The 40s: The Story of a Decade (86 page)

A NOTE BY DAVID DENBY

F
or the overwhelming majority of Americans, “the movies,” in the 1940s, meant the films that issued forth from the Hollywood studios in satisfying numbers and played at the local theatres built right in the middle of town. The movies belonged to everyone, and they fitted into weekly life all over the country. Some successful films had long runs, of course, but many theatres (which were owned by the studios) changed their shows every week. Most Americans didn’t read critics, or wait to hear what their friends said; they thought of movies, as the critic Robert Warshow put it, as a “pure” culture, like fishing or baseball, and they went to films without much thought or planning. After the war, weekly attendance peaked at more than eighty million (it’s now around thirty million). There wasn’t, after all, much competition to speak of, apart from dance bands, newspapers, magazines, radio, bowling, bingo, and fornication.

The studio system, still firmly in place at the beginning of the decade, generated genres and stars. Family pictures opened every other week, and also Westerns, women’s pictures, high-kilowatt Technicolor musicals, dark-shadowed crime films, and psychological dramas—indeed, dreams and traumas of varying sorts, accompanied by portentously equivocal music, took over many serious films, and sympathetic doctors, some of them played by Claude Rains, performed miracle cures, something that now seems inconceivable (Freud’s reputation was running high in the forties). The movie theatre was a place of moral comfort and,
frequently, reassurance, though the studios produced infinite and intriguing variations on formula stories for moviegoers who valued style. It was definitely a time for classicists and connoisseurs in the audience. In later decades, the auteur critics discovered thematic patterns in the work of individual directors, but few people recognized such things at the time or cared. The artists among the directors put up with many frustrations: the demand to stay on schedule as each studio turned out fifty or so movies a year; the revisions of many screenwriters, often guided by producers; the frequent reediting of a movie after a tepid preview. Despite all this, the system worked well for such creators as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, George Cukor, Preston Sturges, Vincente Minnelli, Raoul Walsh, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, and many others. It did not work well for Orson Welles, a man too original and restless to mesh with semi-authoritarians in suits. It was a rich, sinful, corrupt, and productive decade.

It has been said that Brahms was the first composer to possess the same sense of music history (periods, influences, shifts in harmonic inventiveness) that we do. I’m not sure there were many directors or critics who had a comparable sense of movie history in the forties (the way that Scorsese and Tarantino do now). U.S.C. began its film program early, in 1929, and by 1932 was offering a degree in film studies, and U.C.L.A. followed in 1947, but film study was rare or nonexistent at most universities. During the silent period, there had been an enormous flow of euphoric writing about movies as an art form in little magazines devoted to experimental work (
Hound & Horn
) or left-wing politics (
New Masses
). But the coming of sound, and the greater psychological plausibility and realism that came with it, tended, at the serious level, to chase away the aestheticians and to encourage the sociological critics who harped on important themes and the social responsibility of the medium. In the forties, magazine and newspaper criticism was mostly what it had always been, plot summary garlanded with a grade, though there was one great critic, James Agee, at
The Nation
, who wrote enduring American prose about movies.

When
The New Yorker
began, in 1925, the magazine was much more New York–centric than it is now, and the prime local industry in the arts was theatre, not movies. Some of the magazine’s staff wrote for the theatre, or mixed happily with theatre people and wits who lived and breathed plays, productions, actors, and actresses. Hollywood, the place of disillusion, was “out there,” as Dorothy Parker later put it, though, of
course, many
New Yorker
writers, including Parker, went to Hollywood (Pauline Kael has immortalized this coastal transfer in
The Citizen Kane Book
). The general attitude was that Hollywood was a place to make money and have a hell of a good time (when you weren’t having a hell of a bad time).

Movies were omnipresent, familiar, loved, but rather taken for granted. The magazine demanded brevity and wit in its movie reviews and no more than a glancing touch of seriousness, and the writing, from our viewpoint, lacks sensuous evocation and physicality—the commanding impress of image, landscape, atmosphere, eros. Throughout the forties, however, the critics wrestled with the apprehension that something complicated and subtle might be going on in at least some of the films. I admire John Mosher’s way of capturing the bewildering tonal shifts in Chaplin’s
The Great Dictator.
And Mosher’s impressive piece on
The Grapes of Wrath
does indeed work as evocation. I’m surprised that Mosher writes off, with a witticism, the resemblance of Charles Foster Kane to William Randolph Hearst, since that resemblance was, of course, part of what made
Citizen Kane
exciting, but Mosher understood that Welles was creating an entirely new form in his great film. John Lardner, in his appreciation of the noirish
Double Indemnity
, edges toward a recognition of perversity; the movie, he says, is “a smooth account of sordid minds at work, and compromises with sweetness and light only at well-spaced intervals.” And John McCarten, in his lovely review of Vittorio De Sica’s
The Bicycle Thief
, attempts to describe an entirely new mode of feeling: “By now I imagine you will have gathered,” he says at the end, “that I think the thing is a masterpiece.”

JOHN MOSHER

JANUARY 13, 1940 (ON
HIS GIRL FRIDAY
)

S
ince 1931, every movie of newspaper people and their lives has been in one way or another just a repeat of
The Front Page.
No young actor dressed up as a cub reporter and waiting his turn on the set has failed to make his little prayer to the shades of Hildy Johnson, and perhaps each pavilion for the care of the mentally unbalanced has its crop of youngsters who happened to see the movie, or the Hecht-MacArthur play it came from, just before they landed a job in some city room. Looking back through my line-a-day book, with marginalia, for ’31, I discover I thought then
The Front Page
was the funniest movie in town, and I evidently had a very good time with its ribald and hilarious comedy. Now, after all these years and after God knows how many feeble, wispy, sad imitations of the original, I find the new and authentic adaptation—which is what
His Girl Friday
, titled from Walter Winchell’s weekly valentine, turns out to be—as fresh and undated and bright a film as you could want.

Mysterious things, to be sure, have happened to the original, as you can imagine when you hear that the role which brought Pat O’Brien to the screen has been revamped for Rosalind Russell. And that role, you may remember, is the Hildy Johnson part itself. Miss Russell is Hildy and is unabashed at her own audacity, and even Lee Tracy, the first of all the Hildys, should appreciate her verve. With Cary Grant as her editor—that was Menjou once, you know—there’s a shift in the plot, with some new scenes and a ludicrously innocent part for Ralph Bellamy, but the big central scene of the police reporters’ room in the city jail, the jail break of the condemned man—no longer an anarchist, for that would date the piece, as one now doesn’t seem to hear much about anarchists for some reason or other—and all the give and take of the old pretty dialogue remain. It’s not ladyfied a moment just because the beautiful Miss Russell is planted right in the midst of the rumpus. The idea seems ominous, yet perhaps we had best face the prospect: she may do for the ladies what Lee Tracy and Pat O’Brien did for the young men. The women’s wards in those hospitals had better lay in some new cots.

FEBRUARY 3, 1940 (ON
THE GRAPES OF WRATH
)

O
ut from California now comes
The Grapes of Wrath
, the epic of starvation. With a majesty never before so constantly sustained on any screen, the film never for an instant falters. Its beauty is of the sort found in the art of Burchfield, Benton, and Curry, as the landscape and people involved belong to the world of these painters. Its visual qualities, too, can be traced back through the history of the movies; the best of the past has been used, every lesson learned. Thus there are moments when we see a lone figure silhouetted against the horizon as in the old films which aspired to impress. It was a stunt that was impressive then, and it is still impressive. Again, there are moments in
The Grapes of Wrath
so direct and simple that they are like excerpts from a fine newsreel. That, too, is right. Or again, the camera seems to pause in the style of the Russian films, and we are given what is almost a series of stills. Faces are brought forward, out from the huge panorama, and held a moment, close and enlarged—the faces of hungry children, work-racked old men and women—silent and unmoving before us. Such a method, as here employed, does not slow down the film as it has often done in Soviet pictures. John Ford has kept his pace swift, and when familiar approaches to his subject have been essential, he has made them as fresh as though he had been the first to note the dramatic value of that man placed against the sky. He showed what he could do in
The Informer
, and he has gone beyond that in
The Grapes of Wrath.