COMMENTARY : The Best Year of Film’s Life : 50 Years Ago, It All Came Together for Hollywood’s Art

1941 was, in many ways, the first year of the Modern Era--a year when an America recovering from a decade of Depression felt itself pulled, inexorably, toward war; the year of the Fair Employment Practices Act and the Manhattan Project; of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” and Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. And, on Dec. 7, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the nation was plunged into devastating conflict.

It was a year of tumult, anxiety and change. It was also the single greatest year in the history of the American movie industry.

Now, waaaiiiit a minute, I can almost hear some of you saying. 1941? The movies’ greatest year? Didn’t we play this little game two years ago, when everybody claimed that 1939 was Hollywood’s high point? How many greatest years can you have in one century? Are you claiming that all these experts were mistaken?

That’s right. They were wrong.

But they’re not far wrong. One problem with the 1939 theory, is that, temperamentally, I’m close to it. I believe the years 1939-41 mark the studio system’s summit. But I believe that the climactic year, 1941, was by far the best.

1939 had at least 50 fine films, including indelible classics like “Gone With the Wind,” “The Wizard of Oz” and “Ninotchka.” It was an extraordinary year. But so was 1940. And 1941 topped them both.

1941 had as many great movies--even if some aren’t as universally recognized as the 1939 group. And it had more good movies of every variety, from serious dramas to hokey comedies, frothy musicals and chiller thrillers: at least 140 of them--of some lasting historical or entertainment value--on a personal list I compiled from the old Variety clip file. (I did a 1939 list as well; it began to peter out at about 80, stopping entirely at 115.)

1941 also had the greatest movie of all: Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane,” three-time winner on the most prestigious of all movie ballots, the Sight and Sound international filmmakers-critics poll--and the movie that Francois Truffaut said started more directors on their vocation than any other.

The reasons for 1941’s pre-eminence are many. There was, not least, the example of 1939 itself: a mark to shoot at. There was a simultaneous ferment in all the other arts, as the cataclysmic world situation focused an entire nation’s energies.

More importantly, there was the meaning movies had for Americans back then--at a time when, proportionately, more of them went to films regularly: 85 million people a week, on the average.

And there’s an even more crucial factor: The Talent in the Room.

In 1941, the Hollywood talent pool was greater, richer, broader, than at any time before or since. Again, part of the reason was the approaching World War. As Hitler marched through Europe, he first drove most of the best German and Austrian filmmakers (many of them Jews) to the West and then drove many of the best French filmmakers from France--while also scaring off a lot of Scandinavian and Eastern European talent.

A high proportion of them were in Hollywood by 1941, including France’s best director, Jean Renoir, and Germany’s best, Fritz Lang.

By 1941, with the exodus from Europe, Hollywood had become a true international melting pot and cultural center. But the talent wasn’t only, or even primarily, from the recent emigres. The only major 1939 directors who weren’t active in 1941 were Cecil B. DeMille and Leo McCarey. The others--Hawks, Capra, Lubitsch, Walsh, Wyler, Von Sternberg and the rest--were all working, at or close to their best.

Besides Renoir and Lang, there were five major filmmakers directing in 1941, who hadn’t in 1939. These brilliant newcomers included suspense master Alfred Hitchcock (“Suspicion” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”); adventurer-sage John Huston (“The Maltese Falcon”); Renoir’s whimsical colleague Rene Clair (“The Flame of New Orleans”); the inimitably urbane comedy specialist Preston Sturges (“The Lady Eve” and “Sullivan’s Travels”), and a nervy young interloper who provided the year’s--and maybe the century’s--major movie miracle: 25-year-old enfant terrible Orson Welles.

In some senses, I think, the difference between 1939 and 1941, is the difference between its two most celebrated films: producer David O. Selznick’s “Gone With the Wind”, the ne plus ultra of Hollywood glamour, and “Citizen Kane.” Just as “Gone With the Wind” sums up 1939, a year heavy in romantic fantasy and one with an unusually high number of literary adaptations, “Citizen Kane” symbolizes 1941: a year in which the movies tended to be punchier, more daring, more outspoken, more tightly connected to the life and society around them.

We see that everywhere: in the grim parable of conflict between a pacifist spirit and the dictates of war in “Sergeant York,” in the musings on comedy and social conscience in “Sullivan’s Travels,” in the grotesque fantasy of a near-fascist takeover in “Meet John Doe,” in the fierce assaults on greed and materialism in “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Little Foxes,” in the heartbreaking study of the conflict between tradition and industrial progress in “How Green Was My Valley,” in the demonic historical/political fantasy of “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” in the languid non-moralizing portrait of an amoral subculture in “Shanghai Gesture,” in the tense sympathy with outlaw individualism in “Swamp Water” and “High Sierra,” and even in the fantastic fable of a freakish little outsider in “Dumbo.”

Most of all, we see it in “Citizen Kane.”

If “Citizen Kane” is the single most extraordinary product of the Hollywood studios--and I believe it is--it’s partially because the young Welles was a great assimilator, the quintessential quick study. He became a lighting rod for most of his period’s culture, high and low; soaking up films, theater, radio, literature and current events, compacting them all in “Citizen Kane.”

Eric Rohmer compared pre-1950 Hollywood to the workshops of the Renaissance or the Elizabethan stage. If that’s so, the brash, irrepressible Welles--who idolized John Ford and considered him his greatest teacher--arrived when the studio system was at its all-time peak, the competition at its fiercest. It’s that competition, I’m convinced, that drove him to such a prodigious effort, that made “Citizen Kane” the phenomenal debut it turned out to be.

The ascension of 1939-1941 lasted about a decade longer. But it began to split up the very next year, 1942, as many movie people left for the armed forces. After the war came a three-pronged attack: the theater antitrust suit, HUAC and, most damagingly, TV’s post-1949 conquest of the audience.

So it was gone: like the once green valley Ford lamented, in his eloquent saga of reverie and loss.

Some film theorists today attack the Hollywood style of the ‘30s and ‘40s as “dominant cinema,” a filmmaking practice somehow tainted politically and morally. But this is probably ridiculous. Studio moviemaking was simply a form of grammar, and its flaws and gaps--the inane strictures of the Hays Code, the gorgeous but artificial sets--were simply part of a technique that the best filmmakers mastered, or subverted, in order to enjoy the system’s benefits: its astonishing technical finesse and fluency.

That leads us to 1941’s primary lessons: that commerce and idealism are not necessarily antagonistic, and that individuals and systems often function best when they work against the pressure of a dramatic historical moment, or in a mutual, beneficial tension.

But 1941 offers another lesson, too: that critics can be too enamored of the past, too unreceptive to the best efforts of today.

Here is what one of the best of all American film critics had to say, at the time, about the “Golden Era” we’ve been celebrating: “. . . The whole (movie) business has been dying here, 10 years or more. Last year, it seemed to me, was the all-time low--so far.”

Who wrote those darkly disillusioned words? James Agee.

And what year was he describing?

1942.

Friday at 8:20 p.m., a gala screening of John Ford’s “How Green Was My Valley,” to be attended by co-star Roddy McDowall, will begin the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s five-month celebration of “1941: Hollywood’s Extraordinary Year”--including 91 features, plus shorts and cartoons .