American History and Classical Hollywood

September/October 2007 · Historically Speaking 23 American History and Classical Hollywood Jennifer Smyth In 1941 Hollywood released two major assessments of the American past: Cecil B. DeMille's Landof Liberty and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. The first film began as apetprojectof censormoguls Will Hays andJoseph Breen, and later involved the massive editing of many of Hollywood's historical films produced from the late 1 920s on. The editors placed specific emphasis on the powerful cultural and financial strides made by "talking" historical cinema. The film was supervised and narrated by Cecil B. DeMille , who unsurprisingly included sizable clips from his epic Westerns for Paramount Studios, The Plainsman , 1936, and Union Pacific, 1 939, but the production had the nominal cooperation of all the major studios and even boasted a guest historical "advisor" drawn fromtheranksof thediplomaticestablishmentjames T. Shotwell. Although the finished film was first screened in 1939 at the World's Fair, most American audiences didn't see ituntil the 1 941 general theatrical release. What they saw represented the combined efforts of Hollywood's top censors, agovernment-approved historian, and Hollywood's most conservative director of empire-building, nationalist epics. Landof Liberty represented the most prominent and sweeping exampleof "editingforcontent"in Hollywood's history . Forinsuturingtogetherachronologicalnarrative of Americanhistory from earlyEuropean setdement to theconflicts of the20th century, DeMiIIe and companyleftthelastdecade 's numerous historicalcontroversies and challenges to mainstream historical narratives on the cuttingroom floor. Cimarron (RKO, 1931) and Ramona(TwentiediCentury-Fox, 1936), for example, offeredcriticalperspectives onwestwardexpansionin the 19th century, condemned the exploitationof NativeAmericansinOklahoma and California, and featured multiracial protagonists Yancey Cravat andRamonaMoreno. Butmovies like thesedidn'tappearinLandofLiberty . Instead,DeMiIIeincluded shots of classic batdes between white senders and tomahawk -wielding Indians. Scarface (Caddo, 1932), the mostcontroversialmodernbiopicof 1920sgangstericonAl Capone,was totallyignored, as was RKO's biography of Annie Oakley {Annie Oakley, 1935). The filmfocusedon film biographies ofAlexanderHamilton , Abraham Lincoln, and other great white men of the 19th century. The women's war epic Gone with the Wind (Seizmck International Pictures-MGM, 1939) and the anti-Great War stories They Gave Him a Gun (MGM, 1937) and Heroesfor Sale (Columbia, 1933) were purged of their nontraditional accounts of the conflicts. Hollywood's forays into post-Great War American history, such as The PublicEnemy (Warner Brothers, 1931), and the industry's own self-reflexive examinations ofitstroubledpast, WhatPriceHollywood? (Paramount, 1932) andA StarisBorn (Selznick International Pictures, 1937), were also excised from this grand narrative. Classical Hollywood's historical consensus in the 1930sneverexisted,exceptas therefashioned,DeMiIlian visual history, Landof Liberty. However, over the years both historians and film studies scholars have made certain assumptions about classical Hollywood discourseandideology,andinparticular,itsmythicreflection of mainstream, old-fashioned attitudes toward the national past. Hollywood's historical films weredismissedassimplifiednarrativeslackinganyhistorical argument, detail, or engagementwithmultiple perspectives on the past. Their main characters were unsulliedheroes (notheroines). Accordingto theprevailingscholarlywisdom , theHollywoodstudios marketedAmerican historyas great,white, and male. The historical film was a genre based on fabrication, escapism ,andracial,ethnic,andgender stereotypes. Although American historians and Hollywood film scholars often approach film from diametrically opposedpositions (onewidianintrinsicloathingfortheoretical grounding but an unswerving devotion to accuracy;theotherwithanalmostahistorical, theoreticalgroundingthat frequendy prefers calling film history "context-activated" film studies), they nonedieless share abasic creed about classical Hollywood studio production, and in particular historical films. CitizenKane, however,has always been the one redeemable film. Evenhistorianswilladmittoseeingand appreciating it without sneering. Within film studies, CitizenKaneis the ultimate filmmakers' and filmgoers' film, the auteur's masterpiece, the one great film that could be made in spite of the oppressive, corporate capitalist system of Hollywood. But while historians have more or less left the film alone, sparing it their usualblack-and-white,text-over-image,litmustestsof historical accuracy, film studies has traditionally preferred to leave the U.S. history in Citizen Kane stricdy alone. Identifying the film as a closet biography of press and film mogul William Randolph Hearst or mentioning the film's historical context (1865-1940) werenotonlyconsideredprosaic scholarlymoves but also detracted from studies of Welles's auteur genius and his more important filmic innovations. The film had to be an anomalywithin the systemin order to establish the inferiority of Hollywood's collaborative filmmaking to Welles' isolated genius. According to scholarly consensus, with the release of Citizen Kane, themodern film (withits morecomplex forms of narration , character, and possibly historical discourse...