In the 1930s, despite the impact of the Hays Censorship Board on restricting content, movies were perhaps the nation’s top influencers in a world that was being wacked by authoritarian regimes, both communist and fascist.
They served a huge role in ameliorating the terrible impacts of the Great Depression and the unresolved ongoing crises that persisted following the end of the Great War in 1918. While some of the most constructive cultural modifications of society under FDR came through motion pictures, they also included particularly creative contributions like jewish refugee Max Reiner’s classic 1935 production of Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” with an all-star cast that included the first firm role of Mickey Rooney as Puck and James Cagney, Dick Powell, Olivia DeHavilland, Joey Brown and Ross Alexander. It opened with a performance of Mendelsohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” overture. Later, the filming of that movie became the subject of a hilarious play by Ken Ludwig, “Shakespeare in Hollywood.”
There were many other classic films, as well, such as the Golddigger movies of 1933, 1935 and 1937, the Thin Man series that featured a role for the pet puppy Asta, and of course the huge classic, “The Wizard of Oz.” Much more of a sour political intervention came from “Gone With the Wind,” which wound up out gunning the “Wizard of Oz” in 1939 as an overtly racist, pro-Southern account of the Civil War. Overall, however, the decade can be counted among the most important for helping to shape the thinking and morality of the Silent Generation that took such deserved pride in defeating the Nazis and then holding the advances of the Soviet Union at bay following World War 11.
It was a period when the world could indeed look with great pride on the generosity of spirit that defined America then, even as “America First” domestic fascism was also alive and well. Whereas a big deal is made out of the fact that New York’s Madison Square Garden was host to a sold out pro-Nazi rally in February 1939, it was puny by comparison to the near 100,000 who attended the concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. two months later to hear the great African-American operatic performer Marion Anderson.
First lady Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for that concert after Anderson had been denied use of the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall on account of her race.
But the decade culminated with one of the most creative and insightful movies ever, “Citizen Kane” in 1941, the year prior to Pearl Harbor, starring and co-written by the incredibly talented Orson Welles.
The movie was vehemently opposed by powerful newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who believed it was a barely veiled biopic of him. Hearst by 1935 owned 28 major newspapers all across the country, 18 magazines and a variety of news services. He was virulently anti-British, opposed the U.S. entry into World War I and the League of Nations.
But at the heart of the film’s message is the loss of idealism and the love of life that comes in childhood, when something far more valued than wealth, power and possession of things mattered.
It was the importance of loving life, embodied as Citizen Kane lay dying in uttering his final word, “Rosebud.” That was a reference to his favorite childhood companion, his sled, that he’d spent so much time enjoying before he grew up to big time adulthood and the loss of so much innocent, simple joy and exuberance for life.
It is a timeless message and insight that Welles captured so well in this film, of the kind of world in which we lose our most valued joy by being turned into adults and developed as fodder for war machines by having one’s ambitions exploited for the ultimate gains of others.
When Abraham was commanded to spare his son, Isaac, in the Old Testament, the birth of great, moral world religions ensued but the command has always been getting lost. As older men use younger ones to fight their wars and condemn their lives to misery, joy in life gets lost.
