The Roots of Modern Hollywood: The Persistence of Values in American Cinema, from the New Deal to the Present

Introduction

There are two common misconceptions about Hollywood cinema, particularly about more recent American films. The first is that American cinema is politically disengaged, neutral at best, or devoid of social criticism and mindlessly patriotic at worst. The second is that Hollywood films exist for the moment, and are – indeed, are meant to be – disposable populist culture. Accordingly, they do not have an intellectual history in the way that, for example, painting, music and literature clearly have. This book sets out to refute both of these notions.

First, I want to show that modern American cinema (by which I mean films that were made around and after what I see as the watershed of modern Hollywood, 1969–1970) can be as politically and socially informed as any other national cinema. And then second, related to this, I mean to demonstrate that modern American cinema owes a debt to films from the Golden Age (roughly, the 1930s and 1940s) and, in key cases, picks up and develops the very same themes and values from its progenitors. In making this second point, I want to argue that Hollywood cinema has a respectable intellectual heritage from which recent film-makers have drawn and continue to draw.

It would be surprising if one were to discount European cinema as having no real content, and no political or social analysis. Indeed, one would be unlikely to do this in respect of South American cinema, films of the Far East, or African cinema. Yet it is quite common for people to write off Hollywood cinema’s political engagement. Hollywood films, it is often said, are not ‘about’ anything. They are harmless, even mindless, entertainments, designed to amuse, thrill or make us cry, and then be forgotten about shortly afterwards. While such sentiments are understandable, they are misconceived. Hollywood is, of course, a commercial enterprise, and the way in which most films are budgeted and marketed means that they must capture very large revenue flows to recoup their huge costs. Accordingly, as a rule Hollywood films need to appeal to mass audiences, a condition that militates against radical social commentary, marginal attitudes and minority causes. Such a context certainly does inhibit the extent to which modern American films can tackle controversial subjects that will divide audiences and reduce revenue prospects. Yet it is equally true to say that American cinema is heavily value-laden, and always has been. Even in the period of the Golden Age, when every film was intended for family viewing and there was an elaborate system of censorship, Hollywood film-makers invested their works with political and social values.

Moreover, these values were seldom on the ‘conservative’ end of the spectrum. As I have argued elsewhere (Smedley, 2011), New Deal film-makers formulated an impressive body of works that proclaimed the benefits of Roosevelt’s social programmes in the 1930s, and lamented the passing of the New Deal and the rise of Republicanism in the immediate post-war years. It is, perhaps, counter-intuitive to argue that Hollywood as an industry was (and remains) an essentially liberal, left-of-centre community. Viewers of modern American cinema will be familiar with the patriotic bombast of many films, and the apparent complacency with which American values of individualism and democracy are proclaimed. Yet closer examination of these themes reveals, more often than not, a liberal critique of capitalism, an ingrained suspicion of the forces of American authority such as the military, the government and corporate business. This is particularly true of those film-makers who might be said to express a personal and serious world-view in their movies (and on whose works this book will concentrate). Why might Hollywood be more attuned to the liberal agenda in American life, and why might individual writers and directors be more likely to support the Democrats rather than the Republicans? I do not have the definitive answer to this, but one dimension undoubtedly lies in the fact that many film-makers in Hollywood would see themselves more as artists making artistic statements, rather than businessmen and women making commercial products for sale. Many of those who worked in Hollywood in the New Deal era fervently embraced the new, left-wing politics of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and many of them joined the Communist Party, or flirted with the idea (and hence became subject to scrutiny after World War II by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee). Many of those working in Hollywood today have inherited this legacy of liberalism, and give voice to it in the modern era through their socially critical films. Those film-makers to whom I spoke while writing this book (and whose interviews appear in the text below) are politically engaged, and seek to offer direct social commentary in their works.

Modern Hollywood thus continues that liberal dissection of modern American life which made itself so apparent in the New Deal era. Conditions for making films are different now from what they were in the Golden Age, and so I have constructed my analysis of this trend differently from my previous work. In the New Deal era, and for many years thereafter, Hollywood was an industrial conglomerate. It was a vertically integrated industry, in which the major studios owned not only the resources for film production, but also the mechanisms for distributing their products to the market place, and then the cinemas in which the films were exhibited. Actors, writers, producers, directors, technicians, costumiers – all of the people associated with taking a film from the first idea or first draft story through to the completed film ready for distribution – were employees of the studios. This created a far more homogenous film industry than we have today and it produced a much larger volume of films. In my earlier study of the films of this period, it was possible and sensible to consider hundreds of films and to comment on the generality of messages, values and themes in Hollywood at large. It is this cultural legacy that forms the basis of today’s cinema.

But today’s cinema is structured very differently. Nowadays the major studios operate more as deal-makers, negotiating with a writer, actor or independent producer who has a script or story-outline, to put together a financial package to bring a pre-existing product to the screen. The system of censorship has long been abandoned. There is accordingly much greater opportunity (albeit in fewer films) for individuals to express their personal views through the medium of the American cinema. I have not sought in this book, therefore, to argue that modern American cinema as a whole necessarily reflects the major preoccupations of American cinema in the past (although it conceivably might do). Instead, I want to illustrate that the values and ideals laid down in the cinema of the Golden Age persist in the works of at least some modern film-makers working in Hollywood since the end of the 1960s. I have chosen around 100 films from the more recent era that illustrate the argument I wish to make. These films may or may not be representative of the works of a larger body of film-makers. I do not mean to suggest that all Hollywood films since 1970 have pursued the political strategies I discuss in this book. It is, however, my contention that, through the films considered in this book, Hollywood’s liberal values (and much of its anti-feminism) have been kept alive and updated for new audiences. This is an important observation to make, for it demonstrates that Hollywood cinema has a rich cultural heritage on which some of our more recent film directors and writers have chosen to draw. In so doing, these creative artists are commenting on modern society, while at the same time enriching, revising and developing – and ultimately contributing to the survival of – a historical, cultural tradition that is uniquely American. What follows is, therefore, a deliberately selective critique of some of the key themes and trends in Hollywood cinema since 1970.

We do not understand the operas of Benjamin Britten without knowing about the innovations of Wagner, and the development of opera by Rossini and, before him, Mozart. We cannot appreciate fully the works of modern authors without considering the evolution of the novel in the eighteenth century, and the development of that form by Dickens, Henry James and James Joyce. No historian of abstract art would separate the emergence of that style from the works of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, and in turn those painters’ wish to reconsider the formality of nineteenth-century art, itself informed by the works of Leonardo, Raphael, Carravaggio and Rembrant, among others.

Similarly, modern Hollywood film-makers are creating their works as part of an evolving film culture. This is not simply a case of liking old films. Nor does it have to be self-consciously referential, as in the works, for example, of Quentin Tarantino. But, just as cinema has acquired its own history with the passing of time, so the historian can detect the influence of the past on the present, and dig down to the roots of modern Hollywood cinema. In making today’s masterpieces, some American directors and writers are, consciously or unconsciously, reworking themes from earlier periods in American history. One’s understanding of modern Hollywood is enriched by recognizing the recurrence of social commentaries that first emerged in the New Deal era of 1932–1948.

What are these themes, and why should they continue to exercise the film-makers in Hollywood today? In my previous study, I highlighted three particular themes that appeared to me to inform so much of the products of New Deal cinema. The first of these was support for the liberalism and humanitarian concepts of Roosevelt’s political programme. The second was an underlying antipathy to war, which was superseded in the 1930s and transformed into passionate support for American intervention in the European conflicts ignited by Hitler’s Germany. The third theme was the overwhelming and insistent opposition to any form of, what we could call today, feminism.

In this book, I have revisited all three of these themes. I consider where American cinema stands today, and how it has got there, in respect of liberalism, pacifism and feminism. I have found the 1970s very fertile ground for my analysis of dissenting voices in American cinema, and Chapter 1 is devoted to this decade. The prosperity and briefly-recaptured national unity and optimism of the Reagan years in the 1980s offers far leaner pickings for those in search of genuinely radical film commentary, outside the prism of films about the Vietnam War. Accordingly, apart from a glancing reference to this decade in Chapter 2, my main consideration of this period of recent American film history is offered in Chapter 4, which focuses on Hollywood’s treatment of war. With the return of the Democrats in 1992, there was no concomitant return of that celebration of liberal values which had characterized the 1930s. This may surprise some readers. The shift of emphasis by Bill Clinton to the middle ground of politics appears not to have captured the hearts and minds of many liberals in Hollywood. This period of liberal detachment from the direction of American politics is covered in Chapter 2. The uncertainty and ambiguity of many on the left was cemented into harder form by the rise of the Republicans under George Bush Jr in 2000. Even the euphoria surrounding the election of Barack Obama in 2008 has done nothing to penetrate the clouds of anxiety, doubt and suspicion that hangs over Hollywood’s liberal cinema to this day. This most recent period is covered in Chapter 3. There is clear evidence of continuing support among film-makers for the liberal idealism of Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), as developed by Lyndon Johnson and, to an extent, by Bill Clinton. Yet there is very little of the unabashed celebratory optimism of 1930s Hollywood. Around 1970, American cinema turned its face to the darkness and it has never fully recovered the heady optimism of the Roosevelt era. The trend of modern Hollywood cinema is towards what I have called ‘compromised optimism’ – a continuing crusade to establish or maintain the structures of a liberal, humane capitalism, but a crusade that recognizes the unending nature of that struggle.

Although World War II remains a sacred conflict among Hollywood directors and writers, it remains very much the exception in an industry that continues to regard American global intervention as wrong-headed, unjust and ill-judged. Again, this is a reflection of support for Roosevelt’s political philosophy, whereby the Second World War, endorsed strongly by FDR, becomes an ‘acceptable’ conflict, in contrast to Korea, Vietnam and the two wars in Iraq. The analysis of Hollywood and war is covered in Chapter 4.

The treatment of women, however, displays real change. As general popular perceptions of the role of women in modern American life have changed since 1970, Hollywood has been able to embrace feminism to an extent (the same might be said of attitudes in general, and then by Hollywood, towards homosexuality and race). No longer a ‘controversial’ stance, it has become possible for American film-makers to acknowledge a wider role for women than housewife and mother – although the battle is far from won by feminists. This debate forms the focus of Chapter 5.

I should say something about the methodology I have followed in conducting this study. I write from the perspective of a social and cultural historian. I do not see myself in the mainstream of traditional film-studies, where (broadly) the techniques involve considering films as ‘closed texts’, rather than locating them as products of their time and social/cultural context. Thus, conventional film-studies scholars tend to analyse films according to their formal properties – camera angles, set designs (or mise-en-scène), aesthetics, editing – or through psychological studies of audience experience. Even those scholars who, influenced by David Bordwell et al. (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, 1985), consider the influence of the production process on the aesthetic properties of individual films, still examine the films as self-contained artefacts, separated from the flow of history. I take a diametrically opposed view of film history. I prefer to see Hollywood films as being in a direct relationship with the times in which they were made, as well as being part of a longer-term cultural development – one that goes beyond just cinema.

This approach has a number of implications. First, it means that I bring to my analysis a depth of knowledge about American culture and American history. Underlying my discussion of the films in the chapters that follow is a thorough understanding of the history of American thought, as well as the social and political history of the United States in the relevant decades. Thus, my interpretation of the meaning of Hollywood films is informed by their relationship to historical and prevalent currents in American ideology and philosophy, both intellectual and popular, and to the social and political events of the time. Second, I engage directly with the contents of the films. For me, these films are primary sources. They tell us, the viewer and the film historian, what the film-makers are trying to say about the state of the nation in which they are living. They have meaning, in other words, and my task is to unravel that meaning, interpret it and make it plain to my readers. Third, I undertake this task, not only with a background in American history and American culture, but also from a considerable grounding in Hollywood films. I do not concentrate on a small handful of famous films, as many film-studies scholars do. I have watched hundreds of movies, from the 1930s and 1940s and from the 1960s to the present, in order to build up a large database of the ideology and value-systems inherent in American cinema. This gives my analysis much greater depth and breadth than is common. Finally, I offer something unusual in current film scholarship – the long view. Fundamental to my methodology in writing this book is my ability to see recent and contemporary Hollywood cinema in its historical context. This allows me to offer insights into the way in which films from the modern era owe debts – acknowledged and unacknowledged, conscious and unconscious – to Hollywood’s illustrious past.

These significant differences between my approach to film history and that of film-studies specialists means that there is very little point of contact between my work and theirs. Thus, in this book, I have kept references to secondary sources to an absolute minimum, and there are almost no citations or footnotes. My source material for the book is fourfold. First, there are the films themselves – almost 100 of them – that present authorial commentary on American society, if only one knows how to decode and understand them in the broad sweep of American cultural and social history. Second, there are exclusive interviews with four of our most distinguished, and socially engaged, film directors active today – Tony Gilroy, Paul Haggis, Michael Mann and Peter Weir. In every one of these interviews, we not only learn about the evolution of the films from script to screen, but we also gain an invaluable insight into the aims and intentions of their creators. Third, I use the reviews of film critics from the time of the films’ release (and sometimes from a bit later) to evidence how the films were received, which tells us a lot about their intersection with the mores and values of the time. And finally, my own analysis and interpretation is built upon the wealth of secondary literature I have mastered on American culture, thought and politics. This underpinning scholarship is discussed in more detail in the bibliographical essay at the end of the book, and I would refer film scholars and film students to consult that for the background to my own interpretation.

In the chapters that follow, I first survey a number of key films that appear to me to be milestones in the development of these three themes since 1970. Then, in respect of my chosen three themes, I have chosen one or more films that are not only masterpieces in their own right, but also explore and illustrate the themes I discuss in depth and with clarity. These I have called ‘exemplar films’. They are analysed in more detail at the end of the relevant chapter. In some cases, these films are supplemented by exclusive interviews I have conducted with the director. The transcripts of these interviews are included after my analysis of the exemplar film. Although my selection of films is necessarily partial and subjective, I intend to demonstrate that there is a continuing interest among some modern film-makers in the important liberal traditions laid down by Hollywood’s creative personnel in the 1930s – the persistence of values in American cinema, from the New Deal to the present.

Chapter 1

The failure of American liberalism and the cinema of despair: Hollywood in the 1970s

Richard Nixon and the end of American liberalism

The 1970s were a watershed in recent American history. After the development of a brand of liberalism uniquely American under the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s, the politics of the country abruptly changed with the narrow election victory of Richard Nixon in 1968. Kennedy and, more importantly, Johnson were the political heirs of the architect of New Deal liberalism in the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR). FDR had introduced America to a modified style of European social democracy, with public housing programmes, job creation, welfare benefits, unemployment insurance, and so on. He had been able to do so because the devastating impact of the Great Depression on millions of Americans had widened the political debate. Issues that had previously been taboo in American politics became respectable – most critically, the notion that government could intervene in the economy, and that it could initiate social engineering through legislation and the political process. While European governments had been experimenting with such ideas from the late nineteenth century, America had proved far more resistant to tampering with the capitalist system. Roosevelt changed all that, introducing Americans to the concept of an interventionist government with a comprehensive programme of social reform. In the 1960s his legacy was picked up and developed by President Johnson, who implemented significant reforms in public housing, education and civil rights.

The arrival of Richard Nixon in the White House in 1968 signalled the end of Johnson’s expansion of FDR’s political programme. America, at the end of the 1960s, was a country undergoing turbulent change. The broadly consensual nature of American politics began its slow journey towards today’s vicious and divisive approach to governing the nation. Equally, the apparent harmony and shared values of American society began to fragment and, for the first time in American history, the sense of promise in America’s future faltered. There were many reasons for these changes but two critical factors were the emergence of a student movement, which, at first, appeared politically engaged; and the progress of the war in Vietnam. One of the factors leading to the election of Nixon was the perception among some voters that the forces of ‘anti-Americanism’ were gathering strength. While liberal intellectuals welcomed the activism of campus demonstrations, the beginnings of the women’s movement and Black Power, for many Americans this was all part of a breakdown in traditional values. Opposition to the Vietnam War was seen as unpatriotic. The lack of respect for authority inherent in the student protests added to the sense of disquiet. Meanwhile, in South-East Asia, the war was going horribly wrong, and the clear demonstration of the limits of American military power was unwelcome news at home.

The narrow election victory of Richard Nixon in 1968, and his resounding triumph in 1972, presented serious problems for the American left. The New Deal coalition of southerners, Catholics, the white-urban working class, rural communities and urban intellectuals was unravelling. Many elements of this coalition were switching to the Republicans, and would continue to do so as the decade progressed and the American economy declined. The resurgence of the right was accompanied by a crisis of liberalism, as the Democrats fragmented and turned in on themselves. For many, this period marked a disillusion with the political process, and an end to the belief that social reform could be achieved through it. The counterculture’s brief flirtation with radical politics soon petered out, and young people became politically disengaged. Hippies advocated dropping out, rather than campaigning on social issues. For many students and youths, political institutions were corrupt, boring and ‘square’. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr in 1968 removed two of the most charismatic and dynamic liberal leaders, and replacements of their calibre were not to appear.

As the decade wore on, things did not improve for American liberalism. Some of the social changes were depressing for those who had hoped for permanent improvements from the Johnson legacy. People left the cities and moved to the suburbs, leaving behind urban wastelands that soon descended into crime and poverty. Inflation rose and unemployment rose along with it. American manufacturing went into decline, and more and more people became dependent on welfare. Although Nixon was destroyed by the Watergate scandal and forced to resign in August 1974, the narrow election victory of Democrat President Jimmy Carter in 1976 did not herald a new optimism. His inept and unpopular governance cemented the pervading pessimism, and the economy continued to founder. While Nixon had ended the American involvement in the Vietnam War in 1972, the legacy of American weakness endured. Carter’s inability to deal with the capture of American hostages in Tehran was further evidence that the period of American greatness was passing into the shadows. For the first time, there was a serious questioning of America’s destiny and its assured dominance in world affairs.

In these developments, one can find strong parallels with an earlier period in American history, a period that also saw a crisis of confidence among American liberals. After the death in office of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, there was then too a resurgence of the American right. After more than a decade waiting in the wings, the Republican Party found new strength and swept to victories in both houses of Congress in elections held after the end of the war. Although Harry Truman, a Democrat, surprised most people with his presidential victory in 1948, his reign was hampered by his lack of control in the Senate and the House of Representatives. His attempted liberal programme was completely derailed by the rise of Communism abroad and the concomitant anti-Communist movement at home. As would happen 20 years later under Nixon, left-leaning citizens were too easily portrayed as unpatriotic and communist sympathizers – ‘unAmerican’ as they and their activities were soon to be branded. Again as would happen later, there was a sense of pessimism about the liberal cause, and a lament at the apparent lack of moral purpose in American life. In the later 1940s, just as in the 1970s, American power was shown to have its limitations, patently unable to stop the advance of Communism in Eastern Europe and South-East Asia.

Hollywood’s response to the decline of liberalism

I have written elsewhere about the prevailing liberal idealism found in so much of Hollywood’s output in the 1930s and 1940s. Hollywood has for long attracted creative personnel from the left-leaning side of the political spectrum. The messages in the films they make are more often than not embedded in narratives that are entertaining and superficially bland, but the criticism of capitalism is no less powerful or pervasive for that. In the 1940s, Hollywood film-makers had responded to the crisis of liberalism by creating some of America’s most bleak and downbeat films, films that offered a lament for the decline of moral values. Other films used fantasy formulations to show viewers that the higher moral tone of the New Deal period could still be found, but no longer through the endeavours of ordinary people in America. It required the intercession of divine or spiritual forces. In 1970s America, Hollywood film-makers responded to a similar crisis of liberalism by creating some of the most pessimistic and anxious films ever to emerge from that industry, films that offered no hope and rejected the happy endings that had till then characterized American cinema. Some of these films are among the greatest achievements of modern Hollywood.

In the 1970s, film directors had far more latitude than their 1940s’ predecessors to describe graphically what they saw as the complete collapse of American liberal values, and they made the most of the opportunity. The end of the 1960s was, accordingly, as much a watershed in the history of Hollywood as it was in the history of American politics. One reason for this was the way in which the predominantly liberal community in Hollywood reacted to the election of Richard Nixon. The inherent left-leaning stance among film-makers coincided with a recognition in the film industry of the commercial opportunities offered by a burgeoning youth market. There was a deliberate attempt by studio executives to make films that would appeal to the new counterculture. The desire to widen the appeal of films in this way was given additional impetus by the decline in the system of censorship, which had begun to unravel in the 1950s, and continued to decline as the 1960s wore on. Thus, the new American cinema could include more explicit treatment of sex and violence, and could explore the anti-authority and anti-establishment rhetoric associated with the hippy culture. Films about drug experimentation began to appear, portraying soft drugs as a positive experience, as opposed to the historical idea that drugs led to debilitating addiction and the breakdown of family structures. The rise of independent film producers, working outside the studio system (while continuing to seek finance from the major players), gave further scope for new perspectives. New film-makers joined the community: men who were interested in more controversial subjects than had been tolerated in the corporate culture of the big studios.

For some contemporaries, the 1970s appeared to herald a new era in American film, a more mature, harsher, ‘European’ style of movie-making. Similar sentiments had been expressed by industry observers and practitioners in the 1940s, and the parallels between the two eras are striking. Although widely seen, then and now, as a departure from the more conservative, celebratory films of the 1950s and earlier 1960s, the 1970s was not in fact the first time that Hollywood artists had distanced themselves from the direction of American politics. Back in the post-war years of the 1940s, American directors and writers had evoked a sense of despair and pessimism in a series of films noirs and fantasies that acknowledged the end of liberal hopes at that time. The circumstances in American political and social life were, in many respects, similar 20 years or so later. The response of Hollywood in 1968 and after had its roots in a history of alienated liberal idealism, last expressed so purposefully in the 1940s. In that earlier period, the shift to more sinister and cynical films had not been a permanent change. The crisis in American optimism passed and, in the 1950s and 1960s, America had recovered its sense of assured destiny and Americans – and Hollywood liberals – moved on. But in the 1970s, something fundamental occurred. The idealistic celebration of all things American has, for some film-makers, never since been recaptured.

Hollywood and the cinema of despair: first stirrings

One of the first film-makers out of the stocks was Mike Nichols, with his classic, The Graduate (Nichols, 1967). Although released almost a year before Nixon’s election, the film anticipated the increasingly sceptical attitude in Hollywood to American corporate and capitalist culture. The opening credits sequence shows Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) arriving home from college after graduating. As the credits roll, we see Ben moving on a series of travelators across the airport, a blank expression on his face. His journey seems protracted, somehow without purpose. He is going nowhere, or at least nowhere interesting. He is vacant, detached from his surroundings, in that way many of us are when negotiating the passage from the arrival gate to ‘the real world’. Immediately, then, the film prepares us for Ben’s journey to nowhere, his transition from the hope and promise of university life to the emptiness of American society. In what follows, Ben finds himself unable to move seamlessly into an executive career, and he becomes more and more indolent, with no sense of direction. In this state of mind, he is deflected from forming a relationship with a pretty girl of his own age, Elaine (Katharine Ross). Instead of finding a ‘natural’ partner, he is seduced by the empty pleasures of his parents’ generation when he stumbles into an affair with a woman old enough to be his mother, Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft). Although a common adolescent fantasy, being inducted into the mysteries of sex by an older woman is not presented in the film as a