Considering Historical Context
Film adaptations are not made in a vacuum; the filmmakers who decide to bring a certain story to the screen do so in the context they inhabit. The world they live in shapes their storytelling decisions, as do the production circumstances in which they make the movie. The Hollywood of the 1930s was affected by a number of major trends: the solidification of the studio system of production standardized film storytelling conventions into norms; the institution of censorship restrictions forced filmmakers to imply rather than directly depict content and ideas that may have been deemed offensive; more broadly, the United States and the entire world was in the grips of an economic depression that brought terrible financial hardship to many people around the country and subsequently affected box office revenues.
After the coming of sound, Hollywood motion pictures began increasingly to push the boundaries of acceptable content, putting the studios in a bind. On the one hand, films built around salacious topics sold tickets; on the other hand, powerful forces were intent on ensuring that the movies were used for “moral” purposes. Between 1930, after most studios began reshaping their output to sound pictures, and 1934, when censorship came to Hollywood, there was what has come to be known as the Pre-Code Era.
The “Code” refers to the Hollywood Motion Picture Production Code, which is a system of censorship that was instituted and enforced beginning partway through 1934, and which lasted until 1966. The Production Code is the reason that, when you watch Classic Hollywood films, you don’t hear the characters curse. It’s why there are no explicit sex scenes or any moments of nudity. It’s also why men and women, even married couples, tend to sleep in separate, single beds, rather than share one. The violence is restrained, largely avoiding blood and excessive gore.
The Production Code was a system of self-censorship that the movie business instituted on its own. In the early 1930s, the studios were afraid that if they did not make an effort to restrain on-screen content, they would suffer mass boycotts at the hands of The Catholic Church, which was leading a charge against what they saw as moral degradation in the movies. Essentially, the Church, which was extremely powerful in urban areas where many of the studios had ownership stakes in movie houses that played their films, could tell their parishioners to stop going to the movies, and there was a reasonable chance that such a direction could impact the bottom line. The studio heads were also afraid that the federal government would institute a system of censorship if they did nothing, so rather than submit to federal regulation, they decided to create and enforce a system of their own. Out of this precarious moment, with the economic pressures of the Great Depression taking their toll on the studios’ revenues, the Production Code was born.
You should read the Production Code. You can find it here.
It worked differently from the contemporary ratings system (PG, PG-13, R, etc.) that you are likely familiar with. Today, filmmakers have some sense of how their films will be rated while they make them, but the rating is a label applied after the film is made and reviewed by the ratings board. The filmmakers can accept the rating they’re given (an R, say), or they can make changes to the film in order to get a rating they would prefer (making trims to shots of a moment of violence, for instance, to secure a PG-13). Now, the ratings system today is far from perfect, as critics have pointed out. There is a documentary on the subject called This Film is Not Yet Rated (2006, Dir. Kirby Dick) that points out the ways in which the ratings board is more lenient on violence than it is on sexuality, and critiques its double standards for heterosexual and homosexual relationships.
During the Production Code era, however, the film content was subject to the approval of the Production Code Administration. That meant that before a film could even be cleared to go before the cameras, its script had to go through a notes process. The reviewers at the PCA would cross out lines, rewrite words, and make narrative suggestions that the filmmakers had to abide by, or their film script would not be approved. After they cleared this hurdle, the filmmakers would shoot the approved script, and the film would be reviewed again by the PCA to make sure they had adhered to both the spirit and the letter of the law. The Production Code text is a list of “Dos, Don’ts, and Be Carefuls” that looks an awful lot like before-the-fact censorship. A screenwriter could not put curse words in the mouths of the characters. These words were forbidden. Including a few choice words today gets an R-rating; from 1934 to 1966, it was like those words did not exist at all.
The Production Code was written chiefly by a man named Will Hays in 1930, but it was enforced for much of its existence (after 1934) by Joseph Breen, a wealthy man heavily involved in the Catholic Church. Not only did the Catholic Church bring about strong pressure on the studios to regulate their film content, but they also had a big hand in shaping the way the censorship regulations were written and then administered. The films that would be released during the thirty-year reign of the Production Code would reflect a strongly Catholic morality (“deeply Catholic in tone and outlook,” according to Thomas Doherty), in which the righteous are praised and the evil are condemned. If you want to understand how the Production Code worked, the easiest way is to watch a Classic Hollywood movie and think about who is rewarded and who is punished. For example: if a character commits a crime at some point in the film, you can be sure that by the end, that character will be punished, either with incarceration or death, depending on the severity of the crime undertaken. Though not illegal, adultery becomes a similarly punishable offense because it was considered “immoral.” In the Code, it was labeled a “subject [that] should be avoided.” In films from the Production Code era, those who commit adultery ended up worse off than they began; they did not always die (though sometimes they did), but usually suffered some kind of cosmic punishment. This dynamic illustrates the degree to which the Production Code was a system of censorship built on a vision of morality. In punishing the guilty, films made during the Production Code era meant to inspire audiences to believe in systems of law and order, and that anyone who violated the rules of society would eventually be sanctioned for doing so. However, these rules also reflect the worldview of the people who wrote them. Its guiding principle was: “No picture should lower the moral standards of those who see it.”
Consider for a moment the impact of this system of censorship on adaptation. Because cinema is subject to these restrictions for thirty-plus years, and other mediums like literature and theatre are not, there is an inevitable mismatch in the kinds of things that filmmakers can represent on screen versus what their literary or theatrical counterparts might be able to do on the page or on the stage. An intertextual approach to adaptation demands the consideration of these production factors because they shape the final film to a remarkable degree.
The video commentary at right focuses on a scene from Stella Dallas (1937, Vidor), a film about a single mother who struggles to make a better life for her daughter, in which I explore the presence of both the Production Code and The Great Depression as contextual factors that contribute to the film adaptation.
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The 1937 film version of Stella Dallas indicates not only how advantageous it is to rely on an intertextual approach to studying film adaptation, but how necessary it is. A fidelity comparison between the novel and the film version may leave out some of the most important factors shaping the screen version, including changing production circumstances in American filmmaking in the 1930s and the Great Depression’s economic despair, both of which fundamentally shift on-screen representation of gender and class issues. However, an intertextual approach could also accommodate other readings of the film as well, including looking at it through the presence of King Vidor as director (considering him an auteur) and how star Barbara Stanwyck’s screen persona shaped audiences’ perceptions of her character. In general, an intertextual reading of Stella Dallas opens the film up to further study and interpretation.
clip quiz - intertextuality and historical context
Review the following clips and answer the questions in Blackboard.
MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN (1936, Capra)
The screwball comedy Mr. Deeds Goes To Town was released in 1936. How does its historical moment reveal itself in this clip? What are the economic circumstances in the United States at this time, and how does the movie emphasize them? |
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THE BLACK SCORPION (1957, Ludwig)
What are the historical circumstances that led to a film like The Black Scorpion, and how does this scene reveal them to you? |
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RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD, PART II (1985, Cosmatos)
In the aftermath of American defeat in Vietnam, movies like Rambo: First Blood Part II played an important role. What historical or political goal does a scene like this seem to have? How can you tell? |
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CLOVERFIELD (2008, Reeves)
Released in 2008, the alien disaster film Cloverfield, set in New York City, was noted for its invocation of images of 9/11. What representations do you see of 9/11 in this sequence from the film? |
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Historical Context and intertextuality - winchester 73
The opening text of director Anthony Mann’s Western Winchester 73 (1950) announces the film’s particular and unconventional structuring device: this is a movie where there isn’t really a traditional main character—instead, this film will follow a gun. In history, the Winchester repeating rifle is colloquially known as “the gun that won the west,” which acknowledges the technological impact of an invention that made violence more efficient.
The history of the American West is bloody and brutal; there is the wildly unchecked killing of the buffalo, of course, an effort undertaken to decimate the population of Native American tribes who depended on the animals for their way of life. The resulting starvation, extermination, and, in the best case of a series of bad scenarios, displacement, of indigenous people means the Winchester rifle played a dubious role in facilitating a new order.
Winchester 73 stars James Stewart as Lin McAdam, a man riding into Dodge City with mysterious motives; soon, he enters a shooting contest where the prize is a brand new Winchester, which he wins through a test of his skill with a rifle. Subsequently, though, he is beaten up and robbed by the man he bested, Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally), who turns out to be his brother, who has murdered their father in a shootout. The gun changes hands several times throughout the film, from Dutch Henry to gambler Joe Lamont (John McIntire) to Apache warrior Young Bull (Rock Hudson) to gunfighter Waco Johnny Dean (Dan Duryea) and finally back to Dutch Henry, who is eventually killed in a shootout with Lin, who reclaims his property after the violence is over.
In this collection of characters, the film acknowledges the value that the totemic rifle had for a variety of different constituencies in the old West, all of whom used the weapon for their own particular ends. Lamont’s brief ownership of the rifle coincides both with a card game and his selling of the weapon to the Apaches (though they kill him anyway), who need the rifles to help them fend off attacks by the U.S. Cavalry. Young Bull leads an attack on the Cavalry with the rifle on his shoulder, only to be killed himself in the charge. The battles between the U.S. army and the Apaches (and other tribes) were an arms race, with the Apaches continually finding themselves outgunned by the government’s superior firepower. For them, the Winchester rifle was a chance at survival.
Other historical events and figures pop up throughout Winchester 73, despite the fictional characters who dominate its narrative; while Lin is in town at Dodge City, the shooting match between him and Dutch Henry is overseen by a particularly cranky town marshal: Wyatt Earp (Will Geer). There are also numerous references to both the Civil War and an event of extremely recent history for the characters in the film, whose significance everyone seems to understand, which is the killing of General George Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn by Sitting Bull and his warriors.
Winchester 73 is deeply engaged in the historical moment in which it is set; like a work of historical fiction, it sets its fictional characters loose in a real world shaped by real events of historic importance. However, it does so with clear knowledge of how history actually turned out. That means that the death of Young Bull is portrayed as a kind of noble tragedy, while Lin’s forced killing of his brother is a regrettable but necessary act of violence that makes the West safe for decent people. It’s personal retribution for the death of their father, of course, but it’s also a purging of those antisocial types (Waco falls into this category, too) who have no place in a civilized society.
The historical moment of Winchester 73’s production is also significant. It comes at a time when the entirety of American culture is trying to move on from its involvement in World War II, while also on the precipice of getting drawn into The Korean War; discussion of the aftermath of war, in setting and dialogue obviously referencing The Civil War, is pervasive in Winchester 73, just as it would have been for audiences watching the film when it was released. The film’s star, James Stewart, had been a staple in romantic comedies and idealistic social dramas in the late 1930s, cultivating a likeable “aw shucks” everyman persona in a variety of roles. Then, he went overseas to serve in World War II as a pilot, eventually becoming a key part of a bombardment unit that carried out harrowing and dangerous missions all over Europe. In the aftermath of his war service, Stewart turned to much darker roles, especially in the Westerns he made with the director of Winchester 73, Anthony Mann.
Stewart’s character Lin is haunted by his brother’s murder of their father, and wants to settle the score to alleviate his own conscience. But, as Stewart the actor no doubt learned when he fought during the war, violence does not lighten someone’s emotional load; it only adds to it. His killing of Dutch Henry offers little relief. After his fatal shot knocks his brother from a high cliff, he bows his head in solemn regret.
Historical context is often a significant factor shaping adaptation. No film is made in a vacuum, and contemporary history shapes filmmakers in ways that they are not even sometimes aware of. If movies are all products of a series of decisions and choices made by filmmakers, then surely those decisions and choices are affected by the moment in which they live. Historical analysis yields fascinating insights about the multiple points of influence that contribute to film adaptation.