Classical Hollywood Cinema and Its Ideology

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Classical Hollywood Cinema means more than just a film made in a Hollywood studio. It implies a whole style of film, a particular approach to film narrative, a peculiar set of cultural and social values. The character of the Classical Hollywood movie is a given in terms of the social problem film, for the genre inherits the core qualities of the Hollywood film as well as its place in the cultural structure of America. The economic structure of the industry thoroughly influenced the process of moviemaking and movie-consuming, imposing certain variables on filmmaking and fostering certain expectations in audiences (Balio 5).

For instance, by the early 1930s, power in American feature films rested with eight major firms, MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Twentieth CenturyFox, Universal, RKO, Columbia, and United Artists, which had consolidated production, distribution, and exhibition into a monolithic corporate structure monopolizing the industry (Bordwell and Thompson 14). The key element in the structure was exhibition. As long as they owned all the first-run theaters, the Big Eight had control over the market and could close it to any nonaffiliated producer.

The Hollywood movies of the 1930s were based on social problems and themes topical in American society. One of the most popular themes was a ‘low class and the “fallen woman”. It is possible to say that this theme was a response to women rights movement and new social roles accepted by women. This theme rarely includes the Depression in terms of social problems, but nevertheless clearly reflects the situation (LaSalle 43). “Hollywood cinema reinforces the individuality and consistency of each character by means of recurrent motifs” (Bordwell et al 15).

The films have three basic subjects, each one demonstrating a moral breakdown within society, the unwed mother, the mistress of a married man, and the prostitute. All the films attempt to shore up morals and reaffirm America’s Puritan heritage, but the drastic plot twists necessary for this reaffirmation reveal the strains of the times. Though the films allow for the fact that crime and sin are justifiable in times of social duress, they display a moralism (Bordwell et al 71).

Female sexuality requires a more complicated set of rationalizations and more severe forms of punishment. In Classical Hollywood Movies, the fallen woman’s fall must be thoroughly explicated and is only acceptable as an extreme necessity, a last recourse which is never a positive experience so much as a tragic degradation (Bordwell et al 379). First of all, the heroine loses her chastity only for the purest of motives, usually that of true love.

In the early Hollywood Movies centering on the unwed mother, she and her lover are prevented from marriage through extenuating circumstances. He is either a well-meaning, sincere fellow inadvertently separated from the heroine or a wealthy irresponsible playboy who abandons her in her time of need. Born to Love (1931), featuring Constance Bennett, “queen of the confession films,” and her most frequent partner, Joel McCrea, is typical of this series. McCrea plays Barry Craig, a World War I aviator on leave, and Bennett, Doris Kendall, an off-duty nurse. With no time or opportunity to get married but still madly in love, they spend the night together.

Afterwards, he returns to the front where he is soon reported missing and presumed dead while she finds herself pregnant, husbandless, and living in shame. Common Clay (1930), representative of the playboy seducer plot, has the pregnant serving girl deserted by a wealthy heir who bows to his family’s class prejudice. In these and similar films, the heroine struggles to legitimize her child. Either her lover relents and marries her or some adoring boob takes his place.

Born to Love’s nurse weds British stuffed shirt Sir Wilfred Drake for the sake of the baby; the abandoned heroine of Common Clay goes to court to sue for support. In both cases, the heroine suffers harsh treatment but valiantly fights on to selflessly provide her baby with a father, financial security, and social approval. And even in those films where she manages to win both true love and the baby’s wellbeing, this happens only after the heroine has languished in a trap which seems throughout to be inescapable.

The circumstances which force her to detour around the altar and head straight for bed are rarely economic. At a time when lack of money led to countless wedding postponements and made premarital sex a necessary alternative, when families were torn apart as members scattered over the country searching for work, the early confession films avoided explicitly linking the breakdown of socioeconomic structures with the strains on morality and personal relationships.

Still, with their portraits of frustrated love, their stress on sacrifice for children and the struggle for security within a tragic set of circumstances, they reflect the instabilities of the times (LaSalle 83). The continual emphasis on the need to maintain the family seems a conscious effort to reaffirm traditional mores, to reassure a shaky audience that the family unit is still the basis of American life (Vasey 100).

A fallen women theme is unveiled in the mistress films. The mistress character continually sacrifices her own happiness rather than have her lover break up his marriage and leave his children fatherless (LaSalle 70). The title character in Susan Lennox: Her Fall and Rise (1931) is also led into sin while searching for her missing lover. When she does find him, her ruined reputation prompts his rejection and, still alone, she is forced to take a number of progressively sleazy jobs which trade on her sex.

The film depicts a poverty-stricken environment, but the father’s joblessness, it is made clear, is the result of his own laziness, not of any unemployment crisis. It is not society but her father’s irresponsibility that has created revulsion for poverty and lust for the security and comfort of wealth. This leads her first to pose as a model for an ad agency (always the sign of a loose woman) and from there to become the mistress of agency president. He keeps her in a luxurious apartment complete with lavish wardrobe and chauffeured limousine, all of which she accepts not necessarily because it is the only way (she has been employed in the department store) so much as the easiest way to get by.

Even when the prostitutes find their trade profitable, they remain unhappy and unfulfilled. Susan Lennox suffers through periods of affluence as kept women and in the end shamefully submit themselves to their one true love. Susan Lennox must repeatedly try to convince her lover that she is not what she really seems despite the fact that his rejection has contributed to her compromised situation (LaSalle 114-115; Susan Lenox 1998).

The film makes the following statements: the only way to survive is through sin, thus implying a condemnation of society; but as long as a woman is sinning she must be miserably unhappy, thus upholding the established social morality. Society cannot supply the economic means to support true love and family; prostitution provides the means yet excludes the possibilities of love and family. The paradox is resolved by having the heroine overcome her economic plight through sin and then reject the sin. This reaffirmation of moral values is obviously rather shaky. The films final and illogical declaration that love is more important than wealth and can, after all, be achieved within society is about as believable as the gangster films’ assertion that crime doesn’t pay (Braudy and Marshall Cohen 52).

The Depression backdrop remains a core of the plot. Prostitution can be presented only as a last recourse and it can only be a last recourse within a broken-down world where all normal means of survival are cut off. The weakened or missing male figure is clearly representative of a society no longer able to support those it is responsible for. The prostitute pictures must undercut the antisocial implications of the thesis that crime or sin is the only option available for the heroine (Bordwell et al 315; Susan Lenox 1998).).

The conventional morality must be upheld and the women punished. But whereas the gangster is allowed to wreak havoc and enjoy the good life until the very last shootout, the prostitute continually pays the price for her violation of the Puritan code. Her career is a series of ever more degrading acts and escalating anguish. Susan Lennox has to sleep with a circus owner for the right to work in his sleazy sideshow. Later, stranded in the tropics, she is reduced to entertaining sailors in a cheap café-cum-brothel. Noting the fact that all these women gradually proceed southward as their fortunes deteriorate (LaSalle 276).

Another movie devoted to low status of women in society is Blonde Venus. Director von Sternberg despised the film, his original story significantly rewritten by Paramount to follow the fallen women conventions. But although the movie in plot outline sounds very much like other anonymous potboilers of the cycle, there is a subversive subtext that points up the dilemma of Helen’s and woman’s position in society (LaSalle 119; Blonde Venus 1992).

Helen’s descent from family normality to cabaret singer/prostitute represents a quest for identity, so that her final return to the husband she now clearly resents indicates the impossibility of finding any satisfying sense of self. As wife-mother in the opening scenes, Dietrich is desexualized, reduced to knitting in an apron with her hair pinned back and her singing career frustrated. When she does return to the stage, it is her legs that get her the job and her sexual favors the attention and money of politician Nick Townsend.

Her attempts to combine career with motherhood are then thwarted by her husband and officialdom. She finally gives up trying to be a self-fulfilled woman, using sex only to manipulate her way to the top of Parisian night life. In her Montmartre night club, she mocks the notion of manhood and even takes on the male role as aggressor by wearing a tuxedo. But her life is empty because “Nothing means much to me now”, and her return to Faraday, on one level a positive assertion of motherly love as self-definition, also implies a return to the tepid domesticity of the beginning, an admission of failure and despair (Schatz 62). Critics admit that

the use of backlighting on blonde hair was not only spectacular but necessary-it was the only way filmmakers could get blonde hair to look light-colored on the yellow-insensitive orthochromatic stock. A close shot would combine a variety of lights, with arc floodlights at the sides, mercury-vapors and a reflector for fill light in front, and an arc spot at the rear to highlight the actress’s blonde hair.” (Bordwell et al 226).

Though Blonde Venus is the only one of these films that could be described as radical, there is nevertheless an inherent tension within the entire cycle indicative of a strained affirmation (Schatz 14). The unhappy hookers and unwed mothers find eventual normality through contorted, last minute plot twists, with the heroine’s final marriage to her love occurring only after she has endured countless indignities and years of suffering. In the mistress films, the family unit is upheld through tragedy: Cynthia Darlington’s suicide and Ray Schmidt’s lonely, childless aging (Maltby 43). Despite the reassurances of the cycle, the most resonant images are those of suffering and degradation. Woman is a martyr and must endure pain no matter which course of action she takes (Blonde Venus 1992).

The films supplement the image of the individual and society established by the gangster film: the individual is an innocent victim entrapped by a broken-down society with few options open to him or her. This strained affirmation was soon comically turned on its ear by Mae West (Vasey 41). Through sarcastic slander, she reveled in what the fallen woman films had to disguise and circumvent, completely reversing their moral deadliness by making sin a sheer delight and woman a strong, assertive individual who didn’t need any man. She quite frankly boasted, “Goodness had nothin’ to do with it.” She became a central target for the Hays Office (LaSalle 92).

It is possible to say that Dead End (1937) stays apart from these sentimental movies. This is a film on delinquency which focuses on a single dead end street facing the East River and tries to dramatize how this environment shapes all the people living there. In adapting Sidney Kingsley’s play (Bordwell 345-346), Goldwyn made only minor concessions to Hollywood proprieties: Dave the hero was changed from an intellectual cripple who defeats the villain through psychological cunning into a more virile physical hero who defeats the villain through personal combat. Except for the necessary restraint in the language, the film retains much of the play’s toughness.

It does not gloss over the unmitigated hardness of the kids who hang out on the street, and, though confined to a studio set, the film evokes a realistic sense of the grime and heat of an East Side summer. The delinquents are not cute mischief-makers mollified by some reformer, but defiant, antisocial hoodlums. While their crimes are certainly the result of poverty, they do not steal to help their families. They gang up on a new kid in the neighborhood, beat up a rich brat from a luxury high rise, and plan dirty battle tactics for a gang war all as part of their everyday activities. Dave angrily explicates the problem (Vasey 39).

The youths’ fates are foreshadowed by those of an earlier generation raised on the same street. Some have resorted to illegitimate means to escape poverty; others have resisted crime and never moved beyond the dead end slum (Vasey 52). None of them find happiness and fulfillment. Babyface Martin is a killer who has returned home for a visit. He has gone the full route and represents the end product of the slum. Here the gangster is no longer the romantic individualist but a frightened and lonely creature full of false bravado. Rejected by his mother and disillusioned by the fate of his old girl-turned-prostitute, Francie, Babyface ends up shot to death in a dark back street alley (Vasey 82; Schatz 92)

Dead End’s fallen women are not noble martyrs but victims who owe their predicament directly to society. Francie has become a cheap prostitute who rebuffs Babyface’s reproaches for not getting a job with the phrase “They don’t grow on trees” (Schatz 34).

The same inescapable poverty drives Kay to her career as mistress to a millionaire. She recoils in terror at the dirt and cockroaches, at the squabbling couples and rowdy delinquents of the tenements, and flees back to the security of the luxury apartment. Both Dave and Drina remain uncorrupted and as a result are poor and frustrated. Dave, who worked nights and studied to be an architect, now goes without job or money, so that Babyface has every reason to laugh at him: As hero, Dave is impotent, unable to realize his idealistic goals. His ambition to tear down the slums and “build a decent world where people could live decent and be decent” is granted no outlet (Dead Ends 2000).

Where Dave’s education has left him penniless, Drina’s legitimate job has meant low wages and poor living conditions. Her dream of escape from the slums is, like Dave’s plan to rebuild them, thoroughly frustrated, the only tangible results of her strike for better pay being police brutality. Both she and Dave helplessly watch as her brother, Tommy, is twisted by his environment into a violent hood and inexorably follows Babyface Martin’s footsteps toward reform school.

The best Dave can do is to kill Babyface, the model the boys emulate. But as he kills one criminal, Dave witnesses the birth of another–Tommy is arrested on an assault charge. As the fortunes of the earlier generation indicate, the important factor in shaping the boys’ delinquency is the gulf between their poverty in the slum and the wealth of the upper class. The inequities are summarized by the set–the back of a luxury high-rise apartment looms over the slums, looking down upon the dead end street with a cool, superior indifference. More than perhaps any other film of the thirties, Dead End effectively depicts a class tension which frequently verges on warfare.

A uniformed doorman protects the apartment building from the neighborhood, forever sweeping the entrance clear of debris and chasing the kids away with threats of violence. The only tenant from the building to pay any attention to the kids, Mr. Griswold, is likewise a threat. The father of the society brat the Kids viciously mug, he tries to apprehend Tommy only to be stabbed in the arm. Outraged, he demands and receives police action. The rich man is not the benefactor of the screwball comedies or even the kindly gentleman Drina dreams will rescue her. He is a reasonable man, a representative of his class who sends Tommy away to the dreaded reformatory in order to safeguard himself, his son, his class (Dead Ends 2000).

The climactic shootout brings the dramatic action to a conclusion but does not resolve the social issues. Killing Babyface does not help except that Dave can use the reward money to hire an expensive lawyer for Tommy. There is thus only a vague hope that Tommy will be let off and escape, at least temporarily, the fate of Babyface. We know that Dave and Drina will continue to fight for a better world, but there is no real sense that such a world is possible.

Dave cannot even get a job let alone mount a social planning program which would replace the slums. The outcome of Drina’s strike remains unknown, but even if she is granted the raise it is questionable whether it will be sufficient to take Tommy far enough away. “I can only try,” is the best response she can offer. Though there are potential solutions–unionism and slum clearance–they are not so easily implemented. No neat dramatic conventions, no populist benefactor or New Deal program could whisk away the inequities of the social system which creates the slums.

Dead End raises some fairly disturbing questions and gives the audience no easy answers. “The confinement to a single set and a loose unity of duration (one day) mark the film as fairly theatrical. Within these conventions, however, Toland and Wyler create a constant interplay in depth” (Bordwell et al 346).

Though its box office success warranted a number of spinoffs, few producers besides Goldwyn would tolerate an open-ended discussion of social wrong. Warners’ Angels with Dirty Faces, the toughest of the-follow-ups, incorporates Dead End’s box-office ingredients, including the depiction of poverty, into a safer format. Though it relies heavily on the earlier film’s plot structure, Angels manages by the end to twist things around so the Kids will be reconciled with society.

There is no hesitation about presenting the squalor of living conditions in the slums (Bordwell et al 347). Like Dead End, other movies open with a craning camera exploring the crowded streets and dilapidated tenements. Again the Kids are tempestuous roughnecks involved in petty crime not to help destitute families but out of antisocial defiance. Bordering on Dead End’s conclusion that antisocial violence is the most viable reaction to the slum environment, the film suddenly shifts emphasis. Connelly now decides that the problem is not the slums after all but the bad example that Rocky and gangsters like him set for the kids (Vasey 65).

For the last twenty minutes of the film, Jerry abandons his attempts to get the boys into the gym for an all-out effort to get Rocky into jail and crime out of the city. The major part of the film revolves around his attempt to convince his superiors in the church, his financial backers, and the delinquents themselves that Boys Town is the proper antidote to the slums. Problem after problem dissolves before the good Father’s unbeatable combination of tough guy resourcefulness and prayer.

His project is instead a paean to America’s ability to right any social wrong. Boys Town is a microcosm of MGM’s idealized America, a democratically self-governed (it even has its own court of justice) melting pot where boys of all nationalities and faiths work side by side in harmony, under the benevolent care of a purposeful leader (Bordwell et al 346-347; Dead Ends 2000).

As the theme developed and the Depression worsened, the fall of the heroine became ever more severe. The prostitute films best illustrate the relationship between moral and economic breakdown and hence provide the cycle’s most direct, if still metaphoric, allusions to the Depression (Hollows et al 138). Classical Hollywood cinema portrayed that the prostitute must move outside a system that cannot accommodate her. The prostitute takes to the streets to provide food for herself and her family. Though the standard plot of these films finds the heroine beset by an economic crisis, only rarely is this crisis labeled as the Depression. It is because a husband or boyfriend suddenly becomes ill or abandons her that the heroine must quickly find some alternative means of support (Braudy and Cohen 73; Balio 52).

The classical Hollywood movies explored the social and material context in which the women lived. However they explained their involvement in prostitution in such a manner that there appeared to be justification for remaining in prostitution. For example the women claimed that they were involved in prostitution to get money, and yet they also claimed that involvement in prostitution had led to poverty (Balio 123). They asserted that becoming a prostitute had helped them to gain independence from their families, boyfriends, partners and/or local authority care and to escape from violent and abusive partners or families, and yet they also asserted that becoming a prostitute had made them dependent on violent and abusive men for money and housing. Following Bordwell and Kristin Thompson

“Confidential three ill-matched detectives join forces to reveal how official corruption has led to the murders of prostitutes. As another alternative, the thriller can put the criminals center stage. One sub- genre is the hit-man film,” (Bordwell and Thompson 112).

The women declared that they could remedy their housing difficulties via prostitution, and yet they also declared that involvement in prostitution had created housing difficulties. In short, the interviewees said that involvement in prostitution was a means by which they could live the lives they wanted and survive the social and economic difficulties they encountered, and yet they also said that involvement in prostitution had jeopardised their social and economic survival, and at times their very lives (Maltby 39).

Deployment of such conflicting representations of life as a prostitute meant that the interviewees’ tales were highly paradoxical. The social dislocation and criminal subculture explanatory model provides a more complex explanation of women’s involvement in prostitution, and some of the possibilities inherent in the pathological explanations are picked up and developed (Bordwell 315). Economic and political conditions created unique settings and dramatized the plot.

Eviction and subsequent homelessness lead to the prostitution-related housing difficulty: being ‘on the move’. Many of the women characters, out with the ideology of the family, judged and found wanting by public housing, often locked into tied housing and/or undergoing physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their male partners or families, recounted periods of their lives when they had been on the move and said that this was part of life as a prostitute. Solitude accompanies most women in prostitution, particularly in relation to housing (Maltby 98).

In sum, such theme had directly affected the women’s perception of future possibilities. The women had continued to move around until something else happened. The Hollywood movies mentioned above show that the difference between prostitutes and other women is inherently social is underpinned by the demarcation line she draws between prostitutes as a group of individuals and prostitution as a social location.

The Hollywood movies provide a detailed description of the variety of activities, locations and relationships encompassed by the term prostitution. The films build to a powerful tension as picture after picture charts the townspeople’s relentless course toward fallen women. Underpinning the moments at which women chose to leave their partners, were divorced by them, chose to do a runner, accepted tied housing or brought punters back to their flat for business was a calculation of risk. Depending on the degree to which the women’s security and insecurity was mediated by and through their relationships with men, they either faced a threat in their present arrangement (violence, exploitation, control) or they faced the uncertainty of economic instability and homelessness.

Works Cited

Balio, Tino ed. The American Film Industry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
Blonde Venus (1932). Dir. by J. von Sternberg. Universal Studios, 1992.
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. Sixth Edition. New York: McGraw Hill, 2001.
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge, 1985.
Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen eds. Film Theory and Criticism. 5th Edition. Oxford: OUP, 1998.
Dead Ends. (1937). Dir. by W. Wyler. MGM (Warner), 2000.
Hollows, Joanne, Peter Hutchings and Mark Jancovich eds. The Film Studies Reader. London: Arnold, 2000.
LaSalle, M. Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood. St. Martin’s Griffin.
Maltby, Richard. Hollywood Film: An Introduction. Oxford; Blackwell, 1995.
Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. London: Faber & Faber, 1998.
Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Raise (1931). Dir. by R. Z. Leonard. MGM (Warner), 1998.
Vasey, Ruth. The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997.

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Classical Hollywood Cinema and Its Ideology

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