Teaching Spoken English in Japan, Unit 731, and the Konoe Guards

This is an article about what’s laughingly called “cross-cultural communication,” which means, basically, how do you bridge the gap when you live in a foreign country where you’re considered a war criminal if you wear shoes indoors, even in the dead of winter, and you’re not exactly accustomed to that. To be fair, it goes without saying that cultural relativism cuts both ways—Japanese (and others) arriving in the United States are shocked when they're exposed to American cultural customs that are wholly alien to them.

A fascinating December 20, 2006 BBC World article, “'Paris Syndrome' strikes Japanese” describes how every year, an average of 12 Japanese, mostly young women in their 30s on their first trip abroad, suffer nervous breakdowns in Paris as a result of extreme French rudeness. “This year alone, the Japanese embassy in Paris has had to repatriate four people with a doctor or nurse on board the plane to help them get over the shock,” BBC journalist Caroline Wyatt reported. “The Japanese embassy has a 24-hour hotline for those suffering from severe culture shock, and can help find hospital treatment for anyone in need. However, the only permanent cure is to go back to Japan—never to return to Paris."

Between 1989 and 1992, at the beginning of the JET Program, three young foreigners committed suicide by throwing themselves in front of trains. They couldn’t wait for the plane ticket home. Counseling and better preparation on the part of the Japanese Ministry of Education have reduced the casualty count drastically, I understand, but even so, my year as a JET teacher in isolated rural Japan was pretty tough sledding sometimes.

I was asked to write this article in the summer of 1999 by an editor at The Asahi Weekly, a leading English-language Japanese newspaper. Every weekly issue has a page devoted to teaching Japanese readers new English vocabulary words, and I was asked to write up an article about what it was like teaching English in Japan. It turned into an account of the some of the difficulties inherent in teaching spoken English in Japan. Under the title, “Repeat After Me: Teaching English in Japan Under the JET Program,” it was published in the August 29, 1999 issue of The Asahi Weekly. I’d like to thank my friend Heather Holland, a noted Asian affairs journalist, for recommending me to The Asahi Weekly as a writer for their weekly column.

Even though I taught in a third-rate commercial high school where most students were not interested in college (a sure ticket to the grim working class in Japan), I did have a hard core of students who were passionately interested in learning English, and I had a tremendous amount of respect for them. These students were never going to end up in Tokyo University or Kyoto University (the Japanese Harvard and Yale), but I felt passionately that these children of factory workers and shop clerks deserved the best education in English possible.

I knocked myself out teaching up to five classes a day. That’s five hours a day on your feet, gesticulating madly like Mick Jagger to keep the students interested, and you can’t sit down, because in Japan, teachers aren’t allowed to sit down while teaching (you lose face, I was told), and you’re not allowed to drink water while teaching either—it looks unseemly, you know.

I also made it a point to share my knowledge of Japanese history, politics, and culture with my students. I’ve studied in detail the period 1931-1952 (fascism, the Pacific War, and the Occupation), and I impressed on them what an amazing journey their nation had undertaken—to go from pure feudalism when Perry arrived in 1853, to rapid industrialization, to the radioactive ashes of defeat in 1945, to postwar preeminence as the world’s second biggest economy. I told them how proud they should be of their grandparents, who pulled Japan up by the bootstraps after the Second World War.

My Japanese “go-between” English teacher, Yoshio Yamada, clearly didn’t like me sharing my knowledge of Japanese history with my students—he was a first-rate tennis teacher, and his father, a former member of the dreaded terrorist Black Dragon Society, had served as a member of the elite, ultra-right-wing Konoe Guards during the Pacific War. The Konoe Guards were the official Imperial Japanese Guards, dedicated to protecting the Imperial Family, so fanatical that they attempted a coup after Hirohito surrendered in August 1945. Their leader was the ultra-fascist Prince Konoe, former prime minister and member of Hirohito’s inner circle, who thoughtfully committed suicide in December 1945 when he learned he was about to be arrested as a war criminal.

Japanese history—and society—is amazing. You’ll never know who you’ll meet. At a seedy late-night sushi bar outside the Himeji train station one cold winter night, I met a male masseuse who told me about one of his clients in Osaka, the man who had been the official photographer at the Japanese Army Unit 731’s notorious death camp in Harbin, Manchuria. He’d been the guy who’d taken pictures of all the horrific chemical and biological experiments on innocent Chinese civilians and captured Allied POWs, and the masseuse told me, in between bites of tuna, that the old son-of-a-bitch still had nightmares.

"Repeat After Me": Teaching English In Japan Under The JET Program

As a JET teacher, the major obstacle I encountered to the effective teaching of English was the lack of motivation among my students. This was largely because they were attending a commercial high school, and therefore were not college-bound. Another problem was that I was teaching Oral Communication, which is not a subject featured on the grueling Japanese national college entrance examination. It was often remarked on by us JET teachers that demanding as the test was, why should the kids bother studying spoken English if it wasn't on the national exam?

The mistakes in spoken English that I most often noticed among my students were grammatical in nature. Verb tenses were frequently incorrect—the present tense was employed rather than the past—and many times, articles like "the," "an," and "a" were dropped altogether. In their writing, they often made mistakes in spelling and punctuation.

In terms of pronunciation, the greatest bugaboo among Japanese speakers is that shared by most Asian speakers of English—incorrect pronunciation of the letters L, R, and W. Imagine my horror, then, when I had to teach them how to pronounce my full name, which happens to be Wolcott Merrow Wheeler! It's nothing but Ws, Ls, and Rs, and its pronunciation represents a nightmare for most Japanese speakers. Kwaidan, des ne! [What a nightmare!]

As an antidote to these problems, I found the team-teaching approach favored by the JET Program to be most effective. The ALT—a native speaker of English—is teamed with a JTE (Japanese Teacher of English). Since most of my students spoke absolutely no English, the JTE had to translate everything I said. However, when the JTE made mistakes in pronunciation and grammar, my job became one of diplomacy. On the one hand, I didn't want to cause the JTE sensei to lose face by being corrected by his or her gaijin [foreigner] ALT (me); on the other hand, I didn't want the students to learn the incorrect English being conveyed by the JTE, since it was, after all, my job to teach them proper English.

Some teachers made it quite clear that they wanted any mistakes corrected in front of the class. Others, I felt, were more sensitive about the issue. When I began teaching as an ALT, I always deferred to my JTEs. But as I became more comfortable with them, I felt more relaxed about pointing out errors. For instance, when a teacher misspelled a word on the blackboard, I had no problem correcting the spelling—because I knew the students were copying the spelling and, in the tradition of Japanese students, would be committing it faithfully to memory that night. But I always went about it in a very delicate way, saying in a gentle tone of voice, "Excuse me, sensei, but I believe the word is spelled this way." I never said it in an accusatory tone of voice and never in a spirit of oneupsmanship, and always made it clear that the JTE was the leader of the class. The important thing was never whether the JTE or I was right or wrong—only that the students learned proper English.

Sometimes the JTE would make a serious grammatical mistake in the heat of the lesson, when it was obvious that interrupting him or her to make a correction would both needlessly interrupt the class and cause the teacher embarrassment. In those instances I waited until the end of class, when I approached the teacher and informed him or her—again, in a gentle, non-threatening way—that possibly there was another answer to the grammatical question they had posed. In the next lesson, the JTE would teach the correct grammatical rule, never having lost face.

I should add that in my school, there was most definitely a small hard core of very motivated and committed students whose ability to speak, read, and write English often surprised and impressed me (especially since they were not attending an academically-oriented high school). They earned my greatest respect, because I am well aware of how difficult it is to learn a foreign language, especially when you have to switch from Asian ideographs to romanized spelling, or vice versa. To this day I find learning Japanese a challenge, so I have tremendous respect for brave Japanese who dare to tackle the dreaded English Godzilla.

Art For Life's Sake: A Creative Credo

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and such was the case the night of April 12, 1976, when as a young writer and a junior at Princeton one month shy of my twenty-first birthday, I heard esteemed novelist and critic William H. Gass absolve writers of any responsibility for the words they use. At the end of his lecture, I was rocketing up out of my seat and I knew I had to write this essay.

Writers have no responsibility for the words they use? Then it was essentially okay for a writer to channel the sensibility of Reinhardt Heidrich? This essay poured out of my typewriter at white-hot heat that night.

Don't get me wrong: Bill Gass is a brilliant, first-rate American writer, and I have the greatest respect for him and his amazing body of work. But his provocative statements that night seemed so extreme that I felt I just had to respond.

This article was the first thing I ever wrote that I thought showed serious promise, and it was published in the April 25, 1976 issue of The Princeton Forerunner, which at the time was a brand-new alternative campus newspaper that had just sprung up at Princeton, kind of a Village Voice to The Daily Princetonian’s New York Times. It didn’t last long, but there was a young editor (whose name escapes me) who did a terrific job of cutting down my piece.

I still stand by what I said in this article, and it’s the closest thing to an artistic and creative credo I’ve ever formulated.

My thanks to Mr. Gass for forcing me to assess what I really think the artist's role in society is. I guess that's what he wanted me to do as a result of his lecture that night—provoke me to think.

Art For Life's Sake

Two weeks ago, on the evening of Monday, April 12, William H. Gass, professor of philosophy at Washington University, delivered this year's Rabbi Irving M. Levey lecture, entitled "Carrots, Nose, Snow, Rose, Roses: The Ontological Transformation of Language and Literature." Although little known to the general public, Gass is considered one of the foremost writers in America; his novel Omensetter's Luck is one of the premier literary performances of the Sixties.

The fact that he is one of the judges of this year's National Book Award gives added weight to his well-chosen words of April 12. His lecture, and the enthusiastic response it drew, indicates the present direction of American literature and literary criticism.

His central metaphor was that of a snowman. When we build a snowman, we take carrots, lumps of coal, and old woolen mufflers and overshoes out of their quotidian context (that of practical use in our hands) and place them in a wholly fresh one. On a snowman a carrot becomes a nose. We accept it as a nose; we don't think of eating it. As Gass said, this is an ontological transformation.

Gass then applied the same standards to words. In daily conversation, we use words for purely practical purposes—for communication, for self-expression, for getting what we want. We interpret words used in public seriously; if someone tells us, "I hate you," we assume they mean it. We make moral judgments on the way people use words.

But according to Gass, when words are used for a literary purpose, they are suddenly absolved from moral accountability. They need have no rational relation to the outside world, because they have been placed in a different context. Literature does not have to apply to life. On a snowman we accept the carrot as a nose placed in a different context. Literature does not have to apply to life. On a snowman we accept the carrot as a nose and don't think of eating it, right?

The analogy between carrots and words is, of course, a fallacy. A carrot is different from a word. Building snowmen is not the same as writing a novel. Snowmen exist to amuse us. Words exist to enable us to communicate. If I am used to interpreting a word one way when it is used in daily speech and the mass media, I will naturally apply the same interpretation to that word if I encounter it in a work of literature. The same applies to complexes of words, known as ideas. I will identify the anti-Semitism of Ezra Pound's Canto XLV ("With Usura") as the same sentiment upheld in Mein Kampf. Pound's and T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism expressed in their poetry does not carry a different meaning just because those men were great poets. Being a creator of literature does not absolve one from moral responsibility.

Gass believes otherwise. In his lecture he declared, "Physics, philosophy, and poetry are not bound by moral considerations. They should have no end but themselves." It astounds me that any intelligent person in this century could make that statement. Physics is not bound by moral responsibility? J. Robert Oppenheimer believed very deeply in that responsibility; on witnessing the world's first atomic explosion, he realized that now, like Krishna, he could say, "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds." Such awesome power demands moral responsibility. Philosophy not bound by moral considerations? If we accept that we have no right to judge the morality of a philosopher's ideas since his work is an end in itself, then we can place Hitler on the same plane as Sartre.

This is nihilism of the purest sort. It is not only an ivory-tower view; it is a conscious abdication of moral responsibility. As critic John Leonard has written, "I am astonished that we are all prepared to insist on the moral obligations of the nuclear physicist, the cabinet member, the university president, the sociologist on government contract, the director of General Motors, the construction worker and the newspaper editor, and yet we foist upon art an autonomy as if it had been dropped on us from Mars... Without going quite so far as Samuel Butler, who suggested that, 'Books should be judged by a judge and jury as though they were crimes,' I'd say that either we relate our profession to the world we live in or we have no more ethics than a can of Spam."

Writers are supposed to be more than the fathers of pleasant artifacts; they are supposed to be thinkers. Indeed, they should consider very carefully the connotations of every word they employ. That is where words differ from carrots.

Carrots are blank physical entities; one can interpret them as one wishes, as resembling a nose, icicle, phallus, or rocket. The power of a word is derived from the meaning agreed upon by its users. A carrot can suggest whatever you want, but when you use a word, you are making a statement, and it doesn't matter whether you make it in a conversation or a poem or a novel; the word still carries the same meaning and the same moral weight. When Henry Miller tells me in Tropic of Cancer that since the world is destroying itself, he'll look out for himself, full speed ahead and the devil take the hindmost, I don't think, "How droll!" I think Miller is copping out.

I think Gass is copping out too. At the conclusion of his lecture, he could see no reason why art should have anything to do with what he called "the sweaty standards" of the world we live in, and he urged all artists to enjoy their private act of creation before returning to their "less-real rooms." He ended his lecture as he began, with the metaphor of the snowman; only this time, he called upon us to build bigger and better snowmen (metaphors for morally autonomous creation) using not only coal and carrots, but also raiding our homes and adding our grand pianos and family portraits to the growing snowball, until we had fashioned a monster snowman; in other words, he wants us to ignore the reality of daily life in order to create works of art.

(This is known as The Eugene O'Neill Method, and it has its problems. Worship the Muse to the exclusion of your family. And if your kids bother you? Tell them to get the hell out of your household and never come back. Unfortunately, as a result, one of his sons turned to heroin. Tough. Well, at least we have those beautiful plays, right?)

With the arrival of spring, the snowman will melt, of course, Gass said. He went on to pose the question: But afterwards won't our grand piano be ruined? (After the glow of artistic creation fades, won't we suffer from having neglected our everyday responsibilities?) Gass answered, voice oozing sarcastic concern: "What a shame, what a pity." Long pause as he scanned the audience. "What a loss."

Riotous applause.

It upset me. Here he was, asking writers to abandon their moral responsibility and appealing to us to cast our lot with an illusory imaginative construct (a ball of snow, in fact) that was sure to vanish, and allaying our fears by remarking that really the loss of reality (in the form of the snow-damaged piano) was not as important as we might think, and by their applause this audience of intellectuals was showing its approval. Gass is an impressive lecturer, extremely articulate and very witty, but consonant with the artistic preachment of his argument, his lecture was all style and no substance.

For those who follow the course of modern literature, the gist of Gass' lecture will come as no surprise. Scholars of modernist writing have long praised what they see as its detachment from the concerns of realistic fiction, that of making moral judgments and commenting on one's society. But they tend to forget—or rather, to want not to see—that most of their heroes were very involved in the world in which they lived. To quote Pound's review of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, "Flaubert pointed out that if France had studied his work they might have been saved a great deal in 1870." Joyce dealt directly with the strengths and foibles of human nature and was a disciple of Vico's view of history. Mann, Eliot, Pound, all bitter critics of Western civilization, were committed to some way of salvaging it. Many critics, such as Gass, would prefer to deal only with their style, with the fashion in which they formed words. But the greatness of all these writers lies in their marriage of style and content; they stated their unique insights in a style equally original.

In this day of the anti-novel, of what John Barth calls "the literature of exhaustion" of Barth, Borges, Nabokov, Calvino, Barthleme, and Beckett, it has become very fashionable to say that literature has no relation to life whatsoever and so to absolve the writer of all moral responsibilities. Gass claimed the above writers as practitioners of his views, but he was wrong. Nabokov's Lolita is in part a comment on American attitudes toward love and sex. Beckett covers the human condition. Barth's The End of the Road is a critique of existentialism. By no means are these the only themes these writers are employing, but they must be considered.

Absurdism has a great deal to do with Gass' thinking; it is the motive behind his "less-real rooms" remark and his final statement, "What a loss," a deprecation of reality. The reality of existence lacks substance for him. As an artist in the process of creation, he feels his work of art is real, not the life in the streets. All artists feel this to a certain extent, but they must realize there is a world going on out there, because what is happening out in the streets is going to affect not only themselves, but those they love. Look at what happened to Thomas Mann, who had to flee Nazi Germany for fear of his life.

But what do you do when the snowman melts? After you have sacrificed all you have in order to construct your aesthetic fantasy world, what do you do when the mirage disappears? The question does not bother Gass. So everything is ruined when our imaginative construct is gone. "What a loss," he says. It is easy sarcasm which avoids the question posed.

But it is not surprising. To a man who asks that moral autonomy be awarded to physicists, philosophers, and poets, moral considerations are not especially important. To a man who asks us to renounce our "less-real rooms" for giant-snowman building, life is not real. Life is absurd. Life is a joke. So are war, poverty, bigotry, death, and evil. Ha ha. It is not surprising, but it is shocking.

Gass made an offhanded remark that was most revealing. He asked why artists should bother to improve "the scabrous body politic" since it has always been considered "scabrous." It is an easy thing for a white college professor to say in this country, at this time; we are the mightiest nation on earth, prosperous, physically isolated, relatively peaceful.

But it is a short memory that does not recall other times and places, even in this century, that were not scabrous but suppurating. Pick a place, any place. In this racist country alone, one-fifth of whose citizens live in poverty, we are only recovering from a hysterical period of assassinations, race riots, a decade of Vietnam peopled with three million American-made casualties, and a recent attempt to institute a police state known as Watergate. Perhaps this accounts for our present moral exhaustion, as manifested in Gass' lecture.

Yet all the same, his attitude shows an alarming lack of concern for the quality of world our children will inherit. Artists and critics can have an influence on the life in the streets, but they are not going to attain it by sneering at "the sweaty standards" of the workaday world. And as for the human condition, which artists must report, because no one else will, with its interminable misery, waste, and violent death, with its constant loss of intangible qualities, both moral and personal, that can never be recovered, yes, it is a shame, it is a pity, it is a loss.

A DECADE IN LOVE WITH ITSELF

The 1930s are gone...but oh, how their memories linger on!

In retrospect, and unlike the 1930s in life, the 1930s on film were a decade of elegance, glamour and Garbo. Coming of age as they did at just the right moment when America – beginning its slow recovery from the stock market crash and dust bowls, needed its inimitable escapist daydream; the movies and 30s Hollywood were both a continuation of those hedonist heydays that had transformed the fledgling industry into its own empire, and, the beginning of the end of their all pervasive supremacy as the sole purveyors in mass entertainment.

If films did not present the world as it was, they fairly accurately reflected a collective wish fulfillment from a society desperate to believe that the worse was behind them; that better days were still ahead.

It is only in retrospect that the year 1939 is sited as the single most influential and probably, most artistic moment in the history of Hollywood; a flourish of technical prowess awash in a zenith of star talent. Yet, it is important to recognize that neither Hollywood nor its critics then regarded film with much appreciation. In fact, there was a considerable disdain applied by both critics and intellectuals to the Friday night ritual of ‘going to the movies.’

If films were regarded at all outside of the glittering Mecca that produced them, and, apart from their diversionary effectiveness on the masses, then the stories Hollywood told were viewed as incendiary and needlessly flamboyant.

The Catholic League of Decency in particular began to interpret the movies as subversive propaganda put forth by the more liberal cultural mandarins of their day. The movies were dangerous; mildly addictive and cathartic aphrodisiacs imposed on the unsuspecting viewer with subliminal indoctrinations and hidden political agendas. They would surely lead to the downfall of contemporary society.

True to its bottom line, Hollywood dismissed these misperceptions as clearly out of touch with what the general public wanted, expected, and by the limited understanding of their largely uneducated studio moguls, desperately required to anesthetize them from the horrors of poverty. Where else could a meager farmer living in Omaha Nebraska get the opportunity to see the caliber of spectacle as presented in, say, Marie Antoinette (1938) for example, except within the darkened recesses of his local theatre?

No, the movies were an honorable estate – at least, so far as the studio dream merchants were concerned. Indeed, it was difficult to argue with their success. By 1934, Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (the most technically proficient and artistically accomplished of all dream factories) was the highest paid individual in America. Mayer, who scarcely a decade before had been the son of a struggling junk dealer and modest investor in a string of movie houses and his own fledgling production company, ascended to the throne as undisputed ruler of his kingdom – Hollywood’s Raja, so aptly dubbed, for his authoritarian rule dictated the continued success of MGM for many years to come.

The studio system, less than ten years old, a mere neophyte in the art of motion pictures had become an industrial/artistic colossus; a cultural leviathan; an factory-like complex with each studio producing and releasing one movie per week – to say nothing of the countless short subjects, cartoons, news reels and B-pictures that became main staples throughout the 1930s. Mayer and his contemporaries (Darryl Zanuck, Jack Warner, Carle Lemmle, et al) wielded their autonomous scrutiny and control over public tastes.

There was no television, no foreign market to intervene in these halcyon days. If anything Hollywood had monopolized its foreign market – circling and saturating the globe with the celluloid likenesses of Gable, Crawford and Cooper until they and the system were the envy of the world.

Perhaps, in part because Hollywood studios were mass entertainment personified, those seated behind their imposing desks inside the front offices were more nuanced in generating diversity in their product, marking their territory with a distinction in costume, lighting and set design that undeniably established each studio’s output distinctly from its competition.

If these same moguls began the decade with only an abundance of faith, pride and blind ambition to guide them in their new-fangled transference from Nickelodeon to movie palace, by the end of the decade that faith and ambition had yielded enduring and emblematic masterworks; two since made iconic touchstones of our collective consciousness (The Wizard of Oz, Gone With The Wind – 1939), each a definitive example of what the Hollywood of yesteryear exemplified: resplendent escapism.

They were, of course, working from extraordinary material and from a seemingly untapped infinite wealth of contracted thespian talent unequaled in their diversity and proficiency since. Though Hollywood has always been a sucker for pretty faces, in the thirties at least, good looks and youth were not everything.

One of the most endearing aspects about films of the 1930s is their rich affinity for grandfatherly/motherly and parental figures, helmed by old hands (Will Rogers, Lionel Barrymore, Charles Grapewin) and hams (Marie Dressler, Edna May Oliver, Charles Winninger) with equal aplomb. These dexterous performers both looked and behaved according their years. Theirs was a celebration of the twilight of life that Hollywood sought, if not to place at the forefront of its motion picture output, then as solid backup to anchor their stories in a sort of cultural permanence strangely absent from today’s film culture.

In fact, the spectrum of talent acquired and fostered by the studios throughout the ‘30s ran the gamut in maturity, from child star Shirley Temple to aged George Arliss; from teenage Judy Garland to established Flora Robson; from dashing twenty-something Robert Taylor to wily boulevardier Frank Morgan. Diversity also was reflected in the background that actors possessed before becoming stars; from the seemingly overnight discovery of sweater girl Lana Turner inside Schwab’s drug store to the dedicated athleticism of ice skater Sonja Henie or from champion Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmueller; to radio personality Bing Crosby – each new star was a total original in this burgeoning firmament.

If American talent was in more high demand than the sultry Europeans who had been the main staples less than a decade before, this new surge of flag wavers did little to fade the popularity of intercontinental charmers like Maurice Chevalier, Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and of course, the ever-mysterious and illusive Garbo. Talent was where one found it, and Hollywood proved Dorothy’s adage; that there indeed was “no place like home”.

That philosophy extended to shooting schedules as well. Except for the occasional trek ‘on location’ to a handful of privately owned and appropriately rustic ‘ranches’ in the general vicinity, all film production resumed on the studio’s illustrious backlots or inside their cavernous stages that had been erected to accommodate sound recording in late 1929.

Whatever the mood, flavor or background of a particular project, the studios relied on their armies behind the curtain; craftsman, set designers, construction workman, engineers and their formidable art departments to evoke the flair of a stylized New York or ultra chic Paris. If what was depicted on screen was not historically ‘accurate’ it at least represented a reconstitution of places that most of the paying public, recovering from the great depression, were not likely to witness first hand in their lifetimes.

Necessity and healthy competition expedited the film factory’s journey from one reel silent features to lavish sound and Technicolor spectacles. Yet the transition had not been a smooth one. For example, few sitting inside those mausoleum-like early recording booths, fretting over the heartbeat of an actress overpowering her dialogue, could have predicted how efficiently movies graduated from the early stilted complexities of The Jazz Singer (1929) to the swirling smoothness in The Great Waltz (1938). Nor could anyone have forecast that the cumbersome two strip Technicolor process used to photograph key sequences in the silent, Ben-Hur (1929) would eventually eclipse the artistry of black and white photography, the then presumed enduring main staple for the industry.

What is remarkable about the 1930s; that brief span culminating with the penultimate moment that was 1939 – now, almost a forgotten flicker in that immense cavalcade of movie art - is how effortlessly steeped in positivism the output was. In part, due to that self-regulating ‘code’ of ethics that precluded the movies from offering anything but life-affirming, sexless, ‘justice will overcome’ edicts, sanctioned by the Breen office, film art presented the world to the world as a wonderland full of extraordinary possibilities; a luminous manufactured dreamscape that one quickly became disillusioned not to find in nature.

The early days of the gritty gangster, typified by The Public Enemy or Little Caesar (both in 1931), were translated into more glamorous – if tempered - fare about the underworld by the end of the decade (The Roaring Twenties 1939). But more to the point, such explorations into corruption, and those investigating fear – perhaps best exemplified by Universal’s monster series (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy et al) - were increasingly being replaced in popularity by the fanciful Astaire/Rogers or Busby Berkeley musicals, sumptuous costume dramas (Anna Karenina 1935, Maytime 1937) and light-hearted all-star comedies (Dinner At Eight 1933, The Women 1939).

Not surprising then, the alternatives Hollywood cultivated for its patrons were in essence regressive portraits of positivism that systematically ignored the forward looming motion of world events. Thirties films took on history, but with a glittering sheen and star studded patina that extolled the greatness of mankind while discounting its perverse atrocities. They deified historical vignettes, sufficiently removed from the present to allow for a re-visitation through rose-colored glasses.

As a rule of thumb minorities were excluded from the ‘30s white paradise. Those who had made modest inroads into the community during the ‘20s, like the less offensive Anna May Wong gave way to the more atypical stereotype of Charlie Chan. Native Americans were perennially depicted as blood-thirsty cutthroat savages; orientals, to be mistrusted; Mexicans quaint, though feeble-minded. African Americans, arguably the most highly visible and profiled minority in 30s films were background fodder and comic relief; butlers, valets, maids or other menial labor.

To illustrate these shortcomings is to accept them as part of the American tapestry of life rather than stand in contemporary judgment to condemn the cultural mindset that went into crafting its works of art. The Hollywood product of the ‘30s is distinctly American for that period in American history. The best American films of this vintage are unique in that even today they retain their ability to entertain us.

Long after the death of individual craftsman and the studio system - under which such confections of ‘light’ entertainment could only have been made possible – Hollywood’s best loved and most fondly remembered 30s films exist as enduring reflections. In the final analysis, 30s cinema presented the world not as it was, but as we would have liked it to have been and continue, at least on some subliminal level, to hope in vain that it may someday become.

The movies offer glimpses into imperfect moments in history, yet always with the most idyllic frames of reference. We are entertained, not indoctrinated, and led to no finite conclusions – apolitical or otherwise – other than coming to the realization that we have been made a little bit better for the experience. The recent compost that is our movie-going exercise is perhaps more culturally sensitive, though far from being more culturally advanced.

What the 1930s represent best is a level of craftsmanship and artistry that can never be equaled. True, it is a world of cliché, but presented to the paying public at a time before ‘cliché’ itself could be applied with any degree of certainty.

To assuage cultural mistakes as obvious does not degenerate the timeless allure of these movies into the oft’ bastardization of incremental nostalgia. In fact, it only serves to reinforce the resiliency of movies as art. Never again in the history of American films would any one decade become so entrenched in our collective cultural consciousness. We continue to leave 1930s celluloid confections with a smile – an enduring emotional response, both heart warming and life affirming.

In the immortal words of George Gershwin

– “Who could ask for anything more?”

TIMELINE: THE 1930's ON FILM

1930

After a chaotic period of retooling their dream factories for sound recording, the movies settled in for a heady decade of production. Ironically, war pictures proved the most popular with Universal’s All Quiet On The Western Front winning the Best Picture Oscar. As Hollywood struggled with the fact that many of their greatest silent stars spoke with thick foreign accents or perceivable lisps exaggerated by early microphones, the era of the talent scout was born. Actors with even the most scant résumé made the journey to Hollywood in the hopes of becoming famous. While Broadway experience was still regarded as the golden ticket – many on the Great White Way regarded film as ‘dumb show’ and downgrade from their present artistic stature.

Burgeoning new talents were Jean Harlow and John Wayne. Harlow’s inexperience was painfully on display in Howard Hughes’ Hells Angels – though two-strip Technicolor and a harrowing bi-plane action sequence seemed to mask her shortcomings where the public was concerned. Wayne appeared as a western extra and stunt rider, churning out an endless string of ‘B’ movies for Monogram – a poverty row studio. Director John Ford saw something in the lanky young man and recommended him to Raoul Walsh for The Big Trail – a film shot in an experimental widescreen process (a precursor to Cinemascope that would stay buried until the 50s).

Wayne was such an abysmal bomb that his fledgling career practically ended before it had begun. Comedian Harold Lloyd made one of his last great comedies, Feet First. The man of a thousand faces, Lon Chaney starred in his only ‘talkie’ The Unholy Three before succumbing to cancer on Aug. 26. Marlene Dietrich and Humphrey Bogart were signed to studio contracts – she at Paramount, he at Warner Bros. By all accounts, and the ledgers, it was full steam ahead.

1931

James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson exploded onto the screen in The Public Enemy and Little Caesar. Moral activists decried both films as glorification of the gangster life. By now, 85% of movie houses in the United States were equipped for sound. Working with inferior equipment, studios nevertheless managed to refine their recording techniques.

The last silent star to speak – Garbo – made a resounding success of Eugene O’Neill’s seedy waterfront melodrama, Anna Christie. The wooing of Broadway’s biggest names continued; Lunt and Fontaine reluctantly agreed to appear in MGM’s The Guardsman which they had made famous on Broadway. It was a flop that convinced the celebrated duo to return to the stage. They never again appeared in films.

Bette Davis’s fledgling career was nearly sandbagged by narrow-minded Carle Lemmle who first, attempted to transform her into a blonde beauty, then went on record with “She has as much sex-appeal as Slim Summerville!”

Meanwhile at MGM, a rivalry developed between reigning ‘queen of the lot’ Norma Shearer and aspiring social climber Joan Crawford. “How can I complete with that?” Crawford loudly objected, “She sleeps with the boss!” True – but Norma was also the wife of VP Irving Thalberg. Relatively soft spoken English actor, Boris Karloff and Hungarian born Bela Lugosi terrorized audiences with definitive versions of Frankenstein and Dracula.

Oscars favored RKO’s Cimarron as Best Picture, despite the fact that its elephantine investment practically bankrupted the studio. Statuettes also went to Helen Hayes for The Sin of Madelon Claudet. Shot under its working title; Lullaby – the project had been shelved, but was resurrected by MGM’s VP in charge of production, Irving Thalberg who re-shot the ending and changed its title. The film was a resounding success. Wallace Beery took home Best Actor for The Champ – a sentimental melodrama about a washed up prize fighter and his undying devotion to his young son.

1932

Under Thalberg’s guidance, Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel became the first all-star movie masterpiece. MGM threw every major talent it had into the production including Joan Crawford, Lionel and John Barrymore and Garbo. At first assuming that Garbo’s reclusive nature was akin to snobbishness, John Barrymore soon became a life long admirer and friend after realizing that the screen’s most enigmatic star suffered from acute insecurity in front of the camera. “You have no idea what it means to me to appear opposite so great a star as you,” Garbo reportedly told Barrymore on the set.

Joan Crawford, who regretted that her co-star billing offered her no scenes opposite Garbo, gave her most startling performance as Sadie Thompson in Rain – a colossal flop. New England blue blood, Katherine Hepburn appeared in Bill of Divorcement for RKO and was hailed “the find of the year.” But her subsequent appearance in Christopher Strong did much to brand her box office poison a few short years later. Cecil B. DeMille made the Biblical epic, The Sign of the Cross.

Following the resounding success of 42nd Street, Busby Berkeley became the most celebrated hot property on the Warner backlot. Olympic swimmer, Johnny Weissmuller debuted opposite Maureen O’Sullivan in Tarzan The Ape Man, Their skimpy costumes prompted outrage from the Catholic League of Decency. In Germany, Chancellor Adolph Hitler banned the film. At Oscar time, Walt Disney received a special citation for the creation of Mickey Mouse – then as big a star as any in Hollywood. Oscars too for Fredric March’s chilling performance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Grand Hotel – Best Picture.

1933

Mary Pickford – once dubbed America’s sweetheart – made her last screen appearance in Secrets. Pickford’s popularity had waned since the talkies and with all her wealth and popularity in tact she wisely chose the private life instead. Barbara Stanwyck’s sexual escapades in Baby Face prompted cries of moral outrage from the pulpit. The Three Stooges debuted minus their former boss, Ted Healy in a Columbia 2-reel comedy – Women Haters. It would be the first of over 200 shorts made at the studio.

Rival producer on the MGM backlot, David O. Selznick made his own all-star spectacle; the delightful drawing room comedy, Dinner At Eight. Director Frank Capra produced two films of artistic merit; the epic The Bitter Tea of General Yen and poignantly sentimental Lady for A Day – only the latter was successful.

Radio crooner Bing Crosby made the most of his signing a deal at Paramount, but a similar attempt to acclimatize the popular radio personality Kate Smith with a forgettable project, Hello Everybody! was not successful. Cary Grant – who, despite his good looks, had been struggling to make inroads to fame and fortune, scored a coup opposite risqué Mae West in She Done Him Wrong.

Garbo gave a towering performance as Queen Christina – her sexual ambivalence and hinted lesbianism prompted a growing need for film censorship. Kate Hepburn scored in Morning Glory – taking home the Best Actress Oscar. Charles Laughton in The Private Lives of Henry VIII won Best Actor. 20th Century-Fox’s familial tragedy, Cavalcade – Best Picture. Silent star Renee Adoree died of a respiratory ailment. Disgraced pie-face and rotund comedian Fatty Arbuckle was stricken by a fatal heart attack.

1934

W.S. Van Dyke made Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man in 12 days on a shoe string budget; one of the most adroit detective pictures to emerge from Hollywood in years. Shirley Temple became Fox’s number one star after Stand Up and Cheer and Little Miss Marker – outranking such heavy weights in screen popularity and fan mail as Clark Gable, Joan Crawford and Mickey Rooney. Of his pint size costar, Adolph Menjou commented, “She knows all the tricks. She’s Ethel Barrymore at age six!”

On the more lavish side was Thalberg’s The Merry Widow with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald – a titanic hit. Success reigned with such intoxicating confections as The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Broadway Bill, Imitation of Life and Twentieth Century.

Frank Capra scored for Columbia Pictures with It Happened One Night – a film no one except Capra had any faith in. Upon its completion, costar Claudette Colbert lamented “I’ve just made the worst picture of my career.” She won the Oscar for her efforts.

Ditto for Clark Gable, who had been loaned out to Columbia as punishment for refusing a part for his alma mater - MGM. Gable’s lack of undergarments in a key scene in the film caused sales of undershirts to plummet nation wide. Oscars for Best Film and director too. Imminent playwright

George Bernard Shaw put in his own two cents about the movies popularity with “Cedric Hardwicke is my fifth favorite actor, the first four being The Marx Brothers!”

1935

After defying studio edict and attempting to make a film away from Warner Bros. Bette Davis was corralled back into the fold, winning an Oscar as the incendiary bitch in Dangerous. In the trades: Joseph Schenck appointed Darryl F. Zanuck production head of 20th Century-Fox. Zanuck, a film maker at heart, would be the driving force of that studio for the next 3 decades. David O. Selznick launched his own independent production company – Selznick International.

Becky Sharp – one of the first films to be photographed in the newly perfected 3-strip Technicolor process was a glossy, colorful epic that oddly failed to find its audience. So too did success prove illusive for Warner Bros. lavish attempt at fantasy with Shakespeare’s A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream. But a new hero on the Warner backlot emerged when Tasmania born Errol Flynn donned tights and indulged in swordplay opposite Basil Rathbone in Captain Blood.

Amiable Fred MacMurray, suave Charles Boyer and wholesome Ann Sheridan were three new faces who debuted with a bright future ahead of them. Robert Taylor became MGM’s latest heartthrob. Musicals and costume dramas proved the most satisfying to audiences; David O. Selznick’s meticulously crafted David Copperfield; Garbo’s version of Anna Karenina; Gary Cooper’s star turn in Lives of a Bengal Lancer; Nelson Eddie and Jeanette MacDonald’s most glorious operetta, Naughty Marietta and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers best film to day - Top Hat among the year’s most illustrious output.

Only three years earlier – Astaire’s screen test had come back with the hand written note; “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Balding. Can dance a little.” He was, by 1935, already considered the premiere dancer in American movies. Time has done little to diminish that latter assessment of the Astaire style.

Best Picture to MGM’s Mutiny on the Bounty – a thrilling sea epic starring Clark Gable. America’s most celebrated moralist, Will Rogers tragically died in a plane crash. More mysterious was the sudden passing of gifted, Thelma Todd – a death/murder never fully explained away.

1936

As far as product was concerned – few years in recent history compared in quality; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town; William Powell’s refreshing and adroit, My Man Godfrey, Universal’s version of Show Boat; Gable’s celebrated disaster epic, San Francisco; Garbo’s greatest tragedy, Camille; Astaire and Rogers best musical - Swing Time; Romeo & Juliet; Rose Marie and The Great Ziegfeld topping everyone’s favorite ‘must see’ list. ‘Ziegfeld’ won the Best Picture Oscar.

Its heroine, Viennese Luise Rainer took home the first of her two consecutive statuettes as the year’s Best Actress. Color photography, publicly denounced as inconsequential by producer Irving Thalberg, made a splashing addendum to the otherwise leaden offerings of Ramona and The Garden of Allah – the latter an over blown melodrama produced by Selznick that bore the unmistakable producer’s hallmark of meticulous craftsmanship and attention to detail. Two shake ups in management rounded out the year – top heavy mismanagement deposed Carle Lemmle from Universal Pictures in favor of Charles R. Rogers. MGM’s V.P, Irving Thalberg died suddenly of a heart attack. He was 35 years old.

1937

Seventy percent of the world’s entertainment was being made in Hollywood. The best of the lot; the Oscar-winning, The Good Earth; Selznick’s The Prisoner of Zenda; Columbia’s zany screwball, The Awful Truth; RKO’s frank Stage Door, The Hurricane, MGM’s Captain’s Courageous and Frank Capra’s most ambitious project, Lost Horizon all attested to a high standard of quality and craftsmanship.

But the most celebrated coup of the year was a project that had initially been dubbed in the press as “Disney’s folly” – Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs emerged as spellbinding entertainment.

Borrowing against his own life insurance policy, Walt staked both his reputation and future success on the first full length animated feature. The gamble paid off handsomely. MGM’s A Family Affair launched a successful film series with Mickey Rooney playing the irrepressible teenager in perpetual love and heartache, Andy Hardy. Screen siren Jean Harlow collapsed on the set of Saratoga and died at the age of 26 from uremia three days later, forcing MGM to use a double in long shot to complete the film. Clark Gable, Harlow’s costar followed up this project with his only flop for MGM; Parnell.

A new discovery, Hedy LaMarr made her American screen debut. By now the film censorship production code wielded absolute authority over what was seen on the screen. When L.B. Mayer discovered LaMarr had appeared in the raw in a Czechoslovakian film his first question was “Did you look good?” “Of course,” LaMarr replied. “Then everything’s alright!” Mayer reasoned.

1938

Marie Antoinette – a project begun in earnest under Thalberg’s regime in 1936, and starring his widow, Norma Shearer finally made it to the screen; heavily revised, shortened, and, shot in B&W instead of color. It was a success but one whose extravagances L.B. Mayer was determined not to repeat. Television was in its experimental stages. It would debut at the New York World’s Fair one year later before being quashed by the onslaught of WWII.

Big ticket items of the year were Boy’s Town (for which Spencer Tracy won an Oscar), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, George Cukor’s sublime anti-capitalist, Holiday and Errol Flynn’s most lavish swashbuckler to date; in Technicolor - The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Cary Grant played it stuffy in Howard Hawk’s riotous Bringing Up Baby. Said Grant – “I don’t care how ugly they make me in pictures if they just let me play a part with character and substance.”

Determined to rival MGM’s supremacy in musicals, Darryl F. Zanuck premiered his costliest film to date; 20th Century-Fox’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Gable’s reputation as a he-man was kept in tact with Test Pilot – a high flying adventure flick. New faces with a bright future ahead of them included William Holden, John Garfield, Betty Grable, Roy Rogers, John Payne and David Niven – briefly glimpsed the year before in The Prisoner of Zenda.

Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes – both imports from France and England were hugely successful with American audiences. But The Life of Emile Zola won Best Picture Oscar.

1939

The year it all came together. Hollywood produced more contenders for the Best Picture Oscar in this single year than at any other time. The list is endless, but the best of the best included George Steven’s Gunga Din; Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Samuel Goldwyn’s Wuthering Heights; George Cukor’s The Women, and, Merian C. Cooper’s Stagecoach that finally made a star out of John Wayne – cast as the loveable desperado; the Ringo Kid.

Relatively unknown, soft spoken British actor Robert Donat walked off with the Best Actor honors for his touching and thoughtful performance in Goodbye Mr. Chips. The film costars Greer Garson – who would become one of the most popular leading ladies of the 40s and whom L.B. Mayer had first discovered in a play on London’s West End.

Series film making was at its zenith with stellar installments to Andy Hardy, Tarzan, The Thin Man, Sherlock Holmes, Maise and Dr. Kildare immensely contributing to the studios coffers. Garbo finally appeared in a comedy, and one of the best – Ninotchka. A year later she would retire from the screen.

Swedish discovery, Ingrid Bergman illuminated in Intermezzo: A Love Story. But the really big news of the year belonged to two Technicolor super-productions: MGM’s The Wizard of Oz and Selznick International’s Gone With The Wind. Oz made Judy Garland a household name. She took home the Oscar for Best Performance by a juvenile.

Bette Davis – who had desperately wanted to play Scarlett O’Hara was well compensated for the loss – she starred in back to back successes; The Private Lives of Elizabeth & Essex, Dark Victory and Juarez.

GWTW’s Vivien Leigh – a virtual unknown to American audiences towered above the rest to win Best Actress as Scarlett O’Hara. Hattie McDaniel became the first African American so honored with a statuette – as the defiant Mammie.

Gable’s animal magnetism was cemented for posterity by madcap comedian and lover Carole Lombard –

“Clark’s a wonder. I’m really nuts about him…Not just nuts about his nuts!”

By all accounts 1939 should have been the beginning of something big. Instead, with the encroachment of Hitler’s forces decimating the European market, it was the end of the yellow brick road for many years to come.


@Nick Zegarac 2007 (all rights reserved).