1939: Twelve Months of Magic

By Gerald Clarke

It all happened in a single year, just a half-century ago. The dark days seemed to have ended at last -- the years of the Depression and the dust bowl -- and Americans were regaining their pride and self-confidence. They had touched bottom, but they had pulled themselves up. As the '30s ended, the New York World's Fair summed up the nation's suddenly buoyant mood with its official march, Dawn of a New Day. And who, in the atmosphere of optimism that marked the start of 1939, could have doubted that it was so?

Certainly not Hollywood, which was beginning the greatest year of its Golden Age. In fact, it was to be the most memorable twelve months in the history of the American cinema. There was Gone With the Wind, of course, whose production attracted more intense public curiosity than any other film ever made. When Vivien Leigh -- beautiful, talented, but indisputably English -- was cast in the role of the Old South's own Scarlett O'Hara, thousands of Americans reacted with patriotic fury, as if the Redcoats had burned Washington again. "Why not cast Chiang Kai-shek and change the part to Gerald O'Hara?" a correspondent indignantly demanded of Movie Mirror, one of the era's many fan magazines.

But Gone With the Wind was just one in the astonishing list of movies released in 1939. There was also The Wizard of Oz, the grandest and most glorious of all fantasies, and Stagecoach, the model for all westerns to come. There was the dark, gothic romance of Wuthering Heights; adventure stories like Gunga Din, Beau Geste and Drums Along the Mohawk; sophisticated comedies like Ninotchka, The Women and Idiot's Delight.

Historical dramas? Of course. In 1939 there was something for everyone. Try Juarez, Union Pacific and The Story of Alexander Graham Bell. Tearjerkers? Take a box of Kleenex and see Dark Victory, Intermezzo, Goodbye, Mr. Chips and The Light That Failed. Politics? Just think of Frank Capra's populist parable Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or that gritty tragedy Of Mice and Men. The list goes on and on: Babes in Arms; Destry Rides Again; The Hunchback of Notre Dame; W.C. Fields' You Can't Cheat an Honest Man; The Roaring Twenties; and The Cat and the Canary, which gave Bob Hope his first starring role.

In those days of studio czars and long-term contracts, there was no time to watch the waves in Malibu while waiting for inspiration, the right script or more money. Everyone worked in the fantasy factories of 1939, and nearly every major figure was represented by at least one picture. Jimmy Stewart's fans, for example, had no fewer than five to choose from (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Destry Rides Again, Made for Each Other, It's a Wonderful World and Ice Follies of 1939), and so did Henry Fonda enthusiasts (Jesse James, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, Let Us Live and The Story of Alexander Graham Bell).

Bette Davis was in four movies (Dark Victory, Juarez, The Old Maid and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex), as were Claudette Colbert (Drums Along the Mohawk, Midnight, It's a Wonderful World and Zaza) and Mickey Rooney (Huckleberry Finn, Babes in Arms and two movies in his enormously successful Andy Hardy series). Rooney, incidentally, was No. 1 at the box office that year. Greta Garbo laughed, as the ads triumphantly proclaimed, in Ninotchka; Ingrid Bergman made her American debut in Intermezzo; Marlene Dietrich saved her flagging career with Destry Rides Again; the Marx Brothers clowned in At the Circus; and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced through The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. Judy Garland, who was all of 16, was in only two pictures -- The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Arms -- but her giant talent and irresistible personality captured the screen and permanently touched the country's heart.

Behind the cameras were almost all the directors whose work is so avidly studied in the film schools, a group that included John Ford, George Cukor, George Stevens, Cecil B. DeMille, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, William Wyler, Busby Berkeley, Henry King, Ernst Lubitsch and Victor Fleming. Behind them were the producers, who were far more important then than they are now, men such as David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl F. Zanuck, Pandro S. Berman, Hal Wallis and Arthur Hornblow Jr.

The trouble with a Golden Age is that nobody sees the sheen and shine until years later. In Hollywood's case, it was many years later. East Coast intellectuals, who thought that the only real acting was done on Broadway, sneered at Hollywood's output. But, then, why shouldn't they have? The studio bosses, after all, liked to brag that they were just businessmen whose job it was to turn out movies -- no one in those days called them films -- the way General Electric did refrigerators and Ford did cars. The stories of their often comical obtuseness have since filled several hundred memoirs. "Who wants to see some dame go blind and die?" asked Jack Warner when Davis said she wanted to make Dark Victory. But he reluctantly gave in, and the story of the dame who goes blind and dies was one of Warner Bros.' biggest hits.

The directors and scriptwriters -- both William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald were employed in Hollywood that year -- were severely restricted, moreover, by Hollywood's rigid code of self-censorship. Long kisses were forbidden, adultery always had to be severely punished, and double beds were for sinners in New York City. In Hollywood movies, even happily married couples, like Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man series, slept in widely separated twin beds, clad top to bottom in pajamas or nightgown. Such now innocuous four-letter words as hell and damn were proscribed, and Gone With the Wind titillated and sometimes shocked audiences with Clark Gable's final words to Leigh: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

For their part, Americans wanted only to be entertained, or perhaps cooled on a hot summer's night. Until well after World War II, movie theaters and department stores were about the only places that could boast air conditioning. There were, by today's standards, relatively few public diversions; television was still a new invention. Sometime during the week, an estimated 85 million people, about two-thirds of the U.S. population, paid an average 25 cents to go to the movies, which included a cartoon and newsreel as well as the standard double feature. A double feature usually meant a big picture with big stars and a B picture with little stars, like Charlie Chan in Reno and Mr. Moto in Danger Island, to name only two from 1939. To satisfy the insatiable public, the studios released 388 movies that year (compared with 349 in 1988), 378 in traditional black-and-white and ten, including Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, in that relatively new process called Technicolor.

To the studios, movies were products. To audiences, they were cheap entertainment. To actors, directors and producers, they were a paycheck. Why, then, were so many of the movies of 1939 so good? Clearly, something had gone wrong -- or wondrously right -- on the Hollywood assembly line: the studios were not merely churning out moneymaking products, as they thought they were, but a magic that endures to this day.

There is no formula for magic, and what happened then is something of a mystery even today. Part of the explanation may be that the studio system, which had been born 20 years or so earlier, had come of age; it had reached its maturity but was still full of zest. The bosses may have been crude and often tyrannical, but they loved their business, they knew what they were doing, and they had created huge organizations whose only purpose was to send new pictures to thousands of theaters, most of which, in the U.S., were owned by the studios themselves. At the same time, moviemaking had reached a level of technical perfection that would have seemed miraculous even five years before. That technology has long since been surpassed, but a film from 1939 still looks modern, whereas one from 1933 looks like an antique.

Other explanations for the magic of 1939 lie more in the realm of metaphysics than economics or technology. Hollywood in those days really was Hollywood, which is to say it was the place where movies, as well as deals, were made. Very few pictures were shot on location, and inventive scouts either found or contrived every scene they wanted within a few miles of Hollywood and Vine. The Yorkshire moors of Wuthering Heights were so faithfully recreated in nearby Chatsworth that director Wyler bragged that his field of heather looked more authentic than a real field of heather.

Hollywood was a community in which people played together and fought together but always showed up at dawn to make movies together. Commuting by jet from Los Angeles to New York was 20 years away, and only between pictures did the moviemakers and stars leave town. Travel was still a time-consuming, albeit luxurious, event: several days on the Super Chief and 20th Century Limited to New York, then on to Europe aboard the Normandie or Queen Mary. Pan American did not introduce the first commercial flights to Europe until June 1939. But even then, its majestic Boeing flying boats took more than 29 hours to get from Port Washington, N.Y., to Marseilles.

Though it liked to think of itself as the capital of sophistication, Hollywood was in fact just as unworldly as such places as Topeka, or Twin Falls, Idaho, where most of its inhabitants came from. The movies they made reflected and gained much of their strength from that innocence, and they resounded with a sincerity that no amount of artifice can duplicate. Would any scriptwriter today dare to type a corny line like this? "If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with." The writers of The Wizard of Oz dared and thereby helped make a great film.

They were the mirror of the country, those men and women who made the movies of 1939. Like the country, they were confident, certain of themselves and their future. They knew, or thought they knew, the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, and that confidence, which they took for granted, was the rock upon which they built.

But their Golden Age was soon to end, and 1939, which had begun on a note of optimism in both Europe and America ended in a new world war. With an uncanny prescience, the movies of 1939 seemed to anticipate what was to come. People may have gone crazy over there, they seemed to say, but here, here in America, there is still safety. Even that sunny musical, Babes in Arms, ends in a curious and, in retrospect, quite poignant, plea for peace. "We send our greetings to friendly nations," sings the chorus, led by Garland and Rooney. "We may be Yanks, but we're your relations. Drop your sabers, we're all going to be good neighbors here in God's country!"

America was to maintain an uneasy neutrality for nearly two more years, but Hollywood, that faithful mirror, soon reflected the grim reality of 1940. Never again was it to have the brash confidence and high spirits of that year of genius and glitter, 1939.