During the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, which lasted from the
end of the silent era in American cinema in the late 1920s
to the early 1960s, movies were prolifically issued by the Hollywood
studios. The start of the Golden Age was arguably when The Jazz Singer was released
in 1927 and increased box-office profits for films as sound was
introduced to feature films. Most Hollywood pictures adhered closely to a
genre—Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon,
biopic (biographical picture)—and the same creative teams often worked
on films made by the same studio.
After The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, Warner Brothers gained huge success
and was able to acquire their own string of movie theaters, after
purchasing Stanley Theaters and First National Productions in 1928; MGM
had also owned a string of theaters since forming in 1924, known as Loews Theaters, and the Fox film Corporation
owned the Fox Theatre strings as well. Also, RKO,
another company that owned theaters, had formed in 1928 from a merger
between Keith-Orpheum Theaters and the Radio
Corporation of America[3].
RKO formed in response to the monopoly Western Electric's ERPI had
over sound in films as well, and began to use sound in films through
their own method known as Photophone [5]. Paramount, who already acquired Balaban and Katz in 1926,
would answer to the success of Warner Bros. and RKO, and buy a number of
theaters in the late 1920s as well, before making their final purchase
in 1929, through acquiring all the individual theaters belonging to the
Cooperative Box Office, located in Detroit, and dominate the Detroit
theaters.[4] For instance, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films, Alfred
Newman worked at Twentieth Century Fox for twenty years, Cecil B. De Mille's films were almost
all made at Paramount, director Henry King's films were mostly made
for Twentieth-Century Fox, etc.
Movie making was still a business, however, and motion picture
companies made money by operating under the studio
system. The major studios kept thousands of people on
salary—actors, producers, directors, writers, stunt men, craftspersons,
and technicians. And they owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns
across America, theaters that showed their films and that were always
in need of fresh material. In 1930, MPDDA President Will
Hays also founded the Hays (Production) Code, which
followed censorship guidelines and went into effect after
government threats of censorship expanded by 1930. [6] However the code
was never enforced until 1934, after the new Catholic Church
organization The Legion of Decency - appalled by Mae West's
very successful sexual appearances in She Done Him Wrong and I'm
No Angel [7]- threatened a boycott of motion pictures if it did
not go into effect [8], and those that didn't obtain a seal of approval
from the Production Code Administration
had to pay a $25,000 fine and could not profit in the theaters, as the
MPDDA owned every theater in the country through the Big Five studios
[9].
Throughout the 1930s, as well as most of the golden age, MGM
dominated the industry and had the top stars in Hollywood, and was also
credited for creating the Hollywood star system altogether[10]. MGM
stars included at various times "King of Hollywood" Clark
Gable, Greta Garbo, Joan
Crawford, Jean Harlow, Gary
Cooper, Mary Pickford, Marlon
Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Ava
Gardner, James Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, Vivien
Leigh, Grace Kelly, Gene
Kelly, Bette Davis, Gloria
Stuart, Fred Astaire, Ginger
Rogers, John Wayne, Barbara Stanwyck, John Barrymore, Audrey Hepburn, Buster
Keaton and Judy Garland, [11]. Another great achievement
of American cinema during this era came through Walt
Disney's animation. In 1937, Disney created the most successful
film of its time, Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs [12].
Many film historians have remarked upon the many great works of
cinema that emerged from this period of highly regimented film-making.
One reason this was possible is that, with so many movies being made,
not every one had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a
medium-budget feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors: Citizen
Kane, directed by Orson
Welles and often regarded as the greatest film of all time, fits
that description. In other cases, strong-willed directors like Howard
Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Frank
Capra battled the studios in order to achieve their artistic
visions. The apogee of the studio system may have been the year 1939,
which saw the release of such classics as The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
Wuthering Heights, Only Angels Have Wings, Ninotchka,
and Midnight. Among the other films
from the Golden Age period that are now considered to be classics: Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, It Happened One Night, King Kong, Citizen
Kane, Some Like It Hot, All
About Eve, Duck Soup, Bringing Up Baby, North by Northwest, Dinner at Eight, Rebel Without a Cause, Double Indemnity, Mutiny on the Bounty, City
Lights, Red River, Rear
Window, Singin' in the Rain, My Man Godfrey, Top Hat,
Roman Holiday, and Sabrina.
Style
The style of Classical Hollywood cinema, as elaborated by David Bordwell[2],
has been heavily influenced by the ideas of the Renaissance
and its resurgence of mankind as the focal point.
Thus, classical narration progresses always through psychological
motivation, i.e. by the will of a human character and its struggle with
obstacles towards a defined goal. The aspects of space and time are
subordinated to the narrative element which is usually composed of two
lines of action: A romance intertwined with a more generic one such as
business or, in the case of Alfred Hitchcock films, solving a crime.
Time in classical Hollywood is continuous, since non-linearity calls attention to the illusory workings
of the medium. The only permissible manipulation of time in this format
is the flashback. It is mostly used to
introduce a memory sequence of a character, e.g. Casablanca.
Likewise, the treatment of space in classic Hollywood strives to
overcome or conceal the two-dimensionality of film ("invisible style")
and is strongly centered upon the human body. The majority of shots in a
classical film focus on gestures or facial expressions (medium-long and medium
shots). Andre Bazin once compared
classical film to a photographed play in that the events seem to exist
objectively and that cameras only give us the best view of the whole
play[3].
This treatment of space consists of four main aspects: centering,
balancing, frontality and depth. Persons or objects of significance are
mostly in the center part of the picture frame
and never out of focus. Balancing refers to the visual composition,
i.e. characters are evenly distributed throughout the frame. The action
is subtly addressed towards the spectator (frontality) and set, lighting (mostly three-point lighting) and costumes are
designed to separate foreground from the background (depth).
The characters in Classical Hollywood Cinema typically are the causal
agents. They also have clearly definable traits. They are active and
goal oriented.
Production
The mode of production came to be known as the Hollywood
studio system and the star system, which standardized
the way movies were produced. All film workers (actors, directors, etc.)
were employees of a particular film studio. This resulted in a certain
uniformity to film style: directors were encouraged to think of
themselves as employees rather than artists, and hence auteurs did not flourish (although some
directors, such as Alfred Hitchcock, John
Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson
Welles, fought against these restrictions).
Periodization
While the boundaries are vague, the Classical era is generally held
to begin in 1927 with the release of The Jazz Singer. Hollywood
classicism gradually declined with the collapse of the studio system,
the advent of television, the growing popularity of auteurism among
directors, and the increasing influence of foreign films and independent filmmaking.
The 1948 U.S. Supreme
Court decision, which outlawed the practice of block
booking and the above-mentioned ownership and operation of theater
chains by the major film studios (as it constituted anti-competitive and
monopolistic trade practices) was seen as a major blow to the studio
system, clearing the way for a growing number of independent producers
(some of them the actors themselves) and studios to produce their film
product free of major studio interference.
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