Love and Marriage Across Social Classes in American Cinema

287 Pages·2017·3.651 MB·English

by  Stephen Sharot (auth.)

STEPHEN SHAROT
Love and Marriage Across Social Classes
in American Cinema
Stephen   Sharot
Love and Marriage
Across Social Classes
in American Cinema
Stephen   Sharot
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Tel Aviv, Israel
ISBN 978-3-319-41798-1 ISBN 978-3-319-41799-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41799-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956456
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For Guy, Livia, Noam, and Leo
C
ONTENTS
Preface x i
1 Love, Marriage and Class 1
2 Before the Movies: The Cross-Class Romance in Fiction 21
3 From Attraction and the One-Reeler to the Feature 49
4 Sexual Exploitation and Class Confl ict 8 3
5 Consumerism and Ethnicity 1 21
6 The Cross-Class Romance in the Depression 1 63
7 Male Seducers and Female Gold-Diggers 1 95
vii
viii CONTENTS
8 The End of the Golden Era and After 227
9 Conclusion: Formula, Genre, and Social Experience 259
Index 267
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have drawn upon the following of my articles for portions of this book
and I would like to thank the journals’ editors.
“Class Rise as a Reward for Disinterested Love: Cross-Class Romance
Films, 1915–1928,” J ournal of Popular Culture 43.3 (June 2010):
583–99.
“The ‘New Woman’, Star Personas, and Cross-Class Romance Films in
the 1920s,” J ournal for Gender Studies 19.1 (March 2010): 73–86.
“Wealth and/or Love: Class and Gender in Cross-Class Romance Films
of the Great Depression,” J ournal of American Studies 47.1 (2013):
89–108.
“Social Class in Female Star Personas and the Cross-Class Romance
Formula in Depression America,” S creen 56.2 (Summer, 2015):
172–194.
ix
P
REFACE
The cross-class romance fi lm has, at its center, a story of the development
of an intimate relationship between at least two central protagonists, gen-
erally one female and one male, who come from different classes distin-
guished by their economic positions and status in society. This is a formula
that has been the basis of hundreds of American fi lms, albeit with varia-
tions on the theme. In contrast to the tendency in fi lm studies to provide
a detailed analysis of a small number of fi lms, the analysis here is based
on a large sample of cross-class romance fi lms without regard to their
acknowledged quality or status in fi lm history. Cross-class romance fi lms
were made prodigiously from the beginnings of the feature fi lm around
1915 until the USA entered World War II at the end of 1941. At the
height of the studio system, all of the “Big Five” (Paramount, MGM,
Warner Bros., Fox, RKO) produced cross-class romance fi lms, as did one
of the “Little Three” studios (Columbia), along with small independent
production companies such as Chesterfi eld.
Film scholars have analyzed a small number of cross-class romance fi lms
in accord with their various interests in genres, directors and censorship.
Prominent examples discussed with regard to particular genres (romantic
comedy, musical, drama or melodrama) or directors include I t Happened
One Night (Columbia, 1934), G old Diggers of 1933 (Warner Bros., 1933)
and Stella Dallas (Goldwyn/United Artists, 1937). Prominent examples
in discussions of censorship are R ed Headed Woman (MGM, 1932) and
Baby Face (Warner, 1933). In addition to such well-known fi lms, the anal-
ysis here includes fi lms long forgotten, the commercial failures as well as
the commercial successes, those directed by ‘journeymen’ as well as those
xi
xii PREFACE
directed by ‘auteurs,’ those that posed no problem for moral gatekeepers
as well as those that encountered problems of censorship. Scholars some-
times justify their focus on a small number of commercially successful or
critically acclaimed fi lms by citing their popularity with audiences or their
signifi cance in fi lm history, but at a time when a large proportion of the
population went to a cinema at least once a week, the chances were that
frequent cinema-goers would see many cross-class romances, including
commercial failures and those that have been long forgotten.
The analytical foci of this work refl ect the academic background of its
author: a sociologist with a strong historical interest. My aim is not to
propose a new sociological theory of popular cinema but rather to give far
more attention to the socio-historical contexts of popular cinema than is
usually the case in fi lm studies. I am in agreement with Andrew Tudor that
sociologists have contributed little to the understanding of fi lm and that
the uninformed view among fi lm scholars, especially the more theoretically
inclined, of sociology as an unrefl ective empiricist and scientistic discipline
has minimized its potential contribution. 1 The publication in the 1960s
and early 1970s of a few books by sociologists on fi lm, including Tudor’s
own work, was not followed through in the decades that followed. 2 From
the 1970s into the 1990s, the marked theoretical preferences within aca-
demic fi lm studies for semiotics, formal structuralism, deterministic con-
ceptions of ideology, and psychology, particularly psychoanalysis, limited
attention to the historical socio-cultural contexts of fi lms. Some systematic
attention to wider contexts was provided by neo-formalists on the rela-
tionship between fi lm style and the structure of the fi lm industry and by
reception and audience studies. However, among theorists in fi lm studies,
the common assertion that fi lms simply do not refl ect society appeared to
justify the absence of any serious consideration of the socio-historical con-
texts of fi lm ‘texts’, even though generalizations were often made about
the relationship of fi lms to very broadly conceived notions of capitalism,
patriarchalism or patriarchal capitalism.
The importance of attention to socio-historical contexts is now being
recognized by even the major exponents of the psychoanalytical approach, 3
The development of cultural and media studies have provided frameworks
for sociologically informed research on fi lm, but in spite of the blurring
of disciplinary boundaries with sociology, it is still rare to fi nd detailed
attention being given to the larger social context of fi lm representations
by cultural studies and media scholars. 4 My detailed consideration of the
socio-historical context does not assume that fi lms simply refl ect society,