RESEARCH ARTICLE the Shape of 1939 Barry Salt*
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RESEARCH ARTICLE The Shape of 1939 Barry Salt* The London Film School, 24 Shelton Street, London WC2H 9UB, UK This article extends further backwards to 1939 the survey of stylistic changes in American feature films which I began with The Shape of 1999 and The Shape of 1959, previously published in The New Re- view of Film and Television Studies. Keywords: film style; statistical analysis; US films of 1939 The Sample The IMdb records 520 American feature films that were released in 1939, and of these, 171 were available on DVD or video tape at the time this research was carried out. The available films were scattered fairly evenly across the output of the studios and genres, so a random sample of twenty of these films was taken. This is the resulting list:- * Email: [email protected] B. Salt Title Director Studio Another Thin Man W.S. Van Dyke MGM At the Circus Edward Buzzell MGM Blind Alley Charles Vidor Columbia The Cat and the Canary Elliott Nugent Paramount Destry Rides Again George Marshall Universal Each Dawn I Die William Keighley Warner Bros. Harlem Rides the Range Richard C. Kahn Hollywood Pictures Heritage of the Desert Lesley Selander Paramount The Invisible Killer Sam Newfield Producers Pictures In Old Caliente Joseph Kane Republic The Little Princess Walter Lang Paramount Love Affair Leo McCarey RKO Mr. Smith Goes to Washington Frank Capra Columbia The Mystery of Mr. Wong William Nigh Monogram Nancy Drew… Reporter William Clemens Warner Bros. The Old Maid Edmund Goulding Warner Bros. Rose of Washington Square Gregory Ratoff 20th. Century-Fox The Saint Strikes Back John Farrow RKO Tower of London Rowland V. Lee Universal Wuthering Heights William Wyler Goldwyn This sample in its turn also shows a fairly even selection across the stu- dios and the genres, although inevitably some of the small studios that made small numbers of B-pictures are not represented. Given the stand- ard double feature method of film exhibition in the United States at this time, the total number of B-films produced was approximately equal to the number of A-films, and this is reasonably represented in the above sample, along with the fact that most of the major studios produced B- films alongside their A-film production. There are four Westerns in the sample because there were an awful lot of B-Westerns made in 1939, and given that he made nine films in 1939, the laws of chance have almost inevitably given me the No. 2 singing cowboy of the time, Roy Rogers, New Review of Film and Television Studies performing in In Old Caliente. (He made 9 films in 1939). But note that Destry Rides Again is not a B-Western, but one of the few A-Westerns made in 1939. I remind readers that B-features in this period were always about 60 minutes long, whereas A-features were about 90 minutes long. The major studios also made one or two ‘Super-A’ features a year in the ‘thirties, and these had much bigger budgets than regular A-features, and were 110 minutes, or more, in length. In this sample, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is such a film. Also in the sample are a couple of films -- The Invisible Killer and Nancy Drew ... Reporter -- about intrepid female newspaper reporters, which was another interest of the time. And another burgeoning interest appears in the first Hollywood film centering on psy- choanalysis (of a kind): Blind Alley. Method My analytical procedure has been described in the previous articles in this series, but briefly it depends on ripping a DVD or videotape of the film to hard disk, and then using a non-linear editor to mark the boundaries of all the shots in the film, before making a series of passes through the film to count the totals of the other various stylistic variables that I study. These variables are derived from the terms used by film-makers in their construction of motion picture films. The sequential lengths of the shots in each of the twenty films in the sample are not studied in this paper, but they are available on the Cinemetrics web site at www.cinemetrics.lv Scale of Shot The Scale or Closeness of Shot is measured, as before, by the size of the human figure relative to the height of the frame. They are as follows: Big Close Up (BCU) shows head only, Close Up (CU) shows head and shoulders, Medium Close Up (MCU) includes body from the waist up, Medium Shot (MS) includes from just below the hip to above the head of upright actors, Medium Long Shot (MLS) shows the body from the knee upwards, Long Shot (LS) shows at least the full height of the body, and Very Long Shot (VLS) shows the actor small in the frame. As usual, the figures quoted are the number of shots of each scale per 500 shots in the film concerned. You can see the size of these shot scales illustrated in a diagram on page 253 in my book Moving Into Pictures (Salt 2006). Below are the graphs showing the number of shots of each scale per 500 shots in each of the films in the sample. They are ordered from the film with the most emphasis on distant shots to the film with the greatest con- centration on close shots of the actors. This ordering used the ratio be- tween the number of shots with scales greater then Medium Shot to the number of shots with scale less than Medium Shot for each film. A crude measure, but I like to keep things simple. B. Salt In Old Caliente Harlem Rides the Range At the Circus e e e l l l 230 a a 250 a 250 250 c c 208 c s s s n n n e e 200 e 200 200 166 v v v i i i g g g h h 150 h 150 150 t 119 t t i i i 98 w w 92 w 83 s s 100 77 s 100 100 t t 65 t 67 63 o o o 53 h h 36 h s s 50 s 50 33 50 31 f f 20 f 16 18 13 10 o o 2 o . o o 0 o 0 0 N N N BCU CU MCU MS MLS LS VLS BCU CU MCU MS MLS LS VLS BCU CU MCU MS MLS LS VLS Scale of Shot Scale of Shot Scale of Shot The Mystery of Mr. Wong Wuthering Heights The Little Princess e e e l l l a a 250 a 250 250 c c c s s 194 s n n n e e 200 e 200 171 200 v v v i i i g g g h h 150 h 150 150 125 123 t t t i i i 108 w w 95 w 92 89 80 s s 100 s 100 77 100 t t 68 t 62 64 68 o o o h h h s s 50 25 s 50 50 f f 19 8 f 16 11 o o o 5 1 . o o 0 o 0 0 N N N BCU CU MCU MS MLS LS VLS BCU CU MCU MS MLS LS VLS BCU CU MCU MS MLS LS VLS Scale of Shot Scale of Shot Scale of Shot Heritage of the Desert Tower of London The Cat and the Canary e l e e l l a 250 a a c 250 250 c c s s s n n n e 200 e 200 e 200 v i v v i i g 138 g 142 g h 150 h 127 t 150 h 150 i t t i 115 100 i w 96 99 87 w 93 91 w 95 s 100 s t 100 76 s t 70 100 61 t o o o h h h 43 s s 50 s f 16 50 21 50 f f 20 o 3 8 o o . 1 . o 0 o 0 o N 0 N N BCU CU MCU MS MLS LS VLS BCU CU MCU MS MLS LS VLS BCU CU MCU MS MLS LS VLS Scale of Shot Scale of Shot Scale of Shot Destry Rides Again Rose of Washington Square 1939 Average Scales e l e e l a 250 l a c 250 a 250 c s c s s n n e 200 n e v 200 e 200 i v v i i g g g h 150 121 t h h i 150 121 150 106 t t i i 110 w 94 100 w 91 w 94 s 100 72 79 88 87 t 82 82 s 100 78 s 100 t t o o o h h s 50 23 h s s f 50 28 50 f f 19 o 5 12 8 o . o . o 0 o o N 0 0 N N BCU CU MCU MS MLS LS VLS BCU CU MCU MS MLS LS VLS BCU CU MCU MS MLS LS VLS Scale of Shot Scale of Shot Scale of Shot The Invisible Killer Blind Alley Mr. Smith Goes to Washington e e l e l l a a a 250 250 250 c c c s s s n n n e 200 e 200 e 200 v v i v i i g g g h 150 h 150 124 h 126 150 t t i t 119 111 111 i i 107 105 w w w 93 87 s 79 s 75 s 100 100 t 100 74 t 69 t 69 63 o o o h h h s s 28 s 50 26 50 f 50 f f 15 13 o 2 o o 4 .