(Alfred Hitchcock – British and Hollywood film director, producer)

Many film historians have remarked upon the many great works of cinema that emerged from this period of highly regimented film-making. One reason this was possible is that, with so many movies being made, not every one had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a medium-budget feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors: Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles and often regarded as the greatest film of all time, fits that description.

In other cases, strong-willed directors like Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock (pic. 2) and Frank Capra battled the studios in order to achieve their artistic visions. The apogee of the studio system may have been the year 1939, which saw the release of such classics as The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Young Mr. Lincoln, Wuthering Heights, Only Angels Have Wings, Ninotchka, Gunga Din, and The Roaring Twenties. Among the other films from the Golden Age period that are now considered to be classics: Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood, It's a Wonderful Life, It Happened One Night, King Kong, Citizen Kane, Some Like It Hot, All About Eve, The Searchers, Breakfast At Tiffany's, North by Northwest, Dinner at Eight, Rebel Without a Cause, Double Indemnity, Mutiny on the Bounty,City Lights, Red River, The Manchurian Candidate, The Bishop's Wife, Singin' in the Rain, The Great Escape, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Roman Holiday,Jezebel, and Sabrina.[ Lillies Of The Field ] Guess Who's Coming To Dinner]

2. Style

The style of Classical Hollywood cinema, as elaborated by David Bordwell, has been heavily influenced by the ideas of the Renaissance and its resurgence of mankind as the focal point.

Thus, classical narration progresses always through psychological motivation, i.e. by the will of a human character and its struggle with obstacles towards a defined goal. The aspects of space and time are subordinated to the narrative element which is usually composed of two lines of action: A romance intertwined with a more generic one such as business or, in the case of Alfred Hitchcock films, solving a crime.

Time in classical Hollywood is continuous, since non-linearity calls attention to the illusory workings of the medium. The only permissible manipulation of time in this format is the flashback. It is mostly used to introduce a memory sequence of a character, e.g. Casablanca.

Likewise, the treatment of space in classic Hollywood strives to overcome or conceal the two-dimensionality of film ("invisible style") and is strongly centered upon the human body. The majority of shots in a classical film focus on gestures or facial expressions (medium-long and medium shots).

André Bazin once compared classical film to a photographed play in that the events seem to exist objectively and that cameras only give us the best view of the whole play.

This treatment of space consists of four main aspects: centering, balancing, frontality and depth. Persons or objects of significance are mostly in the center part of the picture frame and never out of focus. Balancing refers to the visual composition, i.e. characters are evenly distributed throughout the frame. The action is subtly addressed towards the spectator (frontality) and set, lighting (mostly three-point lighting) and costumes are designed to separate foreground from the background (depth).

The characters in Classical Hollywood Cinema typically are the causal agents. They also have clearly definable traits. They are active and goal oriented. In the classical Hollywood style space and time are unified, continuous and linear. They appear as a unified whole to match our perception of time and space in reality. This is for example achieved by the 180º rule or by the relative lack of jump cuts (cuts that leave out a time period of a continous action.