Hollywood Genres and Post-war America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir (Cinema and Society)

230 Pages·2006·8.41 MB·English

by  Mike Chopra-Gant

Hollywood Genres and Postwar America
Cinema and Society series
GENERAL EDITOR: JEFFREY RICHARDS
Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present
Anthony Aldgate & Jeffrey Richards
Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema
Colin McArthur
British Cinema and the Cold War
Tony Shaw
Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids
Sarah J. Smith
An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory
Annette Kuhn
The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939-1945
James Chapman
The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western
Michael Coyne
Film and Community in Britain and France: From La Règle du Jeu to Room at the Top
Margaret Butler
Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany
Richard Taylor
From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema
Ewa Mazierska & Laura Rascaroli
Hollywood Genres and Postwar America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and
Film Noir
Mike Chopra-Gant
Hollywood’s History Films
David Eldridge
Hollywood’s New Radicalism: From Reagan to George W. Bush
Ben Dickenson
Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films
James Chapman
Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film
James Chapman
Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces
Andrew Moor
Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933-1945
David Welch
Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone
Christopher Frayling
Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster
Geoff King
Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema
Andrew Spicer
The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929-1939
Edited by Jeffrey Richards
Hollywood Genres and
Postwar America:
Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies
and Film Noir
MIKE CHOPRA-GANT
I. B. Tauris Publishers
LONDON • NEW YORK
Published in 2006 by I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
In the United States of America and Canada distributed by
Palgrave Macmillan a division of St. Martin’s Press
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © 2006 Mike Chopra-Gant
The right of Mike Chopra-Gant to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part
thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publisher.
HB: ISBN 1 85043 815 3
EAN 978 1 85043 815 1
PB: ISBN 1 85043 838 2
EAN 978 1 85043 838 0
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin
camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
List of tables
List of figures
One Introduction: Movies, Genre and 1
Zeitgeist
Film noir and the zeitgeist 2
Intellectualism and middlebrow culture 7
Re-thinking zeitgeist 11
Defining the popular 11
What about the rest of the forties? 16
What’s genre got to do with it 21
Two Re-invigorating the nation: popular 26
films and American national identity
Cinderellas of the services 28
The myth of classlessness 33
Land of opportunity 46
Modernizing the American hero 55
American-ness and immigrant identities 57
Three The troubled postwar family: 65
“moms” and absent fathers
The absent father 66
The pleasures of fatherhood 78
Momism 82
Four Performing postwar masculinities 95
Soldier to civilian: masculinity and
performativity 98
Staging masculinities: performativity and
genre 107
Stars and performance 111
Five Military service and male 121
companionship
The all-male group 122
Military service and self “improvement” 130
Buddies 133
Male friendship, mature masculinity and
patriarchal continuity 139
v
Six Popular films and “tough” movies 146
Noir and Nation 149
Social status and the veteran experience 149
Class and democracy 152
The noir hero 156
Noir and the melting pot 158
Noir and the family 160
The absent father of film noir 161
“Mom” and the femme fatale 163
Noir masculinities and performance 164
Noir and male companionship 167
The noir male group 168
Noir buddies 170
Noir and patriarchal continuity 172
Seven Genre and History 175
Problems with “the popular” 183
Notes 189
Bibliography 194
Index 215
vi
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1.1 Popular films in the USA in 1946 13
Table 1.2 Twenty highest revenue-earning films in 18
America 1946-1950
vii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2.1 Al Stephenson (Fredric March) and Fred 34
Derry (Dana Andrews) in Best Years of Our
Lives (1946)
Figure 3.1 Devlin (Cary Grant) in Notorious (1946) 72
Figure 3.2 Madame and Alex Sebastian (Leopoldine 72
Konstantin and Claude Rains) in Notorious
(1946)
Figure 3.3 Madame Sebastian (Leopoldine 86
Konstantin) in Notorious (1946)
Figure 3.4 Shot sequence from Notorious (1946) 88
Figure 3.5 Grandma Leckie (Gladys Cooper) and 90
Robert Shannon (Dean Stockwell) in The
Green Years (1946)
Figure 4.1 Al Stephenson (Fredric March) in Best Years 104
of Our Lives (1946)
Figure 4.2 Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in Road to 116
Utopia (1946)
Figure 5.1 Shot from Blue Skies (1946) 132
Figure 5.2 Shot sequence from Road to Utopia (1946) 137
Figure 5.3 Advertisement for Studebaker cars. Life 142
Magazine 18 February 1946
viii
General Editor’s Introduction
In this illuminating and insightful revisionist study, Mike Chopra-
Gant challenges the received scholarly wisdom about the mood in
America immediately after the close of the Second World War. Most
scholars have taken the film noir genre as an index of popular attitudes
and consider that these films demonstrate a crisis of masculinity, a
perception of widespread corruption in society and a prevailing sense
of gloom, pessimism and cynicism. But Chopra-Gant persuasively
argues that this is too narrow and one-dimensional an interpretation
of the cinematic evidence of the public mood. While not denying the
significance of the film noir and its attitudes, he suggests that there were
alternative outlooks and to discover them he turns to the lists of top
box office successes. He finds there films that have been consistently
neglected by historians, titles like Saratoga Trunk, Till the Clouds Roll By,
The Green Years and Two Years Before the Mast. The lists from 1946 to
1950 are dominated by comedies, musicals and ‘feel good’ movies like
The Bells of St Mary’s, Life with Father and The Yearling. The film noir
genre barely figures anywhere in the top popularity lists.
So what do the most popular as opposed to the most studied films
tell us about postwar America? Chopra-Gant identifies a whole series
of positive values. Many of the films emphasise the triumph of
American beliefs – democracy, classlessness and individualism. The
biopics of Al Jolson, Cole Porter and Jerome Kern show talented
individuals finding success in a land of opportunity. The films indicate
not a crisis of masculinity so much as a celebration of the joys of
masculine comradeship. Films laud the traditional American family,
while recognising the problems that can be created by absent fathers
and domineering mothers. Chopra-Gant rightly concludes that the
film evidence is more complex and multilayered than previously
allowed. He also importantly reminds film historians that it is
imperative to study those films popular with the ticket-buying public
and not just those popular with critics and academics.
JEFFREY RICHARDS
ix