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Hollywood's Washington: Film Images of National Politics During the Great Depression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Lawrence W. Levine
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Extract

In her recollections of the 1930s, Louise Tanner helped to create an image that has stayed with us despite a number of studies that should have dissolved it by now. Thirties movies were, she insisted,

a flop as a source of Communist propaganda. Some studios – notably Warner brothers – tried to bring Father to grips with social reality. But most of the cinemoguls agreed with Louis B. Mayer that Dad got all the social significance he needed at home. The script writers of Hollywood might take the Spanish Civil War to heart but they were more concerned with a public that preferred Carole Lombard doing secretarial work in a penthouse with a white telephone. Father sitting there in the dark forgot his own plight as he watched the gods and goddesses of the screen sweeping down staircases into dining rooms with a footman behind every chair. Depression movies portrayed an America devoid of economic conflict.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 10 , October 1985 , pp. 169 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

NOTES

1. Tanner, Louise, All the Things We Were (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), p. 266.Google Scholar

2. During the 1980 campaign, Reagan spoke about the affinities between the New Deal and fascism, and asserted that key members of Roosevelt's Brains Trust admired the fascist system. See Dallek, Robert, Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 58.Google Scholar

3. “Thomas Predicts Dictatorship Here,” The New York Times, 02 7, 1933Google Scholar; Brown, E. Francis, “The American Road to Fascism,” Current History, 07 1933, pp. 392–398Google Scholar; Loeb, Harold and Rodman, Selden, “American Fascism in Embryo,” The New Republic, 12 27, 1933, pp. 185–87Google Scholar; “Roosevelt – Dictator?” The Catholic World, 04, 1934, pp. 1–8Google Scholar; Shaw, Roger, “Fascism and the New Deal,” The North American Review 238: 6 (12 1934), pp. 559–564Google Scholar; Sokolsky, George E., “America Drifts Toward Fascism,” The American Mercury 32: 127 (07 1934), pp. 257–264Google Scholar; “The Great Fascist Plot,” The New Republic, 12 5, 1934, pp. 87–89Google Scholar; Calverton, V. F., “Is America Ripe for Fascism?” Current History 38 (09 1933), pp. 701–704Google Scholar; Matthews, J. B. and Shallcross, R. E., “Must America Go Fascist?” Harpers Magazine, 06 1934, pp. 1–15Google Scholar; Tigner, Hugh Stevenson, “Will America Go Fascist?” The Christian Century, 05 2, 1934, pp. 592–594Google Scholar; “Need the New Deal be Fascist?” The Nation, 01 9, 1935, p. 33.Google Scholar

4. Swing, Raymond Gram, Forerunners of American Fascism (New York: Julian Messner, 1935), pp. 19, 28–29.Google Scholar

5. Lewis, Sinclair, It Can't Happen Here (1935; reprint ed., New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1961), pp. 86, 97.Google Scholar

6. O'Connor, John and Brown, Lorraine, eds., Free, Adult, Uncensored: The Living History of the Federal Theatre Project (Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books, 1978), pp. 58–67.Google Scholar

7. Dennis, Lawrence, The Coming American Fascism (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936)Google Scholar, Chapters 1–10, 14, 16–17, 23.

8. Except where otherwise noted, all quotations from films come directly from my viewing of the film.

9. Press Release for Washington Merry-Go-Round, in Division of Motion Pictures, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound, Library of Congress. Cited hereafter as Division of Motion Pictures, LC.

10. Advertisement in New York Daily News, 03 31, 1933.Google Scholar

11. Literary Digest, 04 22, 1933Google Scholar; The New Republic, 04 19, 1933Google Scholar; The Nation, 04 26, 1933Google Scholar; The New York Times, 04 1, 1933Google Scholar; The Chicago Tribune, 04 7, 1933Google Scholar; The San Francisco Chronicle, 04 1, 1933Google Scholar; The Commonweal, 05 5, 1933Google Scholar; The Hollywood Reporter, 03 2, 1933.Google Scholar

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13. Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, D. C: Government Printing Office, 1974), pp. 235–239.Google Scholar

14. Quoted in Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), pp. 1–2.Google Scholar

15. See the March 5, 1933, editions of The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, The Washington Evening Star, The Chicago Tribune, and The Los Angeles Times.

16. Barron's, 02 13, 1933Google Scholar. Smith and Landon are quoted in Schlesinger, , The Coming of the New Deal, p. 3.Google Scholar

17. Fortune, 07 1934, p. 45Google Scholaret passim.

18. Time, 12 3, 17, 1934Google Scholar; Press Book for The President Vanishes, in Division of Motion Pictures, LC.

19. The New Republic, 12 26, 1934Google Scholar; The New York Daily News, 12 8, 1934.Google Scholar

20. Dialogue Cutting Continuity for The Man Who Dared, in Division of Motion Pictures, LC.

21. The Washington Post, 10 22, 1939Google Scholar; Press Release for Washington Merry-Go-Round, in Division of Motion Pictures, LC.

22. Dialogue Cutting Continuity for Gabriel Over the White House, in Division of Motion Pictures, LC.

23. Press Book for This Day and Age, in Division of Motion Pictures, LC.

24. Press Book for Song of the Eagle, in Division of Motion Pictures, LC.

25. For more on this theme, see Levine, Lawrence W., “American Culture and the Great Depression,” Yale Review 74: 2 (Winter 1985), pp. 196–223.Google Scholar

26. For an excellent discussion of this strain of thought in the 1930s, see Steiner, Michael C., “Regionalism in the Great Depression,” Geographical Review 73: 4 (10 1983), pp. 430–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. For evidence of Capra's popularity in the 1930s, see the polls in Increasing Profits with Continuous Audience Research (Princeton, N.J.: Audience Research Institute, 1941), pp. 42–43Google Scholar. Robert Sklar has made the point that among the decade's filmmakers only Capra and Walt Disney shared the acclaim of all three of the significant audiences for movies: the ticket-buying public, the critics, and their Hollywood colleagues. While no other director won the Academy Award for Best Director more than once in the 1930s, Capra won it three times. Sklar, , Movie-Made America (New York: Random House, 1975), pp. 197–198.Google Scholar

28. Gerster, Patrick, “The Ideological Project of ‘Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,’” Film Criticism, Winter 1981, pp. 35–48.Google Scholar

29. Quart, Leonard, “Frank Capra and the Popular Front,” Cinéaste, Summer 1977, p. 6.Google Scholar

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31. For more on the importance of the spoken word in Hollywood films, see Affron, Charles, Cinema and Sentiment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)Google Scholar, Chapter 5.

32. Capra made these remarks in a conversation with Richard Glatzer held in August and December 1973. See Glatzer, Richard and Raeburn, John, eds., Frank Capra: The Man and His Films (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975), p. 34.Google Scholar

33. The San Francisco Chronicle, 10 29, 1939.Google Scholar

34. Handzo, Stephen, “A Decade of Good Deeds and Wonderful Lives UNDER CAPRACORN,” Film Comment, 11–12 1972, p. 10.Google Scholar

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36. Dialogue Cutting Continuity for Stand Up and Cheer, in Division of Motion Pictures, LC.

37. Holmes, John Clellon, “A Decade of Coming Attractions,” in McClure, Arthur F., ed., The Movies: An American Idiom (Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971), pp. 114–116.Google Scholar