Tragedy has appealed to audiences ever since screen drama was perfected during the early part of the twentieth century. Their essential appeal ran to the same audience that existed for turn-of-the-century stage melodramas, aimed mostly toward women, who appreciated the diversion from their daily lives.

The essential elements of screen tragedy -- which manifests itself most obviously in the so-called "women's picture" of the 1930s and early 1940s -- are a loyal and loving heroine, or an admirable hero, or both. Not only must they have qualities that audiences can either identify with or aspire to, they must also face the events in their lives with dignity and grace. The most familiar tragic hero is Hamlet, the Shakespearean Prince of Denmark whose only flaw is the inability to make decisions. However, few stage works can aspire to anything even resembling Hamlet's depth or complexity. Most popular stage melodrama never gets beyond the most superficial elements of tragedy. That, however, proved enough for most movie audiences, who devoured tragedy on a multitude of levels for decades.

The celebrated director/producer D.W. Griffith was the most prominent purveyor of screen tragedy from the silent years. His own sense of characterization was formed in the stage melodrama, and he seldom advanced beyond that level in the characterizations of his own movies -- from Judith of Bethulia (1913) to Abraham Lincoln (1930 -- the latest of Griffith's extant movies, The Struggle being generally unavailable), he gave his characters the most easily understandable emotions and motivations, which seem simplistic today but made his heroes and heroines among the most beloved of general film audiences of the late 'teens. His heroines and heroes were always virtuous and trusting, often to their initial undoing, and this was a good representation of the way that audiences of the era wished to see themselves in the era before, during, and immediately after World War I. Griffith's quintessential films are True Heart Susie and Broken Blossoms.

The dawn of the so-called Jazz Age of the early 1920s, however, saw a change in public taste that Griffith was unprepared for. Audiences became increasingly sophisticated and demanded more depth in their movies, which Griffith was unprepared to provide. But other filmmakers =were=, most notably William Wellman, a former military pilot-turned-director. In 1927, Wellman directed Wings, an enduring epic of the First World War that beguiled audiences with its depiction of a pair of heroes corrupted by their experiences during World War I, and a plucky heroine (Clara Bow, achingly beautiful) who becomes more worldly wise than the two men in her life while serving as an ambulance driver in France.

The movies of the late 1920s and early 1930s were populated by an increasingly self-reliant brand of woman, capable of taking care of herself, and tragedy on the screen was a subtext -- characters didn't suffer because of their innocence but because of their bad decision-making. A fairly typical melodrama of its day was Christopher Strong (1933), a romantic tale of a politician (Colin Clive) who is nearly destroyed by his infatuation with a lady pilot (Katharine Hepburn) -- who gamely sacrifices herself for the good of all. During the same era, RKO also brought Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage to the screen, starring Leslie Howard as an idealistic but too-trusting medical student whose life and career are destroyed by the venal, grasping waitress (Bette Davis, in her first major screen role) he thought he loved.

The 1930s saw a toning down of some of these attributes, as Hollywood created the so-called Production Code as an effort at self-censorship, restricting the use of certain kinds of characterizations and plots. For a time, the world on screen seemed more squeaky clean, and tragedies took on a more conventional profile over the years that followed -- one of the classics of the genre is To Each His Own (1946), a wartime melodrama steeped in conventional, even archaic morality, in which Olivia de Havilland, faced with having a child out-of-wedlock in a small town, leaves it on another woman's doorstep and sees it adopted by her neighbor. She comes to regret her decision and tries to undo it, only to have her son taken away from her; she only gets to introduce herself as his mother, in England during the war, on the eve of his flying a dangerous mission over German territory.

The late 1930s and early 1940s were the heyday for screen tragedy, owing in part to the need to appeal to female audiences, who preferred melodrama to action/adventure films and, in large measure, decided what movies were seen by couples. The range of material covered by this category is staggering, and some of it still plays well today -- Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory (1939), starring Bette Davis, reveals the complexity that the best of these screen tragedies could display as her character, stricken with a fatal disease, evolves from vanity and selfishness into a warm, caring, compassionate woman. The movie touches as many buttons as is possible to touch and reached men as well as women, achieving a unique status among "women's pictures."

The nature of tragedy changed as the 1940s waned. By the mid-1950s, the nature of virtue -- public and private -- and cynicism became the dominant mood of tragedy. Billy Wilder's Ace In the Hole (1953), starring Kirk Douglas, defined the best films in the genre during this era -- a hard-boiled, cynical reporter with a chip on his shoulder stumbles on a minor story involving a man trapped in a remote mountain cave and parlays it into a national event, putting him back on the path to success but killing the victim and himself in the process. Rather tellingly, the movie was a failure in its own time (despite being repackaged and remarketed with the more upbeat title The Big Carnival), and only found an audience in the 1970's. Much more successful in its own time was Elia Kazan's savage A Face In the Crowd (1957), a tragedy loosely based on the careers of Elvis Presley and Arthur Godfrey (whose career on television -- as a beloved star-turned-hated-tyrant -- also provided the basis for Jose Ferrer's The Great Man), about a young media star's corruption and fall.

Tragedy as a pure genre fell by the wayside during the 1960s as television came to take the lead in most dramatic areas over film. David Lean's Dr. Zhivago (1965) had its elements of classic screen tragedy which, coupled with its sheer size and scope, made it into a compelling experience for tens of millions and one of the top moneymakers of its decade. Occasionally, a small film would emerge that played off of a tragic plot line -- Jack O'Connell's 1963 drama Greenwich Village Story, despite its slightly mawkish elements, was a compelling piece of low-budget cinema with a surprisingly early anti-drug message. But the tone of the decade generally ran against tragedy; even stories about chronic illness such as Sweet November (1968) -- in which Sandy Dennis played a terminally ill woman -- had a mood of zaniness that seems mind-boggling in retrospect.

The genre became even more rare during the 1970s; it seldom even appeared within other genres. The loosening of moral standards accompanying the youth culture's rise to prominence and the social convulsions associated with Watergate made it difficult to put over tragedy as subject matter -- people wanted to laugh, dance to disco music, engage in recreational sex and drug use, and generally enjoy themselves, not cry. The few weepy pictures that did appear -- Love Story and The Way We Were, among the most successful -- being unbearable in their mawkishness and simplicity. In more recent years, the reality of the AIDS epidemic has restored some of the basis for successful screen tragedy -- Philadelphia (1993) was the valedictory effort in a quest by the activist side of the film community to restore serious subjects as a viable basis for filmmaking. Although it differs from traditional screen tragedy in numerous ways, not least of all its subject matter, this movie seems to hold the possibility of a return to serious subjects, and topically-oriented tragedy.