by Mark Cousins
Judy Garland as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (122 middle), like Garbo in Ninotchka, leaves the grey realities of home and finds a land of apparent pleasure, Oz. The film’s storyline was taken from the seventeenth-century English writer John Bunyan, but with a MGM makeover. Dorothy’s quest, taking her from black-and-white Kansas to the Technicolor magic garden of Oz, contains the pure elements of heightened 1930s Hollywood escapism. Yet the land of song and dance and sleepy meadows and a towering green city of Oz is a false dream. Its distractions do not solve the human problems encountered there and she realizes that “There’s no place like home”. The film questions the very 1930s idea of escapism, gently weighing it up against humbler and more traditional values. In doing so it is reminiscent of contemporaneous Hindi cinema.
Gone with the Wind, based on Margaret Mitchell’s widely read book of the same name, took more at the box-office than any one of the Disney films or the 1950s epics such as The Robe (USA, 1953) and Ben Hur (USA, 1959) and was not superseded financially until the blockbuster horror movie The Exorcist (USA, 1973). It tells the story of Scarlett O’Hara (122, bottom), a spoiled and selfish young woman who loses everything, including the man she eventually loves, Rhett Butler, during the American Civil War. Like The Wizard of Oz and Ninotchka, it charts the development of a young woman as she explores the relationship between an escapist view of life and a more truthful understanding. Whereas the first two films benignly allow their heroines to make mistakes and discover the realities of worlds around them, Gone with the Wind ruthlessly punishes Scarlett for her egotism and denial both of the brutalities of war and that her grand lifestyle is over. It is difficult today not to see this story as an extravagant wake-up call to America. It would be two years before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor would force America into the Second World War, but the film makes plain the consequences of a lack of realism about war and, although it was considered one of the most escapist films ever made, its content explicitly attacks escapism.
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The moment where Dorothy leaves the sepia world of her Kansas home and enters the Technicolor dreamscape of Oz.
The form of Gone with the Wind is another matter. It invented no new film techniques, but created such a vivid, emotional universe and lush, sonic and visual experience that the film’s bitter message was somehow smothered. Entire books have been written about why a film which punishes its heroine should have been so enduringly popular with women. The answer to this does not stem from the film’s content, but lies in its form, or production values. Although the majority of the film was directed by Victor Fleming, a former garage worker who had started in films under D.W. Griffith, its scale, look and feel were controlled by its powerful producer David O. Selznick. One of its most famous images was an idealized one painted on glass showing O’ Hara’s house, Tara, in the distance. The dramatic sunset, which occurs at the end of the golden age portrayed in the film, was a second painting above it. In the foreground, there was yet another painted image of Scarlett, surveying her world as people do in eighteenth-century European landscape art. Finally, a fourth separate painted image of a huge tree created a sense of age and timelessness (124). Composite storybook images such as these are the crux of Gone With the Wind because they root the film in the romance and artifice of their symbols of home and love. The film’s opening title reads that the story is set at a time that “is no more than a dream remembered”, in “a civilization gone with the wind”. Selznick, designer William Cameron Menzies, art director Lyle Wheeler and cameramen Ernest Haller and Ray Rennahan created this remembered dream so successfully that audiences could suffer with Scarlett and emote with this detached, overwhelmingly intense, narrative experience, without having to deal with the real consequences of the tragedy of war. Every one of these crew members got Oscars as a result.
The film’s premiere was in Atlanta, Georgia on 15 December 1939. The state’s governor declared a three-day public holiday prior to its opening night and all schools and public buildings were closed. Over 250,000 people queued for hours to catch a glimpse of actors Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. Gable arrived in a plane emblazoned with the words “MGM’s Gone With The Wind”. The Mayor asked for applause at one of the civic events for the “Negro members of the cast”, who were not allowed access to all the festivities. Ironically, it later emerged that Leigh was part Indian.
The most critically acclaimed film of 1939 was made not in Hollywood, but in France. Jean Renoir directed La Règle du jeu/The Rules of the Game two years after La Grande Illusion. Although it had a similar theme to Gone With the Wind, its tale of rich people’s lives and loves in a grand house on the eve of war was radically differ-ent from the Fleming–Selznick film. It was black and white, satirical, left much unsaid and was acted in a fast, heightened style. Its characters are morally empty pleasure seekers, immersed in overlapping love triangles. The film’s tone is difficult to define, frivolous one minute, vicious the next, as in an early scene in the downstairs kitchen, in which the servants are openly anti-Semitic. Renoir devised new ways of extending space in his imagery (see pages 175 for more on this), but then put gauzes over the lens to soften the harsh edges. Jocular and vicious, romantic and classic, the film’s fame derives from these complex internal seesaws. Renoir himself played a failed artist in the film who delivers its often-quoted line, “It’s another sign of the times – everyone lies – everyone has his motives.” The film’s portrayal of them – and perhaps its even handedness – infuriated its upper-and middle-class audiences, and seats were torn up at the première, which was literally inflammatory, since one man threw lighted papers around the auditorium. It’s portrayal of anti-Semitism was timely and it captured the prevalent mood of pessimism in France which derived from the fall of the Popular Front and the threat from Germany. It was a telling portrait of “these days”, the last words spoken in the picture.
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This composite image of Scarlett O’Hara surveying her beloved Tara at sunset works at emotional and allegorical levels. Its dreamlike, storybook qualities, its depiction of longing, its sense that an era is coming to an end, are all key elements in Hollywood’s romantic aesthetic.
The reputation of La Règle du jeu has increased over the years and critic Raymond Durgnat spoke elegantly for many when he called it “An interrogation of spontaneity, convention and self-deception”.33 Renoir was the favourite director of Orson Welles (whose work is discussed on pages 176–180) and he was the patron saint of the new wave of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s.85
Our last film of 1939 is Stagecoach (USA, 1939). It was directed by an Irish-American who made over 100 films and won more Oscars than any other director. His name was Sean Aloysius O’Feeney, but changed it to the simpler John Ford. He was from the East coast of America, but went to Hollywood in 1913 where he was given his first job by Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal and the man responsible for the Florence Lawrence publicity stunt. From the outset it was clear that he had an eye for composition and an Irishman’s romantic feel for the American dream and, like Griffith, he took epic stories and brought their foregrounds alive with convincing human characters, combining what one critic called, “The twitches of life and the silhouettes of legend.” He developed the shock effect of the Lumière brothers’ 1895 train in the Western The Iron Horse (USA, 1924) by digging a pit under a railway line to photograph a locomotive running straight over the camera. However, such shots were not typical of Ford. He preferred the simplest of camera angles and little movement and, if it had not been for his films’ Irish sentiment, this simplicity would have qualified him as a classicist, like Ozu. His longtime screenplay collaborator, Dudley Nichols, called the static style “studied symbolism”.
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Unlike Gone with the Wind, Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu found a rare balance between romantic and classical elements. France, 1939.
Stagecoach, written by Nichols and based on a Guy de Maupassant story, is about a group of misfits travelli
ng by coach. They are joined by a horseless cowboy known as the Ringo Kid before being ambushed by Indians. One of the travellers, a saloon girl and prostitute, is shunned by others of higher social standing, but Ringo and she leave at the end to start a life together in Ford’s mythical, meritocratic West. Ringo was one of the many flawed righteous men in the Ford–Nichols collaborations. He was played by John Wayne, who had already been in films for twelve years, but it was Stagecoach that made him a star. Eventually Ford and Wayne would emphasize the loneliness of men like Ringo more than their decency in films such as The Searchers (USA, 1956), which has become among the most influential ever made.
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The buttes of Monument Valley in Arizona became a timeless backdrop to John Ford’s movies of cowboys and frontiers. The director used it for the first time in Stagecoach. USA, 1939.
In the seven years after Stagecoach, Ford would make no fewer than seven extraordinary films: Young Mr Lincoln (USA, 1939); The Grapes of Wrath (USA, 1940); The Long Voyage Home (USA, 1940); The Battle of Midway (USA, 1942), a documentary filmed when he was in the Navy; They Were Expendable (USA, 1945), which the director Lindsay Anderson called “Ford’s most personal film, perhaps his masterpiece”;34 and My Darling Clementine (USA, 1946), which is an almost mythic film about civilizing the wild western frontier.
During the production of Stagecoach, Ford filmed for the first time in the startling Monument Valley, Arizona (126), which became as iconic in his films as John Wayne. He would shoot eight other films there. Cities and towns had been photographed in every conceivable way by filmmakers, but there had been few, until Ford, who found open space central to their work. Not since the Swedish masters of the late teens and early 1920s had any filmmaker shown so strong a feeling for landscape. Ironically, Ford’s pastoralism would be cited as influencing key Western filmmakers but, more surprisingly, directors far beyond the reaches of Western cinema, such as Kurosawa in the 1950s, the Brazilian Glauba Rocha (127) in the 1960s and Ousmane Sembene and Dani Koyaté from Senegal in the 1990s.
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Although deeply American, Ford’s Westerns – and in particular the ways in which he had his landscapes photographed – influenced international directors such as Brazil’s Glauber Rocha in films such as Black God, White Devil. 1964.
The rise of the star, the growing role of psychology in storytelling, the shortening of shots, the increasing use of close-ups and of panchromatic film stock, which was sensitive to all colours in the spectrum, had all reduced the role that single wide shots played in the earliest years of filmmaking. But Ford understood the power of such imagery and knew that the emotion felt by each character could be expressed dramatically by using deep space: a scene in the middle of Stagecoach shows Ringo watching the saloon girl, Dallas, go outside. A moment later, he will follow her and, in a daring exchange, propose that they spend the rest of their lives together. The lighting is not only similar to that of a 1920s Expressionist film, but also Ringo in the foreground and Dallas in the background are far apart. Ford staged the sequence in a single image rather than following a close-up of Ringo with a separate shot of Dallas walking away. Whole sequences within the film were handled in this way, making Stagecoach one of the most visually distinctive films of the year. This exploration of visual depth, was seminal. Early filmmakers had tended to photograph scenes in a wide shot, as if they were happening on a stage; in The Assassination of the Duc de Guise (France, 1908) (see page 38–9) actors performed around the set at various distances from the camera. However, in the late 1910s and 1920s, there was a trend in Western mainstream cinematography for flatter, softer and more romantic imagery. The pic-ture of Garbo in Flesh and the Devil (USA, 1926) (see page 68) is a good example of this.
Stagecoach radically reversed the visual flattening of cinematic imagery of the 1920s and 1930s, but Ford was not the first director to do so. As early as 1929, Eisenstein had suggested, as an alternative to his famous editing theories, staging and filming an event in depth, so that if the viewer looks at the foreground, then the background, then the foreground again, a kind of mental editing occurs. His The General Line (Soviet Union, 1929) illustrates this theory. As the viewer’s eyes flick between images of a farmer in the background and his tractor in the foreground, it is difficult to look at both concurrently. Six years later, Eisenstein was to use similar deep-space composition in his uncompleted film, Bezhin Meadow (Soviet Union, 1935–37). In France, Renoir was sometimes using a similar technique, as shown in image 129 from Le Crime de M Lang/The Crime of Mr Lang (France, 1935) and in La Règle du jeu. In certain scenes in these two films the action takes place close to and far from the lens, although Renoir seldom felt the need to have both in crisp focus. The rare image (128) from Mizoguchi’s Naniwa Elejî (Japan, 1936) brings the foreground action radically closer to the camera than either Ford or Eisenstein.
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Mizoguchi going further than most directors of the time in having action take place very close to the camera and very far away from it. Naniwa Elejî. Japan, 1935.
While Eisenstein, Mizoguchi, Renoir and Ford were the key directors in 1930s depth staging, the key cinematographer in American cinema working in this field was Gregg Toland. Toland entered the industry in 1919, the year that Eisenstein started describing his “editing within the shot” ideas. In 1938, Eastman Kodak and Agfa produced new film stocks, rated between 64 and 120 ASA, three to eight times faster than normal studio stocks. Toland quickly realized that if the stock was more sensitive to light, he could use the same amount of illumination in a scene, but close down the lens’s aperture without resulting in a darker image. The cinematographer and director could also stage action near the lens and far from it, without losing focus on either, because the more the aperture decreases on any camera, the sharper the focus across a range of distances. This made the measuring stick we saw in image 42 less necessary to keep Gary Cooper a certain distance from the camera. Toland did not shoot Stagecoach, but worked with Ford on other films such as The Grapes of Wrath (USA, 1940) and shot the landmark film, Citizen Kane (USA, 1941), which pushed the possibilities of staging action in depth so far that its visual style became famous.
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Although Renoir does not attempt to keep all his deep-staged action in focus, he encourages his audience to look at both the woman in the mid-foreground (left) and the man in the hat in the background (centre). Le Crime de M. Lang. 1935.
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Like many scenes in Citizen Kane, this moment from a later Orson Welles film – Chimes at Midnight – stages action close to the camera’s wide-angle lens. Spain–Switzerland, 1966.
Citizen Kane was the first feature film directed by Orson Welles, who apparently watched Stagecoach thirty times in preparation, to learn the craft of filmmaking. One scene shows Welles as the tragic newspaper magnate at his typewriter in the foreground, which must be less than a metre away from the camera; Joseph Cotton is in the middle ground about two metres behind him and Everett Sloane is so far away that, when measured, he is smaller than Welles’s nose. This stylized or “expressionist” use of deep focus was comparable to the use of shadows in Caligari. Toland liked to tell how he would shoot with a lens with a focal length of just 24mm to get shots such as these, whereas the industry norm was 50mm and Garbo-esque soft close-ups were filmed with 100mm lenses or longer. 24mm lenses create visual distortions including the “ballooning” effect that expands the image’s centre and forces the background away from the camera, miniaturizing it and exaggerating perspective to make it look further away than it is. (Many inexpensive or disposable stills cameras have lenses around 30mm. Anyone who has got too close to one of them in holiday snapshots and ends up with an elongated nose or expanded waist-line, will know these distortions.) Toland also took advantage of new brighter arc lights which enabled him to close the aperture even further and achieve still deeper focus.
There is a sense here of Welles and Toland trying to shock the industry, their peers and the public with the
ir extravagant spatial experiments, yet Toland’s implication that this image of Welles at the typewriter was filmed in a new dynamic way is perhaps misleading. It has recently emerged that this dramatic sequence and some of the others in Citizen Kane were created using a more traditional process. For the typewriter scene, Cotten and Sloane were shot using Toland’s short focal length lens technique, then projected onto a screen in front of which Welles-as-Kane sat. This was then re-photographed, creating a new image which appeared to have extraordinary depth of field. More than any other film, Citizen Kane reversed the visual schema of 1920s American cinema. Who was the personality behind such cinematic game playing? Welles was born into a maverick family in Wisconsin in 1914. His father was an inventor and his mother was a concert pianist; both died young when he was eight and twelve years old respectively. He was staging Shakespeare aged four and was educated privately at a school that excelled in music. He was playing lead roles on the Dublin stage aged seventeen, debuted on Broadway at nineteen, formed the acclaimed Mercury Theatre at twenty-two, caused a sensation and national panic with a radio broadcast, War of the Worlds (1938), when he was twenty-three, directed some of the most acclaimed theatrical productions of the 1930s and made what many consider the best film of all time, Citizen Kane, aged twenty-six.