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Early Hollywood’s Social Awareness Films and Contemporary Cinema: The Locarno International Film Festival, 2024

Author: Lucian Țion (University of Amsterdam)

  • Early Hollywood’s Social Awareness Films and Contemporary Cinema: 
The Locarno International Film Festival, 2024

    Early Hollywood’s Social Awareness Films and Contemporary Cinema: The Locarno International Film Festival, 2024

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Țion, L., (2024) “Early Hollywood’s Social Awareness Films and Contemporary Cinema: The Locarno International Film Festival, 2024”, Film Criticism 48(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.6871

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2024-12-12

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Since Italian critic Giona Nazzaro became its artistic director in 2021, the Locarno Film Festival has reinvented itself as an outlet for “entertainment [that] can be both serious and fun.”1 Seeking to discover new talent in its competition section, but also showcase older classics in its long-lived retrospective, the festival gained recognition for unveiling a broad spectrum of oftentimes obscure topics, themes, and even directors whose lesser works became neglected over the years. While the 74th edition featured the largely unfamiliar films of Italian director Alberto Lattuada, and 2022 proposed “The Other Side of Sirk,” a revealing examination of the little-known yet inspiring works of Douglas Sirk, in 2023 curator Olaf Möller chose to unearth the rare “vampires, detectives and monsters”2 of popular Mexican films made between the 1940s to the 1960s to great acclaim.

The 77th edition was no different. Columbia Studios turned 100 this year and Locarno chose to celebrate the event in a section entitled, “The Lady with the Torch,” which featured a carefully-chosen potpourri of unforgettable classics such as Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat. What stood out, however, in the forty-odd titles of the selection curated by Ehsan Khoshbakht, was a distinctive streak of social awareness and progressiveness, which the studio started to promote as early as the 1940s in films which are today unfortunately all but forgotten.

Columbia’s Early Social Awareness Films

This is the case with Under Age, an Edward Dmytryk 1941 film, which promotes awareness for vagrancy and sensitivity to gender equality. Taking his cue from G Men, an iconic 1935 Warner Bros. film featuring James Cagney, which served as an excuse for arming federal agents who oftentimes fell in the line of duty during the gang violence of the Roaring Twenties, Dmytryk’s work could well be considered propaganda today. This is because the film begins with a voice-over stating the producers’ support for law enforcement by the police force as well as cracking down on organized crime. While this rather common technique of the era was certainly welcome for socio-political reasons, the studio’s parti-pris engendered a rather explicit plotline in which the good guys win by a long shot. The only twist in Dmytryk’s case is that the good guys are, well, girls. This makes the script written by Robert Hardy Andrews (whose story Ernst Lubitsch earlier made into If I Had a Million) as feminist as anything that came out in the 1960s, or, really, at any other time in the history of cinema.

The film follows two sisters in their early twenties who were just released from jail after serving time for vagrancy. Jane, the younger and less experienced of the two, convinces her sibling they take a job as “hostesses” for the sinister Mrs. Burke, the forty-something ring leader of a shady business specializing in using women to clean rich customers of their savings. Because she profits from the misfortune of women acting as escorts for gullible gentlemen, the girls’ jobs border on prostitution, while Mrs. Burke is made to appear more patriarchal than the men she steals from. In an unfavorable turn of events Jane discovers one of Burke’s acolytes stealing a box of jewels from the charismatic Rocky Stone—played by Tom Neal—a customer whom Jane helped bring in. Although Rocky smells something fishy, he is too late to save Jane’s life; Burke’s right-hand man murders her to keep Jane from talking to the police. The trial that speedily follows in the finale sees the conviction of the whole gang, including a death sentence for Burke’s acolyte.

Figure 1
Figure 1

Nan Grey as younger sister Jane in “Under Age,” Edward Dmytryk, 1941.

Championing women’s solidarity in the face of a crooked, male-controlled establishment makes Under Age a proto-feminist Hollywood effort. Although educational, the film shows sympathy for the plight of unemployed young women in the depression-ridden thirties, and touches upon a subject that would remain taboo in Hollywood to this day: the dangers of the flesh trade and women trafficking. For that reason, and for the fact that the script is based on real fact, this Columbia picture shows a progressive side for the early 1940s. This is important because film noirs like Detour, which would catapult Tom Neal to fame four years later, showed women as femme fatales or vamps who preyed on men innocent enough to fall for their charms. Instead of promoting such an angle, which noirs helped popularize, Under Age shows the women’s side of the story for a change, as well as the inclement social environment from which they hailed.

The Glass Wall directed by Maxwell Shane, which won the Locarno Leopard in 1953, raises awareness about the injustices of immigration law. Peter Kuban (played by a young Vittorio Gassman), is an escapee from the concentration camps and stowaway on a ship bound for the US. Unable to produce evidence for his legal status, Gassman’s character is detained at the border and threatened with deportation. He escapes the authorities and, because misery loves company, befriends a female employee (the unforgettable Gloria Graham) who is equally maltreated by an unjust system. Other characters sympathize with Peter’s plight. Disappointed with the legal system upon reading Peter’s story in the newspaper, one character sarcastically touts that “We should give this country back to the Indians!”

Figure 2
Figure 2

Gloria Graham and Vittorio Gassman as fugitives from the law in “The Glass Wall,” Maxwell Shane, 1953.

Pete and his female companion search for an American soldier the emigre helped while a runaway in Europe. The soldier’s testimony would qualify Peter for entry under an exception for those who helped the allied forces during the war. Chased by the police for most of the film, Peter escapes to the UN building in the film’s suspenseful finale. The building is meant to represent an oasis of freedom from injustice. In a melodramatic speech he holds in front of a symbolically empty UN assembly room, Gassman’s character asks, “What is the world as long as there is one man who can’t walk free?,” implying that the institution created to ensure freedom has failed the needs of the very citizens it is supposed to protect. What surprises the viewer some three quarters of a century after the release of this film is the effective cry for justice it mounts in the context of an unsympathetic legal system. In this sense, the film becomes a symbol for social change in a country whose rigid laws stand in contradiction with its own claim to be the most democratic system in the world. Taking place over only one night and shot on location in New York City, the dark exteriors give the film a distinctly noir feeling. Coupled with Gassman’s penchant for melodrama, The Glass Wall, which refers to the façade of UN’s iconic building in New York, would not only solidify the Italian actor’s international reputation, but also help raise awareness on the world stage about the political plight of underrepresented citizens and small countries at large.

The same cry for justice is observable in Women’s Prison. Taking stock of another sensitive topic in American human rights abuse history, the film made by Louis Seiler in 1955 inquires as to the fairness of the treatment of female inmates by their women guardians. Ida Lupino offers a powerful performance as the prison warden Van Zandt, who refuses to grant special rights to new inmate Helene Jansen. Of sensitive temperament, Helen provoked a car accident which involved the death of child, and is now overcome with remorse. The prison doctor’s recommendation that Helen be treated kindly does not soften Van Zandt’s stance, who orders Helen into solitary confinement, despite her being in a state of shock. The unjust episode is complemented by a juicy subplot involving the impregnation of a female inmate by her husband – a convict in the adjoining male prison. Unable to find out how the two prisoners got together in jail, the establishment threatens Van Zandt with dismissal. This determines Van Zandt to manhandle the pregnant woman, who dies as a result of her beating. After staging a revolt in which they almost lynch Van Zandt, the women get their day in court when the clique of abusive personnel is condemned and justice is finally made. Despite this happy ending, the film’s dark thematic and the claustrophobic prison environment create discomfort in the viewer, rather than relief.

Despite elegant hairstyles, which make the female inmates look as if they are enjoying a day at the spa, the film takes stock of institutional abuse perpetrated by authorities in a position of power, regardless of gender, and reveals the shortcomings of a legal system which, unlike in the thirties, is too tough on its own citizens (recall Helen’s somewhat hurried conviction for an involuntary traffic accident). Apparently alone in siding with the women’s suffering, the prison doctor reveals the psychopathology of Lupino’s character. Appealing to psychoanalytical theory, in a surprising confrontation with Van Zandt, the doctor goes as far as to call her borderline psychotic because she is jealous of the women she has in her care. The unearthing of this truth contributes to Van Zandt’s psychological breakdown. Even though this film is not as realistically focused on the emotional abuse of female characters as Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, for example, which would be adapted by Hollywood twice, and which would tackle controversial same-sex relationship issues, it is nevertheless a milestone on the road toward realism and away from clichéd depictions of gender.

Originating in Italian neorealism and later used to depict the hardships of the working class in the British New Wave of the 1960s, social realism developed into a powerful tool to fight injustice. Via such realistic depictions of societal ills as the ones featured in the early Columbia films, among others, Hollywood drew gradually closer to accurately portraying the surrounding world in tones similar to those featured in today’s contemporary cinema. While not all films made in the recent years use social realism for the same purpose, directors in various cultures inherited from early Hollywood a penchant to criticize the social environment or inform audiences about various forms of injustice. That is why social realism became associated with criticism of political cultures that do not always adhere to the same standards of democracy as those used in the Western world.

A Focus on Literature

Such is the case in the Venezuelan film The Lost Chapters, a debut from Lorena Alvarado which was featured in the open doors section this year, a section meant to promote independent filmmaking from disfavored regions. Although it bills itself as an endearing tale of intergenerational warmth doubled by love for literature, Alvarado’s work fails to quite hit the spot, despite the director’s somewhat visionary outlook, given that the film was made right before Maduro’s contested reelection of July this year in the midst of an unsettling refugee crisis. Teenager Ena and her book aficionado father go on a quest for a South American novel apparently lost to history, while Ena’s grandmother is slowly withering away with Alzheimer. Despite a certain warmth that Ena exudes when reciting a poem her grandmother has taught her, the close-to-reality depiction of both disease and politics in this South American country with a troubled past and an even more unsettling present chooses to go nowhere, as Alvarado deliberately avoids to provide an ending to the story. This betrays failure rather than ingenuity despite the subtle form of social realism for which the director so obviously aims, and which she uses to tacitly comment upon the desperate condition of politics in this South American country.

While working in a style that is distinctly different from social realist dramas, Edgar Pêra has long been known as a Portuguese artist who engages with literature, and culture at large, to produce thought-provoking films, art installations, and cine-concerts. In his latest effort, Telepathic Letters, Pêra taps the AI technology vein to bring to life visuals which have been relegated to oblivion. This looks promising at first, especially since AI, when not used to cheat on college papers, has exclusively been helpful to those in need of a few laughs. Indeed, an underwhelming feature of the AI revolution became the ability to animate still photography with software that came and went faster than perishable goods. While Pêra succeeds in repurposing this otherwise trivial AI feature, and gives AI animations a pseudo-intellectual purpose in Telepathic Letters, the overall achievement of his film is as unimpressive as AI’s more lackluster results so far.

Betraying interest in genuine literary research, Pêra animates old photographs of modernist icons H. P. Lovecraft and recluse prodigy Fernando Pessoa while imagining a correspondence between them. The animations bring to life the dystopic illustrations drawn to accompany Lovecraft’s sci-fi writings. However, even the quality of the print presented at Locarno lacked the resolution available on a larger budget. Although made up from quotes of the two writers’ otherwise profound oeuvres, the lines spoken in voice-over by the chosen talent often sound tendentious, flat, or downright corny. A more beneficial alternative to the reverberation effect used for the voice overs in order to increase the film’s mystery would have been to make the audience reverberate with the true eeriness of these writers’ mysterious prose. Likewise, instead of relying heavily on split screen photo animations, Pêra could have tried to convey to the public in subtler ways the split personalities these writers donned. That is why the experiment falters somewhat, and is mildly interesting at other times, never surpassing, however, the realm of the predictable. As it is, Pêra’s effort represents a merely acceptable intro into the literary universe of Lovecraft and Pessoa.

Figure 3
Figure 3

Animations of still portraits in “Telepathic Letters,” Edgar Pêra, 2024.

Social Realism in Asia and Eastern Europe

The second of two films released this year at his usual rapid-fire pace, Hong Sang-soo’s By the Stream is a revealing reassessment of the cancel culture spurred by the “Me Too” moment. Although apparently about the relationship between a middle-aged actor and an academic, the film subtly questions the appropriateness of sexual harassment accusations and their impact on the lives of those who become their victims. Sieon (Kwon Hae-hyo) used to be a nationally-renowned actor in his heyday. Now he runs a bookstore which stays empty most of the time in a remote part of the country. Suspecting as much, his niece Jeonim (played by Kim Min-hee, who received the Best Performance Pardo for this role) asks Sieon to replace a young instructor who had recently been fired while directing several female students in a college play, which is now due to go up in ten days. The subdued exchanges between Sieon and Jeonim, characteristic of Hong’s style, lay bare the tension between them while also pointing to Sieon’s not altogether clean past, which fortunately remains unexplained. Things become intricately complex as the plot progresses: In a post-performance conversation over drinks with his female students, Sieon reveals that he met his ex-wife when he used to be a young teacher at the same university while she was a student actress herself. This makes Sieon into an older version of the instructor who was fired for dating his students and possibly an alter ego for Hong, who clearly exposes the hypocrisy of contemporaneity while painting the world of his youth—which was slower to judge such encounters as harmful—in ambivalent rather than purely negative colors. Because Hong offers a polyvalent reading of Korea’s traditional society—and does it with the hand of a restrained tragedian—By the Stream becomes an honest, self-searching examination of the effects of cancel culture on the lives of some of its protagonists as well as another achievement in subdued social realist drama from one of the masters of the genre.

Figure 4
Figure 4

Jeonim (Kim Min-hee) and her friend Jeong (Jo Yun-hee), the academic who falls for Sieon (Kwon Hae-hyo), in the latter’s company at the oft-featured restaurant in “By the Stream,” Hong Sang-soo, 2024.

As in Hong’s case, it appears that Asian and Eastern European cinema spell out the pitfalls of our complex information age world with a finesse that is not as present in films made in the West. Hailing from Turkey, Gürcan Keltek comes very close to describing the confusion, anxiety and alienation of our everyday lives in a society that cares increasingly less about its fellow members. Featured in the international competition section, Yeni Șafak Solarken (New Dawn Fades) tells the story of Akin (Cem Yiğit Üzümoğlu), a thirty-something commoner and a sensitive soul who suffers from the traditionalist culture in which he lives, yet he trusts modernity—at least up to a point—to repair some of this society’s ills. Ailed by an unknown malady, Akin drifts uneasily from one hospital to another (as well as between girlfriends) while finding only temporary relief in acting for a local theatre company. Unwilling to succumb to traditional treatments (in one scene his family attempts to cure him using leeches), Akin is willing to be interned in psychiatric hospitals, and generally shows genuine interest in the medical establishment. Despite Akin’s goodwill, however, his doctor is unwilling to change his treatment, thereby revealing in fact his own lack of knowledge and experience with something that may very well be a cultural disease of our new age. Intimating that it is the medical profession that may be the real culprit, the director seems to indicate that it is Akin’s doctor that is sicker than his patient in this drama, whose expressionistic visuals and phantasmagoric storyline make it vaguely reminiscent of Robert Wiene’s classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

I asked Gürcan at a press conference whether we are supposed to identify with Akin or think of him as a pathological case. The director responded that that was a tricky question, because Akin is almost entirely a product of his times, of which we tend to think as largely normal. We should not be too eager, however, to embrace this new normal, Gürcan further intimated. I agreed, because Akin’s disinfatuation with the medical system and organized religion, as well as the ultimate rejection of his manipulative and overprotective family, point to a character that is stuck between past and present, but also between the traditional East and the West. It is interstitiality that seems to define our contemporary context and that makes it easier to relate to Keltek’s film, regardless of our geographical whereabouts. Despite the attempts of modern ideologues to describe identity as unitary and cohesive, Akin’s postmodern mind is fragmented and displaced among memories of a homoerotic friendship with a teenage male acquaintance and the vestiges of his relationship with a beautiful ex-girlfriend. Keltek offers little in terms of responses to the challenging conundrum of mental health in such a world. What he does offer is oneiric visuals, such as those of Akin’s father slash doctor (it is intentionally unclear from the diagesis) leading a group of new religious converts across a modern Styx, in an Istanbul that becomes a symbolic yet fitting location because the metaphorical river is represented here by the expanse of water separating the continents of Asia and Europe. In fact, Peter Zeitlinger’s camera lingers meditatively on the bridges connecting these continents throughout the film, as if inviting us to decipher the key to some deeply-buried mystery. The mystery is of course how to come to terms with in-betweenness arising from interculturalism and the passing of the postmodern era, and while Keltek does not provide a definitive answer, his slow and hypnotizing film promises to be as thought-provoking as his previous work.

Figure 5
Figure 5

Akin’s mysterious father/doctor (Erol Babaoglu) and his converts about to cross the metaphorical Styx in “New Dawn Fades,” Gürcan Keltek, 2024.

If Keltek’s film only refers poetically to the dangers of an uncaring and unfriendly world, Akiplėša (Toxic), by Lithuanian director Saulė Bliuvaitė, is much more literal in its portrayal of teenage confusion, disorientation and impasse. Winner of the Golden Leopard this year, the film tells the story of two teenage sisters who become the victims of an international scam purporting to recruit underage models and offer them gainful employment and travel opportunities abroad. This actually happens with the consent of their desperate parents, who do not see a future for their children in Lithuania. Despite the unattractive locations, the director descends slowly and unobtrusively into the dead-end provincial town of the post-socialist country in which the girls live, and paints it in loving colors. The result is not an environment that is desolate because of its violence, as so many other Eastern European films have portrayed their surroundings since the fall of Communism. On the contrary, the sisters are shown playing soccer with boys of the same age who are neither aggressive nor sexist. It is rather a Chekhovian ennui that seems to haunt their lives. The pressure to live up to impossible standards of beauty proves almost lethal for the sisters, especially as one of them intentionally swallows a tapeworm to become skinnier.

Figure 6
Figure 6

The future underage models (Vesta Matulytė and Ieva Rupeikaitė) surrounded by their colleagues in “Toxic,” Saulė Bliuvaitė, 2024.

Bliuvaitė’s primary merit is that of making the educational character of this cautionary tale less evident than, say, its Hollywood counterpart of the early 1940s. If the overall description of Toxic distantly resembles the plot of the 1941 film Under Age, it is because the plague that befell the US three quarters of a century earlier has been haunting dystopian post-socialist cultures like Lithuania ever since the advent of capitalism in the early 1990s. For this reason, the dilapidated buildings dotting Bliuvaitė’s background are as important as the characters themselves. The social realism that Hollywood started to develop in the 1940s has by now borne fruit in what we used to call the Second and the Third Worlds, and this Toxic demonstrates well because its plot, not unlike other Eastern European dramas, conveys an ultimate sense of failure: The failure of post-socialist politics to offer its citizens a better alternative to Communism, but also the failure of the West to live up to the promise that capitalism would be successfully implemented here. The results are altogether clear from the devastating civil war in Yugoslavia and the current Ukrainian war, and while the politics of the region point to a future which becomes bleaker with every passing year, Eastern European films manage to sensitively and accurately capture this context for audiences worldwide, not without criticizing in classic social realist style (as in the British New Wave proletarian dramas of the 1960s) the underlying conditions that made that context possible.

The broad range of themes, genres, and styles, as well as its ability to focus on diverse geographies and time periods made this year’s program highly accessible to a wide range of audiences. Moreover, the selection was effective because, rather than looking at today’s world in a narcissistic fashion, as many young directors oftentimes tend to do in their debut works, the program offered an all-encompassing view of today’s social landscapes while keeping constant watch of a past reflected, as it were, in the festival’s rearview mirror, provided by the retrospective. This testifies to Locarno’s ability to successfully bridge the temporal gap between what is often considered the golden age of the silver screen in the mid-20th century and the new trends and currents taking shape in the first part of the 21st. Finally, the festival demonstrated that it can successfully overcome cultural divides between the various national cinemas showcased. Despite different cultural and stylistic approaches as well as diverse national contexts featuring South American, Eastern European and East Asian cinemas, the festival brought together the oftentimes different films in a single progressive direction negotiated via common concerns for social justice and equality.

Notes

  1. Nazzaro, Giona A. “The Retrospective of Locarno76: Espectáculo a diario. Las distintas temporadas del cine popular mexicano,” Locarno Film Festival Website, https://www.locarnofestival.ch/festival/film-sections/retrospettiva/retrospettiva76.html.
  2. Vivarelli, Nick. “Locarno Repositions Itself as Forward-Thinking Filmmakers’ Hub,” Variety, July 30, 2022, https://variety.com/2022/film/global/locarno-film-festival-1235326406/.

Lucian Țion is a researcher of cinema history. His monograph “Romanian and Chinese Cinemas: Socialist Affect and Cultural Politics from Maoism to the New Waves,” which will be published in 2025 by Edinburgh University Press, examines how filmmaking in the two cultures has changed over time, moving from socialist realism in the 1950s to social realism in the early 2000s.