Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films

2 Walking Small: W. C. Fields, Groucho Marx, and the Emasculation of the American Comic Tradition

 Walking Small W. C. Fields, Groucho Marx, and the Emasculation of the American Comic Tradition Fields of Dreams It has been observed that the rise of the gangster film in the early 1930s, after the onset of the Great Depression, revealed a general disillusionment with the American Dream, that nexus of cultural values equating happiness, material wealth, career success, and bourgeois comfort, and the claim that anyone could achieve it in America. This individualism and expansive optimism was fuelled by the open spaces of the American frontier, but by the 1920s, when the gangster film as a distinct genre began to take shape with such silent films as Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927) and Thunderbolt (1929), the frontier was already consigned to history, officially declared closed following the census of 1890. Gangster films constituted, on one level, a cultural response to the closing of the frontier, for its protagonists embraced a pioneer individualism placed in a contemporary setting. Movie gangsters, then, remained remarkably American in spirit, for they were, at the same|   | CHAPTER  time, unethical businessmen, a newer breed of Robber Barons seeking the American Dream amid the dangers and opportunities of the new urban wilderness. In John Huston’s Key Largo (1948), when gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) asks why he needs the drug shipment for which he is holding the inhabitants of a Florida hotel hostage when he is already rich, he promptly replies, like any contemporary corporate CEO, that the simple reason is because he wants more.1 If, as President Calvin Coolidge had declared, “The chief business of the American people is business,” then even during the Depression business continued. In both the movies and the real world, the closing of the frontier, the space that historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued was so important as a social and economic “safety-valve” for the American psyche, was followed by the opening of the bootlegger’s spigots.2 As the criminal lawyer Alonzo Emmerich (Louis Calhern) observes in another Huston crime film, The Asphalt Jungle (1950), “Crime is merely a left-handed form of human endeavor.” With pragmatic American know-how, the gangster reconciled the myth of the American Dream with historical reality and in so doing retained his status as family breadwinner and mythic wielder of phallic power. Yet the American Dream had been shown as fading before Black Tuesday in October 1929, already receding beyond reach like the unobtainable green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). In Fitzgerald’s novel, the eponymous Gatsby, a rich, mysterious businessman who may have earned his fortune as a bootlegger by fixing the 1919 World Series or through a number of other questionable ventures, attempts the Horatio Alger transformation of working-class nobody to host of the rich and famous at his posh Long Island mansion in order to create his own American dream home with his lost love, Daisy. As a sign of his success, he proudly displays his collection of shirts to her as if his wealth and impressive sartorial taste is an index of his worth as a human being, recalling the gaggle of movie gangsters from Little Caesar (Robinson) onward who are fitted for new suits once they take over the gang and their careers are on the rise. But as in the gangster film, so for Gatsby, clothes do not make the man, and his dream ultimately fails, as we are told by Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator, because of “the colossal vitality of his illusion”3 —that is, because of the insistence with which Gatsby maintains his take on the American Dream despite the reality of Daisy’s marriage to another man and the inevitable passage of time. Walking Small |  If gangster movies stubbornly clung to the vitality of the illusion regarding the American Dream, comedies at the time often were more critical of it. Certainly Frank Capra, perhaps the most prominent director of the era, eloquently defended American tradition, espousing democracy, individualism, and capitalism in a series of populist comedies that includes Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941), in which the little guy emerges as hero and is able to bring about change within “the system.” And, too, John Ford celebrated with nostalgic charm a vision of Americana in Doctor Bull (1933), Judge Priest (1934...