The 1930s
1933 & 1939 | Great Depression
During the 1930s, neither war, film noir, horror, nor family movies were particularly popular in Little Rock. AAC showed these types of movies at their theaters, but they showed fewer than expected. Although not initially popular, film noir did emerge in the later part of the decade.
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Film Noir is created
What Was
Popular?
Historical Events of the 1930s
The Great Depression
The 1930s were bleak years. The Great Depression ravaged the country, leaving millions of Americans jobless and struggling to survive.
A fathomless pessimism settled over the country as Americans became disillusioned with society and questioned many of the beliefs they once held true. The people blamed the business and financial leaders for the economic collapse, and they lost faith in Congress and the political process.
People began to turn away from traditional values, and the division between right and wrong blurred. Stealing was wrong, but was stealing to feed your starving family wrong? With all the social and political structures turned on their heads, Americans ultimately feared that their fundamental values were illusions.
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As a result, moviegoers of the early 1930s attended more comedies, musicals, and gangster films because they either provided an escape from the devastation of the Depression or reflected the blurred morality and distrust of authority from their everyday experiences.
A fathomless pessimism settled over the country as Americans became disillusioned with society and questioned all the beliefs they once held true.
Although the election of President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal initially brought hope to the country in 1933, the brewing threat of international war and renewed distrust in politics after Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court caused national confidence to drop again in 1937.
Once again falling into uncertainty and disillusionment, the public became distrustful of movies that tried to raise morale or reinforce traditional values. Instead, they wanted movies that showed a grittier, pessimistic worldview that reflected their own uncertainties.
Genre Trends of the 1930s
Creation of Film Noir
Film noir emerged in the latter half of the 1930s to meet this need. These stylistically black and white crime dramas had similar characters and plots to the earlier gangster movies, but they went further by making the characters more cynical and the plots more fatalistic.
The early noir films before the United States’ entry into World War II resembled the experiences of the audience members. They were set in the Depression era and featured main characters surrounded by crime and haunted by past trauma. In addition, they demonized businessmen, portrayed institutional justice as either thoroughly corrupt or morally good but too bureaucratically slow to effect change, and depicted the modern city as an uncertain dangerous place where things were not what they seemed.
Most importantly, the protagonists of film noir acted as symbolic sacrificial heroes. By watching and learning from the main characters’ struggles on screen, audience members could process their own emotions and traumatic experiences caused by the Great Depression.
Shown in Little Rock
Although the attitudes and social breakdown of American society at the beginning of the Depression would have allowed film noir to emerge then, film censorship at the time required that ambiguous violence be punished on screen. Therefore, noir attitudes were suppressed until the end of the 1930s and early 1940s when film censorship began to relax.