The 1930 - Then and Now - #1 - Gentlemen Are Born - 1934

The next five weeks we're going to be discussing six films of the Great Depression almost a kind of bookend to the series we started earlier in the year about the 1920s and how in different ways that era parallels our times. We see no such parallel with the 1930s, at least not yet, and hopefully, if we do not see the darker aspects of the 1930s, we might still benefit to look back at the remarkable optimism and courage of those times.  That is what stands out in many films from that era. It was not the same kind of propagandist cheerleading that bolstered our morale and sense of purpose during World War II films; it was more down to earth, a smile and a wink from a fellow sufferer that told us we were all in the same boat and that if there weren’t too many lifelines, there was still sympathy to humanize the shared experience.

Though we may have a tendency to look upon classic films of that era as somewhat innocent and naïve, in some respects they were head and shoulders above us for being able to look at life through their times with a sense of humor and a sense of fatalism that was not nihilistic (as it tends to be in our day) but optimistic, that they could be self-deprecating and humorous even in the throes of their problems.

The films we’re going to cover are Gentlemen Are Born (1934), Our Daily Bread (1934), Wild Boys of the Road (1933) and Wild Girls of the Road (1940), One Third of a Nation (1939), and Make Way for Tomorrow (1937).

Gentlemen Are Born (1934) follows four recent college graduates and their quest for work and a place in society which is currently in the depths of the Great Depression. The tone of the movie is at turns lighthearted and silly, and grim and horrifying. It is a modern fable from headlines.

The four pals graduate from an all-male college and though they have different ambitions and different personalities they are a team, and we see them lined up first in their caps and gowns on graduation day, reverently singing their alma mater. Franchot Tone aspires to be a journalist. Ross Alexander aspires to be an architect. Robert Light will enter his father's company as an investment broker. Dick Foran, who is the athlete of the bunch, wants to get a job in coaching.

They are told in the commencement speech to “make of yourself what you choose, for our land is still a land of opportunity." It is the worst days of the Depression but there is still room for hope because this is America.

Two of the fellows, Franchot Tone and Ross Alexander, rent an apartment together in New York City for five dollars a month. Jane Darwell, the comical and disapproving landlady, will charge them five dollars together and not apiece "times being what they are."

Of all the fellows, Robert Light has the easiest time getting a job, he just slides right into his wealthy father's investment firm. His father, played by Henry O’Neill, is a serious but likable fellow and he makes a crack that was typical of that era about trouble in finance "It's a sure sign they are heading for the 40-story drop to the pavement." He means it as a joke but this was an era where many in finance did commit suicide, escaping the mountain of debt, either by throwing themselves out the windows of their skyscrapers or in other ways.

Franchot Tone has trouble getting a job, pounds the pavement, but finally one newspaper will allow him to work “on spec,” that is to submit freelance stories for which he will be paid if they like them. Ross Alexander gets a part-time job at an architecture firm filing blueprints and otherwise being an errand boy. It's not a great job, but he thinks he has his foot in the door and he is the most optimistic of the bunch. He is not only happy, he is almost giddy, and that is perhaps because he has his girlfriend Trudy played by Jean Muir, a delightful, dimpled lass who offers to get a job to help him make do, and they have their plans to get married as soon as possible. Most recall Jean Muir’s fame as being the first actress to have her career destroyed by Red Channels and an accusation of being a communist, which she denied. She is fresh-faced and engaging, and when she arrives in the city to be close to her boyfriend, she becomes the roommate of Ann Dvorak, a librarian looking for someone to help pay the rent.

Miss Dvorak gets linked up with Franchot Tone when the couples go out on double dates, but there is no real attraction between them. She chummily accepts but needles Tone into staying out later with her so that Ross and Jean can go back to the apartment the girls share and “play house.”  A charming and diplomatic phrase the writing staff must have chuckled over. 

The foursome pools their meager resources for spaghetti dinners and breakfast gatherings at the girls’ apartment, which has become their headquarters. Their camaraderie sustains them and they seem to want little else at the moment, even if their dreams are big.

Dick Foran, a big, booming, lovable palooka, who will later go on to singing cowboy roles, has the worst time of all the fellows in landing a job. No university or school will hire him for a coaching position. He tries to get day labor work.

Margaret Linsday is Robert Light’s sister, a Park Avenue debutante with very little woes except for what to wear, and is dodging wealthy suitors her mother, played by Marjorie Gateson, picks out for her. Franchot Tone is very interested, but her father warns him that his daughter receives a $200 a month allowance and he earns $20 a month. It doesn’t seem like a match is possible there, but Margaret Lindsay is a free-thinker, so she dates Franchot for a lark.

Dick Foran eventually gets a job getting beat up in the fight ring for $10. Ann Dvorak and Franchot Tone agonize watching him being beat up. They take him back to the girls’ apartment and the gang has another impromptu party and Ann Dvorak and Dick Foran fall for each other. She sews a button on his jacket and cooks pancakes for him and in the Depression, this is what substitutes for wooing with expensive gifts.

Ross Alexander and Jean Muir do get married and have the baby right away (really right away), a simple marriage by a JP in the girls’ apartment. No expensive bridal gown or “destination wedding” for these kids. And yet, they’re happy.  Who’d have thought that could be possible without spending tens of thousands of dollars?

Ann and Dick would like to marry, but he can’t get a steady job and is down on himself. “Twenty-three years old, six-foot three, college education, broke." Finally, he is offered a job driving a truck temporarily for a department store for the Easter holiday rush, but he is demeaned by the helpful advice, “You don't want that kind of a job—you have a college education."

He replies, hat in hand, "Listen, there's a thousand college graduates in the city who would kiss your feet in gratitude for any kind of a job."

Anybody ever been there?  Me, too.

Ann's got job worries of her own, now.  Her stern lady library boss fires her, first in the suspicion that she is living with a man, and second, because she confesses that she is married to the man. You just can’t win. In that era, female librarians and often female teachers were required to resign their jobs if they married. These were the standards of the day; there was much to overcome but this was a time when the parameters could only be stretched so far and one had to be very creative to learn to live within them. Since there was no wedding scene or mention of one, we have to wonder was the scene edited out, or is Ann lying and are she and Dick really living together?  Another neatly inferenced and sidestepped issued. Since the poor guy’s starving, it would be no wonder she’d take him in even if she wasn’t in love with him.

But nobody’s immune from the Great Depression, which is like another character in the story.  Robert Light, who seems to have it easy going right to work for his wealthy father, actually has a horrific problem on his hands. Unknown to him, his father is involved with a bank failure. Almost as if his father’s joke at the beginning of the movie is a premonition, his father deals with the shame of his problems by committing suicide by jumping out of his office window. Someone shouts that he has “pulled a Brodie.” This is a reference to Steve Brodie, who allegedly jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge in 1886.  Though Brodie survived, the slang term was applied to those committing suicide by jumping.

Franchot Tone was assigned to interview Mr. O’Neill and arrives at the moment of the tragedy. He lies to his editor by telling him that the man fell out accidentally rather than jumped; he is compromising his journalistic integrity, losing a great scoop, to protect his shocked and grieving pal, Robert Light. He will also have to break the news to Light’s sister, Margaret Linsday.

It is a fast-paced movie where the scenes keep jumping, and we go back to Dick Foran, who opens his pay envelope – these are the days when people were paid in cash. And that includes a discharge notice because he was only hired for holiday work. Some of the drivers are involved in stealing from the store and one gangster tries to get rough with Dick Foran, but Foran and Ann Dvorak run from him. Meanwhile, Jean's baby is coming too early and she has to be rushed to the hospital and Foran loans Ross Alexander the only money he's got to get there. While the baby is being safely born, a son, Foran gets mixed up in a fake hold-up, and running away from the police, he is shot and killed. Again, poor Franchot Tone goes to cover the story and ends up instead covering it up, reporting that Dick is an unknown man with no identification. His shock and struggle for self-control is moving.

Though his friend Ross Alexander is over the moon about his new baby, Franchot has become sullen, morose, and philosophical. He wants to know how his friend will live with the added expenses of raising a child.

Ross Alexander replies, "We'll get along somehow. Everybody does."

"And in seventeen years after working and wearing yourself to death, you'll have enough, if you're lucky, to send him to college. So what." His friend suggests they don't need money to be happy and Mr. Tone tearfully spurts out that their friend Dick Foran was killed. "What for? What did he do? They shot them down in the streets like a dog because he was hungry."

We hear that Ann Dvorak is gone back to her family in Des Moines so we don't know how she took the news about her husband/lover, but rich girl Margaret Lindsay comes back. It’s a shame to lose Ann Dvorak at this stage, because she is, and always was, such a strong performer. Miss Lindsay has that polished glamour that’s required to make her the lead female in this picture, but she’s not as interesting as Ann Dvorak.  

Margaret Lindsay had earlier decided to marry a rich boy to pay back the debts in the aftermath of her father’s scandal, but now she’s going to let her mother and brother fend for themselves and marry poor guy Franchot Tone. He jests that she’s out of her element, "You never spent the summer in the city, have you?" and describes how hot and dirty and noisy and claustrophobic it is. (We’ll see a little more of that in our later movie when we cover One Third of a Nation.)

She compromises by stating that she will wait until he can afford to get married, and presumably they will live on his salary. The movie ends with the fellows and their girls singing the alma mater from college, as Franchot Tone is still philosophical and more chagrined than despondent now when he responds, smiling, "We weren’t kidding ourselves much a year ago, were we? When they gave us the diplomas, we thought we had a passport to the universe. The world was our oyster, all we had to do was open it... I just got out today. I forgot I had a post-graduate course coming to me whether I liked it or not." He counts his blessings that he has a crummy apartment, the job, a suit of clothes and, mostly, her. "They can't stop me now, honey."

They are adults; with the exception of Margaret’s and Robert’s tycoon father who commits suicide in the face of financial ruin, none of these young people have families hovering over them, telling them what to do.  They are the caretakers of themselves, and each other.

The attitude that they are stronger for their trials is an optimism they would need during the Great Depression because they had little else, and we would do well to remember to count our blessings from time to time, to keep our dreams high but to keep our living modest when times are really bad. It's easier to say than to do, especially in our world when there is so much to distract us, so much we are told we need and so much we think we want, and so very hard to keep up in a world where incomes are lower and the cost of living is higher. In many ways, the Great Depression’s resultant social programs were revolutionary so that many conservatives argued that they were leading us to communism, but many historians argue that they kept us from communism because they were a safety valve in a dark and potentially dangerous time. Come back next week for Our Daily Bread (1934) and a Hollywood that was sometimes amazingly fearless in chronicling its own era.

All the posts 1-5 in this series are listed below:

Part 1 - Gentlemen Are Born (1934)

Part 2 - Our Daily Bread (1934)

Part 3 - Wild Boys of the Road (1933) and Girls of the Road (1940).

Part 4 – One Third of the Nation (1939)

Part 5 - Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.