The American Worker on Film: A Critical History, 1909-1999 by Doyle Greene: Book Reviews

The American Worker on Film: A Critical History, 1909-1999 Doyle Greene. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2010. In an era when many Americans seek to deny the existence of social class conflict by emphasizing a monolithic middle class society, Doyle Greene, an independent scholar residing in Minneapolis, reminds us that the working class is an essential element of the nation's past and present. Greene analyzes representations of organized labor, workers, the workplace, and the working class in twentieth-century American cinema. Employing both political and film theory, Greene asserts that cinematic depictions of the American worker focus upon the concept of the noble worker, shifting perceptions of the American dream, and the embracing of reform rather than revolutionary change to address working-class concerns. While touching upon a number of films, Greene concentrates his analysis upon ten films ranging from D. W Griffith's A Corner in Wheat (1909) to Mike Judge's Off ce Space (1999). Although one may certainly express reservations regarding whether the films selected for detailed investigation are the most representative of their era, the totality of Greene's discourse certainly provides insight into popular perceptions of the American working class. In his discussion of D. W. Griffith and film during the Progressive period, Greene maintains that the filmmaker acknowledged the greed of the capitalist class and poor working conditions for many laborers. The solution to such problems, however, was not revolution, but rather reform. Individual capitalists deserved condemnation, but not the system itself. Greene concludes that this reformist approach characterized mainstream Hollywood cinema for the remainder of the century. While doing an excellent job of placing A Comer in Wheat within historical and cultural context, Greene provides little attention to the racist side of Progressive reform as depicted in Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915). Greene also tends to ignore politics and cinema during the 1920s, concentrating instead upon the rise of organized labor during the Great Depression and New Deal. For his central film text of the 1930s, Greene selected Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). Although Chaplin was often condemned for his leftist politics, Greene contends that Modern Times, unlike many European films of the depression era, was not a film about class struggle. Instead, the rebellion of Chaplin's worker against the assembly line and Fordism becomes an irrational act of individual protest rather than a collective class action. In the film's conclusion, Chaplin and the Gamin (Paulette Goddard) lose their jobs, but they must "buck up" and keep trying. Thus, Green argues, "The 'dignity' of the workers is that they learn to 'buck up' and love their inherently doomed struggle, and their inevitable defeat. In disseminating this final message, Modern Times itself sustains the imaginary ideology against the real conditions of movie audiences of the 1930s" (51). The myth of the noble worker is also championed in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), but Greene suggests that John Ford's cinematic adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel projected greater ambivalence than Chaplin's Modern Times. The film acknowledges that the capitalist system was not necessarily functioning well for the workers in the 1930s, but they should trust in the reform efforts of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Accordingly, the noble worker Ma Joad (Jane Darwell) gets the final word in the film rather than the more radical Tom Joad (Henry Fonda). Arguing that worker-management cooperation characterized Hollywood depictions of labor during the Second World War, Greene focuses upon how during the post-war period both politicians and filmmakers employed anticommunism to discredit the labor movement in Hollywood and the nation. In a close analysis of Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), Greene discovers elements of fascism in Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) as the waterfront must be protected by a "supra-individual" against organized labor. …