Above: Picture Snatcher (1933)
During the Depression, MGM's studio engorged our starving millions with yachts, bassoons, and polar bears. Grand Hotel, Lovers Courageous, The Washington Masquerade, and Dinner at Eight represent Metro frivolity shouting itself from the rooftops. But these were accompanied by other, somewhat more cagey films whose essential message was, "Hey, the rich have problems too!" Take Bonnie Jordan (Joan Crawford) in Dance, Fools, Dance, personifying plutocracy on the skids: a suddenly ex-debutante forced by circumstance to actually earn her living, armed with moxie and—heaven forfend, Ladies and Gentlemen!—a job. Crawford's wish-list physiognomy, seemingly carved from bone in imitation of some marble original, makes us forget that jobs are themselves an American fantasy, post-Crash.
Into the oblivion of "Ars Gratia Artis" fly bothersome words: "paycheck," "meal," "ob-jay."
Pulling our minds in the opposite direction was that furiously propulsive beast of a studio Warner Bros., forever relieving itself on ermine bathmats with films like Gold Diggers of 1933, Taxi!, Picture Snatcher, and Ladies They Talk About. No less mythical than the disconnected affluence offered elsewhere, these early talkies nonetheless veered toward us—with the piping hot rage of taxi dancers, and the promise of pugnacious, even revolutionary, brass. See Heroes for Sale and plotz.
Today's Depression Lesson is that industrial majesty sometimes goes hand in hand with realism.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sang us sonatas, Warners served up spaghetti.
Part of the on-going series Depression Lessons.