American Film Institute

On the set of Stagecoach (1939), starring John Wayne and Claire Trevor.

John Ford and John Wayne, for example, are linked to the Western, while MGM, with the now-famous Freed unit (headed by composer/lyricist Arthur Freed), excelled at musicals. In industry terms, genre films--especially during the Golden Age from 1930-48--are the compromise between cinematic repetition and variation.

While the studios routinely employed loose classifications of subject matter, formal genre designations, such as gangster or melodrama, were applied retroactively by scholars and historians. It was not until the 1970s that the characteristics of specific genres really began to be mapped, primarily because academics were more absorbed in establishing film's connection to art and locating auteurs--a term applied to gifted directors who "authored" artful films. So while everyone may have had an instinctual understanding of what a Western would deliver in 1935, the genre's exact qualities were formally defined much later.

Identifying a genre style
Isolating a group of films and designating a genre presents a conundrum. As scholar Andrew Tudor writes in his book, Theories of Film (London: Secker & Warburg/British Film Institute, 1974):
To take a genre such as the "Western," analyze it and list its principal characteristics, is to beg the question that we must first isolate the body of films which are "Westerns." But they can only be isolated on the basis of the 'principle characteristics' which can only be discovered from the films themselves after they have been isolated.

This problem of genre classification notwithstanding, at least three approaches to studying film genres

	Thinking Point
	What are some of the factors that must be considered when classifying a film?

can be explored, each yielding different insights into how genres are classified and what their popularity means. None of these three broad approaches to genre categorization are mutually exclusive, and perhaps the ideal film genre study would try to utilize all three. Different film scholars emphasize either the structure, history or cultural context of particular film genres.

The first approach, which originates in structuralism, involves listing a genre's iconography (recurrent visual icons), stock characters, typical themes and central narrative patterns. In other words, a taxonomy of a particular genre can be established. Here genre patterns are analyzed like language: there is an identifiable grammar and a syntax.

Another approach would situate genres more carefully within their historical and cultural context. It would ask a slightly different set of questions to find out how a genre achieved public popularity and to analyze the impact this had on studio production: What were the feedback mechanisms between a studio's production output and the American audience's interest in a particular genre? Was each genre's success dependent on its ability to tap major cultural anxieties prevalent at that time?

The third major approach to analyzing major film categories links changes in genres over time to fundamental changes in culture. So, for example, when the Western goes into decline in the 1970s, does this mean that the American society is tired of cowboys and the frontier? Or, might it mean that the basic story needs to be made relevant in a different way, as when Unforgiven (1992) critiqued cowboy violence and expanded the participation of women and racial others in the West.

The remainder of this session will offer a survey of some of the most popular genres that evolved during the peak of the classical Hollywood system. Examples of the major films and the persistent societal issues associated with each genre will provide a historical understanding of genre terms that are still used today.

Genres of order
Westerns
The Western is one of film's oldest genres, which dates back to Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery of 1903. This category also predates film; Westerns were America's preeminent literary category and include the first captivity narratives. Stock characters of the Western plot include: the cowboy-hero, the comparatively civilized rancher or lawman, the prostitute with the heart of gold, and the settler wife, often a cultivated Easterner, and a Native American. The frontier landscape is key to the Western's iconography, and many have argued that this sense of open, untamed space is a crucial American ideal.

The cowboy is typically reluctant to get too involved with established society but comes through in a crisis to save the day in a way that the civilized characters cannot. He also represents the ideal form of masculinity. His skills are physical, and this is displayed through the conventions of expert handling with horses, guns, lassoes and any difficulty presented by the landscape.

It's a nostalgic genre, set in a mythical past, and scholars have argued that audience's fascination with Westerns is linked to a deeply-seated American desire for choice-avoidance: we want both the maverick, loner cowboy freedom and the safe, but boring and emasculating, town life. Audiences identified with the desire to have a dangerous-but-secure lifestyle, and were captivated by the central conflict between civilization and savagery. Key examples of classical Western films include Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Searchers (1956).

The gangster genre
Another highly masculine film genre is the gangster genre, which also has a long cinematic history, dating back to D.W. Griffith's Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912). The gangster genre surged in popularity during the 1930s, and most historians locate the beginning of its classical phase at this time. The gangster picture became an excellent format to display cinema's sound capacities: ballistic machine gun fire, screeching tires and sharp streets electrified the screen. The rise also coincided with historical conditions of Prohibition, notorious real gangsters, like Al Capone, and violent outbursts, such as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929.

Film historian Robert Warshow has argued that gangster films represent an American form of tragedy, pivoting on capitalism's dark underbelly. Warshow's formula for all gangster films typically involves a

American Film Institute

Paul Muni stars in the classic gangster movie, Scarface, the Shame of a Nation (1932).

poor immigrant so desperate for the American dream--money, position, flashy clothes and cars--that he falls prey to a life of crime. His rise is feverish and his downfall complete, usually culminating in a spectacularly violent death. This climactic ending was necessitated, in part, by censorship's demands for compensating moral values. Filmmakers couldn't glorify crime; they had to make sure that it didn't pay in the final analysis.

Yet, the interest center--a film's most memorable and influential qualities--of the gangster film rests squarely with the use of guns, cars, piles of cash and street smarts. As with the Western, the gangster film reinvents the public's fascination with the swaggering male Western outlaw who has an underlying distrust of modern society, this time set in a decidedly urban milieu.

During the 1930s, cultural anxieties continued to mount over the ghettoization of major urban cities across America. Public attention was focused on individual's fight to access financial security, in addition to new forms of contraband. These factors ensured the success of the gangster film genre, which developed at this time. Key examples of classical gangster films include Little Caesar (1930), Scarface, The Shame of The Nation (1932) and The Roaring Twenties (1939).

Genres of integration
Musicals
Film scholar Thomas Shatz has made the distinction between genres of "order" and "integration." Genres of order, such as the Western and gangster films, negotiate contested spaces, codes of masculinity and overarching systems of power. Genres of "integration," like the musical, the melodrama and the screwball comedy, deal with intimate social settings, codes of community, family and emotional truth.

	Thinking Point
	Can today's films be categorized into the same genres that were used to classify classical Hollywood films? Think of a movie that you've seen recently and consider whether it could be classified as a Western, gangster film, musical, melodrama or screwball comedy.

Obviously the musical contains song and dance numbers--eruptions in the film narrative that often seem "unrealistic." Early musicals, such as those made by Busby Berkeley, are considered non-integrated, in that little attempt is made to weave the numbers into the narrative. Rather, they are highly stylized, exotic displays, usually of scantily-clad women. Later musical numbers, such as those with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, became more integrated into the storyline, which provided feasible reasons for the characters to transition into a vocal scene.

Often the musical weds elite and popular characters in performance, though the genre is ultimately much more invested in presenting utopian energy, abundance and community than specific narrative lines. There may be a push to "put on a show," and in the culminating gala, social and artistic differences are resolved.

Musicals became a favored form for audiences, especially during the Depression. These films celebrate spontaneity, both in terms of trying to replicate the experience of a live performance and having characters frequently pick up a prop and jump into a folksy number. In this way, classical musical films often gave the impression of an amateur's inspired and immediate performance--a type of sudden liberation and celebration that many claim makes for the most escapist-yet-intoxicating of the classical Hollywood genres.

Renowned musicals from this period include, Gold Diggers of 1933, 42nd Street (1933), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Meet Me In St. Louis (1944) and An American In Paris (1951).

The screwball comedy

American Film Institute

Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert star in Frank Capra's, It Happened One Night (1934).

The screwball comedy was another genre that boomed with the advent of sound. A form pivoting on wit, breakneck speed and a madcap battle between the sexes, the screwball comedy, to many, is epitomized in two films released in 1934: Twentieth Century and It Happened One Night.

Unlike earlier romantic-oriented comedies that focused on the foibles of the filthy rich (again, a soothing fantasy to Depression-era audiences), these screwball comedy films united romantic partners from different social types. Their initial antagonism, that yields to eventual union, symbolized an ideal of social integration. As with the musical, the screwball comedy is a genre of reconciliation, insisting that class differences can be resolved, especially in romance.

Deploying sarcasm, repartee and cleverness, the screwball comedy offered some of the strongest, most complex female characters to date. Other famed hits from this genre include the following: My Man Godfrey (1936), Bringing Up Baby (1938), Bachelor Mother (1939) and The Philadelphia Story (1940).

Melodrama
One of the toughest film genres to define is the melodrama. The oldest literary and stage definitions of melodrama stem from the combination of music (melos) and drama, for emotional punctuation.

American Film Institute

On the set for Giant (1956), a classical-era melodrama, starring James Dean.

More specialized meanings have emerged, characterizing melodramas as a form of popular romance, in which a virtuous character or couple struggles within a repressive social situation, such as the nuclear family.

Melodramas focus on a central emotional crisis, and the narrative places key social institutions, such as love, family or work, under scrutiny. In signaling repressed sexual yearnings and neuroses, many film melodramas also address subtly-progressive ideas about sexuality, race, aging and gender roles. Variations of the family melodrama have been identified. The main categories include: the male melodrama (Rebel Without A Cause [1955], Bigger Than Life [1956]); the intruder-redeemer (Picnic [1955]); the widower-lover (All That Heaven Allows [1956], Imitation of Life [1934]); and the aristocracy-estate (Giant [1956]).