Abstract
The main focus of this book is a comprehensive and systematic survey of American films centring on cross-class romance, that is, the romantic involvement (through courtship or, much less often, marriage) of two protagonists ‘who come from different classes distinguished by their economic positions and status in society’ (p. xi). With the help of a range of sources, most notably the American Film Institute’s catalogue of (almost) all films made in the United States for theatrical release, Stephen Sharot has constituted a huge corpus of shorts and features fitting this description, most of which were produced between the mid-1910s and the early 1940s. Chapters 4–7 of the book cover this period in great detail, whereas the early years of cinema and developments since the 1940s are dealt with rather briefly in chapters 3 and 8 respectively, the latter being followed by a brief summary chapter.
Crucially, the first two chapters of this volume outline the history of the relationship between class, gender and marriage in the United States (and also in the UK) from the 18th century onwards, and the depiction of cross-class romance in British and American novels and short stories between the mid-18th and late 19th centuries. This is necessary because Sharot shows that films often reproduced the storylines and thematic concerns of their literary predecessors (indeed many of them were adaptations of novels and plays), and also that these films can be analysed productively with reference to the changing social realities of American courtship and marriage, of gender roles and relations, of employment and class.
Sharot aims to explain why cross-class romances were a significant part of the output of American filmmakers during a particular period, but not before or after, and why there are overriding continuities in his corpus as well as certain shifts in dominant narrative and thematic patterns. In doing so, he considers the operations of the American film industry as well as the social realities the films are dealing with. Indeed, throughout the film historical chapters of the book, he complements a wealth of succinct discussions of individual films and brief statistical analyses of the overall corpus with accounts of important film industrial and broader social developments, but he is not always able to explicate how the latter can help us understand historical shifts in his film corpus.
What are the precise film industrial mechanisms that translate social change into a changed filmic output? This is a question he largely leaves unanswered – although isolated comments on the substantial percentage of female scriptwriters and, in the silent period, also of female directors involved in the production of cross-class romance films, and on the complex ways in which the film industry tried to engage its audiences (not just with its films but also with the movie palaces in which they were shown and the fan discourse surrounding their stars) suggest how one might begin to construct such an answer. Sharot pays particular attention to the challenges facing women in a patriarchal society (with regards especially to paid employment and to social mobility), and considers how films may directly address these challenges, mostly in order to offer solutions, which, as would be expected, tend to operate at the level of wish-fulfilment fantasy rather than functioning as practical advice or political agitation (although Sharot, following in the footsteps of Steven Ross’s groundbreaking 1998 study Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America, finds a fair amount of surprisingly political filmmaking in the 1910s).
Sharot’s emphasis on women is justified by the fact that many cross-class romances (in both literature and film) centre on female characters, and that the main audience for these romances was understood to be female. While he does not always push this line of argument, his overall analysis strongly suggests that the publishing and film industries produced cross-class romances specifically to appeal to women, and that, consequently, these romances offered pleasures (to do with the ideal, or the fantasy, of true love and also, for example, with consumerism) which were associated more closely with femininity than with masculinity. ‘The contextual reality of the heyday of the cross-class romance films’, he concludes (with reference to the years 1915–1941), ‘was one in which large numbers of young, unmarried women were entering the work force, class divisions and conflict were sharp, and there was little questioning of the gender stratification and inequality in the occupational structure’ (p. 262). In this situation, large numbers of women responded enthusiastically, but by no means naively, to Hollywood’s cross-class romances which ‘addressed, albeit in an utopian fashion, their reasonable hopes of class mobility through marriage’ (p. 263).