Reviews in American History

Reviews in American History 32.1 (2004) 97-104

Hollywood, the Working Class, and Emotional Realism

Randy D. McBee

John Bodnar. Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film . Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xxxiv + 284 pp. Notes, sources, and index. $42.95.

Gangsters, brutes, union organizers, housewives, and boxers are just some of the working-class characters that have appeared in movies since the 1930s, characters which are the focus of John Bodnar's new book, Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film. The book explores the ways in which ordinary men and women were portrayed in feature films and the larger relationship between the movies and the "tensions that emanated from powerful political traditions like liberalism and democracy" (p. xv). Since the beginning of movies, Hollywood has depicted some of the battles between labor and capital. Yet films, Bodnar argues, are "sites where many of the most powerful ideas in a culture could be represented at the same time," sites where "attitudes that were rational and emotional, moral and immoral, angry and sentimental" merged (p. xviii). In other words, films since the 1930s, and especially after WWII, presented a world that generally was more complex and more emotional than the world represented by mainstream politics. To a certain extent, Bodnar argues that traditional politics have been left behind. Labor unions and political parties have lost much of their influence and power, and capitalism has rebounded from the challenge it faced during the Depression. Yet Bodnar notes that the push for gender and racial equality and the search for personal rights suggest that liberalism and democracy remain evident. In other words, Blue-Collar Hollywood attempts to "recognize the endurance of traditional politics in mass culture as it documents the demise of customary ways of acting in and seeing the political and social world" (p. xxviii).

Films from the 1930s did indeed provide a critique of capital, but films, Bodnar argues, also suffered from what he calls "political cross-dressing," which was "marked by the merger of all kinds of 'grim antagonisms': worker versus capital, collective versus individual, male versus female" (p. 3). In short, 1930s Hollywood did not simply defend union power or offer an [End Page 97] uncritical view of capitalism. Instead, Bodnar argues that Hollywood chose a middle ground and produced films that "affirmed both the need for individuals to explore their personal dreams and the reality of economic and political exploitation in the nation as well as the requirement that greater measures of fairness and cooperation be implemented" (p. 1). Gangster films, for example, typically dealt with the failure of capitalism and how that failure threatened American society. Films about labor, like Our Daily Bread (1934), emphasized the need for collective action to counter the devastation of the Depression. The Capra films featured middle-class men working to establish a more just community and their own sense of self-realization. And films about the family, like The Grapes of Wrath (1940), offered an example of Hollywood dealing with the crisis of the American family and "its place within a larger society of democratic and antidemocratic forces" (p. 41).

Yet while liberalism and democracy remained prominent in these Hollywood productions, these films offered little hope in terms of solving the problems Americans faced or offered little hope that the common man could solve these problems. Gangster films generally ended with the gangster punished, if not killed, for his gratuitous lifestyle while implicitly supporting the theme that a "working-class life led mostly to hardship" (p. 15). The Capra films often emphasized that escape from a working-class life was a more likely response than trying to reform it. And films often presented a working class that lacked the imagination or motivation to organize concerted political action to try and escape their desperate lives, a theme apparent in The Grapes of Wrath. In the film version of The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad does leave his family to take part in what Bodnar describes as a "vaguely defined struggle...