A Divided World: Hollywood Cinema and Emigre Directors in the Era of Roosevelt and Hitler, 1933-1948

279 Pages·2011·39.118 MB·English

by  Nick Smedley

A Divided World
To Kate, love ofm y life, and wlwse idea it was in the first place.
A Divided World
Hollywood Cinema and Emigre Directors in the Era
of Roosevelt and Hitler, 1933-1948
Nick Smedley
intellect Bristol, UK/ Chicago, USA
First published in the UK in 2011 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol. BSI6 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 0 2011 1ntellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying. recording. or
otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging·in·Publication Data
Smedley, Nicholas.
A divided world : Hollywood cinema and emigre directors in the era of
Roosevelt and Hitler, 1933·1948/ Nicholas Smedley.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978+84150·402·5 (alk. paper)
1. Motion picture industry. .c alifornia ..L os Angeles ..H istory ..2 0th century.
2. Expatriate motion picture producers and directors ..u nited States.
3. Lubitsch, Ernst, 1892·1947 ..C riticism and interpretation. 4. Lang, Fritz.
1890·1976 ..C riticism and interpretation. 5. Wilder, Billy, 1906·2002. .C riticism
and interpretation. 6. Motion pictures. .P olitical aspects. .u nited States.
7. United States ..P olitics and government. .l 933·1953. 8. Germans. .
California ..L os Angeles. 9. Sex role in motion pictures. 10. Immigrants. .
California ..L os Angeles. 1. Title.
PNI993.5.U65S545 2011
791.43'658 ..d c22
2010041838
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Copy· editor: Danielle Styles
Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978·1·84150·402·5/ EISBN 978+ 84150·453·7
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press. Malta.
Part of Case Study 1 appeared in a slightly different form in a volume of Film History
(March. 1993). 1a m grateful to the editors of the journal for permission to reproduce it here.
Contents
Introduction 7
Chapter 1: Once Upon a Time in America: American Society and Culture,1933-1948 17
Chapter 2: The Keeper of the Flame: Hollywood and the Cinema of Liberal Idealism 45
Chapter 3: Trouble in Paradise: Hollywood Films and American Social Change 67
Case Study 1: 'Everything That Happens Must Be Strictly American':
Fritz Lang and Hollywood Idealism 88
case Study 2: sex, Violence and Alcohol: Billy Wilder in the 1940s 121
Chapter 4: The Devil is a Woman: Hollywood Films and the American Woman 137
Case Study 3: 'Definitely Bawdy and Offensively Suggestive':
Lubitsch and the American Woman 155
case Study 4: 'Love cures the wounds it Makes': Lang and Wilder:
Conventional Portraits of the American Woman 186
Chapter 5 The World Changes: Hollywood and International Affairs 195
Case Study 5: 'World Political Theater': Lubitsch and Foreign Affairs 205
Case Study 6: 'As Corruptible as the Others': Wilder on America and Europe 216
Case Study 7: 'Propaganda Can be Art': Lang and International Affairs 225
conclusion 245
Bibliography 249
Index 269
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Richard Paterson at the British Film Institute and Melvyn Stokes at
University College London, both of whom encouraged me to write the book and offered
invaluable advice. Dorothy Haley provided me with a base for my research in Los
Angeles, and became a great friend in the process. Loulou Brown was enormously generous
with her time, if not very generous with her compliments, as she helped me turn the early
verbose draft into something much tighter and readable. Her advice was well worth the
two lunches she made me buy her. Melanie at Intellect was the ideal publisher, efficient,
friendly and helpful at all times. My gratitude also goes to the anonymous peer reviewer,
whose comments on the structure of the book have, in my view, improved it no end. I would
also like to thank Danielle Styles for a superb job in editing my manuscript, and Denise
Derbyshire for producing the index.
Introduction
I n January 1933 the world divided. Two men in different parts of the world took office
in their respective countries. Franklin D. Roosevelt, having been elected the previous
year, was formally inaugurated in Washington DC as president of the United States of
America. He would embark on a programme of social reconstruction that would introduce
to America the ideas and value-S of a welfare society, and active state benevolence and
intervention. He would go on to end America's isolation from world affairs and pave the
way for the foundation of American global imperialism.
In Berlin, over 7000 miles away, Adolf Hitler took the oath of office as Chancellor of the
German Reich in the presence of the venerable World War I veteran, President Hindenburg.
In marked contrast to his American contemporary, Hitler was about to destroy the structures
and institutions ofd emocracy in Germany and to introduce terror and repression, at first in
the domestic sphere and eventually across the whole of Europe. His international intentions
would express themselves in war, conquest, devastation and death. The two leaders' destinies
would come together in late 1941, their countries locked in conflict- a conflict which would
determine the future of the Western world for the second half of the twentieth century.
By 1948, when the period examined by this book ends, both men were dead. The
United States emerged from World War II stronger and more globally dominant than
before, while Europe lay in ruins. The superpower of the Soviet Union faced the newly
triumphant America, and the Cold War began in earnest, ushering in an almost hysterical
anti-communist paranoia and persecution in the United States. The fifteen years from 1933
to 1948 were a momentous time in American and world history.
This book is a history of Hollywood cinema and American social change between 1933
and 1948. It looks at how mainstream cinema in this period responded to, commented
on and contributed to three major aspects of American life: first, the reconstruction of
American values after the ravages of the Great Depression; second, the changes in the roles
and perceptions of women in the United States; and third, the growing international role
played by America, including its gradual commitment to involvement in the Second World
War, and the emergence of the Cold War after 1945.
A Divided World
Methodology
Because I wish to make general observations about the relationship between Hollywood films
and American society, I base my analysis on a very broad range of mainstream Hollywood
product from these years. I do not confine myself to just those fewer, more famous films,
whose popularity has endured to our own time.
ln order to give depth as well as breadth to the study I punctuate this analysis with some
detailed case studies and production histories drawn from the works of three influential
German film-makers who worked in Hollywood at this time - Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch
and Billy Wilder. I do this for two reasons. Partly, it is to demonstrate some of the key voices
in the Hollywood film industry of this time who challenged Ame.ric.an conformity and
articulated dissent from the moral consensus of the New Deal. These are three film-makers
who, in their different ways, profoundly influe.nced the direction of American cinema.
Hollywood's films certainly do betray distinct patterns and themes at this time, despite its
huge output, and I draw these out in the main chapters which follow. But this is not to say
that Hollywood cinema was an entirely homogenous industry. The three European directors
I have chosen to study in depth illustrate how the presence of dissenting voices acted as a
spur to development and innovation in the American film industry.
The other reason for the inclusion of these case studies is to help to deepen our knowledge
of Hollywood production history in this era and to enrich our understanding of the works
of these three huge figures in film history. I hope that in offering both a broad survey of
many Hollywood movies and an in-depth analysis of a few key films I can shed light on the
industry at large, as well as these three individuals in particular and their interaction with
American social change.
Hollywood film-makers, as a rule, embraced wholeheartedly the coming of Roosevelt
and the New Deal. During the 1930s the Hollywood community developed a cinema of
liberal idealism, the influence of which is still felt in many of the films America produces
today. During the 1940s, as the philosophical and social tenets of the New Deal came
under attack from a resurgent Republican Party, Hollywood responded with a cinema of
alienation and anxiety. In both decades American films were unrelenting in their hostility
towards women and female self-determination. On the international front, Hollywood was
an early and vociferous advocate of intervention in the fight against fascism in Europe,
despite the unpopularity of this position in domestic politics. After the war, the onset of the
Cold War found the liberal community in Hollywood silenced. Film-makers were mostly
too frightened of being labelled 'communist' or 'unpatriotic' to mount any criticism of the
clumsy nature of American diplomacy during the post-war reconstruction.
Within this community of largely American-born film directors, Lubitsch, Lang and
Wilder made films which, in certain important respects, were profoundly different. 'These
three European emigre directors produced a body of work which dissented at times from
Hollywood's brand ofc elebratory liberal idealism. Lang and Wilder articulated criticisms of
American society left unsaid by their contemporaries. Lubitsch formulated a programme of
8
Introduction
dissent from the endemic cultural subjugation of women in American cinema and society.
All three challenged the asstunptions underlying American foreign policy and sought to
broaden their audience's understanding of European issues. In addition, they mounted
an important challenge to Hollywood's moral conservatism and the restrictions of the
censorship code operated by the Production Code Administration (PCA). 1l1ese three
directors thus deepened and enriched the cultural commentary of American cinema in this
formative period of the country's growth.
To avoid any possible distortion in my comparison of the work of these three emigre
directors to what I label 'mainstream' Hollywood products, I have deliberately omitted from
the latter category any film directed by an emigre director. Thus, the reader will find no
analysis of films by such luminarie.s as Chaplin, Hitchcock, Renoir or Wyler, for example,
and- by the same token- no study of such classics as Tire Great Dictator (Chaplin, 1940),
Casabla17Cil (Curtiz, 1942) or Lau.ra (Preminger, 1944), for example. This is irrespective of
whether or not these films can be said to be the 'voice' of the emigre director - for the
avoidance of doubt and to maintain my control group I have left out of consideration all
films directed by Europeans (other than my chosen three) who migrated to America at some
point during their adulthood.
The time frame
There are reasons why the apparently arbitrary period of 1933-1948 is, in fact, a coherent
choice. It marks clearly the era of Roosevelt, beginning with his inauguration and continuing
to the end of his final term of election. While FDR died in 1945, Truman can be said to have
completed the Roosevelt era in those last three years, before he stood for election in his
own right. It is always a subjective decision where to draw a line in history between the
end of one era and the beginning of the next - but I would make a case for 1948 being a
dividing line in the history of the United States. It divides the Roosevelt era, including its
decline tmder Truman after 1945, from the post-Roosevelt settlement and the abandonment
of FOR's experiment with social liberalism.
The Roosevelt era clearly began with his first presidential election victory, and the years
from 1933 to 1940 may be seen as the period of the 'high New Deal: when FOR's popularity
remained buoyant and there was a sense of unity as the American nation grappled with
recession. There was a strong consensus in this decade around Roosevelt's programme of
libe.ral social reform. After the interlude of World War 11, when international pressures
meant that domestic disputes were sidelined, the reaction to the dominance of Roosevelt and
the Democrats surfaced. Faced with the seemingly unstoppable expansion in Europe and
elsewhere of Soviet-backed communism, the Republicans - who by now dominated both
Houses in Washington -began a fight -back. Domestic liberalism, along the lines mapped out
by FDR, was now conflated with left-wing dissent, even a lack of patriotism, and eventually,
when Senator McCarthy c.ame to prominence in the early 1950s, with treachery.
9