30's Blog Post

The movie that we created was named The Struggle. Our movie is about a man named Dom Perri, played by Henry Fonda, who looses his job in the work force, and how his kids must quit school and go to work. The movie follows our main character through his stuggles and harships eventually to make it to the end where he finds this amazing job to bring his family from poverty to prosperity. He starting working at a meat packing industry where he was able to make a decent living, untill he has to get layed off because of the tough economic times. The family is then forced to rent house after house, barley being able to pay the monthly rent. Through all the trouble, Dom Perri is able to find a job as a construction worker. The style of this film is consistant with showing the horrific times for family in the great depression as well as sending our message that times do get better eventually.

Our genre of our movie is a drama. We chose to construct a drama film because it fits well with the history of the time. A lot of people were going through these same times, so we figured it would be a good thing to be able to relate to some of these people. This film falls into the catergory of a drama because we can see all the hardships and family problems that come with the Great Depression.

We chose 20th Centry Fox because they made a lot of drama films throughout the 30's that go along with this one. During this time, 20th centry and Fox had merged together to create one studio, so obviously both of these studios were in a depression themselves and needed help. We would want the film to be at a medium scale, considering that we want to be very known, but also we do not want to wear people out with the same stories.

Our Director, Henry King was a hard-working and contract director of 20th Centry Fox. We wanted a reliable director, as well one who could accuretly depict all of the struggles of the family with perfection. We chose Henry Fonda for our lead actor and protagonist from his roll in The Grapes of Wrath, which we thought he did a fenominal job at. We were not as concerned with the other actors for the family, because we really wanted to focus on how Dom Perri felt about the whole situation. In other words, we didnt want Dom Perri to get shadowed by some of the other actors. The other actors that we chose for the family are Jackie Searle, Jane Withers, and Billy Mahan.

The effectos of the Hays code were tremendous to the making of our movie. We could not show Dom Perri stealing anything such as meat or gains for his family to eat. Considering this movie took place in the depression, a lot of people would be stealing anything just to make ends meet. We couldnt also show any drug use to make the family memebers quality of life any better. We could not show the huband and wife of the family either in the same bed or kissing lavishly to make their relationship closer in hard times. We couldnt show the family starving of food either, which would be a great scene to show how badly the family was suffering. Really the only technology we would use would be a black and white film to show the difficulties of the time period. We would also want black and white coloring, so we would be able to relate to people without color televisions.

I think that we should only have the main actor, Henry Fonda instead of including the family right at the beginning. The focus of the movie is the main actor.  I think a good ending would be for him to reunite with his family and for them to live happily ever after.