American Political Movies

An Annotated Filmography of Feature Films

James Combs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317929024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

Essays here explore the relationship between politics and explicitly political feature films from the beginning of the movie industry to World War I, and for each decade through to the 1980's. The included filmography is particularly useful. Originally published in 1990, the method of inquiry put forward in this text is nonetheless extendable to the decades following its publication.

Chapter One

Politics in the Early Movies of Hollywood

The student of the cultural and political history of the era encompassing the beginning of the twentieth century down to the aftermath of World War I can find a number of films of assistance in understanding the political ethos of the era. There is always a kind of “law of diminishing returns” in watching the films of any particular era. After watching a good many films, one realizes that certain genres, themes, and styles dominate and repeat. But certain films stand out as representative of the politics of the age, and as that age advances, blends, and is transformed into another, certain films are of interest as indicative of the kinds of changes underway. The 1910s, like any decade, did not arrive or leave “on time,” nor did it occur in a vacuum devoid of a past and future. But it did constitute an identifiable political period whose politics found its way, as it always does, into popular art, including the explosive and exciting new art form emerging during that time, motion pictures.

It was during this time that the nickelodeon evolved into a major industry centered in Hollywood. People were lured to the spectacle projected onto the screen in increasing numbers. If we are correct about the learning dialectic between moviegoers and moviemakers, and that what we see on the screen tells us something of the political process at that time, then our task here is to select those films which still offer us the most useful popular evidence. As early film became more sophisticated in both subject and technique, and as the film industry developed in wealth and distribution power, films succeeded more and more in offering identifiable narratives of contemporary American life that appealed to increasingly large audiences. By the end of World War I, the movies had become a major cultural force in the United States, and “Hollywood” had become a symbol of the power of this new and awesome form of mass communication to attract and fascinate us, and even perhaps to shape our consciousness of ourselves in ways that no previous medium had been able to do. The new medium of the movies was not just an image of a single sign audiences could see (such as a photograph or painting), nor a diagrammatic arrangement of signs that audiences could scan (such as a map). Rather now audiences were seeing a kinetoscopic photoplay, a dynamic spectacle of signs in action that both represented and superceded life through the persistently unfolding imagery that projected a “metaworld,” both hypothetical and topical, “metareal” and real, dramatically distant and identifiably close, an interplay of Other and Self without peer. In ways we do not fully understand, the genesis of the movies corresponded with the “new consciousness” of the period (most evident in philosophy, psychology, and literature) that explored dreams, the meaning of time and duration, relativity and simultaneity, the “stream of consciousness”—all told, a reality that was complex, dynamic, and visual. The movies were all those things, capturing and shaping the modern imagination.

In the United States, the birth of the movies corresponded with several important social processes that were to have impact on the politics, and concomitantly the popular aesthetic context, of the era. These included the closing of the frontier; the completion of the establishment of much of the industrial base of the economy and the great fortunes derived from industrialization; the growth of urban populations through migration both from the native countryside and foreign immigration; the increasing organization of society in both public and private bureaucracies; and the potential for explosive social conflicts because of the new “mix” of peoples and institutions. Like so many societies undergoing rapid change, there was considerable nostalgia for a pastoral and prelapsarian Eden of mythic memory and celebration. The considerable political upheavals of the period—Populism in the 1890s, succeeded by the more successful Progressive movement of the 1910s—had a nostalgic strain that gave them almost a reactionary myth: we had lost or were fast losing ourselves and our values in the alienating whirlwind of the present. Both William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson were men who venerated the past as a model for the future, in the spirit of our curious political habit of trying to run a large national and capitalist empire on the popular imagination of pastoral and small-town life. We entered a century of increasing organizational gigantism armed with our own sense of individual rectitude and premodern heritage, we thought in our innocence, would sustain us through the colossal changes under way without losing our identity.

The new medium of the movies responded to the “brave new world” of the emerging urban and industrial order, so the immediate imagery and narratives that emerge even in the earliest and most crude of films are of interest to students of politics. Let us mention two early short films in passing as quick examples, before we discuss in greater detail later and more complex films. In the famous The Great Train Robbery (1903), the Western frontier motif and setting is introduced, beginning the long tradition of the Western movie genre. The movies may have done more than any other popular medium to perpetuate the power of that past mythic time, forever underscoring our faith in the vitality and uses of violent action, our distrust of cities and the quasi-European “East,” our need for “frontiers,” and with figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, our incorporation of juvenile fantasies of direct heroic action in the manner of the fictional Western hero into the Presidency. But our political cleavages were not all mythographic. In our populist yearnings, we also imagined the tension over social justice involving the privileged and the ordinary citizen. In Kleptomaniac (1906, directed also by Edwin S. Porter), a rich woman and poor woman are each tried for the same crime, but the poor woman is jailed while the rich one is freed. Here the conflict is rooted in the persistent inequality in our history that led to the recurrent sense of injustice so explosive in the Progressive Era.

Many of the famous Chaplin films from this period offer a glimpse of the new urban order at the bottom, peopled by slumdwellers and immigrants. Chaplin’s sense of injustice, of the rich against the poor, the necessity of becoming “streetsmart” in order to survive, and the brutality and stupidity of authority recur again and again. The popularity of his early films—The Tramp, The Immigrant, Easy Street, The Adventurer, for instance—captured some of the resentment of ordinary people, who could cheer the poetic justice of Charlie’s “little fellow” against the agents of arbitrary authority (policemen, immigration officials, bankers), yet sympathize with Chaplin’s pessimism about the possibility of social reform. The Chaplin character had pretensions to respectability and wealth that are ultimately unsatisfied, so he had to set off shuffling down the road again (or suffer through an absurd and contrived “happy ending” that mocks social optimism). The Chaplin films of 1915–1917 captured something of the contempt for authority and wealth the “lower orders” of the new cities felt, the irony of America as a “land of opportunity” when they lived in slums, yet the desire to achieve some of the wealth and position from which they are excluded. In an odd way, Chaplin’s little fellow and his friends had in common with Horatio Alger’s fictional heroes their pluck, but not their upward-mobile luck.

The populist bias of Progressive Era movies did not only appeal to those audiences caught in the new urban maze, but also included those with nostalgic yearnings for the simplicities attributed to rural culture, the familial devotion of common folk, and indeed the moral certainties of the common life. With the lingering feeling that the urban environment lacks all that, and having to live in the wake of social upheaval, audiences could relate to parables that extolled the tenacity and triumph of loving families in the face of threat and injustice. This attitude helped make the films of D.W. Griffith popular and indeed indispensable for understanding the politics of the era. Griffith himself was a southern Romantic who used women as symbols of domestic gentility to contrast to a world of violence and injustice. He corresponded with Woodrow Wilson, and sympathized with the brand of Progressivism that would somehow “restore” the past in the future, as symbolized by the family and the virtue thought to reside in its sanctity. Audiences responded to his kinetoscopic dramatization of that fundamental popular institution, felt to be so threatened by social change, and his contempt or fear of those forces or groups that threatened the family, including social reformers, plutocratic wealth, war, urban crime, sexual promiscuity, and the threat of alien races.

A Corner in Wheat (1909) begins with pastoral imagery familiar to audiences of that day, farmers sowing wheat, exemplifying a natural unity between man and nature. But quickly we are in the city, and the market in wheat is cornered by the “Wheat King.” We are seeing an image of a dreaded “trust,” the sort of market monopoly that agitated the populists and which the progressives hoped to control or break up. The price of flour doubles, many cannot pay, and farmers cannot sell their wheat, while the Wheat King revels at a lavish party. Bragging of his wealth while touring one of his grain elevators, he falls down a shaft and dies, suffocated by the wheat. Audiences could intuitively sense the justice of the fall of a plutocrat who had disturbed the economics of the popular order. This film expressed a villain worthy of Populist tracts against the conspiracies of the plutocracy, and the Progressive faith that those who have violated the canons of the imagined past economy—competition, fair prices, the sanctity of the yeoman farmer-were subject to divine, and even anti-trust wrath.

Griffith’s famous Birth of A Nation (1915) is of interest to us here on two counts: first, because of the immediate political furor that arose over the movie, and second, because of the reactionary populism inherent in his interpretation of “progressive” history that would shape the reform program of Wilson, literally “reforming” the State around a conception of the major political crisis of the recent past as it gave “birth” to a new society. In this view (shared in more sophisticated form by Wilson himself), the industrial North defeated the plantation South, but unleashed an uncivilized force in the freed slaves and their carpetbagger masters bent on revenge and greed. In order to restore a civilized and virtuous community, they were stopped by the vigilante action of the Ku Klux Klan, restoring the peace and virtue of community and family. The two families, one Northern and the other Southern, who reconcile and intermarry at the end stand as metaphors for the reunion of the nation founded on the natural sentiments of home and family, defeating the evils of cold-hearted industrialism (exemplified by the Radical Republican Senator Stoneman) and alien forces (exemplified by miscegenation: villains are either mulattoes or black). The film was an immediate sensation, and inspired protests by black and liberal groups incensed by the blatant racism of the story. With Birth, observers began to sense that the movies’ power to make a political statement and shape political consciousness was greater than anyone anticipated. Birth gave imaginative shape to not only a Progressive interpretation of the past, but also as a parable of the politics of the present. Not only did it justify the “Jim Crow” laws of the time, it also warned of the dangers of a manipulative industrial elite using power to destroy traditional bourgeois life so dear to the hearts of mythologists such as Griffith. Wilson was a spokesman for that tradition who sought, like the powerless but respectable white men of Birth, to restore a sane and understandable political order that reflected the values, and power, of the large middle class that saw itself as the backbone of the country. Birth was not only, as Wilson was supposed to have remarked, “History written in lightning”; it was also Progressive politics written in lightning, offering a parable of the righteous power of Wilson’s middle-class voting base standing for the virtue of the family-based middle against the plutocracy on the one hand and a degenerate proletariat on the other, and the possibility of a conspiratorial coalition of the two. Progressive order would now be restored, as it was in the movie, not only by concerted political action by the “good people” of the community, but by moral regeneration symbolized by the triumph of familial rectitude and the vision of pristine peace and order governed by the principles of Christ (this, recall, after bloody racial war and vigilante murder). But in the political visions of Griffith and Wilson, violence, like reform legislation, could be used both ruthlessly and morally for the Progressive cause. Birth represents something of the nostalgic and “reactionary” element in Progressivism, uniting on screen both the cinematic and political imagination of a restored and regenerate moral order.

Both Wilson and Griffith were essentially imbued with the romantic sentimentality at the core of popular Victorianism, so dealing with the onslaught of modern urban and industrial change was difficult but compelling for them. Much of Griffith’s work deals with the tensions wrought by modernity, always coming to a resolution in which traditional morality is upheld even in the roughest of circumstances. Griffith’s subsequent work represents some of the periodic political tensions that emerged with the fear, shared by rural folk and urban reformers, that modernity would bring chaotic consequences. Many of his films, from the early Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) to “The Mother and the Law” section of his masterpiece Intolerance (1916) and subsequent films such as Way Down East (1920), deal with the “postlapsarian” world of modernity and how the moral order of “prelapsarian” tradition can be saved from ruin. What is fascinating to the political observer of the times is that both Wilson and Griffith were eclipsed by events, Wilson by World War I and the impulse toward modern life that the war speeded up, and Griffith as an anachronism in the Twenties making movies about the very pastoral life and morality that the Progressive Era and the war had done so much to destroy. Intolerance is of interest not only because it is one of the greatest of all films, but also because of its immediate political eclipse and subsequent political influence. Griffith’s theme is injustice through the ages, in which innocent ordinary folk are subjected to the abuses of the powerful and haughty. His populist roots show in his depiction of the social tension between wealthy industrialists and their “society” wives against the innocent pursuits and urban travails of the new working class. But his Wilsonian ties also are clear, in that both ancient and modern rulers can be just if they are on the side of popular morality, including familial autonomy from a meddlesome, elite-sponsored welfare state and protection from the predatory powers of both industrial magnates and vice lords. Griffith, like Wilson, still retained a kind of sentimental idealism that suggested a political coalition between benevolent authority and the virtuous individual could produce social harmony without disturbing the actual concentration of power in industrial and social elites. Still, one reason given for the box office failure of Intolerance was that the new urban middle classes just discovering moviegoing didn’t like the theme of industrial strife which placed culpability clearing on the shoulders of greedy and hypocritical industrialists. Too, Intolerance not only included some of the more explosive Progressive criticisms of the arrogance of power, it also proceeded on pacifist sentiment and concluded with a moving Utopian vision of a world without war. When Griffith began making the film in 1915, much of the public agreed with this sentiment, and Wilson ran for re-election in 1916 with the claim of moral superiority over the warring nations of Europe, declaring that we were “too proud to fight.” But by the time the film was released late in 1916, the public mood and political realities had changed to a bellicose and interventionist stance, and Griffith’s views seemed curiously if quickly dated.

The Great War raging in Europe was much on the minds of Americans, and the new medium of the movies became a popular forum for us to entertain fantasies about what war was like and what our attitude should be about this war. Some took a “preparedness” stance that advocated intervention, others a pacifist stance that emphasized the horrors of war. The most famous of the former is J. Stuart Blackton’s Battle Cry of Peace (1915). It depicted an invasion of New York by an army from an unnamed country sporting spiked helmets and handle-bar mustaches who ravaged the city and its population, raping women, looting stores, and altogether living up to the nefarious reputation the Germans were acquiring in Allied propaganda. (The film was based on a novel by Hudson Maxim, the brother of the inventor of the machine gun, entitled Defenseless America; was praised by Theodore Roosevelt and condemned by Henry Ford; and is one of the first examples of War Department cooperation with the makers of a film they found agreeable, since General Leonard Wood put 2,500 Marines at the director’s disposal as extras.) Similarly, The Nation’s Peril (1915) involved a foreign spy attempting to steal the plans for an aerial torpedo through the pacifist sweetheart of an inventor but when she discovers the schemes she kills the spy. The movie climaxes with another foreign invasion and capture of an American city, but this time the U. S. Navy bombards them into submission, and the nation is saved. On the pacifist side, Thomas Ince’s Civilization (1916) promoted the still powerful idea that modern warfare was a horror to be avoided by imagining a war between two fictional countries, one of which is clearly Germany. A German submarine commander, envisioning the consequences of sinking a civilian ocean liner, refuses an order to torpedo the ship, and indeed sinks his own submarine and crew rather than defile the innocent (this was the era, recall, of unrestricted submarine warfare by Germany). By sacrificing his life to a “Higher Power,” Christ takes on the commander’s bodily form and preaches peace to the warriors, escorting a military leader that resembles Kaiser Wilhelm across a battlefield, where troops in spiked helmets herd wretched women and children, and a dead soldier is mourned by his dog (“See thou thy handiwork,” Christ enjoins the Kaiser). Ince claimed that Wilson praised the film, and others claimed that the film helped Wilson win the 1916 election, but today it reminds us how much American and Progressive Era pacifism has been rooted in a political interpretation of Christian love that takes precedence over assertions of national interest or even national peril. Since then, pro-war movies have depicted the adventure and glory of war, and the existence of foreign threat to our “way of life”; and anti-war movies have abandoned the “moral” argument against war in favor of depictions of war as a savage reversion to barbarism and an existential nightmare. Civilization’s religiosity is clearly of another era.

With American entry into the war, moviemakers took up the Allied cause and the national commitment with the same enthusiastic innocence that made us believe that this was “the war to end all wars.” It is at this point that the narrative and visual power of the movies was united with political power in the production of officially sanctioned propaganda. The emerging studies of the new institution of Hollywood sought political respectability and sanction, so they threw themselves into making the patriotic fare designed to provide motivation to fight, suppress doubts, and promote the sacrifices and attitudes that would underwrite the war effort. In particular, the propaganda films made pacifists either cowards or naive fools, and associated the willingness to fight and die as the test of a “manly” patriotism that not only won battles but also women’s hearts and men’s admiration. The crucible of war not only would purge us of selfish or weak impulses, it also served a democratizing and moralizing purpose by bringing men together in egalitarian military camaraderie and offered an opportunity for moral regeneration of slackers, effete lounge lizards, and the sons of the idle rich. In other words, these films offered a v...