The Great Depression in the United States took place over the entire decade of the 1930s, hitting the country hard and setting back the economy in profound ways. After a stock market crash in 1929, jobs were harder to come by, the gross domestic product fell by about 15%, and industrial cities struggled to keep their economies afloat. Before Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted Social Security and other government programs to help the poor, those without means were living in squalid conditions and the national conscience was traumatized by the sense that nothing was secure, even the next meal. In spite of this downturn, however, the film industry continued to thrive; indeed, many businesspeople who couldn't find jobs in the business world began to try their hand at the arts, and the movies that were released throughout the course of the 1930s reflect a movie business that tried to bring people hope in a time of darkness, while also representing and reflecting the particular hardships of that decade.
While the effects of the Great Depression were not so evident at first, slowly more and more works of art began to reflect, and eventually seek to transcend, the effects of the economic downturn. Novels like Richard Wright's Native Son and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath depicted a country in crisis, and sought to zoom in on the personal experiences of some of society's most vulnerable. In popular culture, however, the aim was less to show the difficulties and tragedies of life than to provide a rose-tinted escape from them; this is exemplified in the bubbly wit of songwriter Cole Porter, the lilting music of George Gershwin, and the witty and charming characters in films from this era. In film, dancers like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers floating across the dance floor gave people an image of joy and elegance they couldn't otherwise find in their lives. Another significant genre of the era was the gangster movie, which gave viewers an image of the "self-made man" that had drifted away during the Depression.
An especially significant genre that came out of the Great Depression was the screwball comedy, a category typified by Frank Capra's It Happened One Night. A hallmark of the screwball genre is its often-combative banter. In an article about art production during the Great Depression in The New Yorker, Caleb Crain writes that this combative dialogue "came from applying the hardboiled style of crime stories to the softhearted subject matter of a couple falling in love. An adversarial style may have felt appropriate in a romantic context at the time. Unemployment not only placed stress on couples by forcing them to go without; it also deprived the man, the traditional provider, of his power and authority." In a moment when job security was at an all-time low, tensions between heterosexual men and women were also high, as men felt disenfranchised and women felt deprived. This tension is at the core of the contentious chemistry between Peter and Ellie in It Happened One Night. Frank Capra's film set the precedent for what constituted a screwball comedy, beginning a trend for the following decade that delighted audiences while also making them feel like their struggles and concerns were reflected onscreen. As Crain writes, "This nonchalance is what artists had to pull off during the Depression. They had to keep company with misery without adopting it as their purpose. With charm and cunning, they had to come up with different ways of having fun."
