stars came the first movie fan magazines; Photoplay published its inaugural
issue in 1912. That same year also saw the first of the FILM SERIALS, The
Perils of Pauline, starring Pearl White.^The next decade in American film
history, 1918 to 1928, was a period of stabilization rather than expansion.
Films were made within studio complexes, which were, in essence, factories
designed to produce films in the same way that Henry Ford’s factories
produced automobiles. Film companies became monopolies in that they not
only made films but distributed them to theaters and owned the theaters in
which they were shown as well. This vertical integration formed the
commercial foundation of the film industry for the next 30 years. Two new
producing companies founded during the decade were Warner Brothers (1923),
which would become powerful with its early conversion to synchronized
sound, and Metro-Goldwyn (1924; later Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), the producing
arm of Loew’s, under the direction of Louis B. MAYER and Irving
THALBERG.^Attacks against immorality in films intensified during this
decade, spurred by the sensual implications and sexual practices of the
movie stars both on and off the screen. In 1921, after several nationally
publicized sex and drug scandals, the industry headed off the threat of
federal CENSORSHIP by creating the office of the Motion Picture Producers
and Distributors of America (now the Motion Picture Association of
America), under the direction of Will HAYS. Hays, who had been postmaster
general of the United States and Warren G. Harding’s campaign manager,
began a series of public relations campaigns to underscore the importance
of motion pictures to American life. He also circulated several lists of
practices that were henceforth forbidden on and off the screen.^Hollywood
films of the 1920s became more polished, subtle, and skillful, and
especially imaginative in handling the absence of sound. It was the great
age of comedy. Chaplin retained a hold on his world-following with
full-length features such as The Kid (1920) and The Gold Rush (1925);
Harold LLOYD climbed his way to success–and got the girl–no matter how
great the obstacles as Grandma’s Boy (1922) or The Freshman (1925); Buster
KEATON remained deadpan through a succession of wildly bizarre sight gags
in Sherlock Jr. and The Navigator (both 1924); Harry Langdon was ever the
innocent elf cast adrift in a mean, tough world; and director Ernst
LUBITSCH, fresh from Germany, brought his “touch” to understated comedies
of manners, sex, and marriage. The decade saw the United States’s first
great war film (The Big Parade, 1925), its first great westerns (The
Covered Wagon, 1923; The Iron Horse, 1924), and its first great biblical
epics (The Ten Commandments, 1923, and King of Kings, 1927, both made by
Cecil B. DE MILLE). Other films of this era included Erich Von STROHEIM’s
sexual studies, Lon CHANEY’s grotesque costume melodramas, and the first
great documentary feature, Robert J. FLAHERTY’s Nanook of the North
(1922).
European Film in the 1920s
In the same decade, the European film industries recovered from the war to
produce one of the richest artistic periods in film history. The German
cinema, stimulated by EXPRESSIONISM in painting and the theater and by the
design theories of the BAUHAUS, created bizarrely expressionistic settings
for such fantasies as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919),
F. W. MURNAU’s Nosferatu (1922), and Fritz LANG’s Metropolis (1927). The
Germans also brought their sense of decor, atmospheric lighting, and
penchant for a frequently moving camera to such realistic political and
psychological studies as Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), G. W. PABST’s
The Joyless Street (1925), and E. A. Dupont’s Variety (1925).^Innovation
also came from the completely different approach taken by filmmakers in the
USSR, where movies were intended not only to entertain but also to instruct
the masses in the social and political goals of their new government. The
Soviet cinema used MONTAGE, or complicated editing techniques that relied
on visual metaphor, to create excitement and richness of texture and,
ultimately, to affect ideological attitudes. The most influential Soviet
theorist and filmmaker was Sergei M. Eisenstein, whose Potemkin (1925) had
a worldwide impact; other innovative Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s
included V. I. PUDOVKIN, Lev Kuleshov, Abram Room, and Alexander
DOVZHENKO.^The Swedish cinema of the 1920s relied heavily on the striking
visual qualities of the northern landscape. Mauritz Stiller and Victor
Sjostrom mixed this natural imagery of mountains, sea, and ice with
psychological drama and tales of supernatural quests. French cinema, by
contrast, brought the methods and assumptions of modern painting to film.
Under the influence of SURREALISM and dadaism, filmmakers working in France
began to experiment with the possibility of rendering abstract perceptions
or dreams in a visual medium. Marcel DUCHAMP, Rene CLAIR, Fernand LEGER,
Jean RENOIR–and Luis BUNUEL and Salvador DALI in Un Chien andalou
(1928)–all made antirealist, antirational, noncommercial films that helped
establish the avant-garde tradition in filmmaking. Several of these
filmmakers would later make significant contributions to the narrative
tradition in the sound era.
The Arrival of Sound
The era of the talking film began in late 1927 with the enormous success of
Warner Brothers’ The Jazz Singer. The first totally sound film, Lights of
New York, followed in 1928. Although experimentation with synchronizing
sound and picture was as old as the cinema itself (Dickson, for example,
made a rough synchronization of the two for Edison in 1894), the
feasibility of sound film was widely publicized only after Warner Brothers
purchased the Vitaphone from Western Electric in 1926. The original
Vitaphone system synchronized the picture with a separate phonographic
disk, rather than using the more accurate method of recording (based on the
principle of the OSCILLOSCOPE) a sound track on the film itself. Warners
originally used the Vitaphone to make short musical films featuring both
classical and popular performers and to record musical sound tracks for
otherwise silent films (Don Juan, 1926). For The Jazz Singer, Warners
added four synchronized musical sequences to the silent film. When Al
JOLSON sang and then delivered several lines of dialogue, audiences were
electrified. The silent film was dead within a year.^The conversion to
synchronized sound caused serious problems for the film industry. Sound
recording was difficult; cameras had to shoot from inside glass booths;
studios had to build special soundproof stages; theaters required expensive
new equipment; writers had to be hired who had an ear for dialogue; and
actors had to be found whose voices could deliver it. Many of the earliest
talkies were ugly and static, the visual images serving merely as an
accompaniment to endless dialogue, sound effects, and musical numbers.
Serious film critics mourned the passing of the motion picture, which no
longer seemed to contain either motion or picture.^The most effective early
sound films were those that played most adventurously with the union of
picture and sound track. Walt DISNEY in his cartoons combined surprising
sights with inventive sounds, carefully orchestrating the animated motion
and musical rhythm. Ernst Lubitsch also played very cleverly with sound,
contrasting the action depicted visually with the information on the sound
track in dazzlingly funny or revealing ways. By 1930 the U.S. film
industry had conquered both the technical and the artistic problems
involved in using sight and sound harmoniously, and the European industry
was quick to follow.
Hollywood’s Golden Era
The 1930s was the golden era of the Hollywood studio film. It was the
decade of the great movie stars–Greta GARBO, Marlene DIETRICH, Jean
HARLOW, Mae WEST, Katharine HEPBURN, Bette DAVIS, Cary GRANT, Gary COOPER,
Clark GABLE, James STEWART–and some of America’s greatest directors
thrived on the pressures and excitement of studio production. Josef von
STERNBERG became legendary for his use of exotic decor and sexual
symbolism; Howard HAWKS made driving adventures and fast-paced comedies;
Frank CAPRA blended politics and morality in a series of comedy-dramas; and
John FORD mythified the American West.^American studio pictures seemed to
come in cycles, many of the liveliest being those that could not have been
made before synchronized sound. The gangster film introduced Americans to
the tough doings and tougher talk of big-city thugs, as played by James
CAGNEY, Paul MUNI, and Edward G. ROBINSON. Musicals included the witty
operettas of Ernst Lubitsch, with Maurice CHEVALIER and Jeanette MACDONALD;
the backstage musicals, with their kaleidoscopically dazzling dance
numbers, of Busby BERKELEY; and the smooth, more natural song-and-dance
comedies starring Fred ASTAIRE and Ginger ROGERS. Synchronized sound also
produced SCREWBALL COMEDY, which explored the dizzy doings of fast-moving,
fast-thinking, and, above all, fast-talking men and women.^The issue of
artistic freedom versus censorship raised by the movies came to the fore
again with the advent of talking pictures. Spurred by the depression that
hit the industry in 1933 and by the threat of an economic boycott by the
newly formed Catholic Legion of Decency, the motion picture industry
adopted an official Production Code in 1934. Written in 1930 by Daniel
Lord, S.J., and Martin Quigley, a Catholic layman who was publisher of The
Motion Picture Herald, the code explicitly prohibited certain acts, themes,
words, and implications. Will Hays appointed Joseph I. Breen, the
Catholic layman most instrumental in founding the Legion of Decency, head
of the Production Code Administration, and this awarded the industry’s seal
of approval to films that met the code’s moral standards. The result was
the curtailment of explicit violence and sexual innuendo, and also of much
of the flavor that had characterized films earlier in the decade.
Europe During the 1930s
The 1930s abroad did not produce films as consistently rich as those of the
previous decade. With the coming of sound, the British film industry was
reduced to satellite status. The most stylish British productions were the
historical dramas of Sir Alexander KORDA and the mystery-adventures of
Alfred HITCHCOCK. The major Korda stars, as well as Hitchcock himself,
left Britain for Hollywood before the decade ended. More innovative were
the government-funded documentaries and experimental films made by the
General Post Office Film Unit under the direction of John Grierson.^Soviet
filmmakers had problems with the early sound-film machines and with the
application of montage theory (a totally visual conception) to sound
filming. They were further plagued by restrictive Stalinist policies,
policies that sometimes kept such ambitious film artists as Pudovkin and
Eisenstein from making films altogether. The style of the German cinema was
perfectly suited to sound filming, and German films of the period 1928-32
show some of the most creative uses of the medium in the early years of
sound. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, however, almost all the
creative film talent left Germany. An exception was Leni RIEFENSTAHL,
whose theatrical documentary Triumph of the Will (1934) represents a highly
effective example of the German propaganda films made during the
decade.^French cinema, the most exciting alternative to Hollywood in the
1930s, produced many of France’s most classic films. The decade found
director Jean Renoir–in Grand Illusion (1937) and Rules of the Game
(1939)–at the height of his powers; Rene Clair mastered both the musical
fantasy and the sociopolitical satire (A Nous la liberte, 1931); Marcel
PAGNOL brought to the screen his trilogy of Marseilles life, Fanny; the
young Jean VIGO, in only two films, brilliantly expressed youthful
rebellion and mature love; and director Marcel CARNE teamed with poet
Jacques Prevert to produce haunting existential romances of lost love and
inevitable death in Quai des brumes (1938) and Le Jour se leve (1939).
Hollywood: World War II, Postwar Decline
During World War II, films were required to lift the spirits of Americans
both at home and overseas. Many of the most accomplished Hollywood
directors and producers went to work for the War Department. Frank Capra
produced the “Why We Fight” series (1942-45); Walt Disney, fresh from his
Snow White (1937) and Fantasia (1940) successes, made animated
informational films; and Garson KANIN, John HUSTON, and William WYLER all
made documentaries about important battles. Among the new American
directors to make remarkable narrative films at home were three former
screenwriters, Preston STURGES, Billy WILDER, and John Huston. Orson
WELLES, the boy genius of theater and radio fame, also came to Hollywood to
shoot Citizen Kane (1941), the strange story of a newspaper magnate whose
American dream turns into a loveless nightmare.^Between 1946 and 1953 the
movie industry was attacked from many sides. As a result, the Hollywood
studio system totally collapsed. First, the U.S. House of
Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities investigated alleged
Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry in two separate sets
of hearings. In 1948, The HOLLYWOOD TEN, 10 screenwriters and directors
who refused to answer the questions of the committee, went to jail for
contempt of Congress. Then, from 1951 to 1954, in mass hearings, Hollywood
celebrities were forced either to name their associates as fellow
Communists or to refuse to answer all questions on the grounds of the 5th
Amendment, protecting themselves against self-incrimination. These
hearings led the industry to blacklist many of its most talented workers
and also weakened its image in the eyes of America and the world.^In 1948
the United States Supreme Court, ruling in United States v. Paramount that
the vertical integration of the movie industry was monopolistic, required
the movie studios to divest themselves of the theaters that showed their
pictures and thereafter to cease all unfair or discriminatory distribution
practices. At the same time, movie attendance started a steady decline;
the film industry’s gross revenues fell every year from 1947 to 1963. The
most obvious cause was the rise of TELEVISION, as more and more Americans
each year stayed home to watch the entertainment they could get most
comfortably and inexpensively. In addition, European quotas against
American films bit into Hollywood’s foreign revenues.^While major American
movies lost money, foreign art films were attracting an enthusiastic and
increasingly large audience, and these foreign films created social as well
as commercial difficulties for the industry. In 1951, The Miracle, a
40-minute film by Roberto ROSSELLINI, was attacked by the New York Catholic
Diocese as sacrilegious and was banned by New York City’s commissioner of
licenses. The 1952 Supreme Court ruling in the Miracle case officially
granted motion pictures the right to free speech as guaranteed in the
Constitution, reversing a 1915 ruling by the Court that movies were not
equivalent to speech. Although the ruling permitted more freedom of
expression in films, it also provoked public boycotts and repeated legal
tests of the definition of obscenity.^Hollywood attempted to counter the
effects of television with a series of technological gimmicks in the early
1950s: 3-D, Cinerama, and Cinemascope. The industry converted almost
exclusively to color filming during the decade, aided by the cheapness and
flexibility of the new Eastman color monopack, which came to challenge the
monopoly of Technicolor. The content of postwar films also began to change
as Hollywood searched for a new audience and a new style. There were more
socially conscious films–such as Fred ZINNEMANN’s The Men (1950) and Elia
KAZAN’s On The Waterfront (1954); more adaptations of popular novels and
plays; more independent (as opposed to studio) production; and a greater
concentration on FILM NOIR–grim detective stories in brutal urban
settings. Older genres such as the Western still flourished, and MGM
brought the musical to what many consider its pinnacle in a series of films