FILM CULTURE, in conjunction with the literature it was often adapted from, became the largest collective cultural influence on Western civilization as the 20th Century progressed.
But due to the opportunity it offered for sheer fantastic and exaggerated thrills — and which we certainly enjoy from time to time — only a consciously serious effort will keep us focused on those essential films (American, European, and otherwise) which affect our consciousness in a potentially real and practical manner, and via a variety of routes, approach the complex topic of the modern temperament.
The human importance and uniqueness of Hollywood film productions in their greatest decades, critically agreed to be between the 1930s and 70s — after which only a minority of Hollywood films remained focused on problems of general everyday living, without an emphasis on crime, violence, mass tragedies and social hysteria  — is rooted in the idealistic vision and social temperament of the Jewish founders of almost all the famous Hollywood film studios: RKO; Warner Brothers; MGM; 20th Century Fox; Paramount; Universal International; Columbia Pictures, and United Artists.
Most of the Jewish founders of these cinematic artists’ studios were fleeing racial profiling and persecution, beginning in pre-1939 Nazi Germany; in North America, they found the correct democratic social environment, based on individual expressive freedom to create and to prosper by artistic entrepreneurship. The North American Constitution guaranteed and defended such freedom, even though in everyday American civilian life, Jews, like Americans of African descent, had to suffer much social and economic restrictions.
Already, we should see how these negative circumstances led to their very inclusion within the contents of films which came to be essential in defining the emergence of a modern temperament. But what became the cinematic basis of Hollywood’s uniqueness at providing a mass appeal that never existed before on such an influential pleasurable public media level, was the conversion of this suffering, persecution, bigotry, and marginalization by the Jewish experience into films expressing the OPPOSITE; in other words, films which project or convert a history of negative experiences, into positive realities.
The past success of Hollywood is based on this conversion, which obviously attracted all who encountered, or were allowed to encounter, it around the world. Subsequently, this period of classic Hollywood productions led to the industry being named ‘The Dream Factory’.
One might say of these films with their roundabout tribulations, but eventual happy, or stable, or positive endings: “Real life isn’t like that!”  But no! The response encouraged by these classic idealistic Hollywood films is: “Make it like that, then!”
It is here that film culture began to formulate its collective power of influence on the receptive modern consciousness, which had already been set in motion by the popularity of literature and books. Never before, or since, has the world received such a dose of idealism, optimism, and happiness as countless 20th Century American films provided. People began to live their lives according to the positive, idealistic ambitions and quests for happiness suggested by these Hollywood films, which are concerned with the everyday lifestyle and problems of realizing a modern temperament.
Contrary to any commonplace opinions some commentators may voice about the irrelevance of such idealistic Hollywood films to non-whites, whether North Americans or foreigners, strong and influential evidence exists of outstanding American films which do not support the view that specific ‘toe-the-line’ ranks exist in the social hierarchy of Western liberal democratic states for ‘others’, or non-whites, who are not considered eligible for the same rights of freedom traditionally reserved for white males, above all.
The topic of the modern temperament in Hollywood films obviously had to include film content in which issues and problems involving racial bigotries, restrictions, and stereotyping, were challenged and resolved, since the true development of the modern temperament involves social communication and professional acceptance of others previously stigmatized by segregation, misinterpretation, and disregard. Nevertheless, countless classic Hollywood films without non-whites, or with them, in menial, marginal, or lawless roles, focused on major moral issues between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ white characterizations, and this is highly helpful for non-white film viewers everywhere.
The noticeable absence of Afro-Americans for decades in most American films was simply an early defensive economic strategy by film studios not to alienate a majority white American film audience that did not want to see ‘blacks’ in their entertainment, since that ignited unpleasant feelings of historical guilt, and even an infantile abhorrence of social and racial ‘contamination’ through dialogue or cohabitation. Regardless of such opportunistic puerility, no other nation or their cinematic medium has faced the topic of a racially inclusive modern temperament like the American/Hollywood film industry.
This is proven by outstanding and, to some, shocking, unique modern films which no one serious about civilized society should miss; Hollywood films like John Huston’s ‘IN THIS OUR LIFE’ (1942); Arthur Leonard’s ‘BOY WHAT A GIRL’ (1947); Clarence Brown’s ‘INTRUDER IN THE DUST’ (1949); Alfred Werker’s ‘LOST BOUNDARIES’ (1949); Mark Robson’s ‘HOME OF THE BRAVE’ (1949); Elia Kazan’s ‘PINKY’ (1949); Joseph Mankiewicz’s ‘NO WAY OUT’ (1950); Gerald Mayer’s ‘BRIGHT ROAD’ (1953); Richard Brooks’ ‘BLACKBOARD JUNGLE’ (1955); Guy Green’s ‘A PATCH OF BLUE’ (1965); Stanley Kramer’s ‘GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINER’ (1967); and numerous other later Hollywood films which continue this socially positive trend in the creative modern temperament.
However, a new problem exists, where these earlier outstanding Hollywood films are rarely or never seen, or are easily available for the international public, whether in cinemas, TV, or home DVDs. This is a neglectful development, which is perhaps explained by a naïve, fickle tendency in American futuristic enthusiasms which decide an issue has been solved, and the artistic products which helped this progressive solution can now be shelved or abandoned as out dated material.
Such conclusive logic is not sound, however, neither for local American or foreign audiences, since these films possess a special freshness and creative bravery which current Hollywood films lack, due to a substantial loss of innovative independent film production and direction by idealistic contemporaries. In any case, such earlier Hollywood films remain of unquestionable value to other multi-racial societies outside of North America.
What makes the collective cultural influence of these essential films (and the creative literature which often inspired them) the best alternative to changes instigated by real socially and politically harmful conflicts, is the purely theatrical or fictitious methods of such powerful public art. The transformation of nations and societies by a constant massive consumption of such art via cinemas, TV, and book publishing, is a far more harmonious, educational and peaceful method of achieving civilized progress involving the cultivation of the modern temperament.
By the 1960s, we can point to a number of Hollywood films which singularly continued the responsive public’s tolerance considerably towards new manifestations of the modern temperament. One such profound modern film is ‘THE GRADUATE’ of 1967. Directed by Mike Nichols, who is a perfect example of the gifted idealistic immigrant, who, perhaps saw America and Hollywood as the creative opportunity to realize dreams of positive idealistic values for all, via film.
Nichols, whose original name is Russian-Jewish, not Nichols, fled Nazi Germany in 1938, at age seven with his family, and grew up in perhaps the greatest decade of idealistic Hollywood filmmaking, the 1940s, of which 1949 stands out as the last great year of Hollywood’s liberal idealistic progressivism, after which a conservative fear of Cold War Russian/Chinese-styled communism cramped the previous content and style of numerous Hollywood films which previously offered a better, or more morally tolerant, focus on the modern temperament, beneficial to North America itself.
Nichols, one of many Hollywood directors who, since the 1960s, has put back the liberal tolerance into Hollywood filmmaking, is comparable to the new unknown screen actor he chose to star in ‘THE GRADUATE’: Dustin Hoffman.
Nichols was just as idealistic and determined to become a cinematic artist; doing small jobs like night janitor, hotel desk clerk, and delivery truck driver while a student in Chicago; whereas Hoffman, in his struggle to become an employed actor, slept penniless on the floor of fellow actor, Gene Hackman’s New York apartment.
The first radical and meaningful break which ‘THE GRADUATE’ introduced in opposition to the biased favouritism of ‘handsome’ lead stars in previous Hollywood decades, was the choice of Dustin Hoffman, despite his short stature and homely unhandsome looks, to star in ‘The Graduate’, and win the heart of the pretty girl, whose trendy permissive mother he also sleeps with once, though questioning the fickle motive of her sexual lifestyle, no doubt influenced by trying to be part of feminist involvement with 1960s youth culture.
The frankness of the dialogue in the film, its rejection of shallow, meaningless moral conventions, which, for example, tries to prevent the courtship of Hoffman to the daughter of a woman he also slept with, plus the film’s thoughtful conclusion, where the reactionary arranged marriage of the daughter to someone more economically and conventionally suitable is rejected by her when she breaks away and joins Hoffman, the intellectually questioning graduate student, at the film’s end.
All this made ‘The Graduate’ a breakthrough landmark film, not to forget the famous Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack. Nevertheless, Nichols ‘The Graduate’, picked up and carried on themes of liberal tolerance from earlier brilliant classic Hollywood films like Frank Capra’s ‘IT HAPPENNED ONE NIGHT’ of 1934, William Wyler’s ‘THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES’ of 1946, and Sidney Lumet’s ‘THAT KIND OF WOMAN’ of 1959.
The modern temperament is conceived and presented in a realistic ideal manner by Hoffman’s radical questions in the film, which his girlfriend, played by Katherine Ross, supports; hence the film’s exciting use of romantic heterosexual love as a perennial ‘straight’ rebellion in an increasingly jaded America and world.
Nichol’s 1988 masterpiece film, ‘WORKING GIRL’, starring Harrison Ford and Melanie Griffith, takes the classic idealistic Hollywood theme brilliantly forward, in a scenario where the entire content of this wonderful film offers ideal moral influence for business firms, staff employees, investors, lovers, friends, who can make the world the fair place it should be, to everyone’s benefit. This too is central to creating the modern temperament.