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
