Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940-1960

Chapter 1: Hollywood in the Crucible of War

11 1 Hollywood in the Crucible of War In early May 1940, Hollywood producer David O. Selznick spoke to an audience gathered at the University of Rochester. While his motion picture Gone with the Wind (1939) was playing in crowded movie houses around the country, Selznick had strutted through a season of awards ceremonies and speaking engagements. Hollywood’s bespectacled “wunderkind”—at the very pinnacle of his storied career—gladly accepted critical praise and box office rewards that spring. But despite shepherding his production with an almost obsessive eye, Selznick had other things on his mind this night in Rochester. On the eve of Hitler’s seizure of Paris, Selznick lectured students on “New Frontiers in American Life.” At Hollywood’s brightest moment and perhaps the world’s darkest , Selznick stood at the intersection between foreign policy and popular culture. That night, Selznick spoke of a new age dawning in world affairs as well as in cultural affairs. The man who produced what many regarded as Hollywood’s greatest spectacular also understood that motion pictures reached beyond mere commercialism. “I am not insensitive to the importance of motion pictures upon the American way of living as a whole, and upon American thought, and indeed upon world thought,” he told students eager to hear his message. With war on his and his listeners’ minds, Selznick added, “As a propaganda medium, whether or not it is consciously so used, it has few if any equals.” Of course, the political uses of cinema were well known already by 1940. “For better or for worse,” Selznick told his audience, motion pictures affected the viewer’s fundamental “ideals” and “behavior” by defining glamour, success, and even nationalism. American films constructed common values for “people of all races—white and yellow and brown—the whole world over” because audiences identified with Clark Gable, and “girls of six continents argue that they should 12 Hollywood in the Crucible of War be allowed to behave differently than their mothers because of the screen behavior of Loretta Young.” More broadly, “Democracy can find no more effective salesmen in the halls of a war-time Parliament than our Hollywood-created Hardy family.” In sum, American films—acting as “this country’s most fascinating ambassadors”—would project American power abroad.1 As powerful as the motion picture would be in the short term, a new frontier in television would go even further in the long term. Speaking months after David Sarnoff and Franklin Roosevelt introduced television at the New York World’s Fair, Selznick implored his audience to envision a time in the future when Hollywood would broadcast motion pictures into “millions of homes throughout the world.” Just imagine the prospects.2 Selznick, scion of an earlier generation of ethnic filmmakers, understood that the American motion picture industry was coming of age in the 1940s, with “a young generation taking over.” Selznick was among them. Hollywood was populated by idealistic, ambitious, and influential individuals like him who infused their productions with political opinions. As much as the production process was the result of collaboration, individuals ’ ideas made their way to the screen. And in the 1940s, with little doubt, the film production process was enveloped in the most politically charged environment in its history. Political values, largely influenced by the changing world scene of the 1940s, affected motion picture content and the industry’s production process itself. By looking at both industry development and cinematic content, one may see that a contest over American national identity took place during the 1940s, particularly in the crucible of the Second World War. Rehearsal for War Hollywood had changed dramatically since its founding almost fifty years earlier, from dusty desert to cultural showplace with a powerful, entrenched studio system. The “Big Eight” comprised the five “Major” studios—MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century-Fox, and RKO Pictures—and the three “Major Minor” studios: Universal, Columbia , and the important independent distributor United Artists.3 Together, these eight studios accounted for 75 percent of American films and 65 percent of the world’s films. All told, these eight studios controlled the domestic market by gathering 90 percent of the box office receipts. Production was only one part of their operations in the 1940s. The five Majors also owned theater chains. Paramount alone controlled 1,250 Hollywood in the Crucible of War 13 theaters in forty-three states before the war. Others divided the country...