Since early last year, I have been working through my watchlist of some 4,000 films in chronological order. So far I have made it through the ragtag pioneer days of moving pictures in the 1890s and 1900s, the banquet of possibilities that is 1910s cinema, the extreme highs and lows of the 1920s, and the lion’s share of the pre-code talkie era. This journey has been rewarding so far, as I have been able to appreciate each film and then general sweep of film history with a bit more context. The advent of sound hit me, as I imagine it did moviegoers of 1929, like a bolt of lightning!
The genre rigidity as Hollywood and foreign film industries settled into themselves in the 1920s was begging for a shakeup, which arrived with the nearly simultaneous of sound and the Great Depression, which forced the industry into an era of playfulness and in some cases radical experimentalism. The precode talkies that followed famously developed a kind of extremism, exemplified by lurid melodramas and gangster movies that pushed the morality tales of the 1920s to new levels, giddy yet jaded musicals that explored backstage settings through both image and sound, and a wave of comics capitalizing on the power of words and exploring the possibilities of the absurd as a response to a world in rapid and turbulent transition. These trends reached their zenith as the depression reached its peak in 1933. This year warrants special reflection on my part, although I hope to gather my thoughts on each year going forward.
The films I watched were not assembled systematically and definitely don’t represent all of cinema, but do reveal some patterns of the times they were made in. If nothing else, this writing will serve as a viewership diary of sorts for myself, although hopefully one that you will enjoy following along with. But enough preamble! Let’s jump into the meat of 1933. There’s a lot to get into!
I’ll begin by shining a little-needed spotlight on three of the most iconic stars of the era, each of whom capitalized on the dramatic tonal and technological shifts in Hollywood of the early 1930s, and spring-boarded into careers that would define the golden age of Hollywood: Joan Crawford, Mae West, Ginger Rogers.
Joan Crawford was already an established fixture of Hollywood by the advent of sound, having cultivated a flapper persona that served her well in films such as Our Dancing Daughters and its follow ups, Our Modern Maidens and the early sound Our Blushing Brides. By the early 1930s, however, public tastes has changed and her carefree flapper image no longer appealed to an increasingly downtrodden moviegoing public. In the first pivot of a career that would be defined by them, Crawford developed a new persona better developed to the sound era— that of a glamorous but hardworking everywoman. Aided by uncanny savviness in an era sometimes marked more by quantity than quality, Joan could sell any script with her sheer force of personality. In her films of the 1930s, we see a series of inspirations for the American working and middle classes— women who are often down on their luck but refused to relinquish their dignity. By 1933 she had already developed much of this persona through films such as Laughing Sinners, Grand Hotel, and Rain. Ultimately, this image would make Crawford one of the most successful stars of the 1930s and only 1945’s Mildred Pierce would launch a shift toward the indomitable matriarch roles with which modern viewers tend to identify her. 1933 saw the release of two films that would cement her working-girl image: Today We Live, and Dancing Lady. In both films, she plays characters that feel like sisters to her troubled but wry Flämmchen in Grand Hotel.
In Today We Live, Joan plays a recently landless and orphaned Englishwoman (no accent required) who finds herself at the center of a love triangle during World War I. One corner of this triangle dies in a suicide mission, positioning her for a bittersweet happy ending. Despite the implausible script and unconvincing romance between Crawford and a largely wooden Gary Cooper, Crawford remains entrancing, aided by iconic ruffle-collar get-ups by Adrian, who played no small part in defining her 1930s persona. The somewhat more convincing Dancing Lady finds Joan, once again sporting fabulous gowns by Adrian, in the role of a burlesque dancer, who is immediately placed under arrest for indecent exposure. Don’t worry, though! By the end of the movie she will be dancing in a psychedelic musical sequence with Fred Astaire. In both cases, Joan serves as a model of Greatest Generation stick-to-itiveness while retaining a magnetic glamor.
If Joan Crawford’s 1933 persona constitutes an aspirational exemplar of Great Depression values, Mae West burst onto the scene with superhuman bravado that transgressed all rules of propriety. By all conventional measures, Mae West should not have achieved success. A stalwart veteran of Vaudeville, she was already 42 by 1932,when she made her feature film debut. 1933 saw the release of her two most enduringly popular pictures: She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel. The plots of these films hardly matter. They are merely the pedestal on which Ms. West presents the true attraction: herself. Mae West’s characters exist almost outside the text of their films, skewering the other characters and plot points with rapid fire one liners. The early sound era was perfect timing for her act of words, words, words. Though her persona has been endlessly imitated and often mocked, watching these films cements her as one of the greatest American performers of all time. The postmodern humor of New Hollywood is but a pale shadow of Mae West’s brilliance. Only the Marx brothers really approach the reality-defying intensity of her schtick. To a modern viewer such as myself, her power is all the more miraculous for having arrived apparently fully formed. She is a cinematic Athena, born from the broken skull of Vaudeville.
While the Joan Crawford of 1933 was a star making a successful transition and Mae West was bursting into a new medium, Ginger Rogers was a relative novice, having acted in only a handful of films, none of which made much of a splash. 1933 would change that. This year saw her scene-stealing turns in 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, as well as her first pairing with Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio. In 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, Ginger plays supporting roles, but in musical and non-musical sequences, you can’t help but watch her. She is not the most conventionally beautiful of the many starlets in these films, nor does she possess the self assured intensity of Joan Crawford or Mae West, but she has a certain magic that make even her most lackluster films worth watching (although there’s nothing lackluster about these two). If there’s a single image that defines 1933 Hollywood, it’s coin-clad Ginger Rogers singing “We’re in the Money” in pig Latin the opening number of Gold Diggers. And when I watched Footlight Parade, I found myself missing Ginger, despite some obvious advantages of that film over 42nd Street and Gold Diggers (not the least of which is James Cagney, who deserves more attention than this throwaway parenthetical, but that will have to wait for a later post).
In Flying Down to Rio, it’s easy to see why Fred and Ginger became movie icons. Despite an extremely thin plot, which is thankfully bolstered by the presence of Delores del Rio, Fred and Ginger shine in their dance numbers, and it’s hard to choose which of their feet to watch. Like Mae West, Ginger Rogers’s talents could only be highlighted by sound cinema. Thank God for musicals!
By 1933, Hollywood had left the Silent Era nearly fully behind. While a few ingenues (like Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo) managed to forge careers into the sound era, many of the most bankable silent era stars were beginning to see their careers fizzle. Charlie Chaplin, of course, bucked the trend and continued to make silent pictures for over a decade. In the popular imagination, bolstered by films such as Singing in the Rain or the more recent Babylon, the changing fortunes of Silent Era film stars tends to be associated with something unpalatable in their performance style — an unfortunate accent, wooden delivery, or other deficits. While this was undoubtedly true for some performers, some, such as Gloria Swanson and Buster Keaton, retain an undeniable charm in their early sound pictures.
However, the drastically changing economic fortunes of the average moviegoer had shifted their movie-going preferences. Swanson and her fellow queens of the plush spectacles of the 1920s simply didn’t fit the plucky everywomen roles movie audiences were craving as the Great Depression dragged on. Swanson’s 1933 snoozer Perfect Understanding is pleasant enough, but feels predictable, and, worse, out of touch. It’s not so much that Swanson is bad in it — she was merely handed material out of step with its times. Even the good vibes, wish fulfillment musicals of this era tend to emphasize, either implicitly or explicitly, the dire financial straits of its characters. Perfect Understanding, meanwhile, was a pure confection at a moment when audiences were craving a bit of gristle.
The case of silent era comedians such as Keaton and Harold Lloyd is a bit more complicated. After all, there was a healthy market for comedy films throughout the thirties and indeed both of these actors continued to work steadily, if not with comparable success to previously, through the 1930s. Most of the comedies of the 1920s function by pushing situations to their logical extremes, much like later television sitcoms. The silent image serves this approach well. Without words to complicate matters, we are free to absorb the spectacle of a house falling around Keaton in Steamboat Bill Jr. or Harold Lloyd’s famous clock scene in Safety Laugh and be charmed by our plucky heroes facing the exaggerated but straightforward consequences of their own choices and the humdrum mechanization of the plot.
With the advent of the 1930s, two important shifts in film comedy occurred nearly simultaneously. First, words disrupted the unity of image, and the potential of this contrast was immediately taken up buy film comedy acts such as the Marx Brothers, Wheeler and Woolsey, the Three Stooges, and, to a milder extent, Laurel and Hardy. Rather than playing into situational comedy, these acts stand apart from coherent reality and babble omnisciently or in utter ignorance, twisting the words and logic of the other characters. The iconic cartoon shorts of Fleischer studios likewise exploded narrative to produce comedy informed by rhythm and free association more than plot. Betty Boop’s Snow White (easily one of my favorites of the year) bears little resemblence to the familiar story, but does feature Cab Calloway performing in the guise of a dancing ghost with little logical justification. In an increasingly unstable world, where poverty was rampant, fascism was on the rise, and the world was skittering inevitably toward World War II, these changes are hardly surprising.
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In more dramatic pictures, Hollywood was burying its face in the mud, pushing the boundaries of respectable content and creating lurid stories of taboos. Edward G. Ulmer’s Damaged Lives follows the fallout of infidelity and venereal disease in a couple’s relationship. Despite nearly killing themselves, the film’s message is ultimately that these obstacles needn’t have been treated so seriously. More extreme is The Story of Temple Drake, the story of a coquettish southern Belle, who, through a string of bad luck, ends up being raped and human trafficked through a violent underworld of bootlegging criminals. Stephen Roberts’ direction, William Faulkner’s script, and Karl Struss’s cinematography pull no punches, emphasizing both the physical grime and psychological torment of Temple’s situation. In true American style, the picture ends with a courtroom swoon. This movie could only have been released in 1933, a moment where sound film had fully found its footing but before the Hayes Code went into effect a year later. A somewhat antithetical film, Cecille B. DeMille’s This Day and Age, rejects the redemptive potential of the courtroom in a corrupt political system, instead relying in a quasi-fascist mob of teens to enforce their own vigilante justice by hunting a local gangster, and, in the film’s most memorable scene, suspending him over a pit of hungry rats. Not until the 1970s would American A-pictures even dip their toes into similar waters again, and never would they do so without an enfeebling sense of sarcasm or guilt.
Overall 1933 was one of the most rewarding years of my journey so far, and I’m sure there’s much more to discover. But, for now, I’ll leave off, and will see you again in 1934. Major change is on the horizon, and I can’t wait to see how things shake out!
Recommended Viewing:
42nd Street
Baby Face
Betty Boop’s Halloween Party
Blow Me Down
Blonde Bombshell
The Bowery
A Bundle of Blues
By Candlelight
Cavalcade
Damaged Lives
Dancing Lady
Dinner at Eight
Don Quixote
Duck Soup
Emperor Jones
Female
Fetiche
Flying Down to Rio
Footlight Parade
The Ghoul
So ein Mädel vergisst man nicht
Gold Diggers of 1933
Goodbye Again
Hello, Sister
I Am Suzanne!
I Eats My Spinach
I Heard
I’m No Angel
The Invisible Man
The Kennel Murder Case
The Keyhole
Kiss Before the Mirror
Ladies They Talk About
Liebelei
Little Women
Lot in Sodom
Leise flehen meine Lieder
The Mad Doctor
Meet the Baron
The Mystery of the Wax Museum
The Old Man of the Mountain
Pilgrimage
Popeye the Sailor
Private Detective 62
The Private Life of Henry VIII
Queen Christina
Roman Scandals
Rufus Jones for President
Sailor’s Luck
Secret of the Blue Room
Secrets
She Done Him Wrong
Snow White
The Song of Songs
Sons of the Desert
The Story of Temple Drake
The Stranger’s Return
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse
This Day and Age
Wild Elefinks
Zero de conduite: Jeunes disables au college