In four years we will mark the centenary of “The Jazz Singer”, the first talkie movie. That is as long a time as the century between the time of “Great Expectations” and when I graduated from college. That seems to me to be a very big difference. There should be a major celebration of the invention of the talkies, as important as great battles or other events so dedicated, because so much was ushered into our consciousnesses. Maybe the publication dates of great novels, those who always seemed to have been here once they were created, should also provide a new version of a saints calendar, also now forever once canonized. Oh, and how the talkies talked! The dialogue of Thirties films, often based on plays and novels, were crisp and witty and eloquent, characters saying what they had to say about themselves and other people and their situations, even including “The Grapes of Wrath”, where Henry Fonda makes clear enough what an Okie immigrant family off to California had to say for himself in his understated way. But that decade was so long ago, however vibrant they may still be, that the topics covered in them, across the genres of comedy, tragedy and melodrama, are very different from the ones seen today and so it takes some excavation so as to mine them.
The topics for the decade were the condition of women and the condition of the rich. In both cases, the conditions were problematic in that it wasn’t clear what women or the rich were like or what they should be like. Both of those kinds of people were murky and so difficult to understand. Ernst Lubitch, known for his scintillating touch, starts “Bluebeard’s Ninth Wife” with whether Claudette Colbert is married or unmarried or a loose woman or not because she is buying the trousers of men’s pajamas. It turns out that she is buying it for her father and so that is respectable and so the romance can begin, Gary Cooper, not known for comedy, the usual and unproblematic man who is daring, decisive and stoic, just what a stereotypical man should be, just as he is in all his stereotypical roles all the way through “High Noon” and beyond, while Grace Kelly is surprising in that she appears ats the decisive decision maker at the end of that movie. Women are amazingly different from one another even if also attractive while male heroes like Fonda and Heston and the aforementioned Cooper are true to form even if also deficient rather than fulfilled, as happens in “The Wizard of Oz”, where the Tin Man is lacking a heart and the Scarecrow lacks a brain, and the cowardly Lion lacks courage. A true man has to gain all three attributes, while Dorothy and the other women and girls all have their own peculiar motives, Dorothy wanting just to go home, and all those witches, some good and some bad.
The same is true of the women in the melodramas of the Thirties that were regarded as “women movies” because they explored the varieties of what were women, ever fascinating and to men alluring even if subject to conversation as “only” about women’s concern. The queen of the sub-genre was Bette Davis who could be everything: an ugly duckling who becomes a therapist and a lover to a limited Paul Henried in “Now, Voyager”, a flibbertigibbet who becomes a heroine as she faces death in “Dark Victory'', men in these movies dutiful, like George Brett, never fully aware of what is going on in women’s secrets, as when he is killed in a duel in “Jezebel” because Bette Davis eggs him on about supposed slights and then she turns into a hero by taking Henry Fonda into a pest house during an epidemic, she more likely to manage through it if anybody could. Women could be anything, but men were the same old.
The same division between women as problematic as to what they are while men have problems, whether of enemies or existential issues while remaining true to their identity or just failing to accomplish it by being too soft or insufficiently suspicious or overtaken by lust, as happens in “Double Indemnity”, something Catholics understand as an overabundance of a natural thing, also applies to the rich, who are problematic in that they are opaque, not quite revealing what they are up to. The young George Cukor’s movie “Holiday” enters a rich home to find out what those people are like. The girl to whom he is engaged but he knew little about her turns out to want him to become a banker, which he, Cary Grant, finds boring, himself a self made man through Harvard and a fancy law firm, and wants to try out new things, which is admirable for men, and so she tires of him, while her sister, Katherine Hepburn, perhaps at her most glamorous rather than overly angular, wants Grant to follow his whims, which is what a respectable and loving girl wants her man to happen, a lapse into conventionality unbecoming of Hepburn as the independent woman, but there being other fish to fry, and so the two at the end come to one another, as would be expected from the first moment the two stars meet with one another because, after all, they are the stars. The financial magnate of the family, on the other hand, is difficult to understand other than that he has connections but does not know why capitalist fetishism is a concept much less a fault, just trying to meet his potential son in law by offering his own connections and wealth, having disregarded his own son who drinks too much because he is so tied to the loathsome bank when he had wanted to be a musician. Woe is me to the children of the rich. They are all psychologically scarred and most of them would be better off without money, which is a fantasy that other than rich people in the audience might find as a compensation for not being rich.
Unlike most Thirties movies, which are long on talk and short on visuals, Cukor is alive with set decoration, leading to his visualization thirty years later of “My Fair Lady”, what with all those flowers. Here, in “Holiday”, Cukor contrasts the mansion with staircases and internal elevators and regal paintings and adornments, with the room Hepburn has set aside for herself as having a fire, comfortable sofas, bookcases and the piano and barbells her brother used before he gave up his childish ways. (Someone else, I suppose, stokes that fire. As Mel Brooks might say, “It's not bad being rich.”) Hepburn is comfortable rather than stuffy, and that seems all to be said of the difference between the rich and those not inclined to be rich, the father saying he does not understand what is happening to the world other than that it makes him uncomfortable. The rich are not greedy, just confused, a set on the way out if they could bother to notice. Maybe the title is called “Holiday” because viewers are on holiday visiting the rich but knowing the rich are dodos, those people making themselves rather than their employees miserable.Feel sorry for them. That is a kind of vacation.
On the other hand, the poor are not problematic, even if they are also tragic or flawed. To use the terms used by Civil Rights activists in the Sixties, when whites asked what Blacks wanted, the answer was that Blacks wanted to have what white people already had. Similarly, the poor in the Thirties, wanted the comforts of the rich, by hook or by crook. Edward G. Robinson in “Little Caesar” wanted to become a powerful boss and his nerve, intelligence and diligence, all male traits, led that to him, even though he is machine gunned in the end, a classic tragedy about the wheel of life, ending with his remark “Is this the end of Rico?”, which sadly it is. The hero of “Scarface” also rises to the top and also is upended, even more unsettled by his unaware lust for his own sister. But that is aside from the rise and fall, all the way through to the Godfather trilogy, where he cannot free himself from crime and become, let us say, a Senator. His greatest betrayal is that of his wife, who aborts his child, because she does not want to live with this gangster family, and that is the only time that Michael Corleone rages rather than calculates, while his older brother Sonny is always raging, and so weaker as a man. The type of men runs through the movie decades.
One of those so-called “screwball comedies” of the Thirties combines the two binaries of male and female and rich and poor. It is Gregory De Cava’s “My Man Godfrey” starring William Powell and Carol Lombard. The magnate father is annoyed at the spendthrift ways of his wife, who is a ninny, as well as his two daughters, one mean and vindictive and snooty while the other is ditzy, and supposed to have had a nervous breakdown in the past when in fact she was trying to escape from her madcap lives. The two daughters compete in a scavenger hunt, which means they are so mean spirited and callous and humiliating so as to recruit some poor person as well as a live goat to show himself to a society party to win points for having accumulated worthy objects that are useless. The mother has what is called a “protege”, which is an exiled Russian who amuses the family by walking around the living room like a gorilla to amuse the family, in return for which he gets canapes and the chance to play the piano. The idle rich are women who don’t know what to be or to do with themselves.
Into their lot comes a bum who, it turns out (spoiler alert!) to be down on his luck because he was a Harvard graduate who had been spurned by a woman and thought of suicide but was impressed by the stoical men who endured their poverty and so he lived in a shanty near a refuse dump and is picked up for the scavenger hunt and then asks to serve as a butler for what shows itself to be a ditzy family. He too is the compassionate, articulate, well mannered and stoical and resourceful person who can lead the labile young girl out of her distress and she falls for him even though he is thought to be a bum, hardly likely given his bearing, while another bum just wants his reward for having been entered into the scavenger hunt. Poor men have dignity while rich girls are mean or atwitter.
I take note, again, of the set decoration and the costumes. The, at the time, well appointed kitchen has a refrigerator with a cylindrical portion on top of it which I take was the refrigeration unit, and is, of course, now antiquated. Technology marches on.. The women wear Thirties gowns that seem to me colorless and dowdy though no doubt glamorous at the time. Fashion also moves on. The dump where Godfrey is found is just off Sutton Place, which means, I infer, before the FDR Drive built in that area and doing away with the dumps and the bums. Infrastructure changes. The value of a movie made in a time will last as physical culture is available to be appreciated from another time for its atmosphere whatever the time’s only much more slowly changing social structure.
How different it is in the movies twenty years later. In the musical remake of “The Philadelphia Story”, with Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby, called “High Society”, only the just teen daughter acts haughty and weird, everyone else normal people. Another movie at the time, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” has Frederic March as the haggard advertising mogul who blames himself for having neglected his troubled daughter, je in despair about her rather than, in the Thirties, indulging her. Gregory Peck is the up and coming advertising executive, also forthright and stoic, who arranges to provide regular money to the child he had made when in Italy during the war when he finds out about their condition, and the wife supports him in his plan, something regarded as heroic.
Skip another generation. The rich are like Michael Douglas in “Wall Street”, from 2010, just greedy rather than people who can justify themselves, as investment bankers do, of making it possible for the economic market to work, and young women are physically exploited by rapacious men, as is clear in “The Handmaid's Saga”. Reese Witherspoon in the recent miniseries “The Morning Show” offers up many victims of rape because of men using their powerful positions, a version of the idea of a previous generation where Andrea Dworkin saif that all sex is rape, just modified enough to be plausible, when what I think is that Jane Austen got the relation of the sexes and the rich and the poor just about right, however are the changes since then of costume and mores. Mr. Wickham, in “Pride and Prejudice”, is a cad, but he is an exception to the rule, not the rule itself.
A word should be said about the relation of fiction to reality. Should we trust to Thirties movies and those films that follow them about the reality of what is depicted there? After all, fiction, whether a novel or a movie, is made up. Its characters and plots are concocted even if films claim to be “based on a true story” because scriptwriters put in events and characters so as to make the films clearer to follow and so as to fill out a generic type.Its hard to make up settings, it is true, especially in science fiction, where even Kubrick’s “2001” is an extrapolation of how women and men would dress and how no one would smoke. So a reader is unlikely to trust fiction. People are distorted from what people really are and situations are abbreviated or just insufficiently imagined rather than an accurate depiction of reality.
But what is the alternative? Voting behavior measured through polling data may have said somewhat accurately from 1940 to about 1980 or so who would vote for whom, that moment past in that people came to hide their preferences by lying. And even the most innocuous question, such as whether you approve of the President, is ambiguous, in that it doesn’t make clear whether you approve his way as a person or approve of his policies. And much of history is to condense contemporary newspaper reporting with some documents added on. So what else is there to do but find the truth through fiction, especially when it comes to the temper of the times or the fads of the moment, like Hula Hoops and the war between the Communists and the ex-Communists that Whittiker Chambers regarded as the central debate and war of his time?
I would suggest we follow Georg Simmel who thought that what was embedded inevitably in fiction was not the mores or the fashions or the technologies of a time, however much those artifacts are accurately recorded in film s of the past, but what Simmel regarded as the inevitable consequences of sociation, which means the qualities that emerge from people dealing with one another. Things like cooperation and conflict and hierarchy are everywhere the same down to the higher apes and I would suggest the same for friendship (as old as “Gilgamesh”), and courtship and political negotiation. Simmel modified only to mean that social structures may change, but only very gradually, even as those other things feel quite different from one generation to the next. Men and women haven’t changed since Samson and Delilah, even if Feminists say otherwise. So trust the Thirties movies as telling the truth.