For me, watching the Academy Awards is not much different from watching the Grammys – a prolonged celebration of products to which I would otherwise pay no attention. The movies that are awarded by what I once called the Hollywood Institute of Self-Congratulation are the ones that uphold Hollywood’s dimly conceived standard of what a movie should be. But even bothering to state as much has become a whopping cliché. This is how it has always been. The vast majority of movies today are just as awful as they always were, from 1929 to to the present. As even a generous critic like Stanley Kauffmann believed, only less than one percent of them make the medium viable and keep it from veering into irrelevance.
So just now, instead of watching the ceremony, which has always left me feeling slightly sick, allow me to reprint a criticism of Hollywood by an interested outsider. Edmund Wilson is one of the preeminent American literary critics. So what qualifies him to write about movies? One thing qualifies him perfectly: he was not a fan. Being a fan is grounds for the immediate disqualification of any critic, yet the majority of people writing on the subject of film are unmistakable sufferers from this malady. Not only can they not distinguish between what they like and what is good, they refuse to believe there is anything like an objective standard – such as an aesthetic standard.
Ask anyone who knows anything about the subject and they will tell you the same thing: the Hollywood’s Golden Era was the 1930s, and the Golden Year was 1939. Writing a review in 1937 called The Great Goldwyn by Alva Johnston, Edmund Wilson, who never warmed so much to the subject, suggested that this was a misconception, and that Hollywood had little to be so proud of. When Johnston asserted that “Next year is Sam’s silver jubilee [in the movie business]. It is something for everybody to feel patriotic about. The U.S.A. leads the world by a wider margin in pictures than anything else, and one of the chief reasons is the Great Goldwyn,” Wilson took umbrage at the appeal to patriotism, and expounded his reasons why:
Well, I for one will be damned if I will feel patriotic about Sam Goldwyn’s silver jubilee. In what sense does the United States lead the world in moving pictures? We make more of them than any other country and are, I suppose, more proficient technically, but have we ever turned out anything that was comparable artistically to the best German or Russian films? I can think of nothing except Charlie Chaplin, who is his own producer and produces simply himself. There was a time – up to, say, 1930 – when our pictures seemed to be improving. There were new actors brought in from Europe and from the speaking stage in New York; there was mechanical experimentation and an aesthetic attention to photography; intelligent directors were given their chance.
But then the depression fell; the producers were frightened and forced to retrench; and the whole movie business seemed to harden into something immovably banal. It nailed down its favorite formulas in all their vulgarity and falsity, and almost entirely abandoned any attempt to make the old situations seem lifelike or to point them up with novel direction. The actors who were brought to Hollywood were handled with extreme stupidity, and, if they stayed there, almost invariably ruined. A lot of talent has been fed into the studios, and what have our pictures to show for it? How shall we ever know now, for example, whether Katharine Hepburn – or, for that matter, Greta Garbo – ever really had anything in her? They set the talented Emil Jannings to performing over and over again wretched parodies of his German masterpieces, with everything that had given them reality and made them human and moving bleached out by the insipid Hollywood sun, until he could stand it no longer and departed. Charles Laughton has also escaped and has returned to England and the Old Vic. Marlene Dietrich, who must have had some ability at least as a night club singer, because she has made marvellous phonograph records in German, has been turned into something in the nature of one of those loose-jointed dolls designed to be propped up against the pillows in boudoirs with sateen bedspreads, and has been made to appear in pictures so foolish, so unsightly and of such horrible taste that the most beautiful woman in the world could not play in them without looking ridiculous. But the only mirrors, apparently, in which film actors can look at themselves are the magazines that exploit the glamor of the trade and are edited for adolescent schoolgirls. That able Soviet actress Anna Sten the Great Goldwyn was unable to use at all; and I see that she is now making for another producer pictures with such titles as Love Me Again, Gorgeous and Orchid Girl. Mae West, whose peculiar attraction was that she worked up her own material and created a legendary world of her own, now has to have savorless imitations written for her by Hollywood hacks, who have quickly converted her fantasies into run-of-the-mill goods. The vultures of the Coast got them all. A director like King Vidor who has serious aspirations ends by turning out the worst kind of monstrosity: the bad serious picture. The shimmering polish of Lubitsch ends as a veneer on the awful old formulas. We have actually got to a point where features like Tarzan and Charlie Chan are the most satisfactory things one can go to. They are absurd, they are fairy tales; but they do have a certain independent existence.
The other day, after long abstinence from the movies, the result of having seen nothing but bad films for a year, I went to see one for the first time in months. I had assumed that the Marx brothers were indestructible. True, I had been reading the publicity stories about their new picture, A Day at the Races: how it had first been taken all over the country in the form of a stage entertainment, with a view to weeding out every gag that could not be immediately appreciated by the audience of the average town of over two or three thousand inhabitants. But I hadn’t foreseen that the result of this would be to deprive the Marx brothers of all their natural vitality and spontaneity. As if even popular comic art, if this is really to capture the public, were not more a matter of putting over an audience (as Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney have) something from one’s own imagination than of finding an infallible formula to provoke its automatic reactions! The idea of establishing and exploiting the lowest common denominator of audiences has finally killed the movies. They are absolutely sterile and static. And even the Marx brothers are no longer the Marx brothers. Their corporate élan has been deadened by unnatural selection of their dullest gags; and they now fall asunder helpless. It would be amusing if A Day at the Races, after all the special trouble taken with it, should turn out to be a total flop.
I remember only one American critic who has seemed to me to do full justice to this subject of the Hollywood producers: Mr. George Jean Nathan in the Smart Set. Mr. Nathan had the rich and reckless language for it; I am sorry that my own powers are relatively feeble. That was ten years or more ago, but it is plain that today’s producers, including the Great Goldwyn and the late lamented Irving Thalberg, are the same megalomaniac cloak-and-suit dealers that their predecessors were. You have only to look at their products. You have only to look at their staffs. From the servant you may know the master. Mr. Johnston can have had only a brief submergence, and look at the book he has written.
from "IT'S TERRIBLE! IT'S GHASTLY IT STINKS!" July 21, 1937
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