American Cinema of the 1920s: Themes and Variations

1921: Movies and Personality

1921 Movies and Personality MARK LYNN ANDERSON The films made this year and the performers who starred in them participated in a relatively new popular interest in the secret strangeness of the familiar personality. The stories the movies now told bore the traces of a significant cultural transition: from a Progressive Era concern with finding happiness through solving life’s problems to a new but sustained fascination with the experiences and fate of the unusual person. For some, this development marks the transition from a socially conscious cinema to one of mere entertainment, but it also announces the arrival of the contemporary media personality, one of the principal categories through which we now experience the world. Several films released during the year—Enchantment, Footlights, Her Face Value, Hickville to Broadway, Reputation , A Small Town Idol—dealt both seriously and humorously with the complicated lives of fictionalized popular performers. This new fascination with celebrity differed from the traditional admiration of historically significant individuals such as great artists, thinkers, and statesmen. Instead, the new personality was more likely to be any ordinary individual who had, because of some peculiar personal characteristic or particular circumstance, arbitrarily entered upon the world stage. In September, Margaret Gorman, a “Mary Pickford look-a-like” and the newly crowned Miss Washington, D.C., won the first intercity beauty pageant held on the boardwalks of Atlantic City (Allen 80; “1,000 Bathing Girls”). Apparently, a relatively ordinary individual could now achieve unprecedented renown overnight, solely through the possession of some unusual quality or through involvement in some sensational event. Sales of musical records peaked at a level the recording industry would not see again until World War II. While radio and sound movies would eventually become the principal mechanisms for the promotion of popular songs, phonograph records and sheet music remained important components of a mass culture devoted to the promulgation of personalities. Songwriters James F. Hanley and Grant Clarke witnessed the composition 46 they penned for the Ziegfeld Follies become a national sensation, but the appeal of “Second Hand Rose” was inextricably tied to its performer, Fanny Brice, who sang the song at the Follies during the summer. Brice had become a star attraction because of her comedic turns at musical parody and her performance of “ethnic” numbers. Unlike other Jewish performers , Brice exploited her working-class origins by travestying high cultural forms of dance and by singing mock romantic songs in Yiddish dialect. As theater historian Linda Mizejewski points out, Brice’s identity not only contrasted with “the outrageous fabrication” (8) of whiteness and Anglo-ancestry of the typical Glorified American Girl on display in the Follies , but also “situated [her] in the ambiguous intersection of stardom and contempt” (133). Yet as Brice was saving the seemingly indistinguishable bevy of Ziegfeld beauties from conformity to a single standard of American feminine desirability, she also created a popular appeal for her own difference. If public interest in Brice sometimes took the form of ridicule, it also often constituted a cultural appreciation of the comedienne as a compelling figure whose biography and art could provide valuable insight into contemporary life. “Second Hand Rose” was received as a biographical gloss on Brice’s own impoverished upbringing, and with her ability to inject heartfelt pathos into the most comic of songs, the public easily recognized the emotional costs of the struggle to keep up appearances in an increasingly consumerist society: “Second hand pearls I’m wearing second hand curls / I never get a single thing that’s new / Even Jake the plumber, he’s the man I adore / Had the nerve to tell me he’s been married before / Ev’ry one knows that I’m just second hand Rose / From Second Avenue.”1 Second Avenue was the center of the Jewish theatrical district and was known during the early decades of the century as “Jewish Broadway.” Here, the song’s very connection to Brice’s own background opens upon a series of contemporary issues including fashion systems, premarital sex, divorce, class mobility, and the difficulties of ethnic assimilation, making Brice herself a salient interpreter of contemporary America society. The real success of the song’s appeal, however , is its insistence on inevitable failure. By claiming that “Ev’ry one knows” the real identity of Rose, the song describes the public’s own involvement in the construction and deconstruction of modern personalities whose glamorized surfaces were valued precisely because they lead into new processes of discovery...