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With a celebrated conscience that writhed with guilt beside the swimming pool, Hollywood writers sang a song-of social significance. The loner of the '30s film—Gary Cooper, Gary Grant, Jimmy Stewart—always triumphed against Big Money, amid settings of dreamlike luxury, cluttered with butlers, white pianos and canopied beds. Like animated editorial cartoons, their opposition was always a vested—and usually watch-chained—interest on the order of Edward Arnold. The heroine—Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Arthur—spoke with a catch in her throat that accented her vulnerability. But she had a whim of iron, and when she urged John Doe or Mr. Smith to Washington, the nation's laws were rewritten on the spot. As the Girl Friday, she was the flip, half-emancipated helpmeet to the strong but bumbling American Male.
In those films, passion was expressed with a kiss or a cheek-to-cheek dance. Yet, in retrospect, they often seem sexier than some of today's celebrated shockers. What made Mae West's double-entendres titillating was that they really had double meanings; current cinematic sex jokes have but one unmistakable point.
Today, children constitute one of the most militant majorities in America. And since a threat cannot be cute, the late-show screen child seems like a kid who has stayed up past his bedtime. During the Depression parents somehow found their children easier to get along with —perhaps because they had a sense of sharing a common crisis. Children seemed comforting, or at least cheering. Hollywood fostered Jackie Cooper, Frankie Darro, Mickey Rooney, Our Gang and the apotheosis of innocence, Shirley Temple. "I class myself with Rin-Tin-Tin," she later said, referring to such films as Bright Eyes and Curly Top. "At the end of the Depression, people were perhaps looking for something to cheer them up. They fell in love with a dog and a little girl—it won't happen again."
That love was not universal. Only a changed America could drive the Temple from the money changers, but even in the '30s a bulbous misanthrope named W. C. Fields declared that "no man who hates small dogs and children can be all bad." Fields had a following that identified with his constant character, the put-upon male who could neither support nor desert his yapping family. This original style of explosive comedy arose from humanity under pressure—a kind of pressure that affluence has released, perhaps forever. The Marx Brothers, for example, remain as inseparable from the '30s and '40s as F.D.R. More than any other stars, they bridge vaudeville, the silents, the talkies and TV itself. But Fields, who always blew his cool, exerts an appeal rivaled only by Bogart, who never blew his. Both men nurse a surly integrity and loathing for any Establishment except the neighborhood bar—attitudes that delight today's young cynical idealists.