Confirming Pages Chapter 5 The Star System 107 Courtesy of M-G-M ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Flesh and the Devil (1927). infidelity with death. This was a part she also played in The Temptress (1926), Flesh and the Devil (1927), A Woman of Affairs (1928), and a number of other films. In Mata Hari (1932) and Camille (1937), Garbo was the older, more experienced woman of the world who seduced and fell in love with younger men but died tragically, the victim of her own self-destructive nature and past behavior. The stars of the late silent era achieved the status of screen idols whom fans worshiped from a distance. Garbo’s reclusiveness, memorialized in the utterance for which she has become most famous—“I vant to be alone”—lasted even after her departure from Hollywood and her retreat to anonymity on New York City’s East Side, where she continued to play the moody Swede. Though Garbo’s onscreen and offscreen mystery might have exceeded that of other stars, it symbolized the quasi-religious divinity that stars possessed in the eyes of the moviegoing public. But, with the down-to-earth realism associated with the coming of sound, with the social upheavals introduced by the stock market crash and the Depression, and with the redefinition of American notions of individualism brought about by the New Deal, the aloof, aristocratic nature of silent screen stars came under increasing criticism and attack. Though American audiences remained fascinated by stars, they wanted their stars to be more human and more accessible. The transformation of Garbo’s screen persona in the 1930s provided a perfect illustration of the way in which silent stars were forced to step down from their pedestals and come alive in order to prolong their careers. The initial stage in the dedivinization of Garbo took place with her first sound film, Anna Christie (1930), which was sold to the public through an ad campaign that humanized her by simply declaring “GARBO TALKS!” Later in bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 107 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages 108 PART 1 The Mode of Production ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ the decade, when top stars such as Katharine Hepburn and Fred Astaire were denounced by exhibitors as “box-office poison” because fans supposedly found them to be too sophisticated, highbrow, and elitist, Garbo briefly reclaimed her popularity by switching from tragic costume melodramas, such as Camille (1937), to appear in her first comedy, Ninotchka (1939). This film was not only done in modern dress but also featured Garbo as an avid consumer of contemporary female fashion (she fell in love with a hat). This time, M-G-M publicity struck another blow in its attempt to make Garbo more accessible, proclaiming “GARBO LAUGHS!” Depression/Repression: The 1930s New Realities, New Images The transition to sound ushered in a new breed of movie star made up of actors and actresses from the theater (George Arliss, Ruth Chatterton, Fredric March), vaudeville (the Marx Brothers, Mae West), the recording industry (Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor), and radio (Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Jack Benny). Distinct vocal styles provided the basis of stardom for many performers, ranging from the charming French and German accents of Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich, respectively; the cultivated English accents of Ronald Colman and Herbert Marshall; and the urban, lower-class voices of Wallace Beery, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Mae West, and Barbara Stanwyck to the regional speech of Will Rogers and the racial dialect of Hollywood’s first black star, Stepin Fetchit. The major stars of the early 1930s (with one or two exceptions) did not belong to the sophisticated royalty of the silent era but to the working class. American audiences fell in love with burly, homely types such as Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler; with hard-working shopgirls such as Janet Gaynor and Joan Crawford; with proletarian tough guys such as Cagney and Robinson; with homespun humorists and broad slapstick comics such as Will Rogers and Joe E. Brown; and with an adorable little “orphan” whose only possessions were her dimples, her curls, and her boundless optimism for the future—Shirley Temple. All-American Kids: Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, and Judy Garland Between 1934 and 1938, Temple’s films earned more money than those of any other star. By the mid-1930s, she was earning more than $300,000 a year and received more than 3,500 fan letters a week. Her endorsement of products, ranging from dresses to dolls, brought in another $300,000 a year. For Depression audiences, Temple provided sentimental solutions to national problems. In her films, Temple’s character was often an orphan (Captain January, 1936) or motherless (Little Miss Marker, 1934) and came from a working-class bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 108 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages Chapter 5 The Star System 109 Courtesy of 20th Century-Fox ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Shirley Temple dances with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in The Littlest Rebel (1935). background (Marker, Dimples, 1936). The perfect democrat, she befriended both servants (Curly Top, 1935) and blacks (The Littlest Rebel, 1935). More important, she became the focus for a new social order. Her unqualified love melted the hardened hearts of both rich and poor and prompted uncharacteristic generosity among her wealthy guardians and/ or benefactors, who then vowed to take care of those less fortunate than themselves. Temple was America’s answer to the Russian Revolution; she awakened the benign forces of paternalistic capitalism, which healed the nation’s wounds and united formerly antagonistic factions of society. Rescued, adopted, and rewarded with untold wealth for her simple trust and love, the miraculous fortune of Temple’s screen characters made her the embodiment of every spectator’s desires. Temple’s popularity decreased as she approached puberty, but so did the dangers facing the typical American family as it weathered the economic turmoil of the 1930s. Other young stars, such as everybody’s boy-nextdoor and girl-next-door couple Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, took up where Temple left off and provided a similar optimism for audiences of the late 1930s. As Andy Hardy, Rooney applied energy and resourcefulness to the problems that beset bourgeois, middle-class America at the end of the decade. Given a meager allowance by his FDR-like father, the judge, Andy Hardy managed to buy a jalopy, take his girl to the drugstore for a soda, bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 109 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages 110 PART 1 The Mode of Production ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ rent a tuxedo for the senior prom, and—working with the other kids in the neighborhood—assemble an amateur show or musical revue that would put Broadway to shame. Garland, whether as Andy’s sweetheart or Dorothy (of Kansas and Oz), paid similar tribute to the inventiveness and innate talent of the average American teenager. Garland infused everything she did, from singing to coping with the trials and tribulations of adolescence, with emotion. She suggested that the happiness that lay just over the rainbow could be obtained if only you could pursue it, as Judy did, through an intense, wholehearted commitment to pure feeling. Clark Gable: Populist Hero The most representative star of the 1930s was not an old man (Beery, Rogers), a child (Temple), or a teen (Rooney, Garland), but rather a rugged, all-American guy. In Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937), Garland sang to his photograph. She declared, like other female fans who worshiped him, that he was “Not like a real actor. . . . But like a fellow you’d meet at a party.” That fellow was named Clark Gable. The foundation of Gable’s screen persona was laid by Frank Capra in It Happened One Night (1934), in which Gable, in an Oscar-winning performance, played a cynical, big-city newspaper reporter. His character advocated the lower-class, populist virtues of dunking donuts, eating raw carrots, hitchhiking, and giving piggyback rides just like the great Abe Lincoln used to do. Gable’s regular guy educated runaway heiress Claudette Colbert in all of the above and taught her how to survive without money on the road in Depression America. Whether an adventurer in Red Dust (1932) or Call of the Wild (1935), a gambler in No Man of Her Own (1932) or Manhattan Melodrama (1934), or a con man in Hold Your Man (1933), Gable projected a no-nonsense honesty and selfirony that made him an ideal antagonist for and complement to Vivien Leigh’s incurably romantic and self-deluding dreamer, Scarlett O’Hara, in Gone With the Wind (1939). Sex, Censorship, and Star Images Sex continued to play a major role in the construction of stardom in the 1930s, but it did so largely through its overt repression. The comparatively unbridled sexuality of stars such as Bow or Valentino in the 1920s became the object of censorship in the 1930s when the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America reinstituted the Production Code in 1934 in response to protests by certain civic organizations and members of the clergy. Directed against depictions of not only crime and violence but also sexual themes such as adultery; scenes of passion, seduction, or rape; sexual perversion, and miscegenation, the Code handcuffed the rampant sexuality of early 1930s stars such as the sexy platinum blonde Jean Harlow and the sexually suggestive Mae West. It turned the sex comedy into the screwball comedy; it made stars out of presexual child and teen performers (such as Temple, Rooney, Garland, bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 110 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages Chapter 5 The Star System 111 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ and Deanna Durbin) and old men (such as Beery and Rogers). And it forced otherwise sexually healthy and attractive stars to find socially acceptable substitutes for sex, such as Joan Crawford’s onscreen drive toward success in a career. In the 1920s, Rex (the horse) may have had “It,” but in the 1930s, Gene Autry’s horse, Champion, not only didn’t but couldn’t. In It Happened One Night (1934), which was made just after the Code was put in force, Gable found himself in the unusual position of having to deny himself to Claudette Colbert until they could be properly married and the “walls of Jericho” (the makeshift curtain that Gable erected between their twin beds) could come tumbling down. Sexual self-censorship made actors such as Gable even more desirable for their female fans, but it also drove sex underground, where it built up steam during the war years and finally exploded in the resexualization of Hollywood that took place in the postwar years in film noir and in films with more sexually explicit themes and sexier stars. World War II and Its Aftermath A New Generation After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a number of American actors (including Clark Gable, James Stewart, Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Robert Montgomery, and Mickey Rooney) enlisted in the military, creating a vacuum of sorts that a new generation of male stars struggled to fill. Established male stars such as Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, and Spencer Tracy were joined by relative newcomers such as Abbott and Costello, Don Ameche, Dana Andrews, Joseph Cotten, Bing Crosby, John Garfield, Bob Hope, Van Johnson, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, and Orson Welles. Musical star Betty Grable became a favorite with the GIs in her incarnation as a pinup whose leggy picture adorned more than 2 million posters on the walls of U.S. military barracks around the world. At the other end of the spectrum, a desexualized Greer Garson epitomized home-front sacrifice as Mrs. Miniver (1942). Ginger Rogers in Tender Comrade (1943) and Jennifer Jones in Since You Went Away (1944) represented the girls back home for whose safety the war was being fought, as did Judy Garland and child star Margaret O’Brien in the period musical Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). Finally, Ingrid Bergman emerged as the perfect combination of romance and patriotism as a member of the Resistance in both Casablanca (1942) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). Transformations Stardom changed during and after the war as performers began to push the limits of classical social, sexual, and psychological behavior. Cary Grant, a handsome romantic lead in 1930s screwball comedies such as The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby, and Holiday (1938) began to explore the darker side of bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 111 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages 112 PART 1 The Mode of Production ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ his screen persona as a suspected murderer in Suspicion (1941), as a small-town radical in flight from the police in Talk of the Town (1942), and as an irresponsible cockney tramp in None but the Lonely Heart (1944). Musical comedy songand-dance man Dick Powell and easygoing Fred MacMurray underwent a similar image overhaul for their roles as detective Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (1944) and as slick insurance salesman and husband-killer Walter Neff in Double Indemnity (1944). Bogart’s transformation from 1930s gangster (The Petrified Forest, 1936; The Roaring Twenties, 1939) to 1940s romantic lead (The Maltese Falcon, 1941; Casablanca, 1942) represented the flip side of these attempts by leading men to redefine their images: instead of tarnishing his persona, he polished it up; but in the process, Bogart brought something of the gangster to his roles as a good guy. In all of these instances, an amalgam of opposing traits led to the creation of the sort of antihero that would dominate film noir. The postwar period also witnessed the reemergence of the femme fatale, but this time the femmes fatales were homegrown, girl-next-door types rather than vamps from abroad. Stars such as Rita Hayworth (Gilda, 1946; The Lady from Shanghai, 1948), Lauren Bacall (To Have and Have Not, 1944; The Big Sleep, 1946), and Lana Turner (The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946) brought an erotic sexuality to the screen that had formerly been reserved for European imports. (The exception that proved the rule was Theda Bara, who, though born as Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati, Ohio, was given an Afro-European ancestry and an exotic name by studio publicists.) American female sexuality that had previously been channeled into the positive enterprises of creating a family or a career suddenly rebelled, revealing its disastrous potential. And though this sexuality was ultimately contained (as in the case of Bacall, who was “tamed” by Bogart) or proved to be selfdestructive (as in the case of Hayworth and Turner, whose greed, lust, and/or improper desire brought about their own deaths in Shanghai and Postman), that sexuality nevertheless emerged as revolutionary, empowering (albeit briefly) the women who possessed it. The Darker Side: Psychology and “the Method” If perfection characterized classical stardom, postwar stars exposed and took advantage of their flaws—all in the interest of a greater realism. The good looks of a Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, or Robert Taylor gave way to the rough features of a Bogart or Robert Mitchum (who once described himself as looking “like a shark with a broken nose”). Actors began to explore the psychological dimensions of their screen personae, revealing the apparent transparency of their mental makeup to be clouded with psychological complexities. Bogart started talking to himself in Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and developed psychotic tendencies in In a Lonely Place (1950). Edward G. Robinson heard voices in Scarlet Street (1945), and James Cagney became a psychopathic killer with an Oedipus complex in White Heat (1949). bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 112 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages Chapter 5 The Star System 113 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ James Stewart evolved from the naive, small-town, populist hero of Frank Capra’s 1930s comedies (You Can’t Take It With You, 1938; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939) to the bitter, anxiety-ridden, vengeance-obsessed cowboy in Anthony Mann’s 1950s Westerns (Naked Spur, 1953; Man from Laramie, 1955) and the disturbed voyeur and sexual fetishist in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1950s suspense thrillers (Rear Window, 1954; Vertigo, 1958). Even John Wayne developed neuroses as the iron-willed, dictatorial cattleman in Red River (1948) and the socially estranged, broodingly violent, racist Indian fighter (with a quasi-incestuous fixation on his brother’s wife) in The Searchers (1956). But by the mid-1950s, Wayne, Stewart, and others were merely acting á la mode. Hollywood was now populated by a new generation of tormented, high-strung young actors such as Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, who embodied the alienation, anguish, and sensitivity of 1950s teenagers. Clift, Brando, and Dean, along with Lee J. Cobb, Barbara Bel Geddes, Ben Gazzara, Julie Harris, Paul Newman, Jack Palance, Lee Remick, Rod Steiger, Eli Wallach, Shelley Winters, and Joanne Woodward, had studied acting in New York at the Actors Studio, where the dramatic theories of the Soviet theater director Constantin Stanislavski had been adopted and reworked by Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, and others. Stanislavski’s techniques became the foundation for “the method,” training exercises that require actors to use their own past experiences and emotional histories as a basis on which to build an inner identification with the characters they portray. The Actors Studio became so famous for its success in training actors in the 1950s that even established stars, such as Marilyn Monroe, began to take lessons there. However, not all 1950s actors and actresses achieved stardom by means of the method, that is, by baring their psyches and their souls to the public. Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Jane Wyman, William Holden, and Randolph Scott dominated the box office during the decade. But the general moviegoing audience of the prewar years had fragmented into a number of special-interest audiences in the 1950s, which ranged from rebellious teens (who idolized Dean, Brando, and later Elvis Presley), college-age men and women (who liked sexier, older stars such as Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, William Holden, and Gregory Peck), and housewives (who were fans of Rock Hudson, Jane Wyman, Ava Gardner, June Allyson, and Susan Hayward) to conservative older viewers and family audiences who patronized Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedies and biblical epics starring Robert Taylor or Charlton Heston. Stars and Anti-Stars Many of the more stable stars of the 1950s continued to be top boxoffice attractions in the 1960s. Dean had died in a car crash in 1955, after completing Giant; Clift had been seriously injured in another car accident while making Raintree County in 1957 and never quite recovered his earlier form; and Brando floundered in a series of oddball items, including Mutiny bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 113 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages 114 PART 1 The Mode of Production Courtesy of Warner Bros. ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Director Elia Kazan (left) and actors Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, and James Dean on the Warner Bros. lot during the making of East of Eden (1955). on the Bounty (1962), The Ugly American (1963), Bedtime Story (1964), and The Countess from Hong Kong (1967), though his performances in The Chase (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) proved that he had not lost his ability to rivet audiences. Doris Day and Rock Hudson emerged as the biggest box-office attractions from 1960 to 1964, costarring in a number of bedroom farces including Pillow Talk (1959), Lover Come Back (1961), and Send Me No Flowers (1964). Cary Grant and John Wayne continued to hold sway over American screen comedies and Westerns, respectively, but were challenged by a new international star, Sean Connery, whose characterization of Ian Fleming’s British secret agent, James Bond, made him one of the most popular male actors between the years 1962 (Dr. No) and 1972 (Diamonds Are Forever). Resisting Tradition: Nicholson, Eastwood, and Their Peers A number of contemporary stars resisted the traditional star image. They played the role of the reluctant star or anti-star, refusing to give interviews to the press or do extensive publicity for their pictures. Apparent byproducts of a 1960s counterculture, they not only refused to behave like stars, but did not even look like stars (with the notable exceptions of Warren Beatty, Paul Newman, and Robert Redford). Many of them did not live in Hollywood (Woody Allen, Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Bill Murray, George C. Scott, Shirley MacLaine, bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 114 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages Chapter 5 The Star System 115 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Meryl Streep, Sean Connery, Michael Caine, and Dustin Hoffman); some did not bother to pick up their Academy Awards on Oscar night (Allen, Brando, and Scott). Other anti-stars included Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Barbra Streisand. Uncomfortable with celebrity, these anti-stars not only refused typecasting, selecting parts that problematized their personae, but also preferred to play anti-heroes rather than heroes. Eastwood, for example, alternated his role as Sergio Leone’s man-with-no-name in the Italian spaghetti Westerns and the tough supercop Dirty Harry Callahan with a series of parts that explored the hypermasculinity of his screen image, questioning its rigidity and exposing its flaws. Thus, he played a phony cowboy from New Jersey in Bronco Billy (1980) and a self-reflective cop sensitive to women’s issues and critical of his own male chauvinism and excessive violence in Tightrope (1984). Nicholson went from antiauthoritarian rebel (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975) to Mafia hit man (Prizzi’s Honor, 1985), though a certain demented subversiveness has given some consistency to his image from his rebellious youth as an actor (Easy Rider, 1969, and Five Easy Pieces, 1970) to his roles in the 1980s as the maniacal killer in The Shining (1980), the devil in The Witches of Eastwick (1987), and the Joker in Batman (1989). By contrast, more conventional stars, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, have continued in stardom’s classic mold—building consistent screen characters for themselves by playing a fairly narrow range of character types, such as Conan and the Terminator or Rocky and Rambo. Television as Training Ground Since the breakup of the studio system, contemporary stars have entered Hollywood from a variety of other media, developing a star status outside of motion pictures that they then translate into stardom in Hollywood. Television serves as the training ground for many actors, replacing the B pictures and low-budget motion picture mills that provided past performers with experience in front of a camera. Actors who have moved from television series to motion picture stardom range from Steve McQueen, Burt Reynolds, James Garner, and Clint Eastwood to John Travolta, Michael J. Fox, Sylvester Stallone, Robin Williams, and Bruce Willis. (Actresses seem to have been less successful.) Saturday Night Live gave us John Belushi, Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Dan Ackroyd, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner, as well as Mike Myers and Dana Carvey of “Wayne’s World.” A handful of television gag writers and nightclub comics, such as Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, have graduated to the motion pictures, where they perform their own material. Cher, Diana Ross, Kris Kristofferson, Dolly Parton, Liza Minnelli, and Barbra Streisand came to the cinema by way of the recording industry. Cover girls whose careers in modeling led them to the movies have included Brooke Shields, Farrah Fawcett, and Cybill Shepherd. bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 115 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages 116 PART 1 The Mode of Production ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Stars’ Children: Déjà Vu A related phenomenon is the emergence of second-generation stardom— the children of stars whose features and mannerisms recall those of their parents, giving audiences an uncanny sense of déjà vu. Thus Jane and Peter Fonda (children of Henry); Liza Minnelli (daughter of Judy Garland); Michael Douglas (son of Kirk); Jeff and Beau Bridges (sons of Lloyd); Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen (sons of Martin Sheen); Keith, David, and Robert Carradine (sons of John); Isabella Rossellini (daughter of Ingrid Bergman); Melanie Griffith (daughter of “Tippi” Hedren); Laura Dern (daughter of Dianne Ladd and Bruce Dern); Carrie Fisher (daughter of Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher); Jamie Lee Curtis (daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis); Kiefer Sutherland (son of Donald); Timothy Hutton (son of Jim); and Angelina Jolie (daughter of Jon Voight) bring to the screen a kind of selfreflexivity that is quite consistent with contemporary Hollywood’s obsession with its glorious past (see Chapter 16, “The Film School Generation”). In effect, contemporary stars enable us to see the ghost of Hollywood past in the faces of Hollywood present. Different Faces: The Rise of Black Stars From Sidney Poitier to Blaxploitation In the late 1960s, as the political and cultural climate polarized, a growing segment of the moviegoing public, comprised largely of younger spectators under the age of 30, moved to the left, embracing certain aspects of the women’s, youth, and civil rights movements. In the right place at the right time, Sidney Poitier enjoyed unprecedented success at the box office in this period, emerging as the first black star who could draw a significant number of white spectators. His A Patch of Blue landed among the top 10 moneymakers of 1965, earning $6.3 million; To Sir, With Love did the same in 1967, making more than $7.2 million. Then, in 1967, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner placed second only to The Graduate in profits, returning an incredible $25.1 million to its distributor, Columbia, while in 1968 another Poitier picture, For the Love of Ivy, pulled in $5 million. The blaxploitation movement of the early 1970s sought to build on Poitier’s pioneering efforts in creating a crossover audience of whites who went to black films and to address the interests of an increasing number of black spectators, who, industry analysts estimated, made up from 25 to 30 percent of the total moviegoing audience. The phenomenal success of Shaft and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), which grossed $7 and $11 million, respectively, proved that black was beautiful at the box office. But unlike the Poitier vehicles, which catered to a middle-class and lower-upperclass audience, this cycle of black films addressed lower-middle-class and lower-class concerns, dramatizing crime in the streets and creating a black bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 116 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages Chapter 5 The Star System 117 Courtesy of Columbia ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). urban landscape peopled by private eyes, drug dealers, numbers runners, petty criminals, pimps, and prostitutes. Fame in Other Fields The course of stardom for young black actors and actresses in this period followed a somewhat different line of development from that taken by white performers, though black stars also came from other media. For the most part, blacks had to come from noncinematic backgrounds because Hollywood had never invested in the development of more than a handful of black stars. In the postwar era, only Poitier had evolved into a leading man, achieving celebrity in The Defiant Ones (1958), Lilies of the Field (1963), and In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). One or two other black actors such as Brock Peters (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962) and James Edwards (The Manchurian Candidate, 1962) put together careers as talented supporting performers but were unable to find vehicles that would secure for them the singular kind of success enjoyed by Poitier. If television proved to be the station along the way to stardom for white actors in the 1960s and 1970s, this was not the case for black actors, who found it difficult to secure work on TV (though Bill Cosby achieved some recognition in the I Spy series in the late 1960s). It was not until the late 1970s that television provided roles for black actors in any significant numbers. As a result, the studios turned to black stars from other media. Hollywood had done this in the past with black performers whom it had recruited from the world of music and dance, such as Cab Calloway, Paul Robeson, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Pearl bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 117 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages 118 PART 1 The Mode of Production ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Bailey, Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, and Sammy Davis, Jr. Women of color who topped Billboard’s pop music charts—such as Whitney Houston (The Bodyguard, 1992), Beyoncé Knowles (Dreamgirls, 2006), and Queen Latifah (Chicago, 2002; Hairspray, 2007)—have also gained recognition as film stars. During the 1960s and 1970s, Hollywood capitalized on the celebrity of African Americans, but it found them not so much in the traditional media of theater and television as in other fields in which nonacting skills are perfected. Black actors came from the world of fashion; white executives cast former models such as Richard Roundtree (Shaft, 1971) and Tamara Dobson (Cleopatra Jones, 1973) in films. New stars also came from the world of athletics: Hollywood turned to track and football stars such as Woody Strode (Sergeant Rutledge, 1960), Rafer Johnson (Soul Soldier, 1972), Jim Brown (Slaughter and Black Gunn, 1972), Fred Williamson (Black Caesar, 1973), O. J. Simpson (The Towering Inferno, 1974), Jim Kelly (Enter the Dragon, 1973), and “Rosey” Grier (The Thing with Two Heads, 1972). The Eddie Murphy Generation Unfortunately, Hollywood’s interest in producing black films and developing black talent declined as the box-office revenues from blaxploitation films fell off during the mid-1970s—a turn symbolized by the failure of The Wiz (1978), which starred Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. Though mainstream black actors such as Poitier, Belafonte, Cosby, and Richard Pryor continued to attract large crossover audiences in films such as Uptown Saturday Night (1974), black actor-athletes failed to establish themselves as stars. Muscle and good looks only carried black stars so far; it was raunchy nightclub comedy, however, that led the way for the next wave of African American stars. The polite restraint of Cosby plays quite well on the living room TV (which proved to be the best setting for Cosby, who never enjoyed the same success in movies that he did on television). But the less conventional, raw humor of Pryor, who starred in a number of concert films as well as in the box-office smashes Silver Streak (1976) and Stir Crazy (1980), and of Eddie Murphy, who appeared in a string of commercial hits in the mid-1980s ranging from 48 Hours (1982), Trading Places (1983), and Beverly Hills Cop (I in 1984 and II in 1987) to Coming to America (1988), made stars out of both Pryor and Murphy and provided a new format for the showcasing of other black performers such as Whoopi Goldberg, whose skills as a comic actress produced a popular nightclub act as well as hit films such as Ghost (1990) and Sister Act (1992), and Arsenio Hall, who parlayed his costarring role in Coming to America into a short-term berth as a late-night talk show host (1989–1994). During the 1980s, an increasing number of minority actors and actresses established careers for themselves on television and in the movies, including Emilio Estevez, Raul Julia, James Earl Jones, Rae Dawn Chong, Lou Diamond Phillips, Oprah Winfrey, Jimmy Smits, and Redd Foxx. At the same time, black bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 118 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages Chapter 5 The Star System 119 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ actors such as Lou Gossett, Jr. (An Officer and a Gentleman, 1982), Danny Glover (the Lethal Weapon films), Morgan Freeman (Driving Miss Daisy and Glory, 1989), and Denzel Washington (Glory, 1989; The Pelican Brief, 1993; The Siege, 1998) found more or less regular employment in a new Hollywood dominated by liberal white executives who grew up in the 1960s. These moguls seem to have inherited some of that decade’s racial sensitivity. At the very least, they have seen a potential market growing out of the liberal counterculture, and have made films for the children of those (like themselves) who grew up in the 1960s. Economics and Contemporary Stardom The fact that Hollywood has opened its heavens for minority stars remains a significant step forward (especially for those stars of color who have made it), but this development has more to do with simple economics than it does with notions of fair play. Stars are and always have been commodities. Today’s marketplace, though culturally more diverse, is nonetheless still a marketplace, where an increasing number of star images trade places with one another on the floor of the film industry’s own form of stock exchange, in which images are worth money. It is from this perspective that the essential artifice of stardom emerges most clearly. Stars are not born but made, and they are made with a purpose—to sell films. Throughout the history of the theater, the movies, and television, stars have been rated in terms of their bankability, that is, their value at the box office. The star system took shape around the economic reality into which the unique attractiveness of each star was translated. In this way, the star system played a crucial role in the perpetuation of the studio system. After the demise of the studio system in the 1950s and 1960s, the star system became, along with the genre system (see the introduction to Part Two), the most important stabilizing feature of the motion picture industry. Though the path to stardom in the contemporary film industry has become increasingly complex and the attainment of stardom increasingly haphazard, the phenomenon of stardom has remained essential to Hollywood because of its ability to lure spectators into the theater. In the early 1980s, Robert Redford’s presence in a film was considered to be worth $5 million at the box office; Clint Eastwood’s was worth $4 million; and Robert De Niro’s, $3 million. In 1991, Premiere published a list of stars whose appearance in a film “virtually guarantee[d] a foreign presale [i.e., the sale of the film to potential exhibitors overseas prior to its production], regardless of the script, director, or other stars brought to the package.” The most bankable stars included (in order of their box-office appeal) Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise, Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, Jack Nicholson, and Julia Roberts. By 2003, that list of top stars (each earning about $20 million or more per picture) had a few new names: Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, George Clooney, and Russell Crowe. And in the mix of contemporary box-office attractions are bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 119 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages 120 PART 1 The Mode of Production © Doug Mills\ AP Photo ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ At the 2002 Academy Awards ceremony, Halle Berry won an Oscar for Best Actress and Denzel Washington for Best Actor. more women and minority performers than ever before, including Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayek, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Renée Zellweger, Sandra Bullock, Angelina Jolie, Jodie Foster, Eddie Murphy, Jackie Chan, and Halle Berry. A possible indication of changing times is the industry’s recognition of black performers at the 2002 Academy Awards ceremony, at which Denzel Washington won the Best Actor award for Training Day (2001) and Halle Berry won a Best Actress award for her role in Monster’s Ball (2001). Sidney Poitier (Lilies of the Field, 1963) had earlier won an Oscar for Best Actor, but Berry was the first African American woman to win for Best Actress. A few veteran actors have remained top stars, such as Bruce Willis, Jack Nicholson, Mike Myers, Nicolas Cage, and Harrison Ford, but these have been joined by a new generation of acting talents, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Hilary Swank, Keira Knightley, Anne Hathaway, Scarlett Johansson, Antonio Banderas, Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Vin Diesel, Keanu Reeves, and Ben Stiller. Stars continue to play a stabilizing role in the contemporary film industry, providing filmmakers with built-in audiences who regularly watch films in which their favorite actors and actresses appear. However, in recent years, a number of films that feature no major stars have performed exceedingly well at the box office, suggesting that those who are willing to take risks and gamble on the bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 120 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages Chapter 5 The Star System 121 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ public’s potential interest in particular projects can quite often reap even greater rewards than those who hedge their bets by hiring proven (and pricey) stars. Variety’s list of the top-grossing films of all time includes Avatar, E.T.: The ExtraTerrestrial, The Passion of the Christ, the Star Wars films, the Lord of the Rings films, Batman, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, the Harry Potter films, the Twilight sagas, and the Indiana Jones movies—films that feature no well-known stars (except for Harrison Ford, who was more or less unknown at the time of Star Wars, and Jack Nicholson, who played only a supporting role in Batman). In other words, stars are not indispensable. Yet Hollywood, the media, and motion picture audiences seem unable to do without them for any length of time. For over a hundred years, Hollywood’s biggest attractions have been stars and stories. Audiences have come to see Gentleman Jim Corbett, Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, John Wayne, Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Meryl Streep, Eddie Murphy, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and others. To some extent, the stars make the stories, driving them forward with the force of their personalities. More often than not, the stars and the stories collaborate: the stars build their screen personalities on the backs of the characters they play and on the story patterns that writers provide for them; and the fictional characters and stories come to life through the bodies of individual stars. Yet the pleasure that stars provide to audiences has remained unique, because it always depends on the audience’s recognition of the differences between the star and the character which he or she plays. Unlike the novel, in which no such distinction exists—in which there is only character—the movies can never quite collapse a star into a mere character. Our delight in stars comes from an appreciation of them as performers—from the interplay between star and character. Ironically, in order to be caught up in and carried away by a star, we must be fully conscious of the essential artifice that underlies stardom. ■ ■ ■ SELECT FILMOGRAPHY Tess of the Storm Country (1914) Broken Blossoms (1919) The Sheik (1921) It (1927) Steamboat Willie (1928) It Happened One Night (1934) The Littlest Rebel (1935) Camille (1937) Gone With the Wind (1939) Ninotchka (1939) The Maltese Falcon (1941) Casablanca (1942) bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 121 Red River (1948) Singin’ in the Rain (1952) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) Giant (1956) The Searchers (1956) Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) In the Heat of the Night (1967) True Grit (1969) 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages 122 PART 1 The Mode of Production ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) The Shootist (1976) Annie Hall (1977) Bronco Billy (1980) The Shining (1980) Beverly Hills Cop (1984) bel35095_ch05_087-122.indd 122 Tightrope (1984) Ghost (1990) Pretty Woman (1990) Philadelphia (1993) Monster’s Ball (2001) Training Day (2001) Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) 02/11/11 9:54 PM Confirming Pages PART TWO Genre and the Genre System “Genre” is a French word that refers to a kind, type, or category of a particular phenomenon or thing. In the cinema, genre is a term that is used to designate various categories of motion picture production. Major movie genres include such types of films as musicals, comedies, action and adventure films, Westerns, crime and detective films, melodramas, science fiction and horror films, gangster films, and war films. These genres can frequently be broken down into subgenres, or subdivisions of the major genre. Thus, horror films can be subdivided into specific types such as vampire, mad doctor, demon-seed/evil-child, splatter, or slasher films. Comedies can be categorized as slapstick, romantic, screwball, and so on. Genres serve to stabilize an otherwise unstable film industry. Motion picture production is extremely expensive. In 2009, for example, the average negative cost (that is, the amount of money it cost to produce a finished negative of the film before prints were made or costly advertising and distribution expenses were incurred) was $65 million. Marketing, advertising, and print costs in 2009 averaged an additional $39.5 million. Industry analysts estimate that, for any film to break even, it would have to earn roughly 2 to 2½ times its negative costs. Given these costs, motion picture producers face tremendous risks each time they make a film. These risks are increased by the very nature of the motion picture product. Unlike other consumer products—such as cars, household appliances, and fashions, which rely on brand-name recognition for much of their market appeal, each film is necessarily different from every other film, featuring a story and a cast that are unique. Each film is thus an unknown quantity; its producer has no assurance that it will make a profit at the box office. The star system and the genre system attempt to compensate for the dangers involved in this process. They serve to hedge producers’ bets against the unknowns and variables that underlie the production of every film. ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 123 123 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages 124 PART 2 Genre and the Genre System ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Genres result from the success of individual films. The success of one particular kind of film results in the production of another film that resembles it in terms of plot and character type. The film industry assumes that the audience that came to the earlier hit will return to see a film similar in nature to it. Thus, the exceptional profits of the first James Bond film, Dr. No (1962), led to a succession of more than 20 others. This also explains the string of Godfather, Jaws, Rocky, Star Wars, Superman, Star Trek, and Indiana Jones films of the 1970s and 1980s. Films that belong to a specific genre draw from a fairly fixed body of character and story types, settings and situations, costumes and props, thematic concerns and visual iconography, and conventions that are shared by other films in that particular genre. Westerns, for example, regularly contain certain character types such as cowboys, town marshals, Indians, dance hall girls, schoolmarms, cavalry officers, saloon keepers, Indian agents, gamblers, and rustlers who are readily identifiable by the costumes they wear, the props they use, the things they do, and the situations in which they find themselves. The films are set in the West and feature western landscapes or settings. Each new film in the genre banks on a number of familiar genre elements, motifs, and themes but combines them in a novel way. The audiences that go to genre films are lured to them by the promise of seeing a film that is similar in kind to films they have seen and enjoyed in the past. But they are also enticed by the prospect of seeing a film that differs in a number of respects from films they have seen before. In this way, the system of genres relies on a combination of the familiar and the unknown, conventionality and novelty, similarity and difference. It uses the basic ingredients of the genre to produce certain expectations in the audience, but it also adapts, modifies, or plays with those conventions in order to provide audiences with a unique entertainment experience. Because of the economic role that genre plays in the American film industry and because the major genres not only contain a large number of films but also span several decades of film production, a study of genre and the genre system is crucial to any understanding of what classical Hollywood cinema is and how it works. Even more important, by looking at the large body of films in individual genres, we can see how those genres help to shape our understanding of American culture, character, and identity. In the following chapters, we explore the role that a handful of American genres play in expressing “the temper of an age and a nation” and conveying the unique nature of the American experience in the twentieth century and beyond. bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 124 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages CHAPTER 6 Silent Film Melodrama THE ORIGINS OF MELODRAMA “Melodrama” literally means “a drama accompanied by music.” The term was coined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1770 to describe a dramatic monologue that he had written, entitled Pygmalion, that alternated speech with passages of pantomime and music. The emergence of melodrama in France in the 1770s and 1780s can be traced to the royal monopoly, which was held by officially approved, classical repertory companies such as the Comédie Française and which granted them the exclusive rights to stage verbal dramas. Secondary theater groups were restricted to nonverbal dramatic forms such as juggling or acrobatic acts, ballets, puppet shows, and pantomimes. Marcel Carne’s Children of Paradise (France, 1945) provides a vivid portrait of this popular tradition, which was built upon carnivalesque street theater and mime acts. After the French Revolution (1789), this “verbal monopoly” came to an end, and all theatrical groups were able to use words. But even though melodramas could now make full use of dialogue, they never lost their ability to communicate on a nonverbal level. ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 125 125 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages 126 PART 2 Genre and the Genre System ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Theatrical melodrama, which began without a voice, perfected the craft of visual expression, translating thought and emotion into gesture, costume, decor, and other elements of mise-en-scène. It discovered how to say all without literally saying anything. Melodrama even developed its own sign language. Adapting acting techniques from classical theater, it produced a system of gestures and hand movements, which were subsequently recorded and catalogued by a French scholar, François Delsarte. At the same time, melodrama manipulated traditional mise-en-scène in an attempt to wring even greater expressiveness from it, freezing the action at particularly significant moments into a tableau. In tableaus, which frequently came at act endings, the actors assumed particularly revealing and characteristic positions and then held them for several moments in an attempt to underscore or crystallize events, feelings, or ideas for the audience. Melodrama works on a purely emotional level, rooting its drama in a common base of feeling that crosses over all linguistic barriers. In the science fiction tearjerker E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the heart of the film resides in E.T.’s large, expressive eyes and poignant facial movements rather than in anything anyone says. This is typical of contemporary film melodrama. In another Steven Spielberg film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), communication between humans and aliens takes place on a purely affective level—through five musical tones. E.T. moves somewhat beyond that primitive stage, to speech. But when words are used, as in the phrase “E.T. phone home!” they tend to be minimal and rudimentary—almost nonverbal. E.T.’s speech ignores established linguistic conventions and grammatical rules; he/it speaks directly from the heart. The expressiveness of these semiarticulate statements derives, in large part, from their childlike simplicity—from the inability of the alien to express in language the complex longings behind the phrase. This is melodramatic speech. Spielberg’s fascination with the melodramatic resurfaces with a vengeance in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). At the heart of his story is a boy robot, David (Haley Joel Osment), who has been programmed to love. Adopted by a family whose child has been placed in suspended animation until a cure can be found for his terminal illness, David wins the love of his new mother, but, after her own child is restored to health, she abandons David in the woods. Neither he nor we ever quite recover from this traumatic moment. A figure of pure pathos, David then spends the remainder of the film looking for the Blue Fairy who, he has been told, can make him human and thus enable him to win back the love of his mother. As in E.T., Spielberg invests the alien other—here the machine, David—with a capacity for feeling and emotion that exceeds that of any of the actual human beings in the film. In A.I., the simulation of emotions becomes real emotion. The popularity of melodrama as a form of theater for the middle classes during the nineteenth century, and its ability to convey crucial dramatic information visually, made it an ideal form for the silent cinema. Virtually every silent film—including the slapstick comedies of Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton—was, on one level or another, a melodrama. During the 1910s and bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 126 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages Free ebooks ==> www.Ebook777.com Chapter 6 Silent Film Melodrama 127 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ 1920s, the trade press routinely described the majority of films as melodramas. There were romantic melodramas, domestic melodramas, rural melodramas, Western melodramas, sociological melodramas, crime melodramas, society melodramas, mystery melodramas, underworld melodramas, and just plain melodramas. If the story or situation was not rooted in melodrama, then at least the acting or mise-en-scène was. It had to be, to communicate ideas and feelings without dialogue. Although the film melodrama successfully navigated the transition from silent to sound cinema in the late 1920s, silent melodrama, in many ways, represented the melodramatic impulse at its purest and most powerful. TYPES OF MELODRAMA The Melodramatic Mode The melodrama, unlike the Western or the detective film, is a modal genre. But there is a genre called “the melodrama” that features conventional character types, such as heroes, heroines, and villains, as well as predictable plot elements, such as improbable reversals of fortune, accidents, and last-minute rescues. In terms of its predictable or formulaic plot patterns, a typical melodrama might begin with the disruption or disturbance of an idealized emotional paradise by some external force or act of villainy. A happy family in its home is threatened with eviction or its integrity is shattered by the abduction of one of its members; the blissful young lovers are separated or forced apart by those who would block their marriage. Subsequent action presents the struggle of the hero or heroine to restore this initial state of affairs by reuniting the family or removing obstacles that separate the lovers—goals that are accomplished by the end of the narrative. The plot of Home Alone (1990), for example, is essentially that of a melodrama: a child is accidentally separated from his parents; the home is threatened by burglars; the child successfully defends the home against outside attacks; and he is finally reunited with his parents. However, the mode of Home Alone is more comic than melodramatic. The child is fairly well in control of things and actually enjoys his experience of being home alone. That is, the treatment of the situation is not overtly melodramatic; the filmmakers opted for comedy instead. As a mode, the melodrama—or, more accurately, the melodramatic—is less concerned with specific plot and character types than with the creation of a certain mood and a powerful emotional response in the audience. In its status as a mode, melodrama resembles tragedy and comedy in that, though possessing a structure and identifiable motifs and character types, it crosses over from one genre to another. Thus, Westerns such as Duel in the Sun (1946), gangster films such as The Godfather (1972), action films such as Spider-Man (2002, 2004, 2007), and fantasy films such as the Harry www.Ebook777.com bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 127 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages 128 PART 2 Genre and the Genre System ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Potter series (2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011) are melodramatic. In other words, film melodrama exists primarily as an attitude or method of treatment—a melodrama is a film that features conventional character types and formulaic plot patterns presented in a melodramatic way. A Moral Phenomenon Like Westerns or gangster films, melodramas can also be defined in terms of their milieu. Much as Westerns are set in the West and gangster films in an urban criminal underworld, melodramas tend to take place in the domestic space of the family or in the private, intimate space of the romantic couple. At the core of melodrama, however, lies neither milieu nor plot but a certain mode of address to the spectator that is emotionalized by the use of melodramatic stylistic techniques. As a mode of address, the melodrama speaks to viewers in a way that is primarily emotional rather than logical. Indeed, one of the oppositions that characterizes traditional screen melodrama is that between emotion and reason. Characters in melodramas who are extremely articulate or presented as intellectuals are often exposed either as phonies or as emotional cripples who have lost touch with their feelings and need to be rescued from the paralyzing forces of rationality. The villain in Terms of Endearment (1983), for example, is predictably the college professor (Jeff Daniels), who cheats on his wife (Debra Winger) with one of his female graduate students. Glib men are just not to be trusted in melodramas. In its attempt to deal with emotional or spiritual experience, the melodrama draws on the affective power of images and music to render the emotional dimensions of experience. That is, it attempts to depict those emotions that cannot be rendered in words. In attempting to say what cannot be said, the film melodrama traditionally relies on stylistic excess—on an extreme camera angle, an overstated set or costume design, a delirious camera movement, or an unusual color scheme—in an attempt to make visible that which is essentially invisible. The moral forces of good and evil that lie beneath the surface of experience are pressured to the surface by melodrama’s excesses and put into relief. Melodrama reveals the structure of our experience of the world as a moral and emotional phenomenon, clarifying and working out in dramatic form the emotional and moral conflicts that take place within the individual. In this respect, it is an objective rendering of subjective inner experience. Thus, in melodramas, children and animals often prove to be emotional touchstones—they are more capable of distinguishing good from bad and right from wrong than are their elders. In E.T., the children intuitively understand the alien from another world and prove more adept than adults when it comes to communicating with it. Family and feelings are the common denominator to which all melodramas ultimately return. Melodrama is about the loss and recovery of feelings (Awakenings, 1990), about lovers (Titanic, 1997; Brokeback Mountain, 2005; the Twilight sagas, 2008, 2009, 2010), about the restoration of the family unit (Ransom, 1996), about fathers and sons (Affliction, 1999), about bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 128 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages Chapter 6 Silent Film Melodrama 129 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ mothers and daughters (Thirteen, 2003), about brothers (Rain Man, 1988), about sisters (Little Women, 1996), and about every other possible configuration of the family from those depicted in Edward Scissorhands (1990), The Prince of Tides (1991), Batman Returns (1992), and American Beauty (1999) to those in Far from Heaven (2002), In America (2002), and There Will Be Blood (2007). The melodrama and the melodramatic—whether in the form of a melodramatic situation, gesture, element of mise-en-scène, line of dialogue, or bar of music—have tended to be regarded by critics as second-rate forms of expression and clearly inferior to the more aristocratic forms such as tragedy and the tragic. One definition of melodrama describes it as “domestic tragedy.” Tragedy was understood (by Aristotle and others) as a serious drama consisting of events and characters of considerable magnitude. In other words, classical tragedy from Aeschylus to Shakespeare dealt with kings, queens, princes, and other figures of social importance whose actions determined the fate of cities, principalities, kingdoms, and nations. The realm of melodrama, by contrast, is limited to private as opposed to public spheres. It concerns more or less ordinary characters whose actions affect the fortunes of much smaller social units; it focuses on the fate of the couple, the family, and their immediate community. Although tragedy appealed to all classes, it emerged as the dramatic form par excellence of the nobility or social aristocracy in whose world it was situated. Melodrama, like certain forms of comedy, gives expression to the concerns of the lower ranks of society. It is the genre of the “historically voiceless” (to borrow David Grimsted’s term), and its popularity in the nineteenth century accompanied the emergence of a new social order to which it appealed—that of a middleclass mass society. Democratic Virtue Nineteenth-century melodrama brought with it a new vision of the universe and of the individual’s place in it. Much as the French Revolution overthrew the traditional institutions of a supposedly divinely ordained, hierarchical society—the church and the monarchy—in favor of a more democratic social order, so the melodrama supplanted the elitist vision of the tragedy with a more democratic worldview. Classical tragedy, which died in the seventeenth century with Racine, could be seen as elitist largely through its concern for the fates of characters of a certain magnitude or social stature. But it was also aristocratic in its basic understanding of the essentially static relationship of individuals to the existing political and social order. The heroes and heroines of tragedy struggled to maintain the natural order of things or to repair that order when it had become unnatural. Thus, Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex attempted to rid Thebes of the plague and restore it to health, much as Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play concerned himself with purging the state of Denmark of something that was rotten. The heroes of tragedy sought to maintain or restore the order of the world, but that order and that world was theirs. For them, what bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 129 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages 130 PART 2 Genre and the Genre System ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ was natural was necessarily a reflection of the value system of their particular social class. Both Oedipus and Hamlet ended with the imposition of a new order, but that new order was merely a more benign form of the dominant social order (that is, monarchy) with which the drama began. When characters in melodramas fought to maintain or repair the natural order of things, the values that informed their struggle were those of a different social class: the middle class. The stature of a character in a melodrama was a measure of his or her moral rather than social position. Virtue empowered its heroes and heroines; evil, its villains. Virtue was not the exclusive property of any one class but was equally obtainable by all. The commoner had as much access to the truth as the noble. Yet it was often easier for the lower classes to discover truth and to achieve virtue or moral wisdom because simple people were less burdened with artificial knowledge and distinctions than the nobility. But in tragedy, knowledge and truth tend to be the exclusive property of the aristocracy. As Grimsted argued, “the melodrama reflected and supported what is perhaps the key element in democratic psychology: the sense which individual men have of their ability to decide, and hence of their right to participate vitally in the wielding of power.” Dozens of stage melodramas (primarily those of European origin) cast the conflict between good and evil in social terms, presenting it as a class war in which the audience is encouraged to root for the underdog. Thus, the villain, frequently a landlord, routinely demanded the hand of his tenant’s daughter when the rent was unpaid. Scores of other melodramas, especially those set in contemporary (nineteenth-century) America, staged moral conflicts in terms of geography. These works explored a basic opposition between nature and culture, between the innocence of those who lived in the world of nature— in small towns or on farms in the country—and the corruption and decadence of those who lived in the city. For example, D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920), an adaptation of a popular stage melodrama, traces the journey of its innocent heroine from the small town where she lives with her mother to the big city, where she is seduced and abandoned by a member of the social aristocracy. The film concludes with her return to life in the country, where she finds a job working on a farm, and with her recovery of innocence through her contact with the purifying world of nature. A SOCIAL VISION Melodrama as a Tool of Reform Melodramas may work primarily on an emotional level, but they also deal with ideas and social problems. In this way, they speak to the fundamental interests of “the people.” Grimsted observes that these dramas frequently bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 130 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages Chapter 6 Silent Film Melodrama 131 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Author’s collection deal with social and economic issues that concern the middle and lower classes—with “the hard lot of the poor, the corrupt practices of the rich, the social threat of rapid urbanization, the evil of slavery, the injury of bad family upbringing.” Novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery narrative Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was adapted for the stage shortly after its publication in 1852 and became “the greatest success in the history of the American theatre,” helped to transform the theater into a popular forum for the discussion of social issues. Melodramas also serve as tools for social reform, describing the evils of middle- and lower-class vices such as gambling and alcohol. In one of Griffith’s Biograph shorts, A Drunkard’s Reformation (1909), the hero attends a play that dramatizes the disastrous consequences of drinking, and he vows never to touch alcohol again. Reformers praised melodramas because, as in A Drunkard’s Reformation, they depicted the triumph of good over evil. Film in general (and film melodrama, in particular) was seen in the United States as a “grand social worker” in that it lured working-class men away from saloons and other forms of vice and promised, as Lary May points out, to teach “Anglo-Saxon ideals” to all, transforming all those who went to the movies into a “model citizenry.” Melodramas dramatized the fears of Victorian America about the toll that modernization and urbanization would take on the institution of the family. As Griffith suggested in the modern story of his four-story epic, Intolerance (1916), the anonymity of life in the city posed a danger to the traditional bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 131 Parodying a typical melodramatic situation, Mack Sennett (right) ties Mabel Normand to the railroad track in Barney Oldfield’s Race for Life (1913). 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages 132 PART 2 Genre and the Genre System ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ values of family and community; fatherless daughters and husbandless wives would be pursued by immoral men. Greedy factory owners were shown to be anything but paternalistic; they ruthlessly exploited their workers. In other films, the clichéd image of a heroine tied to the railroad tracks gave voice to the particular concerns of a new social order—to the fears of an emerging lowerand middle-class society caught up in the onrush of fast-paced technological changes that threatened to overwhelm them. The average American was suddenly in danger of being crushed by the forces of industry, symbolized by the locomotive. Though the melodrama was born in France, it adapted itself quite readily to the needs and demands of American audiences. Theatrical melodrama dominated the American stage in the late nineteenth century in the form of both European imports adapted for American audiences, such as Dion Boucicault’s The Poor of New York, and domestic originals, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight. Popular melodrama helped to shape American character, expressing the American temperament, preaching American ideologies, embodying American aesthetic principles. Daniel Gerould sees it as having been essentially egalitarian: “it was founded on a belief in opportunity for all, and dedicated to getting ahead and making money.” [Unlike tragedy, melodrama is] “totally devoid of fatality and inevitability. Contingency rules; things can and will be otherwise. The individual can make of himself what he will. . . . Each human being has the chance in a society unfettered by Old World hierarchies of class and profession.” In this way, melodramas embodied the American dream, offering success to anyone with the courage and strength to pursue it. Politics and Melodrama Given its associations with the French Revolution and its popular appeal in the United States, the melodrama was often identified as a tool of revolutionary change. Wylie Sypher argued that the genre conceived of things in terms of dialectical opposition—in terms of good and bad—and thus reflected the same worldview of inevitable class warfare and either/or ideology that informed Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Whether melodrama was a form of revolutionary consciousness or not, it nonetheless provided a way of looking at history that proved compelling to filmmakers who occupied vastly different positions on the political spectrum. Griffith, for example, made melodramas that, on one hand, called for reform but that, on the other, also conveyed disturbing racial fears and a deep suspicion of radical change. Griffith’s melodramatic polarization of society served as a weapon against blacks in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and against Bolsheviks (communists) in Orphans of the Storm (1922). Griffith’s melodrama was essentially populist in nature. It sought to restore an idealized, agrarian America that had been destroyed by big business, industrialization, and urbanization. bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 132 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages Chapter 6 Silent Film Melodrama 133 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Approaching the genre in another way, the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein infused his melodramas with a Marxist vision. His hero was the masses, and his villains consisted primarily of the czar and counterrevolutionary forces in films such as Potemkin (1925) and October (1928). Though both Marxists such as Eisenstein and populists such as Griffith used melodrama to speak out on behalf of the plain people, Marxists spoke in the language of class conflict—the capitalist exploitation of the working classes. Populists spoke in the language of universal, heartfelt truths that all Americans supposedly understood and respected. The politics of American melodrama remained steadfastly populist; they were driven by a desire for reform and never embraced the revolutionary spirit of Marxism. But populism was not monolithic; it encompassed a broad spectrum of various grassroots political positions. Rural populists, for example, consisted largely of farmers, farm workers, and residents of small towns. They tended to be Protestants whose families had lived in the United States for several generations. Urban populists were largely blue-collar laborers who worked in steel mills and factories, or wage earners with jobs in department and retail stores. Many were recent immigrants who retained strong ties to an ethnic community and tended to be non-Protestants, such as Catholics or Jews. Both wings of the populist camp supported social reform and shared a distrust of big business, industrialization, and the growth of impersonal corporations that threatened to swallow up the individual. TWO FILM MELODRAMATISTS: GRIFFITH AND VIDOR An Agrarian Past Populism is neither monolithic nor static. It changes its point of view somewhat from decade to decade as the demographics of the American landscape change. It spoke, from the 1890s to the 1920s, from the perspective of the agrarian majority. But in the 1920s, when the majority of Americans had moved from rural farms to live and work in the cities, populist rhetoric more and more frequently began to address the concerns of the urban working class. In particular, it attempted to deal with the problems posed to middle-class Americans by the shift that took place in American identity as it was slowly forced to confront its new foundation in urban and industrial culture. In the past, American identity had been tied to notions of individual success, which was understood to be directly related to one’s character, energy, and enterprise. In the world of the 1920s postindustrial mass society, the ability of the individual to realize the American dream was seriously compromised by his or her powerlessness in the face of the growing industrialization and corporatization of modern life. bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 133 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages 134 PART 2 Genre and the Genre System ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ This shift can best be illustrated by comparing the different visions of society and the individual’s place in it in two silent film melodramas—Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928). Griffith’s silent melodramas spoke on behalf of nineteenth-century agrarianism. His films looked back to an earlier, more utopian, preindustrial past that was threatened by the forces of modernism. In A Corner in Wheat (1909), for example, the natural economy of the past is upset by the intervention of a greedy businessman. A farmer grows wheat out of which bread is made to feed the city’s poor. But a middleman, in the form of a speculator in the grain market, interferes with this process. The speculator buys up all the wheat, then artificially drives up the price of flour to increase his profits, ignoring the plight of the urban poor who can no longer afford to buy a loaf of bread. Griffith’s romanticized portrait of the farmer is heightened by the latter’s heroic refusal to admit defeat at the hands of the stock manipulator. The film ends with the farmer replanting his field, but it has become clear by now that his success rests not with his own efforts but in the hands of forces beyond his control. A Corner in Wheat dealt with recent events—with the 1897–1898 attempt by a speculator to corner the wheat market on the Chicago Board of Trade (which provided, in turn, the basis for Frank Norris’s novel The Pit, on which the Griffith film was partially based). The Birth of a Nation was made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and was thus set in the much earlier era of the war itself (1861–1865) and Reconstruction (1865–1877). The world of the antebellum South, which provided the primary perspective from which Griffith viewed events, emerged as a paradise lost. In both the film and in popular mythology, the prewar agrarian South marked the final flowering of an old world (aristocratic) pastoral ideal before it fell victim to an unwanted industrialization externally imposed on it by the North. History as Melodrama: The Birth of a Nation The Birth of a Nation begins with an idyllic portrait of the southern Cameron family, whose happiness and tranquility is then disturbed by the war. Their attempts to restore this paradise lost after the war are thwarted by abolitionist politicians, northern carpetbaggers, mulattoes, and renegade blacks. Inspired by the traditions of his Anglo-Saxon (Scottish) heritage, Ben Cameron forms a modern-day clan—the Ku Klux Klan—to avenge the death of his sister and to protect southern womanhood from feared black rapists. After defeating the black militia and putting an end to black rule, the Klan restores a utopian social order. The film ends with a millennial vision in which Christ returns to earth, puts an end to war, and presides over a “heavenly throng” who celebrate the regeneration of mankind and the return to the ultimate populist paradise—a latter-day Garden of Eden. The Birth of a Nation renders American history as melodrama. The Civil War takes the form of a family melodrama with the role of the villain(s) played by northern abolitionists, mulattoes, and blacks. The chief villain, however, proves bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 134 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages Chapter 6 Silent Film Melodrama 135 Author’s frame enlargement ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ A black fist threatens the abducted white heroine, Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish) in The Birth of a Nation. to be the black race. For Griffith, the issue of slavery, introduced in the film’s first shot of a slave market, leads to the outbreak of the war that then turns brother against brother. The northern Stonemans and the southern Camerons, once friends, are suddenly made unwilling enemies. The effects of the war are presented in melodramatic terms as well. Northern and southern families are forced to sacrifice their sons to the war effort—one Stoneman boy and two Camerons die in battle. Given Griffith’s racist scenario, the resolution of the conflict between North and South and the restitution of unity can only come through the reunification of the white race in the face of a common enemy—the black race. Near the conclusion of the film, the elder Camerons, their daughter, and the surviving Stoneman son take refuge from the black militia in the shack of two former Union veterans. An intertitle explains the obvious symbolism of the moment: “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.” The film’s ultimate hero becomes the Ku Klux Klan, which rides to the rescue of the besieged whites. The film’s logical solution would be the transportation of blacks back to Africa. This action would restore the purely white world that was disrupted at the beginning of the film when, as an intertitle claimed, “the bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion.” Indeed, historians note that the film originally ended with what Griffith described as “Lincoln’s solution”—the deportation of blacks to Africa. This scene was later cut from the film which ends with the suppression of blacks within a bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 135 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages 136 PART 2 Genre and the Genre System ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ white-dominated society. Griffith’s melodramatic excess led to his distortion of historical reality. His depiction of blacks and his ending of the film were pure fantasy—the product of a melodramatic imagination that had put itself at the service of a racist agenda. The phenomenal success of the film suggests that it somehow spoke to the needs of a troubled America for a return to a simpler past and to a simplified notion of American identity based on racial purity. It also reveals the negative aspects of the populist mythology—its racism, its anti-intellectualism, its paranoia, its religious fundamentalism. Everyman/No Man: The Crowd Everyman John Sims (James Murray) enjoys a day at the beach with his wife (Eleanor Boardman) and children in The Crowd (1928). bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 136 Courtesy of M-G-M The Crowd deals with a more contemporary historical reality—the transformation of 1920s America into an urbanized mass society. It follows its hero, John Sims (James Murray), from his birth in small-town America in 1900 to New York City, where he moves to live and work in the 1920s. The film shows his subsequent marriage, the birth of his children, and his raising of a family, and concludes more or less in the present (1928). In the world of The Birth of a Nation, it was possible for its hero not only to control events around him but even to play a role in the shaping of history. Ben Cameron’s life is spared by the intervention of Abraham Lincoln, “the Great Heart,” who pardons him when he is falsely charged with treason. And Cameron is, after all, the (fictionalized) founder of a powerful organization, the Ku Klux Klan. He possesses “agency,” that is, he could do things that had consequence for others. The melodramatic action of The Crowd concerns the 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages Free ebooks ==> www.Ebook777.com Chapter 6 Silent Film Melodrama 137 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ struggles of a character who has little or no control over his own destiny, much less that of the nation. John battles within a conformist culture to establish a unique identity, which is constantly threatened by the mundane realities of day-to-day existence. He tries to assert his own unique identity amid the drudgery of work in a large insurance office, the monotony of marriage, and the despair of failure as an employee, husband, and father. Vidor’s hero is an everyman—a man in and of the crowd. But as an everyman, he is also no man—a nobody whose identity, goals, and desires are given to him by others rather than stemming from his own inner needs. As a child, John is driven by his father’s ambitions for him. When he and his boyhood friends tell one another what they want to be when they grow up, John proudly boasts, “My dad says I’m gonna be somebody big.” Working for a large insurance company in New York, John becomes one of the crowd, behaving like everyone else. On a double date with his friend Bert and two girls, John watches Bert kiss his girl, then John kisses his date, Mary. On the subway ride home, John looks at a furniture ad that says “You furnish the girl; we’ll furnish the home.” He then turns to Mary, whom he has just met that night, and proposes to her. Vidor presents John as the product of a world that lacks the romantic heroism of Ben Cameron’s universe. In John’s world, individual success is not tied to one’s character, energy, or enterprise. Agency, the ability to shape one’s own fate, is only an illusion. John is the product of the age of advertising; commercials shape John’s desires, and he becomes the perfect consumer in a mass society that is itself driven by the needs of a new, twentieth-century institution—mass consumption. In his spare time, John even writes copy for advertisements. Indeed, he achieves the greatest success in his life when he wins $500 for coming up with the catchy phrase: “Sleight o’Hand—The Magic Cleaner.” John’s great fortune, however, is as unpredictable and uncontrollable as his misfortune, which mounts toward the end of the film. John does not distinguish himself from the crowd at work, remaining a mere clerk while his friend Bert is promoted. Later, one of his children dies in a traffic accident, he loses his job, his wife threatens to leave him, and he contemplates suicide. Through no fault of his own, John has not only failed to become “somebody big” but he has lost his identity—along with his job, his wife, and his family, who provided the only tangible signs of that identity for him. John’s problems lay, in part, in his belief in the nineteenth-century notions of individualism and agency that Griffith celebrated in The Birth of a Nation and that John’s father bequeathed to him on his birth. Vidor’s film suggests that this ideology, or system of beliefs, no longer had any connection to contemporary social and economic reality. The film’s hero is forced to recognize his own relative powerlessness as an individual and come to terms with his new status as one of the crowd. At the very end of the film, John recovers his identity as father, husband, and workingman and rejoins the crowd from which he earlier tried to remove himself. He discovers that a crucial aspect of his identity depends on his identification with the crowd—that he cannot exist apart from, but must be a part of, mass society. www.Ebook777.com bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 137 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages 138 PART 2 Genre and the Genre System ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ESCAPE AND TRANSCENDENCE Home as “Seventh Heaven” Diane (Janet Gaynor) and Chico (Charles Farrell) find a refuge from the outside world in their Seventh Heaven (1927). bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 138 Courtesy of 20th Century-Fox In The Birth of a Nation, Griffith implicitly rejected the modern in favor of a mythic past. In The Crowd, Vidor demonstrated the need for the creation of a new model for understanding the relation of the individual to the world of 1920s America. In general, the film melodrama conveyed either open hostility or profound ambivalence toward modern times. In films such as Frank Borzage’s Academy Award–winning Seventh Heaven (1927), it became something to transcend. Borzage’s hero and heroine defy the original sins of contemporary mass society—despair and cynicism. They overcome the anonymity and heartlessness of the city and create a refuge or “seventh heaven” within it. (“Seventh heaven” refers to their apartment, which is on the seventh [and top] floor of an apartment house in Paris, and thus closer to the heavens than the streets below where they are first introduced.) They are subsequently separated by the world’s first truly modern war— World War I. Both remain steadfastly loyal to one another, communicating through a quasi-spiritual ceremony they perform every day at 11 a.m. Even after 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages Chapter 6 Silent Film Melodrama 139 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ the film’s hero, Chico (Charles Farrell), dies in combat, the heroine, Diane (Janet Gaynor), continues to be faithful to him, refusing a wealthy suitor. At the end of the film, Chico miraculously returns from the dead, and Diane, somehow sensing that he is still alive, rushes to him. The film’s fairy tale ending firmly plants it within the world of melodramatic wish fulfillment, which can overcome all the obstacles that mundane twentieth-century life places in the paths of young lovers. The seventh heaven that the lovers create for themselves serves as a secular Garden of Eden amid the turmoil of modern times. It is an idealized space that virtually every melodrama—before and since—has sought to establish and protect from the outside world. The threats to this domestic space come, more often than not, from forces that are produced, in large part, by an increasingly impersonal and hostile urban mass society. In A Man’s Castle (1933), a small wooden shack in a New York City “Hooverville,” which has been built by those made homeless by the Great Depression, serves as a “safety zone” against economic despair. In Since You Went Away (1944), the home is described as the “fortress of the American family” and comes to symbolize the spirit of the homefront effort in World War II. The Lure of the City: Sunrise In F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), a rural family (husband, wife, and child) is threatened by a woman who has journeyed from the city to the country and (apparently) seduced the husband. During a late-night rendezvous in the swamp with the man, she entices him with images of life in the city and then tries to encourage him to murder his wife, sell his farm, and come back with her to the city. This woman plays the role of villain, as does the city itself, which seems to be the source of her destructive power. She is also a product of the times—she is a “new woman.” She has a short, mannish haircut; she smokes; she dresses like a flapper; she is sexually liberated; and she assumes an aggressive role in her relationships with men. The man’s young wife, on the other hand, looks (although pretty) like an old-fashioned, nineteenth-century “old woman,” in other words, like a European hausfrau. She wears a peasant-style dress, and her hair, unlike that of the woman from the city, is long and blonde. Crosscutting between her with her child and the woman from the city embracing her husband emphasizes their status as moral opposites. The wife is associated with home and family; the woman from the city with the swamp and adultery. However, the simple moral opposition between nature and culture, or the country and the city, is more complex than it initially appears. The woman from the city is associated with the country—in particular, with the swamp. The regeneration of the marriage between the husband and the wife takes place in the city, where they symbolically renew their marriage vows (at the marriage of another couple), formalize their relationship with a posed photograph, and celebrate their reunion with a peasant dance, which they perform before an audience of city dwellers. Though Murnau’s film seems to present a negative view of urbanization and industrialization, it undercuts its critique of the city with a suggestion that bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 139 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages 140 PART 2 Genre and the Genre System Courtesy of 20th Century-Fox ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ The woman from the city (Margaret Livingston) seduces the husband (George O’Brien) in the swamp in Sunrise (1927). the experiences of its rural characters in the city provide a valuable perspective on their prior relationship that ultimately restores them to one another. Yet, the final reconciliation of the couple takes place in the country, in the domestic space of their bedroom, as the woman from the city returns to the city. In this way, Sunrise captures the ambivalence of an America that was negotiating a dramatic change in its identity from an agrarian to an urban base. The dramatic action of the film suggests that the innately natural values of the country can be renewed by contact with the city—that is, that the threats of an urbanized, industrialized America can be contained. Modernity will not destroy the values that inform American identity, but will test and prove their strength, guaranteeing the continuity of the experience of America as it evolved from an agrarian to an industrial society. SOUND AND MELODRAMA The coming of sound, which took place between 1926 and 1929, transformed the melodrama from the format or mode in which most films were made into one genre among many. Sound brought about changes in acting style, making it bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 140 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages Chapter 6 Silent Film Melodrama 141 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ no longer necessary (or even desirable) to say everything with the body instead of the voice. In his first sound film, Abraham Lincoln (1930), Griffith attempted to stylize dialogue in order to suit it to the emotionalized atmosphere of the melodrama, much as he had earlier stylized his actors’ performances. But Griffith’s melodramatization of dialogue remains an isolated experiment in an industry that regarded sound as a crucial step forward in the medium’s quest for greater and greater realism. In this context, that which was melodramatic was looked on as old-fashioned or, because of its overt interest in the world of emotion, as somehow appropriate only for women’s pictures. Formerly a universal cinematic language, melodramatic style was suddenly demoted to an inferior dialect within a new, more realistic system of communication and signification. Melodramas thrived during the sound era. Several of these “women’s pictures,” such as Gone With the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940), not only appealed to a general audience but also won Academy Awards, providing added prestige for the genre. The melodrama and the melodramatic continued to satisfy basic needs of audiences for certain kinds of characters, situations, and stories. But the sound melodrama necessarily distinguished itself from the silent melodrama, which was so closely identified with the silent film itself. The tradition of the theatrical melodrama—which began in France in the 1770s, dominated the nineteenth-century American stage, and provided an expressive language for early film directors such as Griffith—ended with the coming of sound. Although the theatrical melodrama died, its power to address human feelings lives on in the melodramatic, in an emotionalized way of telling stories that continues to move audiences, as the astounding successes of E.T. and Titanic at the box office demonstrates. ■ ■ ■ SELECT FILMOGRAPHY A Drunkard’s Reformation (1909) The Birth of a Nation (1915) Way Down East (1920) Orphans of the Storm (1922) The Big Parade (1925) Seventh Heaven (1927) bel35095_ch06_123-141.indd 141 Sunrise (1927) The Crowd (1928) A Man’s Castle (1933) Since You Went Away (1944) E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) 09/11/11 10:58 PM Confirming Pages CHAPTER 7 The Musical FROM NARRATIVE TO MUSICAL NUMBER Setting the Stage In Singin’ in the Rain (1952), when silent film star Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) tries to tell Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) how he feels about her, he is at a loss for words. Confessing that he is such a “ham” and needs “the proper setting,” he takes her from a bright, sunlit exterior into a dark interior—a deserted motion picture stage. With the flick of a light switch, he paints “a beautiful sunset.” Turning on a fog machine, he adds “mist from the distant mountains.” With a bank of red lights, he conjures up “colored lights in the garden.” Positioning his Juliet on a step ladder, he tells Kathy she is “standing on her balcony.” Using a single floor lamp, he floods her with moonlight, then adds “500,000 kilowatts of stardust.” Finally, he turns on a wind machine—“a soft summer breeze”—and he has the proper setting to speak (or rather sing) to her. The number is “You Were Meant for Me.” 142 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ bel35095_ch07_142-162.indd 142 09/11/11 11:02 PM Confirming Pages Chapter 7 The Musical 143 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ What Lockwood does here is what most musicals attempt in order to make a smooth transition from narrative action to musical number: they transform the setting or space from one that grounds the action from the more or less realistic world of the story (its fictional reality) into a different register. In this new world, new laws take hold; the characters are momentarily freed from the fictional reality of the narrative and surrender themselves to the fantasy of song and dance. In other words, the conventions of classic realist narration, in which characters do not normally break into song and dance, suddenly yield to the conventions of the musical number, in which they do. The heart of the musical (what makes it a musical and not another kind of film) lies in its music and the characters who sing and dance to it. Characters in nonmusicals often sing, but their singing tends to be narratively motivated (and not very good). Cary Grant and Myrna Loy are connected as a couple in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) when they both sing “Home on the Range” in the shower. It’s not unusual to sing in the shower: everyone does it. It is perfectly natural for a liberal politician such as Jay Bulworth (Warren Beatty) to try his hand at rapping in Bulworth (1998); it shows that he wants to be hip. And it is okay for Legal Eagles (1986) attorney Tom Logan (Robert Redford) to tap dance in an attempt to cure his insomnia. These are all believable idiosyncratic practices; that is, they function as an extension of character. Narrative Reality The term “classic realist narration” should not be understood as meaning simple realism. It refers to a narrative world that is consistent and coherent; that world obeys a stated or unstated set of rules that give it credibility. That world may contain unrealistic elements, such as aliens (Men in Black, 1997) or portals into the brain of John Malkovich (Being John Malkovich, 1999), but as long as the characters in these films obey the laws of those worlds, audiences will summon the necessary willing suspension of disbelief to grant those characters and their world a certain verisimilitude; in effect, these films produce their own reality— a reality that is whatever those films want that reality to be—and, by adhering to that reality’s laws, make it credible. Musical Reality Musicals, however, differ from classic realist narrations in that they have (at least) two sets of books. They operate according to two different laws—and they alternate back and forth between them. As Martin Rubin has written, musicals rupture the fabric of traditional narrative verisimilitude by suddenly shifting from narrative to musical spectacle—to song and dance—that the narrative fiction is unable to naturalize. This is precisely what makes a musical such as Singin’ in the Rain, Moulin Rouge (2001), Chicago (2002), Dreamgirls (2006), or Mamma Mia! (2008) different from a film with music, such as In the Line of Fire (1993, Clint Eastwood playing the piano) or 8 Mile (2002, Eminem playing an bel35095_ch07_142-162.indd 143 09/11/11 11:02 PM Confirming Pages 144 PART 2 Genre and the Genre System ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Rutgers Cinema Studies In Singin’ in the Rain, Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) needs the proper setting—a studio sound stage—before he can tell Kathy Seldon (Debbie Reynolds) that “You Were Meant for Me.” aspiring rapper). In a musical, there’s a shift from one level of reality to another that involves a rupture or break; in a film with music, the music is part of the narrative, a window that opens into the psychology of the character. In the musical, this shift is what produces the lift or experience of ecstatic pleasure that we associate with most musical numbers; this lift involves a movement out of and away from the laws that govern the mundane world of the fiction. Musical sequences interrupt the linear flow of necessity—the narrative—and release the actors from their duties and responsibilities as credible identification figures for us, permitting them to perform for us, to display their exceptional talents as singers and dancers. We suddenly shift to bel35095_ch07_142-162.indd 144 09/11/11 11:02 PM Confirming Pages Chapter 7 The Musical 145 ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ a world of pure spectacle: in this fantasy world, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and others drop the pretense, for a moment, that they are playing characters and perform for us simply as Astaire and Kelly. Shifts in Register Musicals operate on two different dramatic registers—that of the narrative and that of the spectacle. Their movement can be charted according to the shifts they make from one register to the other, that is, from narrative to song and back again. This movement is perhaps most obvious in what is considered to be Hollywood’s first film musical, The Jazz Singer (1927), where the shifts from narrative to musical number are marked by shifts from silent footage (with orchestral accompaniment) to sound footage in which Al Jolson sings. The example cited earlier from Singin’ in the Rain deliberately foregrounds this shift in register, laying bare the dynamics of the musical itself. The fact that it takes place on a film stage and involves the machinery used to make films (lights; fog and wind machines) underscores its self-reflexive play with the essentially illusory foundations of the musical number. Chicago The transition from one register to another need not be slow or gradual. In a film such as Chicago (2002), a single cut will often serve to shift us back and forth from the real world to the musical number. As Roxie Hart (Renée Zellweger) listens in the holding pen of the Cook County jail to Big Mama Morton (Queen Latifa) giving her the instructions for new inmates, the lesson is intercut with an onstage musical number, “When You’re Good to Mama,” sung by Big Mama to a well-dressed audience in a crowded, fancy nightclub. Chicago opposes reality (the prison) and fantasy (the nightclub) through abrupt juxtapositions, but the editing also fuses the two worlds together. It is as if the prisoners somehow had access to the musical number through the cutaways. Other numbers in the film, such as “Funny Honey” and “Razzle Dazzle,” play with a similar confusion between registers. In both these and other numbers, the film employs a variety of editing matches (eyeline matches, graphic matches, matches on action) to connect the narrative action to the musical number. Even when connected into an apparently seamless continuity, the narrative and the musical number depend on their essential difference from one another to produce the sense of ecstasy associated with the musical. “Ecstasy” (from the Greek word ekstasis) literally means “standing outside of oneself,” and it depends on the sensation of displacement that is exactly the sense that Chicago’s staging of musical numbers attempts to achieve. Characters are there in their narrative bodies yet simultaneously outside of themselves singing and dancing in the same composite scene. Even when blurred, the distinction between registers bel35095_ch07_142-162.indd 145 09/11/11 11:02 PM Confirming Pages 146 PART 2 Genre and the Genre System Photofest ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Fantasy becomes reality for Roxie (Renée Zellweger, right) and Velma (Catherine Zeta-Jones) in the final number of Chicago (2002). remains perceptible, and our awareness of that distinction becomes the basis of the musical number’s power to transport audiences. The basic pattern for the musical numbers in Chicago involves an alternation between reality and fantasy within the numbers themselves. This tension is resolved in the final number (“I Move On”), when fantasy becomes reality. Roxie and Velma (Catherine Zeta-Jones) realize their individual dreams through a unique partnership: their collective notoriety is turned into the main attraction at a big downtown Chicago theater, where they dance and sing for thousands of spectators. For the first time in the film, there are no cutaways to narrative action occurring elsew...