In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

58 “I wanted life to be romantic, and I wanted to be thin” Girls Growing Up with Cinema in the 1930s Popular memory as well as historical record have it that in Britain cinema began to enjoy its greatest popularity during the 1930s. It has been claimed that Britain had the highest annual per capita cinema attendance in the world, and it is certainly true that for considerable sectors of the population “the pictures” became an integral part of daily life during the decade. Cultural competences associated with cinemagoing—a taken-for-granted shared knowledge of (invariably hollywood) films and stars—were widespread , to the extent even of being referenced within films themselves. The popular singer, radio performer, and music hall artiste Gracie Fields was the highest grossing performer in British-made films for a good part of the 1930s. Fields’s appeal, which lay in the down-to-earth quality of her star persona, stood in complete contrast to the more obvious appeal of hollywood glamour. For certain class and regional fractions of the British cinema audience, “our Gracie” was “one of us,” and like any demotic performer could be relied upon to give voice to the current concerns and preoccupations of “ordinary people.”1 This included “the pictures,” and there are knowing references to hollywood cinema in several of her films. In the gritty but upbeat Sally in Our Alley (1931), for example, the Fields character—the Sally of the title—rescues a motherless and delinquent young woman, Florrie, from a brutal father. Florrie finds escape from her joyless existence in hollywood’s fantasy world, spending the little cash she has on film magazines and going to the pictures, and then trying to imitate the makeup and hairstyles of her favorite stars. Florrie’s eventual redemption through Sally’s generosity and goodness involves the exorcism of her obsession with “the pictures” and an acceptance of the limitations—and of 01 Chapters_1_3.indd 58 1/13/10 11:57 AM 59 Girls Growing Up with Cinema in the 1930s the less glamorous if more communitarian pleasures—of “real” life. This resolution is fully in keeping with the general tenor of attitudes toward cinema in Britain during the early 1930s. Opinions would soften later in the decade, though; and the 1934 Fields vehicle Sing As We Go is perhaps indicative of the start of what was to become a significant cultural shift. The film features, in a minor part, a teenage maid-of-all-work, Gladys, whose last act before settling down to sleep at night is to moon over portraits of her favorite film star. Gladys’s starstruck behavior is regarded more indulgently than critically by the Fields character: “Come on, hurry up. Put that light out and take Clark Gable with you.” In both these films, a preoccupation with cinema and film stars figures is seen as silly, even as damaging; and in both, the foolishness of the starstruck girls is set against the no-nonsense big-sisterliness of “our Gracie.” It is as if in the characters she plays, Gracie Fields the film star absolves herself from involvement in the peculiar fascinations cinema held for its— and her—fans; while the pitiable or slightly ridiculous figures of Florrie and Gladys stand as embodiments of a stereotypical contemporary film fan. But such images of solitary, starstruck girls fail to do justice either to the complexity of 1930s cinema culture or to the significance of films and cinema in the everyday lives of young women of the time. According to the editors of Mass-Observation at the Movies: “While a large proportion of the population at large went to the cinema occasionally, the enthusiasts were young, working class, urban, and more often female than male.”2 The downtrodden girls of the popular imagination, then, translate as the young, urban, working-class females of the social historians’ account. however characterized, though, all these young women are undergoing the passage from girlhood to womanhood. Like Florrie, they are experimenting with identities, with ways of being women. But alongside their dreams, they must negotiate family ties and obligations, school or work, friendships , and the anxieties and pleasures of consumerism and courtship. For these young filmgoers of the 1930s, adolescence is constrained and shaped in particular ways by circumstances of social class, gender relations, and economics. At some level, we already know who the keenest cinemagoers of the 1930s were, and even something of their tastes and preferences. We can speculate, too, about...

Share