All together now: “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”
Thus goes the oft-quoted dictum of producer Sam Goldwyn, who is not speaking in a malapropism manner but rather correctly articulating a simple directive for Hollywood filmmakers: remember that people attend movie theaters for entertainment, not to hear lectures, and keep your personal politics off screen. Goldwyn’s rule served as a benchmark for the traditional Hollywood era.
The meaning underlying the proverb is resurfacing. The success of the comparatively talking-point-free Twisters, A Quiet Place: Day One, and Deadpool & Wolverine has revived the old wisdom, which has been battered by critics who have consistently connected box office losses to liberal political themes.
Hollywood movies have always sent messages, of course, usually the best when they were not even conscious that they were sending them. Nothing was more effective in preaching the virtues of postwar capitalist democracy than a flag-waving patriotic speech from an on-screen idol than a relaxed portrayal of everyday American life in a wealthy neighborhood of single-family homes. The “chickie race” scene from Rebel Without a Cause (1955) is a representation of teenage anguish and fake bravado in the eyes of Americans. Audiences abroad were astounded to learn that American youths not only possessed personal vehicles but also amassed so many extras that they could amuse themselves by driving them off cliffs.
In academic cinema studies, most of the effort is in deciphering that kind of concealed messaging in supposedly apolitical Hollywood fare. Entire fields of study are devoted to exposing the hidden ideologies that underlie fluffy romantic comedies and adrenaline-packed action movies: the demonic allure of internal combustion engines, the patriarchal designs in climactic scenes. All Hollywood film, viewed through the appropriate prism, becomes political.
For the others of us, however, a movie’s political message needs to be obvious, partisan, blatant, and frequently uttered straight from the screen in order to stick in our thick skulls.
The history of the hectoring technique is almost as old as the motion picture industry itself. Progressive reformers, the forerunners of the social justice movement, seized onto the new platform at the beginning of the 20th century in order to advocate for legislation and increase public awareness. They used the silent screen to spread sermons against poverty (Shoes, 1915), child labor (Children Who Labor, 1912), and alcoholism (Ten Nights in a Bar-room, 1909). The Birth of a Nation (1915) was written with overtly political intentions by D. W. Griffith, who intended it to be both an anti-war tract and a manifesto for white supremacist ideology.
But as Hollywood grew, the Goldwyn rule took hold. “Keep all political politics off the screen” was the mission statement president Will H. Hays issued upon the creation of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America in 1922.Hays maintained, for the duration of his twenty-three-year rule, that the motion picture business was little more than an escape from reality with no discernible political purpose or influence.
Trade critics recited the same line. “The entertainment motion picture is no place for social, political, and economic argument,” declared Martin Quigley, the influential editor-publisher of Motion Picture Herald in 1940. “The propagandists” who would “make the screen their soapbox” should be purged from the industry. For their part, exhibitors figured that any film pleasing to Democrats would displease Republicans and vice versa, so why alienate half your potential audience? The Hays office kept a watchful eye on potential flashpoints. In 1936, it banned a Hollywood version of It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’s best-selling anti-fascist novel, because “the film industry is opposed to using the motion picture for controversial politics.”
Warner Bros. was the exception to the make-no-waves commercial philosophy, the only studio to openly display its liberal ideology. Warner Bros..’ trademark “social consciousnesses” films of the 1930s stood apart from Hollywood’s product line in acknowledging a world beyond the theater lobby where the Great Depression blighted lives and crushed hopes. Its fast-paced series of noirish melodramas condemned the criminal justice system (I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 1932), worker exploitation (Black Fury, 1935), and lynching (They Won’t Forget, 1937). Moreover, the studio choreographed a solution to the problems of the day that was impossible to miss. In Footlight Parade (1933), a Busby Berkeley chorus line coalesces into a picture of FDR and the Blue Eagle, symbol of the New Deal. However, Jack and Harry Warner were the exceptions. Paramount vice president Frank Freeman spoke for the consensus. “Films should entertain, not theorize,” he said, and “should not be used to form public opinion on any controversial subject.”
Hollywood was forced to stop pretending it was exclusively in the business of producing escapist foam when World War II broke out. The entertainment machine was retooled to serve overt, obvious, spoken-aloud ideological purposes before, during, and after the war.
Between 1939 and 1941, the motion picture industry made its first forays into contentious ground during the prewar interregnum, when America was not at war but Europe was.After Hitler came to power in 1933, the big studios faced a geopolitical reality that they had mostly disregarded and started an audacious cycle of anti-Nazi pictures. Following Warner Bros.’ pioneering work, Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), the film industry abandoned its isolationist stance and encouraged Americans to follow suit, if not directly assist in the European conflict, then at least gain an understanding of the adversary and recognize that the wolf was at the door. Charles Chaplin’s 1940 film The Great Dictator, in which the comic portrays a similar-looking Hitler, is the most well-known example of the cycle.
Political films frequently suffer from the common hazard of didactic speechifying, in which a voice of virtue delivers the lesson in an on-screen monologue.Based on Phyllis Bottome’s 1937 novel, Frank Borzage’s The Mortal Storm (1940) adopted a different approach, subtly conveying the idea that a loving household’s bliss is destroyed by Nazism in Germany through the lens of a family drama.Hollywood’s sudden interest in foreign affairs was so unusual that, in 1941, the U.S. Senate brought a number of studio executives before an inquiry committee, accusing them of “war mongering.” Hollywood (led by Chris Yogerst) despises Hitler! The entire story is chronicled in Jew-Baiting, Anti-Nazism, and the Senate Investigation into Warmongering in Motion Pictures, which was published in 2020.)
During World War II, war mongering became official government policy, so official that the Office of War Information issued a guidebook of instructions for best propaganda practices entitled the “Government Manual for the Motion Picture Industry.” Wartime Hollywood followed orders in countless films showing guys cheerfully giving up recreational driving to conserve gasoline, gals making do without nylons, and kids collecting scrap metal. Traditional genres were refitted to teach teamwork and tolerance (Air Force, 1943), home front solidarity (Since You Went Away, 1944), and dutiful self-sacrifice (Casablanca, 1942). Not all the wartime messages mandated by the OWI have dated well, most notoriously Mission to Moscow (1943), which rewrote the history of the Soviet Union in the 1930s along Stalinist lines. Predictably, though, even at the height of wartime patriotism — pace Goldwyn — audiences grew weary of a cinematic diet of non-stop lectures. “The war, on film, is clearly out of hand,” Red Kahn at Motion Picture Daily dared to say in 1943. “That goes for Hollywood whose primary function is” — you guessed it —“entertainment.”
However, following four years of brainwashing through screens, the notion of pure amusement was no more. Hollywood kept sending out telegraphs, and people were willing to sign for them. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) is the most notable example; it was a critical and financial hit that perfectly combined fun and education while focusing on the psychological and physical wounds experienced by returning warriors.Postwar “social problem films” addressed a series of contentious and politicized subjects that would have been taboo prior to World War II: alcoholism (The Long Weekend, 1945), antisemitism (Crossfire, 1947), mental illness (Spellbound, 1945, The Dark Past, 1948, and The Snake Pit, 1948), and so on. Many of these films featured connect-the-dots dream sequences.
Postwar social problem films at their worst were puffed up with their own noble ideals, tendentious and didactic. A government agent, sociologist, or psychiatrist would frequently appear in their schoolmarmish roles, using low angle and valorizing close-up shots to spread the word to the ignorant.
At the conclusion of Crossfire, Robert Young’s character, the detective, turns to face the camera and delivers a protracted tirade against antisemitism. Which is one method to express anti-antisemitism; however, gesture and visuals can convey the same message more tastefully, as stated by film critic Farran Nehme Smith. Robert Mitchum gives the location where the disgusting antisemite played by Robert Ryan touched his shoulder a quick glance, as if to say, “Now I am going to have to get my uniform dry cleaned.” I am not cool with antisemitism if Robert Mitchum, the epitome of postwar masculine cool, isn’t.
The positioning and timing of the postwar social problem films set a pattern for subsequent Hollywood excursions into edgy political territory: catch a cultural wave as it crests toward a consensus and expresses an opinion that audiences already have absorbed or are ready to listen to. Gentleman’s Agreement, wrote columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, “is high powered propaganda for decency, and I think only those with uneasy consciences will deliberately miss it.” Those of us with easy consciences — that would be you and me — will certainly not miss it.
On rare occasions, though, Hollywood dared to go against the grain and explore hazardous areas. A daring series of integrationist and egalitarian movies from 1949 to 1950 (No Way Out [1950], Home of the Brave, Lost Boundaries, Pinky, and Intruder in the Dust) promoted a political agenda that went against the norms and laws south of the Mason-Dixon line. The studios continued to oppose Jim Crow despite possible negative box office effects, discarding the “miscegenation clause” and the Production Code’s ban on racial epithets. In the South, many movies in the cycle were openly prohibited, while others were only allowed to screen once their racist content was removed. Not until 20th Century-Fox gave in to Christine Smith, Atlanta’s top censor, and stopped the attempted
Ever since then, politically conscious Hollywood films have attempted to find the ideal balance between staying within the boundaries of their audience’s political comfort and pushing the boundaries just a little bit. The best illustration of the tactic is the fact that, up until the end of the war, no high-profile Hollywood production ventured to question American involvement in Vietnam. Similarly, Hollywood only spoke up against nuclear power (The China Syndrome, 1979), the blacklist (The Front, 1976), and Nixon (All the President’s Men, 1976) after the blacklist was lifted and no one wanted to live next to a nuclear power plant.
For the majority of the history of the business, the fact that both sides adhered to the same fundamental ideals and viewpoints made it easier for filmmakers to assess the political climate of audiences. Although Hollywood has shifted leftward in terms of politics since FDR, the distance between the forty-yard lines might be used to gauge the difference in viewpoints. The gap widened as executives and performers allegedly moved more to the left, first toward field goal range and then, some conservatives claimed, into the end zone.
It makes sense that some moviegoers have advised Hollywood to start a podcast instead of trying to communicate a message.
*In my Brandeis University undergraduate seminars, I always put the epigram in bold type up front when we talk about Hollywood politics.After that, I have to define “Western Union.”
