Notwithstanding remembrance of the 1930s as a golden era of iconic movies and glamorous stars, the decade was a time of crisis and transformation for Hollywood in the face of the Great Depression. An industry that had still not come to terms with the costly advent of sound technology found itself plunged into financial meltdown in 1931–2 as movie ticket sales collapsed. By the late 1930s, however, the major film companies had consolidated their status as vertically-integrated oligopolies that dominated movie production, distribution and exhibition. The classical movie style of the late silent era, initially under threat from the limitations of early sound systems, benefited from technological improvements in filmmaking that enabled its application to new and reinvented cinematic genres. In parallel with this development, producers adapted the star system to guarantee the value of their films in a Depression-hit market. As social scientist Leo Rosten wrote in 1941, ‘Hollywood means movies and movies mean stars.’ It also meant the Production Code, adopted by film companies in 1930 as a marketoriented and consensual guarantee of good taste and morality in their products but only rigorously enforced from 1934 onwards.

One of the contributors to this volume, Ina Rae Hark, has observed elsewhere of the 1930s, ‘In perhaps no other decade did the Hollywood film industry and its product look so different at its conclusion compared to its beginning’. As if to signal that the film business had emerged triumphant from the Great Depression and the other challenges of the 1930s, Hollywood would enjoy what is conventionally recognised as the greatest year in its history in terms of the cinematic quality of its films in 1939. Nevertheless, the film industry's financial health was nowhere near as robust as its output. As another movie historian, Adrienne McLean, commented, ‘[B]ased on box-office sales and studio profits, the 1930s was hardly a “golden age”, and, on fiscal terms, the end looks rather more like the beginning than one might have expected’.

ORGANISATION OF THE VOLUME

Hollywood underwent a significant transformation in response to the crisis of the Great Depression, but not a complete one. The contributors to this book offer perspectives on the complex experience of the film industry and those working in it during the 1930s.