1933, coinciding with President Roosevelt’s inauguration and a general turn toward optimism in US society, the Catholic Church and other groups renewed their protests against Hollywood films. Facing boycotts and more urgent calls for federal censorship, the Production Code was revised in 1934 to include a Seal of Approval that would be given only to those films deemed acceptable. Hollywood companies agreed only to show films in their theaters that had the Seal of Approval attached (or face a large fine), and thus the industry became self‐censoring. This was also a new way of denying exhibition to other types of films, further consolidating Hollywood’s oligopoly. As a result, Hollywood films became a dependable source of escapist fantasy through the rest of the Depression and into World War II. While some films of the 1930s did acknowledge contemporary issues of poverty and unemployment, more regularly Depression‐era Hollywood films showcased the lifestyles of the rich and beautiful (as in the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals). Anything too political (such as race relations, class division, or women’s rights) was not allowed to be discussed in a Hollywood film. Most women were depicted as asexual wives and mothers, people of color were consistently marginalized as stereotypical servants, and homosexuals officially disappeared from the movies altogether.
World War II and Postwar Film
World War II substantially upended the day‐to‐day life of almost every American citizen. Many men entered military service, while women contributed to the war effort by entering the home front workforce. Although unemployment was practically non‐existent, Americans could spend their paychecks on very little due to war rationing. The movies benefited as a result, and Hollywood studios made considerable sums during the war years. Hollywood continued to provide escapism, but also made films supporting the war effort (despite the Production Code’s prohibitions on political themes). The war movie as a genre reached its classical apex during these years, thematically promoting American unity in the face of our enemies’ aggressions. Often these films showed members of different ethnic groups or racial backgrounds overcoming their differences and learning to work together as a unit. On the other hand, Hollywood war films often featured grotesque stereotypes of Japanese enemies.
When World War II ended, many American citizens continued to fight for social causes. Groups began campaigning more vocally for African American civil rights, and some homosexuals began to organize as well. Hollywood made a number of films in the late 1940s that addressed various social issues, including those faced by veterans disabled during combat. Other social problem films explored topics previously considered taboo or financially risky, such as racism and anti‐Semitism in the United States. In addition to the social problem films, audiences watched stories of frustration and corruption told in a number of dark mysteries and thrillers. Termed film noir by French film critics, these films questioned the ideals of American capitalism that citizens had just been fighting to preserve. Film noir also expressed the social and personal tensions between men and women in the postwar period, tensions that had been created by women’s wartime independence versus the postwar patriarchy’s need to make them once again subservient to men.
Turning back the calendar on women’s roles after the war exemplified a general reactionary trend in American society as the 1940s ended. Following World War II, America found itself in a Cold War of espionage with the Soviet Union, and began to fight communism abroad in actions both open and covert. The resultant Red Scare, a term that refers to the hysteria about possible communist infiltration that swept America at this time, caused immense changes to American film practice in the postwar years. The congressional committee known as HUAC (the House Un‐American Activities Committee) investigated allegations of communist infiltration in various American industries and institutions. In 1947, HUAC came to Hollywood, and charged that leftist and communist filmmakers were instilling anti‐American messages into their films. The owners of the Hollywood companies quickly closed ranks and offered up sacrificial victims to the committee. The Hollywood Ten, as these people became known, refused to answer the committee’s questions, and most of them served time in prison. Soon, studios were making employees sign loyalty oaths, and blacklists (rosters of people who were to be considered unemployable because of their political beliefs) were circulated throughout the industry. Careers were ruined and in many cases lives were destroyed. Other people under investigation recanted their former political beliefs and were readmitted to the industry.
John Garfield was a popular Hollywood actor whose career was destroyed by the Red Scare; he suffered a heart attack and died in 1952.
Unidentified publicity photo, authors’ personal collection.
In retrospect, the people targeted by HUAC during these years were disproportionately Jewish, homosexual, non‐white, or people struggling to organize the working classes – in other words, people who were legitimately critiquing the elitism of the white patriarchal capitalist ruling class. The heads of the studios used the Red Scare to weaken the power of labor unions in Hollywood, since unionizing seemed dangerously close to communism in those trying times. (A number of other industries also used this gambit against unions.) This type of communist “red baiting” came to an unofficial end around 1954 when Senator Joseph McCarthy (one of the leading alarmists who had used the Red Scare for his own political gain) was discredited and censured by Congress, after he alleged that the US Army itself was infiltrated by communists. Yet the blacklists that had been created in Hollywood and many other industries lingered well into the 1960s.
Partly in response to the Red Scare, mainstream American culture throughout the 1950s stressed conformity to white patriarchal capitalist ideals, under the assumption that even discussing cultural difference or social inequity would be misconstrued as un‐American. Hollywood filmmakers deliberately avoided making films that might be understood as in any way critical of American foreign or domestic policy. Social problem films and film noir dried up as filmmakers became afraid that such movies could get them fired and/or blacklisted. Musicals, melodramas, lush historical romances, and Biblical epics became the mainstay of 1950s Hollywood film production, as these genres were felt to be safe and apolitical. The 1950s is often spoken about nostalgically as a time when people migrated to crime‐free suburbs to raise perfect nuclear families. Yet underneath that facade lay ugly reminders of social inequity that many people choose to forget. Many of those perfect neighborhoods were zoned to keep out blacks and/or Jews, women often chafed under the restrictions placed on them, and gay and lesbian people could be arrested and fired from their jobs for merely meeting in a bar.
The Red Scare was not the only problem facing the Hollywood studios after the war. Postwar migration to the suburbs took customers away from urban areas where film theaters were located, and many preferred to stay home with their new television sets rather than drive to the movies. By 1960, about 90% of all American homes had TV. In an attempt to hold onto its audience, Hollywood responded with expansive technologies that TV did not have – widescreen formats, stereo sound, and color, as well as novelty techniques such as 3D. Even more dire, the Supreme Court declared in 1948 that the Hollywood industry had formed an illegal and oligopolistic business trust. The Paramount Consent Decrees (as the rulings became known) forced the Hollywood studios to dismantle their vertical integration throughout the 1950s. Hollywood companies chose to sell off their exhibition outlets as a way of complying with this decision. However, without guaranteed theaters to show their films, and with the loss of filmgoers to TV, the Hollywood studios were again forced to cut back production and whittle down their employee rosters. Many stars, directors, and writers became independent agents, no longer tied to one particular studio. This development, along with theaters that were now free to book non‐studio‐produced films, encouraged more independent filmmaking, even as the political climate of the 1950s did not exactly encourage independent thinking.
While Hollywood filmmakers aimed for a broad appeal that would offend no one, some independent filmmakers
