By Nora Thomas
For this podcast, I spoke with Dr. Jacqueline Reich, a Communications professor at Fordham University specializing in Film History, Star Studies, and Italian and Italian-American Cinema. My survey of Depression-Era films included:
The Public Enemy (1931)
Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)
She Done Him Wrong (1933)
It Happened One Night (1934)
My Man Godfrey (1936)
Modern Times (1936)
Stella Dallas (1937)
Holiday (1938)
Works Cited:
Bergman, Andrew. We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films. New York: New York University Press, 1971.
Cohen, Harvey G. Who’s in the Money? : The Great Depression Musicals and Hollywood’s New Deal. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018.
Horak, Laura. “Modernity, Sexuality, Cinema: Early Twentieth Century Transformations,” in Modernities and Moderization in North America, ed. by Ilka Brasch and Ruth Mayer. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019.
Sharot, Stephen. “Social class in female star personas and the cross-class romance formula in Depression-era America.” Screen. 2015, Vol. 56, No. 2., pp. 172-194.
Sharot, Stephen. “Wealth and/or Love: Class and Gender in the Cross-class Romance Films of the Great Depression.” Journal of American Studies. February 2013, Vol. 47, No. 1., pp. 89-108.
Shurlock, Geoffrey. “The Motion Picture Production Code,” in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Vol. 254, 1947. pp. 140-146.
Verba, Sidney and Kay Lehman Schlozman. “Unemployment, Class Consciousness, and Radical Politics: What Didn’t Happen in the Thirties.” The Journal of Politics. May 1977, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 291-323.
Jacqueline Reich. Interview with the author. December 10th, 2020.
