ii. Movies, Politics, and the Working Class continued

These early theaters drew their most loyal and numerous patrons from immigrants and working-class Americans. Excluded from many other entertainments by their high costs, virtually all working people could afford the five cents it cost to go to the movies. Some people dropped in at lunch time or on the way home from work; others liked to get dressed up and make going to the movies a special occasion (fig 8, 9).

fig 9: Rex Theater, Hannibal, MO. (1912)

Since workers and immigrants comprised the bulk of prewar audiences, it is not surprising that movies about working-class life came to occupy a central position in American cinema. These Working Class Films -- a classification I use that is based on a film's subject matter rather than its genre -- generally fell into one of three categories: (1) innocuous romances, melodramas, comedies, and adventures that used workers and immigrants as protagonists in their plots but could just as easily used middle class or elite characters; (2) social-problem films, such as Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) (fig 10) and The Italian (1915) (fig 11) that depicted the general hardships of working-class life (tenement life, crime, poverty, old age, etc.); (3) labor-capital films that told highly politicized stories of class struggle. It is this last category that is the focus this project.

fig 10: Musketeers of Pig Alley (v)

Throughout the silent era, politically engaged screenwriters and producers turned out movies that examined strikes, union organizing, and efforts by radicals to overthrow the capitalist system. The relatively inexpensive cost of making films before World War I ($400 to $1,000 a reel) allowed a wide variety of groups we would not normally associate with the film industry to make movies that presented their cause to a mass public. Early filmmakers included the American Federation of Labor, the Ford Motor Company, the Socialist party, the American Bankers' Association, the National American Women Suffrage Association (fig 12), and the National Child Labor Committee.

The diversity of producers created a competition of ideas and politics unknown in today's movie industry. Films dealing with class conflict grew so numerous that by 1910, reviewers began talking about the emergence of a distinct labor-capital genre. Films within this genre generally fell into one of five categories: conservative, radical, liberal, populist, and anti-authoritarian. In confronting the most contentious class problems of the day, labor-capital filmmakers relied on several if not all of the following techniques to impart a variety of ideological messages and class fantasies about workers, unions, radicals, and their struggles: the repeated use of standard plots, stock images, casting decisions, editing techniques, costuming, make up, and the choreography of crowd scenes.

Let us look at examples from each political category to see the ways in which filmmakers went about putting ideology on the screen.