Americanizing the Movies and Movie-Mad Audiences, 1910–1914 (review)

Richard Abel's study of American movies and moviegoers after the turn of the century is film history at its best. A welcome contrast to screen studies based on theoretical models with fashion cycles, his work will have a lasting shelf life. Writing about reception in terms of constructing nationality when cities teemed with immigrants, Abel illuminates subject matter as well as method based on print media in engaging chapters. An imaginative presentation of data includes not only illustrations, but poetry and documents that bring the era to life, and entr'actes about topics such as song slides and non-fiction films. A few maps and charts would have highlighted this wealth of material.

Abel focuses on southern New England, northern Ohio, and the upper Midwest, particularly cities like St. Louis, Des Moines, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Pawtucket, and Lowell. Painstaking research based on local newspapers, the trade press, and the earliest fan magazine, Motion Picture Story Magazine, yields significant distribution and exhibition data: location and number of theaters, admission and seating capacities, play dates, variety programs with short films versus features, General Film's rivalry with independent distributors, critics influencing production and reception, social composition of moviegoers, popular genres exploiting racial and gender relations, and ascending early stars.

Walking to neighborhood theaters to see westerns disparaged by trade press critics, moviegoers voted with their feet. Consequently, producers and distributors began to market cowboy (and cowgirl) films on a regular basis to draw predictable crowds. As product improved, with attractions like G.M. Anderson (who was Jewish) as Broncho Billy, critics became more enthusiastic. Westerns were also exported because Europeans were enthralled with the vast landscape of the Wild West and the romantic figure of the Indian. Particularly instructive for immigrants, who were themselves other (but Americanized at neighborhood venues) were characterizations of the Indian as racialized and unassimilable.

Another genre that attracted ethnic moviegoers, Civil War films romanticized the Old South and represented blacks as self-abnegating Uncle Tom characters. Showcasing large battle scenes, exciting spy stories, and melodramatic romances, such films validated national reunion (while Jim Crow practices disenfranchised blacks). So many characters, even cross-dressers, donned so many disguises as they criss-crossed enemy lines that immigrants learned to reinvent themselves by shopping for apparel. Abel neglects to comment, however, on the most egregious and problematic example of "passing" in these films, that is, white actors donning blackface.

Constituting yet another popular genre were thrillers, including animal and jungle pictures. But critics interested in Progressive uplift were dismayed by the appeal of sensational French crime films. By contrast, Traffic in Souls (1912) represented the triumph of Protestant morals and law enforcement over filthy urban vice. Serials like The Perils of Pauline (1914) featured feisty heroines in cliffhanger episodes calculated to entice moviegoers on a regular basis.

Writing historical narrative about local events raises questions about just how much space should be devoted to the broader context. Unlike most film historians, Abel draws upon the work of social and cultural historians. But his use of Benedict Anderson's construct of "an imagined community" is problematic because "horizontal comradeship" among diverse first generation immigrants was difficult to build. Roy Rosenzweig found ethnic enclaves of Jews, Poles, and Lithuanians in Worcester, for example, to be "insular and separate". American laborers have historically been unable to unite across ethnic, let alone racial, lines to promote class interests. Workers in a color-conscious society would forego economic gains to cling to what David Roediger terms "the wages of whiteness". Anderson himself states that American society was internally riven by fierce racial conflict; nationality was based on exclusion as well as inclusion.

Abel's characterization of the western as a "usable past" with a foundational myth for "an imagined community" has unexplored implications. Americanizing immigrants not then considered white raises issues about the meaning of race relations in frontier narratives. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues, such myths substitute nationalism and jingoism for harsh economic reality. White males escaping the industrial order felt entitled to perpetrate...