Tick...Tock...Tick... Eddie Alperson, you were a genius.
My favorite course at the moment is Professor Bernstein’s Classical Hollywood seminar, not only because it covers one of the periods in American film history that I’m most interested in, but also because it has led me to think in a bit more depth about what sort of research I want to do for my MA thesis, and potentially a dissertation. As of right now I’m thinking of two possible tracks.
First, my work so far on James Cagney at Grand National got me thinking about Poverty Row in general. In film history courses we all learn about studios like Monogram and Republic. These studios were outside the big five integrated majors, and even the so-called “little three” studios that weren’t vertically integrated (since they didn’t own theaters in any meaningful sense). They produced ultra-low-budget product to fill seats, since even the majors couldn’t make enough films to fill double bills changed two or three times a week. Doing research on Grand National, it struck me how quickly they rose and fell…in 1936, they had production facilities, exchanges, and even a few theaters, and they hoped that Cagney could help catapult them into the same category as the majors, but both of Cagney’s films failed miserably (supposedly because the majors blocked distribution) and GN fell apart by the late 30s. At any rate, GN did not want to overthrow the oligopoly of the majors so much as join it. I have been doing some searching and I can’t find any comprehensive academic work on poverty row, their role within the studio system, and especially the role of stars (like Cagney) who had been temporarily “banished” or “expelled” from working with the majors.
"For cat's sake!"
The other possibility arises from a discussion we had in the Hollywood seminar just this week. We were discussing Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (Diana Productions through Universal, 1945 – watch it here). This is a film about a man (Edward G. Robinson) who has an affair with an “actress”-prostitute (Joan Bennett), kills her with an ice pick, and frames her pimp/boyfriend (Dan Duryea) for the murder, lets him be executed, and goes unpunished by the law. The film was actually banned for a time in New York, Milwaukee, and Atlanta, and all of us in the seminar were struck by how a film like this could have gotten a seal from the Production Code. The whole point of the Production Code for the studios was to prevent their films from being censored or banned by outside censorship bodies, and it would seem that in this case the Breen office failed miserably. But Scarlet Street is only a slight limit case – by the late forties and into the fifties, the draconian Production Code of the thirties and early forties seems to have lost its teeth. What lay behind this? Was it the rise of independent production? Changing cultural mores? A lessened economic importance in terms of rural exhibition? As Professor Bernstein pointed out, tomes have been written on the pre-code era and the Production Code at its height, but no one has really done much work on the Production Code in the forties and fifties.
At any rate, if anyone out there has ideas on either of these questions or knows of work that someone has done on either, please do comment.
Time for Kracauer…
