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Annette Kuhn discusses the distinctive tastes of British cinemagoers

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The distinctive tastes of British cinemagoers

Critics and historians of cinema agree that Hollywood’s command of the world’s cinema screens was well under way by the mid 1920s, and that this domination was more or less secured by the early 1930s, when the ‘talking picture’ was established. Since Hollywood provided the majority of films screened in Britain, its influence is very apparent in British filmgoers’ tastes throughout the 1930s. But if British fans took Hollywood to their hearts, the Hollywood they embraced was very much their own.

A consistently popular type of film among British cinemagoers was undoubtedly the musical comedy. The early 1930s especially saw a cycle of well-received ‘Viennese musicals’, most of them from Hollywood. Among these were Ernst Lubitsch’s The Love Parade (US, Paramount, 1929; UK general release 1930), voted Best Film of 1930 by readers of the magazine Film Weekly.

The distinctive quality of British cinemagoers’ tastes emerges especially strongly in their preferences among Hollywood films and stars, however. Although this is true across the board (for example, among Hollywood stars favoured particularly by British audiences are the ‘quality’ actors Ronald Colman and Norma Shearer), again a predilection for the musical seems to set British preferences apart. Thus although Shirley Temple was top box office on both sides of the Atlantic for several consecutive years, a number of other Hollywood musical stars scored degrees of box-office success in Britain that they did not enjoy in their own country–Jeanette MacDonald and Deanna Durbin, for example.

United States box-office rankings
1935 1936 1937 1938 1939
Shirley Temple Shirley Temple Shirley Temple Shirley Temple Mickey Rooney
Will Rogers Clark Gable Clark Gable Clark Gable Tyrone Power
Clark Gable Astaire/Rogers Robert Taylor Sonja Henie Spencer Tracy

source: International Motion Picture Almanac, 1933-41

British box-office rankings
1936 1937 1938 1939
Shirley Temple Shirley Temple Shirley Temple Deanna Durbin
Astaire/Rogers Clark Gable Jeanette MacDonald Mickey Rooney
Gracie Fields Gracie Fields Spencer Tracy Shirley Temple

source: International Motion Picture Almanac, 1937-41

British box-office rankings: stars of British-made films
1936 1937 1938 1939
Gracie Fields Gracie Fields George Formby George Formby
Jessie Matthews George Formby Gracie Fields Gracie Fields
Jack Hulbert Jessie Matthews Will Hay Robert Donat

source: International Motion Picture Almanac, 1937-41

An interesting finding to emerge from a study of the tastes of the cinema audience of the 1930s relates to paradigms of femininity embodied in the personae of Britain’s favourite female stars: all of them conspicuously lack attributes of overt, adult, sexuality. While the more glamorous Hollywood stars of the 1930s found relatively little favour, films starring performers who were, or appeared, pre-pubescent, rated highly with British audiences. Hollywood’s Shirley Temple and Deanna Durbin are the most prominent instances of this tendency, but there are others.

Among stars of British films, the juvenile actress Nova Pilbeam (perhaps best remembered today for her role in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much [UK, Gaumont-British, 1934]) enjoyed a large following among some sections of the audience; as did Elisabeth Bergner–all but forgotten today–an actress adult in years but gamine in image. Both Pilbeam and Bergner received awards voted by filmgoers: Pilbeam from readers of both Picturegoer and Film Weekly for her role in Tudor Rose (Robert Stevenson, UK, Gainsborough, 1936); Bergner likewise (for Escape Me Never [Paul Czinner, UK, British and Dominions,1935]).

A few Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain participants still remember these actresses. Beatrice Cooper of Harrow [BC-95-208OT001], who enjoyed Pilbeam’s performance in Little Friend (Berthold Viertel, UK, Gaumont-British, 1934), recalls seeing her perform live at the Golders Green Hippodrome. Of “the brilliant, brilliant actress” Bergner, Mrs Cooper says: “…She came to this country, between the wars…. She made a film called Escape Me Never. Which was absolutely, it was revolutionary. Everybody queued up to see Elisabeth Bergner.” “Escape Me Never. Everybody was crazy about it. Erm, she had a special, very special appeal, Elisabeth Bergner. She was very childlike. In her appearance.” And in his diary entry for 7 May 1935, Glasgow informant Norman MacDonald [NM-92-005PW002] notes: “At night saw Elisabeth Bergner in Escape Me Never at the Gem Cinema and thought it a very fine picture.”

While this trend in cinemagoers’ tastes runs throughout the 1930s, a number of shifts are observable towards the end of the decade. Although the musical continues to maintain its appeal, for example, we see the emergence of a new generation of musical stars. In 1938, the year in which George Formby ousted Gracie Fields from her long-held position as top money-making star of British-made films, the Canadian-born Hollywood singer/actress Deanna Durbin shot virtually overnight into the position of Britain’s overall favourite star. Another juvenile musical performer, Mickey Rooney, also entered the British ratings in the late 1930s and, along with Durbin, displaced Shirley Temple from her top ranking.

These transitions are by no means confined to cinema culture, however. They coincide with significant shifts in meanings of femininity in Britain. But that’s another story….

Annette Kuhn,

1 March 2021

Annette Kuhn talks about a key aspect of CCINTB’s research design

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A key feature of the Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain Collection is the interviews that were conducted during the mid-1990s in four UK locations, Glasgow, Greater Manchester, East Anglia, and the London suburb of Harrow: these places were carefully chosen to give a spread of settlement patterns and class and regional cultures. Interviews were piloted in the city of Glasgow in the southwest of Scotland, where the project was based at that time. A centre of shipbuilding and other heavy industry in the 1930s, this self-styled ‘movie-mad city’ was reputed at the time to have Europe’s highest number of cinema seats per head of population. Greater Manchester in the northwest of England was an important centre of the textile industry up till the 1970s, and during the 1930s was home to many cinemas, old and new. Fieldwork in the Greater Manchester conurbation incorporated the towns of Bolton (the site of Mass-Observation’s 1930s ‘Worktown’ studies) and Bury, as well as the city of Manchester itself. Situated to the north-west of London, Harrow underwent considerable growth during the 1930s, becoming transformed from a semi-rural area to a prosperous metropolitan suburb boasting several new supercinemas. In the 1930s as today, the predominantly rural counties of Suffolk and Norfolk in East Anglia featured a variety of settlement patterns, including small towns and seaside resorts, as well as villages of various sizes; while farming was the area’s main industry.

Interviewees were sought in several ways. Most of the Glasgow informants were selected from people who had been in contact with me before CCINTB was launched in 1994: attendees at a 1992 Glasgow Film Theatre screening and talk on popular cinema in the 1930s completed short question sheets and left their contact details if they wished to remain in touch (example pictured below); an appeal in a local newspaper, The Glaswegian, drew inquiries from further interested parties. Other Glasgow interviewees were previous contacts of the project’s Research Fellow. Pilot interviews with upwards of thirty individuals were conducted in Glasgow in late 1994 and early 1995. In the other locations, participants were sought through appeals in local media and national publications for the elderly; approaches were also made to, and came from, institutions and organisations of various kinds (local history societies, friendship groups, housebound library users’ services, residential homes for the elderly, and so on).

One-Page Question Sheet

From the pilot interviewees in Glasgow and the first contacts elsewhere a total of seventy-eight core informants were selected, with a view to balancing demographic factors such as location and social class in the 1930s, gender, and ethnicity. All but three of these participants were interviewed more than once, the majority twice, and a handful three times. Forty-five people were interviewed on their own, the rest in couples or groups. Interviews were conducted by Research Fellow Valentina Bold, an experienced oral history researcher. Most took place in participants’ homes, and a few in day centres, residential homes, or group meeting places. A total of 186 hours of tape-recorded interview material was gathered from core informants, mostly during 1995. In all but a handful of cases (where audio was of very poor quality, for example), these interviews were transcribed during the 1990s, and some of the Glasgow pilot interviews have been transcribed more recently.

All interview audio of acceptable quality has now been digitised in both WAV and MP3 format and we are in the process of indexing and time-stamping each interview. To enable visitors to perform keyword searching of the interview transcripts synced to the audio, we are using the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer application, developed by the University of Kentucky Libraries. See the Participant Interviews area for details of how to access the interviews.

For further information on interviews, interviewees, and other aspects of CCINTB’s research design, see Kuhn, A. (2002) An Everyday Magic (London: I.B.Tauris), pp.240-254.

Annette Kuhn