Wheeler Winston Dixon (ed.),
American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations.
Oxford: Berg, 2006.
ISBN: 9781845204358
£14.99 (pb)
283pp
(Review copy supplied by Berg)

As the title suggests, Wheeler Winston Dixon’s American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations applies the now half-century old decades formula to the study of 1940s Hollywood film. The purpose of the book, and of the ‘Screen decades: American culture / American cinema’ series in general, is made apparent by the 1940s survey’s attention to organizational consistency, which makes the book easy to read but rigidly predictable. Specifically, the book starts off with Dixon’s accessible and engaging introduction before launching into ten independently authored chapters, each exploring one year of the decade. I say ‘chapters’ rather than ‘essays’ because each contribution is similarly structured, beginning with cultural and historical events of the year in question before moving on to comparative readings of films that emphasize the films’ specific responses to questions of class, gender, race, family, nation, and/or, most commonly, World War II.

In the first part of the book especially, readings of the films tend to summarize more heavily than they analyze, which suggests that the book is meant mostly for a general audience and for undergraduates. In fact, because of its readability and organizational consistency, American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations would work perfectly in a class on the 1940s, as would any of the essays for a class on a specific year, 1940-1949. I can easily imagine using this book as a supplement in a theme based film, composition, or multimedia course on the decade in question, and the book would make an accessible and well-researched addition to a library. However, Dixon and his contributors’ approach to the material often sacrifices more probing argument and theoretical clarity for accessibility, a rhetorical editorial decision belonging probably to the larger series as a whole more than to Dixon. The advantage of the book’s approach, beyond its admirable refusal to alienate readers, is that students in a class could read the analyses here and still have plenty to talk and write about. The disadvantage is that the juxtapositions of history, cinematic trends, and specific films become rather formulaic and under-theorized in some of the essays. Indeed, the unnecessarily consistent organizational structure leads to analyses that sometimes resemble sound bites in a made-for-television documentary on the decade, which leads me to believe that most film scholars and educated film instructors could come up with many of the collection’s analytical claims rather quickly just by watching and discussing the films in question, or by reading the critics who are most often quoted in the collection.

For instance, it is not until page 94 of the 243 pages of argument about intersections of historical milieu and film that one of the contributors, Catherine L. Preston in ‘Movies and national identity’, theorizes the relationships among events, media, and ideology by summoning Benedict Anderson’s idea of ‘imagined community’, which, in Preston’s words, argues that “a definition of nationalism should not start with commonly held political ideologies but with the cultural systems that precede them” (95). Preston clarifies the specific nature of the cinema’s response to social and political upheaval, arguing that “the idea of the nation can be usefully understood as a symbolic construct, an ‘imagined community’, as a system of cultural signification built up through the nations’ representations of itself” (95). Preston’s attention to the theoretical grounds of her argument allows her to integrate such disparate reflections upon the war as Guadalcanal Diary (USA 1943) Destination Tokyo (USA 1943), Tender Comrade (USA 1943), This is the Army (USA 1943), and Stormy Weather(USA 1943) something that all of the chapters attempt to do with different films but with mixed results, and Preston’s choice for ‘dark contrast’, Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (USA 1943), provides closure to her argument motivated by the argument itself, something that many chapters in the collection simply lack (96).

Preston’s is the strongest essay in the collection, but other chapters here work as well. The historical introductions to each chapter are lucid and concise, and the strongest among these history sections – Nicholas Spencer on 1944, Wheeler Winston Dixon on 1946, for example – are very engaging. Likewise, Joanna Rapf’s chapter on 1948 uses ‘family’ to effectively integrate her readings of the films, and both the ideas and the prose in Marcia Landy’s chapter on 1949 are exemplary. In fact, Landy’s reading of Max Ophüls’s Caught (USA 1949) is one of the highlights of the book. Also, while many of the observations throughout the book lack originality, the experience and field knowledge of the contributors and of Dixon are unsurprisingly apparent insofar as the contributors acknowledge the right people in the right places. Matthew Berstein, for example, gives due credit to Judith Mayne’s work on Dorothy Arzner (34-37).

However, while the best analyses in the collection – Preston’s and Landy’s, in my opinion – make the rigid organizational structure of the collection work, the structure is mostly overbearing, discouraging original analytical insights and thematic coherence across films, except insofar as the films discussed in each chapter came out the same year and reflect the preoccupations of that year. As a result, some of the most probing, inspired, and broadly applicable analyses in this collection feel smuggled in around apparently obligatory and far less interesting surveys of events and plots, which again makes me question the value of this book for scholars in the field, most of whom are pretty intimate with the type of reading the collection does. Limitations of the collection aside, it is fun to sit and watch or re-watch some of these movies with the chapter sitting in front of me, and the book could work really well with students. If the purpose is to engage a larger audience and remain interesting, this book mostly succeeds. If the purpose is to move the discussion of cinema and socio-historical context forward in any theoretically original way, the book does not, though some of the essays are excellent examples of the critical formula.

Matt Wanat,
Maryville State University, USA.

Created on: Sunday, 17 June 2007