American Cinema

I

Introduction

American Cinema, historical development of cinema in the United States. The first 20 years of technical and organizational progress that created the standard form of cinema was a complex process that took place in both Europe and the United States, as is described in the article Early Development of Cinema. But by 1914, American cinema had become the dominant force in the world, both technically and commercially, as it has remained to this day.

During World War I, there was a major reorganization of the American film industry. Film exhibition in the cities moved over from small nickelodeons to large purpose-built cinemas holding a thousand people or more, and new production and distribution companies replaced the members of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), who gradually went out of business because they were unable to adapt to the new type of film-making. At the same time, Hollywood became the major centre for production, almost completely displacing the studios around New York. The vast new studios built around Los Angeles were converted for filming completely in the dark, solely under artificial lighting, which made for greater efficiency and controllability of production.

New topics were added to the existing subjects dealt with in films, reflecting changes in society. “Flappers” (modern young women who behaved in unladylike ways) began to appear on the screen, science-fictional devices such as television and death-rays were used in serials, and, during World War I, American film-makers as well as European ones tackled big themes and told apocalyptic stories in their films.

For several years, the production companies which organized around a star or a director were the most prominent centres of film-making, but after the war these were absorbed into the growing number of vertically integrated companies such as Universal and Paramount, which owned cinemas, distribution agencies, and studios. As larger and larger fees were paid to stars such as Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, their films came to be rented and exhibited at special higher prices, and the true reign of the film star was under way in the United States. Realizing their own value, the most prominent of these figures—Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith—joined together in 1919 to form their own company, United Artists.

II

American Silent Cinema of the 1920s

The major American production, distribution, and exhibition companies as they are known today were all consolidated by the mid-1920s, with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Warner Bros., Columbia, and Fox (see 20th Century-Fox) joining Universal, Paramount, and United Artists, which had been formed several years before. As these companies increased in size, production methods became more regimented, and the producer system was instituted, whereby one man, working above the film directors, supervised the production of a small group of films from the scripting stage to finished film. Within the limits of mainstream cinema, a few film directors occasionally managed to produce something very individual, but only in the subject matter they dealt with. Cecil B. DeMille continued to be more interested in social trends than most film-makers, and his films dealt with such things as “jazz babies”, prison conditions, and Darwinism. Erich von Stroheim combined an obsessive interest in the detailed realism of his films with a taste for rather grotesque characters, as seen, for example, in Greed (1925). A more extreme instance was the collaboration between the director Tod Browning and the actor Lon Chaney in exploring human disfigurement and physical disability in a long series of films that made a star of the latter. Similarly, in slapstick comedy, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton had very individual approaches within a somewhat old-fashioned style, but by far the most popular comedian of the 1920s was Harold Lloyd, whose films, such as Safety Last (1923, Sam Taylor), were shot in the polished contemporary style, and who also played a realistic character in them. Tom Mix, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford continued as top stars, but others with a more up-to-date persona, such as Norma Talmadge, Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, and Colleen Moore, had greater appeal for the general public.

In the mid-1920s, American film-makers were very impressed by German films made by F. W. Murnau (The Last Laugh) and E. A. Dupont (Varieté). As a result, there was a renewed interest in camera movement, superimposition effects, and montage sequences in American films. Successful examples can be seen in films such as Seventh Heaven (1927) by Frank Borzage.

III

The Coming of Sound

Practical systems for synchronizing recorded sound with films had been demonstrated from the early 1920s, when good electronic amplifiers became available, but it was only in 1926 that Warner Bros. introduced them commercially, as part of their well-funded expansion plans. The original idea was to provide a canned accompaniment for silent films for those small theatres that could not afford the usual live orchestra, but when Al Jolson spoke a few lines in The Jazz Singer (1927, Alan Crosland), the immense success of the film showed that audiences wanted to hear actors’ voices more than anything. The very costly transition to using full synchronized sound in all American films took a few years, but was complete by 1930. In common with most technical developments before World War II, sound film started in Western Europe a couple of years later than in the United States, and even later in other countries.

Synchronized sound did not change the style of American films greatly, though in 1928 and 1929 there were a number of badly paced and rather static sound films made. On the other hand, there were American directors who managed to continue the use of elaborate camera movement and Russian-style fast editing that had begun in later silent films. In general, shots did become much longer, but by 1932, when the technical problems with mixing and editing sound had been solved, the cutting in American and British films speeded up, and the flexibility of the silent film was fully regained. The greater amount of dialogue in sound films permitted plots of more complexity than had been possible in the silent period, and the number of script scenes in a film increased as well. At the same time, the use of symbolic scenes and inserts decreased, as the meanings these were intended to suggest could be more naturally implied through spoken dialogue.

The general difference between American and European films persisted, in that, on average, European films were shot at a great distance from the actors, the shots went on for longer, and there was more talk than action compared with American films. However, in these respects, British cinema alone produced films much closer to the American models.

IV

The American Sound Cinema

The coming of sound gave a boost to film production in most non-English speaking countries, as audiences preferred to hear their own language spoken by native actors on the screen. Nevertheless, American films remained very popular, although they were gradually eliminated by state action in the European dictatorships towards the end of the 1930s. The economic depression of the 1930s severely reduced cinema income around 1933, and the financial difficulties produced bankruptcy and significant changes in ownership for some of the majors, but this had little effect on the type of pictures produced, other than introducing an element of defiant optimism into some screenplays. With the coming of sound, three whole new film genres developed. One of these was the musical, which, after initial over-production, settled down to play an important part in production until the 1960s, when rising labour costs meant it became too expensive to make.

Initially, most film musicals reproduced the look of very lavish stage musicals shot head-on, but there were also foretastes of what was to come in the musicals with all-black casts such as Hearts in Dixie (1929) and Hallelujah! (1929), which presented their material in a more fluid and filmic way. Another purely filmic sort of musical was developed by Busby Berkeley in the early 1930s, which relied on the geometrical organization of large numbers of dancers within the flat plane of the film frame, rather than in three-dimensional space seen from head-on, as was traditional. However, the musicals of the song-and-dance duo Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers proved more popular as the 1930s went on.

Two other new genres dealing with gangsters and newspapermen merely reflected the interest in these subjects already evident in other media in the late 1920s, particularly in the stage play. There was also a new place in the movies for established stage acts and actors whose success depended on speech, particularly famous examples including the Marx Brothers. Since the cinema as an industry depended in general on appealing to the greatest audience possible, unpleasant social issues had always been largely avoided in films, but sometimes studio heads, particularly those at Warner Bros., would take a risk over a subject they believed important, such as prison conditions in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), lynchings in They Won’t Forget (1937), and labour conditions in The Grapes of Wrath (1939, John Ford).

By the late 1930s, the Hollywood studio system had reached its most regimented form, with each film under the general control of one producer during its progress down the production line. Nevertheless, there was usually one top director at each studio, and they were allowed slightly more leeway in how they made their films; some, in particular Frank Capra and Josef von Sternberg, managed to make very personal films. The numbers of each type of film were predetermined by the cinema chains under studio control, and the standard double-feature programme in the cinemas only left some room for smaller producers to provide B-films, or B-movies (the lesser features), at fixed prices for minimal profit. In fact, B-film production was rather like television production today.

The major technical development of the period was the first realization of a successful system of full-colour cinematography—Technicolor. This depended on a special camera taking three simultaneous negatives, one for each primary colour, and then making three printing “matrices” on three strips of 35-mm film, which applied the three dye colours by contact with the final print, rather like lithography. This was used in live action filming from 1934, but mainly only in very special productions such as The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind (both 1939, Victor Fleming), because of its cost.