Although Hollywood films of the Depression era would never take the vanguard of social critique, they exerted a powerful influence on the way Americans perceived their place within an increasingly divided society. Social commentators of the late 1920s and early 1930s saw film as a way of exposing class disparities. The movies were a potential means of “undermin[ing] the ideological structure of the middle,” of “consolidat[ing] the working class,” and of bringing the artist and intellectual into direct contact with the masses.

Among the genres of Hollywood film, comedy was to prove one of the most effective in reflecting the social crises of the Depression era. Although Depression comedies may not have satisfied the desires of critics like Dwight MacDonald and Robert Gessner for a socially engaged cinema, they did provide a commentary on wealth, power, and class privilege that functioned as a popular indicator of current social perspectives. Hollywood responded to the ideologically charged early years of the Depression with two very different kinds of comedy, each of which exploited the possibilities of cinematic speech but which used spoken language for very different purposes.

The first of these comic modes was exemplified by two films made by Ernst Lubitsch in the early 1930s: Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Design for Living (1933). In these films, a smooth, effortless, and highly stylized use of language becomes an end in itself, as the brilliantly witty dialogue of the central characters displaces the need for any direct treatment of social issues.