It's tempting to romanticize the Golden Age of Hollywood, the studio era, with its glamor and its relatively high level of quality production. This era produced the modern myth of the movies and the classic films many of us grew up on, the films that inspired most of the important filmmakers of today.
In fact, however, the era may come to be seen as something of a plateau in the history of cinema -- an exploitation of the great innovations of the silent era, when the freewheeling improvisations of the film pioneers were standardized into readily marketable corporate entertainment.
The studio system was artificial on many levels, depending on a virtual monopoly of distribution by the major Hollywood studios, a monopoly protected by corruption of the political system and ruthless in suppressing outsiders. A closed market like this doesn't really reflect public taste in any profound sense and it tends to foster creative paralysis in times of change, as happened after WWII when Hollywood lost touch with the mood of its audience and started fighting a rear-guard action that continues to this day.
Louis B. Mayer, the head of the most prestigious and powerful studio of the Golden Age, mutilated Erich Von Stroheim's Greed and destroyed the footage he cut from it. Mayer also offered to buy and burn the negative of Citizen Kane. It could be argued that these were two of the greatest works of art created in Hollywood, but they violated the conventions of studio production and thus were a threat to it -- because if these films, as completed by their creators, had gotten a fair chance at the market, they might have made money, and that would have called Louis B. Mayer's and MGM's whole raison d'etre into question.
We cannot deny the glories that the studio system sometimes produced, but we also cannot afford to ignore the fact that they were rare, often derivative, often compromised. Movies, popular movies, could have been much more than the Hollywood studios were willing, or able, to admit.
When the studio era is evaluated in the future I think it may become clear that its one truly original contribution to the art of cinema was the musical -- the MGM musical in particular, which was a curious product of Louis B. Mayer's whims and the genius of the man whose vision Mayer indulged, Arthur Freed.
Freed may come to be seen as the one filmmaker working within the studio system who made a deep and lasting contribution to movies, seen in the broadest context of their development. It will take some time. The movie musical is dead today, and the unapologetic sentiment of Freed's work makes many contemporary critics uneasy -- but these are matters of fashion, and perhaps it's possible to look past them even now.
In upcoming posts I'll make a stab at evaluating Freed's accomplishment as it may appear to critics of the future.