An anatomy of change to be sure. What was America like in 1939? It was on the threshold of a new era, but the experts of the future were scarred by the Great Depression and blind to the impending World War…
The year 1939 saw “Gone With the Wind” which some people still consider the movie to end all movies. And it witnessed a good deal else in the motion-picture field. With an investment of two billion dollars and 282,000 persons regularly employed in it at the start of the year, the industry in 1939 turned out five hundred and thirty feature films and more than seven hundred short subjects. Eighty-five million Americans, or 65 per cent of the total population of all ages, went to the movies at least once a week.
—Lamour’s star image was somewhat unusual in that, from her first starring role, the studio found an image that clicked with the public. Her frequent declarations that she was fed up with wearing sarongs indicate that this image clicked all too well. Her track record at the box office showed that the films in which Lamour did not appear in a sarong reaped less money than the ones in which she did.
By studying the factors that contributed to Dorothy Lamour’s star image, I hope to make a case for both her uniqueness and her ordinariness. That is, she was special because of the unique persona which was created for her, but she was also just another profit-making device for Paramount.—click image for source…
The movies formed the country’s image, abroad and to a great extent at home. Everyone knows that it was a distorted image and did America harm in the world, but many of the movies of 1939, taken on their own terms, were remarkable achievements of popular entertainment. If anyone doubts the depth and breadth of the country’s acceptance of the movies as a cultural asset in 1939, let him remember that it was the year when the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art proudly accepted for its collection the sarong worn by Dorothy Lamour in Her Jungle Love.
—Family of migrant agricultural workers: Canal Point, Florida (1939) In the foreground is a bean hamper which the family use to sit on and they call a ‘muck rocker.’ Some of them are from Missouri and Arkansas.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2160512/Poignant-pictures-poorest-families-survived-Great-Depression.html#ixzz2HoWFGR7S
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What with cars and the beginnings- however rudimentary they look now- of mass industrialization and urbanization, the traditional basic American unit, the family, was showing signs of changing or breaking up. Concern for the delicate psyches of the young and permissiveness in the school and the home, notions to which the middle class of the twenties had paid aggressive lip service but not much more, were now the rule in practice- and the first signs of a backlash were appearing. ( to be continued)…
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