iii Looking at Labor-Capital Films

Anti-Authoritarian Films

Audiences also saw a number of anti-authoritarian films that, while not directly challenging capitalism, mocked the authority of those who often gave workers the hardest time: foremen, judges, police, and employers. Some films, like The Kleptomaniac (1905), presented messages in form of melodrama. Producer/director Edwin Porter exposes the dual standards of justice in America: the poor go to jail for their crimes, while the wealthy are able to avoid the consequences of their actions by buying justice (fig. 53).

Most anti-authoritarian films, however, relied on comedy and satire to convey their point of view. They poked fun at and showed the ways in which workers got the better of foremen, employers, landlords, judges, and police (fig. 54).

fig 54:The Eviction (1904)

Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops delighted audiences with hilarious portraits of police, the representatives of state authority most frequently encountered by working people, as bumbling incompetents incapable of protecting anyone -- including themselves (fig. 55).

fig 55:In the Clutches of the Gang (1913)

In addition to mocking firemen, police, and the rich, Charlie Chaplin, the master comic of the age, delighted in exposing the foibles of the middle class. In The Floorwalker (1916), a foppish department store manager spends all his time watching the shabbily dressed Charlie, while "respectable" well-dressed middle-class men and women rob the store blind (fig. 56).

fig 56:The Floorwalker (1916) (v)

Chaplin also poked fun at the working class itself, and mocked, in conservative fashion, the laziness and violence of strikers (fig. 57, 58).

fig 57, 58:Behind the Scene (1916) (v)