Sam B Girgus,
Hollywood Renaissance: The Cinema of Democracy in the Era of Ford, Capra, and Kazan.
Cambridge University Press, 1998
ISBN 0521 1625521
A$33.95 (paper)

Uploaded 12 November 1999

When I was interviewed for my first job teaching film studies in 1978, the head of the English Department asked me if I really believed that any Hollywood movies were as worthy of critical attention as, say, a minor Shakespeare play. Sam B. Girgus would have provided him with the answer to his question. Hollywood Renaissance is constructed around the critical conceit that the work of a number of filmmakers- Ford, Capra, Hawks, Zinnemann, Kazan and George Stevens- “created a democratic cinema of aesthetic complexity and depth” in the period between 1939 and 1964, and in the process “achieved the kind of cultural renewal through film that earlier generations of Americans accomplished in literature, art and thought.”(177) Girgus takes the structure of his argument, as well as his title, from F.O. Mathieson’s analysis of the literary output of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman in the half-decade between 1850 and 1855. In his introduction, Girgus makes much of the coincidence that the “cinema of democracy” he identifies was emerging as Mathieson was writing American Renaissance in the late 1930s. Methodologically, he places his own work as imitating Mathieson’s synthesis of “the symbolism and autonomy of literature, as espoused by the New Critics, with the historical and social consciousness of what became the interdisciplinary American studies movement.”(3)

It is, in 1999, a curious project, even though a former student recently reported being asked exactly the same question about Hollywood and Shakespeare in a job interview only a few months ago. If you are likely to be having a job interview in an American Studies department where you think the question might come up, this book might be a sensible preparatory read. In other circumstances, the recommendation comes with a few caveats.

While Girgus claims to be demonstrating the existence of a liberal ideology of consensus in a democratic cinema which “synthesised popular culture forms and elite sensibilities,” what he actually does is to write in depth about fewer than ten movies that meet his aesthetic and interpretative requirements. Implicitly, he justifies this choice by reference to Mathieson’s assertion that the authors of the American Renaissance assimilated and transfigured the democratic culture they inhabited. The movies on which he dwells achieved, he claims, a similar “heightening of the strengths, weaknesses, ambiguities, tensions, and dangers of American culture as a whole.”(212)

Their ideology is, however, an entirely textual phenomenon. While Mathieson cited his five authors asserting their commitment to a “literature of democracy,” Girgus provides no comparable contextual support for his interpretations. Beyond its initial positioning in an “era of national crisis and uncertainty”(211), Hollywood Renaissance is little troubled by either history or chronology. Having argued that the Renaissance he describes began in 1939 and that Ford was its leading figure, he actually begins his own analysis with a discussion of The Searchers (USA, 1956) not returning to Stagecoach (USA, 1939) until the fourth chapter. More generally, he offers no explanation of how the thirty-year period from which he takes his examples can be compared with the significantly shorter period identified by Mathieson.

Girgus is an unabashed auteurist. He consistently invokes concepts of aesthetic coherence and of the visionary individual creativity of the six directors about whose work he writes. The spectre of the “organic” work haunts the underlying aesthetics of his argument, and the book is populated with as many “flawed masterpieces of American cultural production” (90) as it is with characters imitating Captain Ahab. While Girgus mentions other directors in passing, he is not troubled by any need to explain how his creators operated in the American film industry. He declares the existence of their aesthetic autonomy, and his analysis is unhindered by any discussion of industrial or institutional constraints. The history of movie regulation, which had a number of quite specific influences on the production of Mr. Smith goes to Washington (USA, 1939), for example, does not crop up here. The ideological, and perhaps more precisely the political analysis of Hollywood movies has of late achieved a far grater degree of sophistication and detail than appears here, and few works in the field would now feel confident in making such large claims about the ideological activity of “Hollywood” on the basis of so small a sample analysis.

But if the book fails to demonstrate its thesis, it nevertheless contains some interesting, if contentious, analyses of individual movies and individual scenes within movies. What actually holds the book together is Girgus’ discussion of the performance of masculinity and heroism, as enacted by several of the icons of mid-century American cinema: Wayne, Stewart, Cooper, Brando. Methodologically and descriptively, this analysis owes a debt, which Girgus freely acknowledges, to James Naremore’s Acting in the Cinema. He writes illuminatingly about the relationship between specific directors and actors in the construction of a version of American masculinity: Ford and Wayne, Zinnemann and Cooper, Kazan and Brando. But the interpretative convolutions that he constructs in order to rationalise the endings of several of the movies he discusses indicate the intractability of his project. Hollywood’s product is at its ideologically most revealing when it fails to resolve the contradictions it constructs. The auteurist search for coherence, aesthetic integrity and ideology finds itself looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place.

Richard Maltby