Modernism and Mass Culture

Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture. By Susan Hegeman. Princeton University Press, 1999

American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s. By John Veitch. University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Popular Literature. By John Parris Springer. University of Oklahoma Press, 2000

1

One of the most improbable adaptations of Romeo and Juliet ever recorded on film occurs in the middle of The Goldwyn Follies, Samuel Goldwyn's 1938 movie musical about the problems of making movie-musicals. A collaboration between Ben Hecht, George and Ira Gershwin, Lillian Hellman, and George Balanchine, The Goldwyn Follies is loosely modeled on the stage extravaganzas of Florenz Ziegfeld and features ventriloquist Edgar Bergen doing comic shtick with dummy Charlie McCarthy, Metropolitan Opera star Helen Jepson singing arias from La Traviata (1853), the Ritz Brothers doing madcap Marx Brothers-style clown routines, dancer Vera Zorina performing a serious water-nymph ballet choreographed by Balanchine, and popular radio crooner Kenny Baker singing sentimental Gershwin ballads. It is, depending on your point of view, either a colossal mish-mash of cultural styles, or an elegant refutation of Lawrence W. Levine's thesis in Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1986) that this kind of mixed entertainment died out at the end of the nineteenth century. Levine should have seen more old movies.

What holds all of this together, or at least is meant to hold it together, is a story about movie producer Oliver Merlin (Adolphe Menjou) who has lost touch with the tastes of common people. With his career in jeopardy, Merlin discovers Hazel Dawes (Andrea Leeds) while filming on location in the countryside. She is a simple, spontaneous, and pure young girl from small-town America who is more than willing to tell him what is wrong with his movies. He quickly brings her to Hollywood as his personal advisor, nicknames her "Miss Humanity," and warns her against having anything to do with actors, "beautiful, charming people but dangerous to talk to off stage." Hiding her under a blanket at the studio to keep her presence a secret, he asks her to watch a rehearsal of a dance number based on the Romeo and Juliet story. "Romeo loves Juliet, but his family likes jazz dancing, and her family likes ballet dancing," he explains, in a line that must have made Shakespearean purists in the audience cringe in horror, but might also have inspired a young Leonard Bernstein with the idea he would later turn into West Side Story (1957). "All I know is what I like," Miss Humanity tells Merlin. "So much the better," he reassures her. "There are two hundred million people who only know what they like and they're all sitting up here with their mouths open and their eyes shining. If you like it, you nod your head and that will be two hundred million people nodding." A generation before American literary critics became enamored of reader-response criticism, Goldwyn, Hecht, and Hellman were leading the way in this remarkable movie, which is not simply about Hollywood's use of Shakespeare, but also about Hollywood's sensitivity to the needs of the people.

As the ballet starts we see a street scene with a Hotel Montague on one side of the stage, a Hotel Capulet on the other, and clotheslines of women's underwear strung between them. The camera moves in for a number of close-ups of sexy women looking out of windows on both sides of the street. Then as the laundry is suddenly pulled aside, two groups of women appear onstage, a unit of jazz dancers wearing red, white, and blue tops and shorts, and a unit of ballet dancers in classical white ballet dresses. The two groups dance back and forth, chasing each other off the stage a number of times, and although both sides have equal dance time, there is no doubt that our loyalties are...