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Queer representation was common in American cinema during the Great Depression, and the records of Hollywood's Production Code Administration prove that those images were read as such at the time. Queerness was criticized because it refracted traditional masculinity imperiled by the socioeconomic crisis, yet it was essential as entertainment and ideological prop.
Gender Reversals, Queerness, and a Nation in Crisis. An extraordinary scene takes place near the beginning of The Strange Love of Molly Louvain, a typically punchy Warner Bros, melodrama directed by studio ace Michael Curtiz in 1932. A small-time confidence trickster and his cronies are sitting inside a hotel lobby, staring out a picture window, betting on whether the next person passing outside will be a man or a woman. The con man is on a winning streak, but when a man passing by tips his cigarette in a seemingly flouncy manner, the gang pauses for a beat, uncertain as to which among them won the bet, before one says, "It's a man!" They try again; this time it's a woman, but the con protests what appears to be his loss: "No, women in pants don't count."
This scene summarizes much of this article. As cinema learned to talk, so did it also "speak" about the gender roles so crucial to Hollywood film. Far from giving viewers a "[picture] window on reality," films from the early sound period often seem to "frame" their highly theatrical, performed nature. As with the betting game, these films came under close scrutiny by producers and audiences alike, the former seemingly "shooting the works" in terms of titillating, "dangerous" content on their every try, the latter, less able to play the game with so little pocket change to spare. In the darkest days of the Great Depression, a great deal was at stake, as every successful man felt that his winning streak could end at any moment. Many of U.S. society's gender roles were out in the open, if only "in passing," with "women in pants" and effeminate men questioning and threatening the domain of the male breadwinner in the aftermath of the Great Crash, a moment of "lost bets."
Much has been written about how, as Robert McElvaine has argued, "the Depression can be seen as...