Filmmakers seem to have a fascination with the 1930s. Perhaps it's because the prevailing events - the Depression, prohibition and the lead-up to a world war - offer such fine dramatic material. Perhaps it's because the decade serves as a convenient bridge between the Victorian past and the modern present.
Whatever the reason, cameras have extensively documented the decade with varying degrees of success. Whether good (Cabaret, Ironweed, The Natural) or questionable (Lucky Lady, Big Bad Mama), movies about the '30s always hold a special resonance, a familiar nostalgia, for audiences and movie makers alike. Here are some favorites:
ALL THE KINGS MEN (1949): Borrowing liberally from the life and political career of former Louisiana Gov. Huey P. Long, this story of Southern "machine" politics recounts the rise and fall of a common man in the corridors of power and ably re-creates the attitudes and atmosphere that permeated the troubled region during the first half of the 20th century.
AMACORD (1973): Autobiographical in tone, Frederico Fellini's Amacord (which means "I Remember" in the Rimini, Italy, dialect) is not so much a story of the director's youth, although there is a character clearly based on him, but of the people and place that helped him become the chronicler of human foibles. Beautiful and often bawdy, Mr. Fellini's last masterpiece is an enchanting, seemingly effortlesspiece of filmmaking and a lovely re-creation of Italy in the 1930s.
PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO (1985): Movies in the '30s offered a cheap respite from the turmoils of the outside world. Filmmaker Woody Allen uses the period's escapist fare as the starting point for his story of a silver-screen adventurer who suddenly finds himself drawn from his celluloid fantasy world into New Jersey circa 1935.
CHINATOWN (1974): A masterpiece of modern screenwriting, this film, based on an actual water scandal in pre-war Los Angeles, is an astonishing re-creation of Southern California before the L.A. basin became a garden spot. Chinatown was intended to be the first of three films centering on the fictional character of Jake Gittes and his relationship with Los Angeles. The second, The Two Jakes, was made and panned in 1990 and the third lies in limbo.
THE STING (1973): A crime film antidote for the gangsters that seemed to inhabit every urban streetcorner in the 1930s, The Sting replaces tommy guns and rum-runners with a far more subtle breed of law-breaker, the con artist. The second Robert Redford-Paul Newman pairing, The Sting is a complex, sometimes confusing tale of an elaborate con.
Ironically, the film's famous score, which utilizes Scott Joplin ragtime, would be more appropriate for a film based around the turn of the century. Ragtime was old news by the '30s.
Reach Steven Uhles at (706) 823-3626 or steven.uhles@augustachronicle.com.
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