English 4950: American Film in the
1930s
Spring 2012
Grady
Third Essay Assignment
A
five-to-six page essay (1500-2000 words) on one of the topics below is due, via
email submission, on Friday, May 4; extensions will not be readily granted this
time. Essays should be double-spaced in
a 12-point font with one-inch margins, and of course they should have a strong,
identifiable thesis that is carefully supported with evidence drawn from
relevant films. Don't make mistakes with
the evidence--that is, don't reconstruct from memory what you think happened in
a particular scene; review the films as necessary. Do not mistake “its” and “it’s.”
***indicate in your message whether
you would like your essay returned at the time of the final (May 7) with
minimal comments, or at the end of the semester with the usual comments***
1. Design your own topic related to the films that we've seen and
the topics we've discussed. Please
provide me with a detailed paragraph describing your topic by Monday, April 30. One option here would
be to pursue a discussion board topic you find interesting.
2. [this one
never gets old!] Did women characters in the films of 1939 particularly need to
be disciplined? Consider the lessons learned by such characters as Ninotchka, Judith Traherne,
Dorothy Gale, Scarlett
O'Hara, and Bonnie Lee. Is there a
pattern to the education they receive in their stories? Do they end up in similar places at the end?
Write an essay about the romantic and domestic plots or subplots of at least
three films we've seen this term, and what those plots assume about the proper
role for women.
2a. Is the need to discipline women a
phenomenon associated with a crisis in masculinity in the 1930s—the kind of
depression-generated paternal failure described by Levine and Rauchway?
3. Discuss the ways in which the
Depression-era films The Grapes of Wrath,
Gone with the Wind, and The Wizard of Oz represent and comment upon the lives of
agricultural workers and families. (You might want to look back at Lawrence
Levine’s essay, “American Culture and the Great Depression,” if you take up
this topic.)
4. Do endings matter? There are at
least two ways to frame this question:
(a) endings are always predetermined in some
way—they correspond to the expectations of a particular genre, or to the need
for closure that the industrial organization of Hollywood filmmaking imposes on
movies—so what’s interesting about movies is their middles, where possibilities are raised and rules are bent and
experiments with character are conducted, before the inevitable happy/tragic
conclusion is imposed.
(b) Hollywood movies are not experimental at all but fundamentally conservative,
and the function of the predictable endings of genre films like westerns or
melodramas is precisely to demonstrate that experimentation and rule-bending
are dangerous things indeed.
5. “More generally, Lincoln is a
paradigm of the Fordian hero of any date: solitary,
celibate, almost impotent in grief, yet of the people; independent of logic, he
arrogates authority to intervene, even violently, even by cheating, in order to
mediate intolerance and to impress his personal convictions whose thinking he
faults…; he reunites a family and walks away at the end.” So writes critic Tag
Gallagher of John Ford’s Young Mr.
Lincoln. With this somewhat
grandiose remark as your starting point, write an essay about “the Fordian heroes” that we’ve seen this term: Abe Lincoln, Tom
Joad, the Ringo Kid, Judge Priest.
6.
Write an essay about the role of Abraham Lincoln (as figure, figurehead,
monument, inspiration, model, scoundrel, clown, sensitive guy, mediator, bully,
icon?) in the films of 1939-40 (Young Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Gone with the Wind).
7. [an updated topic!] Film critic
William Paul writes of Ninotchka, "That
the film finally sides with no ideology is not so much a mark of cynicism as a clearsighted unserstanding of the
paradoxical nature of all beliefs" (Ernst
Lubitsch's American Comedy [Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 216). But of course there's another way to explain
the film's generally evenhanded treatment of communism and capitalism that has
to do with what Maltby and Craven call Hollywood's "commercial
aesthetic," the industry's tendency to produce films that subordinate
complex ideological conflicts to much more simple romantic (or violent or
spectacular) events that satisfy the demands of the medium rather than more
abstract philosophical considerations.
Since we watched Ninotchka, we’ve read
and talked quite a bit more about the ways ideology is expressed in popular
film. Choose a film from the second half
of the course and discuss some of its ideological preoccupations, the way it
confirms/challenges/ contains/critiques/resolves/ambiguates/
explores/avoids/dances around some contemporary (i.e., 1930s) American cultural
concern. Two ways to get started on this
topic:
(a)
Choose a single idea (“Washington DC” or “the family” or “home”) and trace the
way it is used in several different films, or
(b)
Go back to Robin Wood’s essay, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” and describe the way
some of the “hopeless contradictions” of American capitalist ideology play
themselves out in a film.
8. Discuss the ways in which female
characters in some 1930s films (Clarissa Saunders, Bonnie Lee, Melanie
Hamilton, Frenchy, Zee Cobb, Abbie
Irving?) can function as surrogates for the film audience, learning to love or
appreciate or defend or forgive the (mostly) male leads with whom they
interact.