THE human value of most of those American/Hollywood films classified by TCM as classic movies today resides precisely in creative film-stories with no specific glorification of any society, culture, or individual shaped by monolithic inherited mental habits, customs, or traditions embraced as dogma, and obeyed without ongoing question.

The uniqueness of classic American/Hollywood cinema is rooted in this quality of intellectual freedom which explores a definition and practise of culture based in the present, even as it changes (rather than assuming a documentary projection of how ‘the future’ will look) in preference to merely being the mouthpiece or reproduction of frozen a priori cultural values.

Cinematic freedom
The popularity of American/Hollywood cinema became based on this critical search for contemporary cultural morality via the artist’s (writer, poet, film director, playwright, visual artist, musician) exploration of human interaction, cause and effect, self-conscious experience of conscience, and detached observation.
This is so rooted in basic human freedom and honesty rather than opportunistic favoritism towards one’s racial culture that, increasingly, we see films and other manifestations of art in well-known tradition-oriented nations today, such as India, China, Japan, England, Africa, etc, building on classic Hollywood’s preserved cinematic achievements.
The attraction of such an American example of art, even by societies sometimes critical of North America, is because such art is not a reflection of the American State, but of a people’s cultural freedom, guaranteed nevertheless (for example) in President Abraham Lincoln’s famous statement of “government of the people, for the people, and by the people”, which is assumed by the best American artists of conscience, rather than artists of some doggedly obeyed ideology.
It is those artists who create films (or any art) from the open viewpoint of the human conscience, who also best represent the leadership of responsible uncontaminated freedom not associated with an a priori religious, political, or governmental opinion, even though such artists may personally share certain religious, political, or governmental values.
The work of conscientious art is a human value in itself, distinct from any type of pre-organized content. In this way, such works of art can become a positive addition to human values; a direction which will emerge during its making, rather than being prefabricated and artificially inserted within the art-form being used.

‘Grand Hotel’
A profound example of such art is the famous classic film, ‘GRAND HOTEL’ of 1932, which TCM presented a few months ago, directed by Edmond Goulding, an Englishman and just one of a multitude of foreign filmmakers from Ireland, Scotland, Germany, France, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Italy, Greece, China, Japan, Mexico and Brazil who became America’s and some of the world’s most outstanding directors and cast members after being permitted to work as artists and settle there, especially since the Franklin D. Roosevelt open-minded government from 1933 to 1943.
‘Grand Hotel’ was Goulding’s first great film in America, a 1932 Academy Award winner, followed by a succession of stunningly humane and uplifting films.
What was Goulding’s creative secret? What made his films soar with that perennial social relevance that helps produce a classic? In ‘Grand Hotel’, Goulding focuses on a group of diverse characters who interact with each other while staying at a hotel.
Even though the characters  — some female, played unforgettably by two of Hollywood’s great actresses, Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford, and leading male characters played  by John and Lionel Barrymore — are Whites, a few with Russian and German backgrounds, Goulding does not represent them from an inherited cultural perspective. They are human characters personally responsible for their thoughts, opinions, and actions in the present.
In this way, ‘Grand Hotel’ is an artistic masterpiece which, by its very individual conception, does not implicate collective inherited cultures as responsible for human behaviour, but each specific individual.
Classic films like ‘Grand Hotel’ therefore create culture as an original conceptual idea rather than on a simplified inherited level, for example, based on the type of traditional foods we might eat, traditional clothes we might like to wear, etc. It is the film that creates culture, not examples of an a priori culture that creates the film.

Modern cultural relevance
For this reason, classic films like ‘Grand Hotel’ helped enormously in shaping the conscientious morals of film audiences anywhere, but especially in the USA, Canada, the Caribbean, and South America, whose citizens are faced with creating a contemporary modern culture out of a history of fragmented original cultural experiences, and diverse distant origins.
In ‘Grand Hotel’, it is a hotel which provides the unifying signifier for our focus on a variety of individuals, in the larger way that the concept of a ‘nation’ does the same for its citizens. Goulding also strengthens the artistic form and content of ‘Grand Hotel’ by providing its beginning and end with a lone observant character in the hotel’s lobby, whose detached voice-over or soliloquy briefly admits the various experiences we observed. This delivers the film as a self-sufficient representative of culture.

‘The Great Lie’
In ‘THE GREAT LIE’ of 1941, also another recent TCM feature film, Goulding presents a story so modern it seems made in 2013. By putting two great actresses, the legendary British-born Mary Astor and the strong-willed American Bette Davis, as rivals sharing the pleasure of a good-natured adventurous playboy, the whole issue of differing temperaments finding their calling in life is evoked on the basis of the fulfillment of individual human character.
Similarly, in the film, Goulding presents a large Afro-American family, who, as live-in servants to Bette Davis’s affluent family, act out a noticeably relaxed social interactive freedom quite different from the general racial reality of Afro-Americans in the 1940s, when ‘The Great Lie’ was made.
Director Goulding therefore establishes a better influential EXAMPLE for social interaction between human parties with a history of unequal rights and relations. In one scene, the young son of the servant family is shown singing in the fork of a tree, but his is not a typical ‘negro spiritual’ with any hint of inherited cultural style, but rather a distinct melodious, individual human voice, no doubt projected by Goulding as the source of artistic originality which brought countless Afro-Americans to stardom and success.

The artist’s role
Individual artists play a central role in many Goulding films. In ‘Grand Hotel’, Greta Garbo is a sensitive, well-known actress; in ‘The Great Lie’, Mary Astor is an egotistic, flamboyant, classical pianist; in ‘THE RAZOR’S EDGE’ of 1946, Tyrone Power, in perhaps his best role, is a seeker of knowledge who travels to India in his search for wisdom and self-fulfillment; but the India that helps him is one of spiritual wisdom, philosophy, and objective detachment, not one of complicated rituals and ethnic particularities.
In a sense, this is a creative viewpoint similar to classic cinema’s education of the human conscience as our guiding light.