|
Sociology on Film Postwar Hollywood’s Prestige Commodity
Chris Cagle
New Brunswick (New Jersey): Rutgers University Press, 2017 Hardcover. x+189 pages. ISBN 978-0813576947. $80
Reviewed by Andrea Gazzaniga Northern Kentucky University
Sociology on Film : Postwar Hollywood’s Prestige Commodity examines the social problem film as a complex genre that proved to be “a central part of the refashioning that Hollywood would undergo after World War II” [6]. Chris Cagle, Associate Professor of film history and theory at Temple University, focuses his study primarily on films of the 1940s, arguing that “postwar social problem films were a form of popular sociology marrying contemporary developments in American sociology to the new type of prestige filmmaking” [6]. Cagle’s intellectual fairness and sound logic fortify his case for connecting the postwar rise of functionalist sociology as a discipline to Hollywood’s evolving representations of social issues in prestige films. For example, he acknowledges the slipperiness of the very term “prestige films,” and, in doing so, establishes his credibility to define it for his purposes as class-A pictures with higher production budgets and more “sophisticated subject matter” [6]. Likewise, he interrogates the problematic term “social” as a fraught abstraction with multiple applications before marshaling it forth in his analysis. Such careful consideration to define terms while also recognizing their complexity and resistance to being clearly defined is a hallmark of this book’s scholarly approach. Cagle thoughtfully engages with a vast array of critical discourse and theory (Bourdieu, Habermas). He is well-versed in foundational studies of the social problem film as well as studies more immediately preceding his own that use recent developments in the social sciences to read or re-read film history, such as work by Ellen Scott and Lee Grieveson. His study expands our thinking about the social problem film by considering particular influences that have been largely overlooked in other histories of the genre. For example, while film historians have identified the documentary cycle, wartime journalism, and New Deal movements as all contributing to Hollywood’s turn to a more realistic aesthetic in the 1940s social problem film, Cagle makes a case for including the middle-class novel into that mix. Specifically, his chapter on “Realist Melodrama” attends to how the middle-class novel, a frequent source for screenplay adaptations, not only extended the “broader middlebrow literary culture” into cinema but also “served as an aesthetic model for Hollywood’s newer realist prestige style” [129]. Cagle effectively uses The Human Comedy, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Cass Timberlane, A Bell for Adano, and Kings Row as case studies to illustrate how the peculiar combination of sentimentality and realist objectivity found in the novels translated to an oddly melodramatic realism in film. He shrewdly reads selected passages from the novels and demonstrates how they were interpreted into a realist cinematic aesthetic that did not forsake emotional appeals. Famed cinematographer James Wong Howe’s work in The Human Comedy (Clarence Brown, 1943) gets particular, well-deserved attention for his hybridization of realism and sentimentality that became a signature of the postwar prestige film style. Indeed, Cagle makes a compelling case for assigning a “hybrid aesthetic” to social problem films, which he defines as “a peculiar form of realism that synthesized documentary and sentimentality, the social scientific and novelistic” [7]. The book’s strongest moments emerge when analyzing the intersection of aesthetics and the social in film. Cagle’s discussions of The Lost Weekend and Gentlemen’s Agreement are particularly compelling and instructive. Also of particular interest is his shot by shot analysis of Sam Dodsworth’s (Walter Huston) entrance into an ocean liner dining room in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936) set in contrast with a two-and-a-half minute scene of a dinner conversation between Marty (Ernest Borgnine) and his mother in Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955). The close attention to mise-en-scène and cinematography in each sequence deftly illustrates how the aesthetic formula typical of prestige cinema before World War II, as epitomized in Wyler’s adaptation of a “high-brow” Sinclair Lewis novel, radically alters to accommodate “an internalized middlebrow sensibility” that looks to television for “cultural legitimacy” [22-23]. All this to demonstrate how Hollywood’s move to incorporate high culture into a middle-class commodity not only legitimized social problem cinema as an art form but also legitimized the socially charged subject matters they drew upon. In a similar vein, some of Cagle’s most compelling insights emerge when he addresses the way certain films both confirm and challenge middle-class ideologies, rightfully arguing “social problem films and other prestige films could be both middlebrow culture and a self-critical commentary on middle-class life” [15]. Cagle aligns himself with the methodologies of Amanda Ann Klein in seeing film cycles as a useful tool for genre studies and argues that the postwar prestige cycle “overwhelmingly drove the process of genre formation” of the social problem film [97]. Chapter 4, “A Genre out of Cycles,” persuasively traces the emergence of the social problem film within the trajectory of film cycles he labels as follows: headliner cycle (1932-1939), populist A-film cycle (1932-1947), postwar prestige cycle (1945-1950), film gris and ambitious B Films cycle (1947-1955), and self-conscious cycle (1950-1967). Cagle cites memos from 20th Century-Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck and trade press reviews to evince his claim that the social problem film’s form and success were largely driven by industry concerns about audience expectations. While his readings are much more nuanced than can be outlined here, they convincingly support his major point that the social problem film genre was shaped by multiple and often competing industrial pressures. Supplementing this point, the book features useful tables that list the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America’s Summary of Member Productions, by Genre Category from 1939-1940 and from 1940-1944. These tables chart the rise and decline of social problem films during those years, but also provide useful data for scholars and historians interested in the production volume of other genres and sub-genres at the time, such as melodramas, westerns, and adventure films, just to name a few. The book also contains instructive tables on the Production Code Administration Records of Postwar Problem Films that lists films from All the Kings Men to Wild One and classifies the “angle” (Political, Racial, Military, Religious, Psychological) of each “social problem” film. Cagle acknowledges that social problem films are more “popular sociology than academic social science” [13]; nonetheless, he spends a chapter [Chapter 2, “Hollywood as Popular Sociology”] tracing the evolution of academic sociology in America. He illustrates how sociological movements, from early twentieth-century Progressivism to the interwar Chicago School, resonated in a film such as Dead End (1937, William Wyler) and even extended into 1940s films, such as Mr. Soft Touch (Gordon Douglas, Henry Levin, 1949). Adopting Émile Durkheim’s writings, American sociologists shifted to a more functionalist approach, and Cagle outlines in detail the philosophies behind that shift. For a scholar not well schooled in the social sciences, it is a welcome education. For a film scholar, his subsequent readings of Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949) and Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown, 1949) through the lens of sociological studies on race, such as Myrdal, Sterner, and Rose’s An American Dilemma : The Negro Problem and American Democracy (1944), add a new and sophisticated dimension to our understanding of these social problem pictures. Cagle concludes by noting that though the post-World War II social problem film cycle, which he has meticulously traced, eventually ends, it does not mean the social problem film itself fades into obsolescence. On the contrary, he cites Hollywood’s “Oscar film” to be “a meta-genre [that] charts the history of the contemporary social problem film” [158], noting as evidence the resurgences of the social problem film in the 1970s, with Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978) and Norma Rae (Martin Ritt, 1970), and again in the 2000s, with films such as Crash (Paul Haggis, 2005), Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004), and Milk (Gus Van Sant, 2008). While he admits that these films are easily classified into other genres, the basis for “seriousness” in prestige films, and thus the serious consideration given to them for Hollywood’s highest honor, is often dependent upon the topical social issues they address. The case can be made, then, that Hollywood always has and still does carry considerable power to advance political and social interventions. This reviewer most appreciates Cagle’s political evenhandedness. Writing about socially charged issues in film during a climate of hotheaded political debate would make it quite easy to inject ideologically biased readings, but Cagle’s tone remains measured and intellectually honest throughout. He carefully historicizes midcentury politics and acknowledges the ideological shifts in political movements, particularly liberalism; more importantly, he is careful not to dismiss the intellectual history of film studies nor raise himself above the ideologies of the past. As he explains, Without discounting how postwar critics and thinkers participated in an ideology, we can recognize how complex the intellectual and popular discourses of the postwar period could be and how they do not always conform to the retrospective caricature of political containment that subsequent decades have of them [6]. Freeing himself from the pitfalls of poststructuralist revisionism, Cagle has been able to present an impeccably documented and highly reasonable argument for seeing the postwar social problem film’s evolution as central to a richer understanding of Hollywood’s cinema history.
Cercles © 2017 All rights are reserved and no reproduction from this site for whatever purpose is permitted without the permission of the copyright owner. Please contact us before using any material on this website.
|
|
|
