From Tom Joad to Norma Rae to Spike Lee's Mookie in Do the Right
Thing, Hollywood has regularly dramatized the lives and struggles
of working people in America. Ranging from idealistic to hopeless,
from sympathetic to condescending, these portrayals confronted
audiences with the vital economic, social, and political issues of
their times while providing a diversion -- sometimes entertaining,
sometimes provocative -- from the realities of their own lives.
In Blue-Collar Hollywood, John Bodnar examines the ways in which
popular American films made between the 1930s and the 1980s
depicted working-class characters, comparing these cinematic
representations with the aspirations of ordinary Americans and the
promises made to them by the country's political elites. Based on
close and imaginative viewings of dozens of films from every genre
-- among them Public Enemy, Black Fury, Baby Face, The Grapes of
Wrath, It's a Wonderful Life, I Married a Communist, A Streetcar
Named Desire, Peyton Place, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Coal Miner's
Daughter, and Boyz N the Hood -- this book explores such topics as
the role of censorship, attitudes toward labor unions and worker
militancy, racism, the place of women in the workforce and society,
communism and the Hollywood blacklist, and faith in liberal
democracy.
Whether made during the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold
War, or the Vietnam era, the majority of films about ordinary
working Americans, Bodnar finds, avoided endorsing specific
political programs, radical economic reform, or overtly reactionary
positions. Instead, these movies were infused with the same current
of liberalism and popular notion of democracy that flow through
theAmerican imagination.
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