Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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52 Chapter 3
Wolves that dealt with the Dreyfus case and Zola’s heroic role in it. Muni was
especially drawn to roles in these Warner Bros. biopics of the mid- and late
1930s, like Pasteur and Juarez, as well as Zola. He found it a challenge to move
from role to role as a different prominent historical figure from one Warner
biopic to another. It was this opportunity that anchored his commitment to
stay with the studio through the late 1930s. Several years later, Muni severed
his relationship with Warner Bros.—on good terms—because he felt the stu-
dio no longer was providing him with the other sorts of roles that he wanted.
As Wallis put it: “He wanted his films to be about something.”
Hollywood studios had a great investment in their star players, whom
they nurtured in their screen careers and whose private lives the studios typi-
cally treated with paternalistic caution. The Hollywood star system was based
upon contract players being controlled by the studio artistically and cast by
studio producers in roles that the executives thought fit for them. By the
late 1930s, however, a number of individual stars had carved out niches of
independence for themselves within the system. Paul Muni was one of them.
Muni’s individual importance to the Warner biopics translated into unusual
power that accrued personally to his career. As the production of biopics
declined in the early 1940s, Muni left Warner Bros. and made a stellar career
for himself well into the 1950s, alternating between screen roles for various
studios and stage performances in New York City theaters.
THE ANIMATED FEATURE
Yet another aspect of Classic Hollywood was the success of animated films.
The earliest animated movies that warranted the attention of mainstream Hol-
lywood came from the Walt Disney Company. Walt and his brother Roy
founded their studio in 1923 with the intention of standing apart from the rest
of the movie industry by producing “family-oriented” motion pictures, which
meant making movies aimed primarily at children. With its emphasis on ani-
mation, Disney held a unique place in the Hollywood firmament for years. In
fact, Disney was not seen as a real competitor to the other major studios until
the early 1980s, when one of its subsidiaries began producing and distributing
live-action films for mature audiences.
In the 1930s, Disney had a niche in Hollywood that precluded it being
considered a major player in the movie industry. At first, the studio made
short, animated cartoons with their familiar characters. In 1937, when it be-
came known that Walt Disney was producing a full-length animated movie
with cartoon characters, a great many film critics and motion picture industry
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pundits promptly labeled the project “Disney’s Folly.” At the premiere of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in December 1937, however, an opening-
night crowd of movie industry insiders could not help but express delight
with the classic story of a princess, her evil stepmother, and the seven little
men who protected her. This expensive and risky venture took Disney and
his staff five years to produce, and by the time it was finished, Snow White had
cost $1,500,000—three times its original budget. Such expenses, however, are
not called runaway madness when the box office earnings from a movie show
substantial profits; Snow White’s success shifted the Disney name to a new posi-
tion in the motion picture industry.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs required techniques, and the tools to
make them, that no one in motion pictures had tried before. All Disney’s early
short cartoons had been produced lacking depth of field, meaning that as the
camera moved closer to any character, the character grew larger but so did
the background. To solve this challenge, Disney and his technicians, working
on Snow White, perfected what they called a “multi-plane camera” that could
shoot several layers of animation at once in order to give the picture an illu-
sion of depth. Disney’s animators also studied film footage of actors perform-
ing the motions they wanted their animated characters to imitate, creating a
technique called “rotoscoping” that helped to develop animated characters
whose motions and movements actually resembled those of living human be-
ings. The same was done for animal characters in Disney’s animated movies;
their movements were modeled on those of actual animals in nature. Disney’s
original animators included Joe Grant and Frank Thomas, who were as vital
as Disney himself to the production of Snow White and in creating this entirely
new genre: the animated feature.
Walt Disney brought an acute sense of sound to his productions, as well.
Once synchronous sound had come to motion pictures, Disney insisted that
songs in a soundtrack always must contribute to either character or plot de-
velopment, and he paid great personal attention to music and lyrics. Unlike
earlier musical films, modeled on Broadway stage shows in which song-and-
dance numbers occurred at regular intervals, intruding on the story rather than
necessarily supporting it, each song in Snow White filled specific storytelling
goals or contributed to character development. “Some Day My Prince Will
Come,” “Heigh Ho,” and other songs from the Snow White score enhanced
the movie’s story and, at the same time, became popular hits. Naturally, this
close linking of music and lyrics found its critics. Those who objected to
Disney’s technique for selecting music and lyrics—as he did for Snow White,
which critics considered too literal—coined the term “Mickey Mousing.”
From then on, “Mickey Mousing” became widely used in Hollywood as a
derogatory term to refer to any use of sound in the movies that was considered
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too pointedly precise, predictable, and literal. Vital to the sound design of this
movie was the voice of Snow White, as performed by Adriana Caselotti.
With Snow White, Disney and his staff had created an original piece of
work that many film historians argue has never been surpassed. In 1987, on
the fiftieth anniversary of the movie’s premiere, Snow White was still the only
animated character with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Praise for the
technical and the aesthetic achievements of the project were extensive. The
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences even honored Disney with a
special award in 1938: a statuette Oscar and seven miniature statuettes with it.
An animated feature was considered an extraordinarily high risk in 1937,
and neither the will nor the commitment needed by the Disneys to complete
it can be overestimated. Successful cinema frequently has been a result of
timely banking, and indeed, only a last-minute loan to Walt Disney and his
business partner, his brother Roy, from the Bank of America saved the pro-
duction. But in this case, the risk once taken was bountifully rewarded. The
estimated gross earnings for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the first year
of its release were ten times the cost of its production. Moreover, the power
of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the box office has been sustained over
decades. The basic concept for the movie provided a model for tie-ins and
spin-offs that would find some resonance in Classic Hollywood, but only later
would become definitive of the modern Hollywood high-concept feature
after the mid-1970s (see part III). Considered a highly risky gamble when the
movie was in production in the mid-1930s, by the fiftieth anniversary of its
1937 premiere Snow White’s earnings exceeded $330 million.
BRINGING UP BABY AND YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU
Featuring the song “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby,” as sung to
a young leopard, the 1938 screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby stands as a gem
of fast-paced wit and whimsy on-screen. Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn’s
combined display of sheer verbal velocity is emblematic of a dialogue-packed
screenplay that unfolds at a breakneck pace. The movie’s dialogue track could
stand alone as a model of clipped, staccato speech delivery that was emblem-
atic of Classic Hollywood diction and pacing from the mid-1930s until after
World War II.
Hepburn plays an irresponsible and irrepressible heiress who manages to
unearth the hitherto deeply hidden funny bone in a dour paleontologist played
by Grant. Their director, Howard Hawks, has been cited repeatedly by crit-
ics for having had the capacity to bring out Grant’s talent for learning how
to project his feelings of absurdity through his character, creating an entire
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comedic style out of those characters’ feelings of silliness. Hepburn, however,
claimed that it was Grant, more than Hawks, who taught her that “the more
depressed I looked when I went into a pratfall, the more the audience would
laugh.” Hawks, on the other hand, recalled that it was actually a little-known
contract comic player at the studio named Walter Catlett, cast in the role of
the constable in the movie, who stood in for Hepburn in a rehearsal with
Grant, that really demonstrated to her how to rein in her performance to
achieve its greatest comic effect.
In this “screwiest of the screwball comedies,” as one critic called it, the
paleontologist’s dinosaur bone is snatched by Asta, the pesky terrier of Susan
Vance (Hepburn), but the “baby” of the movie’s title who is the real source of
tension between them is Nissa, Susan’s not-so-tame pet leopard. The couple’s
chance meeting on a golf course leads Susan to target Dr. David Huxley
(Grant) for a romantic conquest, and she persuades him to help her deliver the
pet leopard to her aunt in order to get him away from the woman to whom
he is engaged to be married.
An RKO production, Bringing Up Baby had a different preservation
and survival history than many of the other movies of the studio era that are
considered classics, since RKO’s control over its release prints sent around to
movie theaters—and sometimes even over the original negative prints of its
movies—was notoriously lax. Questions still arise about the exact version of
Bringing Up Baby that was actually released to theaters and circulated in 1938.
You Can’t Take It with You, the Academy Award–winning Best Picture
of 1938, was yet another Frank Capra–Robert Riskin collaboration, based on
a stage play written by the well-known team of George S. Kaufman and Moss
Hart that was still running on Broadway when the picture opened in movie
theaters. Columbia Pictures paid $200,000 for rights to adapt the stage play,
which had won a Pulitzer Prize in drama for 1936/37. Popular as the stage
play was, though, many contemporary critics argued that in spite of its ec-
centric and engaging characters the story was still weak, and they questioned
Columbia’s investment for the rights to make it into a movie.
In the face of this second-guessing and the industry skepticism that the
project could succeed as a movie, You Can’t Take It with You proved to be
a triumph. As the review in Time pointed out, Riskin’s screenplay provided
for a wonderfully effective translation of the material from the stage to the
screen, because “the [movie’s] characters are human beings drawn on a he-
roic scale, and [because] there is not merely plot for its own sake but rather
to provide such great dramatic conflict.” It was a buoyant movie meant to
cheer up audiences and apparently designed to encourage viewers who took
the movie to heart to draw from it a measure of encouragement to live their
lives as they saw fit.
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Penny Sycamore, played by Spring Byington, is an eccentric woman who
writes plays because sometime long ago someone had mistakenly delivered a
typewriter to the family home. Grandpa Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore) had
encouraged her in such idiosyncrasies, agreeing that playwriting was quite a
logical and natural use of any typewriter. Meanwhile, the antics of the family’s
other daughter, Alice Sycamore, played by Jean Arthur, has driven her would-
be suitor, who is also her boss, Tony Kirby (Jimmy Stewart), into a dizzying
romantic swoon.
Several critics attributed the success of the movie as coming from the
on-screen chemistry and comic dynamic between Arthur’s Alice and Stewart’s
Tony. To say that there is on-screen chemistry between two characters,
however, is clichéd shorthand for saying that a relationship between charac-
ters on-screen “works” dramatically or as comedy, without offering further
illumination as to how this happens. As the contemporary review in Time in
1938 noted, “Wholly successful motion pictures are the consequence of a col-
laboration too complex for analysis.” The analysis of screen performance, and
the chemistry sometimes achieved by it, is especially elusive. Are we talking
about likable characters, or believable ones? Or is screen chemistry found in
characters with whom audiences can empathize, even if they are not necessar-
ily so believable or likable?
In its time, the movie’s themes were interpreted as populist for endorsing
a freedom of expression and attacking greed and materialism. Decades later, as
the American populist values of the 1930s embodied in You Can’t Take It with
You came to be fodder for cultural critics, especially after the late 1960s, such
sentiments frequently were judged to be trite, preachy, and naïvely optimistic.
Nonetheless, movies based on Robert Riskin screenplays, directed by Frank
Capra, and produced and distributed by Columbia Pictures in the mid- and
late 1930s provided one form of accomplished moviemaking that spoke to
strong currents in American popular culture. These were highly crafted stories
with compelling dramatic tensions that gave way to moments of resolution.
The characters in these movies, although idealized, were built out of traits that
much of mainstream American culture believed in and valued on the eve of
World War II. These movies celebrated common notions in the culture that
applauded virtues of integrity and moral fiber found in everyday Joes and Janes
all across the United States, who worked hard, played fair, and held a concern
for doing what they believed to be right.
SUMMARY
In the late 1930s, the supremacy of MGM as Hollywood’s leading studio was
unchallenged. The unit production management system crafted by Irving
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Thalberg facilitated the studio’s effective transition of prime properties into
profitable movies. The studio’s boss, Arthur B. Mayer, demanded a conser-
vative approach to business practices and promoted MGM as having Holly-
wood’s most glamorous screen stars and most lavish productions.
Despite these qualities that defined MGM, other studios still were able
to make their distinctive marks on Hollywood. Warner Bros. mastered the
genre of biopics, tackling complex and inspiring stories of individuals who
influenced science, politics, and culture. Walt and Roy Disney’s company
took its place alongside the other Hollywood majors by establishing the ani-
mated feature film as a distinct art form. Charlie Chaplin continued to forge
a unique position for his screen comedies, which, by the late 1930s, were
more direct in their social commentary than ever before. RKO stabilized
its position in the motion picture industry during the period, while the tal-
ents of the director Frank Capra and the screenwriter Robert Riskin were
enough to place Columbia Pictures right alongside the other major studios.
In the late 1930s, Classic Hollywood was coming together as a diverse and
distinctive entertainment center.
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For Columbia Pictures’ 1939 movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, director
Frank Capra sought to present on screen a measure of visual authenticity by
taking his cast and crew to Washington, D.C., to film the scenes in which
Jimmy Stewart’s character, Jefferson Smith, discovers the nation’s capital
through its landmarks. Later, Stewart himself referred to these sequences as
“absolute realism.” Stewart’s aesthetic judgment was based on the fact that
these sequences of his character riding on a bus through the city were shot
on location in Washington, D.C., rather than the typical Hollywood practice,
which would have placed a stationary bus on a soundstage in front of projected
footage of Washington, D.C. Realism, however, is one of the more slippery
words in aesthetic usage, easily confused with the word reality. Whereas the
aesthetic of realism is an artistic contrivance, reality is any observable phenom-
enon of life. As the dramatic theorist Richard Scheckner reminds us, thinking
about a character in a movie as if he or she were a real person is like trying to
have a picnic on a landscape painting.
Indeed, many of the contemporary responses to Mr. Smith Goes to Wash-
ington seemed confused about the occasional elements of aesthetic realism in
the movie and the reality of representative institutions in the nation’s capital.
In the movie, when a U.S. senator from a western state dies, that state’s gov-
ernor—ostensibly influenced by his own children—appoints an eager Boy
Scout leader, filled with patriotic passion, to fill the remainder of the deceased
senator’s term. Jean Arthur plays a seasoned secretary and Washington insider
who, like much of D.C., is at first baffled by the idealistic Jefferson Smith. In
time, she falls in love with him as he filibusters against a scheme to designate
land in his state for a dam project. He wants that land reserved for a summer
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Banner Years
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camp where boys from all across America would learn about the Constitution
of the United States and American government.
While movie critics generally liked the film, apparently most members of
the U.S. Senate did not. Democratic Senate leader (later, U.S. vice president)
Alben Barkley, who had long been considered a legislative friend of the mo-
tion picture industry, was described in newspaper accounts as getting furious
on the floor of the Senate chamber about the movie, arguing that “people in
Podunk and Squeedunk don’t realize the Senate isn’t like that.” The movie’s
portrayal of the legislative body depicts longtime Senate members as cynical
and corrupted by special interests, but Capra defended himself by saying that
the film was intended to “idealize American democracy, not to attack it.”
Nonetheless, some of Capra’s most bitter critics argued that enemies of the
United States, from Berlin (Nazi Germany) to Rome (Fascist Italy) and on to
Moscow (Soviet Russia), would surely take delight in the negative caricatures
of the upper house of the national legislature and its members. Given all this
uproar around a fiction film, one columnist at the New York Times fired off a
commentary saying that American democracy seemed most endangered by the
prospect of losing its sense of humor.
In 1939, the American Communist Party’s newspaper, the Daily Worker,
published a very positive review of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington written by
Howard Rushmore, who took the movie seriously and found it thoroughly
praiseworthy. He concluded his article by elaborating on the view that a Hol-
lywood movie industry that could produce mainstream hits like the Warner
Bros. biopic Juarez as well as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington reflected a cultural
institution in which someone on the far left politically should not lose faith.
Later, during the early years of the Cold War, an article in Variety in 1950
reported that Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was being exploited in Moscow
screenings by the Soviet regime as anti-American propaganda. As recently as
2003, debate over Mr. Smith Goes to Washington filled the pages of the Los
Angeles Business Journal, with columnist Andrew Ferguson complaining that,
while Capra saw the film as a hymn to the ideas of democracy, “in reality it is
no such thing. Like nearly all depictions of Washington in feature films, Mr.
Smith actually seethes with impatience and contempt for the raw material of
democracy: debate, deal-making, log-rolling, and compromise.”
Such readings of any movie take a fictional work and extrapolate from
it by drawing broad inferences about what it stands for and means. No fic-
tion movie goes beyond oblique references to reality. We can document that
American moviegoers at the end of the 1930s responded well to the movie Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington at the box office, but we cannot say just how each
of those thousands of moviegoers interpreted this fictional story of the power
of one person to make a difference in society. Without documentation that
Banner Years 61
demonstrates clear links between a movie and changes in politics or political
behavior, we always are left to speculate on how audience members connected
such motion picture depictions to political reality, if at all. Still, although the
movie was controversial at the time because of its depictions of Washington
politics, in 1939 the industry trade journal Boxoffice reported that not a single
exhibitor in the United States canceled an order for the movie.
MONUMENT VALLEY TO YORKSHIRE’S MOORS
Another movie from 1939 that has been recognized for its significant achieve-
ments is Stagecoach.
With the Apaches on the warpath, the stage from Tonto, New Mexico,
sets out on the perilous trek west to Lordsburg, Arizona, carrying a curious
mixture of passengers: Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell), a drunkard long ago
ousted from the medical profession; Dallas (Claire Trevor), a woman of ill
repute; the Ringo Kid (John Wayne); Mrs. Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt), a
blossom of the Old South who is nine months pregnant and en route to meet
her husband, who is a cavalry officer; Hatfield, a gambler (John Carradine);
a jittery whiskey salesman named Mr. Samuel Peacock (Donald Meek); and
Henry Gatewood (Berton Churchill), a local banker who nervously clutches
a small, black valise. This collection of characters, under the direction of John
Ford, is often cited for beginning the “modern movie western.”
The ingredients for the modern western are a group of misfits set into a
location where there is a constant struggle between the law, chaos, and intol-
erance. Stagecoach utilizes standard story lines and situations of the Hollywood
western, such as the impending threat of an Indian attack. Moreover, its array
of characters became standard types, often found on-screen in westerns made
after it: the outlaw hero, the honest officer of the law, the crooked banker, the
good-hearted prostitute. As critic Pauline Kael, writing in the New Republic in
the summer of 1967, observed: “Just about every good Western made since
1939 has imitated Stagecoach or has learned something from it.”
Arizona’s Monument Valley provides much of the backdrop, and the
movie’s director of photography, Bert Glennon, made the most of it. His cin-
ematography celebrates the landscape and vistas superbly. Famed Hollywood
stuntman Yakima Canutt was featured in a rip-roaring chase scene, and under
the supervision of Boris Morros, the musical score for Stagecoach was assembled
from the “found music” of seventeen American folk songs. Cobbled together
as it was with so many of the elements of Americana, Stagecoach may be con-
sidered the classic John Ford ensemble piece, the pinnacle of his career as a