Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling

By David Bordwell

In the 1940s, American movies changed. Flashbacks began to be used in outrageous, unpredictable ways. Soundtracks flaunted voice-over commentary, and characters might pivot from a scene to address the viewer. Incidents were replayed from different characters’ viewpoints, and sometimes those versions proved to be false. Films now plunged viewers into characters’ memories, dreams, and hallucinations. Some films didn’t have protagonists, while others centered on anti-heroes or psychopaths. Women might be on the verge of madness, and neurotic heroes lurched into violent confrontations. Combining many of these ingredients, a new genre emerged—the psychological thriller, populated by women in peril and innocent bystanders targeted for death.

If this sounds like today’s cinema, that’s because it is. In Reinventing Hollywood, David Bordwell examines the full range and depth of trends that crystallized into traditions. He shows how the Christopher Nolans and Quentin Tarantinos of today owe an immense debt to the dynamic, occasionally delirious narrative experiments of the Forties. Through in-depth analyses of films both famous and virtually unknown, from Our Town and All About Eve to Swell Guy and The Guilt of Janet Ames, Bordwell assesses the era’s unique achievements and its legacy for future filmmakers. Reinventing Hollywood is a groundbreaking study of how Hollywood storytelling became a more complex art and essential reading for lovers of popular cinema.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Oct 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9780226487892

David Bordwell

David Bordwell is Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies and Hilldale Professor of Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Among his books are Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (California, 2004), Film History: An Introduction (with Kristin Thompson, 2002), Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (2000), and On the History of Film Style (1997).

Book preview

Reinventing Hollywood

Reinventing Hollywood

How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling

David Bordwell

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Paperback edition 2019

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48775-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-63955-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48789-2 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226487892.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bordwell, David, author.

Title: Reinventing Hollywood : how 1940s filmmakers changed movie storytelling / David Bordwell.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017001123 | ISBN 9780226487755 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226487892 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—California—Los Angeles—History—20th century. | Narration (Rhetoric). | Motion pictures—California—Los Angeles—Plots, themes, etc.

Classification: LCC PN1993.5.U65 B654 2017 | DDC 384/.80979494—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017001123

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Marjorie Jones Bordwell (1922–2001)

and Jay Wesley Bordwell (1923–81)

It is not enough just to tell an interesting story. Half the battle depends on how you tell the story. As a matter of fact, the most important half depends on how you tell the story.

Darryl F. Zanuck, 1947

Contents

INTRODUCTION  The Way Hollywood Told It

CHAPTER 1  The Frenzy of Five Fat Years

Interlude: Spring 1940: Lessons from Our Town

CHAPTER 2  Time and Time Again

Interlude: Kitty and Lydia, Julia and Nancy

CHAPTER 3  Plots: The Menu

Interlude: Schema and Revision, between Rounds

CHAPTER 4  Slices, Strands, and Chunks

Interlude: Mankiewicz: Modularity and Polyphony

CHAPTER 5  What They Didn’t Know Was

Interlude: Identity Thieves and Tangled Networks

CHAPTER 6  Voices out of the Dark

Interlude: Remaking Middlebrow Modernism

CHAPTER 7  Into the Depths

CHAPTER 8  Call It Psychology

Interlude: Innovation by Misadventure

CHAPTER 9  From the Naked City to Bedford Falls

CHAPTER 10  I Love a Mystery

Interlude: Sturges, or Showing the Puppet Strings

CHAPTER 11  Artifice in Excelsis

Interlude: Hitchcock and Welles: The Lessons of the Masters

CONCLUSION  The Way Hollywood Keeps Telling It

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX

Introduction

The Way Hollywood Told It

The history of an art is the history of its masters; it is not a history of its bunglers. If the movies were judged with similar criteria we would understand why the historians of the year 2000 may well write: In the 1940s, Hollywood experienced a renaissance.

Leo Rosten, 1941¹

Alfred Hitchcock once claimed he didn’t see many movies. An executive was puzzled. Then where do you get your ideas?²

The anecdote seems to typify pure Hollywood superficiality: recycling formulas ad nauseam, no attempts at true originality. Yet Hitchcock could have answered, From silent films, particularly American and German and Russian ones, and from British thriller novels. And his remark wasn’t altogether candid; he keenly followed the work of other directors. After all, not even a Hitchcock movie comes from nothing. Deliberately or unwittingly, filmmakers are indebted to their forebears and their contemporaries.

Hollywood in the 1940s was a vast storytelling ecosystem, bursting with compulsive energy. Films of many sorts blossomed. Story ideas, some grown in Hollywood soil, some transplanted from adjacent media, were cultivated in the studio hothouses. Forms were generated, repeated, swiped, tweaked, parodied, pounded flat, turned inside out. Catchy ideas might suddenly seem old hat, and moribund ones might be brought back to life. The central idea of this book is that this turbulent process of repetition and variation worked to the benefit of cinematic art.

Fans and critics have long recognized the special flavor of films from this time. Citizen Kane, Rebecca, Casablanca, Fantasia, and dozens of film noirs and crazy comedies and Gothic melodramas stand as prototypes of forties cinema. They are perennials of cable television and archive restorations. Cinephiles rightly celebrate the brilliant stars, the ripe production values, the lustrous cinematography and soaring scores. But we’re also responding to the films’ adroit storytelling strategies.

Sometimes the plot is offbeat, with confused heroes, duplicitous heroines, or curious premises (say, visits from beyond the grave). Just as striking, as the Zanuck epigraph at the start of this book indicates, the how of movie narrative becomes as important as the what. We find dead narrators and multiple flashbacks and surprise voice-overs and bizarre dream sequences. Many of these techniques can be found piecemeal in earlier eras, but in the 1940s they became common, prominent, and unexpectedly varied. Narrative options crystallized in ways that gave American films a new complexity and power. The richest of these movies are dense, through-composed, endlessly revealing. And far from being decorations or gimmicks, their storytelling strategies can profoundly shape our experience.

The results are most palpable in moments that continue to grip us. Here are some that work on me: The urbane murmur of a bon vivant over darkness (I shall never forget the weekend Laura died . . .); in Shadow of a Doubt, young Charlie’s discovery, in a small-town public library, of the damning article her uncle has torn from the family newspaper; the final chapter of Meet Me in St. Louis, with a title card labeled simply and radiantly Spring; the boy in How Green Was My Valley cradling his father in his arms as the voice of the man he will become assures us, Men like my father can never die; the conclusion of The Human Comedy showing a dead father quietly bringing his dead son to revisit their family; in On the Town, three sailors singing and dashing across Manhattan landmarks as a digital clock readout unwinds beneath them; George Bailey of It’s a Wonderful Life discovering a mean-spirited alternative future for his town of Bedford Falls; in Double Indemnity, an insurance man, bloody cigarette dangling from his lip, talking into a tape recorder (I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman); Mildred Pierce stepping out of darkness to find her husband embracing her daughter; and enormous lips gasping Rosebud—two syllables that launch an exhumation of a man’s past. However much the films owe to tradition, nothing in earlier American cinema quite prepares us for the galvanic tingle yielded by these and a hundred other moments.

Seen with historical detachment, they stand as sharply etched emblems of forties Hollywood, a period when bold storytelling techniques were deployed with an eager, sometimes reckless energy. In both masterpieces and unheralded programmers, through ballyhoo and quiet accumulation, narrative innovations went mainstream. Once there, they shaped what contemporaries and successors could do. They would persist for decades. Today, they’re probably most visible in the work of Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Joel and Ethan Coen, Paul Thomas Anderson, and other ambitious filmmakers, but in quieter form they pervade our run-of-the-megaplex fare as well. The forties gave us basic tools of modern movie storytelling.

Don’t Forget Amnesia

What distinctive narrative strategies emerged in the 1940s? Where did they come from? How did various filmmakers use them? How did the innovations change the look and sound of films?

Obvious as they are, these questions haven’t been asked, let alone answered in a systematic way. Most books on Hollywood at this period concentrate on particular filmmakers, films, or genres. My compass is wider. I consider individual feature films as a repository of creative decisions, alternative pathways through a maze of storytelling options. Probably the nearest kin to Reinventing Hollywood are those studies of the conventions governing English playwriting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.³

Alternatively, many studies of the forties treat the films as reflections of American moods and mentalities. Wartime cinema is said to embody public anxieties about democracy, while postwar cinema purportedly reflects widespread concerns about the Cold War, the atomic age, and prospects for the future in a Washington-led imperium. Films of many sorts are interpreted as overt propaganda or as concealed expressions of social doubts and dislocations.⁴

This is not that sort of book either. For one thing, I’m asking questions about the development of narrative techniques, and propaganda chiefly involves explicit messages, the what rather than the how. Authorities monitoring scripts in the Office of War Information weren’t concerned with flashbacks or inner monologues as such: the targets were situations, dialogue, character traits, and professions of ideology. Even then, there were continuing clashes between policy directives and Hollywood entertainment values.⁵ One writer has pointed out that popular culture comfortably absorbed new wartime content into its long-standing conventions.⁶

What about treating the films as exposing deeper-seated public attitudes? I believe such interpretations usually don’t stand up to scrutiny. Reading films as reflecting national character, a zeitgeist, a cultural imaginary, or the mood of a moment seems questionable. Such interpretations rely on assumptions about what factors cause things to appear in films, and those assumptions haven’t been plausibly supported.⁷ We’d need independent evidence of some macro quality (national character, mood, pervasive psychological states) and a sense of how widely it’s shared. Then we’d need a causal story of how that quality comes to manifest itself in motion pictures. No such evidence and no such stories have been forthcoming.⁸

The reflectionist line of interpretation is itself largely a product of the 1940s, when Siegfried Kracauer and other social critics undertook the task of reading national character or mood from current films.⁹ James Agee provided a vigorous objection:

It seems a grave mistake to take [movies] as evidence as definitive, as from-the-public, as if 40 million people had actually dreamed them. Take the far simpler case of advertising art. The American family, as shown therein, is not only not The Family; it isn’t even what the American people imagines as The family. It is A’s guess at that, subject to the guesswork of his boss, which is subject in turn to the guesswork of the client. At best, a queer, interesting, possible approximation, but certainly never definitive. In movies many more people take part in the guesswork, but not enough to represent a population: and many more accidents and irrelevant rules and laws deflect and distort the image. A movie does not grow out of The People; it is imposed on the people—as careful as possible a guess as to what they want. Moreover, the relative popularity or failure of a picture, though it means something, does not at all necessarily mean it has made a dream come true. It means, usually, just that something has been successfully imposed.¹⁰

Do films perform cultural and political work? Absolutely. But to track that, along with the aesthetic effects the films have, I think the best starting point is the institutional activity of the film industry and its decision makers, along the lines Agee sketches. Filmmakers make educated guesses about what will grab audiences. When they’re successful, they can’t say with assurance why, though like critics filmmakers will sometimes invoke the zeitgeist.¹¹

If we want to understand continuity and change in film history, it’s useful to assume that cultural attitudes, memes, sticky ideas, and the like serve as materials for movie making. They’re selected and sculpted by filmmakers and the pressures of cinematic tradition. They’re modified by context. As in other art forms, filmmakers swipe cultural elements and submit them to the demands of their craft.

Take amnesia. With so many forties characters suffering from it, we’re tempted to interpret their plight as reflecting wider forces. One critic proposes that films featuring amnesia (like movies about angels and ghosts) were the culture’s way of offering solace to those who lost loved ones.¹² A more academic critic might suggest that broader anxieties within American society led to a fascination with a loss of cultural memory. But exactly how the US population, 130 million strong, induced Hollywood to make such movies is never explained.

There’s no disputing that a great many 1940s Hollywood films involve amnesia—over seventy, by one count. But we can find over sixty amnesia-driven releases in the 1910s, about fifty in the 1920s, and at least forty in the 1930s.¹³ Amnesia is rare in real life but common in movies.¹⁴

And not only movies. It’s a treasured plot resource throughout the world’s literature. Clinicians may deplore the fact that creative writers almost never represent amnesia accurately,¹⁵ but fictional versions answer to narrative demands, which often care little about realism. Movie amnesia is only one step above the magic forgetting we find in folk tales. Folklorists have compiled catalogs of amnesia motifs, such as forgotten fiancées and forgetting by stumbling.¹⁶ Great authors from Homer and Shakespeare to Dickens and Balzac have had recourse to amnesia, and it has been a common device for modern writers, high and low.¹⁷ The river Lethe, the lotus fields of the Odyssey, the laudanum that causes memory loss in The Moonstone, the problems plaguing the protagonist of Memento (1999)—across the ages, memory breakdowns afford storytellers a wide range of creative options.

I suggest we be cold-blooded and take amnesia not as a symptom of audience anxieties but as a reliable narrative device. News of battle injuries and home front breakdowns offered forties filmmakers a realistic alibi for stories of memory loss. Whatever sympathies a screenwriter may have had for wounded vets or tormented housewives, craft conventions made amnesia an attractive option.

For instance, stories demand gaps in knowledge. One way to spread fruitful ignorance is to create characters who don’t recognize themselves, or who can’t recall things they’ve done, or who can’t remember their loved ones. Amnesia generates curiosity (What has made X forget?) and suspense (Who will X turn out to be?). Amnesia can justify flashbacks and can cover time gaps later to be revealed as important (Calling Dr. Death, 1943). A lost identity can create dramatic crises, as when the protagonist in Random Harvest (1942) finds that for years he has led a double life. Amnesia can also generate changes in character. Sullivan’s Travels (1942) shows a befuddled film director sentenced to a chain gang. Had he remembered who he was, he would not have learned about life at the bottom of society.

As a momentary device, amnesia can prolong situations and trigger humor or tension. As a more basic premise, it can turn an entire plot into a search. In Identity Unknown (1945) an amnesiac pilot tries to find himself by tracking down the families of all the buddies lost on his mission and asking, by cruel elimination, if anyone recognizes him. Amnesia can be contagious too. The most florid case in Love Letters (1945) strikes a young wife because of a traumatic murder, but forgetting haunts other characters as well.

Filmmakers were well aware of using the ailment opportunistically. Coming up, wrote a columnist, is another picture about amnesia, a common malady these days.¹⁸ A review criticized Street of Memories (1940) for adhering to the outdated amnesia formula.¹⁹ The pressure was on filmmakers to freshen up this old device, and several did. Love Letters, noted Variety’s reviewer, employs such plot oldies as the Cyrano de Bergerac and the amnesia adventure as foundation, but develops a pattern of gripping interest from them.²⁰ In I Love You Again (1941) a prissy small-town Rotarian, conked on the head, realizes he’s had amnesia for nine years. He was originally a slick con man, and now, coming home, he must pretend to still be the hick he temporarily was. I Love You Again was praised for finding a new twist on the cliché.²¹

This isn’t to say that movies’ version of amnesia is sheer plot contrivance. Lost memory has its own appeals. It’s fun to think about. It generates sympathy for its victim and raises thematic questions about what is stable in personal identity. Through the device of amnesia, films can conjure up serious concerns about returning veterans. From the standpoint of craft demands, though, 1940s social conditions can be used to realistically motivate this conventional device. Throughout this book, what might be taken for passive reflections of a zeitgeist can better be seen as filmmakers’ fitting bits of immediate actuality to narrative needs.

Smooth, Fast-Moving, Effortless—and New Besides

I’ve spoken of how the Hollywood tradition submits common topics and themes to narrative pressure. What might that tradition be?

Back in the 1920s, writers began to argue that Hollywood had created a vivacious art form that fully earned its name, moving pictures. Gilbert Seldes, in his influential book The Seven Lively Arts (1924) argued that lowbrow mass entertainments had a spontaneous energy that genteel fiction, poetry, and theater lacked. On the screen, fine as Griffith and DeMille were, it was Mack Sennett’s slapstick comedies, with pratfalls and careening chases, that best fulfilled cinema as an art of movement: Everything capable of motion set into motion.²²

From this standpoint, the coming of sound could only seem a setback. Movies became more dialogue-driven, even stiffly theatrical. Seldes claimed, though, that Hollywood regained its footing in the mid-1930s. The gangster films in particular had achieved the perfection of the silent movies with dialogue superimposed.²³ Talkies had recovered a distinctive cinematic pace through merging vigorous action with terse conversation. Critic Otis Ferguson celebrated the crisp, thrusting rhythm of comedies, social dramas, and adventure films.

If there is any one thing that the movie people seem to have learned in the last few years, it is the art of taking some material—any material, it may be sound, it may be junky—and working it up until the final result is smooth, fast-moving, effortless. . . . Whoever started the thing in the first place, Hollywood has it now, and Hollywood speaks a different language.²⁴

The key, Seldes noted, was not the story itself but the way the story is told, which is by movement.²⁵

That movement need not be extreme, as F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed out in his unfinished novel The Love of the Last Tycoon. In one scene, studio boss Monroe Stahr explains to a snobbish writer from the East how to grab the viewer’s interest. Stahr sketches a scene: A young woman hurries into an office and furtively burns a pair of black gloves. The phone rings, and when she answers she says she’s never owned a pair of black gloves. Now Stahr reveals that there’s a man already in the office watching her.

The hypothetical sketch isn’t a virtuosic visual turn like a Keaton gag. It depends on a situation that’s articulated in a bit of dialogue, a few hand props, and simple bits of business. No fights or pratfalls here, yet the action summons up curiosity, suspense, and surprise. Stahr’s eastern writer is intrigued. Go on. What happens? I don’t know, says the tycoon. I was just making pictures.²⁶

Fitzgerald had worked on screenplays, and like his peers he was aware of the power of visually grounded narrative. In 1937 Frances Marion, a distinguished MGM screenwriter, published a how-to manual that explained everything from double plotlines and character arcs to trick transitions and swift pacing.²⁷ A year earlier, the journalist Tamar Lane had written a discerning book about the new technique of sound pictures. Lane surveyed a host of creative options, including plot twists, montages, and clever exposition.²⁸ Clearly, filmmakers of the mid-1930s were confident that sound could be assimilated into their tradition of pictorial storytelling.

We can think of that tradition as a vast set of collective solutions to basic problems: controlling exposition, picking out protagonists, building up drama, sustaining suspense, and so on. By the end of the 1930s, several other collective problems had been solved. Sound technology was improving immensely. Multichannel recording was established, microphones had become more sensitive, and fine-grain print stock began to be used during recording, mixing, and printing for final release.²⁹ Filmmakers had also created a new genre, the musical, and major variants—the revue, the backstage story, the musical as a romantic comedy with songs—had been mapped out.

Thanks to both dramaturgy and technology, then, most 1930s films preserved the fluidity of 1920s storytelling. The action was usually presented chronologically and objectively, and the characters were typically fixed, consistent, and transparent in their traits and motives. Accordingly, the narration was reliable. Except in the case of mysteries, the viewer could take what was shown at face value. The stability of this storytelling system was later celebrated by critic André Bazin, who maintained that studio narrative technique had reached a point of perfection by 1938–39.³⁰

In creating this stability, though, filmmakers tended to iron out aspects of 1920s cinema that Seldes and Ferguson had played down. Silent filmmakers had pioneered some flamboyant storytelling techniques. Many 1920s films resorted to self-conscious devices, and some flaunted them to an extreme degree (figs. I.1 and I.2). Such straying into stylization was mostly suppressed after the coming of sound. True, talkies continued to employ the montage sequence, a string of rather abstract images portraying a place or summing up a process (train trip, business success, changing seasons).³¹ But most 1930s scenes relied on the sharp, sober presentation of dialogue and behavior exemplified in Monroe Stahr’s phone-call intrigue.

I.1. The silent version of The Last Warning (1929) provides a grab bag of outré narrative devices. This over-the-top tale of a haunted theater exploits flashbacks, hallucinatory visions, and replayed scenes. When a woman finds her face dripping with cobwebs . . .

I.2. . . . we are given her optical viewpoint. In the thirties, this pictorial gag would have been unlikely; we would simply have been asked to enjoy the comedy of her discomfiture.

Making pictures, as Fitzgerald’s mogul conceived it, was what Hollywood had learned how to do. But too much repetition wasn’t good for business. Along with stability came a steady pressure toward novelty. As happens in any period, some filmmakers sought to be original in a noteworthy way.

What new things might be accomplished in the 1940s? Well, filmmakers could consolidate and expand certain options already developed. Thirties screwball comedy could be sustained in Ball of Fire (1942), The Major and the Minor (1942), and other pictures. The A-level Western, exemplified by Stagecoach (1939) and Dodge City (1939), became the super-Western of Duel in the Sun (1947) and Red River (1948).³² Opulent costume dramas and turn-of-the-century Americana persisted through the decade. In the face of slumping box office in the late forties and early fifties, biblical spectacle was revived in Samson and Delilah (1950), David and Bathsheba (1951), and Quo Vadis (1951). Comedy teams like Abbott and Costello and Hope and Crosby recalled the heyday of the Marx Brothers but brought their own sensibilities to the genre.³³ New trends in all areas should be encouraged, noted one commentator: Without such pictures, there would be no progress in picture making, no competition in picture making, and no fun in it at all.³⁴

Forties musicals epitomize the urge for constant, expansive novelty. Some musicals took on a populist or nostalgic tenor (Meet Me in St. Louis, 1944; State Fair, 1945), while others benefited from merging conventions with the biopic (Yankee Doodle Dandy, 1943; Night and Day, 1946).³⁵ Production values became more flamboyant thanks to rich Technicolor, bigger budgets, and ambitious special effects.³⁶ Esther Williams’s aquatic spectacles, the banana ballet of The Gang’s All Here (1941), the sailors’ urban adventures in On the Town (1949), and Fred Astaire’s pipe-cleaner body stretching in slow motion in Easter Parade (1948) made even the excesses of 1930s musicals look staid. Still, these sequences had their roots in earlier song-and-dance extravaganzas. Astaire’s signature special-effects cadenzas, for instance, were ambitious revisions of his Bojangles of Harlem number in Swing Time (1936).

Beyond revamping older traditions, filmmakers could push some boundaries. Could movies become sexier? Yes. The Breen Office, the industry’s censorship agency, was letting its guard down, and David O. Selznick, Preston Sturges, and Howard Hughes, among many others, found ways to heat up the screen. And could movies tackle social problems like racism and anti-Semitism? Yes. A wave of message pictures garnered prestige and box office revenues.³⁷ Exploitation pictures, once relegated to Poverty Row, went upmarket as studios based combat pictures, spy films, and crime movies on the day’s headlines.³⁸ The Lost Weekend (1945), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Naked City (1948), Home of the Brave (1949), and other films were rewarded for risky themes and more adult attitudes.³⁹

Most films in these genres and cycles display Ferguson’s smooth, fast-moving, effortless technique. Yet the forties demand for movies, almost any movies, yielded an opportunity to experiment with narrative as well. In conditions that favored risk taking, some filmmakers tried revising the storytelling conventions they inherited. That meant, in many cases, returning to possibilities sketched in the 1920s—greater subjectivity, playing with time and viewpoint, a willingness to create highly stylized narration. And revival led to revision. Filmmakers, recognizing the new demands of sound cinema, could develop those tendencies in ways unavailable to silent movies.

Exploration and variation come with the territory. A filmmaker deploying any technique is forced to choose among fine-grained options. If you opt for flashbacks, will they be memories or testimony? Will they be anchored in a single character, or will they provide different characters’ perspectives on a situation? Will the flashbacks be fully informative about past events, or will they leave out crucial items—to be provided, perhaps, by other flashbacks? Will the flashbacks be arranged chronologically or shuffled out of order? If you choose a voice-over, will it be subjective, flowing inside a character’s mind? Or is it more detached, recounted by the character at a later time? Or might the voice-over issue from an external narrator? Will it hold back information we need to follow the action? Apart from forced choices, there’s the need for novelty. After many filmmakers have embraced one option, how can the next film distinguish itself?

Which is to say that many forties filmmakers constantly set themselves fresh creative problems. This effort, I hope to show, made filmic storytelling rich, complex, and engaging. By consolidating new narrative norms, filmmakers encouraged further innovations. It’s this flowering of forms that partially explains the thickening we sense in forties classics, their demand that we rewatch and discuss them.

Bazin thought the turn of the decade marked the beginning of a new cinema style, on display in the deep-focus, long-take works of Orson Welles and William Wyler. It was the beginning of something else as well. From 1939 onward, collective efforts at narrative innovation wound up recasting the entire Hollywood tradition. That process is the subject of this book.

The Repetition of Forms

The pages that follow are a gloss on this remark by screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière:

The makers of films, who are themselves viewers of films made by others, have a rough idea of whether or not they will be understood by their contemporaries. The latter, for their part, adapt (unwittingly, often unconsciously) to forms of expression which briefly seem daring but quickly become commonplace. . . . It was through the repetition of forms, through daily contact with all kinds of audiences, that the language took shape and branched out.⁴⁰

Carrière drives home the point that film artists feed off the films around them. In their search for novelty filmmakers strive to build stories that are at once fresh and comprehensible. That search creates its own logic of imitation and variation—a branching out of competing creative options.

It’s time to explain my periodization, which runs from 1939 to 1952. Changes in any art need not march in lockstep with the calendar or with social and political history. Based on the questions I’m asking about narrative form, it’s untenable to fit developments snugly to the war years or the postwar period. Many of the trends I’m plotting emerge at the very end of the 1930s, and they do, I think, become fairly routine by 1953. Still, I’ll be considering occasional pre-1939 examples, usually as one-off efforts. More extensively, I’ll be suggesting that these creative choices enjoyed a long life from the 1950s on. What happens in the forties doesn’t stay in the forties.

Another point about dating involves the films. The date I assign to a title is its year of release as listed in The American Film Institute Catalog.⁴¹ This careful compendium identifies, as best evidence indicates, when films were made, premiered, and released. Sometimes the public saw a film years after it was finished. Arsenic and Old Lace was completed in late 1941 but was withheld while the play remained a hit on Broadway. According to the Catalog, the film didn’t premiere until September 1, 1944, and it went into general release later that month. Accordingly, I date it as a 1944 movie. Occasionally a film will premiere in November or December but not go into release until early the following year, so my date won’t match that in other sources. The most outrageous example is Gone with the Wind, which had several premieres in late 1939 but went into general release in January 1940. Like everybody else I think of it as a 1939 movie, but for the sake of dogged consistency I tag it as a 1940 film.

Leo Rosten’s expectation of a 1940s renaissance can find support in the pages that follow, but quality isn’t my sole concern. I discuss many masters and masterpieces, but these stand out from a background of common practices. Andrew Sarris suggests that in appraising the forties we should concentrate on the top people, accept occasional dividends from the ‘intermediates’ and forget about the dregs.⁴² I don’t dwell on many dregs, but some have slipped into my catchment area. I think we best appreciate the complexity and richness I’ve mentioned by seeing what these qualities owe to conventions on display in films at many levels of achievement. Sarris is interested in the poetry of auteurs; I’m interested in the poetics of Hollywood.

That aim isn’t utterly new for me. Earlier work, particularly my contributions to The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, tried to demonstrate the continuity of the studio tradition from its origins to recent times while tracing industrial and aesthetic circumstances that sustained that continuity. This book pursues a somewhat different question. Moving down a level of generality, I explore how, at one period, the flexible framework of that tradition fostered fresh strategies of storytelling. Again, we’ll see that the process relied on the mutual interaction of business practices and artistic creativity.

Finally, a map of the book. After an overview of the forties filmmaking community, chapter 1 suggests some ways to think about innovation in studio cinema and the adjacent arts. One of the most powerful innovations involved playing with story chronology, so that strategy launches my investigation in chapter 2. The following chapter surveys some basic plotting options, with emphasis on the role of protagonists. Chapter 4 then analyzes principles of ensemble plotting, block construction, and other unusual options.

The next four chapters consider broad principles of narration, the patterned flow of story information. I analyze restriction and ellipses (chapter 5), voice-over and character narrators (chapter 6), optical and mental subjectivity (chapter 7), and the deeper subjectivity of dreams and hallucinations (chapter 8).

Having considered techniques of plotting and narration, I look at three broad trends that encouraged innovative storytelling. Chapter 9 traces the push toward quasi-documentary realism and the complementary rise of fantasy. The new importance of mysteries and thrillers is the subject of chapter 10, and chapter 11 considers the trend toward self-conscious artifice (reflexivity, if you insist). A conclusion considers the legacy of the period 1939–52 for later filmmaking, and not just in America.

The bulk of the book ransacks hundreds of films for evidence and examples. The wide compass of the main chapters has left little space for closer analysis of individual films. Since a depth sounding can be as persuasive as generalizations, between most chapters I’ve sandwiched brief probes of one or a few films, and in three instances I’ve focused on the work of innovative directors.

These interludes operate as hinges; they usually pick up points from the previous chapter and anticipate ideas in the next one. They enrich my argument, I think, by showing how some filmmakers wove the finer texture of their films. The forties innovations in plotting and narration shaped the design of images, the succession of shots, the filigree of performance, the tonalities of the sound track. Although this book isn’t predominantly about film style (1940s visual and auditory techniques deserve books of their own), the craft and cunning of the period’s storytelling is as evident in small things as in big ones.

To give a sense of the finer texture of the films, Reinventing Hollywood occasionally draws on frames taken from the films. In addition, I have put some extracts from particular scenes online at http://www.davidbordwell.net/books/reinventing.php. When a scene I mention is among those extracts, an endnote also signals it. Other clips and commentary relevant to the book’s argument are gathered at http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/category/1940s-hollywood, in the blog I coauthor with Kristin Thompson.

In the course of all this, I’ll consider cooperative competition, popular culture as variorum, the special rules needed for supernatural tales, and the breadcrumb trail encouraged by flashback stories. I’ll broach matters of block construction and multiple-protagonist plotting. We’ll see the new role filmmakers assigned to mystery, and we’ll consider how the industry generated its own historiography. In all, I hope to offer some fresh ways to think about Hollywood’s vast experiment in collective storytelling.

---

The 1940s were an era of tremendous creative ferment across the American arts. Novelists Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Carson McCullers, and Gore Vidal launched their careers. The theater was rejuvenated at one extreme by the psychological dramas of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, and at the other by exuberant musicals in the wake of Oklahoma! In music, serial composition and the experiments of John Cage ran alongside the flowering of big-band swing, the emergence of bebop, and the consolidation of country music. Abstract Expressionism became a definitive contribution to postwar modern painting.

Still, you could make the case that Hollywood film was America’s greatest contribution to world art in the 1940s. I believe this, but I’m biased. This cinema was my introduction to film. It was my parents’ cinema (they met during World War II), but I claimed it as mine. I grew up watching forties classics on black-and-white television. From my childhood through to my retirement years, The Magnificent Ambersons and His Girl Friday and The Best Years of Our Lives and Notorious and How Green Was My Valley and Meet Me in St. Louis and dozens of other films from the era have been my touchstones for Hollywood at its finest. They still give me goosebumps of delight.

Evidently I’m not alone. Forties films have lived on for decades and have sunk into the consciousness of millions of viewers. Filmmakers from Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan and Terence Davies have paid tribute to the cinema of this period. I hope to show, in the very last chapter, that the look and feel of today’s cinema, whether mainstream or relentlessly quirky, are indebted to the ways forties filmmakers reinvented the Hollywood tradition.

Since deciding to write this book, I’ve watched scores of films previously unknown to me. Many of them are what Sarris would call dregs. Yet I persist in believing that American cinema of this era was an extraordinary artistic achievement—a machine for producing pleasure on a scale the world had never seen before. And a good part of that pleasure stemmed from a thrusting, occasionally demented urge for novelty at almost any price.

Chapter 1

The Frenzy of Five Fat Years

The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line and yielding to the stimulus of suggestion, compassion, emulation.

Henry James¹

In the summer of 1942, Radio City Music Hall screened Mrs. Miniver before its general release. An average film played at Radio City for two weeks; this one played for ten. Across five shows a day, the film drew crowds we can scarcely imagine today. The theater, the world’s largest, had a capacity of 6,200. By the end of the run, 1.5 million tickets had been sold. The movie could have played longer, but the management had to move it aside for a new attraction, Bambi.²

Of course Mrs. Miniver is an exceptional case. Six months after America’s entry into the war, audiences were keen to see a drama of the British home front. Critics’ reviews were ecstatic, and the film proved successful throughout the country. Still, the record attendance—which was said to have returned half of the film’s production cost—can stand as an emblem of the sheer power of Hollywood cinema in the 1940s. For a few years the industry knew an unprecedented stretch of success before plunging into a decline that would persist for decades. And the good years, sustained by a public for whom moviegoing was both routine and special, would enable filmmakers to recast cinematic storytelling.

Film Frenzy

The industry had weathered some tough years during the Great Depression, when attendance and profits dropped. Some studios narrowly avoided closure. Yet the system remained robust. MGM, Paramount, 20th Century–Fox, Warner Bros., and RKO not only produced films but owned theater chains. The Big Five controlled a mere fraction of US screens, but they held nearly all the important ones. The biggest first-run houses, which had thousands of seats and were immense real-estate assets, served as shop windows for the studios’ products.³

The pace of production ensured a regular flow to the audience, but no single studio’s output could fill America’s seventeen thousand screens. Double bills (duals) were common, and some programs changed two or three times a week. In exhibition the Big Five cooperated by booking their rivals’ products. Since the studios’ theater chains tended to group regionally, the affiliated theaters in any area could play the top films from all the studios. Columbia, Universal, and United Artists (the Little Three companies) owned no screens, so they had to work with the big firms’ exhibition branches while finding independent theaters to show their products. Still smaller outfits, such as the Poverty Row companies, usually catered to remote houses and the bottom slots of later-run duals.

The Majors (understood at the time as the Big Five plus the Little Three) exploited their power ruthlessly.⁴ Independent theater chains might be forced to block-book a studio’s entire annual output sight unseen. In the late 1930s government anti-monopoly intervention forced the Big Five to book in smaller blocks and to schedule trade screenings so exhibitors could see what they were buying. Yet not until the 1948 Supreme Court decision on the Justice Department’s Paramount Case were the Big Five forced to divest themselves of their theaters.

By then the industry had seen steep ups and downs. At the end of the 1930s, the studios had just spent many millions upgrading their facilities. In 1940 film grosses, which had already been declining, fell off sharply. Attendance dropped, and the European war made Britain the only significant foreign market.

Soon, though, a huge boom began. The annual domestic audience grew from 3.5 billion in 1941 to 4.7 billion in 1946. In this world without television and the Internet, as many as 90 million movie tickets might be sold each week. (Today’s totals are about a third of that, for a population nearly three times as large.) Studio profits leaped from $19.1 million in 1940 to nearly $120 million in 1946. The Mrs. Miniver blowout was only one symptom of a new surge in moviegoing.⁵

The period 1942 through 1946 might be called the Five Fat Years. America’s shift to a war economy in the late 1930s had begun to dispel the Depression. After Pearl Harbor, thanks to six-day workweeks and plenty of overtime, people had cash to spend. You could sell anything you got, recalled a grocer. It just walked off the shelves.⁶ As consumer goods from bicycles to razor blades were rationed, movies benefited. The working public, a trade paper noted, is finding that food, clothes, liquor, and entertainment are just about the only outlets it has for its money. . . . This is turning money into the box office from people who’ve not been in a movie house for years.⁷

The appetite seemed boundless. In the centers of war production, factories ran around the clock, and so did theaters, with swing-shift matinees starting at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. Frank Capra recalled one manager’s telling him, No matter what crap is playing, all you have to do is open the doors and duck.⁸ The programs offered one or two features, shorts, a newsreel, a cartoon, trailers, and often live entertainment in the form of musical numbers, comedians, and vaudeville acts.

Outside the theater, Americans bumped into Hollywood at every turn. Fan magazines fed the appetites of thirty-five million readers a month, and more than twice that number read Hollywood hype in newspapers.⁹ The studios cross-promoted their films with other industries, putting stars of recent releases in magazine ads for cigarettes or toothpaste. In radio, the most popular medium of the era, the studios had already secured a foothold through investment. Versions of popular films were broadcast on Lux Radio Theatre and other showcases. Some films became radio series.¹⁰ Dozens of radio performers moved to the big screen in the late 1930s and early 1940s, from Alan Ladd and Jack Benny to Don Ameche and, most successfully, Bob Hope.

The Majors hit on several ways to sustain the excitement. The main decision: Don’t make more movies, make bigger and splashier ones. Studios began to trim their slates of B films, the sixty- to seventy-minute fillers for double bills. The cutback was partly due to government rationing of raw film stock, but it was also strategic. Exhibitors rented B films for a flat fee, while A pictures yielded the studios a percentage of the box office. In addition, A pictures played the top theaters, with higher admission prices. With A films as the stronger investment, the studios filled them with the biggest stars, whose pay rose accordingly. Standard for a first-tier star was $110,000 to $150,000 per picture (minimally $1.5 million in 2016 currency). For Notorious (1946), Cary Grant earned the equivalent of $7 million today.

For several years the A-picture strategy yielded bigger grosses. Before 1945, only twenty-five films had taken in $4 million or more. In 1945 alone, nineteen films did.¹¹ The intermediate pictures, the in-betweeners or nervous As, got inflated as well, by adding a star or filming in color. The movie fever fed on older blockbusters too, as studios discovered when reissues of King Kong and Snow White captured handsome revenues.¹² Columbia, Universal, and Republic upped their game, investing in As and becoming more profitable along the way. And with the flood of viewers, the theaters controlled by the Big Five garnered a share of all studios’ successes.

There were also more specials, exceptionally expensive projects. In 1939 a $1.5 million budget was rare, but a few years later it was common, and $3 to $4 million budgets weren’t unknown.¹³ To recoup costs, a special was likely to be road showed, playing at fewer sessions per day and with top ticket prices before going into first-run release. For an ordinary A picture the studio might claim 30 to 40 percent of the box office, but the road shows of Gone with the Wind (1940) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) returned an astonishing 70 percent to their distributors.¹⁴

An A film took longer to make than a B, but that didn’t slacken the pace of work. Actors worked six-day weeks, and many would finish a film on Saturday and start a new one on Monday. A performer might play in six or eight films a year. Actors on double duty might commute between sound stages or studios. Robert Mitchum and Janet Leigh recalled making three movies at the same time.¹⁵ Not all the results were released immediately, though. Because runs were extended to meet demand, nearly every year the studios had some films on the shelf.

Yet nobody was complaining. Although some films lost money, producers acted as if every film were a potential hit. Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century–Fox summed it up in deciding to do Jane Eyre (1943): The picture will do business, and because business is phenomenal, it will recoup its cost.¹⁶

To increase the must-see factor, studios acquired best-selling novels and popular Broadway plays. Retail book sales boomed in the 1940s, accelerated by the arrival of cheap paperbacks, while Broadway had thunderously successful seasons thanks to the war economy. Slick-paper magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, with circulation in the millions, also provided pretested material. The hunger for stories brought even pulp writers into the studios.¹⁷ Steve Fisher’s I Wake Up Screaming sold to Fox for $7,500 in 1940; by 1946 he was a successful screenwriter and got $50,000 for another novel.¹⁸

The bidding went higher and higher. Margaret Mitchell’s $50,000 payday for Gone with the Wind began to look paltry.¹⁹ Warner Bros. bought Irving Berlin’s musical This Is the Army for $250,000, and Fox paid $300,000 for the now-forgotten combat play The Eve of St. Mark.²⁰ Later in the decade Annie Get Your Gun commanded $650,000.²¹ Studios invested in Broadway shows like Life with Father and I Remember Mama to get a jump on movie rights.²² Iconic authors James Hilton and Erich Maria Remarque supplemented six-figure sales with guaranteed percentages of box office revenues.²³ Producers hired novelists to write books to be adapted, with MGM financing competitions for aspiring novelists.²⁴ By 1944 75 percent of the Majors’ releases were adaptations, and the most prestigious ones ruled critics’ ten-best lists, the top-grossing lists, and the Academy Award nominations.²⁵

The crash came with changing consumption patterns. As the war wound down after 1945, commodity prices shot up without commensurate wage hikes, so workers spent more on food, clothing, and durables. Demobilized soldiers returned, started families, and moved to the suburbs. Mortgages, autos, appliances, and television sets squeezed moviegoing out of budgets. In 1947 profits plunged, and in 1948 so did admissions. By 1952, ticket sales had fallen 45 percent from the 1946-47 peak, and over 3,000 theaters had closed.

Moviemaking wasn’t the only business that was staggering. Most entertainment industries, from nightclubs and record companies to concerts and legitimate theater, saw a sharp postwar downturn.²⁶ But for Hollywood the pressure was particularly keen. While the domestic market waned, the foreign market remained largely frozen, and $20 million worth of literary and stage properties had to be dumped, swapped, or sold off at a loss.²⁷ The audience dropoff created shorter runs, which led exhibitors to demand more releases—at a moment when making pictures had become very expensive. In 1942 the average movie cost about $350,000; a decade later it cost $1.1 million. Meanwhile, television emerged as a key competitor. By the early 1950s TV stations were broadcasting dozens of old studio pictures each day.

Most dramatically, in 1948 the Justice Department won its anti-monopoly case, and the Big Five slowly began to divest themselves of theaters. They lost their guaranteed showcases and the revenues flowing from them. Divestment reinforced the A-picture strategy because now every film needed to be promoted singly; there were no more packages including weaker titles.²⁸ Exhibitors demanded blockbusters in order to compete with foreign releases and with television.²⁹

In the studios, cost cutting was the order of the day. The Majors reduced shooting schedules and let contracts lapse. Half of contracted screenwriters in 1945 were freelance in 1948, and half of craft workers were dismissed over about the same period.³⁰ Many stars, realizing they could drive harder bargains on their own, had already left the studios. Purchases of top plays and novels fell off, since original screenplays were cheaper. B films, now often made by independent producers with studio distribution deals, returned to fill dual programs.

The late forties didn’t witness an utter collapse. Two of the top box office successes of the decade were The Jolson Story (1947) and Samson and Delilah (1949). And the trend toward drive-in theaters somewhat offset the loss of hardtop screens. Yet day by day things were sagging, and Hollywood’s lean years would stretch on for decades.³¹

The year 1953, producer Dore Schary reflected, marked the beginning of the end of the big studio system.³² But the pressures favoring innovation begun during the boom years didn’t abate. The need to sell pictures singly encouraged original work, such as the cycle of social problem films. Given studios’ need to streamline production, more filmmakers became hyphenates, with writer-directors, writer-producers, and producer-directors gaining greater creative authority. Some of America’s most original and provocative movies were made as the studios’ fortunes declined.

Sources of Innovation

The stability of the system owed a good deal to disciplined production. A studio would employ several executive producers, each overseeing a batch of projects. Those were assigned to writers, directors, technicians, and staff, most of them under long-term contract. Developing the script might take weeks, months, or years, but shooting was comparatively brief—typically from eighteen days for program pictures to three months for big releases. Filming started at 9:00 a.m. and ended at 6:00 p.m., but actors came in much earlier for makeup; they often worked twelve-hour days. Rehearsals were rare, though actors might rehearse informally while lighting was being set. The director was expected to cover two to four pages of script a day, and representatives of the producer submitted daily progress reports. Postproduction—editing, scoring, sound work—might take another two or three months.³³

From acquisition of the story to final release, an A picture typically took a year to eighteen months.³⁴ Accordingly, every studio had many projects in different stages of preparation. Every spring the studio head and his executives would settle on a set of releases for the upcoming season, which started in September. This sturdy routine allowed the eight principal studios to produce over four thousand features between 1939 and 1952. Hundreds more were released by Poverty Row and independent outfits.

Because the system was so routinized, it’s sometimes compared to assembly-line output in a factory. That’s plainly a mistake. The product wasn’t uniform; no two movies were as alike as two cars rolling out of the Ford plant at River Rouge. Moreover, the process was quite flexible. Scripts were rewritten or passed among many hands. Failures of casting or differences of temperament could force major changes. On A pictures, the director would typically work with the writer to reshape story and dialogue. Things might be changed again on the set; powerful directors like Howard Hawks and Leo McCarey could let actors improvise, and Hitchcock could turn a deaf ear to a producer’s pleas. The film could be further adjusted in postproduction, with scenes reshot, sound redubbed, and editing shaped by the producer or studio head, often long after the director had departed.

To this mode of production corresponded norms of style and storytelling. Principles of characterization and plot construction that grew up in the 1910s and 1920s were reaffirmed in the early sound era. Across the same period there emerged a clear-cut menu of choices pertaining to staging, shooting, and cutting scenes. In sum, American mass-market filmmaking created a distinct cinematic tradition.³⁵

Instead of an assembly line, then, a closer analogy would be painters’ ateliers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There teams of specialists contributed their bits to paintings designed and overseen by master artists and guided by the demands of patrons. Another comparison would be to putting on an original Broadway show, in which script, physical production, performances, and overall concept are malleable from the first table reading to opening night and even after. In both instances, everyone’s work is governed by shared protocols of subject matter, genre, and style. The comparative looseness of moviemaking, typical of show business generally, had long given film workers a chance to reshape their products at many stages.

Since those products couldn’t be identical, variety was built into the system. Economic standardization demanded product differentiation, which meant aesthetic variation. The wiggle room in the production process made formal innovation possible, and in the forties that process was especially energetic. Why?

The guaranteed audience provided a solid foundation. The focus on A pictures, the expanded budgets, the rise in salaries, and the tonier sources helped. So too did a waning of censorship. The Hays Code, stiffened in 1930, was still in place, but more filmmakers were learning to evade it, and studio heads sometimes ignored the Breen Office’s requests for changes. Onscreen violence and sexual suggestion increased dramatically.³⁶ Unfilmable books like The Postman Always Rings Twice and Forever Amber made it to the screen. By the end of the decade, My Foolish Heart (1949) could have the heroine headed for divorce without a new man in sight. The women-in-prison picture Caged (1950) could imply that the heroine would become a hooker, while in Francis (1950) the talking mule could lament that he would never raise a family.

There’s also some evidence of foreign influences. British and French films could be seen in New York and Los Angeles during the 1930s. Hitchcock’s thrillers were particular favorites. The dark French crime dramas Crime et châtiment (1935), L’alibi (1937), and Le jour se lève (1939) got American release, and the last was remade as The Long Night (1947).³⁷ Writer-director Sacha Guitry won acclaim for his experimental bent.³⁸ In The Story of a Cheat (1936), Guitry’s voice-over played all the roles, while Pearls of the Crown (1937) traced the circulation of royal pearls across historical periods. Several of Guitry’s techniques would surface in 1940s Hollywood.

In the war years and thereafter, imported British films reinforced comparable formal options. Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve (1942), influenced by Citizen Kane and hailed as one of the greatest pictures ever made, confirmed the dramatic power of voice-over narration, parallel flashbacks, and temporal overlaps. Other Coward films, including the family saga This Happy Breed (1944) and the suave ghost comedy Blithe Spirit (1945), chimed with American trends. Likewise, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger deftly worked with the autobiographical flashback (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 1943) and the afterlife drama (A Matter of Life and Death, aka Stairway to Heaven, 1946). At a time when England was America’s biggest foreign market, there seems to have been a dialogue between Hollywood filmmakers and their British counterparts.

Crucial to the innovations of the war and postwar years was the greater power given to ambitious talents. A few months before the war, William Wyler negotiated a contract allowing him one picture a year for Samuel Goldwyn and one or two for other studios. (The outside project for 1942 was MGM’s Mrs. Miniver.)³⁹ Other writers, directors, and producers who could steer A pictures gained greater creative authority. Writers and directors were starting to serve as producers.⁴⁰ Stars could occasionally become directors, as Robert Montgomery and Ida Lupino did. Writers too became hyphenates, with Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, John Huston, and Delmer Daves starting to direct their own screenplays.

Some of this new talent was resolutely intellectual and inclined to experiment. Sturges, Mankiewicz, and Albert Lewin had been working in Hollywood as writers and producers throughout the thirties. The opportunity to direct encouraged them to create dense, formally ambitious works. As for newcomer Orson Welles, he and his collaborators felt no compunction about thickening Citizen Kane with subtle references and half-hidden motifs. Susan, forced to embark on a singing career, trains on Una voce poco fa, a lament from a woman held captive by an older man (I let myself be ruled . . .). Welles included what fans now call an Easter egg by slipping the snow globe into inconspicuous spots during Kane’s flashbacks.

Producers won greater creative control too. Independent David O. Selznick brought Hitchcock to America and, somewhat erratically, micromanaged some of the forties’ most important pictures. Samuel Goldwyn and smaller independents, overseeing less grandiose operations, were able to hire freelance A directors such as Sam Wood, Fritz Lang, and René Clair.⁴¹ The independents were on the whole dependents because they relied on studios’ facilities and distribution machinery. The studios demanded stiff terms, but in the boom years the rewards were worth it.⁴² Universal, for instance, became a significant studio by supporting producers Mark Hellinger, Jack Skirball, and Walter Wanger. Probably the most successful semi-independent producer of the period was Hal Wallis, who had been production head at Warners on Casablanca (1942) and other top pictures. Moving to Paramount, he arranged an in-house deal and began building a stable of stars, including Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

High taxes on salaries drove stars and other creative personnel to set up independent outfits, where income would be taxed as capital gains. The results were meager, and many of these companies collapsed after only a few pictures. The most prestigious director company, Liberty Films, founded by Capra, Wyler, and George Stevens, quickly fell apart. But the wave of independent production created consequential films, including It’s a Wonderful Life (1947), Rope (1948), works by Fritz Lang and Max Ophüls, and a throng of offbeat Bs. It also gave writers and directors the incentive to try new things, as we’ll see throughout the chapters that follow.

Both the studios and the quasi-independent companies benefited from a flood of new talent. Writers came from the pulps, from the slicks, from best-sellerdom and Broadway. A 1939 Variety article pleaded, Need Fresh Pix Directors, and they weren’t long in arriving.⁴³ Some worked their way up the studio hierarchy, others came from the stage or radio. The forties roster of newcomers included Edward Dymtryk, Elia Kazan, Joseph H. Lewis, Vincente Minnelli, Preston Sturges, John Sturges, Delmer Daves, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Vincent Sherman, Robert Wise, Mark Robson, Richard Fleischer, Samuel Fuller, Jules Dassin, Jean Negulesco, Don Siegel, Phil Karlson, Abraham Polonsky, Ted Tetzlaff, Anthony Mann, Irving Reis, George Sidney, and Orson Welles. Émigrés like Lang and Clair were already working in Hollywood, and they were followed by Douglas Sirk, Robert Siodmak, Otto Preminger, Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier, Zoltan Korda, Alfred Hitchcock, Curtis Bernhardt, Anatole Litvak, Fred Zinnemann, and Billy Wilder.⁴⁴ A great many directors who started in the forties would enjoy rich careers for thirty years.

Fresh talent brought new storytelling ideas into circumstances that encouraged innovation. And alongside the studio system there flourished a social network that facilitated the rapid exchange—borrowing, swiping, call it what you will—of ideas and personnel.

Cooperative Competition

Although nearly 34,000 people were said to be involved in American film production at the end of the 1930s, Hollywood counted itself a small town.⁴⁵ The top creative workers formed a tight community. In 1940, the eight principal companies had under contract about 600 actors, 114 directors, and 340 writers.⁴⁶ Even adding in agents, producers, extras, and the employees toiling on Poverty Row, the top echelon formed not so much a small town as a hamlet. Somewhat insulated from both the Depression and the impact of the war, the filmmakers could cultivate a vibrant social network.

Nepotism was no stranger to the system, of course. Pals and relatives and hangers-on might be hired out of loyalty or helped out with funds. William Goetz left Fox to form another company, International, thanks to a million-dollar investment from his father-in-law, MGM’s Louis B. Mayer.⁴⁷ MGM’s head costume designer, known simply as Irene, was married to the brother of Cedric Gibbons, the studio’s top art director. Sometimes the personal threads became quite tangled, as when director Charles Vidor married actor Evelyn Keyes, who soon married John Huston (after his affair with