The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (10 page)

Film trade publication writers hugged her too. “The chief topic of conversation at home, at the office, at the club and wherever you go is Shirley Temple,” the
Hollywood Reporter
exulted. And everyone rejoiced in her unaffected, natural manner.
Time
magazine emphasized how the “blonde and pretty” discovery had been chosen from two hundred child actors answering a general casting call. Yet she apparently had no previous training and had learned singing from imitating radio crooners and picked up most of her tap routine on the Fox lot. That she was supposedly only four and a half years old and the daughter of a Santa Monica assistant bank manager, not a theatrical family, enhanced her little-darling-next-door image.
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The 1934 breakthrough in
Stand Up and Cheer!
that ultimately led to Shirley’s meeting with the real-life President Roosevelt came at a critical moment not only for the Temple family but also for Fox Film and the American film industry as a whole. That industry had enjoyed spectacular success in the two decades prior to 1933, but in the depths of the Great Depression it struggled to regain its footing. Prior to 1914 the majority of the world’s films were made abroad. When the war disrupted European film production, American filmmakers leapfrogged ahead to capture the world market. Concentrating film production in the Los Angeles area, with its sunshine, temperate climate, and abundant land, and emphasizing maximum efficiency, American companies turned out films on a large scale much as Henry Ford made Tin Lizzies. By 1920 these companies produced 80 percent of the world’s movies; by 1930, 90 percent.
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Dominating the industry were the “Big Five” motion picture conglomerates: Loew’s, Inc., owner of the nation’s largest theater circuit and the parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; Paramount; Warner Bros.; Fox; and Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO). All of these integrated film production, distribution, and exhibition on a massive scale, nationally and internationally. Among the next rank of motion picture corporations, the “Little Three,” Universal Pictures and Columbia Pictures were similarly organized, though with proportionally fewer theaters. The last of the Little Three, United Artists, functioned principally as a backer and distributor for independently produced films. Among the Big Five, most corporate capital was invested in movie theaters, not production, so that, as far as the film corporation presidents were concerned, studios made movies to accord with the needs of exhibitors, not the other way around. Together, these five corporations controlled most of the first-run movie theaters in the country, which screened new movies at least a month before lesser theaters, presented live stage shows and shorts as well as feature films, provided greater amenities, including air-conditioning, and charged premium prices. These advantages and their far greater seating capacity meant that the theaters controlled by the Big Five, although only 15 percent of all those in the country, garnered roughly 75 percent of all box-office receipts.
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Members of the Big Five developed regional concentrations and openly colluded with one another and the Little Three to their mutual advantage. They largely shut out independent products through block booking and blind bidding, whereby independent movie exhibitors were compelled to take a large, motley package of a company’s movies sight unseen, including some as yet unmade, if they wanted to show the top films. Paramount controlled New England, the Upper Midwest, and the South; Warner Bros. presided over the Mid-Atlantic states; Loew’s and RKO divided New York, New Jersey, and Ohio. Fox’s greatest strength lay in the area west of Denver, but it included important holdings in Kansas, western Nebraska, Missouri, and Wisconsin, and presences in such cities as Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit. Fox’s flagship, the ornate Roxy Theatre, the “Cathedral of Motion Pictures,” seated five thousand in its main auditorium in New York City’s Times Square.
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Fox and other corporations established branch offices, agents, and control of theater chains around the world, making American films an overwhelming global presence and exponent of American values. Of these foreign markets, the largest lay in the United Kingdom, which had a robust movie attendance and a keen appetite for American offerings.
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Despite pressure from various countries, most notably Nazi Germany, to restrict American film distribution and exhibition, by 1937 a reported 40 percent of the United States’ major motion picture corporations’ revenues came from abroad. Of these, Great Britain contributed 45 percent, the rest of Europe 25 percent, Australia and New Zealand a combined 12 percent, Latin America 11 percent, the Far East 5 percent, and all other markets 2 percent. In addition, Canada accounted for 5 percent of what was expansively considered the domestic market. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), the trade organization that sought to protect American interests, tried to anticipate material that would prove objectionable in foreign markets and served as the American film industry’s representative with the U.S. Departments of State and Commerce. Roughly half of this global market was English-speaking, and the rest viewed Hollywood films with subtitles, in dubbed versions, or, in smaller language markets, with printed summaries. By one 1938 estimate surveying movie theaters from more than eighty foreign countries, 70 percent of screen time was devoted to American films. In some countries the proportion reached as high as 95 percent.
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America’s major film companies, riding the wave of sound that surged after the success of
The Jazz Singer
in 1927, initially gloated that they were “depression-proof.” The industry did indeed remain profitable as late as 1931, but by 1933 nearly one-third of movie theaters in the country had closed their doors. Paramount had declared bankruptcy, and RKO and Universal had fallen into receivership. Fox Film was staggering badly. Within the past several years, the company had enjoyed a spectacular rise and suffered a crippling fall. By 1929 William Fox had built the enterprise from a chain of movie and vaudeville theaters to the largest motion picture production and distribution empire in the world. His aggressive expansion was heavily mortgaged, however, a gamble that he made confidently, betting on the appeal of innovative sound technology and extensive theater chains to attract new audiences. He lost the bet. An automobile accident in July 1929, the stock market crash that began in October, and an antitrust suit combined to topple him from his position as president and into bankruptcy. Without an experienced pilot, Fox Film Corporation foundered in debt until Sidney Kent took the helm in 1933 and steered it toward a 1935 merger with the brilliant Joseph Schenck’s Twentieth Century Pictures.
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As the movie industry slumped, moreover, moral critics pummeled it from all sides. The very advent of talking pictures that garnered new profits also aroused a backlash against its perceived vulgarity, violence, and sexual impropriety—including titillating and coarse dialogue accentuated by sound. “Silent smut had been bad. Vocal smut cried to the censors for vengeance,” the Jesuit priest Daniel A. Lord observed. “Sophisticated” fare that appealed to young adult urban movie patrons at the profitable first-run theaters shocked and angered parent-teacher associations, women’s organizations, Protestant ministers, and other moral arbiters and pressure groups among the middle class, especially in small towns and rural areas. The famous Payne Fund studies bolstered these concerns. In a series of sociological investigations conducted between 1929 and 1933, they warned of the pervasive and troubling effects of movies on children and youth—ranging from loss of sleep to delinquency and crime. Joining the backlash against Hollywood’s influence on the lives of children and their families, independent neighborhood exhibitors protested that they were forced by distribution contracts to book movies that their audiences found offensive. Various state and local censorship boards snipped objectionable scenes from Hollywood films, sometimes rendering them incomprehensible as a result, and calls mounted for censorship on a national level. Especially alarming to the major film companies, such federal oversight threatened to regulate their monopolistic business practices as well as their movies’ content.
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Hollywood had endeavored to placate its critics and to attract investors with elaborate declarations of its own commitment to reform. To quell the rising moral panic, in March 1930 the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association announced a code of general moral principles and their applications for movie productions—much of it building on previous recommendations of major film executives. The code, drafted by Daniel Lord, emphasized conservative social, sexual, racial, and religious attitudes—above all, the rewards of virtue and punishment of vice. At the same time, it left open numerous possibilities for depictions of wayward figures, especially those struggling with sexual and criminal temptations before they either successfully resisted—or paid the awful price. Yet in the early 1930s many Hollywood films clearly lacked such a clear moral compass, and outcries persisted, until the MPPDA declared that, beginning on July 1, 1934, all of its members’ films would require review and a seal of approval before being released. Appointing a prominent Catholic, Joseph Ignatius Breen, as head of this Production Code Administration (PCA), American movie titans successfully forestalled more draconian penalties.
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That Shirley Temple’s great breakthrough in
Stand Up and Cheer!
came only ten weeks before this demonstration of the film industry’s moral rectitude was no accident. Like Breen’s PCA, she represented an emblem of virtuous innocence for an industry scurrying for moral cover.

The film industry sought political cover as well. Just as
Stand Up and Cheer!
linked arms with FDR in celebrating national recovery, so did Hollywood promote a positive vision of American democratic life. This emphasis pervaded films of all sorts: gangster and detective thrillers, screwball comedies, melodramas, musicals, and westerns. Indeed, taken as a whole, 1930s Hollywood films stressed American rather than exotic locales, reaffirmed populist rather than elite values, and stressed the emotional virtues of resiliency, optimism, courage, and cheer. In such ways, Hollywood participated fully in the broad artistic and cultural enterprise of the decade, energetically encouraged by the New Deal and abundantly manifested in literature, art, music, drama, history, and other fields: the reaffirmation of vernacular forms, democratic values, and American traditions.

To be sure, a lighter tone and characteristic happy ending had long distinguished American cinema from its English and European counterparts. As early as 1909, the trade paper
Moving Picture World
advised exhibitors, “Give the public good cheer and watch the increased stream of dimes and nickels which will flow into your coffers.” Explaining the dominance of Hollywood films in Great Britain in 1928, the future filmmaker John Grierson observed that American movies were optimistic and full of vitality, “bubbling vigor and . . . self-confidence,” whereas their British competitors offered little encouragement or comfort to their audiences. He reported the tart observation of an American, “These English pictures don’t make you feel any good.”
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In the context of the Great Depression, to downplay dispiriting conditions became a conscious ideological choice. The Hollywood film industry treated political and industrial issues gingerly, aiming to affirm the essential rightness of American democracy and capitalism. The MPPDA considered these as much as they did personal morality. Even conventional melodrama had to be handled with care in the context of widespread poverty. Thus, in April 1932 Jason Joy, an administrator of the Motion Picture Production Code, wrote the MGM producer Irving Thalberg concerning
Faithless
, a movie about a rich socialite’s loss of her fortune and descent into prostitution. The drama’s moral issues, he believed, carried disturbing implications in the context of the Great Depression: “If it is to be suggested that the depression not only has stripped the nation of its wealth but has reduced its women to going on the streets as prostitutes to obtain the bare necessities of life, then our whole national life is depicted at a low point. There would be justifiable resentment of this insinuation, particularly in view of the rather heroic efforts being made by the relief organizations, individuals, and the government itself to take care of the needy.”
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In the released version of
Faithless
, a friendly policeman catches the heroine on the verge of her first pickup and sends her back to her husband and the path of virtue.

With the tightening of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1934 and also great pressure for political censorship from movie markets abroad, such restrictions increased. Martin J. Quigley, one of the Catholic architects of the code as well as a leading trade publisher, flatly asserted that movies with a political message “had nothing whatever to do with the amusement industry.” Speaking to white southern theater owners in 1937, Quigley defended Hollywood’s concentration on movies that fostered “contentment and happiness” as a bulwark against political radicalism. Communists and other radicals, he said, “want the film to be realistic—to deal with the facts of life in the raw. They are unhappy because the people are made happy in the theatres. They want the screen to shock and embitter patrons so that the ranks of the discontented will be enlarged, giving to them recruits in greater numbers to flock to their magical cures for what’s wrong with the world.”
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Thus, Hollywood movies, in their very lack of sharp social critique, served a political purpose.

Ultimately, Hollywood not only succeeded in surmounting the immense financial, moral, and political challenges that arose in the early 1930s but went on to attain significant growth, nationally and internationally. This achievement held immense cultural significance. During the Great Depression, the greatest worldwide economic crisis in history, movie attendance rose. In a time of scarcity, spending flowed far beyond dire necessities, pouring into sites of drama, abundance, vitality, and emotional relief. Hollywood’s stupendous supply of entertainment met avid and widespread demand.