Hollywood and the Great Depression: American Film, Politics and Society in the 1930s

In the popular imagination, 1930s Hollywood was a dream factory producing escapist movies to distract the American people from the greatest economic crisis in their nation’s history. But while many films of the period conform to this stereotype, there were a significant number that promoted a message, either explicitly or implicitly, in support of the political, social and economic change broadly associated with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programme. At the same time, Hollywood was in the forefront of challenging traditional gender roles, both in terms of movie representations of women and the role of women within the studio system. With case studies of actors like Shirley Temple, Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, as well as a selection of films that reflect politics and society in the Depression decade, this fascinating book examines how the challenges of the Great Depression impacted on Hollywood and how it responded to them.

Iwan Morgan is Professor of US Studies and Commonwealth Fund Professor of American History at University College London. He is a former chair of the Historians of the Twentieth Century United States, co-founder of the Presidential History Network, British Association of American Studies Honorary Fellow and Honorary Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.

Philip John Davies, Director of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, is the former President of the European Association for American Studies, and has also served as Chair of the American Politics Group of the UK, Chair of the UK Council of Area Studies Associations and Chair of the British Association for American Studies.