好莱坞电影简史(英文版)

The Beginnings

When Harvey Wilcox bought a piece of land in Southern California in 1887 and named it ‘Hollywood’, he had no idea that only a few years later filmmakers would make this spot the movie center of the world. However, it was Thomas Edison who laid the first milestone in American cinema history by inventing his Kinematoscope in 1891. In 1894 Edison presented his film Black Diamond Express to the audiences which set the foundation of the new entertainment. The first genius in early film history was D.W. Griffith who realized that the static camera was not enough to mediate his vision and by starting to use close-ups, cross-cutting, fade-outs and other camera technique he invented movie editing. While he was also the first person to shoot a film in Hollywood, namely In Old California (1910), his greatest success remains The Birth of a Nation (1915), a three-hour epic of the Civil War

and its aftermath. The movie remains controversial: movie historians acknowledge its pioneering approach to visual storytelling as well as its technical achievements, but criticize the explicit racist depiction of blacks and the glorification of the Ku Klux Klan.

Among the earliest movie stars we find the impersonation of innocence or ‘America’s Sweetheart,’ Mary Pickford, also Gloria Swanson, and Douglas Fairbanks, whose most popular films were The Mask of Zorro (1920) and Robin Hood (1922). In the 1920s more and more people went to the nickelodeons (the early movie theaters where the admission fee was a nickel) to watch such epics as, for example, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923).

The mild climate and the year-round sunshine drew more and more filmmakers to Southern California, where the center of American film industry gradually emerged. Samuel

Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, the Hungarian-born Adolph Zukor and William Fox, and the four Warner brothers dominated the production side of the business and established their own movie studios. The studio system was to rule the film market in the following three decades. The five major studios, or the Big Five as they were called at the time, were Warner Bros., 20th Century

Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount,

and RKO, while among the then smaller studios we count Columbia, Universal, and United Artists. In the 1920s a new genre, the slapstick comedy started to gain ground in film production with such names as Fatty Arbuckle or British-born Charlie Chaplin who eventually became his own star, director, and producer. He developed the character of the Tramp, a comic but also pathetic figure in overlarge gentle man’s clothes, bowler hat and grotesquely big shoes, and made several movies in this role: The

Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), etc. Chaplin kept making basically silent movies in the sound era as well, e.g. Modern Times (1936), but his talkie The Great Dictator (1940) with its caricature of Adolf Hitler was also a popular success. Chaplin’s greatest rival was the stony-faced Buster Keaton who always played the perfect scapegoat and was famous for never smiling on screen. His best film is considered to be Steamboat Bill (1928).

Besides slapstick comedies, the major genres were swashbucklers, historical films and melodramas, although filmmakers were experimenting with all kinds of genres throughout the decade.

The premiere of The Jazz Singer in 1927 launched a new technological breakthrough, the talking picture, or talkie, with the result that the silent film had practically disappeared by the 1930s. The careers of many actors were broken as they could

not live up to the demands of this new way of moviemaking. Among those who survived we find Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, or Gloria Swanson. Also in 1927, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) was founded and the first Academy Awards (popularly known as Oscars, after the nickname of the statuette given to the winners) were presented in February 1929.

The Golden Age of American Cinema: the 1930s to the 1940s

The 1930s

With the appearance of the ‘talkie’ a new era of filmmaking began in Hollywood. The most popular genres of the time were the western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, biopic (biographical picture), etc.

As opposed to today’s practice producers, directors, actors, technicians, etc. were kept on salaries at the different studios, each studio having its own personnel. The studios also owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns where they were able to show their own films. Big business went hand in hand with infamous relationships and scandals, and by the beginning of the 1930s Hollywood came to be known as the most sinful city. As a countermeasure General Will Hays introduced the Production Code (not enforced until 1934) to set the guidelines for films concerning sex, violence, and religion.

In the 1930s also new genres appeared such as the adventure or fantasy movies. This was the time of Johnny Weissmuller’s first film, Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), which was followed by Tarzan and His Mate (1934) and several others. David O. Selznick, one of the most famous producers of the period, introduced the first classic monster in movie history, King Kong, in 1933. Another great

adventure hit came when Charles Laughton came to Hollywood after the success of The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and played in the Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).

Another new development of the decade was the horror film. In 1931 the Hungarian Bela Lugosi appeared as a vampire in Dracula and Boris Karloff as the monster in Frankenstein, laying the foundation of a long tradition. The 1930s also saw the unfolding of the gangster movie genre with Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932), and the Hungarian-born director Michael Curtiz’s Angels With Dirty Faces (1938).

New movie comedians also surfaced beside Chaplin: such figures appeared as the group named the Three Stooges in Woman Haters (1934), and they went on producing slapstick comedies until 1959. The best film of the

popular pair of comedians Laurel and Hardy, Sons of the Desert, also came out in 1933. After World War I numerous European artists came to Hollywood: Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang and Josef von Sternberg among the directors as well as for example Marlene Dietrich among the actors. Dietrich and von Sternberg made seven films together in Hollywood out of which Morocco (1930) and Shanghai Express (1932) are the most memorable.

The greatest year in the 1930s was probably 1939 when such movies appeared as The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind (winning eight Oscars that year with British actress Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in the leading roles), Stagecoach (directed by John Ford, one of the finest directors of the time), or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The 1930s also marked the beginning of the famous feature-length animation

film production of the Disney Company with the classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Other famous cartoons of the company were soon to follow: Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961).

This was also the decade when the first great stars as we know them appeared: Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, just to name a few, while others, for example Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were best known for their dancing talents.

1940s and the Film noir

As noted above, Alfred Hitchcock came to Hollywood to direct his first American film, Rebecca (1940) under David O. Selznick. Among his later thrillers that became classics of American film history, Notorious (1946), Rear

Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963) are considered the best by critics and fans.

1941, the year in which the US entered World War II, meant shortages, blackouts, and other wartime restrictions which harshly affected the film industry. Yet, by 1946 the attendance in theaters reached the highest percentage up to that point. Many directors and producers (John Ford, William Wyler and Frank Capra among them) set out to make documentaries and training films to aid the war. The most famous, partly propaganda film of the time was Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Peter Lorre. This dark romantic story illustrates the struggles of Rick Blain, a bar keeper in Casablanca who has the means to save his former lover’s husband by giving him false documents, while this way he would lose the woman he loves. Another