Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (review)

Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. Steven J. Ross. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. 367. $29.95.

Steven J. Ross spent a decade laboring on Working-Class Hollywood, and it shows on every page. It is a phenomenally well-researched study, both in its coverage of vast secondary literatures in American studies and film studies and in its inventive use of an array of far-off-the-beaten-path primary sources--socialist newspapers, union newsletters and meeting minutes, FBI surveillance reports, oral histories, censorship reports, recreation surveys, unpublished manuscripts, etc. This book is about as far from an academic "quota quickie" as one could possibly get, and yet is highly readable, without a hint of droning pedantry.

It focuses on what Ross dubs the working-class film. On the broadest level, this can be defined simply as a film revolving around working-class protagonists. At this level of generality, which Ross wisely sidesteps, the concept is not terribly productive since in many such films the protagonists' class is relatively incidental to the story (one could substitute well-to-do characters without profoundly altering the film), and in any case, huge practical problems constrain research on this broadly-defined body of working-class films. It is both too massive (there are simply too many thousands of them to allow reasonably comprehensive analysis) and too meager (only a small proportion can actually be viewed). Ross instead concentrates on three overtly political subsets of the working-class film: the social-problem film, the labor-capital film, and the worker film.

While Ross has interesting things to say about the Progressive-era social-problem films (films that exposed problems of poverty, exploitation, sexual harassment, primarily as suffered by women and children, and that were more descriptive than prescriptive), Working-Class Hollywood is most groundbreaking in its account of labor-capital and worker films. More vigorously polemical than social-problem films, labor-capital films generally examined the hardships of masculine labor, chronicling class conflict in struggles among unions, strikers, capitalists, police, government troops, and mercenary goons. Worker films were a subset of labor-capital films produced and distributed by labor activists, funded by union organizations and by shares sold to union members. Charting these films through the silent era, Ross discovers two trends: as cinema moved from the nickelodeon and transitional eras (1905-1917), to the rise of Hollywood during World War I and the red scare (1917-1922), and finally to Hollywood's heyday as a purveyor of opulent escapism and consumerist fantasy (1923-1929), the number of labor-capital films dwindled, and they became decidedly more conservative. Whereas before World War I, two-thirds could be classified as liberal, antiauthoritarian, populist, or radical (Ross makes useful distinctions among these groups) with one-third staunchly procapital/antilabor, Hollywood studios inverted the ratio, and the radical group disappears altogether. Ross's explanation of this phenomenon illustrates his impressively multidimensional historiography. The factors he examines include: Hollywood's corporate consolidation and reliance on large-scale capital investment; the increasing expense of film production and the inability of independents to compete with Hollywood production values; Hollywood's avoidance of controversial topics that could alienate much sought-after middle- and upper-class spectators; entry barriers created by the studios' oligopolistic control of distribution networks; government censorship; the patriotic deferral of domestic conflicts during World War I; the social climate of the red scare; management acrimony stemming from internal labor strife in the studios; labor movement infighting; incompetence, embezzlement, and the popular audience's general preference for romance and fantasy over didactic class-conscious cinema.

Working-Class Hollywood is undoubtedly the best book to date on the social history of silent cinema with respect to the dynamics of class--onscreen, in the theater environment, and in the social discourses surrounding cinema. But it is also a somewhat problematic book. For all the...