The Great Depression

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Charles J. Shindo

This "golden age of turbulence," according to film historian Robert Sklar in Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, lasted from 1930 to 1934 when Hollywood, under pressure from civic organizations like the Catholic Church's League of Decency, discovered there was as much, if not more, profit to be made on supporting traditional American values as there was in challenging them. With the 1934 introduction of the Breen Office (officially the Production Code Administration, but popularly named after Joseph Breen, the film industry's self-imposed censor who had absolute power), the movie industry stopped challenging traditional values by becoming one of their most staunch supporters.

The Breen Office brought about the "golden age of order" in which the social order was restored in films that reinforced traditional notions about social roles and American ideals. Screwball comedies set among the upper classes, such as Bringing Up Baby (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940) replaced the anarchic vision of the Marx Brothers and the brazen sexuality of Mae West. Gangster movies focused not on the lawless, but on the government agent, the G-man. And Hollywood began producing socially conscious films such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and the films of Frank Capra.

Frank Capra best exemplifies the "age of order" with his morality plays set among the common people of America. Capra produced films which encouraged Americans to reaffirm their beliefs in democracy, community, and humanity. In his "American trilogy," of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941), Capra presented American democracy at its best with each protagonist (Deeds, Smith, and Doe) overcoming the challenges to honesty and decency through perseverance. In Mr. Deeds, Gary Cooper stars as Longfellow Deeds, who plans to use his inherited millions on establishing farmers on their own small plots of land in an attempt to recreate the Jeffersonian vision of the democratic yeoman farmer. In Mr. Smith, James Stewart stars as Jefferson Smith, a junior senator who envisions a boys' camp in the western wilderness to teach boys the virtues of independence, self-sufficiency, and frontier democracy. And in John Doe, Gary Cooper once again stars, this time as Long John Willoughby, a down-and-out baseball player recruited by a big city newspaper to play the role of John Doe, a "common" man who has threatened to end his life as a protest against modern society. John Doe not only becomes a circulation booster, but his simple ideas about neighborly consideration and the "little guys" watching out for each other is readily picked up by an eager public searching for solutions to the depression. The John Doe Movement, with the establishment of John Doe clubs, is manipulated by the tyrannical newspaper owner D. B. Norton, who aspires to political office. Norton and Willoughby come into conflict when Norton's machinations are revealed and Willoughby seeks to stop him. Norton exposes the "fake" John Doe and the movement crumbles. In the end, Willoughby seeks to follow through on "John Doe's" original promise to jump off the city hall tower on Christmas Eve. Like all Capra movies, the honest and decent hero survives the attacks against him through the faith of a loving woman and the eventual realization of "the people." Capra reaffirms traditional ideas about self-help and the private function of charity in the face of adversity, as opposed to more modern ideas in which the federal government assumes responsibility for the health and welfare of individual citizens. Despite the revolutionary medium of motion pictures, late 1930s movies overwhelmingly reinforced traditional values.