As we try not to dwell on our current economic recession, enjoy our throwback salute to the films of an era when times were really tough: the Great Depression. While generally upbeat, the ’30s movies selected for this series aren’t strictly escapist; rather, the breadlines and vast unemployment almost always provide the motivational force for snappy characters and stories.
Carole Lombard, perhaps the finest comedienne of Depression-era cinema, appears in three movies in this series. First, as the fiancée of a spoiled soap fortune heir who must look for a real job in It Pays to Advertise (August 2), co-starring Rochester’s own Louise Brooks in a rare sound-era appearance, and screening as part of a double bill with White Woman, which features a desperate, out-of-work Lombard who agrees to marry a whacked-out Charles Laughton and starts to regret it when he crowns himself “King of the Jungle.” On August 6, it’s a wealthy Lombard who learns a little something about the common man when her screwy family adopts homeless William Powell as My Man Godfrey.
Another pair of iconoclastic leading ladies, Joan Crawford and Gloria Swanson, are teamed up in a pre-code double feature of Possessed and The Trespasser on August 9. Crawford and Swanson both play women from the wrong side of the tracks who find love and happiness on their own terms. Unequal distribution of wealth, and city living versus country living, are the themes from which great romantic comedy emerges in two other classics of the screwball comedy, Frank Capra’s Oscar®-winning It Happened One Night (August 13) and the underrated Theodora Goes Wild (August 20).
You won’t find any signs of economic blight in Cecil B. DeMille’s positively loopy musical Madam Satan (August 16). A moralistic yet lighthearted story of infidelity among the filthy rich, DeMille concludes Madam Satan with a visually spectacular set piece: an orgiastic costume ball set aboard a crashing zeppelin. Also dazzling to the eye is 42nd Street (August 27), the best-known of the Busby Berkeley-choreographed Warner Bros. musicals, whose ostensible heroine is played by Ruby Keeler, a hard-working chorine looking for her big break in a Broadway show.
