Golden Era movies for material culture?

[St. Louis]

I was watching Letter to Three Wives recently, one of my favorite postwar films. I get a huge chuckle out of the kitchen scenes in Lora Mae's Mom's home. Whenever a train rattles by, everything shakes and all conversation stops. I'm particularly intrigued by the little details in the kitchen. In fact, this movie is a great study in the material culture of the era, because each of the wives comes from a different social class. You can get a clear picture of how middle versus working versus upper class people lived.

I can't do screen captures because I only own the movie on VHS, but I highly recommend it. It's funny, moving, and clever.

I was wondering whether people here could recommend other Golden Era movies that show realistic interiors?

 

[Chasseur]

A fun one is "Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House" both in terms of the cramped New York apartment but also trying build a dream house out in the country.

While it is all exaggerated for comedy you get a good feel for the post-war desire of moving out of the city and having a house in the suburbs and there are some nice interior details.

 

[Yeps]

My Man Godfrey is a good one, showing a lot of social contrast and such for a screwball comedy.

 

[Fletch]

My Man Godfrey is a good one, showing a lot of social contrast and such for a screwball comedy.

Without the middle class, which was just a thin sliver of society in the '30s. It existed mostly on the screen and mixed with the lower class, but never the upper.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Capra's "You Can't Take It With You" is a good look at how Hollywood imagined working-class people in the Era. Lots of clutter, lovable eccentric characters all around, folksy down-home common sense, etc.

The best place to see *real* working class surroundings is in "Our Gang" comedies from the 1929-34 period. Most of these were shot in real neighborhoods around the scruffier sections of Culver City, and are not in the least bit dressed up or prettified for screen purposes, and the kids themselves are suitably scruffy-looking.

 

[Wally_Hood]

Capra's "You Can't Take It With You" is a good look at how Hollywood imagined working-class people in the Era. Lots of clutter, lovable eccentric characters all around, folksy down-home common sense, etc.

The best place to see *real* working class surroundings is in "Our Gang" comedies from the 1929-34 period. Most of these were shot in real neighborhoods around the scruffier sections of Culver City, and are not in the least bit dressed up or prettified for screen purposes, and the kids themselves are suitably scruffy-looking.

Ditto for some of the Laurel and Hardy shorts shot on the streets of Los Angeles and in the surrounding areas.

 

[Stanley Doble]

You have to be careful of Hollywood's depiction of the "average" family. I'm reminded of a conversation that supposedly took place with a studio head describing his new picture to his staff.

"It's the story of the average American family. Typical, see? Father makes about $20,000 a year".

The joke is, at that time the typical middle class family made $5000 a year or less. $20,000 would be the equivalent of about $500,000 today. But that was a movie studio head's idea of the "typical, average" family.

You see the same thing these days. For example in "Friends" a group of semi employed young people struggling to get by, occupy a Manhattan apartment that would go for about $3500 a month and never seem short of money.

 

[Fletch]

This review nails it - or, I should say, quotes someone who nails it.

In 1939, writer E.B. White wrote a terrific essay entitled "Movies" about the Bette Davis film Dark Victory. In this film, Davis plays a wealthy young girl with a terminal illness who decides to give up her horsy Long Island existence to go live with her true love in Vermont where she has "nothing." As White exposes in his essay, however, (complete with a line-item budget) the "nothing" that she has includes a nicely renovated farmhouse, three hired household help, and so forth. "So it would seem fairly safe to say that this little establishment where Miss Judith was finding such peace in having 'nothing,'" White writes, "was costing somebody ... somewhere between eleven and twelve thousand dollars a year."

He continues: "The interesting and really absorbing thing, to my mind, is that to the members of the audience, sitting there with me in the dark ... to them the illusion was perfect: this twelve-thousand-dollar country estate for a brief cinematic moment was indeed nothing. It represented the ultimate simplicity, the absolute economic rock bottom. It is disturbing to realize that even after we have been reduced to Hollywood's low, we are still rolling in the sort of luxury that eventually destroyed Rome."

 

[LizzieMaine]

The joke is, at that time the typical middle class family made $5000 a year or less. $20,000 would be the equivalent of about $500,000 today. But that was a movie studio head's idea of the "typical, average" family.

The thing to keep in mind is that the "middle class family" in 1940 was in fact not typical -- someone making 5 g's a year was a doctor or a lawyer, not a machinist or a low-level white-collar office clerk. The true "Average American Family" in 1940 was strictly working class -- which included both blue collar and petty white-collar types -- and if they had an income of $1700 a year they were earning about what most people did: enough not to be poor, enough to own a Low Priced Three car, but they didn't own their own home, they didn't have a lovable chucklin' maid in a headscarf to do the heavy work, and there wasn't a chance of the kids going to college.

I think the best movie depiction of such a family was the Parker family as shown in "A Christmas Story." If you look at the details in the set and in the way the family lives and relates to each other, it's a dead-on depiction of what life was like for the white-collar working class. The radio series "Vic and Sade" is another extremely evocative portrayal of the same type of people.

 

[Wally_Hood]

The thing to keep in mind is that the "middle class family" in 1940 was in fact not typical -- someone making 5 g's a year was a doctor or a lawyer, not a machinist or a low-level white-collar office clerk. The true "Average American Family" in 1940 was strictly working class -- which included both blue collar and petty white-collar types -- and if they had an income of $1700 a year they were earning about what most people did: enough not to be poor, enough to own a Low Priced Three car, but they didn't own their own home, they didn't have a lovable chucklin' maid in a headscarf to do the heavy work, and there wasn't a chance of the kids going to college.

I think the best movie depiction of such a family was the Parker family as shown in "A Christmas Story." If you look at the details in the set and in the way the family lives and relates to each other, it's a dead-on depiction of what life was like for the white-collar working class. The radio series "Vic and Sade" is another extremely evocative portrayal of the same type of people.

Vic and Sade were presented as "Radio's Home Folks," because Vic, Sade, and Rush went out only occasionally. Rush might go out with his high school buddies to watch the fat men play handball at the "Y", but they stayed home because, I suspect, money for entertainment was tight. It was card games with Fred and Ruthie, or a visit to the Bijou for a double feature for fun. Not mentioned but surely present was the medium of radio itself as a form of distraction. But Vic and Sade was about cooking at home, sewing rips and patching garments, sitting around talking about the day, wondering how to stretch a dollar; in other words, they were about what most Americans were were about at that time.

 

[Richard Warren]

Somebody wiser than me said that the problem is not what people don't know, but the things they do know which aren't true. A lot of those things they learned from the movies, an almost necessarily dishonsest medium , or at least one in which the dishonesty is harder to conceal. Chances are, nothing you ever saw in any movie is real, or true, or accurate.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Movies and novels tell you more about the times and milieu in which they were made than the supposed subject of the work.

 

[dhermann1]

There are a lot of location shots in
It Happened Oner Night", when they go out on the road and wind up in the famous motel (where Gable revealed his undershirtlessness to the world). The scenes were actually filmed at a real motel (which in those days was a MUCH more declasses form of establishment than it is now). No indoor plumbing, you had to stand in line to use the bathroom for a shower or even to wash your hands.
I have a DVD of an old Hoot Gibson cowboy flick from 1931 called "Wild Horse". There's a very cool scene of a rodeo, obviously filmed at a real Los Angeles area rodeo about 1930 or 31. Hundreds of Model Ts, etc., very authentic looking slice of western life of the day.

 

[skyvue]

Chances are, nothing you ever saw in any movie is real, or true, or accurate.

This strikes me as an overstatement. I'm not for a moment saying that movies are an entirely accurate reflection of reality, but there is much to be gleaned from them.

It depends very much on the movie and also on what it is you're trying to learn about.

When seeing a contemporary movie (not superhero movies and other such vehicles, but movies about average folks), do we shake our heads in disbelief at the stark difference between what's on the screen and how we live our lives? I don't. The clothes are basically what we wear, the characters generally (with exceptions, of course) speak roughly as we do, the attitudes and lifestyles portrayed resemble to varying degrees life as it's lived today.

If movies that aren't fully escapist (the aforementioned superhero pictures and their ilk) didn't on some level reflect our own lives, those movies wouldn't resonate with us and we'd not pay good money to see them. Even if they reflect only our dreams and fantasies, they will reveal to future generations something of who we were, just as movies of the 1930s and '40s do today.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Movies, and all other entertainment, are products of the culture that produces them -- they show what we want to be as much as they show what we actually are. This was especially true in the Era, when movies were made for mass audiences as opposed to the niche audiences they're made for today. I think everyone here fully realizes the so-called "ideal middle class family" of movies and television was never a gritty, realistic depiction of the real world, and it always amazes me when someone points this out and expects us to be shocked, shocked at the revelation.

The original poster was looking for good visual examples reflecting everyday life in the Era, not documentary portrayals of reality. There's a difference, and we're all intelligent enough here to know that.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There are a lot of location shots in
It Happened Oner Night", when they go out on the road and wind up in the famous motel (where Gable revealed his undershirtlessness to the world). The scenes were actually filmed at a real motel (which in those days was a MUCH more declasses form of establishment than it is now). No indoor plumbing, you had to stand in line to use the bathroom for a shower or even to wash your hands.

I spent a weekend c. 1989 in a motel exactly like that -- the only concession to postwar change was a black-and-white portable television with tinfoil wrapped around the antenna to get the stations from Portland. Otherwise, all I could think of that whole weekend was "It Happened One Night." Unfortunately, Clark Gable did not make an appearance.

 

[dhermann1]

When I was a kid a made a couple of visits to motels like that. Once in 1951, on the way upstate with my grandmother. Being little I had no idea whgat it was all about. But the beds were comfy. And in 1963, on a college hunting trip, we stayed at a place in Waterford NY, just north of Albany, right on the Hudson River. Friendly Farmer's Cottages. George Washington had slept across the road in 1778, or something. Just a bare cabin, with plumbing in a central frame structure. In the middle of the night my little brother sat up bolt upright in the bed and said. "What is this place!!??" He didn't even remember the next day.