Cross-class romances in popular culture, most of which are between wealthy men and poor women, can be found in what are regarded as the first modern novels, which included what were to become the major female types from the lower class: the virtuous heroine (Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, 1740) and the amoral social climber (Moll Flanders, 1722; Shamela, 1741). Films with the theme of cross-class romance, most with virtuous heroines, have been made throughout almost the entire history of the cinema (recent examples include Crazy/Beautiful, 2001; Maid in Manhattan, 2002; Chasing Liberty, 2004; Shopgirl, 2003; and The Nanny Diaries, 2007), but the number of such films in recent years cannot compare with the 1920s and 1930s, when, on average, at least one cross-class romance film would appear every month. From the beginnings of the feature film around 1915 until 1938, cross-class romance films were far more numerous than they would be thereafter.Footnote 1 They reached a peak during the early 1930s, the worst years of the Depression, and dropped rapidly after 1938.Footnote 2 All the studios of the “Big Five” (Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros., Fox, RKO) produced cross-class romance films, as did one of the “Little Three” studios, Columbia, and small independent production companies such as Chesterfield.
A few cross-class romance films made in the 1930s have been analyzed in film studies from a number of perspectives and the analysis here differs from them in two principal foci: first, the analysis is of a large sample of films; and second, the films are related principally to the sociohistorical context. Film scholars have analyzed a small number of the cross-class romance films in accord with their various interests, such as genre, directors, and censorship. Prominent examples discussed with regard to particular genres (romantic comedy, musical, drama or melodrama) or directors include It Happened One Night (Columbia, 1934), Gold Diggers of 1933 (Warner Bros., 1933), and Stella Dallas (Goldwyn/United Artists, 1937). Prominent examples in discussions of censorship, particularly with respect to the “fallen woman” theme, are Red Headed Woman (MGM, 1932) and Baby Face (Warner Bros., 1933). These films have also entered into the discussion of film scholars over whether a clear line can be drawn between the so-called “pre-Code” period from 1930 to July 1934 and the remainder of the decade.Footnote 3
In contrast to the tendency in film studies to provide a detailed analysis of a small number of films, this analysis is based on a large sample of cross-class romance films without regard to their acknowledged quality or status in film history; it includes the well known and the long forgotten, the commercial successes and the commercial failures, those directed by “auteurs” and those directed by journeymen, those that encountered problems of censorship and those that posed no problem for the moral gatekeepers. The cross-class romance may be considered a formula,Footnote 4 but it is a formula that crosses genres. There were variations according to whether the film was a comedy or drama, but there were common patterns across the genres and it is perhaps significant that a large number of cross-class romance films can be categorized as comic dramas or dramatic comedies.
I propose that, when the cross-class films of the 1930s are considered as a whole, they may be usefully analyzed in their sociohistorical context. From the 1970s into the 1990s, the marked theoretical preferences within academic film studies for semiotics, formal structuralism, deterministic conceptions of ideology, and psychology (particularly psychoanalysis) limited the analysis of films within their historical sociocultural contexts. Less theoretical, more popularized, accounts sometimes gave greater attention to sociohistorical contexts, but the linkages made tended to be schematic and anecdotal.Footnote 5 Among theorists, the common assertion that films do not simply reflect society appeared to justify the absence of any serious consideration of the sociohistorical contexts of film “texts,” even though generalizations were often made about “capitalism,” “patriarchalism,” or “patriarchal capitalism.” Wider contexts have been provided by neo-formalists on the relationship between film style and the structure of the film industry and by reception and audience studies. A relevant factor to the analysis below is that during the 1930s the studios assumed that their audience was a predominantly female one, and the female-centered cross-class romance was clearly oriented toward that audience.Footnote 6 The importance of attention to sociohistorical contexts is now being recognized by even the major exponents of the psychoanalytical approach,Footnote 7 but the minimal contribution of sociologists to an understanding of film and the negative view of sociology by film scholars has meant that there has been little conceptual or theoretical framework for making the linkage between film and society.Footnote 8 Ideally, an analysis of cross-class romance films of the 1930s would provide a synthesis of the interrelationships among the intertextual and contextual (industrial, societal) factors that influenced their narratives and styles. Within the space permitted by an article, I have chosen to focus on just one relationship: the films' narratives and the sociohistorical context.
CROSS-CLASS ROMANCE SAMPLE
From the American Film Institute index and from other sources I have built up a sample of eighty-five cross-class romance films released between 1929 and 1939, of which I have been able to view fifty-nine.Footnote 9 I found that in seventy films (82 percent) the male protagonist is rich and the female protagonist poor. This continued the pattern that I found in a sample of 118 films released between 1915 and 1928; in that period the male protagonist is rich and the female protagonist poor in 101 (85 percent) of the films. In the sense that they end with marriage or the promise of marriage, the romances in most cross-class films are successful: sixty-five films (76 percent) of the 1929–39 sample and 98 films (83 percent) of the 1915–28 sample. The proportion of unsuccessful cross-class romances is somewhat more frequent in the male rich–female poor romances than in the female rich–male poor romances, but in a number of the cross-class romance films with rich females their relationship is not with working-class men but with middle-class men, often reporters, and in these, mainly screwball comedies, the romance is almost inevitably successful. Where the male is wealthy, the female is almost invariably from the working or lower class in occupation, such as maid, salesgirl, stenographer, or chorus girl.
Most of the heroines in the cross-class romance films are virtuous, but the sexually empowered woman who manipulates men, who came to be known from about 1915 as a “gold digger,”Footnote 10 appears frequently in the films of the early 1930s. The adoption of the term “gold digger,” which had replaced “vamp” as the most prominent type of femme fatale, was part of a broader shift in popular conceptions of women who had moved away from their families and lived alone or with other women.Footnote 11 As the term indicates, the motivation of the gold digger is material benefit, whereas the motives of the vamp are often elusive and impenetrable: the vamp may simply take pleasure from the entrapment and destruction of men.Footnote 12 Another difference between the vamp and the gold digger is that whereas the class origins of the vamp are unknown, ambiguous, or irrelevant, those of the gold digger are almost always lower or working class. The gigolo, who has been credited as the male counterpart of the gold digger, makes far fewer appearances than the gold digger; he is rarely a central protagonist, and, unlike the gold digger, he is not a character with whom spectators are invited to identify.Footnote 13 This paper proposes that a combination of social and cultural changes accounts for the popularity of, and the narrative permutations of class and gender in, the cross-class romance films of the 1930s.
THE SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT
The popularity of the cross-class romance films from the period of the First World War was related to the spread of the disinterested ideal of romance throughout the class structure, and the advance of consumerism, with its linkage to romance. This linkage highlighted the rewards that awaited the love object from the lower class and provided the contexts in which the fictional love affair was acted out, which moved from factories in the cross-class romance films of up to about 1917 to department stores, luxury hotels, and commercial business offices in the films of the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote 14
Although romantic love in Western societies was commonly associated with marriage from at least the eighteenth century, prior to the twentieth century it was widely and openly acknowledged that marriage was principally an economic transaction, an agreement between families of a favorable alliance that would reflect or strengthen their economic interests and status in society. This principle was especially important among the upper middle and upper classes, who were concerned to retain or increase their family property or capital, but considerations of income, skill levels, and “respectability” in potential marriage partners were likely to have been considered by the working classes. From at least the end of the eighteenth century marriage choices were also articulated in romantic terms, and by the end of the nineteenth century the disinterested ideal of love had spread throughout the class system. The institution of “calling,” by which families in the middle and upper classes had regulated their children's choice of marriage partners, was replaced by “dating,” an institution that was expected to be conducted in accord with the disinterested ideal of love and was understood to transcend class boundaries.Footnote 15
The adoption of the romantic ideal has made little difference to the practice of homogamy or class endogamy. The vast majority continue to marry or cohabit with people from their own class, and in those cases where there is class crossing the couples tend to come from adjacent classes. This does not mean that people lie to others and perhaps to themselves concerning their romantic motivations and that in fact practical considerations hold sway. It is rather that people do fall in love disinterestedly but they do so with people of their own class because these are the people they meet more frequently in their workplaces, neighborhoods, and social gatherings and with whom they find common interests.Footnote 16 Having said this, we can acknowledge that rational calculations remained present in the choice of partners, but that once the romantic ideal became the norm, they were rarely admitted openly, and people who were seen to be so motivated were subject to moral condemnation.Footnote 17 In the cross-class romances of popular culture, the person from the lower class whose love for the upper-class person is genuinely disinterested is most often rewarded by both love and wealth, but the calculating person who seeks to gain wealth by a romantic tie or marriage, such as the gold digger, most often fails or is punished in some way.
Although romantic love was ideally disinterested, its conduct and expressions had become strongly linked to consumerism, which, in some ways, was in contradiction to disinterested love. Romantic love was initiated within the appropriate patterns of consumption while dating, and it was sustained, and even strengthened, through the use of appropriate commodities in marriage. The “commodification of romance” occurred largely within the framework of commercialized leisure, which had developed extensively across the class structure around the turn of the century. Although dating provided greater opportunities for class mingling, the commodities and forms of entertainment consumed in dating were largely determined by access to wealth and leisure time. Women required resources to make themselves attractive through clothes and beauty products, but the customary practice of “treating” a woman meant that the costs of dating fell most heavily on the man. The costs of theater and movie tickets, flowers, chocolates and taxi rides, items that had become central to the seduction process, meant that many lower-income men were disadvantaged in the new economy of love.Footnote 18
The 1920s has been described as a milestone decade in the development of consumerism, as the decade of a clear shift from a producer to a consumer economy, but the Depression's impoverishment of large sectors of the population did not stem the development of consumerism, and although having very little was nothing new for a large part of the population, the belief in entitlement to the good (consumer) things of life was taking greater hold. The experience of scarcity did not immunize Americans against dreams of abundance, which were encouraged by the advertising of consumer goods.Footnote 19 Women were the main targets of advertisers, but the Depression was a blow to any hopes that women might have had that they might rise in class and attain the joys of consumerism through their own endeavors in the work place. Many women found it easier than men to find and hold onto work, but this was because they received lower wages and worked in service occupations, which were less vulnerable to hard times than manufacturing jobs. The minimum-wage laws passed during the 1930s improved the situation of low-ranking women workers and there was a small advance in the unionization of women, but at the end of the decade the overwhelming majority earned very little.Footnote 20 Many women remained employed by taking less desirable jobs, and at the bottom of the scale there were young girls who joined boys on the road as hobos, some turning to prostitution as an alternative to hunger.Footnote 21
Women with college degrees interested in entering business or the professions found few opportunities, and the proportion of working women engaged in the professions fell. Many women in managerial positions were replaced by men and were only able to remain in employment by accepting demotion. Even in those work areas such as teaching, librarianship, and social work in which women were prominent, women lost ground to men who entered these fields and dominated the higher-level positions.Footnote 22 When women succeeded in business or the professions in spite of limited opportunities, they were unlikely to find approval. Business magazines of the 1930s were wary of ambitious women and critical of those who were more interested in a career than in marriage.Footnote 23 Working women appeared in films of the 1930s more frequently than in later decades, but the message conveyed by the films is that even if a woman is successful in her profession or in business she will only be happy and find meaning in her life if she gives up working for love, marriage, or her husband's esteem.Footnote 24 Many young women dropped their academic or vocational pursuits, lowered their career goals, and sought security and possibly mobility in marriage.Footnote 25
The exchange of sex for mobility, material benefits, or sheer survival was made more prominent by the Depression. The bargaining of sexual favors for material benefits was recognized by contemporary observers as a far wider phenomenon than prostitution, and it was seen to extend to the “capture” of husbands of substance. Investigators reported that waitresses and salesgirls realized the need for them to exploit their “sex appeal,” and, with the increase of women into the lower ranks of white-collar work, the press carried sensational stories of secretaries and typists who purposely set out to seduce and blackmail their bosses. Sociologists, legislators, and legal scholars joined in depicting sexually emancipated women as a threat to men, and lawyers and politicians labeled men who had become embroiled in breach of promise and alienation of affection suits as “blackmail victims.” In legislating for “anti-heart balm” laws, the “heart balm statutes” were held to place innocent men at the mercy of ruthless women. Men were seen to require more protection as a consequence of more liberated sexual activity and the greater willingness of women to make their cases in public, and it was stated that men should not be held responsible for giving way to their natural urges in response to women's wiles.Footnote 26
Mobility through marriage was considered an important trajectory of mobility for women, but the Depression cast a shadow on this possibility as the marriage rate declined. Although women were no less affected by the Depression, its dominant images were those of males seeking work and relief at employment and welfare offices and queuing at soup kitchens and in bread lines. Many unemployed men defended the norm of the male breadwinner role and forbade their wives to go out to work. Families reduced their expenditures and drew upon their savings in order to avoid the wife's working, but many families were left with no choice and it has been estimated that in the worst Depression years one-third of all married women workers were the sole support of their families while over half augmented income earned by other family members. Men insisted that their wives' employment was a temporary expedient until they regained employment, but this became difficult to maintain as the Depression continued.Footnote 27 In some families the loss of the male breadwinner role resulted in a partial or complete emancipation of the wife from her husband's authority, and some men felt a sense of deep humiliation as a consequence of their economic dependence on their wives and daughters.Footnote 28 Thus the Depression accentuated fundamental social anxieties of both women and men regarding class and the gender divisions. The cross-class romance films allowed for imaginary solutions to these anxieties.
CLASS BOUNDARIES AND GENDER DISTINCTIONS
In the vast majority of cases in society where women were mobile through marriage, their class mobility was short-range; for example, if the woman's father had a manual occupation, her husband had a lower-white-collar occupation.Footnote 29 Cross-class romance films differed from this common pattern in society insofar as they represented mobility through marriage as long-range, from the poor stratum or working class to the wealthy upper middle or upper class. In order for such long-range mobility to appear plausible the class structure had to be represented as a fluid one in which class boundaries are transgressed by class-passing,Footnote 30 and in the films it often takes little more than a change in clothing for a person from one class to be accepted in another. In most of the films in which class-based cultural differences, such as speech and taste in clothes, are emphasized, those differences are overcome by love. The storylines of cross-class romance films do not usually continue beyond marriage (a well-known exception is Stella Dallas) or the promise of marriage, so that differences in cultural capital or in class-conditioned habits and outlook are not shown to test the marriage. The opposition of the wealthy protagonists' parents, particularly mothers, to the cross-class romance is represented as a consequence of their snobbishness, their fears of status loss, or their failure to appreciate the overwhelming power of love.
The crossing of class boundaries in cross-class romance films almost invariably involved the retrenchment and reinforcement of gender distinctions, particularly as they related to the place of men and women in the workforce. At the most simple level, the marriage of a poor female to a wealthy male meant that she no longer had to work, whereas it is made clear that it was inappropriate for a poor male to give up his work if he was to marry a wealthy female.
Two common themes in the poor female–wealthy male romance films strengthened gender distinctions: the redemption of the wealthy male by the poor female in order that the couple will be able to perform their appropriate gender roles, and the sacrifice that the poor female is willing to make in order that the male will be able to continue to perform his appropriate gender roles.
The poor female does not simply escape from her class of origin; she proves her worthiness for class advance by redeeming the wealthy male. In Personal Maid (Paramount, 1931) both the lower-class family from which Nora Ryan (Nancy Carroll) wishes to escape and the upper-class family in which she finds work as a maid are portrayed negatively, but Nora defines herself as middle class and it is her middle-class values that enable her to reform Dick Gary (Gene Raymond), the dissolute wealthy son. In an early scene when Dick attempts to kiss Nora and she repulses him, he remonstrates, “Don't act like this, Nora, it's so darn middle class.” Although she is from a poor tenement family and works as a maid, Nora replies that she is middle class and that Dick should act like the gentleman he is supposed to be. Nora's response earns Dick's respect for her and he sets out to reform himself by getting a job and supporting himself without his family's wealth.
The rich male is not always inclined to prove that the work ethic is superior to his hedonistic way of life, but he has no choice if he is to redeem himself in the eyes of his loved one. Unlike most cross-class romances, Brief Moment (Columbia, 1933) begins with a marriage. The wealthy playboy Rodney Deane (Gene Raymond) marries Abbey (Carole Lombard), a nightclub singer, who quickly becomes dissatisfied with her husband's lifestyle of nightclubs and drinking. She wants a proper (middle-class) marriage in which the couple spend their evenings at home and are not forever surrounded by others in a constant merry-go-round. She tells Rodney that he “cannot spend your life having a good time,” and that he needs to work in order to attain self-respect and for her to be proud of him. Rodney goes to work for his father but he quickly tires of the boring, routine work that he is given, and, while pretending to Abbey that he goes to the office every day, he spends his time at the races. When Abbey discovers his deceit she berates him: “Where would you be if you didn't have your father's money. You could not make a living if you tried … How little you amount to.” After Abbey leaves him, Rodney is propelled to search for work, but his lack of experience results in refusals until his emotional appeal to an employer finally gets him a job. He proudly shows his first paycheck to Abbey, who exclaims in delight, “You did this for me!” He replies, “I did it for myself.” Proud of her working husband, Abbey is now content to leave her work and become a housewife.
A workaholic wealthy husband can be as unsatisfactory as a non-working wealthy husband if this results in the inability of the woman to perform her appropriate roles as wife and mother. This is the situation in She Married Her Boss (Columbia, 1935) after Julia Scott (Claudette Colbert), a middle-class executive secretary, marries her boss, Richard Barclay (Melvyn Douglas), an upper-middle-class owner of a department store. Julia is unable to persuade her husband to take time off work and even have lunch with her. The major issue is that the hardworking man wants his wife to continue to help at his work, whereas she protests that marriage is “a woman's real career.” Richard expresses his feelings when, instead of helping him in his business, he finds his wife singing nursery rhymes with his daughter from a previous marriage: “I've always known you as a competent, sensible woman whose career means something to her. All of a sudden you are pouncing about in soft things, wearing negligees, being coy and things like that.” Julia submits to no longer acting like her idea of how a woman should act and she returns to work. A female assistant tells Julia that she is her model because “she is important in the business world and a career is important.” When the assistant tells Julia that her career comes before her beau, Julia replies that instead of working she should go out and be with her beau and “do something which is really important.” Julia is able to play the roles she believes are appropriate for a woman only after Richard gets drunk with his butler. This enables him to loosen up and finally take time off work and go on a cruise with Julia.
In films with a wealthy male who does not require redemption, the poor female often proves her disinterested love by her willingness to sacrifice her love when she is convinced, often by one of the hero's parents, that the marriage would impede the son's career or status. The heroine's sacrifice often involves an attempt to alienate the wealthy male's affection for her by acting deliberately in an obnoxious manner, as in Love among the Millionaires (Paramount, 1930), or by entering a relationship with another man, as in Ladies of Leisure (Columbia, 1930). Even without the pressures of rich parents or other family considerations, heroines from poor backgrounds are willing to give up their love for the sake of the man's career. The character played by Joan Crawford in Possessed (MGM, 1931) persuades the lawyer whom she loves that she plans to wed another in order not to handicap his chances of being nominated for governor. In Gambling Lady (Warner Bros., 1934) the heroine Lady Lee pretends that she is leaving the wealthy Gary for alimony when, in fact, this is the only way for her rival to agree to give Gary an alibi when he is falsely accused of murder.
Where the female is poor in a cross-class romance, it is evident that her mobility is dependent on marriage to the wealthy male. Where the male is poor, it is evident that marriage with the wealthy female will not affect the male's authority. Poor males in cross-class romances have a penchant for demonstrating that they could live without the money of their spouses. The steelworker who marries the daughter of the factory boss objects to becoming one of the Kept Husbands (RKO, 1931), and he eventually convinces his wife to live on his salary without the help of her wealthy father. The wealthy heiress who marries a working-class man in Saleslady (Monogram, 1938) accepts his refusal of her father's offer to help them out. The riveter in The Hot Heiress (First National, 1931) tells the wealthy girl that they will live on his wages and insists that she will not work.
The working-class males are often macho and compare favorably with the sometimes feminized upper-class fiancés of the wealthy heroines, and the attraction of the virile, underclass male to the wealthy or upper-class female takes on added meaning when that male is a gangster, as in the film A Free Soul (MGM, 1931). The gangster's combination of machismo and illegality excites the wealthy woman's sexual desire and she is prepared to flout sexual convention to be with him. She is not, however, necessarily interested in marriage, and the ending of what Sonnet calls “the gangster-inflected social melodrama” usually finds the gangster dead or otherwise absent and the upper-class female reunited with a class-appropriate partner.Footnote 31 Within the category of cross-class romance films, the flagrant active sexuality of the upper-class females in relationships with gangsters is unusual. Among the poor females in cross-class romances heightened sexuality is generally restricted to gold diggers, but gold diggers in cross-class romance films tend to be “converted” to disinterested love.
THE REDEMPTION OF GOLD DIGGERS
In contrast to sociologists and judges in the 1930s, films, together with popular novels and magazine stories, portray sexually emancipated women, and even some gold diggers, sympathetically. Unlike the earlier heroines of popular literature, who face threats to their virtue or whose illicit sex leads to death or ruined lives, the sexual activism of the new heroines does not necessarily prevent them ending up happily married to the men they love. When the manipulative gold diggers in some magazine stories are redeemed by love, they are no longer expected to pay for their “sins,” and they often succeed in their goal of marrying wealthy men.Footnote 32
Films joined with judicial critics in presenting alimony as a form of female extortion, but the gold digger, particularly if unmarried, is often portrayed, as in magazine stories and popular songs, as ultimately good-hearted. McLaren writes that whereas courtroom judges decried the activities of gold diggers, movie audiences cheered them on. In answer to the question whether women were ever justified in exploiting sex, McLaren claims that the courtroom and the movies provided two contrasting responses.Footnote 33 However, when we consider the films themselves it would be misleading to state that they unequivocally justify women's use of their sexuality for material gain.
In considering the film narrative trajectories of gold diggers and the public response to them, it is important to distinguish between comedies and dramas. The humor that accompanied Mae West's blatant sexuality in her “pre-Code” films of the early 1930s, together perhaps with the films' noncontemporary settings, allowed her portrayals of successful unchaste women to be widely accepted.Footnote 34 The comedy in the Jean Harlow film Red Headed Woman made palatable the theme of an unredeemed gold digger who does not pay for her sins.Footnote 35 Although Harlow's character does not achieve her goal of acceptance into respectable upper society, she is last seen with a bearded old sugar daddy in a car driven by her lover chauffeur. It became evident with the stricter imposition of the Code in 1934 that not all Americans, and least of all Joseph Breen, the head of the Production Code Administration from June 1934, shared the view that comedy diffused the offense of a successful, unrepentant, gold digger. In dramas, even in the “pre-Code” period, women who exploit their sexuality to gain wealth and social status and remain unredeemed are almost invariably punished in some way. Falling to her death from a fire escape is the punishment of a particularly immoral gold digger in the 1930 film Party Girl, a sexploitation film of poverty-row studio Tiffany Productions. Even when a gold digger foregoes her predatory ambitions she does not necessarily escape punishment. The gold digger played by Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face redeems herself in the last minutes of the film by sacrificing her jewelry for love, but the censors insisted on an absurd ending in which we hear that she returns to a working-class life, albeit with the man, the disgraced former bank president, she loves.Footnote 36
In a number of films the conversion of a gold digger to disinterested love takes the form of the heroines' leaving their rich partners, whom in most cases they do not really love, for “true” love with a non-wealthy partner. This happens in Bought (Warner Bros, 1931), Sinners in the Sun (Paramount, 1932), Hands across the Table (Paramount, 1935), and Three Blind Mice (Twentieth Century Fox, 1938). Even if the reformed gold digger's reward is a poor man rather than a rich one she sometimes has to undergo hardship before the final embrace. Bed of Roses (RKO, 1933) begins with Lorry (Constance Bennett) and Minnie (Pert Kelton) released after a stretch in a reformatory with no signs of their having been reformed. Minnie immediately suggests the promise of sex to a driver for a lift into town. Lorry tricks a wealthy publisher who, although he comes to understand her manipulations, takes her as a mistress and sets her up in a luxury apartment. Lorry's redemption through love occurs when she falls for Dan (Joel McCrea), a barge owner, and leaves the publisher, but because she feels unworthy of her true love, instead of going to Dan, she moves into a small one-roomer and finds work in a department store. It is Minnie, the ongoing gold digger, who brings Lorry and Dan back together again.
As in a number of other films with more than one gold digger, the redemption through disinterested love of the heroine in Bed of Roses is offset, to some extent, by the continuing gold-digging spirit of her friend. When there are three or more gold diggers, alongside the gold digger who reforms a further differentiation is made between unreformed but good-hearted gold diggers and the unreformed bad-faith gold diggers. Examples of such distinctions are made in The Greeks Had a Word for Them (Goldwyn/United Artists, 1932, rereleased as Three Broadway Girls) and the musical Gold Diggers of 1933 (Warner Bros., 1933).Footnote 37
The chastity of the gold digger is required in most cases if she is to undergo redemption through disinterested love, and this is the case even when she is employed in occupations that are associated with prostitution, such as “party girls,” taxi dancers, and escort services. The early 1930s films of Mae West and the well-known films Baby Face and Red Headed Woman are among the exceptions in this respect.Footnote 38 The sexual favors provided by a sympathetic gold digger in her relationship with a wealthy man with whom she is not in love were presumably understood by spectators but they are rarely shown. Blondie McClune (Marion Davies) in Blondie of the Follies (MGM, 1932) is set up in a luxurious apartment by an elderly oil tycoon, but the film does not show them together in the apartment or having any physical contact that could be construed as sexual. The services provided by a party girl are left almost solely to the imagination in Ladies of Leisure (Columbia, 1930). When the party girl played by Barbara Stanwyck meets the artist son of a railroad titan she makes a point of explaining what a party girl (“that's my racket”) does, but her description is hardly informative: a party girl acts as a “filler-in” when girls are needed for parties. In Girls About Town (Paramount, 1931) the chastity of the two “escorts,” Wanda and Marie, who are paid by a businessman to entertain and soften up his business associates, is established in an early scene. The girls are shown using a trick which indicates to the audience that they do not go as far as prostitution. When the men they have been entertaining accompany them back to their building the girls tell them that their mother is waiting up for them and point to a silhouette of a woman sitting by their window. In fact, this is their African American maid. However, the difference between the two girls in their tolerance of providing sexual favors is also established early on in the film when Wanda tells Marie how she is fed up with having to hire herself out for the evening and asks Marie if it doesn't make her sick “to be pawed by a bunch of middle-class Babbits.” Marie replies that she is always revived by the money they receive, and although Wanda acknowledges that someone's got to pay for her dress, her candidacy for redemption through disinterested love has been set in place and she proceeds to fall genuinely in love with a wealthy man.
A number of changes, including the political climate and stricter censorship, brought an end to the representations of successful gold diggers. As Jacobs has shown, the rapid rises in class status and the relatively easy class crossing, as represented by material accoutrements such as clothes and jewels, enjoyed by the heroines of the early 1930s films became less common after 1934. Jacobs' major example of the change is the remake of Stella Dallas, which, like the first silent version, transforms the class rise motif into one of maternal sacrifice.Footnote 39 This was a theme that did not encounter problems of censorship, and, in general, the dwindling number of cross-class romance films of the late 1930s provided few problems for the censors. Fewer films were produced with genuine gold diggers, and when they make an appearance, as in Three Blind Mice (Twentieth Century Fox, 1938), there is no doubt as to their chastity and innocence. At the end of the decade the heroine could only be suspected or accused of gold digging (Josette, Twentieth Century Fox, 1938; The Rage of Paris, Universal, 1938). The heroine in Fifth Avenue Girl (RKO, 1939) only poses as a gold digger at the request of a wealthy older man who is neglected by his family.
CONCLUSION
Cross-class romance films dealt, in a dramatic or comic fashion, with a contradiction that became particularly evident, as a consequence of social and cultural changes in the early decades of the twentieth century, between interests of wealth and social status on the one hand and the value of romantic, disinterested love on the other. The Depression of the 1930s made more acute a related contradiction between the economic pressures on women, including married women, to enter the labor market and the gender values that stood in opposition to women's working outside the home. Most cross-class romance films unequivocally supported disinterested love over material interests, but that the resolution in favor of disinterested love had to be repeatedly reenacted exposed the continual confrontation of values by material interests and suggested that, in the real world at least, the contradiction could never be finally resolved.
The cross-class romance films crossed over commonly recognized genres, but as a formula it could be said, like genres, to be an imaginary world whose rules had become familiar to audiences through repetition. By conforming to those rules, the cross-class romance films provided, like other formulae and entire genres, a temporary escape from the frustrations of life. The common solution, in which the poor protagonist is rewarded for her or his disinterested love by a successful union with the wealthy protagonist, might be termed “escapist,” but it was probably recognized and accepted by many in the audience as conforming to the rules of what had become a familiar formula. However, this particular “escape” may have been especially pleasurable to particular audiences (urban, female, with aspirations to mobility) because it was grounded in a reality of class and gender inequality, which, given the limited opportunities for women in the labor market, made the social mobility of women dependent on marriage. Unlike most cases of women's mobility through marriage in society, the films represent mobility through cross-class romance as long-range, and whereas the boundaries between the highest and lowest classes in society are formidable, they prove surmountable in cross-class romance films. Audiences may have identified or felt some involvement with the heroines and heroes as they finally surmounted the class barriers to achieve union with their love object, and they were unlikely to feel dejected by a comparison with their own situation because they had learnt to experience the formula as an entertainment without continually comparing it with their own experience. The cross-class romance films provided their intended audiences with a dilemma that was familiar in their real world and an ideal solution that overcame the ambiguity, uncertainty, and limitations of that world.
Many of the cross-class romance films begin with a situation in which the “proper” roles of males and females are inadequately fulfilled. The more frequent romance between wealthy male and poor female conforms to the accepted pattern of mobility of the female through marriage, but in many cases the male has to be redeemed by the poor female from a dissolute lifestyle or overdependence on his family in order for him to become an appropriate male provider. The potential gender imbalance in favor of the female in the romance between a poor male and a wealthy female is rectified by the male's insistence that the female has to be dependent upon him; and if the male lacked cultural finesse, its representation in the form of machismo is likely to be among his attractions to the upper-class female. There were, of course, variations on these themes, but although the films tend to assume and support the fluidity of class boundaries, the narratives and the orientations of protagonists almost invariably reinforce normative gender distinctions.
The morally scrupulous working girl remained the dominant type in the cross-class romance, but the manipulative, sexually designing gold digger makes frequent appearances, especially during the worst years of the Depression in the early 1930s. Unlike the innocent working girl, whose love for the wealthy man is disinterested from the beginning, the gold digger is interested in the material benefits of her relationship with the male. In a society where the options for women to advance in the work force were severely limited, female spectators in particular could appreciate the rationale of the gold digger and possibly identify with her success. As the barriers to the occupational opportunities and mobility of women are reinforced, the gold digger demonstrates with particular clarity that the solution for women is to find the right man. However, although the assumption that female sexuality has commodity value is made apparent in many films, it is also assumed that a chaste, virginal woman has higher value in the marriage market than the sexually experienced woman. Thus, although the conception of a gold digger is of a woman who used her sexuality for material gain, a number of films go out of their way to establish that she is nevertheless chaste. The sexuality of the gold digger is displayed, but, if there is to be a happy ending in a love-based marriage, it has simultaneously to be repressed and only in a few films is it made evident that the gold digger engages in actual physical sexual activities as a means of socioeconomic mobility. In most cross-class romances with gold diggers, the redemption of the gold digger is not from her sexual behavior, which is basically chaste, but from her materialistic motivation in her pursuit of the male.
If gold diggers provided women with protagonists with whom they could identify in their efforts to overcome economic deprivation and discrimination, they also spoke to the socioeconomic anxieties of men. The sexual division of occupations within the labor market provided men with some measure of protection from the competition of women, but this division was not complete and many men believed that women were taking jobs that rightfully belonged to men. Men found their gender status in jeopardy as the Depression threatened the notion of manly workers and their ability to be the providers for the family. The portrayals of gold diggers in films displaced male anxieties from the economic and occupational realms to a moral realm. The motivations and actions of gold diggers were based on the assumption that women were dependent economically on men. Men were portrayed as the source of capital and status, and although the gold digger would use her sexuality to exploit male weaknesses, she was not in competition with them. The gold digger represented a moral predicament, but this could be diffused by narrative solutions, particularly romantic ones.
The data presented here is of relevance to the controversy over whether the stricter imposition of censorship from June 1934 represented a clear division between the cinema of the early 1930s and the remainder of the decade. On the one hand is the contention that a “pre-Code” cinema characterized by transgressive sexuality and violence and subversive or dissident social consciousness, unfettered by censorship, was followed by a highly regulated cinema of moral and social conservatism.Footnote 40 On the other hand it is argued that it is misleading to claim that censorship was not seriously administered in the early 1930s; rather, it is suggested, changes in the moral tenor of films were gradual and the stricter imposition of the Code made for films of greater ambiguity, especially in representations of sexuality.Footnote 41 A related controversy concerns the groups and motivations behind the stricter censorship. One view is that censorship was imposed, by pressure groups from outside the industry, principally the Catholic Legion of Decency, on an industry afraid of boycotts and on a passive and easily manipulated moviegoing public. An alternative view is that the industry cooperated with the Catholic moral campaign in order to protect its oligopoly and business methods against broader attacks from Protestant interest groups and moral reformers and from the threat of federal regulation. Maltby believes that far from the “pre-Code” cinema reflecting a breakdown of values and morals as a consequence of the Depression, a revival of moral conservatism was already evident in the early 1930s.Footnote 42 Brauer points to 1934 as a year of “conservative counterrevolution,”Footnote 43 and Smedley writes that a significant cultural change in America from 1932 provided the milieu for Hollywood's comfortable support for the “high moral tone” of the New Deal.Footnote 44
The revisionist questioning of a “pre-Code” period, made most forcefully by Maltby, has been based on a close consideration of censorship processes and documents.Footnote 45 The quantitative analysis of film narratives and the sociohistorical approach presented here provide some support for the revisionist view. With regard to the number of cross-class romance films, the dividing year is not 1934 but 1938, after which far fewer films of this type were made. The high moral tone of some of the cross-class romance films of the early 1930s suggests that the notion of a morally daring “pre-Code” cinema is dependent on a selective choice of films. One change that was evident from 1934 was a decline in the number of gold diggers, and films with cynical narratives of class rise through sexual allurement were no longer produced. A stricter censorship may have played a part here, but probably more important was that the differences between men and women in unemployment and downward mobility became less obvious after 1934 and male anxiety concerning competition with women in the labor market may have declined. Again, this change should not be overstated. Even in the early 1930s, most gold diggers were redeemed by disinterested love, which in the cross-class romance films continued to be rewarded by class rise.
