Section 3: Hollywood Cinema

Chapter 11: Classic Hollywood, 1930–1960

SUGGESTED RESOURCES

The following resources will help develop your knowledge about a variety of classic Hollywood films as well as the Studio System: 

• This series of short films, Film History: Rise of the Studio System (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS6Vuy5dV1Q) gives a useful potted history of the Studio System.

• The You Must Remember This podcast (http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/) by Karina Longworth is an invaluable resource of meticulously researched accounts of Hollywood history, told in a gripping style. Subjects cover the period of the Hollywood blacklist, case studies on stars such as Jane Fonda and Jean Seberg, as well as an account of the Manson murders.

Case Study: Humphrey Bogart

How can a man so ugly be so handsome? (Märta Torén to Bogart in the film noir, Sirocco, 1951).

Bogart’s first major roles were as a contract player at Warners, where he appeared in many gangster films playing cruel and ruthless criminals, these included:

• Bullets or Ballots (1936),
• San Quentin (1937),
• Dead End (1937),
• Angels with Dirty Faces (1938),
• The Roaring Twenties (1939).

Bogart was never the lead in these films, playing supporting roles to James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and George Raft. The Bogart star persona only developed in the 1940s with his ‘good/bad’ roles in thrillers and film noir:

• High Sierra (1941),
• The Maltese Falcon (1941),
• Casablanca (1942),
• To Have and Have Not (1944),
• The Big Sleep (1946).

In the final years of his career, Bogart played roles that seemed to analyse the divided personality of his earlier roles, these included:

• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948),
• In a Lonely Place (1950),
• The Caine Mutiny (1954).

How to deconstruct the Bogart persona?

 

Bogart’s persona can be seen to represent a shift in style and tone in Hollywood cinema from the relatively clear-cut good hero and bad villain to a new confused (and confusing) type – half-good, half-bad. The development of this persona is first apparent in the private detective films and film noir, and then in his role in wartime dramas. Throughout these roles, Bogart retains a continuity of voice, gesture, movement, costume, and worldview. This included the gravelly voice, the trench coat, and sentimental sarcasm.

There are certain gestures that can be detected across his performances – cupping of a cigarette, the lisp, the squint, the grimace. Put together, these gestures and performance suggest the contradictory aspects of Bogart’s persona, which can be seen in the roles he plays and suggest the reason he became a star.

To sum up, the persona can be read as distant but tender, cruel but thoughtful, calm and passionate, but weakness must never show. Star images such as Bogart’s can be seen to have an ideological function through the meanings they embody about cultural values and gender. If we compare Bogart to contemporary male stars like Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, and Brad Pitt, we can see a range of different ideas about masculinity in our culture, suggesting the difference between the 1940s and today.

Bogart’s persona has been particularly enduring and he was taken up by the counter-culture in the 1960s, when he seemed to represent the atmosphere of pessimism and cynicism while retaining honour and integrity – aspects which are apparent in Godard’s homage to Bogart in Breathless (1959).

Case Study: Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1957, USA)

 

Vertigo is one of the most admired films in cinema history made by an undisputed auteur; a director whose achievements as an artist have been compared to Shakespeare’s.

Some evidence of the status of the film and director:

• In 1954, Cahiers du Cinéma (the film journal where Truffaut, Godard, et al. developed la politique des auteurs) was devoted to the career of Hitchcock.
• For Andrew Sarris (1968), American translator of la politique des auteurs, Hitchcock belonged in the Pantheon – the highest category reserved for the very few great directors.
• A poll conducted by Sight and Sound (2002) critics voted Vertigo the second greatest film of all time (Citizen Kane was first). In the same poll, Hitchcock was voted the second greatest film director (beaten by Orson Welles).
• In his analysis of Hitchcock’s films, Robin Wood claimed; ‘Vertigo seems to me Hitchcock’s masterpiece to date, and one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has yet given us’ (1965, 77).

It is important to remember:

• The initial reception of Vertigo was not so affirmative; even positive reviews saw the film as a prestigious, star-led thriller, rather than a work of art.
• The context of auteur theory has been widely attacked; this would question the validity of the concept of Hitchcock as great director.

Robin Wood argues that Hitchcock should be taken seriously as an artist because of the ‘thematic and formal unity’ evident in his work – nowhere more so than in Vertigo.

Warren Buckland (1998) summarises the key features of Hitchcock as an auteur:

• The narrative is based around an investigation. This is either by the hero into a suspected crime or the hero is himself being investigated.

• The structure of the investigation leads to other themes:

• confession and guilt,
• suspense,
• the perfect murder,
• the wrong man.

• These themes are explored through a distinctive visual style which includes:
• emphasis on editing and montage,
• a high number of point of view shots,
• shooting in a confined space.

Identification and point of view

 

The success of Hitchcock’s films is reliant on the careful manipulation of spectator response; one of the techniques used to affect this is identification with character. In film, identification with character is created in a number of ways:

• through creating sympathy with characters, an emotional identification which allows us to empathise with the character; 
• through an ‘intellectual identification’ where the audience has the same information as the characters; 

through point of view shots, which although rarely used, can place the spectator in the character’s position.

A world of chaos and disorder

Hitchcock’s films represent a world in chaos with no structure or rational order. This is an unstable place with no God, and a frightening unpredictable place where things happen by chance and without explanation, whether you are a good or bad person. You might be killed in the shower, attacked by birds, mistaken for a spy or murderer, your favourite uncle may turn out to be a murderer, or you may find the woman you are in love with doesn’t exist.

In analysing narrative and genre in Vertigo, remember:

• Vertigo opens in disruption – rather than equilibrium – with the race across the rooftops and the death of the policeman. At the end of the chase, Scottie is left hanging from the roof by his fingertips and a reverse zoom shot visually represents his fear of falling – the vertigo of the title.
• It is not clear how Scottie is rescued from the rooftop and this has become the focus of much analysis of the film. For some critics, it is an example of Hitchcock’s playful attitude to the details of plot (there is a very similar incident at the end of North by Northwest (1958)). Others have read it as much more symbolic: Scottie remains hanging, unable to move throughout the film, never the one to take action, he is always propelled by more powerful characters.
• Vertigo ‘breaks’ the rules of the thriller genre by destroying the suspense and solving the puzzle two-thirds of the way into the film. This is a very disorientating experience for the audience, as we no longer have our narrative and genre expectations to guide and reassure us. A similar effect is created in Psycho when the central character, the one who the audience identifies with, is murdered in the shower.

References

Buckland, W. 1998. ‘Film Authorship: The Director as Auteur’. In Teach Yourself Film Studies. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Wood, R. 1965. Hitchcock’s Films. New York: A.S. Barnes.