Conservativism and Cinema in the 1930s
In the US and Portugal alike, films often conveyed a yearning for simplicity and stability amid that decade’s economic and political upheavals – though not without their nuances.
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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal developments.
I’m currently in the process of completing a journal article on conservatism and representations of law and justice in 1930s Hollywood film, or rather, one film in particular: A Family Affair, released by MGM in 1937 and starring Lionel Barrymore as its protagonist, Judge James K. Hardy. It was the first of the ‘Hardy Family’ series, which as it progressed became primarily a vehicle for Mickey Rooney as Judge Hardy’s son Andy (Barrymore was too expensive to be cast in any of the sequels, in which he was replaced by Lewis Stone). MGM was closely associated, through studio head Louis Mayer, with the Republican Party.
This post is a prequel and partner to that article. It is about the lessons we can draw from looking at A Family Affair in comparison with a Portuguese counterpart, Aldeia da Roupa Branca, which was released two years later. Starring Beatriz Costa – one of the country’s most prominent film stars of the era – as its heroine, Gracinda, it is a key example of the Comédia à portuguesa genre that dominated Portuguese cinema during the early decades of the right-wing authoritarian rule of António de Oliveira Salazar. The parallels and contrasts between the two films can tell us something about the appeal of conservatism as an ideology and practice at a point not only of considerable political and economic upheaval worldwide, but also the rapid advancement of film as a medium following the arrival of sound.
MGM and the Republican Party
Under the Republican presidencies of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, economic liberalism regained its position as the dominant logic driving US policy between the early 1920s and early 1930s. The Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression eroded the legitimacy of this approach, paving the way for Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt to trounce incumbent Hoover in the 1932 presidential election. Roosevelt soon implemented his not entirely coherent but far-reaching package of policies known as ‘The New Deal’, which drastically increased the role of the state in directing economic activity, regulating business, protecting labour and consumer rights, and providing welfare. Meanwhile, out of office, Hoover became something of a lodestar for a reconfigured American right, whose critique of the New Deal combined free market economics with a fundamentalist approach to interpreting the American constitution. He warned that Roosevelt operated on the misassumption that individual rights were the gift of government rather than preexisting naturally and accused him of having dictatorial tendencies. In contrast to current government policy, he championed rugged individualism, individual, local, and state autonomy, and voluntarism. This ideological alignment was visible beyond the Republican Party itself, in ostensibly grassroots but often big business-dominated organisations that agitated against progressive legislation during the 1920s and 1930s, although it was not hegemonic within the party itself.1
Louis B. Mayer had become heavily involved in Republican politics, through his executive assistant Ida B. Koverman, during the 1920s, and was very close to Hoover. He played a crucial role in fundraising, campaigning, and gaining endorsements for Republicans, as well as advancing their public relations strategies more generally. He also played an important role in Hollywood’s often exceedingly dirty campaign to defeat the socialist Democrat candidate, Upton Sinclair, in his unsuccessful 1934 bid to become Governor of California. A poor Jewish childhood migrant from the Russian Empire to Canada and then the US, Mayer was drawn to Republican politics by own belief in entrepreneurialism, and his personal need for acceptance within the American social elite. He also used the party to secure political favours and business-friendly policies at a local and national level and turned MGM into a site for the conservative political education of Hollywood stars, including Barrymore. Though principally involved in the business rather than creative aspects of the running of the studio, he himself favoured films offering family entertainment and celebrating the American way of life – most of all, the Hardy Family films.2
A Family Affair
A Family Affair was set in the fictional Midwestern town of Carvel. At the centre of the film’s plot was a plan to build an aqueduct to transport water from Carvel to a growing nearby city, carried out by contractor Hoyt Wells, with strong backing from local newspaper The Carvel Star and its publisher Frank Redmond. The lucrative scheme was, however, halted by Judge Hardy, determined to ensure its propriety before work on it progressed. The town quickly turned against Hardy, while Wells and Redmond sought to blackmail him. They warned they would block his re-nomination as district judge, and then also threatened to print allegations about a roadhouse tryst involving his elder daughter, Joan, that had led to her estrangement from her husband, Bill. At the same time, Judge Hardy faced fierce objection from his other daughter, Marion, whose fiancée Wayne was employed to work on the aqueduct as a civil engineer. However, Judge Hardy was able to win the day. Firstly, he convinced Bill of Joan’s fidelity and to publicly deny rumours of their impending divorce. Then, he demonstrated at the nomination meeting that the aqueduct project was facilitated by an enabling act allowing the neighbouring city to commandeer as much of Carvel’s river and surrounding valleys as it demanded, resulting in the town’s inevitable ruin. Judge Hardy revealed he had struck down the enabling act down as unconstitutional, and he was subsequently renominated as district judge by universal acclaim. The film ended with his reunion with his watching family, during which he promised Wayne that a new enabling act would be passed allowing construction of an aqueduct to take place, but this time making sure Carvel would get ‘a square deal’.
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With a judge as its protagonist, the film was centrally concerned with questions of jurisprudence. Traditionally, the American judiciary were widely represented as unbiased interpreters of a concrete system of laws handed down by the country’s founders. However, this viewpoint came under increasing attack from a new generation of legal scholars who saw it as irrelevant to actual legal practice and in the face of the growing complexity of social and economic life.3 In A Family Affair, Judge Hardy reasserted the primacy of ‘The Law’ as a preexisting force guiding his actions. This initially came across as almost comically stubborn: the original injunction was brought by a rival newspaper publisher who subsequently tried to drop it after being bribed by Wells, only for Judge Hardy to refuse and throw him out of his office. Yet the film ultimately rewarded his refusal to bow to public pressure and his unyielding faith that sticking strictly to protocol would result in the right outcome. At the end, popular opinion would be reunited with his point of view, on his terms.
However, other aspects of the film did not map quite so neatly onto the Republican politics of Hoover and Mayer. It certainly exhibited a strong scepticism, in the era of the New Deal, towards large-scale public projects. The film was though far from pro-business and anti-government. Judge Hardy’s principal adversaries were, after all, powerful businessmen, capable of using their wealth to corrupt democracy and public opinion. He defeated them through his expertise and service-mindedness as a public official, redeeming local democracy by demonstrating its ability to responding appropriately to the truth. In opposing the interests of a small town to a big city it was certainly on the side of the former rather than the latter, but only as an abstract idea. The small town stood for individual freedoms from the tyranny of majorities, for ordinary people’s desire for prosperity and contentedness in a town like Carvel. Yet A Family Affair’s portrayal of Carvel – its residents so readily misled, its local institutions often threatening to the Hardy family – was for the most part at best ambivalent. As for the big city, it remained unshown and unnamed throughout, standing for exploitation and expropriation, but most readily associated with the plutocrat Wells who linked it with Carvel.
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The film was, on the other hand, unambiguously celebratory of the nuclear family. Judge Hardy’s home and his relationships with his wife and children were characterised throughout as a necessary haven from the burdens of professional and public life. At the same time, the film drew strong connections between his qualities as a judge and as a father: patient, moral (but not moralising), and concerned above all with the welfare of those in his charge. As with the law, his approach to childrearing lay in a faith in timeless principles that would win out if given the time to. Yet the film also made it clear that the things Judge Hardy wanted for his children, and that they told him and his wife Emily that they wanted for themselves, were threatened by the same growing social and economic complexity that challenged conservative approaches to law and administration. Joan’s marriage was jeopardised by the ‘fast’ crowd she and Bill had fallen into, exemplified by the roadhouse where he had seen her being kissed by another man, which also stood in more generally for commerce shorn of morals. Meanwhile, as Marion pointedly complained to her father, career opportunities were far less readily available to her generation than his, and hence his blocking of the aqueduct project made it far likelier than Wayne would have to move on in search of work, jeopardising their own engagement. A Family Affair took the laments of the adult Hardy children seriously. However, it resolved them through their father’s successful renomination as district judge, his legal and political victory creating the necessary conditions for their reconciliation with their own romantic partners.
Cinema in the Estado Novo
Like many regimes of the interwar period, Salazar’s dictatorship blurred the lines between authoritarian conservatism and fascism. Beset by fiscal and monetary problems, lacking buy-in from traditional conservative elites and a bloated military, Portugal’s First Republic was overthrown in a coup in 1926. The military dictatorship that supplanted it continued to struggle with internal conflicts and economic problems and in 1928 appointed Salazar finance minister, in which capacity he stabilised Portugal’s currency and achieved a budget surplus. He accepted the role of prime minister in 1932 and oversaw the development of a new constitution implemented in 1933. The Estado Novo was heavily underpinned by his nationalist and Catholic ideals. It drastically expanded executive power over legislature and judiciary and restored dominance of civilian government over the military. It curtailed individual freedoms and rights, including through censorship and a repressive policing apparatus. It more closely integrated and subordinated governance of its empire with and to the metropole. It was economically corporatist interventionist, constraining labour but also competition, prioritising national self-sufficiency in its dominant agricultural and smaller industrial sector, and channelling investment into infrastructural development. Salazar was elitist and anti-populist by instinct and critical of the ‘caesarism’ and ‘paganism’ he saw in Italian Fascism and Nazism. His government coopted or stifled the most explicitly fascist movements in the country. He established a new single party, the União Nacional, but did not develop it into an alternative power base and principally sought to depoliticise rather than mobilise society. Following the outbreak of civil war in neighbouring Spain, he did introduce a paramilitary youth organisation and a militia, albeit while restricting their connections with other parts of the regime.4
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The contradictory and hybrid nature of the Estado Novo were typified, in many ways, by its approach to cinema. António Ferro, director of the Secretariat of National Propaganda, was heavily influenced by fascism and copied from methods already deployed in Italy and Germany, but the secretariat lacked the coercive power of its counterparts there. Nonetheless, the state exerted strong influence on Portuguese cinema through newsreel production, protectionism, subsidy, and censorship. Salazar himself was little concerned with cinema, but Ferro perceived its value as a medium and successfully created a production environment marked by ideological conformity with Salazarist principles, though with some scope for their covert subversion. It was in this context that the Comédia à portuguesa emerged as a trademark of the county’s film output, characterised by a light-hearted tone, and avowed apoliticism, and a celebration of traditional values. Portuguese studios also regularly made films across different genres set in rural communities, characterised as the authentic embodiment of Portuguese society in opposition to the vices of urban life. At the intersection of these two tendencies was Aldeia Da Roupa Branca, or ‘The Village of White Clothes’, the musical comedy produced by Espetáculos de Arte and released in 1939.5
Aldeia Da Roupa Branca
Aldeia Da Roupa Branca centred on laundress Gracinda, her godfather and employer Jacinto, and his son Chico. It commenced in the titular village, with Jacinto struggling to compete with his principal business rival, the wily Widow Quitéria and her son Luis, and reduced to cutting prices in a bid to win back lost custom. Gracinda convinced him to send her to Lisbon to retrieve Chico, who was working there as a taxi driver and pursuing an affair with a singer named Maria Da Luz. Chico returned and took a firmer hand in running the family business, reviving its fortunes and his romantic relationship with Gracinda, but also his rivalry with Luis, who at one point forced him off the road as they raced in their horses and carts to take passengers to Lisbon. The two families also vied to put on the better show in the village festival, including hiring rival bands. With the two bands converging on the village bandstand, a drunken brawl broke out. Seeing the mounting chaos, Jacinto and Quitéria agreed to return to their old set prices to ensure better relations between their businesses, before Jacinto gave a comical but heartfelt speech that convinced everyone to stop fighting. However, Chico learned that Maria Da Luz was attending the festival and upon encountering her and her boastful patron Borges, returned to Lisbon with them in Borges’s motorcar, to Gracinda’s dismay. Quitéria and Luis spied an opportunity and courted Gracinda to persuade Jacinto to sell them his assets and retire. However, Gracinda instead used the money to buy a motortruck, which Chico returned to the village driving. As the shocked Quitéria and Luis looked on, Jacinto stood proudly by the parked truck, ‘Jacinto and Son’ embossed on its side, while inside, Chico proposed to Gracinda.
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The contrast between rural and urban life was at the heart of Aldeia Da Roupa Branca. The film characterised village life as organic and communal, though hiearchical. Its characters were shown to be content with humbler pleasures such as communally playing music and singing, amateur dramatics, traditional dancing, and playing quoits. Its qualities were embodied by Gracinda, who embodied an authentic, humble, caring womanhood, though at the same time was also characterised as outspoken, quick-witted, and hardworking. Her qualities were symbolised by her simple peasant dress, and frequent juxtaposition with Jacinto’s livestock, as well as with the village’s children, as the cast of the play she was putting on for the festival. All of this is contrasted with Lisbon, with its more urban entertainments and activities, its artifices embodied by Gracinda’s nemesis, Maria Da Luz. Chico characterised the tension between the two, being lured back to the village by Gracinda and then back to the city by Maria. He professed to prefer driving motorcars to animals but could not ignore the yearning to return to his rightful place working alongside his father in the countryside. This conflict was ultimately resolved by Gracinda using his boyish enthusiasm for motorised transport to bring him back to the village again, harnessing and contained modern technology for the purpose of perpetuating rural life and harmony.
A further notable dimension of Aldeia Da Roupa Branca was its treatment of the theme of competition. The rivalry between Jacinto and Quitéria was embodied in economic terms by their continual efforts to undercut each other’s prices. It was mirrored by that between their sons, which the film made clear dated back to their youths. The revived contest between them first manifest in a not-so-friendly game of quoits, in which Luis beat a rusty Chico, and then in their road race that endangered Chico’s life. Jacinto and Quitéria’s one-up(wo)manship also corrupted their civic roles: sitting atop the local social structure, they used their respective resources in the planning of the festival not to the benefit of their village but rather with the intent of humiliating each other, with the result of an explosion of violence – including fisticuffs between Luis and Chico. Their agreement to fix their prices preceded the resumption of social harmony, as Jacinto, drunk but statesmanlike, addressed his fellow villagers as ‘Countrymen’, and spoke about the importance of peace and friendship, stressing the bonds that existed between the villagers. It was only after Quitéria broke the spirit of their concord in trying to again drive Jacinto out of the market that the film rewarded Gracinda’s greater cunning, in turning Quitéria’s offer to Jacinto’s final business advantage. The natural economic order of the countryside that the two families’ rivalry upset was rather captured in the good-natured fatalism of the traditional songs performed by the cast.6 It was also contrasted with that of the city, where Chico had forsaken his inheritance to form part of an impoverished working class. The rightfulness of the property his family possessed was implicitly contrasted with the ostentatious wealth enjoyed by the city-dwelling Borges.
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Chico was also central to another of the film’s key themes: that of family and patrimony. It portrayed his youthful masculinity as a potentially disruptive force, particularly when it lured him to the city or into risky confrontations with Luis, but also as one that had to be directed into the revival of his father’s struggling business. The need for him to bring a firm hand, quite literally, to proceedings was demonstrated in an instance where he struck his father’s drunken coachman Chitas, whose inebriety was a major contributor to the family firm’s decline, in the face and then fired him. While Jacinto was later shown promising Chitas that he would speak to Chico about giving him his job back, again highlighting that the film was far from entirely condoning of Chico’s male aggression, nonetheless the logic of the film was that it was also a vital force of renewal of rural life. This renewal also required him to choose marriage to Gracinda over the pursuit of the philandering Maria. The scene with the children’s play, moreover, signified the need to perpetuate the union of Chico and Gracinda among the next generation. The play, in which a wicked princess from the city had a spell cast on a shepherd to stop him returning to his true love in the countryside, served as a transparent metaphor for Gracinda’s and Chico’s relationship; in the ensuing musical number, the children were also shown mimicking the courtship rituals of their adult counterparts.
Making comparisons
The driving logic underpinning the narratives of both A Family Affair and Aldeia da Roupa Branca was the need to reproduce the existing social order: for the Hardy children to imitate their parents and marry and procreate with partners from similarly middle-class professional backgrounds; for Chico to take over the running of the family business and marry Gracinda and assumedly produce a further heir. All this was synonymous with the family patriarchs retaining their positions at the local apex of that social order through their respective lines of work. The threat to all this in both cases was economic change, wrought by the worst malcontents of contemporary capitalism. The corrupting capacities of plutocrats, embodied by Hoyt Wells and, far more briefly, Borges. The moral dissolution that occurred around urban pleasure economies, whether those found in Lisbon or the less salubrious parts of Carvel. More contrastingly, there were the dangers posed by too much business-state collusion in A Family Affair, and by too much intra-business competition in Aldeia da Roupa Branca.
The extent of these parallels is more striking when we compare the contexts in which they were made. A Family Affair was made by a studio closely aligned through its management with the wing of the Republican Party most implacably opposed to the hugely interventionist policy programme of the governing Democrats, within an (unevenly) wealthy and developed American settler state. Aldeia Da Roupa Branca was made in a cinema industry overseen by one of the more fascist-adjacent aspects (in terms of style, if not power) of the Salazar regime, sharing some of the interventionist instincts of the Roosevelt administration – but obviously far more authoritarian and less welfarist – within a far more uniformly poor and undeveloped (but empire-possessing) Southern European state. The very different social milieus within which the two films were set were in each case not especially representative of the audiences of those films, but rather of certain locations seen as emblematic of their respective nations (though set more specifically towards the top of the social hierarchies in those places). Ideologically, there clearly was some alignment between sources of political patronage and the content of the two films, in terms of what they celebrated, what they pathologised, and what they omitted entirely. Yet there were also some rather left-populist undertones in the questions that both A Family Affair (especially) and Aldeia Da Roupa asked in places, with the capacity to prompt audience responses and interpretations less in keeping with Hooverian Republicanism or Salazar’s brand of autocratic corporatism. All this perhaps is a reminder that the economic and political capital the gatekeepers to film production possess means they can frequently enforce a high degree of ideological conformity in what does and does not get made but define the content and ambiguities within individual films much less.
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As well as the influence of Politics with a capital P, we need to pay equal attention to how the conventions of medium and of genre shaped the films ideologically. These too strongly determining of what stories are told and how, with major implications for their messages they can carry. A drama like A Family Affair had a problem-centred logic that required a strong resolution to the political problem it presented, whereas a comedy like Aldeia da Roupa Branca is far more dependent on their characters being cyclically fallible, rendering repetition of errors more likely and even desirable. These generic dimensions cannot be wholly separated from their contexts, of courses. The faith in progress past difficulties is an integral tendency of the American liberal tradition that offset some of A Family Affair’s both more reactionary and more radical elements. Likewise, the idea that human failure is inevitable and that a degree of fatalism is necessary, clearly present in Aldeia da Roupa Branca, is also a strong element of some Catholic intellectual traditions. Nonetheless, these generic conventions have also fulfilled certain psychic needs among their audiences that, while maybe not universal, are nonetheless far more historically and geographically general. Yet to get more specific again: this was the 1930s, when cinema as a mass medium further cemented its cultural significance, and when the coming of sound invited a closer convergence between the narrative tendencies of film with those of older literary formats. This combination of possibility and tradition made it capable of offering reassurance in a decade that began in economic crisis and was marked by worsening political volatility – as both A Family Affair and Aldeia da Roupa Branca can testify.
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On the evolution of conservatism in the Republican Party and beyond in interwar America, see: Julia Bowes, ‘‘Every Citizen a Sentinel! Every Home a Sentry Box!’: The Sentinels of the Republic and the Gendered Origins of Free-Market Conservatism’, Modern American History, Vol. 2 (2019), pp. 269–297; Gordon Lloyd and David Davenport, The New Deal & Modern American Conservatism: A Defining Rivalry (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2013); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2010); Elliot A. Rosen, The Republican Party in the Age of Roosevelt: Sources of Anti-government Conservatism in the United States (Charlottesville, VA, and London: University of Virginia Press, 2014).
On MGM and the politics of 1930s Hollywood more generally, see: Donald T. Critchlow, When Hollywood Was Right: How Movie Stars, Studio Moguls, and Big Business Remade American Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Ch. 1; Steven J. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), Ch. 2; Mark Wheeler, ‘The Political History of Classical Hollywood: Moguls, Liberals and Radicals in the 1930s’, in Iwan Morgan and Philip John Davies (eds.), Hollywood and the Great Depression: American Film, Politics and Society in the 1930s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 29–48
On the evolution of and changes in American legal thinking through to this period, see: Neal K. Katyal, ‘Rethinking Legal Conservatism’, Harvard Journal of Legal & Public Policy, Vol. 36, No. 3 (2013), pp. 949–953; Samuel R. Olken, ‘The Decline of Legal Classicism and the Evolution of New Deal Constitutionalism’, Notre Dame Law Review, Vol. 89, No. 5 (2014), pp. 2051–2092; Edward A. Purcell, Jr., ‘American Jurisprudence between the Wars: Legal Realism and the Crisis of Democratic Theory’, American Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 2. (1969), pp. 424−446'; Harry N. Scheiber, ‘Original Intent, History, and Doctrine: The Constitution and Economic Liberty’, American Economic Review, Vol. 78, No. 2 (1988), pp. 140–144.
On the ideological, administrative, and economic make-up of the Salazar regime, see: Goffredo Adinolfi and António Costa Pinto, ‘Salazar’s ‘New State’: The Paradoxes of Hybridization in the Fascist Era’, in António Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis (eds.), Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 154–175; Luciano Amaral, The Modern Portuguese Economy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Chs. 2–4; Roger Griffin, ‘Fascist or Conservative? Portugal, Spain and the French Connection’, Portuguese Studies, Vol. 14 (1998), pp. 138–151.
On the development of cinema and characteristics of film in Salazar’s Portugal, see Patricia Vieira, Portuguese Film, 1930–1960: The Staging of the New State Regime, trans. by Ashley Caja (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).
The chorus to one of the songs had the lyrics: ‘If the groom is from Caneças/And the bride is from Malveira/They can ask support from all the peasants/But if that doesn’t work, something else will’.