in old movies they always dress up for dinner at home?

[green papaya]

something I notice about old movies from the 1930's - 1940's is they often show a family all dressed up around the table at evening meal at dinner, and they often have a servant or house boy / house lady.

would the average middle class family have been all dressed up in suits & ties at home for dinner? at home? judging by old movies they wore a suit & tie 7 days a week.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Not the average middle class family but upper middle class and higher. Robert Benchley made a comment in the 1930s that might fit here. He did a review of a Gilbert and Sullivan musical and commented on the audience, that they were wearing evening clothes which was the custom for theater going at the time. But he commented that they may not be wearing the latest thing in evening clothes but you got the impression they would have been wearing them anyway in other words, did not get dressed up just to go to the theater but dressed for dinner every night.

Even then, this was old fashioned and going out of style but, Gilbert and Sullivan fans were that kind of people.

And yes, there were people who dressed in a suit and tie every day of the week. Even when they were going fishing or camping.

 

[Stanley Doble]

You should keep in mind that Hollywood had a way of dressing things up and making them look good. You see comments today about the semi employed young people in Friends living in a New York apartment that would rent for about $5000 a month. You could say the same about 30s movies where people who would be making $5000 a year, which was a very good salary then, live as if they made $50,000 a year.

 

[green papaya]

they even wore a suit & tie to go to the corner market to pick up a few groceries, the 1950's seemed more "casual" more people wore a polo shirt with khakis, and maybe a lightweight sports jacket.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The average moviegoer in 1939, if lucky, made about $1000 a year, which was a good salary for a factory worker or a petty white-collar office worker. The average moviegoers didn't dress up like they did in the movies, nor did they have a lovable chucklin' grinnin' maid out in the kitchen to dote on their every need. The men's collars were frayed, their shirts were "tattle-tale grey" and if they wore suits they were usually bagged-out, shiny-seated blue serge, and their ties had to be knotted to hide the weak spots and grease stains in the fabric. If they were factory workers or farmers, they wore sturdy but shapeless work clothes. The women wore plain, often home-made clothes, and might have three outfits in the closet to rotate. The kids also wore inexpensive clothes, often hand-me-downs, and were expected and required to change out of their "good clothes" as soon as they got home from school.

Most likely they ate simple food put together by an overworked, overstressed mother who had been aged prematurely by the experiences she'd been thru since she got married, and wondered whatever happened to the dreams she used to have. She didn't have a maid, didn't know anyone who had a maid unless the maid was a friend of hers, or even herself. But she didn't say anything because she knew from personal experience that it could be a lot worse. They probably ate at the kitchen table, and at least one person at the table had a napkin shoved down the front of their clothes to catch the drippage, so that said clothing might be worn another day without having to be washed.

Hollywood was in the business of selling fantasies, not realities. Who'd pay thirty-five cents to sit in the dark and see the lives they really led? The "middle class" as depicted on screen was actually a small minority in the 1930s and 1940s, and the working class bought the majority of movie tickets. Fantasy sold very well.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^^^
Indeed. Escapism ain't inherently unhealthy, but we ought recognize it for what it is.

Run-of-the-mill Westerns (real hoots, generally) would be taken as accurate reflections of late 19th-century life on the frontier only by the naive. Clean clothes. Complete sets of teeth. Attractive widows aplenty. The bad guys rarely hit their targets; the good guys rarely miss. What pre-adoloescent male wouldn't long for such a time and place? They lined up around the block, clutching their dimes, for a couple of hours in that mental space.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Another thing worth noting is that the movie industry was founded and run thruout the Era by a generation of late 19th Century working-class immigrants. Louis B. Mayer had run a junkyard in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Adolph Zukor had been a fur cutter. Sam Goldwyn was a glove salesman. William Fox was a cloak-and-suit man. Carl Laemmle was a petty bookkeeper. The Warner Brothers were traveling showmen raised by a cobbler. Harry Cohn was a trolley conductor. None of them came from anything resembling a middle-class background, and they wanted to show the world that they could be just as bourgeois as the WASPs. Hence the constant emphasis on an idealized White Middle Class lifestyle in their pictures -- it was the natural result of striving parvenus trying to show the people who really ran the country that they themselves could fit in.

If you wanted to see how people really lived in the 1930s, you wouldn't find it in movies or on the radio. You might find it in a Broadway play, if that play was written by Clifford Odets or Sidney Kingsley.

 

[vitanola]

The concept of "dressing for dinner" is very much class based, but also a regional phenomenon. "Dressing for dinner" means dinner jackets and evening dresses, and was a practice which was common among only the wealthiest in the Nineteenth Century. The practice was common in our principal cities among the capitalist and uppermost members of the professional classes, but once one passed into the bulk of the Upper Middle Class one found that American men were exceedingly reluctant to don "Monkey Suits" unless forced to do so by their wives for public occasions.

After 1920, the daily wearing of dinner jackets and gowns was generally associated with denizens of homes with more than three servants, those who lived in suites in hotels in the great metropolitan areas, and the Country Club set on the East and West Coasts. By the time of the Second World War, the practice was rapidly falling into desuitude in all settings.

 

[vitanola]

Another thing worth noting is that the movie industry was founded and run thruout the Era by a generation of late 19th Century working-class immigrants. Louis B. Mayer had run a junkyard in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Adolph Zukor had been a fur cutter. Sam Goldwyn was a glove salesman. William Fox was a cloak-and-suit man. Carl Laemmle was a petty bookkeeper. The Warner Brothers were traveling showmen raised by a cobbler. Harry Cohn was a trolley conductor. None of them came from anything resembling a middle-class background, and they wanted to show the world that they could be just as bourgeois as the WASPs. Hence the constant emphasis on an idealized White Middle Class lifestyle in their pictures -- it was the natural result of striving parvenus trying to show the people who really ran the country that they themselves could fit in.

If you wanted to see how people really lived in the 1930s, you wouldn't find it in movies or on the radio. You might find it in a Broadway play, if that play was written by Clifford Odets or Sidney Kingsley.

Actually, the settings be of the Hal Roach comedies of the !ate 1920's and early 1930's gave a reasonably good impression of the middle class domestic life of the day. After mid-1931, though,the settings be become unrealistically rich. Even in '31 one sees false notes of prosperity. Note that Miss Crabtree, a young school teacher just out of college, is driving a new Chrysler 75 roadster, a $1600 machine in it's day.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The rawest depiction of "real life" in all the Roach canon has to be the 1931 "Our Gang" comedy "Dogs Is Dogs," in which Wheezer and Dorothy are trapped in the custody of a bitter, violently abusive stepmother played to terrifying perfection by Blanche Payson. The film has a fairy-tale "rich aunt to the rescue" ending, but the first three-quarters of the picture give a real sense of what it meant to be fallen-middle-class during the Depression.

 

[St. Louis]

One of my favorite films for a depiction of various lower-to middle-to upper middle class life is Letter to Three Wives, released in 1949, that showed the lives and attitudes of married women. I'm not positive about how realistic it is, but the working-class portrayal seems fairly true to life. The contrast between these folks (who ate in the kitchen) and the upper-middle class family (who had a maid, played brilliantly by Thelma Ritter) is striking.

My sense is that most working people did feel they ought to wash their hands, straighten their ties, and take off their aprons when they sat down to dinner or supper.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Massman family sits down to supper, Washington DC, 1943. Hugh Massman, a 2nd Class Petty Officer on Navy shore duty, eats his meals in his undershirt to keep from spotting his uniform blouse. (OWI photo.)

 

[Fading Fast]

...Hollywood was in the business of selling fantasies, not realities. Who'd pay thirty-five cents to sit in the dark and see the lives they really led? The "middle class" as depicted on screen was actually a small minority in the 1930s and 1940s, and the working class bought the majority of movie tickets. Fantasy sold very well.

I've mentioned it before (several times as I have very few original thoughts), but it is amazing how many movies Hollywood made about the super-rich during the depression. Assuming my source for 1930s movies - TCM - is a reasonably accurate cross-section, then the people Lizzie describes (and that my parents were), wanted to see wealthy people in dinner dress, in mansions, driving fancy cars, flying plays, playing polo, going on vacation, having many servants, going to their country homes, their country clubs, buying jewelry - basically being rich and doing rich things.

While these movies (big generalization that has many individual exceptions) would point fun at the foibles of the rich, they weren't bitter angry class warrior movies. They were lighthearted movies that might have a message like the maid or poor relative has the kindest heart or a simpler life is better, etc., - but they weren't anti-rich. If people were really angry at the rich, these movies would have flopped and the bounding movie moguls would have stopped making them.

I mention this because I am amazed that they were successful. My dad and grandmother are dead, but I would love to ask them how they felt about these movies in the '30s. My grandmother loved movies, but I can't see her in the '30s going to see if Robert Montgomery, in a dinner jacket, was going to marry Joan Crawford in a designer gown at a country estate where he arrived in a sport car for a weekend of tennis, "riding" and sumptuous meals? But I'm probably wrong.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Farm family meal, 1940."

 

[LizzieMaine]

While these movies (big generalization that has many individual exceptions) would point fun at the foibles of the rich, they weren't bitter angry class warrior movies. They were lighthearted movies that might have a message like the maid or poor relative has the kindest heart or a simpler life is better, etc., - but they weren't anti-rich. If people were really angry at the rich, these movies would have flopped and the bounding movie moguls would have stopped making them.

I mention this because I am amazed that they were successful. My dad and grandmother are dead, but I would love to ask them how they felt about these movies in the '30s. My grandmother loved movies, but I can't see her in the '30s going to see if Robert Montgomery, in a dinner jacket, was going to marry Joan Crawford in a designer gown at a country estate where he arrived in a sport car for a weekend of tennis, "riding" and sumptuous meals? But I'm probably wrong.

Keep in mind that the screen was not a "free market based" medium in the 1930s. Once full enforcement of the Production Code began under the fascist-leaning Joseph Ignatius Breen in 1934, movies that questioned or criticized the social system in anything but a deeply veiled manner simply weren't allowed to be made. That's why all those hardboiled "social realism" pictures the Warners made in 1932 and 1933 suddenly disappeared. Ideological censorship was as heavily practiced by the Breen Office as sexual censorship, and the object was to present a very specific view of the "American Way." The US screen was every bit a venue for social and cultural propaganda as the German or the Soviet screens. We just pretended it wasn't.

 

[Fading Fast]

One of my favorite films for a depiction of various lower-to middle-to upper middle class life is Letter to Three Wives, released in 1949, that showed the lives and attitudes of married women. I'm not positive about how realistic it is, but the working-class portrayal seems fairly true to life. The contrast between these folks (who ate in the kitchen) and the upper-middle class family (who had a maid, played brilliantly by Thelma Ritter) is striking.

My sense is that most working people did feel they ought to wash their hands, straighten their ties, and take off their aprons when they sat down to dinner or supper.

All around good movie. And I agree, an interesting window into various "lifestyles" form the very rich guy who owns the appliance stores and lives in a mansion to the maid who lives in a "shack" by the railroad tracks.

But in a way, the most interesting is Kirk Douglas' house where it is openly discussed that his teacher salary isn't paying the bills for their upper-middle class lifestyle but they live on his wife's job as a writer for radio shows (Lizzie, who knew writing for radio was so lucrative ). The striving for a "better" lifestyle is central to the story and Douglas' character (I'm doing this from memory) gives some great speeches about how this is viewed by their neighbors, friends and how it affect his wife and his relationship. It's a very class-conscious movie, but in a very open way.

As to maids, based on all that I've read, they were much more common back then and many not-rich households had one and many even not-at-all-rich households might have a maid "come in" several days a week. It cost less (relative to today) to hire one and there were a lot less labor saving devises and easy-to-prepare meals than today. In a way, I sometimes think that we've replaced the maid with all our appliances in that even lower income houses have (not all, but many) air conditioning, washers and dryers, microwaves, etc.

Fifty years from now, some might wonder how so many low-income households afforded all those fancy appliances.

 

[Fading Fast]

Keep in mind that the screen was not a "free market based" medium in the 1930s. Once full enforcement of the Production Code began under the fascist-leaning Joseph Ignatius Breen in 1934, movies that questioned or criticized the social system in anything but a deeply veiled manner simply weren't allowed to be made. That's why all those hardboiled "social realism" pictures the Warners made in 1932 and 1933 suddenly disappeared. Ideological censorship was as heavily practiced by the Breen Office as sexual censorship, and the object was to present a very specific view of the "American Way." The US screen was every bit a venue for social and cultural propaganda as the German or the Soviet screens. We just pretended it wasn't.

All good, smart points, but they made a whole lot of movies about the super rich, not just ones about good middle-class America - it feels like there was a desire to see the super rich. If not, if the public didn't want them, they would have made more middle-class or "wholesome" working class movies; instead, (based on TCM), they made more about the rich than either of those other two categories.

I'm with you arm in arm that the code distorted movie making and force a lot of what we saw onto the screen in a propaganda way. I'm not arguing against that. I'm just saying that even within that construct, these movies must have done well (put butts in seats), or the moguls would have found another formula that conformed to the code and sold more tickets.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Radio writers did pretty well after they banded together to form the Radio Writer's Guild. The work could be brutal if you worked in a production-line shop like the Hummerts ran, but the money was still decent.

Meanwhile, here's war worker Howard Babcock and his family sitting down to eat. This is another 1943 OWI photo documenting "how Americans are living in wartime." It's propaganda, but they don't make an effort to pretty things up.

 

[LizzieMaine]

All good, smart points, but they made a whole lot of movies about the super rich, not just ones about good middle-class America - it feels like there was a desire to see the super rich. If not, if the public didn't want them, they would have made more middle-class or "wholesome" working class movies; instead, (based on TCM), they made more about the rich than either of those other two categories.

I'm with you arm in arm that the code distorted movie making and force a lot of what we saw onto the screen in a propaganda way. I'm not arguing against that. I'm just saying that even within that construct, these movies must have done well (put butts in seats), or the moguls would have found another formula that conformed to the code and sold more tickets.

I think the joker in the deck is that for a great many people going out to the movies was the sum total of their social life -- you went to the movies to see your friends, to be part of a communal neighborhood experience, as much as you did to see a specific film. A lot of the people who came to our theatre here in the 1940s --and I know many of them, in their 90s -- didn't much care what the movie was one way or another. It was just the experience of "going to the movies" that mattered to them. This also explains why there were so many indifferently made, mediocre movies in the Era that still made good money.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Sunday Dinner," c. 1940.