Mr. Smith Goes to WashingtonJames Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), directed by Frank Capra.© 1939 Columbia Pictures Corporation; photograph from a private collection
Howard, John; Grant, Cary; Hepburn, Katharine; Stewart, James; The Philadelphia Story(From left) John Howard, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story (1940).Courtesy of United Artists CorporationBetween 1930 and 1945, the studio system produced more than 7,500 features, every stage of which, from conception through exhibition, was carefully controlled. Among these assembly-line productions are some of the most important American films ever made, the work of gifted directors who managed to transcend the mechanistic nature of the system to produce work of unique personal vision. These directors include Josef von Sternberg, whose exotically stylized films starring Marlene Dietrich (Shanghai Express, 1932; The Scarlet Empress, 1934) constitute a kind of painting with light; John Ford, whose vision of history as moral truth produced such mythic works as Stagecoach (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), My Darling Clementine (1946), and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949); Howard Hawks, a master of genres and the architect of a tough, functional “American” style of narrative exemplified in his films Scarface (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and The Big Sleep (1946); British émigré Alfred Hitchcock, whose films appealed to the popular audience as suspense melodramas but were in fact abstract visual psychodramas of guilt and spiritual terror (Rebecca, 1940; Suspicion, 1941; Shadow of a Doubt, 1943; Notorious, 1946); and Frank Capra, whose cheerful screwball comedies (It Happened One Night, 1934) and populist fantasies of good will (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939) sometimes gave way to darker warnings against losing faith and integrity (It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946). Other significant directors with less-consistent thematic or visual styles were William Wyler (Wuthering Heights, 1939; The Little Foxes, 1941), George Cukor (Camille, 1936; The Philadelphia Story, 1940), Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, 1937; Going My Way, 1944), Preston Sturges (Sullivan’s Travels, 1941; The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, 1944), and George Stevens (Gunga Din, 1939; Woman of the Year, 1942).
The most extraordinary film to emerge from the studio system, however, was Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), whose controversial theme and experimental technique combined to make it a classic. The first of six films Welles had contracted to produce for RKO with his Mercury Theater radio ensemble company, Citizen Kane made radically innovative use of sound and deep-focus photography as it examined the life of Charles Foster Kane, a character based on the press baron William Randolph Hearst. The film employs a complicated flashback structure in which Kane’s friends and associates give their accounts of the man after his death, paradoxically revealing not greatness or might but pathetic insecurity and emptiness. In creating this portrait of a powerful American who could bend international politics to his will but never fathom human love, Welles stretched the technology of image and sound recording beyond its contemporary limits. Using a newly available Eastman film stock with increased sensitivity to light, plastic-coated wide-angle lenses opened to smaller-than-normal apertures, and high-intensity arc lamps, cinematographer Gregg Toland achieved a photographic depth of field that approximated the perceptual range of the human eye and enabled Welles to place the film’s characters in several different planes of depth within a single scene. These deep-focus sequence shots are complemented throughout the film by the techniques of ambient and directional sound that Welles had learned from radio. Most important of all, the resonance of the film’s narrative matches the technical brilliance of its presentation, functioning on several levels at once: the historical, the psychological, and the mythic. Although recognized by many critics as a work of genius, Citizen Kane was a financial failure on its release, and Welles directed only three other films under his RKO contract. Citizen Kane remains, nevertheless, one of the most influential films ever made and is widely considered to be one of the greatest.
Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941).RKO Radio Pictures Inc.
International cinema
Having created large new markets for their sound-recording technologies in the United States, Western Electric and RCA were eager to do the same abroad. Their objective coincided with the desire of the major American film studios to extend their control of the international motion-picture industry. Accordingly, the studios began to export sound films in late 1928, and ERPI and RCA began installing their equipment in European theatres at the same time. Exhibitors in the United Kingdom converted the most rapidly, with 22 percent wired for sound in 1929 and 63 percent by the end of 1932. Continental exhibitors converted more slowly, largely because of a bitter patents war between the German cartel Tobis-Klangfilm, which controlled the European rights to sound-on-film technology, and Western Electric. The dispute was finally resolved at the 1930 German-American Film Conference in Paris, where Tobis, ERPI, and RCA agreed to pool their patents and divide the world market among themselves. The language problem also delayed the conversion to sound on the Continent. Because dubbing was all but impossible in the earliest years of the transition, films had to be shot in several different languages (sometimes featuring a different cast for each version) at the time of production in order to receive wide international distribution. Paramount therefore built a huge studio in the Paris suburb of Joinville in 1930 to mass-produce multilingual films. The other major American studios quickly followed suit, making the region a factory for the round-the-clock production of movies in as many as 15 separate languages. By the end of 1931, however, the technique of dubbing had been sufficiently perfected to replace multilingual production, and Joinville was converted into a dubbing centre for all of Europe. Great Britain
Because of the lack of a language barrier, the United Kingdom became Hollywood’s first major foreign market for sound films. The British motion-picture industry was protected from complete American domination, however, by the Cinematograph Films Act passed by Parliament in 1927. The act required that a certain minimum proportion of the films exhibited in British theatres be of domestic origin. Although most of the films made to fulfill this condition were low-budget, low-standard productions known as “quota quickies,” the British cinema produced many important film artists (most of whom were soon lured to Hollywood). One of the first major British talents to emerge after the introduction of sound was Alfred Hitchcock, who directed a series of stylish thrillers for British International Pictures and Gaumont British before he moved to Hollywood in 1939. His first sound film, Blackmail (1929), marked the effective beginning of sound production in England. The film was already in production as a silent when the director was ordered to make it as a “part-talkie.” It was especially noted for the expressive use of both naturalistic and nonnaturalistic sound, which became a distinguishing feature of Hitchcock’s later British triumphs (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934; The Thirty-nine Steps, 1935; Sabotage, 1936), as well as of the films of his American career. Among the significant British filmmakers who remained based in London were the Hungarian-born brothers Alexander, Zoltán, and Vincent Korda, who founded London Films in 1932 and collaborated on some of England’s most spectacular pre-World War II productions (e.g., The Private Life of Henry VIII, 1933; Rembrandt, 1936; Elephant Boy, 1937; The Four Feathers, 1939), and John Grierson, who produced such outstanding documentaries as Robert Flaherty’s Industrial Britain (1933) and Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon (1935) for the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit and its successor, the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit. France