Harking back to the Golden Age. George Clooney and Cate Blanchett in Steven Soderbergh's The Good German.
Although he's a studio favourite these days, Steven Soderbergh's career began with Sex, Lies and Videotape and inaugurated an extended purple patch for American independent cinema. He's still making thoughtful and personal films outside the studios, of course, and remains a kind of poster boy for indie cinema.
So it came as a bit of a surprise, in yesterday's New York Times, to see him extolling the virtues of the old studio system of moviemaking, and talking fondly of how he often thinks how he "would have been so happy to be Michael Curtiz". Indeed, his new film The Good German is a very deliberate attempt to make a film in the manner of Curtiz's studio pictures. Its tale of an American war correspondent who returns to the ruins of postwar Berlin to find his old lover, was carefully filmed with the speedy techniques and limited cameras of the lot-based, production line movies of the 30s and 40s.
The studios, these days, are not generally regarded as a great thing, with their addiction to huge, lumbering blockbusters, 'high concept' (meaning 'lowest common denominator') plots and budgets to match the size of their actors' egos.
But Soderbergh's nostalgia is for a different era of studio filmmaking, which many people think of as the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema, running from the ascendance of sound in the 30s to the breakup of the original Big Five studios. This was an era in which Hollywood produced many more films, with much smaller budgets, than today; when stars, directors and other key crew were generally under exclusive contract to one or other of the studios; when stars had less power and directors less 'vision'.
It's a moot question whether these old days were really that good. For while Curtiz's Casablanca is clearly a masterpiece of popular filmmaking, Curtiz directed many other films for Warner Brothers in those years, including Passage to Marseille, a truly execrable sequel featuring much the same cast, that makes Ocean's 12 look like The Godfather II by contrast.
This was also the age in which Orson Welles's Magnificent Ambersons was butchered for posterity by the producers; and the period of sappy all-American propaganda which nurtured the career of Ronald 'the Gipper' Reagan and blooded him in really poisonous politics at the House Un-American Activities Committee.
I have to say that I'm with Soderbergh on this one (even if I don't completely buy into his fondness for Michael Curtiz).
Hollywood has never been in better health than in the 30s and 40s, and while The Good German may very well be a good picture, there are all too many historical reasons why a studio renaissance is never going to happen.
The main one, of course, is that cinema is no longer the mass entertainment that it was. It's not just that television has stolen its audience; late capitalism and its nest of 'niche' audiences mean that there's really no such thing as mass entertainment any more. These days, if Hollywood wants to bring out a mass audience, it has to pretty much bully them off the sofa with relentless and very expensive advertising campaigns.
With those kind of marketing budgets - often matching and even outstripping the production costs - it makes little sense to do 'small' pictures, hence the very cautious and conservative mega-pictures of which Hollywood is these days so very fond.
The decline in English-speaking audiences has also led Hollywood to seek out the international market. What this means is that dialogue is now reduced to the very barest minimum: Mr Bean and Arnold Schwarzenegger are the ideal stars of today's cinema, men of few or no words grunting between big explosions in a way that can easily be sold to the Middle East, Asia and beyond.
And that, for me, is probably the bitterest loss. Because although there was no shortage of bad films made in the Golden Age, even the bad ones had some great lines. (Hellzapoppin, for instance, is a jewel of bad filmmaking: preposterous plot, a festival of ham acting, so much schmaltz that your eyes water. But there's also a blizzard of snappy gags. Quite a few are terrible, but about 50% are absolutely worthy of a rimshot.)
But maybe I'm slipping into premature grumpy-old-manhood. Are there any readers out there willing to defend the current state of the Hollywood studios?
