Reinventing Hollywood : How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling

David Bordwell wrote Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling. Instead of approaching the decade through the lens of one genre or auteur, Bordwell thinks about the stylistic hallmarks that distinguished the decade—for example, screenwriting conventions like flashbacks, voiceover, dreams, different point of views —and how they paved the way for the classical Hollywood form we might take for granted today.

Listen to the interview by FilmComment.

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 theatre 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.”

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.” 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.

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

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.”

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. 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. 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 became more sensitive, and fine-grain print stock began to be used during recording, mixing, and printing for final release. 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.

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. 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). But most 1930s scenes relied on the sharp, sober presentation of dialogue and behavior exemplified in Monroe Stahr’s phone-call intrigue.

     

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). 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. 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.”

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). Production values became more flamboyant thanks to rich Technicolor, bigger budgets, and ambitious special effects. 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. “Exploitation pictures,” once relegated to Poverty Row, went upmarket as studios based combat pictures, spy films, and crime movies on the day’s headlines. 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.

                                                                           

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 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.

Extract from the book. Lapham's Quarterly, October 25, 2017.

Details on the book: The University of Chicago Press

The curious reader whose reference points for '40s films are such classics as Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), and It's a Wonderful Life (1947) will have to search through the index to be satisfied, but it's worth the effort. The first two titles, adaptations of James M. Cain novels, worked different sides of the era's storytelling approaches. In the first, Director and co-screenwriter Billy Wilder understood that the flashback approach (very popular for the era) was about “Inevitability suspense".

“…Double Indemnity uses the flashback to create the sort of 'doom' plot associated with Cain's novels and film noir generally…Flashbacks trade on…hindsight bias…Once we know an outcome, we tend to think that it was obvious before the fact." It didn't hurt that stars Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck were desperate, vicious, and shamelessly conspiring to kill her husband in order to collect insurance money. It was a film dictated by a dying man (much like Wilder's later classic "Sunset Boulevard") and the thrill of these stories was in knowing from the start how things ended up.

                                                                                    

In Mildred Pierce, which Bordwell includes in a section called “Telling It Backward, or Sideways, or In Bits" we see how some approaches in film were ingeniously misleading. Was this title character the killer? “Mildred's opening sequence is a masterpiece of cunning 1940's misdirection, but at least it hints, however fleetingly, at what will prove to be the truth." Everything we know about Joan Crawford's shameless sacrifice as the mother to a heartless daughter is in the eyes, the shadows, and all the shades between.

 With It's a Wonderful Life, Bordwell has an overwhelming task. He needs to effectively incorporate how this remarkable film so successfully and ingeniously absorbs various styles to represent the best of the era. It's a post-WWII Frank Capra film starring James Stewart as George Bailey, a hapless Bedford Falls Buildings and Loans financier at the end of his ropes. As the film starts, angels are praying for him to pull through his crisis of faith. There's a 90-minute flashback tracing his life and times, and as Bordwell points out, it follows another tradition of the era: “The embedded story uses a minor schema of the period the biography of the exemplary ordinary man… a goal-oriented protagonist, but his goal is maddeningly frustrated by accidents."

It's a bold, audacious film for the time. Clarence the angel (Henry Travers) is a loveable character, but his presence is not all innocence. “The film has already synchronized George's past with that of the audience, binding them through public events like Depression and war…" What's remarkable for Bordwell is how this era he's examining was able to dwell in the shadows of the murder mystery noir and also highlight films like It's a Wonderful Life, a hybrid of fantasy/wish fulfillment life and love after death that was still not afraid to go dark when and if necessary.

(...)

Bordwell carefully spells out his arguments about flashbacks, especially the different way they were (and are) used in literature and film. “In fact, film flashbacks are oddly unliterary in being freed from the character recalling… them. A novel's flashback is traditionally confined to the knowledge of the character experiencing it… a film flashback is almost never restricted to what a character could plausibly know." He makes a clear and effective delineation between recalling (perhaps through the gauze of romanticized sentimentality) and recounting (more likely a character being called upon to account for their actions on a given day.) It can be a little difficult to follow, but Bordwell presents it in a clear, effective manner. There are embedded flashbacks, second layer flashbacks, and core flashbacks. Their shared goal, of course, is always to reinforce the theme. It's how the filmmakers use these tools that separates the minor from the major players.

Once he establishes the variations of flashbacks in the films of the era, Bordwell argues that “Flashback construction is the most visible way that Hollywood dramaturgy of the 1940's broke a story's continuity." How did they do it? In the instance of a classic like The Best Years of Our Lives, the filmmakers allowed us to pick our heroes. “Each of its three protagonists… could have provided a film on his own… The men represent three branches of the service… The film's exceptional length allows each story line to bring in secondary characters…" The only way such a film could earn its length and the trust of the audience, then and now, is to demonstrate skill in juggling the characters without any visible subsequent damage.

                                                                      

There are flashbacks, multiple plot lines, and then there's real time. Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) was one of the first and best examples of a film that unfolded in “real time" (roughly 90 minutes) as two young men host a dinner party. They've killed a third, placed the body within the location, and we know it within the first act. Their professor (James Stewart) manages to uncover the truth, and the strength of the film (then and now) rests in Hitchcock's style, his technique. For Bordwell, “Hitchcock… offered filmmakers models of what to do and what to avoid." With such efforts as the lethal suburban domestic suspense murder mystery Shadow of a Doubt (1943), the classy Notorious (1946), and the gothic Rebecca (1940), Hitchcock developed the template from which so many others would follow.

Again, Bordwell has an enormous task here. How do you encompass the impact of such larger than life characters like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles without letting that narrative overwhelm his mission? In “Hitchcock and Welles: The Lessons of the Masters", Bordwell notes the differences. “Circumstances made Welles peripatetic." After 1941's masterpiece Citizen Kane, (which periodically alternates with Hitchcock's 1958 Vertigo as the most lauded film of all time), Welles, was usually on the run away from others and towards validation.

“During Hitchcock's final years [he died in 1980] his reputation among cinephiles grew hugely, despite films that didn't find favor with either critics or a large public. Welles went out with an emotionally piercing Shakespeare adaptation… a litter of unfinished products. Both men were sometimes denounced as mountebanks, but eventually they ruled film culture."

It's this comprehensive and clear-headed assessment that makes Bordwell's book a thick, academic volume that educates, illuminates, connects the past with the present, and at times thrills with this picture of American culture at a crossroads. The reader is able to envision a studio system churning out product under the mandate of Selznick or Mayer or others in the studio system. The growth of auteurs like Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges was powerful to watch. Add to that Charlie Chaplin's audaciously charming serial killer in Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and the players became more daring, more complex. Reinventing Hollywood brilliantly and effectively shines a necessary light on an era that came after the golden age of the late '30s and before the '50s, when the studios were on their final leg and dealing with the power of TV. Dive deep into this book and follow Bordwell as he successfully proves that revolutionaries, renegades, and visionaries were as strong in the '40s as they were in the '60s. The likes of the players Bordwell analyzes may not be working now, but history and retrospect will probably find a way to find today's great risk-takers overturning the tables and making us see common themes from yet another angle.

 'Reinventing Hollywood' Educates, Illuminates and Connects Films Past and Present. Review of the book by Christopher John Stevens, PopMatters, November 6, 2017. 

Radio was a primary laboratory, something that tends to be overlooked, because while people continue to listen to old music and watch old movies, few take much trouble to track down old radio plays. How many hours did Americans spend in the 1940s listening to voices in the dark, as Welles or Arch Oboler created dense dramatic soundscapes for an audience that had learned to pay attention to every audible clue? The fluidity of radio drama—its ability to shift from place to place, to switch narrators, to vividly describe events through sound effects alone—was a source for much of what seems most characteristic of 1940s movies. The potent emotional possibilities of voice-over narration had no cinematic precedent: the offscreen voice of Irving Pichel breaking into the narrative of How Green Was My Valley and at the same time announcing its conclusion with “Men like my father cannot die,” or the voice of Welles accompanying the shattered Tim Holt through the streets and into the deserted family mansion in The Magnificent Ambersons as he tells us that “George Amberson Minafer had got his comeuppance,” or Robert Mitchum describing the long days of waiting for Jane Greer to walk into a Mexican cantina in Out of the Past.

Radio was a more intimate medium than film. It whispered suggestions, and you completed its pictures within yourself. Improvements in sound technology made it more intimate yet, as the faintest gasp of breath or rustling curtain became distinctly audible. Those same improvements made their way into movie theaters, until soundtracks were as detailed and descriptive as the visuals:

A B picture like One Crowded Night (1940) can capture sleeves brushing a diner’s counter. A medium shot of two men drinking coffee can include the tiny sounds of their swallowing (Fallen Angel, 1945). In merely twenty seconds, Lady on a Train (1945) gives us the noises of footsteps on carpets, stairs, and wood flooring, a bag tossed from a window onto a canvas car top, the swish of a door, and telltale creak that reveals the heroine hiding behind it—all standing out against a fluctuating orchestral score.

The malleability of recorded sound lent indispensable support to the tensions and terrors so often depicted: the heavy breathing of a threatening phone call, a haunting remembered phrase echoing in the mind, the approach of a distant police car siren. On the screen, the noises that on the radio were shorthand for unseen events became an overloading of the visible, in which the sound of the smallest thing that happened was isolated and amplified, often, as Bordwell suggests, in distinct counterpoint with a symphonic environment created by Max Steiner or David Raksin.

Hollywood innovated in order to compete. Modernist stylization, Freudian plot lines, documentary realism, the otherworldly abstraction of theremin music: all these were no more than plausible ways of giving the product line a fresh sheen. But whether in the hands of artists within the system with their own preoccupations or simply by the expressive force of the forms themselves, new ways of constructing stories could end by generating new stories. The form itself became the story. The splintered personality of the troubled Laraine Day in The Locket is rendered through a complicated series of contradictory flashbacks, a Hollywood-style Cubism that literally embodies her madness to far more effect than any glib verbal diagnosis. The triangular romance of Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon takes on an unexpected ambiguity not through any particular originality in its situations or plot points—even if it did manage to nudge an inch or so beyond Production Code conventions—but through a deliberately elliptical presentation that leaves its characters’ intentions unexplained: “The obscurity of their motives and purposes is enhanced by the utterly objective narration that rules nearly the entire film.…They may be dissembling or simply assuming a certain attitude by habit.”

At times—as Bordwell demonstrates amusingly in a detailed analysis of Arthur Ripley’s The Chase —the structural devices may have exercised an aesthetic power beyond the intentions of the filmmakers. This adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s The Black Path of Fear has a deserved reputation as one of the most hallucinatory of B movies, but the film’s dream-within-a-dream loopiness resulted in large part from the producers’ pragmatic desire to refashion the plot so that the female lead would not get killed halfway through the picture. The old “it was all a dream” device was brought into play, but in such half-logical fashion as to throw the whole story into a Borgesian mode of infinite regression.

The book has many accounts of similarly bizarre examples: a movie in which virtually the entire running time is devoted to a flashback that turns out to be a lie (The Guilty), or a mystery constructed within a psychoanalytic framework that unaccountably culminates in a Sid Caesar monologue satirizing psychoanalysis (The Guilt of Janet Ames). Bordwell keeps the book in focus by fixing his eye essentially on the narrative devices themselves rather than the ambitions of those who used them or the ultimate merit of the films in which they did so, and thus Citizen Kane is juxtaposed with One Crowded Night, The Guilt of Janet Ames with Double Indemnity, all these hundreds of films flung together as in the world in which they came into being.

 Freudian Noir. Review of the book by Geoffrey O’Brien. New York Review of Books, May 24, 2018.              

David Bordwell on working on the book : 

Instead of social reflection, we should expect refraction. Decision-makers opportunistically grab memes and commonplaces (the unhappy housewife, the juvenile delinquent, the returning vet) in hopes they can make something appealing out of them. They absorb those into familiar (narrative) forms. We get, then, not a “vertical” or top-down flow of social anxieties into artworks, but a “horizontal” ecosystem, a dynamic of exchange and transformation. The creators copy one another, obeying local norms while also resetting boundaries. This process includes selective assimilation of ideas thrown up by the culture, and it gets amplified by network effects, as sticky ideas themselves get copied. In other words, ideology doesn’t turn on the camera. The final film is always mediated by humans working in institutions, and both the people and the institution have many agendas.

A second point follows. Working on this book brought home to me how much film owes to other media. In a way, Forties cinema became more “novelistic” because it sought to assimilate techniques of split viewpoints, replays, inner monologue, and subjective response characteristic not so much of modernism (those were old hat by the 1940s) but of popular fiction and what we might call “middlebrow modernism.” A Letter to Three Wives (1948) attaches itself in turn to three women, each with memories of the past, with that trio interrupted by a never-seen fourth woman mockingly narrating the tale. It’s a cinematic treatment of the shifting viewpoints and personified narrative voices to be found in the nineteenth-century novel (Dickens, Collins, James) and later in genre fiction, not least in mystery tales. (It’s also a modification of the source novel.)

But you could also argue, as André Bazin did, that the 1940s saw a new “theatricalization” of cinema, with self-conscious adaptations that stressed stage conventions like the single-setting action. And of course radio supplied important prototypes for acoustic texture and first-person voice-over. Each of these devices wasn’t simply ported over to film; moving images and recorded sound gave literary, theatrical, and radio-based techniques new expressive possibilities. And all depended on the churn of people working side by side to innovate within familiar norms.

Observations on film art. September 13, 2017