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  • Introduction:Audiences and Ideology
  • Richard Koszarski, Editor-in-Chief

In 1917, D.W. Griffith arrived in England to begin production on Hearts of the World, a film whose ideological agenda was fairly obvious. Feted by British civil and military authorities and escorted to the front by uniformed personnel, Griffith was obviously going to produce a film in support of England and the Allied cause.

Forty years later, in the back country of rural Iceland, the United States Information Agency and the Soviet MIR engaged in a delicate battle to win the hearts and minds of a local population whose support seemed, for the moment, potentially up for grabs. Non-theatrical catalogs and 16mm projectors were the weapons of choice, a story pieced together here by Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson and Tinna Grétarsdóttir from period documentation and oral histories with the survivors.

These two stories book-end this issue of Film History, and describe events in which the ability of the motion picture to attract eager audiences was used for explicitly ideological reasons by a range of actors, political and otherwise. But all films want an audience, and even the most blatantly commercial films often want something more from that audience than the price of a ticket.

When three activist intellectuals created Puerto Rico's Tropical Film Company in 1916, they obviously had commercial hopes and expectations. But they also saw their film company as an extension of other projects they had launched to increase patriotic feeling and nationalistic self-awareness. As Naida Garcia-Crespo argues, they intended their motion pictures to play a role not unlike that of the newspapers and nationalistic broadsides they were already publishing. And if foreign audiences were also enticed to come and enjoy Puerto Rico's scenic splendors, so much the better.

The career of Guy Madison hardly suggests the same set of revolutionary expectations, but his employer, David O. Selznick, had an agenda of his own when he put the good-looking young sailor under contract. Beyond the promotion of any particular film, Selznick wanted to sell his audience on the idea of Guy Madison, and build support for him as a branded performer whose future appearances might be followed by legions of hard-won fans. As Leonard Leff demonstrates, the goal may have been simple enough, but the execution proved trickier than Selznick had predicted.

Monogram Pictures would seem to have existed as far as possible from the exalted sphere of David O. Selznick. But in an industry where the rules were set by a handful of vertically-integrated majors, both Selznick and Monogram needed to survive as independents. By analyzing the ways in which Monogram tried to differentiate its meager products from those of its rivals, Kyle Edwards shows how W. Ray Johnston and Steve Broidy succeeded in selling their customers a particular notion of showmanship that may not have matched the Selznick standard, but still offered, in box-office terms, something almost as good.

Raoul Walsh's first feature film marked the beginning of his long line of streetwise, working-class fantasies. But Regeneration was also the last of something - an instructive, even inspirational, account of immigrant redemption that had already found its public in the press, on the stage, and in the form of a best-selling memoir. Tony Tracy puts back the pieces, and restores the tale's original sense of purpose.

All these strands come together in Arthur Lennig's account of D.W. Griffith's battle to find a shape, and an audience, for Hearts of the World. The ideology implicit in his Great War feature was not just that of his British supporters, or of his own vision of Love's Struggle redeeming humanity: as Lennig makes clear, it was also because the audience, the distributors, [End Page 389] and even the censors, each had their own role in this saga, a lesson that Griffith continued to learn with the release of every new super feature. [End Page 360]

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