In order to understand how 1939 happened, you have to know a hell of a lot of context.
Silent film had an arc, a rise, and a fall that existed independently of sound film. Looking back without watching carefully, it seems as if sound film evolved from silent as if it was the next dry step under the larger art umbrella of film, but that is wrong.
Sound film and silent film are separate categories, with different histories, different movers and shakers, different purposes. The demographics of their audiences differed; their performance styles radically differed; the way each was exploited as a sellable product differed. They overlapped, is all.
The history of sound film has lasted so much longer than that of silent that we often forget. We forget that the visual grammar of cinema took shape in a couple of decades on hand-cranked cameras, and thus, nearly everything we need to know about one of the primary languages in the developed world exists on flammable, toxic strips no one ever runs anymore.
Take those twenty years of silent film, when Hollywood went from a flyspeck to one of the most talked-about towns in the world. Consider the scaffolding of those years, a skeleton for the vast machinery yet to be built: celebrity, wealth, shadows on the cave wall—and a few insane men beginning to seize power over hearts and minds. Fix these circumstances in your mind.
Then think carefully about the early years of the sound period, which get skipped over a lot. Witness the awkward pacing and furry, staticky voices of the late 20s giving way to the squirrel-patter of screwball comedy and the mystery of non-diegetic music starting up every time Fred Astaire wants to win the girl.
See the garters and gams Berkeley prized, flashes of nipple and struggles with the law—all the sin and independence of a Hollywood drunk with freedom and money, adjusting bravely to galloping technology and the music of well-trained voices. Cameras growing larger and better. Studios building wasteful Deco sets. Tracking dollies, James Wong Howe, Westerns, Cagney.
Maybe I’m losing you. But this is the hell of a lot of context. I mentioned in the first sentence. Between ’27 and ’39, the speed and degree to which film evolved seem more astonishing every time I consider it. As if Hollywood progressed from Super Mario Bros. to Gears of War in 12 years instead of 30.
It was a profound acceleration, encompassing thunderous changes that sound like whispers today; these changes did nothing less than allow films to be watchable for audiences in decades to come. They standardized the pace and style of Hollywood movies, and that standard would hold until almost the end of the century.
There’s a barrier for entry between a 2020 audience and a 1932 film, a certain set of filmmaking tics that the audience has to understand and grow accustomed to, but that barrier had almost dissolved by 1940.
These changes both explain 1939, the Masterpiece Year, and render it all the more miraculous. Oh, right! That’s what this essay is about, the year 1939.
Ty Burr summarizes in Gods Like Us:
"The consensus among cineastes and historians is that the Hollywood studio system peaked in 1939, the year of an unusually high number of movies that were recognized as great then and that have lasted: Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, The Women, Destry Rides Again, Only Angels Have Wings, Ninotchka, Gunga Din. The mother of them all, of course, is Gone with the Wind."
This list is not my list (there’s also Dark Victory and The Roaring Twenties—neither perfect, both so worth your time—and The Rules of the Game, which is not a Hollywood film), but even leaving out half of these, it’s still a surprising number of films of surprising quality to come out in such a short period of time. And maybe it’s additionally surprising that the Masterpiece Year occurred on the early side of the classical period, which ranges roughly from 1934 to 1968. But Hollywood likes to hold on to what it’s got a lot more than it likes to innovate.
1939 came about through a collision of many circumstances. The advent of Technicolor and ever-better recording equipment. Oodles of money to hire good crew as well as good stars and to build good sets. Directors and editors who’d gotten enough experience with sound films and their timing to assemble them sharply, which makes them carry over to the present better than the (smarter, riskier, cringier) films of the early ‘30s. Five years in the corset of the detestable Hays Code, which at first made films dumb and milquetoast and then challenged them to be better, as any decent writing constraint will do.
It was the moment when Hollywood was “at the height of its manipulative powers,” as Eleanor Ringel puts it in an essay on Gone with the Wind in The A List. Hollywood was still flexing and pushing at the edges of those powers, before it took them for granted and did things by rote. The wonder of Dorothy opening the door into Oz testifies to this (on the big screen, it’s a whole different experience), as do the generations of filmmakers who’ve been inspired by Oz’s bottomless subtext.
Stagecoach feels like the bedrock Western film, like the caring, strong, unflappable patriarch from which all lesser sons spring, even though this is not at all true. James Stewart’s quivering, heartsick performance as Mr. Smith stuns and moves the most jaded of viewers, even today.
And Gone with the Wind—well. I can no longer enjoy the film, after reckoning with it in my early 30s, but Ringel is right about it: “As magnificent as it is phony, as stereotyped as it is stunning. Enduring and immutable, it is what movies are all about. Not a grande dame, as I once thought, but a grand illusion.”
Those illusions never before or again had such consistent power as in the Masterpiece Year. Again and again, I watch new-to-me films from 1939, and again and again, they are so damn good. Fine enough to be the top films of any other year. Clearly, something was in the air.
Then came the war.
1939 was not the last or only good year for cinema, but cinema would never be so uniformly sweeping and clear-eyed again, so wholeheartedly, uncynically invested in its power. The war and its illusion-stripping capacities certainly had something to do with that, but so did the very system that produced the Masterpiece Year, one that strengthened across the 1930s and kept its jaws locked for two more decades.
That system had been feeding amphetamines to children and covering up abortions and marrying off gay stars all along, mind. Cynicism hardly sprang from the forehead of 1941. But 1939’s films have a quality of authentic investment missing from later good years.
More and more, thoughts turned to the bottom line, to what you could squeeze from a star before her light snuffed out. Make another one, just like it only different, and another one, and another, team them up again, make him work all night, give her a nose job, brighter colors, heavier makeup, more more more more more. In 1939, more was more (Wind, Oz). By 1953, it’d become less (Esther Williams).
Take just one example. Only a handful of years after Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Capra would flunk the box office test with an even more heartfelt and ambiguous little picture, It’s a Wonderful Life. Observe as the sincerity of Mr. Smith becomes the sentiment of George Bailey; see the stakes change from democracy to economics. Watch the war burning in James Stewart’s eyes as he stands on that fake bridge in the fake snow. He cannot go back, and neither can Hollywood.
Maybe the change has to do with Capra and his evolving sensibility, or mid-century mawkishness that seems gloppy as hell today. But the explanation I like has to do with unrepeatable magic and the way it all collected in one remarkable year. No matter where it came from, how it used its strength, or what its values look like today, there will never be another year like 1939.