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.