Daily Archives: September 14, 2013

Golden Gate Bridge, 1937

1937 was another year of firsts at the movies, giving viewers the first full-length animated feature, Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  Snow White was the top money maker in 1938 and was also the first film with an official soundtrack, and the first film to release a motion picture soundtrack album.  The year also saw the first film pairing of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry and the first appearance of Daffy Duck in animator Tex Avery’s “Porky’s Duck Hunt”.  Louise Ranier won the first back-to-back acting Oscar for her performance in 1937’s The Good Earth, following her Best Actress win in 1936’s The Great Ziegfeld.

Blonde bombshell Jean Harlow died at age 26 due to uremic poisoning on June 7, 1937, before the completion of filming for Saratoga with Clark Gable.  Clark Gable and Myrna Loy were crowned the King and Queen of Hollywood and Gable and Shirley Temple were the two top box-office stars.

In the United States, the average cost of a new house was $4,100.00 and the average wage per year was $1,780.00.  The average unemployment rate was 14.3 percent.  A gallon of gas cost about 10 cents.

In the the news, the Golden Gate Bridge opened to pedestrian and vehicular traffic.  Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared after taking off from New Guinea during Earhart’s attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world.  American popular composer George Gershwin died in Los Angeles of a brain tumor at age 38.   The German airship Hindenburg burst into flame in Lakehurst, New Jersey killing dozens on board..

Guernica by Pablo Picasso, completed June 1937

The rumblings of war continued to intensify in the rest of the world.  The Condor Legion of the Nazi German Luftwaffe, in support of the Francoists in the Spanish Civil War, bombed Guernica, destroying three-quarters of the town and killing hundreds.  The Soviet Union commenced one of the largest campaigns of the Great Purge to “eliminate anti-Soviet elements.”   During the seige of Nanjing, Japanese soldiers killed over 300,000 Chinese in 3 months.  This is remembered as  the “Nanking Massacre”.  Germany, in a note to Brussels, “guaranteed” the inviolability and integrity of Belgium so long as the latter abstained from military action against Germany.  In the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler held a secret meeting and stated his plans for acquiring “living space” for the German people (recorded in the Hossbach Memorandum).

The 1937 movies I will try to watch are listed here:  http://www.imdb.com/list/YQrx2nQOaQg/

Hindenburg Disaster – British Pathe newsreel footage

Sisters of the Gion (“Gion no shimai”)
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Written by Kenji Mizoguchi and Yoshikata Yoda based on the novel “The Pit” by Aleksandr Kuprin
1936/Japan
Daiichi Eiga
First viewing

[box] O-Mocha: If we do our jobs well they call us immoral. So what can we do? What are we supposed to do?[/box]

This sad but beautiful film by Kenji Mizoguchi is quite thought-provoking.

O-Mocha (Isuzu Yamada) and Umekichi are sisters.  They barely make ends meet working as geishas in the Gion, the pleasure district of Kyoto.   The gentle Umekichi’s patron has gone bankrupt and she feels an obligation to take him in and look after him.  O-Mocha’s philosophy is that men are the enemy and should be taken for everything that can be gotten out of them. She plots to rid the household of Umekichi’s patron and find rich patrons for both of them.  Like a Japanese Scarlett O’Hara she will stop at nothing to get her way.  Ultimately, neither sister’s philosophy of life emerges victorious.

I thought this was rather fantastic.  Isuzu Yamada was even better than she was in Osaka Elegy and the cinematic storytelling is stunning.  Once again, there are few sympathetic characters here.  O-Mocha in particular is heartless in the extreme.  However, the film really made me think.  What, indeed, were they supposed to do?  O-Mocha finds herself in a tragic state of affairs at the end and her sister says she would not have suffered her fate if she had been nicer to men.  But O-Mocha says, even when she is broken, that being nice would mean giving in and she will never give in.  And Mizoguchi makes it clear that the nice sister doesn’t get anything for her pains either.  The system is stacked against the geisha and by implication against women in general.

And that concluded my viewing for 1936!