Hollywood's America E-Book

Steven Mintz

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1074

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Fully revised, updated, and extended, the fifth edition of Hollywood’s America provides an important compilation of interpretive essays and primary documents that allows students to read films as cultural artifacts within the contexts of actual past events.

• A new edition of this classic textbook, which ties movies into the broader narrative of US and film history
• This fifth edition contains nine new chapters, with a greater overall emphasis on recent film history, and new primary source documents which are unavailable online
• Entries range from the first experiments with motion pictures all the way to the present day
• Well-organized within a chronological framework with thematic treatments to provide a valuable resource for students of the history of American film

Leseprobe

My Little Chickadee (1940). Universal Studios. Directed by Edward F. Cline. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach, www.doctormacro.info.

HOLLYWOOD’S AMERICA

UNDERSTANDING HISTORY THROUGH FILM

Fifth Edition

Edited by

STEVEN MINTZ, RANDY ROBERTS, and DAVID WELKY

This fifth edition first published 2016 © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc

Edition History: Brandywine Press (1e, 1994; 2e, 1997; 3e, 2001); Blackwell Publishing Ltd (4e, 2001)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for.

9781118976494 (paperback)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Dreamstime © Namolik

Contents

Preface

Introduction: The Social and Cultural History of American Film

The Birth of Modern Culture

The Birth of the Movies

Part I: The Silent Era

Introduction: Intolerance and the Rise of the Feature Film

Chapter 1: Workers in Early Film

Notes

Chapter 2: Silent Cinema as Historical Mythmaker

Notes

Chapter 3: The Revolt Against Victorianism

Notes

Chapter 4: Primary Sources

Edison v. American Mutoscope Company

“The Nickel Madness”

Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio

Boston Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1915

Analysis by Francis Hackett

Seeing Our Boys “Over There”

Part II: Hollywood's Golden Age

Introduction: Backstage During the Great Depression: 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade

Chapter 5: Depression America and Its Films

Notes

Chapter 6: The Depression's Human Toll

The Gangster Cycle

The Fallen Woman Cycle

Notes

Chapter 7: Depression Allegories

Notes

Chapter 8: African Americans on the Silver Screen

Notes

Chapter 9: Primary Sources

THE INTRODUCTION OF SOUND

“Pictures That Talk”

Review of Don Juan

“Silence is Golden”

FILM CENSORSHIP

The Sins of Hollywood, 1922

“The Don'ts and Be Carefuls”

The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930

The State Department on Hollywood in Germany, 1934

The State Department on Hollywood in Latin America, 1934

Part III: Hollywood in the World War II Era

Introduction: Hollywood's World War II Combat Films

Chapter 10: Movies and Great Britain: Anglophilia on Film

Notes

Chapter 11: Blockbuster as Propaganda

Summary of Casablanca

A Critical Examination of Casablanca

Chapter 12: John Wayne and Wartime Hollywood

Chapter 13: The Woman's Film

Notes

Chapter 14: Primary Sources

Sumner Welles to Franklin Roosevelt, 1941

THE 1941 ACADEMY AWARDS: HOLLYWOOD AND THE PRESIDENT

Correspondence between Walter Wanger and Stephen Early

Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Academy Awards Dinner

Walter Wanger to Stephen Early

Madeleine Carroll to Franklin Roosevelt

U.S. Senate Subcommittee Hearings on Motion Picture and Radio Propaganda, 1941

Excerpts fromThe Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry

Bureau of Motion Pictures Report: Casablanca

Part IV: Postwar Hollywood

Introduction: Double Indemnity and Film Noir

Chapter 15: The Red Scare in Hollywood

The Black List

Movies and Communism: From Mission to Moscow to Big Jim McLain

Notes

Chapter 16: Movies Grow Up

Notes

Chapter 17: The Morality of Informing

Notes

Chapter 18: Science Fiction as Social Commentary

Notes

Chapter 19: Primary Sources

United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1947)

HEARINGS REGARDING THE COMMUNIST INFILTRATION OF THE MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY

U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities, 1947

U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities, 1951

The Waldorf Statement

Part V: Hollywood in an Age of Turmoil

Introduction Bonnie and Clyde

Chapter 20: The Dark Side of the 1960s

Chapter 21: Films of the Late 1960s and Early 1970s

Alienation and Rebellion

The Hollywood Counterrevolution

Notes

Chapter 22: Film Capital and National Capital

Chapter 23: Reaffirming Traditional Values

Notes

Chapter 24: Presenting African Americans on Film

Chapter 25: Coming to Terms with the Vietnam War

Notes

Chapter 26: Primary Sources

Raymond Caldiero to Herbert L. Porter, 1972

Part VI: Hollywood in the Post-Studio Era

Introduction: A Changing Hollywood

Chapter 27: Feminism and Recent American Film

Production and Publicity

Knowing Me Knowing You

Rape and Allegory

Women and the Law

The Female Outlaw Couple

Resistance and Address

Gender, Genre, and Closure

Notes

Chapter 28: The Screen and the Cross

Chapter 29: Social Revolution on Screen

Queers as Actual Human Beings

Notes

Chapter 30: Encountering Distant Lands

Notes

Chapter 31: Superheroes for the Twenty-First Century

Chapter 32: Movies and the Construction of Historical Memory

Bibliography of Recent Books in American Film History

Reference Works

General Interpretations

Eras

Genres

Age, Class, Ethnicity, Gender, Religion, and Sexuality in Film

American History in Film

Special Topics

Index

EULA

List of Illustrations

Frontmatter

My Little Chickadee

(1940). Universal Studios. Directed by Edward F. Cline. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach, www.doctormacro.info.

Introduction

Intolerance

(1916). Wark Producing Corp. Directed by D.W. Griffith. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach, www.doctormacro.info.

The Immigrant

(1917). Mutual Film Corporation. Directed by Charles Chaplin. Mutual Film Corporation.

Douglas Fairbanks in

The Black Pirate

(1926). United Artists. Directed by Albert Parker. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach, www.doctormacro.info.

Part II

Footlight Parade

(1933). Warner Bros. Directed by Lloyd Bacon. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach, www.doctormacro.info.

Chapter 5

Public Enemy (

1931). Warner Bros. Directed by William A. Wellman. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach, www.doctormacro.info.

Chapter 7

The Grapes of Wrath

(1939). 20th Century Fox. Directed by John Ford. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach, www.doctormacro.info.

Part III

Objective, Burma!

(1945). Warner Bros. Directed by Raoul Walsh. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach, www.doctormacro.info.

Chapter 11

Casablanca

(1942). Warner Bros. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach, www.doctormacro.info.

Chapter 13

Mildred Pierce (1945). Warner Bros. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach, www.doctormacro.info

.

Part IV

Double Indemnity

(1944). Paramount Pictures. Directed by Billy Wilder. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach, www.doctormacro.info.

Chapter 17

On the Waterfront

(1954). Columbia Pictures. Directed by Elia Kazan. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach, www.doctormacro.info.

Part V

Photograph of the real-life bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Courtesy of the FBI.

Chapter 32

Portrait of Pocahontas, from a painting by William Sheppard, dated 1616. Courtesy of Prints and Photographs, Library of Congress.

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Preface

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Preface

Anyone who wishes to know about the United States would do well to go to the movies. Films represent much more than mere mass entertainment. Movies – even bad movies – are important sociological and cultural documents. Like any popular commercial art form, movies are highly sensitive barometers that both reflect and influence public attitudes. Since the beginning of twentieth century, films have recorded and even shaped American values, beliefs, and behavior.

Hollywood's America has two fundamental goals. The first is to use feature films to examine the central themes of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American culture. The book begins with a concise introduction that presents the history of American film against a backdrop of broader changes in popular culture since the late nineteenth century. It is then followed by a series of interpretive essays that examine how specific films, film genres, and developments within the film industry illuminate important aspects of American political, economic, and social life. These interpretive essays are supplemented with primary sources that offer first-hand looks at the movies' connection with the larger world. It concludes with an up-to-date bibliography of American film history.

As we shall see, the history of the movies is inextricably intertwined with broader themes and issues in American cultural history, such as the transition from Victorian culture, with its emphasis on refinement, self-control, and moralism, to modern mass culture. Popular films offer a valuable vehicle for examining public responses to the social disorder and dislocations of the Depression, the fears of domestic subversion of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the cultural and moral upheavals of the 1960s, the meaning and significance of the Vietnam War, and the growing multiculturalism within the United States. Through their plots, their characters, and their dramatization of ethical issues, movies have captured the changing nature of American culture.

The book's second aim is to help students develop tools for reading and interpreting visual texts. In a society in which visual images have become a dominant mode of entertainment and persuasion, used to promote both products and politicians, the ability to analyze visual texts may be as important as a facility with the written word.

Motion pictures contain a distinct set of rules and grammar that demands the same critical thinking and analytical skills one uses to read written texts. To analyze a poem, one must understand patterns of rhyme and rhythm and a poet's use of sound and imagery. Likewise, to interpret a film, one must understand how filmmakers use camerawork, editing devices, lighting, set design, and narrative to construct their text.

The films examined in this book are feature films – not documentaries or avant-garde or underground films. These are the classic movies that made Americans laugh and weep, shriek with terror, and tremble with excitement. They offered wit, suspense, romance, thrills, highlife, and lowlife. Highbrow critics might dismiss most Hollywood films as schlock, but these movies gave audiences more pleasure than any other art form and taught truly fundamental lessons dealing with intimacy, tenderness, initiation, lust, conflict, guilt, and loyalty. It was from the silver screen that Americans received their most intensive – if highly distorted – picture of their country's past, the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and the underside of American life.

For more than one hundred years, films have been the most influential instrument of mass culture in the United States. As America's “dream factory,” which manufactures fantasies and cultural myths much as a Detroit automaker produces cars, Hollywood has shaped the very way that Americans look at the world. Hollywood's films have played a pivotal role in “modernizing” American values. They have been instrumental in shaping Americans' deepest presuppositions about masculinity, femininity, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Movies have helped form Americans' self-image, and have provided unifying symbols in a society fragmented along lines of race, class, ethnicity, region, and gender. In certain respects subversive of traditional cultural values, movie culture created a mythic fantasy world that has helped Americans adapt to an ever-changing society.

IntroductionThe Social and Cultural History of American Film

One night a year America shuts down. All across the United States tens of millions of people press the buttons on their remote controls, sit back in their easy chairs, monitor their Twitter feeds, and become the world's largest congregation, watching a key event in the country's civic religion – the Oscars. Even though movie attendance has fallen steeply – to just one-third of what it was at the time of the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1927 – Americans still gawk at the limousines as they pull up to the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles, gaze at the stars' tuxedoes and gowns, and wait impatiently for a memorable moment – a naked streaker racing across the stage or a controversial acceptance speech.

Americans watch the Academy Awards presentations for many reasons: to briefly see a more human side of their favorite movie stars; to pit their judgment against that of the 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; to partake in the trashy pleasure of watching the glitziest extravaganza that Hollywood is capable of producing. But the Academy Awards ceremony also offers something more: it gives Americans a chance to recognize the movies that entertained them, engaged their emotions, expressed their deepest hopes and aspirations, and responded most successfully to their anxieties and fears. From All Quiet on the Western Front – a graphic portrait of the horrors and futility of war that came to embody the pacifism of the late 1920s and early 1930s – to 12 Years a Slave – a gut-wrenching take on race, power, and history – Oscar winners and nominees have offered a vivid record of shifting American values.

Of all the products of popular culture, none is more sharply etched in our collective imagination than the movies. Most Americans instantly recognize images produced by the movies: Charlie Chaplin, the starving prospector in The Gold Rush, eating his shoe, treating the laces like spaghetti. James Cagney, the gun-toting gangster in Public Enemy, shoving a grapefruit into the side of Mae Clarke's face. Paul Muni, the jobless World War I veteran in I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, who is asked how he lives and replies, “I steal.” Gloria Swanson, the fading movie goddess in Sunset Boulevard, belittling suggestions that she is no longer a big star: “It's the pictures that got small.” Even those who have never seen King Kong or Casablanca or The Godfather respond instantly to the advertisements, parodies, and TV skits that use those films' dialogue, images, and characters.

Intolerance (1916). Wark Producing Corp. Directed by D.W. Griffith. Courtesy of Jerry Murbach, www.doctormacro.info.

The Immigrant (1917). Mutual Film Corporation. Directed by Charles Chaplin. Mutual Film Corporation.

Movies are key cultural artifacts that offer a window into American cultural and social history. A mixture of art, business, and popular entertainment, the movies provide a host of insights into Americans' shifting ideals, fantasies, and preoccupations. Like any cultural artifact, the movies can be approached in a variety of ways. Cultural historians have treated movies as sociological documents that record the look and mood of particular historical settings; as ideological constructs that advance particular political or moral values or myths; as psychological texts that speak to individual and social anxieties and tensions; as cultural documents that present particular images of gender, ethnicity, class, romance, and violence; and as visual texts that offer complex levels of meaning and seeing.

This book offers examples of how to interpret classic American films as artifacts of a shifting American culture. It begins with a concise summary and interpretation of film history that locates the evolution of the movie industry against a broader backdrop of American cultural and social history.