You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet: The American Talking Film - History and Memory, 1927-1949, by Andrew Sarris OUP 573pp, £25 in UK
The Genius of the System: Hollywood Film-making in the Studio Era by Thomas Schatz Faber & Faber 514pp, £14.99 in UK
Two long titles for two long books; these are serious studies rather than mere anecdotage and gossip. Sarris, for many years the film critic for the Village Voice in New York, aims for the greater profundity, but he writes a clotted prose that pursues non-sequiturs like a demented computer mouse - the introduction almost caused me to give up in despair, and readers would be wise to skip it altogether. When he gets into his stride, however, his enthusiasm for his subject and the fact that he appears to have seen every film ever made between 1927 and 1949 - and remembers them - conspire to over-ride the complexity of his language.
Schatz is an admirer of the studio system - he actually takes Sarris to task for his advocacy of the auteur theory in his book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, in which Sarris cast the studio boss as the heavy and reduced American film history to the careers of a few dozen heroic directors. For his part, Schatz takes three of the big studios - MGM, Paramount and Warner Brothers - and, examining their output and the dictatorial powers of the moguls who ran them, seeks to show that collective responsibility by far outweighed individual flair in making movies that lasted.
His arguments on this topic are many and persuasive, and make up the bulk of his book, but, to give him his due, he doesn't strive to gloss over the equally valid protests of the opponents of the studio system. A number of these people were writers, such as Ben Hecht, for instance, whose "Hecht's Prayer to His Bosses" began:
Good gentlemen who overpay
Me fifty times for every fart,
Who hand me statues when I
bray
And hail my whinnying as Art
-
I pick your pockets every day
But how you bastards break my
heart.
Using a quote from French critic Andre Bazin as the focus of his polemic - "The American cinema is a classical art, so why not then admire in it what is most admirable - i.e., not only the talent of this or that filmmaker, but the genius of the system" - Schatz goes on to proclaim that we should see "classical Hollywood" as "a period when various social, industrial, technological, economic, and aesthetic forces struck a delicate balance", a balance that was "conflicted and ever shifting but stable enough through four decades to provide a consistent system of production and consumption, a set of formalised creative practices and constraints, and thus a body of work with a uniform style - a standard way of telling stories, from camera work and cutting to plot structure and thematics". And, of course, "The sites of convergence for those forces were the studios themselves, each one a distinct variation on Hollywood's classical style."
Having got this off his chest, he then proceeds to examine individual studios, the ones I've already mentioned, plus Selznick International Pictures, which David Selznick set up as a film-making plant in 1935. Front and centre step the powerful production executives, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg at MGM, Jack Warner and Hal Wallis at Warner Brothers, Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox, Harry Cohn at Columbia, and major independent producers like Sam Goldwyn and the aforementioned David Selz nick. These men - and they were always men - wielded absolute power, over writers, technicians, directors and actors - what they said, went, and they used every bizarre stratagem in the book - Mayer wept, Thalberg cajoled, Zanuck fornicated and Cohn fulminated until the rafters rang - to get their way.
There is no doubt that many of the classic films of the period were made under their aegis, but how many others that might have become classics were prevented from going into production? These executives were fearsome in the one-track decisiveness of their policy - witness the preoccupations that guided the various "styles" of their studios: the horror films of Universal, the gangster films of Warners, the musicals of MGM. Tyrants do get things done, it is true, but at what cost?
To hear Schatz tell it, film making would have become diffuse to the point of disappearing if it were not for the studio system, which put a curb on auteurists and channelled writers down the correct paths. And, I suppose, if we view the artistic endeavour of movie making as one of the least cerebral, then the family fare that the cartel of movie factories turned out at the rate of a feature a week for a hundred million viewers from the Twenties up to the decline of the studio system in the Sixties would vindicate Mr Schatz's theory. He does make a rather persuasive case in his long and closely argued work.
Mr Sarris has no such axe to grind, but his pressure-cooker prose that is forever following its tail up its own fundament (my God, I'm succumbing myself) makes for heavy going at times. Also, his efforts to intellectualise film - surely one of the least intellectual of all the artistic processes: how many times have we heard the dictum that bad books make the best films? - become wearisome in the extreme and caused me to skip, skip, skip in order to get to the more interesting bits.
And it must be said that they are many. Breaking his text up into sections, Sarris first takes a run through the big Hollywood studios in the talking era; then he investigates the various genres: the Musical, the Gangster Film, the Horror Film, the Screwball Comedy, the Western, the War Film and the Film Noir; after that comes the Directors, the Actors and Actresses, and finally a section entitled Guilty Pleasures in which he indulges some of his own particular idiosyncratic likes.
The man must have rectangular eyes from all the films he has seen - for example, in the Gangster Film section, after analysing such well-known products as Little Caesar, Scarface and The Big House, he goes into detailed examination of such little-known features as Alibi, Bat Whispers, Hell's Highway and Blood Money. And he does the same for all the other genres mentioned.
There is rich reading here, then, for the film buff, and I particularly enjoyed his dissertation on the great Preston Sturges. I have been a Sturges fan ever since I fell in love with Diana Lynn, as Betty Hutton's saucy sister, Emily Kockenlocker, in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. I also picked up bits of new information in other departments, such as the fact that Laird Cregar was picked to play the part of Waldo Lydecker in Laura, but died before the film went into production. Could he have done as fine a job as Clifton Webb?
All and all, then, there is here the best part of a thousand pages on films and filming. And whether you are the cerebral kind of fan - "Silent, upon a peak in Darien" - or the more emotion-charged - "Potent, behind a cart with Mary Anne" - you are bound to find something of interest in these two volumes.
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic