Magical History Tour

From the 1930s until the end of the Second World War, the United States dominated the international film market. In Hollywood's studio system with its standardized mode of production and organization based on division of labor, a number of popular genres evolved that then dominated film production and soon became seminal. Musicals and gangster movies, both telling stories of life in the big cities and of success and failure, emerged along with the sound film and against the background of economic depression in the early 1930s. Sound lent the gangster movie the realistic quality it required to give an account of the rough life in the streets. The period of prohibition from 1920 to 1933, with its flourishing alcohol bootlegging and the hard reality of economic decline, form the frame of reference for many films of this genre, which was proud of its authenticity: "Pictures snatched from the headlines," was Hollywood's slogan. In the 1930s, comedy evolved from the more bodily oriented comic of the silent movie era to funny dialogs. The screwball comedy carried plays on words and fast, hefty exchanges to extremes. We have to limit ourselves to a small number of films from this immensely rich period in the history of cinema.