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"Hollywood's Golden Era"
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Sunny
  
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"Hollywood's Golden Era"
Mar-16-00, 07:57 PM (GMT-5)
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The 1930s was the golden era of the Hollywood studio film. It was the
decade of the great movie stars--Greta GARBO, Marlene DIETRICH, Jean
HARLOW, Mae WEST, Katharine HEPBURN, Bette DAVIS, Cary GRANT, Gary COOPER,
Clark GABLE, James STEWART--and some of America's greatest directors
thrived on the pressures and excitement of studio production. Josef von
STERNBERG became legendary for his use of exotic decor and sexual
symbolism; Howard HAWKS made driving adventures and fast-paced comedies;
Frank CAPRA blended politics and morality in a series of comedy-dramas; and
John FORD mythified the American West.^American studio pictures seemed to
come in cycles, many of the liveliest being those that could not have been
made before synchronized sound. The gangster film introduced Americans to
the tough doings and tougher talk of big-city thugs, as played by James
CAGNEY, Paul MUNI, and Edward G. ROBINSON. Musicals included the witty
operettas of Ernst Lubitsch, with Maurice CHEVALIER and Jeanette MACDONALD;
the backstage musicals, with their kaleidoscopically dazzling dance
numbers, of Busby BERKELEY; and the smooth, more natural song-and-dance
comedies starring Fred ASTAIRE and Ginger ROGERS. Synchronized sound also
produced SCREWBALL COMEDY, which explored the dizzy doings of fast-moving,
fast-thinking, and, above all, fast-talking men and women.^The issue of
artistic freedom versus censorship raised by the movies came to the fore
again with the advent of talking pictures. Spurred by the depression that
hit the industry in 1933 and by the threat of an economic boycott by the
newly formed Catholic Legion of Decency, the motion picture industry
adopted an official Production Code in 1934. Written in 1930 by Daniel
Lord, S.J., and Martin Quigley, a Catholic layman who was publisher of The
Motion Picture Herald, the code explicitly prohibited certain acts, themes,
words, and implications. Will Hays appointed Joseph I. Breen, the
Catholic layman most instrumental in founding the Legion of Decency, head
of the Production Code Administration, and this awarded the industry's seal
of approval to films that met the code's moral standards. The result was
the curtailment of explicit violence and sexual innuendo, and also of much
of the flavor that had characterized films earlier in the decade.
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