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.