Abstract
Rarely is an immensely serious book so much fun as is the case with A New Kind of Public. Recalling, for some of us, some of the most entertaining films of the New Deal era, and introducing them to others, Graham Cassano also offers an ambitious and theoretically sophisticated reading of what those films tell us about popular culture, class, race, gender, and audience. The result is a study ideally suited not only to history and film studies classes but also to those in sociological theory.
Cassano takes his title from a 1936 line from the director John Ford, who sought to remake his career in Hollywood by making films for “a new kind of public.” Ford’s remark signals much that structures the book. It signals how late-coming what Cassano calls New Deal cinema was. Through much of the early New Deal, class-aware films like those studied by A New Kind of Public were slow to appear, and the formal end to the New Deal, whether dated from the Second World War or the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, did not signal an end to Hollywood’s efforts to imagine an audience ready to hear and see inequality and attempts to address it. Thus Cassano gives us a late and long periodization of New Deal cinema.
The idea of imagining a new public also underlines the manner in which Cassano frames the question of relation of artist and audience in popular cinema. Firmly rejecting the more extreme indictments of commodified mass culture, he argues for the popular as forever engaged in complex dialectics that both express and reshape existing social relations. Indeed the use Cassano makes of Althusser’s work on interpellation and of Gramsci on audiences opens the possibility that Ford is to be read as both noting the presence of a receptive new public and bent on calling out to an imagined new audience he was helping to create. The ability to find a struggle for new kinds of happiness, however mediated, in mass-marketed forms that animates this work perhaps most fully approximates the cultural work done by C.L.R. James in American Civilization.
Such a view differs from the important work of Michael Denning on the “Cultural Front” during these years, although here as elsewhere A New Kind of Public manages to both expand on and refashion existing work while also using and praising it. Cassano’s choice of the label New Deal cinema rather than Popular Front (or Cultural Front) film allows more flexibility. Many of the artists he treats wrote and directed in a Communist and Popular Front milieu, but as many did not. Ford’s politics in particular both changed greatly over time and were difficult to pin down in any given moment. What made Ford’s films resonate with attempts to call a new public into being was not how convinced he was by Communist politics, but how he regarded immigrant working-class life, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and an anti-colonialism that reached beyond his Irish roots into the Pacific.
The book defies full summary in a short review, treating over 50 films and closely studying many of those. After a fascinating theoretically grounded introduction, its first chapter discusses the fierce and gritty stories of class conflict in Black Fury (1935) and RiffRaff (1936). From the start Cassano shows how central contradictions must be to any understanding of the relationship between class and radicalism on screen. In the former film, frank treatment of class struggle coexists with a critique of ways in which “new immigrants” from eastern and southern Europe were racialized as less-than-fully white. At the same time Black Fury derides labor radicals, as was noted by Communist critics at the time, and effaces women’s labor, as was not. RiffRaff offers even more explicit anti-Marxism and support for conservative craft unionism, as well as a greater suspicion of immigrant workers. However, it places women’s work and toughness at the center of the plot.
The second chapter makes a single film, My Man Godfrey (1936), the subject of its analysis. The use of Durkheim’s thought illuminates the appeals of the film to a desire among viewers for a “moral capitalism” – interestingly centered in finance, not industry – capable of reanimating the homeless and the rich. It also shows the appeals of a happy ending capable of providing a healing of strained gender relations. Such an agenda makes My Man Godfrey “a critique of the conditions it represents” (p. 83) but not a radical film.
Among many brilliant readings of films, that of Swing Time (1936), the central subject of the third chapter, is the most sustained and impressive. What might be seen as an escapist Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire vehicle is shown to be a critical and self-aware exploration of class and the politics of style. Swing Time represents for Cassano a clear example of the New Deal film showing a world of the haves, acknowledging that world’s appeals to the have-nots, and presenting the possibilities of resisting the blandishments of conspicuous consumption in favor of the vitalities of working-class life. The boundaries of inclusion are equally well-explored through the analysis of Astaire’s appropriation of African American dance in his famous blackface dance performance in the film’s “shadow” scene. While allowing that the scene contains elements of critique, Cassano argues strongly that it also “unconsciously trumpets its own guilty conscience” (p. 96).
Chapter 4’s focus on Ford’s The Hurricane (1937) deepens the consideration of race and ethnicity in its appreciation of the film as a high point in anti-colonial cinema, again having dance and love as central elements. Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols draw upon “their common memory of Irish dispossession” (p. 105) and their imagined audience’s willingness to appreciate appeals to justice to mount a critique of colonialism – not, however, US colonialism – in the South Pacific. However, the critique of white supremacy abroad stops far short of underwriting sympathetic portrayals of Africans in the US in Ford’s work.
The final two chapters each approach a raft of films. In the first of them, Cassano returns to Ginger Rogers, considering a series of arresting features she made from 1939 to 1941 as capturing a “(Hollywood) proletarian imaginary” (p. 123). Building on his earlier insights regarding labor struggles in the factory-like system of the movie business and the portrayal of dance as work, Cassano shows how Rogers’ characters challenged and conformed to Popular Front images of idealized femininity, especially regarding motherhood. The analysis of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s attempts to place traditional attitudes towards gender in the service of radical class politics in Kitty Foyle (1940) is especially provocative.
The final chapter, along with an afterword interestingly framed around Psycho (1960), considers the transition from New Deal cinema to Cold War film. The chapter totals significant losses by looking at Ford’s films from 1940 to 1948. Thus the limited but insistent class critique of Grapes of Wrath (1940) and the not-hostile portrayal of socialism in How Green Was My Valley (1941) give way to the chilling, if conflicted, endorsement of providing cover for genocide at the conclusion of Fort Apache (1948). All that has come before shows how elements necessary for joining the Cold War consensus – paternalism, corporatism, and a tendency to settle for the inclusion of new immigrants from Europe in the American dream rather than pressing for freedom for all – were parts of New Deal cinema. This enables Cassano to analyze rightward motion profoundly.
The range and depth of insights in A New Kind of Public, along with the ability to write for those very familiar with the films considered and those having never seen them, make this an ideal work for the historical sociology classroom. Indeed it participates in a significant flowering of historical sociology also forwarded in the recent works of Moon-Kie Jung, Satnam Virdee, Julian Go and others.
Equally exciting is the way in which Cassano’s book might be used to teach social and historical theory. The text is not overburdened by theory, and jargon is absent. However, it is characterized by explicit discussions of how social theory informs the author’s interpretations. In addition to the thinkers mentioned above, Freud, Veblen, Mills, Volosinov, Arendt, and R.W. Connell make important appearances. The sections bringing Marx and Weber together, while specifying what can be taken from each, are especially apt models. Clearly further reading of theory and clips of the films would maximize the uses of A New Kind of Public in such classes. Indeed I suspect this fine book will find readers in a great many settings.