INFLUENCE OF ART DECO ON THE AMERICAN CINEMA

by M. Barron Stofik

Radio City Music Hall

Introduction

            Parisians looked around in 1912 and realized that France was losing its "mission civilisatrice," its cultural leadership of the world.  New art was being created by Picasso, a Spaniard; new literature was being written by Americans; new architecture was coming from the Bauhaus School in Germany, of all places.  It was time for France to reclaim its rightful place.  An international exposition of modern style was planned, delayed by World War I, and finally opened in April 1925 as the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes.  Missing from the nations participating were all the countries of the Americas, who chose not to attend, and Germany, which was not invited.  The largest exhibitor was, of course, France, which established the look for the event with monumental entry gates.  The biggest scandal was Le Corbusier’s severe modernist housing module.  The biggest surprise was that it made a profit (Chandler).  By the time the fair closed in October, France had introduced a new 20th century style that stripped away the pedimented porticoes and cherubs, and used modern technology and materials to create dramatic geometric forms.  It returned the crown of fashion arbiter to France and would influence design around the world for the next fifteen years, including the look of the American cinema.  The style would come to be called Art Deco.

            The new look was not universally welcomed.  Marie Durmoy, a French art critic of the era, wrote, "In 1900, we saw the triumph of noodling ornamentation.  Today we have the pretense of doing away with such ornament " but it is only a pretense.  We no longer speak of ‘the right line, or "the essential thing" or of construction.  Instead, to take the matter as it really is, today the ornament has become the essential thing, with the result that we have more useless ornament than ever before" (Durmoy).

            America was not as critical.  In the years immediately following World War I, there was an atmosphere of exuberant hedonism.  The economy in the United States was booming, a new class of nouveaux-riche was being created, and a relaxed social code was inviting people to explore new behaviors.  There was an attitude that everyone could aspire to wealth and glamour; the good life was within reach.  The ratification of the Volstead Act imposing prohibition had generated an underground nightlife.  The post-war Harlem Renaissance had introduced a white audience to the exotic rhythms of jazz.  Art collectors and readers were mesmerized by the output of Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon, a center of modern creativity by Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, George Braque and Thornton Wilder.  The American public was ready for a fresh look.

The reaction to the Paris show was immediate.  Art Deco, a term that did not come into popular use until 1966, arrived in a United States that was riding a crest of bustling consumerism built on mass production.  Soon Deco could be seen on the streets of American cities in a new style of skyscrapers inspired by a 1916 New York zoning law that dictated the mass of buildings.  The result was tall structures with a ziggurat form expressed in stone, terra cotta, steel, bronze and glass, with both subtle and overt nods to the industrialization of America in their ornamentation (Duncan 146).  Art Deco could be seen in sleek ocean liners that developed their own unique architectural vocabulary.  It could be seen in sculpture, interior design, advertising, housewares, jewelry and entertainment.  Art Deco appeared in the architecture of train stations, office buildings, gas stations, schools, and aluminum ticket booths in front of theaters (Duncan 146) 

The "modern woman" embraced the new style with enthusiasm.  Women had exercised their independence and self-reliance while the men were away at war and did not intend to relinquish their new found freedom.  They were driving cars, smoking in public, working and living alone, traveling abroad, and, with ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920, voting.   In literature, Anita Loss’s 1925 novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, glamorized the lives of free-spending, independent women.  In speakeasies, the modesty of the Victorian era was cast off and replaced with slinky Deco dresses that celebrated the social liberation of the period.  Women were becoming more athletic, actively participating in sports that required new clothing, including trousers, which gave them the physical freedom to pursue their interests.  Coco Chanel’s 1926 "little black dress" made Deco acceptable to socialites (Benton 261).  Fashion conscious sophisticates were reading Paris fashion magazines filled with styles inspired by the exotic costumes of the Ballet Russes (Lussier).  Department stores scrambled to provide affluent shoppers not just with the new fashions but also the proper setting in which to shop.  New York’s A.T. Stewart, the oldest department store in the city, redid its exterior and interior in a Deco motif.  Bergdorf-Goodman went even farther in 1928, building a new store in a luxury Deco style to resemble the homes of its wealthy customers, symbolically building it on the former site of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s great Beaux Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue (History).   Art Deco was new, modern, sexy, sophisticated and had the additional cache of being French.

The female form became the favorite subject of Art Deco design.  Sculptures of female dancers and athletes, shapely furniture, and fashion that celebrated the female form were the iconic images of the period.  In her exhaustive study on women in the Art Deco era, Lucy Fischer interprets “this female fixation as a symptom of societal anxieties about the emergent New Woman” (Fischer 254).

Historian Frederick Lewis Allen, in his book Only Yesterday,  expressed the societal changes as a revolution, explaining, Diverse influences - the post-war disillusion, the new status of women, the Freudian gospel, the automobile, Prohibition, the sex and confession magazines, and the movies - had their part in bringing about the revolution.  Each of them, as an influence, was played upon by all the others; none of them could alone have changed to any great degree the folkways of America; together their force was irresistible (Fischer 31).  They all came together in the one medium that perhaps was the most powerful trendsetter of them all: the American cinema.  King Vidor, one of Hollywood’s great directors of the 1920s, summed it up, "We must seek a common denominator, a means of telling a story that is understandable to all classes of people" (Benton 327).  That common denominator was Art Deco. 

The Movie Industry

            The American motion picture industry was born on the east coast but by 1920, the major movie studios had established a beachhead in Hollywood, California.  They began building vast production facilities, including sprawling back lots and bungalows for their major stars.  The film industry had amassed a $2 million capital investment by the mid-1920s.  Films were becoming longer, more polished and more expensive.  The large studios tightly controlled every aspect of the production of their product, from the writers to the distribution of their product in studio-owned theaters (Dirks).

Hollywood Walk of Fame gazebo

    Each studio had its own "look" on screen, the result of a team of set designers, costumers, lighting directors, cinematographers, directors and actors churning out picture after picture, an average of 800 new releases each year by the late 1920s, compared to less than 500 today.  The big five included Warner Brothers, which made the first talkie in 1927 and produced most of the Busby Berkeley spectaculars; Paramount, the result of a 1927 merger between Adolph Zukor and Jess Lasky, which had Cecil B. DeMille in its stable and had a continental look to its films; RKO, formed in 1928, which produced the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals; and 20th Century Fox, created by a merger in 1935 of pioneer Fox and its Movietone newsreels with Darryl Zanuk’s 20th Century Pictures.  Three others - Universal, United Artists and Columbia - were limited in their distribution because they did not own their own chair of theaters (Dirks).  The independents, such as William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures, and Howard Hughes, had to arrange their own distribution.

             All of the major studio heads were Jewish, most were European immigrants, and several came from the fashion trade.  They were attuned to the public’s fickle interest in style.  They weren’t interested in creating art; they were interested in making money.  If the public wanted Art Deco, that’s what the public would get.  The Art Deco style appeared even in period movies and westerns because studios quickly adopted the look for their logos.  20th Century Fox opened its films with a logo that was remarkably similar to a Raymond Lowry-designed ad for Saks Fifth Avenue that appeared in Vogue in 1927 (Duncan 235).  RKO incorporated the popular Deco chevron shape into its logo.  Universal surrounded an image of planet Earth with Deco lettering (Mandelbaum 18).

            Many of the 1920s directors also were European - Jacques Feyder, Victor Sjöström, Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau - and brought to the screen the cosmopolitan attitude they brought from Europe (Fischer 25).  The legendary Cecil B. DeMille was one of the first American directors to use Art Deco in film, bringing in French designer Paul Iribe, a pioneer of the design in the early 1920s.  DeMille’s films were considered groundbreaking in their daring and sophistication, prompting writer Anita Loos to call him “the High Priest of savoir-faire” (Mandelbaum 37).  He exploited the relaxation of moral standards following World War I with films such as “Male and Female (1919, Paramount) that included bathroom scenes with patial nudity.  DeMille capitalized on the public’s expressed taste for luxury, presenting sensual films that equaled the decadence of the glorious movie palaces in which they were shown (Mandelbaum 38). 

          There is a consensus that Our Dancing Daughters (1928, MGM) was Hollywood’s first fully Art Deco film.  A review in Motion Picture Magazine called it "smart and modern".  Starring Joan Crawford, it was a classic story of two girls vying for the affections of the same guy.  The set was designed by Cedric Gibbons, the art director at MGM for almost 40 years, who dictated "the look" of the studio’s films, which was uncluttered and highly stylized (Fischer 109).  The sets featured strong vertical and horizontal lines, clean arches, conical tiered sconces, Deco sculptures, low platform furniture and diffused lighting.   The class difference was clear when the maid, clad in dreary black Victorian garb, was positioned next to the glamorous heroine in a spangled Deco cocktail dress and feather-trimmed evening cape.  The public loved it.

            However, two developments were about to change the course of the movie industry.  Sound technology had been developed and by the end of 1928, most movies were "talkies."  Not everyone agreed that Hollywood’s new Art Deco talking pictures were an improvement.  Some critics preferred the early silent era as a more responsible art form, claiming it was better at telling an emotional and meaningful story and complaining that commercialization was killing film (Seldes 336-337).

            Other developments in technology helped execute the Art Deco look on film.  After the introduction of sound, actors no longer had to be constantly moving to convey the story.  They could be posed like Deco sculptures within the scene.  Sound also prompted a change in lighting.  The old white flame carbon arc lamps made a sputtering sound.  New incandescent lamps had not only the advantage of being quiet, but they could be aimed more precisely and registered white paint as true white (Benton 273).  Designers such as Paramount’s Hans Dreier used the new illumination to its full potential, creating spare, brilliant lighting that emphasized the sleek Deco style of the sets (Benton 329).  After the development of sound mixing equipment in 1932, sound no longer was limited to recording live on the set, but the benefits of incandescent lamps had been established.  MGM’s high-key photography provided better contrast by concentrating on lighter colors and using dark areas for stronger contrast (Benton 273).  The new panchromatic film stock gave the images on the screen a crisp sharpness compared to the softer images of early films (Mandelbaum 34). 

            Other technological innovations were dictated by the sets and style of the Deco movies.  Cranes had to be built to photograph the enormous sets, especially cavernous nightclub scenes.  Moving stages were necessary for Busby Berkeley’s complex dance numbers.  Berkeley, a Broadway veteran, made the camera an active participant in the scene, originating new camera techniques to capture images from under water, looking up from beneath a floor, seeming to spin through a chamber of mirrors, and the famous Berkeley "top shot" where the camera peered down on a kaleidoscope of prone dancers from a 45-degree angle (Fischer 141).  Even the dance numbers had a mechanical allusion as moving geometric shapes appeared with the dancers’ positioning against the floor.  These creative indulgences were a visual salute to the technology that was transforming industry.  Although not an American movie, Metropolis (1927) by German director Fritz Lang must be noted for its critical science fiction exploration of the rapid industrialization of the world and its possible consequences.

            The second event that would change the film industry was in 1929 when the stock market crashed, setting off a series of economic upheavals that led to the Great Depression.  The onset of the Great Depression hit the studios where it hurt most: in the box office.  Audiences dropped by a third between 1929 and 1932.  Almost 6,000 of the nation’s 22,000 movie theaters closed (Halnon).  Unemployment soared from 3 percent in mid-1929 to 25 percent by 1933.  Theater owners tried promotional gimmicks to bring in customers, including giving away sets of dishes, with a different piece in the set offered each week.  Fashion responded to the nation’s economic crisis by stripping off much of Art Deco’s ornate decoration of the 1920s to reveal strong sleek, modern lines.  While the 1920s had been influenced by Europe, Art Deco in the 1930s developed a more American aesthetic (Benton 325).  New mass-produced materials such as Lucite, Vitrolite and chrome-plated items replaced art glass, marble and silver.

            Many of the perceived gains for women were lost as men fought for the available jobs and women returned to more traditional roles (Fischer 35).  The years of decadence were over.  Hollywood was seen by many as being partly responsible for the excesses of the 1920s.  Scandals involving high-profile celebrities and the image of Hollywood as "Sin City" led to the creation of an industry association to try to improve its image.  As sound and improved film quality made the content of movies more vivid, local censorship of films became more widespread.  The industry responded with the adoption of the Production Code, commonly called the Hays Code for William Hays, head of the Motion Picture Association of America.  The Hays Code started being enforced in 1934 to evince a sense of morality by requiring films to earn its seal of approval before being released (MPAA).  The more restrained style of 1930s Deco was well-suited to the new restrictions.

            President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was inaugurated in 1933, giving the country a more positive outlook.  The moviegoing public wanted to focus on the promise of the future and escape the dreary reality of the present.  Hollywood was happy to accommodate them.  By the mid-1930s, movie attendance was back to near pre-crash levels.

            The excesses of the flapper era were over.  Unbridled consumerism ground to a crawl.  The 1930s version of Art Deco design was sleek, pared down, more streamlined.  Peeling away some of the ornate elements revealed exciting shapes, clean lines and a futuristic look at a time when people needed to believe that the future would be better.  Again, Hollywood responded with movies that allowed ticket buyers to escape the gloom of reality and portrayed a bright future that was attainable (Carney).  Sound made the script more important, so studios attracted famous writers to add their views of the era.  Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Ben Hecht, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald all tried their hand at screenplays.

Hollywood sent the message that the savvy woman of the thirties could marry up, and that anyone could mingle with the upper crust.  Grand Hotel (1932, MGM) attempted to bring audiences back to the theater with more glamour and "an erosion of the boundaries between class and sex."  The choice of Art Deco costumes and sets suggested the status and personality of each of the five main characters (Benton 329).  The proof that one had "arrived" was being dressed in and surrounded by the newest, more luxurious Art Deco styles.  Our Blushing Brides (1930, MGM) was typical of the morality plays of the era.  Three salesgirls in a depression-era New York department store seek to trade their independence for a rich husband.  A fashion show scene displayed the latest Deco fashions to provide stark contrast to the salesgirls’ tired wardrobes.  The two who yield to the temptation of immoral behavior fall from grace, but the one who maintains her values (and her virginity) is rewarded with a successful marriage set in Art Deco opulence (Fischer 54).  The emergence of women in the workplace also was treated in Baby Face (1933, Warner Brothers) in which Barbara Stanwyck used and discarded men on her way up the corporate ladder (Mandelbaum 82).  When a working girl teamed up with an unemployed guy, as Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire did in Swing Time (1936, RKO) they both could rise to the top, conquering Manhattan in high Deco fashion (Benton 332). 

            Hollywood even made the Deco style the subject of movies.  Skyline (1931, Fox) used the skyscraper building boom as the center of the story.  Transatlantic (1931, Fox) was written around the popularity of ocean liners.  The enthusiasm for the Paris designs became the plot for Fashions of 1934 (1934, Warner Brothers) which included an elaborate set representing a Paris salon.  Broadway (1939, Universal) was just one of many movies that celebrated New York’s "Great White Way." 

            Hollywood mirrored the fashion tastes of the American public.  The wealthy aristocracy still preferred their antiques.  The middle class lived with chintz slipcovers.  But they both enjoyed escaping the familiar to see how the nouveaux-riche were living in Art Deco splendor.  Even the middle class could afford a pair of chromium-plated candlesticks bought from a mail-order catalog (Hiller 18).  Hollywood sets were so glamorous and luxurious that stars and studio executives asked the art directors to redecorate their homes in moderne style.  None were likely to have rooms the size of ones constructed on the sound stages, where living rooms were the size of the waiting room at L.A.’s Union Station. 

            Much of the "look" of films from each studio was the work of the art directors:  Van Nest Palglase at RKO, Stephen Goosson at Fox, Cedric Gibbons at MGM.  Gibbons was considered by many to be the most influential art director in American cinema.  Although he was a supervising executive, no set was constructed without his detailed approval.  He was the only Hollywood designer who went to Paris for the 1925 Exposition and he put what he learned to full use.  He banished painted backdrops and set the standard for three-dimensional constructed sets (Mandelbaum 31). 

            In real life, Art Deco used vivid colors that could not be transferred to black and white film.  The set designers resolved that problem with creative contrasts, such as the lobby floor in Grand Hotel, in which black and white checkerboard tiles spiraled out from the reception desk like a pinwheel (Benton 327).  Another solution was the “big white set” in which textures and materials created visual interest in a room that could have as many as eleven shades of white, as seen in Dinner at Eight (1933, MGM).  Even the actresses matched the look with platinum hair, pale white skin and a stunning white dress (Benton 329).   Designers were quick to incorporate new materials such as Bakelite, Vitrolite, chrome and glass tiles that played with light and added interest to the scene.

            Victorian carved headboards were tossed out in favor of a platform bed with a geometric panel behind it.  Furniture was low-slung and curvilinear.  Doors were inlaid with geometric patterns, expansive doorways were surrounded with compound Deco arches, even drapes were hung in geometric shapes.  There were fountains, decorative plaster, etched glass and enormous murals.  Rooms were filled with cylinders, spheres, curves, and severe angles.  There were zigzag staircases, brilliantly buffed floors, glass, metals, polished woods, and lacquered furniture to give the camera a variety of reflective surfaces.  Textiles were given shadow effects, graduated stripes and overlapping geometric shapes.  The foreign influences common in Art Deco appeared in Mayan, African, Oriental, and Egyptian decorative objects.  Every surface was enhanced with an Art Deco sculpture or ashtray or martini shaker. 

            Many design elements seen at the 1925 Exposition found their way to the Hollywood set.  Deco sculptures of dancers and athletes, bas-relief panels over doors and fireplaces, inlay and marquetry using Deco motifs, intricate geometric metalwork, ziggurat and curvilinear shapes, and Venetian blinds appeared in every room of film homes.  Jean Dupas’s "Les Perucches" decorative panel that had been a focal point of the Paris Expo appeared on a wall in Dynamite (1929, MGM).   Studios hyped their use of the style in publicity releases such as “Modernistic effects in furniture and architecture are used with a vengeance by MGM in Joan Crawford’s new picture” (Mandelbaum 33).

            Deco design had done away with ornate table lamps with fabric shades trimmed with fringe.  The new essential for the fashionable home was diffused lighting that concealed the source of illumination.  Specialized lighting exhibits were offered at department stores such as B. Altman, Bloomingdale’s, John Wannamaker’s and Macy’s (Duncan 75).  Hollywood sets were filled with indirect cove lighting, Saturn lamps with frosted-glass shades, torcheres, multi-tiered disc chandeliers, chevron-shaped wall sconces that cast light upward, and diffusing glass panels.

            Bathrooms often played a featured role in films, giving the director a reason to show more of the actress and affording set designers an opportunity to create another fantasy for the audience.  Marble, onyx, tile, chrome, gold, brass and bathtubs the size of small swimming pools became standard.  Cecil B. DeMille undressed star Key Johnson for a soak in a tub of gold and cut glass in his first talking picture, Dynamite, and Tallulah Bankhead bathed in a circular tub set in a tiered pedestal surrounded by gleaming metal railings in Faithless (1932, Paramount).  The studios were so proud of their sets that one press packet included a photo of the bathroom set captioned, “Modernism enters the bath” (Mandelbaum 38, 70, 76).

            Set designers saved their most outlandish ideas for nightclubs.  Real-life nightspots such as speakeasies and the Harlem jazz clubs had thrived in spite of prohibition and, with the anticipated ratification of the 21st Amendment, grand new Art Deco clubs started to open in the early 1930s.  New York was the leitmotif of Deco movies and New York nightclubs never looked better than they did on screen.  John Haskrider designed the Silver Sandal nightclub for Swing Time as the epitome of glamour and romance.  The space was organized in true Deco geometric patterns.  There was a twin pair of curving shallow stairs, perfectly sized to be part of a dance number.  Angles and curves played off each other, much as Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire did on the Bakelite dance floor.  Even the bandstands on the stage resembled skyscrapers (Fischer 125).  The Silver Sandal’s competing establishment in the movie, Club Raymond, was modeled after New York’s Rainbow Room, which opened in 1934.  The Club Raymond had quilted ceilings, a cylindrical glass elevator and huge panels of flowing drapes.  Some were larger, but none were grander than the nightclub constructed for Broadway (1929, Universal), one of the most lavish Deco sets ever built.  A special crane was built to capture every angle of its skyscraper columns, enormous murals, and daringly cantilevered dining loges overlooking the mirror-finished black dance floor (Mandelbaum 103).

            With so many films set in New York, the skyscrapers that were redefining the city’s skyline became familiar to movie audiences all across the country.  The Chrysler Building (1930), the Empire State Building (1931), Bergdorf-Goodman (1928), the Waldorf-Astoria (1931) and many others were frequent backdrops.  Location filming in Los Angeles provided Art Deco backgrounds including Bullocks Wilshire department store (1929), the Eastern-Columbia building (1930), the Sunset Tower (1929, now the Argyle Hotel).  King Kong broke loose from his chains at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium in his 1933 eponymous movie.  

            No genuine location was considered off limits from receiving the Art Deco treatment.  Instead of reproducing an authentic-looking Venice for Top Hat (1935, RKO), Polglase created a soundstage Venice complete with Art Deco buildings and bridges so it would "photograph properly" (Mandelbaum 163).  Even historical dramas, such as Cleopatra (1934, Paramount) and The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938, MGM) were modernized with Deco-inspired sets.     

            No mode of transportation better embodied Deco design, however, than the ocean liner.  The public closely followed the contest among the cruise lines for the Blue Riband, the honor held by the ship with the fastest Atlantic crossing.  Equally important was the competition to have the most sumptuous ship.  The epitome of the French Deco style and luxury was the Ile de France that made its first crossing in 1926 and captured the public’s imagination with art and furnishings by Paris’s top designers.   The Queen Mary, launched in 1934, was a floating luxury hotel in high Deco style (Benton 320-321).  It was followed by the Normandie in 1935 with a streamlined, sleek décor with cove lighting, walls encased in hammered glass, coffered ceilings, a soaring grand salon, spectacular murals and bas reliefs, and staterooms promising "the inventive genius of modern French decoration" (Guinn).  The glamour was just for the first class passengers, but everyone could sail first class in the movies.

            The grand ocean liners docked in New York, so Hollywood built a fleet of its own for a string of movies at sea.  Stars from Constance Bennett to the Marx Brothers, Douglas Fairbanks to Carol Lombard frolicked in the streamline moderne splendor of an oceangoing film.  The ultimate movie ocean liner was the all-white S.S. Gigantic built for The Big Broadcast of 1938 (Paramount) inspired by a Norman Bel Geddes design (Mandelbaum 125).  Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced across the Atlantic in Shall We Dance (1937, RKO) with black Bakelite floors providing the requisite reflective surface to showcase their intricate footwork (Mandelbaum 124).  Reaching for the Moon (1930, United Artists), with story and songs by Irving Berlin, paid tribute to Art Deco’s French roots by naming its ship L’Amérique.  Each film ship had grand staircases, nightclubs, enormous staterooms and Deco furnishings that bettered the finest the cruise lines could offer.  The largest ship set built for a movie wasn’t an ocean liner but a battleship for Born to Dance (1936, MGM).  The set was 65 feet high and 85 feet wide and, unlike most battleships, was outfitted with silver, etched glass and alabaster (Mandelbaum 139). 

        Art Deco also provided an ideal visual vocabulary for science fiction films.  The streamlining, modern materials and clean geometry created a high tech décor ideal for futuristic cities, rocket ships, scientific labs and other-worldly locations.  The serial movies Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (1936, Universal), Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938, Universal) and Buck Rogers Conquers the Universe (1939, Universal) were the first “comic book Deco” films that became popular Saturday afternoon matinee fare (Fischer 233-234). 

            The streamlined Deco look also adapted well to provide a cold, sterile environment for science fiction horror films such as The Return of Dr. X (1939, Warner Brothers).  Set in 1930s New York, the minimalist lines of a Deco hospital and the luxury of a Deco hotel contrast with the clutter of a busy metropolitan newsroom.  The stark shadows created by a creative set designer and lighting director added to the terror of the story (Scheib)      

            Fashion was a primary focus of the 1925 Exposition in style-conscious Paris.  Designs by Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli became de rigueur for wealthy socialites.  The public was able to take advantage of the Art Deco style most quickly in fashion, which had a short production time and represented less of an investment for the style conscious than impetuously redecorating an entire house.  The cinema used fashion, particularly for women, as symbolic of class differences, career choices and questions of morality.  Fashion was used to help create the screen image.  Art Deco fashion was identified with being a modern woman.  Heroines wore white, “bad girls” wore dark colors.  Fashion became a silent symbol of a character arriving at a new and affluent point in her life.  When Greta Garbo evolved from being a Spanish peasant girl with a pleasant voice to being a Paris diva in The Torrent (1936, MGM), the change was accompanied by an appropriate new Art Deco wardrobe by Adrian.  Single working women wore structured suits, high society ladies were attired in gowns that draped to the floor, and girls whose behavior was considered risqué might be seen in nothing but a Deco slip and high heels.  Moms didn’t wear Deco.

           During the Depression, American women were mending and patching last season’s clothing and sewing their own.  For those who could afford new fashions, they found that the hemlines had dropped and necklines were lower on dresses that were molded to fit the figure.  Hollywood designers poured over the fashion columns and answered the emerging look by draping their actresses in streamlined and elegant costumes.  Designers had mastered the bias cut that allowed the fabric to follow the natural line of the body and enhance curves (Benton 267).  The pastel colors being seen on fashion runways read as "light" on the screen.  Insets, layers and lots of sequins, butterfly sleeves, ostrich feathers and fabric flowers and bows revived femininity.  Musicals set in nightclubs and ballrooms gave designers a good excuse to put dancers in sweeping, flouncy gowns with trains that grazed the floor and directors could stage graceful entries of characters wrapped in sable, chinchilla or mink capes and stoles.      

            Busby Berkeley took the Art Deco style a step beyond, attiring his dancers in sculptural dresses with abstract sequin designs or, in "The Shadow Waltz" from Gold Diggers of 1933 (Warner Brothers) in spiraling skirts and metallic skullcaps that added animation and sparkle to the scene.

            Art Deco women’s fashion was about more than changes in hemlines and waistlines.  A woman’s face, figure, hairstyle, posture and grooming became as important as what she was wearing (Nolan).  Ads in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar touted the latest cosmetics along with the newest fashions.  Hollywood actresses reflected the look with rouged cheeks, smoky eyes, red lips and fingernails, and bobbed hair.  Silent screen star Louise Brook’s straight bob was so popular that women across the country were asking their hairdressers for “the Louise Brooks hairstyle.”  By 1924, variations in the bob included a razor-cut shingle style and the Eton crop that used brilliantine to shape the hair into a gleaming skullcap (Thomas).  Softer hairstyles featuring finger waves made it to the screen in the 1930s.  The sheen of the waves captured light to illuminate the face.  The hat of the 1920s was the cloche, its brim narrowing to near nothing by the end of the decade.  Directors liked that it shadowed the eyes, making the actress look even more mysterious and alluring.  Skullcaps that eliminated anything that would detract from the face were popular for actresses whose beauty could stand alone.  The cloche was replaced by asymmetrical berets, pillbox hats and turbans in the 1930s.  The styles translated perfectly to the screen, framing the face to make it the focus of the camera.  Jeweled evening bags, feathered and bejeweled headpieces, and bold jewelry of precious metals set with gems completed the ensembles.

            London, rather than Paris, was the center of men’s fashion and was a bit slower to respond to the Art Deco influence.  The sacque suit remained standard daywear in films of the early 1920s, with tails for evening wear.  The jazz era ushered in the baggy pants and fitted jackets of the zoot suit and, briefly, the pencil thin pants of the jazz suit.  Tweed became a popular fabric and quickly moved into costumers’ arsenal for actors’ attire (Nolan).  The depression took a toll on the men’s clothing business so tailors became more creative to attract the well-heeled who still could afford fine fashion.  Movie studio costume designers snapped up new fabric weaves such as glen plaid, herringbone and stripes of all widths.  As soon as the business suit jacket was redesigned in the mid-1930s with broad shoulders enhanced with padding, wide pointed lapels, tapered sleeves and nipped-in waists topping generous cut trousers, it began appearing on the screen’s leading men.  The Palm Beach suit of silk shantung or linen was used for film characters of the leisure class, and dark blazers worn with light cotton or linen slacks were ideal for roles in movies set on a yacht or ocean liner (Thomas).

           All of this high fashion men’s attire was worn particularly well by the crop of film "dandies" who populated the screen to contrast with tough guys and gangsters such as James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson.  The dandies had slight builds, elegance, and a sophisticated wit that put them at ease in any social situation.  They were equally at home in poolrooms and ballrooms, in the row house and the penthouse, usually fooling the elite into thinking he was one of them (Todd).  They were the 1930s versions of today’s metrosexuals.  They flaunted style and defied class boundaries, characters who were unemployed by day but squired beautiful women around high society nightclubs in the evening, representing both the reality and aspirations of the middle class audience (Todd).  No matter what his circumstances, Fred Astaire’s characters always were attired in impeccably-tailored suits and gleaming shoes, and presented a sexual ambiguity that made him every man’s best friend and every woman’s prince charming.  Designer Orry-Kelly appropriated the look of New York’s most fashionable men’s furnishings to dress Leslie Howard in luxurious satin robes, ascots and a cream-colored tuxedo jacket for It’s Love I’m After (1937, Warner Brothers).  In a medium where the camera added weight to an actor’s frame, their lean, suave look played gracefully on the screen.

Nowhere else was Art Deco showcased as it was in Hollywood musicals.  With audiences turning to movies, vaudeville was fading and, with it, the careers of many of the performers and Tin Pan Alley composers.  The advent of sound in movies lured them to Hollywood where they discovered primitive recording equipment and a lack of acoustical knowledge.  Much of the music in early Hollywood musicals came from the stockpiles of songs by the New York composers.  The poor quality of the sound began to wear on audiences, but rapid advances in recording technology were made.  By the early 1930s, almost every major Broadway composer was under contract to a Hollywood studio.  The music that was the sound of Broadway during the Art Deco era soon began appearing on the silver screen.  Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart and George Abbott all tried their hands at the medium.  Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sang and danced to the music of Irving Berlin in Top Hat,  Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields in Swing Time, and George and Ira Gershwin in Shall We Dance (1937).  Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer wrote many of their most popular songs, such as "Blues in the Night" and "That Old Black Magic" to entertain Hollywood, not Broadway audiences (Maslon).  Even with all this high-powered talent, when the first Cedric Gibbons-designed Oscar statuettes were presented for music in 1934, they went to a drama with a score by the Columbia Studio music department and to two Hollywood songwriters for "The Continental" as best song.  

  Fred and Ginger

            Jazz gained international popularity in the 1920s and became the rage with flappers in the speakeasies.  Like everything Deco, jazz was considered modern, sophisticated and a little bit naughty.  African rhythms moved into the mainstream in songs like "Begin the Beguine" by Cole Porter for the movie Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940, Warner Brothers) that showcased the dancing of Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell.  Big bands of the 1930s took jazz and created swing music, which filled dance halls, nightclubs and the movies.  Harold Arlen composed dozens of songs for the movies at the same time he was writing two shows a year for the Cotton Club where New York’s elite gathered to hear the best in Harlem Renaissance entertainment.  The studios cast entire popular orchestras in movies including Duke Ellington, Guy Lombardo, Kay Kyser, Benny Goodman, the Dorsey brothers and Count Basie (Shapiro).  

New directions in dance again started in Paris with American dancer Josephine Baker, whose outrageous costumes and exotic dances made her the most highly-paid entertainer in Europe (Fischer 133).  American audiences weren’t quite ready for that, so the movie studios turned to proven vehicles such as vaudeville and Broadway musicals to incorporate the sought-after Deco feeling.  One of the first was The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (MGM) with the studio’s contract players performing as themselves.  Its second act opened with "The Tableau of Jewels," a living Art Deco sculpture featuring a Cedric Gibbons’ set of enormous white pearls supporting platforms where women attired in costumes by Erte stood and sat frozen in exotic poses.  Only the set moved, rotating against a dark background (Fischer 147-148).   By the 1930s, movies loosened up a bit with dance songs such as "Puttin’ on the Ritz," "Stompin’ at the Savoy," and "Jumpin’ at the Woodside" echoed what the sophisticated New Yorker was hearing in the "hot" nightclubs of New York, particularly those in Harlem which were setting the trends in popular music (Shapiro). 

           It was the years of the depression when the Hollywood musical came into its own.  Three sub-genres emerged:  the "backstage Broadway" story of youngsters trying to make it big in New York, the Fred Astaire musical in which people of modest means dance their way to a lifestyle of glamorous affluence, and the great MGM musicals that utilized its stable of big-name stars and concentrated on the story line.  Each of them presented women in a less threatening role than in 1920s films, reflecting changing relationships during the difficult economic times.  On screen, male and female were partners, supporting each other but with the man clearly in the lead.

            Art Deco’s influence on New York and the Broadway stage was forwarded to Hollywood in movies such as Broadway Babies (1929), Broadway Melody (1929), Footlight Parade (1933) and Warner Brothers’ Gold Diggers series.  They showcased musical numbers against a background story of young girls looking for their big break on Broadway, a show in financial trouble, and a boy-gets-girl love story.  The one that has remained in the American entertainment repertoire was 42nd Street (1933, Warner Brothers) that produced the much-misquoted line, "You’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star." 

          Warner Brothers’ secret weapon was Busby Berkeley, a Broadway veteran who was able to translate Art Deco style and sculpture to the screen in abstract fantasy.  Berkeley made no pretense of incorporating his spectacular dance numbers into the storyline.  In "By a Waterfall" from Footlight Parade, Berkeley used an ornate multi-level Deco set by Anton Gout to pay homage to the new female athleticism, featuring dancer/swimmers who evoked the image of Chiparus’s "Starfish Dancer," underwater camera work that created a frosted glass effect a la Rene Lalique, and ended with a human "frozen fountain," an image seen often at the 1925 Paris Exposition (Fischer 137-138).   He staged dancers playing with giant beach balls and bubbles, a popular image of the time that was seen in items as mundane as Anchor Hocking glassware (Fischer 144).  Berkeley placed dancers on a stairway stretching to infinity in Gold Diggers of 1935, used them as a living jigsaw puzzle in Dames (1935, MGM), and equipped them with neon-lit violins on a physics-defying curvilinear staircase in Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mandelbum 103, Fischer 119).  It was celluloid Art Deco sculpture.

            The relationship between the world of Art Deco and the American cinema was symbiotic.   Fashion designers, cosmetic manufacturers, furniture makers, car companies, and appliance producers created the style that Hollywood adapted for the screen, often providing actual products to be incorporated into the sets.  In turn, Hollywood promoted the look, which increased the sales of clothing, cosmetics, furniture, cars and appliances, and the cinema was used in ads for everything from shoes to vacuum cleaners.  Inexpensive knockoffs of Hollywood costumes appeared in stores, challenging the haute couture designers to come up with newer and more dramatic designs which then were copied by Hollywood and the cycle started again.   It was not a subtle coupling.  When Paramount Studios released The Magnificent Flirt in 1928 with sets by Van Nest Polglase, it boasted in its publicity that the film was making "full use of ‘the new French Decorative Art" (Mandelbaum 13).  In its pressbook for Trouble in Paradise (1932), Paramount Studios devoted almost all of its 41 pages to the film’s fashions and cosmetics, product tie-ins and publicity for exhibitors, stressing the marketing opportunities for those interested in the latest trends (Todd).   As Bevis Hiller, one of the country’s leading authorities on Art Deco, explained it, "The importance of the cinema in art was that it gave designers and decorators a chance to let themselves go, untrammeled by the limitations imposed by bourgeois purses and bourgeois domestic tastes" (Hiller 47).

Theaters 

            Marcus Loew once said, "I don’t sell tickets to movies.  I sell tickets to theaters" (Halnon).  Loew was one of the premier builders of "movie palaces," ornate theaters built in the 1910s and ‘20s.  A handful of Loews theaters of the early 1920s remain in operation to give today’s movie goers a sense of the days when people dressed up to go to the movies, were greeted by a doorman in a top hat as they entered a monumental lobby worthy of a Vanderbilt, and were shown to their seats by a uniformed usher.  A massive proscenium arch framed the stage and every surface of the auditorium was decorated with Beaux Arts elegance.  Designed with a maximum of gilded baroque ornamentation, the movie houses provided the audience with a complete entertainment experience.  S.L. "Roxy" Rothafel’s 6,600-seat Roxy Theater in New York, which opened in 1927, had a 100-member orchestra, a musical stage show by the Roxyettes, and an enormous Kimball organ with three auditorium consoles to accompany the silent films with appropriate music and sound effects (Green).

            The movie palaces invited the audience to wallow in luxury it could not afford at home but became theirs for the price of a movie ticket.  All of the big five Hollywood studios owned their own theater chains as part of a vertically integrated corporate structure.  The studios knew that if the public wanted Art Deco on the screen, they also would want it in their theaters.  Alexander Pantages built the first recognized Art Deco theater for the Fox chain in 1930.  It was one of the first theaters opened after the introduction of talking pictures and the resulting discovery that the elaborate ornamentation of the Beaux Arts movie palaces created acoustical problems (Duncan 202).  The Pantages’s elaborate sound system is concealed beneath luxurious Deco gilded ceilings, sculptural columns and pendulous chandeliers (Pantages).  The theater’s lobby was so spacious and so grand, it was used as a set in The Good Fairy (1935, Universal).      

            The demand for the moderne look was so intense that even theaters in smaller cities began redecorating their older interiors with new Deco decors, sometimes for specific movies.  The Fargo Theater in North Dakota ripped out its 1925 Baroque design in 1937 and replaced it with metal-trimmed African mahogany, horizontal blue neon stripes on the walls, and a color palette of coral, amber, maize, chartreuse and blue-gray (Welcome).   However, no theater better reflected the effort to satisfy the public’s appetite for Art Deco than New York’s Radio City Music Hall.  Built by "Roxy" Rothafel in 1932 as part of the Rockefeller Center complex, the theater seats almost 6,000 in surroundings of sleek Deco splendor.  The interiors by Donald Deskey follow a “Progress of Man” theme in murals and sculptures set among rooms decorated with marble, gold foil, Bakelite and aluminum.  Its sweeping arches emit a golden glow and drop in segments toward the stage where the final arch forms the proscenium.   Although all films had sound when it opened, Radio City continued the tradition of presenting a full program complete with symphony orchestra, stage show and music from its mighty Wurlitzer theater organ (Mandelbaum 21).  Many Art Deco films, including Swing Time and Top Hat premiered at the New York landmark theater.   Because of the economic impact of the stock market crash of 1929, Radio City was the last of the Art Deco movie palaces built, but smaller neighborhood theaters continued to reflect the Art Deco style into the early 1940s.  

Conclusion

            By 1940, Europe again was at war and America was preparing to join the hostilities.  The Art Deco era had run its course and, with the advent of war, new construction ground to a hall.  The French influence on fashion was interrupted.  Stocks of fabrics were confiscated to manufacture war goods and designers developed austere styles that relied primarily on synthetic fabrics.   Hollywood quickly toned down the glamour and began churning out war-related films.  In 1948, the Supreme Court issued an antitrust decision against the major studios that abolished block booking in the studio-owned theaters and opened all movie theaters to independent producers (United States v. Paramount Pictures)  The studio era that produced the Deco films of the Golden Age of Hollywood was over.

In a review of the landmark 2005 Art Deco exhibition mounted by the Victoria and Albert Museum, Linda Hales wrote, "No era defined high-glam better than Art Deco, the heady current of art and culture between the two world wars.  Scholars debate whether Art Deco was coherent enough to be a style or existed merely as a spirit" (Hales).

            If it was a spirit, it is one that has not died.  Art Deco is enjoying a retro resurgence in the 21st Century.  Nokia has just introduced a line of Deco cellphones.  Fashion designer Mark Jacbos’ 2005 collection for Louis Vuitton was based on 1920s Art Deco styles.  Art Deco styles are highly-sought after by antique and vintage clothing shops.  Art Deco buildings throughout the country are receiving facelifts and are the anchor for the revival of Miami Beach’s historic district. 

Hollywood produced Captain Sky and the World of Tomorrow (2004, Paramount) and Batman Begins (2005, Warmer Brothers) using today’s technology to return to 1930s Deco New York.  Director Robert Altman contrasted his Deco-clad characters against the Victorian splendor of an English country house in Gosford Park (2001, USA Films).  The Aviator (2004, Miramax) recreated Hollywood’s Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s when Howard Hughes was making his own mark on the American cinema with Hell’s Angels (1930).  Costume designer Sandy Powell used lustrous fabrics, fur and leather to properly outfit the cast of familiar Hollywood characters.  The sets by Dante Ferreti won the Oscar for their accurate representation of interiors from Pan American Airway’s president Juan Trippe’s celestial Deco office to a reproduction Elgin "Manhattan" knob and backplate on the door to Hughes’ private screening room.  Art Deco structures still appear as settings for films.  Hoover Dam appeared in the remake of Ocean’s Eleven (2001), the Empire State Building has been featured in movies from King Kong (1933, RKO) to Independence Day (1996, 20th Century Fox), and Los Angeles’s Griffith Observatory (1935) was used in Rebel Without a Cause (1955, Warner Brothers) and today in the "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" video game.

Art Deco film festivals are introducing a new generation to Deco-era films.   Art Deco movie houses are being renovated as first-run theaters, art cinemas and performing arts centers, from the waterfall tower above the marquee and the Deco chandeliers of the 1937 Cerrito Theater in El Cerrito, California to the San Marco Theatre in Jacksonville, Florida, that now serves nachos, pizza, beer and wine to the lounge-style seating in its 1938 Art Deco auditorium (Bly).  The Pantages in Hollywood has been completely restored, including its 2,691 seat auditorium.  The Film Foundation, founded in 1991 by director Martin Scorsese, and the Motion Picture Academy’s Academy Film Archive are dedicated to the restoration and preservation of Hollywood’s historic films so they can continue to be enjoyed by future generations.  Although half of the films made in the U.S. before 1950 have been lost to deterioration, the magic and glamour that defined American cinema during the Art Deco era continue to be an influence to this day.

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First presented to California State University DH, June 29, 2005.

©2005 M. Barron Stofik