Larry May,
The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
ISBN 0 226 51162 6
348pp
US$32.60 (hb)
(Review copy supplied by Chicago University Press)

Uploaded 20 September 2002

In The Big Tomorrow, Larry May makes the case that certain “traditional” American values often associated with the films of the Hollywood studio system were not as monolithic and consistent as is often assumed – that the ideology of the industry and its films was often complex and contradictory, and that Hollywood’s imagination of the American conceptualisation of nationhood needs to be further problematised and historicised. More specifically, he makes a useful and provocative claim for a progressive, socially inclusive, anti-Big Business ethos in the films of the 1930s, arguing that a swing in the general outlook of Hollywood films, along with an historical amnesia about earlier affiliations, came into play in the immediate postwar years.

The first part of the book, the most compelling and persuasive, consists of three chapters under the rubric of “The modern republic comes of age” and makes an illuminating case for understanding the films and the industry politics of the era as informed by an anti-corporate, anti-elite stance in keeping with emergent New Deal views. The first chapter uses as a springboard for the book’s arguments the striking fact that Will Rogers was actually the most popular star of the time, though now hardly a fixture in film history texts – an amnesia May will contend is symptomatic. Integrating film analysis with an examination of various public discourses about Rogers (including those about his Native American heritage) and his relation to his audience, May shows how the star was strongly linked to populist, anti-hierarchical perspectives. In his films, for example:

Over and over the main characters initially affirm the hegemonic values of the corporate order, of static gender and racial roles, and of separation of the classes. . . . Yet as these norms lead to disaster, the characters shed loyalty to the wealthy to reconstruct public life and Americanism itself. Undergoing a bottom-up conversion narrative, they align with the lower class to create a civic arena that begins to include women, minorities, and youth. (38)

As Rogers’ films and radio shows worked to promote a “major realignment of cultural authority”, so was the performer an important campaigner for New Deal candidates and policies – even though his posthumous image is anything but that of a figure agitating for reform.

The second chapter works to demonstrate that the phenomenon of Will Rogers was hardly isolated – that the reworking of conceptualisations of American nationhood in such a way as to invert prior hierarchies of power and to increase inclusiveness can be seen across a range of Hollywood productions of the 1930s. May starts by sketching the industrial context in which such a shift was possible: a context in which a group of relatively new companies and independent production outfits were able to hold their own against the majors in part by producing films with certain new perspectives that appealed to the mass audience – perspectives which, for example, questioned the accessibility and value of a materialist American dream, and perspectives which encompassed the experiences of recent non-Anglo-Saxon, working class immigrants. Important to this shift in perspective was the arrival of sound, which allowed the use of vernacular and accented speech (and thus in a literal sense helped interject “into the national civic sphere the voice and views of formerly silenced groups” (62)), and the ascendance of the gangster genre, which, as several scholars have noted, questioned the establishment values the gangster figures are unable and/or unwilling to adhere to. (The significance of sound and ethnic identity to the ideology of the 1930s gangster film is a topic recently analysed at length by Jonathan Munby in his book Public Enemies, Public Heroes and it is surprising May does not engage with him at greater length here – though this may well be because of the close publication dates of the respective volumes.) May goes on to examine the fallen women genre and comedies featuring ethnic comics as other entertainment forms which also countered earlier social identities and values, forms that engaged a mass audience and that “evoked dreams of a more inclusive and modern culture” (99). Other related cinematic trends May delineates to support his case are the rise of characters who bridge formerly disparate realms – characters suggesting hybridity in terms or race, class, and/or culture – and a concordant aesthetic shift toward compositions which allow the layering of multiple planes of reality.

The third chapter fascinatingly extends May’s argument into the realm of theater architecture. May traces a cultural negotiation over theater design in the 1930s, after the lavish movie palace of the 1920s had fallen from favor as an emblem of pre-Crash profligacy, removed from the realities of contemporary audiences. Designers ultimately opted not for the aestheticism of the contemporary Art Deco movement, but a new functionalism consonant with principles of egalitarianism – a democratisation of space to remove hierarchies of seating and other markers of status.

While I do find May’s broader claims in Part One convincing on the whole, I suspect some readers may feel that he overstates his case, that he gives an insufficiently holistic view of the political climate of Hollywood at the time. May does briefly allow that in spite of the shifts he sees, “There is no doubt that many films perpetuated racial stereotypes.” Yet when, for example, he cites The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) as an instance of a film illustrating the potential mixing of races, he seems to take no account of the deeply racist narrative context within which that illustration occurred. This problem of painting Hollywood’s political environment with too broad a brush comes up as well where May describes Hollywood’s support for New Deal policies with a publicity train for the film 42nd Street, the “42nd Street Special,” participating in the celebrations of Roosevelt’s inaugural. May includes a still of the train, on which can be seen two plaques of equal prominence, one for Warner Bros. and one for General Electric, but there is no commentary on the GE connection to this event. The image is but one trace of the heavy convergence of studio interests and outside corporate interests (as well as banking and finance interests) which have always been a part of the Hollywood landscape and which have been highlighted by a number of scholars. What is lacking here, the image reminds us, is more of an accounting of how Hollywood’s imbrication within the larger corporate environment of America jibed with the decidedly anti-corporate progressiveness of its productions and personnel.

In Part Two of the book, “The American way and its discontent,” May shows how the conceptualisation of nationhood gaining currency in the 1930s mass culture – one acknowledging tensions within the American body politic and agitating against corporate and establishment interests – was quickly deemed unpatriotic in the World War Two years, when all were pressured to support a unified national front in the name of democracy. What eventually took the place of the 1930s mass culture in the postwar years, he argues, was “a consumer culture identified with the rise of the ‘white suburban home’ undergirded by anxiety” (141). The transformation was effected in part by an increase in government control over production and a loss in the vitality of the independent sector (even to the extent that smaller outfits were unable to gain access to film stock) during the war years. Films now re-marginalised non-mainstream voices, absenting class conflicts and ethnic difference in favor of a unified patriotism. This deradicalising of Hollywood fare and its attendant emphasis on the joys of domesticity (which May illustrates in part by reference to the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope vehicles of the era) had its correlative in a sharply conservative turn in industry politics in the postwar years; where the Screen Actors Guild once supported an inclusive, left-wing politics, in the postwar years (and under the guidance of a future US president) it took a decidedly anti-radical stance.

The glimmer of hope in all of this, for May, is the emergence of a film-noir trend on the part of left-wing filmmakers largely at the fringes of the industry which once more questioned capitalist values – a questioning taken up as well by the nascent youth film genre in the fifties. The left-wing noir productions, the author argues, managed to achieve success in their conservative age because of “their capacity to reorient cultural authority from officials to the anti-heroes and heroines” (229), a capacity clearly developed further in the films of such youth-culture stars as James Dean and Marlon Brando, and taken up more whole-heartedly in the mass culture of the 1960s.

These broad later claims are not entirely new, although May does put them into a new perspective (with respect to 1930s radicalism) and does rally some interesting and varied pieces of evidence in support of them. His claims for general shifts in ideological values are supported in part, both here and in Part One, by reference to a statistical analysis of film plots systematically sampled from a major trade journal, the Motion Picture Herald. One potential problem the method presents is the interference of interpretive maneuvers on the part of the original Herald reporters; when taking figures about, for example, the portrayal of “foreign elements as a danger to the hero/heroine,” or of the “progressive reform of society,” one is dependent in part on the reporter’s “reading” of the text. There is also the danger of reading too literally the connection between a given set of film plots and the attitudes of the contemporary public. Yet, to May’s credit, he is not as much arguing an exact correlation between films and attitudes as he is claiming parallel shifts; what he emphasizes is the importance of the longitudinal nature of the study, which allows the examination of movements in attitudes “in dialogue with the changing face of politics and power” (6). The potential pitfalls of the method aside, the work offers a sound effort to integrate textual analysis and studies of institutions and discourses with concrete historical data – a convergence often lacking in film studies scholarship.

May is dealing with some very broad and very fundamental questions about American film history in The Big Tomorrow, and it is in part because of this that many readers will no doubt find some of his larger claims regarding the tendencies or attitudes of particular periods require further qualification. But while certain contentions are perhaps not as nuanced as they might be, it is hard not to think differently about the social contours of Hollywood history and the ideological leanings of its films after reading this significant study.

Adam Knee