Film and the Working Class

The Feature Film in British and American Society

Peter Stead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317928423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Taking the subject chronologically from the 1890s to when the book was initially published in 1989, this book analyses those films specifically concerned with working-class conditions and struggle, and discusses them within the context of the debate on the social significance of the feature film. It concentrates on films which depict labour organizations and political activists, as well as life in working-class communities and actors with working-class identities such as James Cagney.

Reviews of the original edition:

'…fills a gap in film studies…the study of social and labour history, and the development of popular culture in Britain and the United States.'

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1 Showmen and the nature of the movies

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Motion pictures were to develop into the great mass entertainment of the twentieth century but they had first been shown in the cities of the late nineteenth century and both as an industry and as a social activity they were never to lose characteristics that had been determined at their birth. What Americans came to call ‘the movies’ and what in Britain was referred to as ‘the pictures’ had emerged out of a complex and distinctive metropolitan and urban culture which was very much achieving its quiddity as the nineteenth century came to a close. The nature of the movies was determined at an early stage and to study film history is to be reminded of the extent to which American and British cultural patterns in the modern era were determined within the context of the late nineteenth-century city.

There had always been cities providing a variety of religious, political, and commercial functions but few contemporaries doubted that the industrial city of the nineteenth century was a new phenomenon. What was revolutionary was the rate of growth and the sheer size of the metropolitan and urban populations: cities had become dynamic and populous. Even more revolutionary, though, were the social adjustments that needed to be made to accommodate the new masses. In almost every respect the new city was shaped by the interplay between elites and key leadership groups on the one hand and the masses on the other. To a greater or lesser extent all activity became popular. There was a new pattern of industrial relations, a new range of religious and social agencies, a new democratic politics, and a whole host of leisure-time activities and preoccupations that have been identified by historians as constituting a ‘popular culture’. The basic framework of that popular culture was fairly obvious for urban workers not only lived close together in distinctive communities but had also begun to pick up the rudiments of an education and they had both savings and time to spare. They were soon identified as potential customers by tradesmen, bankers, building societies, and insurance companies, then by streetcar and railway companies, by the publishers of newspapers, journals, and cheap novels, and finally by a whole army of showmen whose task it was to inveigle the masses into circuses, fairgrounds, peepshows, roller-skating pavilions, theatres, and sporting fixtures. For many years serious and respectable citizens had worried about the new masses but now at least entrepreneurs and businessmen were able to offer them every service, every distraction, and every entertainment that their wages allowed. It was into this world that the movies, and of course the citizens of the twentieth century, were born.¹

The movies were something very new and they soon developed a unique and distinctive position within the culture but that position can only be fully understood by reference to that context of nineteenth-century popular culture from which they emerged. The term ‘popular culture’ is a modern one but it describes what was a readily identifiable reality in the new urban areas of the nineteenth century. One difficulty with the term is that many contemporaries would never have been prepared to apply the word ‘culture’ to the new preoccupations of the masses. The initial political and social fears of the masses had always been accompanied by a dread of their cultural impact and by a conviction that civilized values and standards could not possibly survive. The emergence of a popular culture confirmed many fears and yet there was some compensation in the fact that things might have been far worse. In general the activities of the masses were though of as mindless but they were at least non-political and in many cases they even encouraged the acceptance of social norms and new routines necessary to urban and industrial life. Furthermore there was in many of these activities at least a hint of some of the better cultural values. Sport for example diverted the energy of the masses into activities that could inculcate both useful and attractive qualities. The content of the new journalism was appalling but at least it indicated that the masses could read and apart from being useful that offered the prospect that readers might move on to better things. Then there was the exciting development of ‘live’ variety, music-hall in Britain, vaudeville in America. Much of this was not respectable but at least it showed that popular music and humour could be channelled into the conventions of legitimate theatre. The cultural value of all these activities was thought to be negligible but at least some useful qualities were being inculcated and above all their commercial basis bound them in to the mainstream organization and values of middle-class society. Within the culture as a whole these popular activities can be said to have established a limited, unresolved but not entirely unsatisfactory position.²

Further objections to the term ‘popular culture’ have come from left-wing or Socialist historians who also question the cultural value of these activities before going on to ask whether the word ‘popular’ needs also to be examined.³ Certainly they conceded that these activities were popular in the sense that millions of people availed themselves of them but their argument had been that only in a very limited way can we talk of these activities as belonging to the masses: rather they represented the expropriation and packaging of what had previously been popular forms by middle-class organizations and in most cases by businessmen and entrepreneurs. What they suggest is that the roots of these activities lay deep in popular or folk culture but that ultimately the new urban manifestation of these activities revealed more about the values of the business classes than they did about the masses themselves. What left-wing historians regret in particular is that the emergence of this new ‘popular culture’ came at precisely the moment when conditions were favouring the development of a radical working-class political consciousness. Just as education, literacy and communications were beginning to prepare the workers for new radical organizations their attention and savings were captured by opportunistic entrepreneurs with a very different set of values. Instead of a new social awareness the masses were given in particular fiction, humour, and music which were apolitical and essentially sentimental in tone. To historians of the left the new popular culture represented a fatal and quite decisive fragmentation of what should have been a working-class consciousness.

Any examination of nineteenth-century popular culture then necessarily involves confronting the basic cultural and political values that have determined British and American society in the modern era. To understand the precise position of the movies in this whole process we need first to look more closely at that activity which, at least superficially, seemed to be the direct ancestor of the cinema, that is music-hall or vaudeville. Towards the end of the nineteenth century these forms of ‘live’ variety seemed to be carrying all before them and they had become almost the symbolic or quintessential entertainment of the new city. Yet their cultural position both for contemporaries and subsequent historians was complex and again is directly relevant to any understanding of the movies. The great difficulty with music-hall and vaudeville, and this is a point of crucial significance to movie historians, is that they have earned or been given a very special place in the popular memory and in social history by those who recall with great fondness those heady pre-1914 days. To understand music-hall and vaudeville one has to fight through layers of myth and romance and one has to undo a whole view of the past that uses nostalgia for pre-1914 as a touchstone. Not surprisingly it is difficult for us to decide both how good and how genuinely popular all live variety was, let alone its precise relationship to the new entertainment of the movies.⁴

Recent writers have suggested that almost everything about the music-halls and vaudeville theatres has been gilded by memory. There must have been some great stars and some ecstatic moments in those cosy halls but there must also have been many second- and third-rate performers, constant recourse to stereotypes, excessive repetition, and buckets of sentimentality. Why is it then that these halls have been recalled with so much pleasure in so much twentieth-century writing? The answer is surely that they occupied a very special place in the lives of many young middle-class men and especially in the lives of those of them who were budding artists, writers, or intellectuals, who in short were Bohemians. To the English writer George Moore the halls were a ‘protest against the villa, the circulating library, the club’ and, we may add, much else that characterized middle-class life.⁵ The halls were hardly respectable and they allowed ‘young bucks’ to escape for a while to an alternative world that offered not only contact with the masses, humour, and song but also drink, conviviality, and sexual opportunity. The new pattern of variety was an adornment to what Michael Chanan has called ‘the night-time city’, and the whole beauty of the format was that everything took place not in sordid cellars or popular drinking places but in buildings that had much of the appearance and many of the conventions of legitimate theatre.⁶ The Bohemians thought of the halls as catering essentially for the masses but they were delighted that they could take their place beside them as part of what Vachel Lindsay was to call ‘a jocular army’.⁷ The English writer Max Beerbohm spoke of how the music-halls had ‘grown up with reference to nothing but the public's own needs and aspirations’, of how the audience was ‘the maker of the form’, and of how music-hall had always offered ‘a great chance to any student of humanity at large’.⁸ Even the novelist George Gissing, who was ‘no friend of the people’ and who was the most scathing critic of so many aspects of the new popular culture, has his fictional alter ego Henry Ryecroft recalling the pleasures of having been young in London, of the public houses with their ‘pints of foaming ale’ and the supper bars with their ‘sausage and mash’, of the theatres where one could ‘roll and hustle with the throng at the pit-door’, and of walking home singing as he went. For Ryecroft, like so many others who had worried about culture and the masses, had learnt ‘the true instinct of townsfolk’ which was to find pleasure in the ‘triumph of artificial circumstance over natural conditions’.⁹ The ‘artificial circumstance’ of the theatre and of ‘live’ variety allowed some middle-class observers a safe glimpse into that ‘tumult and promiscuity’ which Arnold Bennett found to be typical of American hotel lobbies and which most respectable people took to be the hallmarks of the new city.¹⁰

The Bohemians thought that they were glimpsing ‘humanity at large’, the ‘throng’, but more recently historians have questioned whether that was the case. The theoretical debate has tended to follow Raymond Williams's suggestion that although the urban working-class found in music-hall performers ‘their most authentic voice’ the halls were not full manifestations of working-class culture but were rather ‘a very mixed institution’.¹¹ They were mixed because although all the vitality, the songs, humour, and much of the idiom came from what E. P. Thompson has described as the traditionally ‘rowdy’ element in working-class culture these things had now ceased to be spontaneous and informal and had passed into other hands.¹² In their examination of popular culture Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel were worried by the fact that music-hall seemed to belong far more to the professional performers than to the audiences and that it was individual stars who actually seemed to have created the stereotypes and much of the idiom.¹³ A more fundamental objection has been that music-hall and vaudeville were essentially controlled by showmen who were of course entrepreneurs. It was they who controlled the way in which performers, who came largely from working-class backgrounds, developed and packaged popular forms into acceptable acts. The new variety was a carefully edited version of a more traditional and informal entertainment. Whatever values and viewpoints were embodied in the acts would have ultimately been those that were acceptable to the promoters. It was for this reason that the halls were never radical or seditious and that the songs, like everything else that was on offer, were, as Colin Maclnnes suggested, ‘too inhibited emotionally, too limited intellectually, too commercial in their intentions’.¹⁴ To the Marxist historian Michael Chanan the halls were merely ‘tools of commercial exploitation’ but a more balanced view would rely on an appreciation of the way in which ‘live’ variety revealed as much about showmen as it did about ‘humanity at large’.¹⁵

Most social historians have tended to stick with Raymond Williams's argument and have been reluctant to give up the notion that what was most lively and energetic in all that variety came from the working class. Even Colin Maclnnes remains convinced that music-hall was ‘an act of working-class self assertion’ although he concludes his analysis of the music-hall songs with a phrase that should set film historians thinking, for he sees them as a ‘sort of bastard folk song of an industrial-commercial-imperial age’.¹⁶ The point surely is that music-hall and vaudeville were transitional forms, transitional, as Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel suggest, between the genuine folk culture of an earlier age and the mass commercialization of the twentieth century. They were transitional in almost every respect including that of audience composition. The theoretical debate has concentrated on organization and form but it is only more recently that film historians have actually raised the question of audiences. The Bohemians thought that in going to the halls they were confronting humanity, albeit on their own terms. In reality they were confronting those mixed audiences that frequented these theatres. As Robert Sklar has suggested the music-halls and vaudeville were essentially down-town or city-centre entertainments and would therefore be attracting typical down-town audiences, which would consist of an alliance of regulars, casuals, workers, clerks, parvenus, and Bohemians.¹⁷ Music-hall and vaudeville belonged not to ‘humanity at large’ but to its audience and that audience was hardly ever an exclusively working-class audience. There were working-class regulars but the vast majority of the working class would have been excluded, at least in part by the cost and social ambience of the halls but far more by their geographical location. Something of a myth has developed about the universality of ‘live’ variety that can be explained in terms of generalizations based on those great centres London and New York, and by the ubiquitous nature of printed sheet music which often used the name of a star as a selling gimmick and which took songs into many pubs and drinking saloons as well as into many homes.¹⁸

The music-hall and vaudeville were transitional as really was all nineteenth-century popular culture. Through its entrepreneurs middle-class society had made its first approaches to the masses. Popular forms were expropriated and then given back suitably packaged. Everything was aimed at what Henry Ryecroft thought of as ‘the host of the half-educated’ and was therefore of no real cultural value but the compensations were real. Quite apart from any utility or negative political advantage that came out of popular culture, the important thing was that establishment culture was at least in touch with the masses. Total disaster had been averted, channels of communication had been established, and there were foundations on which to build. There was even, as we have seen, the chance of some vicarious pleasure to be gained from some of the new manifestations. It was into this unresolved but not unsatisfactorily balanced situation that film was introduced, and was immediately identified as something new. A vital clue in this respect was the attitude of the Bohemians and those other refugees from the middle-class world who had found music-hall and vaudeville such an exciting diversion. Almost to a man they were against the new phenomenon of the movies and they made no effort to include them in their ‘night-time’ world. There was to be no mingling with the throng at the movies. The representatives of the middle classes were quite prepared to leave the movies to the masses. What had arrived now really was mass entertainment.

From the outset it was the sheer popularity of the movies that struck observers. The movies had broken through to a vast new public and everything was on a different scale. Of course the trade papers revelled in hyperbole but the claims that were being made had a greater validity than those that had been made for music-hall. The Exhibitors Film Exchange spoke of how movies had brought themselves within ‘intimate reach of the great mass of humanity’.¹⁹ The Bioscope very much approved of the description of the movies as ‘the drama of the masses’ and went on to argue that the whole beauty of the movies was that they were for the first time providing amusement, ‘the greatest factor in the life of the masses’, to ‘the millions’ who had been ‘passed over for so many years and considered of no account’.^20...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• General editor's preface
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Showmen and the nature of the movies
• 2 Towards significance in the silent era
• 3 ‘The sociological punch’ of the talkies
• 4 ‘The propaganda mills of the 1930s’
• 5 ‘The faintest dribble of real English life’
• 6 ‘The wartime drama of the common people’
• 7 The post-war age of anxiety
• 8 British working-class heroes
• 9 The national experience in Britain and America
• 10 Workers and the film
• References
• Index of films
• Index of names