Child Prison Narratives of the 1930s as Religious Filmmaking

This essay explores the 1930s children’s prison film in the context of adjacent genres such as the adult prison film. While the children’s prison film engaged with contemporary social concerns by examining the origins of criminality, it nonetheless valorized the priest or judge in a revival of the mid-nineteenth century understanding of religious authority as inhering in the adult male rather than in the child. The children’s reformatory thus emerges as site of potential regeneration because in the hands of the proper reforming spirit it is a controlled experimental environment that is both scientific and sacred. When Clothes Don’t Make the Man: Sartorial Style, Conspicuous Consumption, and Class Passing in Lothar Meggendorfer’s Scenes in the Life of a Masher