For the next few days I will screen some landmark films from, arguably, Hollywood’s greatest year, and attend lectures by distinguished film scholars.

First impressions: Hillsdale is sort of like a set for a Frank Capra film.

Hillsdale College Campus.

About an hour from Detroit, Hillsdale is in the middle of flat farmland where white-tailed deer graze in golden fields.

Most of the buildings are informed by peaked roofs and references to classical Greek and Colonial architecture. The school is situated on 200 acres, has  100 full time faculty members and approximately 1,300 students.

Refusing all Federal dollars, Hillsdale is one of the few Conservative American colleges—Claremont and Grove City are two others that spring to mind—thus the school is truly independent, not shackled by government grants or political headwinds.

Hillsdale, a co-educational, liberal arts college, established by Freewill Baptists on Dec 4, 1844, was the first American college to prohibit in its charter all discrimination based on race, religion, or sex. In the 1970s Hillsdale refused, on principle, to “submit Assurance of Compliance forms mandated by Title IX” of Affirmative Action programs, on the grounds that its own policies were  less discriminatory than those of the federal government.

The Constitution and our American freedoms are taken very seriously by administration and students alike.

Over the next few days I’ll report on Hillsdale College, and the Films of 1939.

Here’s my schedule:

Sunday, March 7, 2010

4:00 p.m. Showing of “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” (dir. Sam Wood)

8:00 p.m. “Hollywood in 1939”
David Thomson
Author, “Have You Seen…?” A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films

Monday, March 8, 2010

4:00 p.m. Showing of “Young Mr. Lincoln” (dir. John Ford)

8:00 p.m. “John Ford: Chronicler of America”
Dan Ford
Author, The Life of John Ford

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

4:00 p.m. Showing of “Ninotchka” (dir. Ernst Lubitsch)

8:00 p.m. “The Art of Ernst Lubitsch”
Scott Eyman
Palm Beach Post
Author, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

“John Ford”

Lecture by John Marini

Claremont McKenna College, Professor of Political Science

4:00 p.m. Showing of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (dir. Frank Capra)

8:00 p.m. “Capra as Director”
Peter Bogdanovich
Director and Film Historian

Thursday, March 11, 2010

11:00 a.m. Faculty Roundtable

I need to keep track of three time zones: dual time piece displays (top) California, (bottom) New York. The second watch shows the local time. I know, I know, New York and Michigan are in the same time zone. What can I tell you. The redundancy is reassuring. If one watch quits, I have the second as back-up.

I have to tell you, I hate traveling. I hate being in new places. I hate not sleeping in my own bed. And I really hate being separated from the love of my life, Karen.

Look, when you’ve been in love with the same woman since age nine—I never said I was normal—being away from said woman induces a kind of inner chaos. It’s like, I’m gone for a few days and oh-oh, now she’s going to get wise to how easy life can be without yours truly always kvetching about everything under the sun.

Let’s face it, I’m a high maintenance husband.

Another reason I hate to travel, even to see great films, is because I always end up in some random corner of the universe—Japan, China, Kansas—where kosher food is not only unavailable, but not even a rumor.

But I have to hand it to Hillsdale. They have done everything possible to accommodate my religious observance.

Hillsdale’s Joe Cella, who assisted in promoting this film forum and invited me to attend, listened patiently over the phone and said:

“I’ll run the traps for some kosher food.”

I was like, “Huh?”

I felt like I was talking to Grizzly Adams.

Finally, Joe explained that running the traps is Midwestern talk for, y’know, getting stuff done.

So: I’ve got a refrigerator and microwave in my room. Tons of fresh fruit and salad, and of course all the food Karen packed for me.

Note to self: In the future, do not pack the diet Ginger Ale. The can explodes like a grenade at 30,000 ft.

I’ve been up for about sixteen hours.

Must get some sleep.

Stay tuned for further posts over the next few days.

Strolling along the Hillsdale campus, I discovered this statue of Margaret Thatcher. Be still my heart.

P.S. I am fuh-reezing.

On their improbable wedding night, anti-Communist reporter—remember them?—Clark Gable gives Bolshevik Hedy Lamarr a luscious, Adrian designed silk nightgown. Unlike Travis Banton, Adrian was concerned with silhouette and in this exquisitely bias-cut negligee—Gable just happens to have it in his suitcase—Hedy Lamarr’s figure is highlighted to a spectacular effect.

Long live the products of decadent American capitalism.

Capitalist Clark Gable puts Communist Hedy Lamarr in touch with her feminine side in Comrade X, 1940.

Hedy, playing a variation of Greta Garbo’s Ninotchka, is a humorless Soviet scold more concerned with industrial production than with her own femininity, which translates into her humanity.

TCM’s Shadows of Russia series, organized and programmed by my favorite  film blogger Self-Styled Siren and The New York Posts’s fine film critic Lou Lumenick, kicks into a refreshing mode—after the shallow and dopey Reds—as we view the lighter side of the Russian revolution.

Comrade X, directed by King Vidor from a story by Walter Reisch and script by the great Ben Hecht is the story of an American reporter who is blackmailed into getting the beautiful but ideologically rigid streetcar—not named Desire—conductor out of Russia.

Interesting to note that Hedy Lamarr’s character is ideologically committed to Communism. But Clark Gable’s hard-nosed American reporter never really claims an ideology. In fact, as he and Lamarr are about to face a Soviet firing squad, Gable passionately states: “You’re a beautiful woman and nobody’s gonna turn a machine gun on you. That’s my politics.”

Clark Gable, more than any other American actor, exudes a deep and abiding love for women. In Comrade X he projects just the right degree of lust to melt Hedy Lamarr’s Marxist heart. The flawless landscape of Lamarr’s face allows this lovely but limited actress to project the heartless core of Soviet totalitarian rule.

Garbo surrenders to Paris fashions and Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchka, 1939.

Ninotchka, produced a year earlier, Garbo’s best role and her best film, was a huge hit. The story is a classic Hollywood fish-out-of-water tale. Garbo, a Soviet envoy who carries a portrait of Lenin in her suitcase, arrives in decadent Paris and is swept off her feet by the charming and corrupt Melvyn Douglas, and Paris fashions as interpreted by Adrian.

The script, credited to Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch was, in fact, the work of at least ten Hollywood screenwriters. But it is a seamless screenplay and Ernst Lubitsch’s assured hand brings a consistent tone to this near-perfect Hollywood classic.

Casual but razor-sharp lines nail the murderous and corrupt Soviet regime.

Says Garbo: “The last mass trials were a success: there will be fewer, but better Russians.”

This one piece of dialogue is more honest than the entire three-hour plus Reds.

As in Comrade X, a hard-core Commie babe is taught by a decadent American to get in touch with her feminine side. Love vanquishes politics. Like Gable, Melvyn Douglas has no particular ideological bent except a fondness for champagne and beautiful women. This, I suppose, is a way of indicating the American love of freedom in contrast to dreary and regimented Communism. When Douglas views the lights of Paris he sees beauty and romance. Garbo’s Ninotchka sees a waste of electricity—she’s already an insufferable Greenie. Thus, Garbo’s transformation from Soviet drudge—wisely, Lubitsch keeps Garbo in medium shot emphasizing her chronically bad posture—to capitalist swan is deliriously romantic.

Comrade X and Ninotchka are like Soviet versions of What Not to Wear—and you thought I only watch classic Hollywood movies—with free market American males rescuing Bolshevik beauties from the unspeakable horrors of Communist shmattes. In both films the Commie females are decidedly, er, masculine until all American males effect fierce make-overs, thereby freeing up natural feminine impulses.

Flashback:

I’m sitting with my wife Karen watching What Not to Wear.

Karen: “You’d never nominate me for this show, would you?”

My wife is wearing a killer Prada dress and lethal Christian Louboutin heels. The rabbi’s daughter  is just as beautiful as when we first met in third grade.

Me: (totally sincere) “Of course not.”

Karen: (totally sincere) “Because if you did, I’d dis-em-bowel you.”

End Flashback:

Satire is, perhaps, the most potent weapon in Hollywood’s arsenal, and these two films, more than any other I have ever seen, expose and ridicule the evils of Communism. Comrade X and Ninotchka are classic Hollywood movies, hugely entertaining, and deeply enlightening. Both films recognize that Communism is an assured platform for mass murder, but it is also a decidedly anti-romantic ideology. And that is intolerable.

Both movies take it for granted that Stalin’s regime was a monstrous killing machine liquidating vast swaths of its people. Hollywood is properly repelled by Soviet Communism. In contrast,Walter Duranty, Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for praising Stalin and defending the brutality of the Communist purges. The Soviet-manufactured mass starvation in the Ukraine never happened in the expert opinion of this Communist hack. Predictably, Duranty never recanted his noxious opinions—a true Stalinist—and the New York Times never returned the Pulitzer—true running dogs of elitism.

With two elegant and fluffy romances, Hollywood righteously skewers Soviet Communism.

For a shining moment tinsel town was on the side of the angels.

By the way, “Garbo Laughs,” was the line used by MGM to sell Ninotchka. But if you look carefully at the scene where Garbo laughs, it appears that her voice is out of synch—I ran the scene back on forth on my DVR like a complete lunatic. Almost certainly, Garbo’s laugh was dubbed, probably by some anonymous actress or sound editor.

© Robert J. Avrech

It’s a truism among fans of classic movies that 1939 was the Hollywood cinema’s greatest year. But if it has become something of a cliche to say so, it’s only because it’s so undeniably true.

It’s really rather amazing to consider how many classic or transcendentally classic films were released during that annus mirabilis. Among the most highly praised then and in the ensuring years were the following:

• Gone with the Wind
• The Wizard of Oz
• Stagecoach
• Beau Geste
• Goodbye, Mr. Chips
• Gunga Din
• The Women
• Wuthering Heights
• The Roaring Twenties
• Love Affair

Those would be enough for a great year in itself, but there was so much more–such as Ninotchka, Only Angels Have Wings, Drums Along the Mohawk, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Allegheny Uprising, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Stanley and Livingston, The Man in the Iron Mask, Dark Victory, Of Mice and Men,Young Mr. Lincoln, The Rains Came, Midnight, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Union Pacific, Babes in Arms, The Little Princess, Another Thin Man, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, The Hardys Ride High, Golden Boy, Dodge City, Gulliver’s Travels, The Light That Failed, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Old Maid, Son of Frankenstein, Destry Rides Again, and many, many others of like quality.

And from overseas: The Rules of the Game, The Four Feathers, The Stars Look Down, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, and others.

And perhaps even more impressive is the high quality of even the year’s lower-budget films, such as Code of the Secret Service and Secret Service of the Air, both starring Ronald Reagan. What all the Hollywood films mentioned here shared was the industry’s ability at the time to alternate scenes of grandeur and intimacy with consummate skill and confidence.

The Hollywood movie factories had been perfected by the mid-1930s, and the studios were amazingly adept at turning out greatly entertaining movies that reflected and reinforced the values of their audience. Although the stars and other filmmaking principals were paid amazing sums of money then as they are now, the industry did not then reflect the elitism now rampant in Hollywood.

The studio moguls, who were largely self-made and from humble origins, enthusiastically accepted the nation’s founding values and made sure that their product reflected those notions.They did so both for patriotic reasons and because they knew that was the best way for them to make money.

Thus while MGM head Louis B. Mayer was a staunch Republican and the Warner Bros. were supporters of FDR, all shared a strong patriotic love for their nation and shared their audience’s values.

Also important was the more conservative social values that arose during the Depression 1930s after the social excesses of the Roaring Twenties. Audiences preferred movies to reflect values such as personal responsibility, long-term thinking, the value of hard work, personal sacrifice for the good of others, modesty, and the like. Hollywood was voluntarily under the authority of the Production Code, which set moral standards for the industry and protected the studios from a race to the moral bottom and an unbridled pursuit of sensationalism.

The Production Code was clearly not a straitjacket on creativity, given the impressive films made while it was in place during the 1930s through the 1950s. Contrary to the claims of many critics (and the Wikipedia entry cited here), the Production Code Administration was willing and in fact eager to work with producers to ensure that films could be as creative as possible without undermining the nation’s morals.

Refraining from undermining people’s morals may seem rather a quaint notion to many people today, but it indicates a sense of honor, decency, and humility that is sorely lacking among all to many purveyors of cultural products today.

Of course, there’s no sense in hoping for a return of the Production Code, but a greater sense of responsibility on filmmakers’ part would certainly be welcome. It would benefit the movies both morally and esthetically.