At the beginning of the "Politics" chapter of Hollywood Cinema, Maltby quotes the critic Michael Wood (writing in 1975) and

MPPDA president Will Hays (in 1938):

Movies, he argues, dramatize "our semi-secret concerns" in a story, allowing them a ''brief, thinly disguised parade": "Entertainment is not,

as we often think, a full-scale flight from our problems, not a means of forgetting them completely, but rather a rearrangement of our problems

into shapes which tame them, which disperse them to the margins of our attention." (Wood)

In a period in which propaganda has largely reduced the artistic and entertainment validity of the screen in many other countries, it is pleasant to report

that American motion pictures continue to be free from any but the highest possible entertainment purpose. The industry has resisted and must continue

to resist the lure of propaganda in that sinister sense persistently urged upon it by extremist groups . . . The distinction between motion pictures with a

message and self-serving propaganda is one determinable only through the process of common sense ... Entertainment is the commodity for which the

public pays at the box-office. Propaganda disguised as entertainment would be neither honest salesmanship nor honest showmanship. (Hays)

Bearing these remarks (and the potential difficulty of reconciling them) in mind, provide a sketch of how some of the movies

we've seen this term (let's say at least three) express themselves in ways that we might call "political" (or, if we've read to the

end of the chapter, "ideological"). How does “the political” (or “ideology”) manifest itself in the Hollywood cinema of the 1930s?