Bowery to Broadway: The American Irish in Classical Hollywood Cinema (review)

The dustcover of Christopher Shannon’s new book on Irish-American involvement in Hollywood from the 1920s to the late 1950s carries an enthusiastic endorsement from Ruth Barton, an esteemed critic of the Irish cinema. The praise from Barton is particularly apt, for Shannon’s book nicely complements her own recent study, Acting Irish in Hollywood: from Fitzgerald to Farrell (2006). Barton chronicles the careers of indigenous Irish actors who—by migrating to the United States or commuting between it and Ireland—exerted and continue to exert a profound influence on films made in Hollywood. Shannon’s focus, by contrast, is on representations of the Irish-American ethos in classic Hollywood cinema at the height of the studio system, and he offers original and perceptive insights into the impact that these films had on Hollywood and on motion picture audiences.

An historian by training, Shannon sets very clear goals in this study, and he has produced a book that will become in effect a reference work for anyone working in the field of Irish-American cinema. Because the title can be misread or at least create expectations that the author does not intend to address, it is important to clarify what Shannon’s study does and does not do. Shannon writes at length about the roles undertaken by Irish-American actors like Pat O’Brien or James Cagney, but this is not a study of their careers. Nor does he examine in any detail the work of directors like Leo McCarey or John Ford. Bowery to Broadway is emphatically History and not Film Studies. In meticulous detail and with wonderfully accessible prose, Shannon presents accounts of essential, and in some cases not-so-essential, films that represent key elements of Irish-American life—at least as it was perceived by Hollywood producers, directors, and screen writers.

Bowery to Broadway offers a popular account of a distinct social phenomenon, Hollywood’s interest in an ethnic group that often seemed quite different from both the Norman Rockwell version of America enforced by covers of the Saturday Evening Post and from the equally ethnic world of the Hollywood studio system. Shannon emphasizes chronicling over interpretation, though the latter is tantalizingly present throughout. As such, he does not attempt the wide ranging analyses of a work of Film Studies, nor does he undertake a complex sociological assessment of the forces shaping Hollywood’s interest in Irish- American themed films over three decades. Instead, Shannon presents a carefully organized account of a phenomenon of which many readers interested in film, in Irish Studies, and in Irish America may be only vaguely aware. In this, Shannon’s project on film might be compared to what William H. A. Williams did for sheet music in ’Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream (1996)—that is, retrieve and thoughtfully interpret a large body of ethnic material that had previously been ignored.

Shannon begins with a thumbnail sketch of the political career of Al Smith, the unsuccessful Irish-American Catholic presidential candidate of 1928. He emphasizes Smith’s ethnicity as a defining feature of both the candidate and the campaign, and without belaboring the point, shows how these traits ensured Smith’s defeat. Shannon ends with a brief reference to John F. Kennedy, whose 1960 success came about in no small part from the transformation of his identity from an ethnic to an indigenous candidate. Between these two stories is a meticulous rendering of a series of Irish-American films covering a variety of categories and dominated by ethnicity.

Shannon organizes his engagement with Hollywood cinema according to genres, starting with the one most recognizable to readers and the one most analyzed by film critics: gangster films. Despite the familiarity of this ethnic-dominated category, Shannon makes excellent points about the contrasting features of films with Irish-American gangsters and those featuring Italian Americans. The very nature of these ethnic representations raises the danger of biased, even offensive, commentary, but...