Out of the Thirties

To Lary May the steady rise in cinema attendances during the thirties, accompanied after 1932 by the opening of newly designed ‘moderne’ theatres, contributed to the emergence of the country’s first national mass culture. Cinemas increasingly symbolised not European decadence but the American way of life and the aspiration to middle-class status, and for the growing immigrant audience the cinema was a powerful influence on their dawning American identities. How audiences interpreted the films that they viewed in new theatres and old is more difficult to ascertain. The Lynds reported in their ‘Middletown’ survey that exhibitors detected a public desire for pictures ‘on the happy side’ during the Depression years, but if consumers were unable to check their anxieties at the door they may have supplied their own ambiguity to even the most—perhaps especially the most—anodyne of Louis B.Mayer’s ‘confections’. As Levine suggests, substantial numbers of viewers may have been aware of the ambiguities of the films that they were viewing, despite or because of their optimistic conclusions. ¹