Entertainment in the 1930s

Popular Entertainment

Vaudeville was a form of theater that was popular in the United States between the 1880s and 1930s, similar to the music hall shows in Britain. Vaudeville performances were collections of shorter acts that included a variety of entertainment forms, including music, dancing, acrobatics, comedy skits, ventriloquists, juggling, and short plays. These vaudeville performances helped to inspire and promote popular music of the time and the early movie industry. Some actors who later became famous had their start in vaudeville or came from families of vaudeville performers. Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele, got their start as a Vaudeville dance team before moving on to Broadway. Adele retired from performing for a time after her marriage in 1932, and Fred continued, taking new partners, eventually teaming up with Ginger Rogers. Together, they performed memorable dance scenes in movie musicals.

Bingo also started to become a popular game in the United States. Bingo started as a variation on the older game of Lotto. It was turned into a carnival game played with beans called Beano, but after Edwin S. Lowe, a toymaker and immigrant to the United States, encountered the game, he designed the variant called Bingo with redesigned card to limit the amount of different number combinations. The association between Bingo and churches began in 1934 when a Catholic priest asked Lowe about the idea of using the game for a fund raiser. It worked very well, and the use of Bingo in churches helped to make the game more popular.

Music and Radio

Culturally, this was the era of swing music, although there were many other styles of music available at the same time, like jazz and country music. Radio was a popular form of media, and radio shows came in great variety.

Jitterbug Dancers
Jitterbug Dancers, 1938
From Wikimedia Commons (Considered public domain in the US)

Some of the most famous musicians from the 1930s were Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, Tommy Dorsey, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, and Bing Crosby (who was also a movie actor and sang in movies). Among the popular songs of the 1930s:

Aside from music, radio programs during the 1930s were plays and stories, much like programs that would later air on television. In fact, some of the early television shows started as radio programs and transitioned over to the new medium. Radio shows came in great variety with dramas, westerns, comedies, mysteries, horror, and game shows. In a bizarre bit of radio history, Orson Welles's science-fiction program, War of the Worlds for The Mercury Theatre on the Air in 1938, took the form of radio news broadcasts about an alien invasion from outer space, and some people who tuned in to the program late didn't realize that the "news" broadcasts were part of a fictional program and were afraid that Earth had really been invaded by aliens. It's difficult to say how many people actually got scared by the broadcast, and it might not be as many as newspapers of the time initially reported. (75 Years ago, 'War Of the Worlds' Started a Panic. Or Did It?)

Girl Listening to Radio
Girl Listening to Radio, c. 1938 to 1945
From Wikipedia (Considered public domain in the US because it was produced by a government employee)

Among the programs that people listened to during the were were:

  • Dick Tracy (1934-1948) - A detective show based on a newspaper comic strip, popular with kids.
  • The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1939-1948) - A mystery detective show. As part of the show, listeners were invited to review the clues and solve the mystery before the detective, Ellery Queen, revealed the final solution.
  • The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939-1950) - A mystery detective show with the classic characters of Sherlock Holmes and Watson played by the same actors who portrayed the characters in movies during the same period, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. In 1946, Basil Rathbone left the show and was replaced by another actor. Later, Nigel Bruce left the show as well and was also replaced.
  • Little Orphan Annie (1931-1942) - A drama show for kids about the popular comic strip character. One of the first programs for children.
  • Fibber McGee and Molly (1935-1956) - A comedy program that many people remember for the running gag where everything falls out of the hall closet.
  • Lights Out (1934-1947) - Horror and supernatural stories. This program became a television show later.
  • Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1932-1936, 1939, 1940, 1946-1947) - Sci-fi radio drama based on a novel and a series of comics. The character Buck Rogers was a veteran of The Great War (World War I) who was placed into suspended animation because of radioactive gas in an abandoned mine for nearly 500 years. When he wakes up, he finds himself in an unfamiliar world fighting a different kind of war.
  • The Lone Ranger (1933-1954) - A popular western show that later became a television show.
  • The Green Hornet (1938-1952) - A crime-fighting hero show. The Green Hornet didn't have any super powers, but he did have a sidekick named Kato and a high-tech car called "Black Beauty." The character of The Green Hornet was supposed to be the grand-nephew of The Lone Ranger.

For a more extensive list of 1930s radio programs, see Wikipedia's list of 1930s American Radio Programs.

You can listen to old radio programs for free online at Old World Radio, OTR.Network Library, and Old Time Radio on Internet Archive. Old World Radio also has recordings of President Franklin Roosevelt's Fireside Chats in which he discussed recent events with the American public, and some historic news broadcasts and speeches. There is a specific collection of World War II News Broadcasts. The World War II News Broadcasts begin in the 1930s with events leading up to the war.

Radio stations and their programs made their money through advertising, much like television shows would later. Radio shows were sponsored by different companies, which provided fnding for the shows and used them for advertsing purposes. The host of the show would tell listeners who their sponsor was at the beginning and end of the show, talk about the quality of the sponsor's products, and give their slogan or advertising jingle. Shows also had intermissions, where the sponsor's product would be advertised again. There would be no advertisements for any other type of product besides the show's sponsor. If a radio program lost its sponsor, possibly because the sponsor didn't think that the show was popular enough to justify the costs, the radio station would either take it off the air and replace it with a different show or try to find a new sponsor for it. When radio programs were targeted at children, they often had fan clubs for the shows. When kids joined the fan clubs for their favorite shows, they would be sent membership cards and promotional materials.

Movies

The 1930s were part of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and movies often helped people to forget their troubles. Comedies were popular and helped to cheer people up during the hard times. A particular variety of comedy emerged in the 1930s, "screwball comedy." Screwball comedies were popular into the 1940s, and they usually featured subtly racy jokes, trying to slip some innuedos past the film censors of the time. (The Hays Code spelled out what was and wasn't allowed in movies.) One film critic defined the genre as "a sex comedy without the sex." Certain things were implied but never explicitly shown. They were basically romantic farces with over-the-top characters and mismatched couples who would overcome their romantic problems in a humorous way. Also, the women in screwball comedies usually took the lead in defining the romantic relationships in the stories or choosing to pursue the men, which was a role reversal from other film genres of the time.

There were also a lot of musicals and gangster films. Child stars, notably Shirley Temple, became popular. Most of these movies were still black-and-white, but color film was used for a few major films by the end of the decade, particularly The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind. Walt Disney created his first full-length animated movie in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Among the popular movies during the Great Depression:

  • All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
  • The Public Enemy (1931)
  • Dracula (1931) - With Bela Lugosi, based on the novel by Bram Stoker and a stage play version of it.
  • Frankenstein (1931) - With Boris Karloff.
  • The Mummy (1932) - With Boris Karloff
  • The Old Dark House (1932) - This is the movie that gave a name to the old dark house genre of movies. Old dark house movies are basically what they sound like, mystery or horror movies that take place in old, dark, isolated houses with a limited cast of characters. There is often a reason why the characters can't leave the house to get away from the murderer or whatever danger that they're in or call the police to help. In the case of this moving, a group of travelers are forced to take shelter at an isolated mansion during a terrible storm. The people who live in the house are very strange. The travelers eventually learn that one of the members of the family is insane and is locked in an upstairs room of the house. Before the storm ends and the people can leave, the insane man escapes and tries to set fire to the house. There are no ghosts or supernatural elements. The danger comes from the humans involved. The movie has a happier ending than the book that the movie was based on, Benighted by J.B. Priestley (1927).
  • Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)
  • King Kong (1933) - With Fay Wray.
  • Duck Soup (1933)
  • It Happened One Night (1934) - A slightly racy romantic "screwball comedy" with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. This movie is credited with being the first of the screwball comedies.
  • The Thin Man (1934) - A comedy mystery movie, the first in a series, with William Powell and Myrna Loy. The movie was based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett. Although other movies in the series would use the title "Thin Man" as if it applied to the detective in the story, Nick Charles, it was originally the description of the man who disappeared in the story and an important clue later in the mystery. The movie series was also unusual in that it featured a flirtatious, happily-married couple who acted as a team. Nick's wife, Nora, is wealthy but enthusiastic about her husband's detective businesses, encouraging him to take cases even when he is reluctant and insisting on helping him with his investigations.
  • The 39 Steps (1935)
  • One Frightened Night (1935) - An old dark house mystery movie. A wealthy old man seeks his missing granddaughter (having disowned her mother years before for marrying a man he didn't approve of) as he begins giving family members early bequests in order to avoid paying extra estate taxes. When two young women claiming to be his granddaughter show up on the same dark and stormy night and one of them is murdered, it leaves the questions of who killed the young woman and whether her murderer killed her because he thought that she was the real heiress or because he knew she wasn't.
  • My Man Godfrey (1936)
  • Snow White (1937) - Disney's first full-length animated film.
  • Bringing Up Baby (1938)
  • The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) - With Errol Flynn.
  • The Lady Vanishes (1938) - A mystery movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. An English tourist, Iris, is traveling in Europe by rail meets a kind older woman on a train. When Iris wakes up after having a long nap, the older woman, Miss Froy, is gone. Other people aboard the train insist that Miss Froy was never on the train in the first place and that she was only a figment of Iris's imagination, possibly caused by a head injury that she sustained earlier. However, Iris knows that she didn't just imagine Miss Froy. She doesn't know what happened to Miss Froy or why people are lying about seeing her, but she knows that Miss Froy must be in trouble.
  • The Cat and the Canary (1939) - With Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard. This old dark house comedy/mystery is based on an earlier silent movie and an even earlier stage play. Years after the death of an eccentric but wealthy man, his remaining family members gather at his isolated mansion for the reading of his will. His dislike of his greedy relatives was one of the reasons for delaying the settling of his estate. His will leaves his house and fortune to the only living relative of his who shares his last name and who attended the reading of the will. This turns out to be a young woman who is a distant niece. However, there is insanity in the family, and so he also leaves a message with his lawyer with the name with the name of an alternate heir, in case the first one turns out to be insane. That night, a series of strange events and the murder of the lawyer seemed designed to frighten the heiress and either drive her insane or convince her relatives that she is crazy.
  • The Wizard of Oz (1939) - One of the earliest color films, based on the children's book by L. Frank Baum. In the original book, Dorothy's magic shoes were silver. However, to better show off the new technology of color movies, the film makers decided to have her wear red shoes, calling them "ruby slippers." From this point on, people began to associate ruby-colored shoes with the story and the character of Dorothy. When children dress up as Dorothy for Halloween and wear red shoes, they are dressing as the movie character of Dorothy as portrayed by Judy Garland, not the original book character. Prior to this specific movie, no one thought of Dorothy as wearing red shoes.
  • Gone with the Wind (1939) - A Civil War and Reconstruction drama based on a novel by Margaret Mitchell. Known for being a long epic film and one of the early color films. Starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh.
  • Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) - A new senator goes to Washington DC and confronts the corruption and self-interest of other senators.

I want to talk about portrayals of minorities in films of this period, and I'd like to start with the Charlie Chan series.  The Charlie Chan mystery movies began in the 1930s but continued into the next decade, ending in 1949. The character of Charlie Chan, a Hawaiian detective of Chinese ancestry, was created by Earl Derr Biggers for a series of novels. Up to this point in history, western literature tended to cast Asian characters in the role of villains, such as Fu Manchu, but Biggers wanted to create an Asian character who was the hero of the stories, basing him on a real detective from Honolulu who had Chinese ancestry.

The Charlie Chan series has caused mixed feelings about its treatment of minorities. On one hand, the original author's attempt to create a hero who was Asian, intelligent, and admirable, was a step in a positive direction, away from the previous stereotype of "inscrutable" Asian villains. On the other hand, it is worth noting that, even though different actors portrayed Charlie Chan through the 1930s and 1940s, not one of them actually was Asian. Real Asians played the parts of Charlie Chan's wife and his children, at least one of which appears in every movie. It's a running gag that Chan has a large family, and his children can't resist getting involved in his work. Charlie Chan travels a lot in his work, but he usually travels with at least one child and brings presents home for the others. He is often critical of his teenage/young adult sons, especially when they do things that he thinks are foolish (which happens often for comic relief), but he does generally seem to love his large family. However, the filmmakers were reluctant to cast an Asian in the lead role, instead using makeup to make non-Asian actors look Asian. Also, while Charlie Chan's children speak standard American English fluently and use American slang terms, Charlie Chan himself speaks in somewhat broken English and frequently offers up proverbs that sound like they came from fortune cookies instead of ancient Chinese wisdom. (It's part of the humor of the series but also pretty hokey.) On the brighter side, there are times in the movies when Charlie Chan meets with people who have racist attitudes, and he always finds a witty way to turn the joke back on them.

From a historical perspective, the Charlie Chan movies are interesting because they reference a number of important events that were happening at the time they were being made, including events that led up to the beginning of World War II. During the war years, at least one of Chan's sons is in the army and Chan assists the government in espionage cases. I don't think there was a movie that referred directly to the attack on Pearl Harbor, even though Charlie Chan lives in Hawaii. Perhaps the filmmakers thought it would be too traumatic to depict, especially so soon after the event. A number of the movies in the series, especially the earliest ones, are considered "lost" films because no copies are known to exist. The series includes (among others):

  • Charlie Chan in London (1934) - In the 2001 movie Gosford Park, which is set in 1932, there are people from Hollywood researching English country house life for a Charlie Chan movie they're working on. That Charlie Chan movie is this real film.
  • Charlie Chan in Paris (1935)
  • Charlie Chan's Secret (1936) - Has elements of spiritualism, which also appears in other Charlie Chan movies.
  • Charlie Chan at the Circus (1936) - One of the films which shows Chan with his entire large family instead of one or two children.
  • Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936)
  • Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937) - One of Charlie Chan's sons is an Olympic swimmer for the United States team, taking part in the 1936 summer Olympics in Berlin. This is the same Olympics where Hitler was irritated that black American runner Jesse Owens won against German athletes. The mystery in the movie concerns military technology and espionage, and this is before World War II began and the United States knew that it would be at war with Germany. Some people were sensing the international tensions and war that would eventually come.
  • Charlie Chan in City in Darkness (1939) - This movie focuses even more on the coming war and the manufacture of war munitions.

Another racial issue with the Charlie Chan movies, as well as other movies that were produced in the 1930s, is the treatment of black people. When black actors appeared in films during this time, they were typically cast as servants or comic relief or both. (There are worse terms for the specific types of characters that they portrayed, but that's essentially what they were doing. Typical roles for black characters were often chauffeurs, valets, train porters, maids or housekeepers, and sometimes even slaves, if the movie a period drama, like Gone with the Wind.) One of Charlie Chan's helpers is a black servant called Birmingham Brown (who appeared in the Charlie Chan films made in the 1940s) who is also a comic relief character, being over-the-top scared or goofy, depending on the situation. Sometimes, black actors of the time were criticized for portraying characters that promoted stereotypes, but I don't really blame them because they didn't write the scripts and those were basically the roles that they were allowed to have. My theory is that accepting even bad roles helped them get their foot in the door of the film industry when they might otherwise not be allowed to participate. I think actors during this time period probably realized it and went along with these undesirable roles in the hopes that they would eventually be able to get enough public support to change things, but that's a matter of opinion. In spite of the unfortunate roles they were given, the black actors were genuinely good actors who played their parts well. Among the black actors of the period whose performances I particularly enjoy when watching old movies are:

  • Bill "Bojangles" Robinson - A famous tap dancer. He appeared in multiple Shirley Temple films, and the two of them are credited as being the "first interracial dance team" - Shirley Temple's youth and innocence made it more acceptable to audiences of the time but their dance scenes together were still controversial, especially in the South, and sometimes, those scenes were cut from showings there.
  • Willie Best - I particularly liked him in The Ghost Breakers with Bob Hope in 1940. His character, Alex, was much sharper and more personable than most black servant/comic relief characters were, and I thought it was one of his best roles, compared to others I've seen, showing more of the wit that he was capable of when he was allowed to show it.
Willie Best and Dudley Dickerson in Dangerous Money
Willie Best (right) and Dudley Dickerson in Dangerous Money (Charlie Chan film, 1946)
From Wikipedia (Considered public domain in the US because it was published without a copyright)

To see more information about early black film actors, see this list of African-American Film Pioneers. The article African-Americans on Screen, 1903 to Present explains more about stereotypical black character roles in the early days of Hollywood and how black film roles changed over time.

Theaters were also still showing movie serials in the 1930s. Movie serials were episodic films shown one episode at a time in theaters with episodes ending with cliffhangers to keep audiences coming back to see what would happen next. One example is the Flash Gordon serial. The character of Flash Gordon was created for comic books in 1934, and he had science fiction adventures. In the 1936 serial, Flash Gordon and his friends fought against Ming the Merciless, the evil emperor of the planet Mongo. One of the fun things about this serial is noting props and footage that was recycled from other movies. The Flash Gordon serials helped to inspire aspects of George Lucas's Star Wars movies. Lucas was a fan of Flash Gordon and other old science fiction movies and series. One of the first things that fans notice is that Lucas copied the style of scrolling text that Flash Gordon used to introduce the episodes of the serial and remind audiences of what happened in the last episode.

Books

Among the books published for adults in the 1930s:

  • The Maltese Falcon (1930) - The famous mystery novel featuring detective Sam Spade. By Dashiell Hammett.
  • Murder on the Orient Express (1934) - One of the most famous Hercule Poirot mystery novels. By Agatha Christie.
  • Fer-de-Lance (1934) - The first in the Nero Wolfe mystery novel series. By Rex Stout.
  • They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935) - By Horace McCoy.
  • Your Turn, Mr. Moto (1935) - The first Mr. Moto spy novel. Mr. Moto is a Japanese secret agent. After Earl Derr Bigggers, the creator of the Charlie Chan mystery novels died, The Saturday Evening Post wanted more stories with an Asian hero, and Mr. Moto was created to fill the void. The first printings were titled No Hero and Mr. Moto Takes a Hand. By John P. Marquand.
  • Gone with the Wind (1936) - By Margaret Mitchell.
  • Of Mice and Men (1937) - By John Steinbeck.
  • The Grapes of Wrath (1939) - By John Steinbeck.