Film is only one of the topics covered so well by Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the GreatDepression (publishsed by W.W. Norton). Morris Dickstein, CUNY professor of English and theater, writes perceptively of many things in this lucid and lengthy account of a time when Americans turned to popular music, movies and literature for emotional sustenance against economic collapse. He covers many things, from the influence of the Communist Party on some writers and artists to the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, from John Steinbeck to Irving Berlin. But Hollywood, which continued to build an audience of habitual moviegoers even during the worst years of uncertainty, occupies a significant portion of his narrative.
One of Dickstein’s themes was how the American preoccupation with individual success faired at a point where the system that promised economic rewards had broken down. Dickstein analyses how the movies mirrored their audience’s anxiety over success and failure, sometimes through escapism but often by enabling people “to tap into their fears and work them through.” Although he alludes only in passing to horror films, Dickstein otherwise covers such characteristic genres of the 1930s as musicals, gangster movies and screwball comedies.
An ambiguous figure, the gangster was doomed to failure for living dangerously outside the law but compelling as an ethnic outsider fighting for his place at the table and as “the epitome of the self-made man.” In many musicals, “the concerns of the individual give way to a new sense of community, interdependence.” The showgirls, actors, directors and producers needed each other to get on with the show, and this pulling together found its abstract representation in the drill team choreography of Busby Berkeley.
The lightning fast verbal wit of screwball comedy developed in response to the tightening of Hollywood censorship, “the tang and effervescence of sharp repartee and the look that accompanied this thrust and parry were the only effective ways of being sexual,” Dickstein writes. The daffy characters in films such as Bringing Up Baby and My Man Godfrey spoke to “energy, spirit, insouciance, and independence, qualities with which their hard pressed audience was quick to identify.” Perceptively, Dickstein draws a connection between the rat-a-tat prose of ‘30s hardboiled crime fiction and the “unsentimental crispness and cynicism” of Depression-era comedy.
Dickstein devotes an entire chapter to a film that would seem to be at the margin of his history, Citizen Kane. Unlike film historians and critics who see the Orson Welles classic as the creative moment for much that follow, including film noir and the jump cuts and multiple perspectives of the New Wave, Dickstein recognizes Citizen Kane as the result of what came before. He calls it “the last film of the 1930s,” a brilliant culmination of a decade of movies about hard-charging reporters, much-raking stories about the rich and their discontents and anxiety over homegrown fascism sprouting on American soil.
