by Mark Cousins
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Ruan Lingyu, the Chinese Greta Garbo, in The Peach Girl. China, 1931.
Ruan Lingyu served this function for Chinese filmmakers. In New Women (1935) she played a real-life actress and screenwriter who committed suicide after being hounded by the press. The prurient Shanghai tabloids of the time attacked the film and the leftist Ruan because they felt threatened by New Women. Ruan’s response was tragic – she took an overdose of pills and died. Her funeral procession was three miles long, during which three women committed suicide, nine years after similar events at Rudolph Valentino’s Hollywood funeral. The New York Times’ front page described it as “the most spectacular funeral of the century”.
In 1937, Japan invaded China proper. In the same year, China’s most significant director of the time, Yuan Mazhi, released Street Angel, often voted one of the best Chinese films ever made. Its opening title sets the scene: “Autumn 1935. In the world of Shanghai’s underclass.” A young trumpet player falls for a Manchurian tavern singer, and a story unfolds about the way that the Shanghai underclass suffer under the Japanese occupation. Yuan intended the film to be a critique of the nationalist government, which was threatened by his film’s success. He fled the Japanese invasion and worked for the communist leader, Mao Zedong, in Yen’an in 1937, where the Chinese communists had regrouped after their “Long March” to escape the Nationalists. Shanghai remained the centre of conventional, state-approved filmmaking but by 1938–39, a small island off the southern coast of the mainland, Hong Kong, became the focus for Cantonese filmic innovation.
THE NEW AMERICAN SOUND GENres
Back in America in 1931, the nine studios established during the 1920s – Universal, Paramount, United Artists, Warner Bros., Disney, Columbia, MGM, RKO and Fox (which would become 20th Century-Fox in 1935) – formed an oligarchy which controlled the industry. Hollywood had not only transformed itself physically, from a sleepy location of orange groves and mountain cats to a boomtown of Deco cinemas and hi-tech studios (94), but had also accrued myths. Destinies were manipulated, it was the home to the world’s best jazz music, its grand cinemas were sometimes modelled on Egyptian palaces and Grauman’s Chinese theatre, a Shanghai-esque extravaganza, started to perpetuate the hand and foot imprints of movie stars on its sidewalk. The Hollywood Hills were dotted with swimming pools and its graveyards received the first shocking reminders that stars were not immortal. Fading Hollywood actors and exalted stars started to feel the agony of this existential fall-out. A bookish bisexual Italian, Alfonzo Guglielmi, had been carried shoulder-high by the town for just five short years, from 1921 to 1925. He conspired with Hollywood’s heady, cheap and erotic image of him, and when he died at the age of thirty-one, his gravestone had on it a more familiar name, that of Rudolph Valentino.
The oligarchy eroticized and idealized all the beautiful, immature, expendable stars and starlets that it seduced in Southern California. They had palaces built for them, which were then razed within a generation. They wore platinum dresses and drank martinis at a set time (usually 5.50pm), clustered together around their azure pools which emptied Mojave desert lakes while intermarrying and displaying their smiles and biceps, flushed by the glory reflected off each other. They tried to transform the Hollywood Hills into a vision of Tuscany.17 And the things they made, the reasons why they pushed back the Southern Californian desert in the first place were, indeed, sometimes splendid works of cinema. We have seen how musicals grew out of the potential of sound technology, but other genres and branches of filmmaking blossomed during this period: gangster pictures, Westerns, screwball comedies, horror films, war films, animations and serious dramas. The first four of these were the most distinctively American. Nine major companies were now producing eight types of films, which encompassed the matrix of Western entertainment until the 1950s.
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By the early 1930s, Hollywood had become a sprawling oligarchy. This aerial shot shows Paramount studios.
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Boris Karloff as the monseter in James Whale‘s Frankenstein. This publicity still captures the persecuted quality of Karloff’s performance as well as the influence of German expressionist shadows on Whale’s film. USA, 1931.
Horror movies had already been made in the 1920s. The most striking, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene, 1919), The Golem (Wegener and Boese, 1920) and Nosferatu (Murnau, 1921), were German. Hollywood’s Universal studios followed in this tradition with Lon Chaney’s haunting performance as The Phantom of the Opera directed by Rupert Julian in 1925, but it was not until after two massive box-office successes in 1931 that the same studio launched horror as a genre, a type of pleasurable film that audiences recognized and enjoyed and which had its own actors and style.
These two films were James Whale’s Frankenstein and Tod Browning’s Dracula. Browning’s film, full of silent, almost static appearances by Bela Lugosi as the vampire is cinema literally holding its breath. It shocked audiences on its first release, but today has little of the unsettling power of Nosferatu of a decade earlier. Like Dracula, Frankenstein’s design was based on theatrical dramatizations of the story rather than Mary Shelley’s original novel. The film’s English director, Whale, a gay former actor, cartoonist and set designer realized, unlike Browning, that German Expressionism would lend a striking style and mood to popular Hollywood horror. Whale and his writers combined elements of The Golem and Caligari with the theatrical imagery and elevated the story of a scientist creating a monster out of body parts into a mature tale of a mute outsider, shunned by society because he is visually repulsive. Boris Karloff’s tender performance added depth to this theme of ostracism. Frankenstein (95) is early cinema’s greatest essay in prejudice and illustrates how apparently commercial studio genre material could be meaningful. It is also a bold and surprising reversal of the normal methods of novelistic adaptation. In Shelley’s novel, the monster speaks frequently and articulately. Moreover, when novels are used as source material for films, their characters’ internal thoughts are usually externalized and given dialogue. However, Whale and his screenwriters ensured that the monster was practically mute.
In many other ways Frankenstein was hugely influential. Karloff became a star and for the next forty years was Western cinema’s most famous horror actor. German and American cinematic horror continued to intersect when Karloff played the title role in The Mummy (Universal, 1932), directed by Karl Freund, who had shot The Golem, Variety and Metropolis in Germany. Horror became Universal Studios’ trademark and to this day its back-lot tours display Frankenstein sets which are still standing. The success of Frankenstein and Dracula established the thrill of fear as commercial cinema’s newest attraction. Films like King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, USA, 1933), Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, France, 1959), Psycho (Afred Hitchcock, USA, 1960), Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo, Japan, 1964), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, USA, 1973) and The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez USA, 1998) not only tested the audience’s appetite for horror, but also became aesthetic and technical landmarks in film history. Although the Frankenstein cycle would soon degenerate into cheap laughs, its artistic legacy was ensured by the original tenderness of the Whale–Karloff vision. Forty years after the release of the original Frankenstein, Victor Erice made The Spirit of the Beehive (Spain, 1973) about a little Spanish girl who sees Frankenstein and then imagines that the monster comes to her village. Set soon after Franco’s victory, Erice uses the monster as a symbol for the sort of outsiders who were denounced by the country’s new right-wing political regime. Gods and Monsters (USA, 1998) explored Whale’s complex feelings of love for his actors.
The gangster picture also shocked and fascinated audiences and, unlike horror films, had no European roots. It too became a recognizable genre in 1930–31 with its own stars, plots, imagery and themes. It is easy to see why, at first, it was a purely American genre: the manufacture and sale of alcohol were illegal in the US between 1920 and 1933 and gangs of entrepreneu
rial lawbreakers, or gangsters, ran alcohol between country still and city speakeasy. Often of Italian or Irish descent, they structured their empires like families and became famous figures in cities like Chicago and New York. This mixture of fame, crime, family drama and ethnicity proved to be irresistible to Hollywood. The first film which integrated these elements fully was Little Caesar (Mervyn Le Roy, 1930), in which Edward G. Robinson plays an Italian mob leader, who wages war on his rivals18 and is brought down by his moll (96 top). The story is violent and Robinson plays his role unsentimentally, as would the other gangster icon of these years, James Cagney. In the following year, Cagney took on the role of a middle-class lad who becomes a mobster through the liquor racket. Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931) is more violent than Little Caesar and, controversially for the time, less damning of its main character. Cagney, an ex-dancer, moves gracefully throughout the film and spits out his lines with relish. He had charm and many organizations in America denounced the film for indulging his seductive qualities. This was to be the start of the moral debate about gangster films that continues to this day. Robinson’s Rico and Cagney’s Powers were Italian and Irish respectively. Catholicism and the familial and deferential aspects of this type of Christianity have remained central to gangster pictures ever since. Forty years later, and the most famous and morally and visually darkest gangster films in cinema’s history continued this tradition. Francis Coppola’s19 Godfather trilogy continually contrasted the piety of their Italian Catholic characters with their murderous brutality. This made for potent cinema but there were objections, as in the early 1930s, that Hollywood cinema had acquired a fascist taint in its ongoing love affair with gangsters.
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The first film to portray the social and psychological aspects of 1920s gangsterism. Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar. Director: M. Le Roy. USA, 1930.
The Russian-Jewish New York journalist Ben Hecht wrote two of the earliest gangster pictures and established the genre’s themes as much as any director. Underworld (Joseph Von Sternberg, 1927) was a precursor about a gangster and his moll on a moral trajectory, which became the genre’s staple in subsequent years. Scarface: Shame of a Nation (Howard Hawks, USA, 1932), was the most significant gangster film of its era. It was stylistically more daring than others, using Expressionist lighting and symbols. It was more interested in detail, recreating real-life incidents such as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in journalistic detail. It emphasized the sexual inadequacy of its main character, Catholic Tony Camonte. Hecht, who would become one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood history, wrote a highly cynical script which disregarded civilized feelings and the niceties of life, and the censor forced its director, Howard Hawks, to add scenes denouncing Camonte. Scarface was remade and updated, with cold brilliance, by Brian De Palma in 1983. He augmented the violence, having characters at one point fight with chainsaws. Camonte’s character had metamorphosed into a Cuban thug who goes to Florida and becomes a drug lord, dealing in cocaine. The ethos that greed is good was only too appropriate in the consumerist 1980s. De Palma took Camonte’s demise in the Hawks–Hecht picture (he dies under a tourist sign which says “The World is Yours” [97 top]) and transformed it into an extraordinary shot in the middle of this remake, which centres on a giant balloon in the sky, emblazoned with “The World is Yours” [97 bottom] and then cranes down to an artificial coastline and Al Pacino who stares up at it blankly (182).
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Lead character Tony Camonte’s sexual inade-quacy was highlighted in Scarface: Shame of a Nation. Director: Howard Hawks. USA, 1932.
Hollywood made at least seventy gangster films in the first three years of the genre, 1930–32. They captivated audiences, worried commentators and their themes and style influenced filmmaking in France in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, in Britain in the 1950s and 1970s, in Japan from the 1940s onward, in Hong Kong from the 1960s onward and then India and the Middle East from the 1970s onward. Back in the US, the complex set-ting of Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (USA, 1948) was a number gambling racket and its characters spoke some of the most poetic dialogue in cinema. On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, USA, 1954) turned a former boxer, who breaks the mob’s control of a labor union, into a christ-like martyr. In that same year, The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1954) combined gangster and Western themes with a traditional Japanese story of swordsmen and villagers and became a hugely influential film. Le samouai/The Samurai (Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1967) took Kurosawa’s style and fused it with American gangster and Western movie motifs. In the same year, Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, USA, 1967) made two bank robbers appealing to the emerging counterculture. Performance (Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell, UK, 1970) used the gangster milieu for their piercing exploration of identity. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1972) shrouded its characters in darkness, as if in a portrait by the Dutch painter Rembrandt. A new master of the genre, Martin Scorsese debuted with Mean Streets (USA, 1973) and emphasized the Catholicism of gangsters by using religious quotations from James Joyce. Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, Italy, 1984) was the most stylistically complex gangster film since Force of Evil. Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, USA, 1992) was a highly influential, talky drama with elements of classical theatre (98).
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Camonte’s tragedy was that he believed such tourist signs. The original Scarface (top) and De Palma’s 1980s remake (bottom two).
As audience’s fear of evil became a new theme for filmmakers to play with after the success of Frankenstein, so the lawless lust for power became a fascination for international filmmakers after the early gangster cycle. International filmmakers saw gangsters as existential heroes, fascists, social victims, enigmatic, hubristic and tragic. Gangsterism’s later social and aesthetic richness found its roots in the schema of early 1930s America.
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Six decades after Scarface, filmmakers and audiences remained fascinated by gangsters. Reservoir Dogs. Director: Quentin Tarantino. USA, 1992.
Musicals, horror films and gangster pictures multiplied in the 1930s, but the other genres within American closed romantic realism cannot be placed so easily. Many westerns were made between 1928 and 1945, but they were better explored in their later 1940s heyday. However, it should be noted how richly they compare to gangster pictures. The majority of films about the mob are concerned with decaying societies and an exploration of the conse-quences of law breaking. A large proportion of westerns are about emerging societies and an exploration of lawlessness and the consequences of creating laws. Westerns tend to be set in the period 1860–1900, years which overlap with the beginning of filmmaking. Former cowboys were often extras or stunt-men in early movies. William F. Cody, also known as Buffalo Bill, became friendly with filmmakers, who transformed his life story into myth.
Several epic westerns such as The Covered Wagon (James Cruze, 1923) and The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924) were made in the 1920s and in 1935 a new, small film studio, Republic Pictures, started producing B-westerns and serials, or oaters, to play before the main feature. It was this cheap and cheerful world of low-budget production and audiences’ avid responses to it that led the American film industry to make more movies of this genre than any other. Few of these films’ actors transferred to major studio A-westerns. But one did, and he would become not only the most famous of all Western stars, but also an icon of American masculinity and idealism. His breakthrough film will be discussed later in this chapter. His name was John Wayne.
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One of the great closed romantic realist directors, Howard Hawks (left), used a camera unobtrusively, had a distinctive view of the relationship between men and women and handled the movie genres more adroitly than most.
Silent American cinema’s greatest genre, comedy, had changed course at the beginning of the sound era and the fates of its director–stars were varied. Chaplin continued to make significant films such as City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936), but t
he careers of Lloyd and Keaton petered out. The most unexpected change was the feminization of comedy. Under the influence of Lubitsch and patially as a result of early feminism’s advances, women became important, not only as performers (such as Mae West, Katharine Hepburn and Carole Lombard) but also as the subject of and inspiration for 1930s comedy.20 However, the studios’ only high-ranking woman director, Dorothy Arzner, who had previously been a respected editor in the 1920s, contributed little to this shift. There might be feminist touches in her films, for example Christopher Strong (1933) in which Katharine Hepburn plays an aviatrix, but Arzner ends the film in a moral manner – Hepburn commits suicide on discovering her pregnancy.
The battle of the sexes became a wellspring for writers and directors. The reason (or unreason) of the comediennes disrupted the story (and male characters) with delightful results. The most distinctive of these films were farcical in tone and performed at a very fast pace, legacies of the madcap style of 1910s chase movies and the dizzying pace of some vaudeville and burlesque routines. The first of these new comedies was Twentieth Century (USA, 1934) and the best – the funniest and fastest – was Bringing Up Baby (USA, 1938). Both were directed by the casual chameleon of American cinema, Howard Hawks, who was perhaps the most important 1930s studio director (99). He was born in Indiana in 1896, his family moved to California around 1906, he studied engineering and, at the age of sixteen, became a professional car and airplane racer. He got into the film business by taking a summer job at Famous Players-Lasky around 1912 and worked his way up through the editing and story departments. Aged twenty-six, he directed a few short films with his own money and then started working on features at the end of the silent era. Having teamed up with Hecht, he made Scarface; the screwball comedy, Twentieth Century; the first and best of the dark films of the Humphrey Bogart–Lauren Bacall pairing, To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946); two of the most significant Westerns, Red River (1948) and Rio Bravo (1959) and one of cinema’s most playful musicals, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). He was also a brilliant talent spotter, discovering Lauren Bacall and Montgomery Clift.