collaborative art that involves scores of major production personnel, such pair-
ings bear witness to the special dynamics between two talented creators. The
Riskin-Capra success with It Happened One Night marked a turning point for
Columbia Pictures, catapulting the studio from its inferior status as a second-
rung Hollywood company into a production company roughly on a par with
the other major Hollywood studios. The Riskin-Capra collaborations helped
to keep Columbia in that position into the late 1940s.
For the most part, the Riskin-Capra movie collaborations were inter-
preted as populist in their themes, celebrating the “little man.” Their movies
appeared to endorse and extol a strong strain in the ideology of a great many
Middle Americans. Later, some academic film critics would label such themes
naïve, even coining the term Capra-corn to denigrate the optimism that perme-
Early Synchronous Sound 41
ated these films. Such ideological criticism remains problematic, however. At
the most basic level, audiences appreciated the way screwball comedies, and
other Capra-Riskin movies, provided the witty and sharp give-and-take that
characterized Classic Hollywood screen dialogue, the many clever scenes that
played well as set pieces, and stories in which characters with determination,
who worked hard and conducted themselves honorably, prevailed.
It Happened One Night’s Best Picture Oscar win was an instance of a
“sleeper” film suddenly breaking into the motion picture industry’s aware-
ness and gaining recognition and endorsement from fellow professionals in
the Hollywood community. This surprise was a first in Hollywood history,
but 1934 would hardly be the last time an unexpected movie topped other
favorites and swept away a Best Picture nod from the Academy. It Happened
One Night was the very first movie to win five Oscars (including Best Direc-
tor, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay, in addition to Best Picture).
Nonetheless, comedies have been rare choices for Best Picture awards in the
Academy’s voting. Moreover, the number of comedies found on the Ameri-
can Film Institute’s list of 100 Greatest Films is not large. Notably, It Happened
One Night continued to draw recognition from industry professionals, critics,
and scholars into the twenty-first century.
THE MARX BROTHERS AND SCREW-LOOSE COMEDY
In the early 1930s, Hollywood movie comedies often were derived directly
from the performance traditions of live vaudeville, with a structure that moved
from one set piece to another or, more simply, from one joke to the next.
Just such a structure was the underpinning for the clever screenwriting of a
Robert Riskin screwball comedy, much as it was part of the structure for the
popular Marx Brothers comedies of the era, like the 1933 Paramount produc-
tion Duck Soup.
While the development of It Happened One Night went from one comic
incident to the next, while building a tightly knit formula comedy with a
strong narrative progression, Duck Soup went from one comic skit to the next
with little logical connection, creating a pacing that underscored feelings of
anarchy and whimsy. The Marx Brothers features made for Paramount in the
early 1930s established anarchy, whimsy, and an absurdist approach to screen
comedy, in contrast to the finely crafted, story-based humor found in other
film comedies. This tradition in Hollywood comic movies, for lack of a bet-
ter term, may be called “screw-loose.” Unlike many movies that are funny
because of their scripts and dialogue and that confront sympathetic characters
with dilemmas they must overcome with cleverness, screw-loose comedies are
based more purely on an actor’s funny performance.