Hollywood's America

Understanding History Through Film

Steven Mintz, Randy W. Roberts, David Welky

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118976524
• Edition: 5
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

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

Part I
The Silent Era

Introduction
Intolerance and the Rise of the Feature Film

Intolerance (1916), the great film director D.W. Griffith's epic attack on bigotry throughout history, was American silent cinema's greatest artistic achievement and a ruinous box-office failure. Created in response to charges that Griffith's notorious Birth of a Nation (1915) was bigoted, as well as to protest efforts to censor that earlier epic, Intolerance interweaves four stories that illustrate “how hatred and intolerance, through all the ages, have battled against love and charity”: the fall of Babylon, the crucifixion of Christ, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of the French Huguenots in 1572, and the wrenching poverty and exploitation of the modern American urban worker. Initially, the silent epic attracted large crowds. Soon, however, increasingly bewildered audiences shrank.

In a masterful display of film editing, Griffith cuts among four distinct stories: a mountain girl's struggle to warn the Babylonian king Belshazzar of the imminent arrival of the Persian army; Christ's march toward Calvary; a French Protestant's effort to rescue his fiancée from French mercenaries intent on killing the Huguenots; and, in the modern story, labor strikers battling the state militia, crowded tenements, wretched slums, an unjust legal system, and intrusive social reformers. Linking these four stories is a recurring shot of actress Lillian Gish rocking a cradle, accompanied by lines from Walt Whitman:

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking.

Today as yesterday, endlessly rocking, ever bringing the same joys and sorrows.

A dramatic illustration of film's artistic possibilities, the picture cost at least $300,000 to make – more than three times the cost of Birth of a Nation. Much of this was spent on the grandiose Babylonian set, perhaps the most famous movie set ever built. But in the end the film disappointed as spectacle and went unheard as message. Its plea for peace and tolerance was ignored as the nation crept closer to involvement in World War I.

Intolerance was only the most dramatic example of how rapidly the movies matured during their first two decades. As early as 1909, primitive films that drew upon the conventions of vaudeville and featured sight gags, simple skits, pranks and practical jokes, chases and rescues, and scenes of everyday life began giving way to the modern feature film. The earliest movies had been quite brief, usually involving a single shot, often taken from a distance. Newer films were longer and more complex in structure. Finding inspiration in the novel and the dramatic theater rather than vaudeville, these new films emphasized storytelling, and were likely to fix on individual psychology and personality. The new feature films offered a distinctive aesthetic and visual style as well, as lighting, camera angles, editing, framing, and camera placement were designed to tell the story as clearly and unobtrusively as possible. To focus the viewers' attention on the film's narrative, directors kept camera angles at eye level and framed shots to keep action in the screen's center. Directors used dissolves and fade-outs to convey the passage of time, and cross-cutting to link chains of separate events. Styles of acting changed as well. Exaggerated pantomime increasingly gave way to more restrained forms of expression; emotions more and more were conveyed by facial expressions rather than by elaborate hand gestures.

D.W. Griffith contributed greatly to the creation of the modern narrative film. But in important respects his epic Intolerance departed from the emerging conventions of the classical Hollywood style. Indeed, the film's financial failure may have been due to its radical deviation from audiences' notions of what constituted a feature film. At a time when audiences expected movies to tell an entertaining story, Griffith's goal was to send a clear message. His film consisted of four separate allegories, featuring unnamed characters (like the “Mountain Girl” or the “Friendless One” or the “Dear One”) at a time when viewers expected to see a unified narrative focusing on individual characters. This refusal to individualize his characters may have been a large reason for its failure to grip its viewers.

Chapter 1
Workers in Early Film
Silent Agitators: Militant Labor in the Movies, 1909–1919

Michael Shull

Today, silent films are rarely watched curiosities, except for a handful of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton comedies and a few notable epics. Watching a silent film is a vastly different experience from watching a modern blockbuster. The pace is slower, the acting style broader, and the images grainier. About 90 percent of movies made during the silent era are lost forever, often because the nitrate-based film they were printed on deteriorates at a rapid pace. Few modern Americans miss them.

It is more appropriate to view the silents as a distinct art form than as “primitive” films that pointed the way toward the talkies. Silence freed artists to use visual imagery rather than words to tell a story. As moviemaking matured, innovative directors and cameramen created stunning, lyrical scenes that immersed viewers in their cinematic spell.

As Michael Shull observes, early motion pictures were also more explicitly political than today's. Movies grew up alongside urbanization and industrialization. Their audience consisted largely of immigrants seeking escape after long hours working in factories. Many films addressed issues of immediate concern such as working conditions, unions, and strikes. These were cinema's Wild West days, before the emergence of large, corporate studios tamed the sometimes subversive messages projected on screen.

“Silent agitators” was a slang term for paste-up sticker slogans the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) used to urge the working class to organize and resist both real and perceived injustices of capitalism. Soon another form of silent communication began to address class consciousness and labor activism while entertaining millions across class lines. Motion pictures began to tell stories that spoke to a working-class audience.

The turmoil and diversity of the movies' early years allowed many voices to be heard in this new form of silent entertainment. In 1909, short programs of one-half reel and one-reel “flickers” were the standard fare shown at thousands of small makeshift places of exhibition, usually referred to as nickelodeons. Soon, longer “feature” films appeared in a growing number of converted stage theaters, movie houses, and luxurious theaters known as “picture palaces.” Unlike the Hollywood-based motion picture industry dominated by less than a dozen studios that evolved by the mid-1930s, in the 1910s there were over one hundred companies located in New York, New Jersey, Florida, and the Midwest, as well as in California. During this decade, more than 150 films (an average of two films a month) portrayed workers taking some form of direct action such as a strike against their employers. These “Capital vs. Labor” films addressed an “astonishing range” of the social issues of the day, often with considerable candidness. The somewhat balanced treatment dissolved, however, in the wake of World War I, the “Red Scare” that followed, and with the consolidation of the film industry in the conservative environment of Southern California.

The dominant message repeatedly appearing in the early Capital vs. Labor films is that the working class is inherently good, but that it can be easily led astray by militant outside labor agitators; consequently, it is in the best interest of the nation for labor to abstain from violence and to seek a harmoniously symbiotic relationship with capital. Likewise, the films remind capitalists that they must not mistreat faithful workers, and that they often share the guilt with “agitators” when trouble develops. Capitalists must change or deserve the hateful opposition their actions foment.

This capital versus labor friction is usually mitigated by some form of reconciliation. A cross-class romance frequently terminates labor violence and results in the granting of concessions to the employees, giving the appearance of resolving or eliminating the sources of class antagonism. A typical example of this genre was The Eternal Grind (Famous Players/Paramount, 1916), in which silent screen idol Mary Pickford stars as Mary Martin, one of three sisters working as seamstresses in a sweatshop owned by James Wharton. One of his sons, Owen, is a settlement worker who labors in the dirty, crowded factory under an assumed name so he can better understand worksite conditions. Handsome Owen and “little” Mary fall in love. But when Owen is seriously injured at the sweatshop after falling through some rotten flooring, Mary refuses to go to his bedside until his capitalist father agrees to pay his “employees living wages” and make the Wharton factory a “fit place to work in.”

On several occasions, the films culminate with a pledge by the capitalist to his/her working-class sweetheart, symbolizing a form of class-based pre-nuptial agreement, to respect the rights of the workers. This is particularly poignant in The Blacklist (Lasky/Paramount, 1916). In this film, the mine owner, shot in the name of the working class by a miner's daughter, who is actually in love with him, solemnly pledges to her from his sickbed that in the future they will strive together to resolve the issues that have separated capital and labor.

Capitalists are occasionally shown aiding their workers, sometimes secretly and even during periods of labor strife. In Destruction (Fox, 1915), the capitalist's handsome son, Jack, for example, persuades a baker not to prosecute the starving laborer's son who had stolen bread while his father was out on strike. The print cartoon cliché of the top-hatted, cigar-smoking, bloated capitalist, while certainly exploited in some films, never became a universal stereotype on America's movie screens. Instead, American films caricatured capitalists by revealing their class-based biases, which were disrespectful of or detrimental to the well-being of the working class. Screen portrayals of this bias show capitalists wantonly neglecting the basic needs of laborers, hypocritically rationalizing their exploitation of the working class in the guise of social altruism, or engaging in mean-spirited patronizing of their employees. For example, in Why? (Eclair, 1913) a young man of the privileged classes has a nightmare about capitalist abuses of labor, including vivid images of railroad ties made from worker's skeletons and a seamstress who is forced to dye the thread of the embroidery she sews with blood obtained from a self-inflicted wound.

Capitalism itself is seldom attacked head on in anti-capital motion pictures. But a comeuppance for egregiously greedy capitalists does occur in a number of films, such as Money (United Keanograph/World, 1915). A Rockefeller surrogate named John D. Maximillian and his evil associate are killed in a climactic storm and Maximillian's palatial home destroyed.

The negative portrayal of America's wealthy elite is particularly vigorous in the “modern” story portion of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (Biograph, 1916) – a film nearly three hours in length and at the time the most expensive film to have been produced in the United States. An extravagant party held at the cavernous mansion of mill owner Jenkins – the scenes tinted a deep red – graphically suggests the wealthy are living off the blood of their workers. When the stone-faced Jenkins is privately approached by his spinster sister to financially support her newly sponsored Moral Uplifters Society – the footage now in stark black and white – the capitalist agrees, coldly noting that he will raise the funds by cutting his workers' wages 10%. His communication of this decision to the mill's manager over the phone further accentuates Jenkins' remoteness from his workers. Although Jenkins' factories are featured in Intolerance, the film also clearly identifies him as the leading member of a consortium called Allied Manufacturers. The name imparts the concept of a monopolistic group that is joined for a common purpose, united in an alliance directed against the interests of labor.

Wages, invariably at or near subsistence levels, are arbitrarily reduced in several motion pictures in order to make up for expenses incurred through the irresponsible or profligate activities of the capitalist owners' or managers' families. The supposed anti-capitalist message in these films is especially effective since it is textually demonstrated that class conflict has occurred because of the selfishness of insensitive individuals rather than because of the failures of the capitalist system, such as business losses resulting from a period of economic downturn. A strike that leads to the destruction of an immigrant Lithuanian family is directly attributable to such a wage cut in The Jungle (All Star, 1914), which closely adheres to Upton Sinclair's famous novel. This story of economic injustice and working-class resistance in Chicago's meatpacking industry, however, differs from most films of the era by advocating that socialism is a humane alternative to the ravages of capitalism.

Unlike the few motion pictures that addressed labor issues after 1920, many earlier Capital vs. Labor films actually take place on or near work sites at “the point of production.” Some of these films, including The Jungle and The Eternal Grind, contain extended scenes of stained-clothed laborers performing their ...