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Hollywood was a community in which people played together and fought together but always showed up at dawn to make movies together. Commuting by jet from Los Angeles to New York was 20 years away, and only between pictures did the moviemakers and stars leave town. Travel was still a time-consuming, albeit luxurious, event: several days on the Super Chief and 20th Century Limited to New York, then on to Europe aboard the Normandie or Queen Mary. Pan American did not introduce the first commercial flights to Europe until June 1939. But even then, its majestic Boeing flying boats took more than 29 hours to get from Port Washington, N.Y., to Marseilles.
Though it liked to think of itself as the capital of sophistication, Hollywood was in fact just as unworldly as such places as Topeka, or Twin Falls, Idaho, where most of its inhabitants came from. The movies they made reflected and gained much of their strength from that innocence, and they resounded with a sincerity that no amount of artifice can duplicate. Would any scriptwriter today dare to type a corny line like this? "If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with." The writers of The Wizard of Oz dared and thereby helped make a great film.
They were the mirror of the country, those men and women who made the movies of 1939. Like the country, they were confident, certain of themselves and their future. They knew, or thought they knew, the difference between good and bad, right and wrong, and that confidence, which they took for granted, was the rock upon which they built.
But their Golden Age was soon to end, and 1939, which had begun on a note of optimism in both Europe and America ended in a new world war. With an uncanny prescience, the movies of 1939 seemed to anticipate what was to come. People may have gone crazy over there, they seemed to say, but here, here in America, there is still safety. Even that sunny musical, Babes in Arms, ends in a curious and, in retrospect, quite poignant, plea for peace. "We send our greetings to friendly nations," sings the chorus, led by Garland and Rooney. "We may be Yanks, but we're your relations. Drop your sabers, we're all going to be good neighbors here in God's country!"
America was to maintain an uneasy neutrality for nearly two more years, but Hollywood, that faithful mirror, soon reflected the grim reality of 1940. Never again was it to have the brash confidence and high spirits of that year of genius and glitter, 1939.