iii Looking at Labor-Capital Films

Populist Films

The movie industry produced a fourth category of films that offered viewers yet another way of looking at class & class conflict. Populist films brought 19th century populist ideology to the screen with provocative images of monopolists and other nonproducers thwarting the will and undermining the wellbeing of the nation's ordinary citizens. These movies made little effort to be dispassionate or measured in their tone, but appealed directly to the collective anger of audiences. There was little gray area in these films for they always had clear villains and heroes. They adopted a tone that preached a gut-level class hatred designed to enrage audiences against those Theodore Roosevelt called the "malefactors of wealth." While radicals founded newspapers with calming names like the Appeal to Reason, the films of populist directors might be dubbed the Appeal to Passion.

No one was more masterful at the populist form than D.W. Griffith. His movies oozed with raw populism. He told workers that the world really was exploiting them; that they really were being victimized by big fat capitalists. The monopolist was exactly what people feared: an unredeemable blood sucker. Worse yet, they committed crimes and unspeakable acts that went unpunished by authorities and drove honest working people to ruin and suicide. Griffith visualized these fears by casting overweight men as his monopolists, dressing them in tuxedos and top hats (or some other form of fancy clothing), and having them puff away on big cigars. In A Corner In Wheat (1909), a food monopolist who causes hunger and riots by driving up wheat prices to exorbitant levels, falls into a grain elevator and is slowly smothered to death as tons of golden wheat fall on top of him (fig. 50, 51, 52).

fig 50:A Corner In Wheat (1909)

fig 51:A Corner In Wheat (1909)

fig 52:A Corner In Wheat (1909) (v)