Cinema Quarterly (1934 - 1935)

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THE NEW DEAL AND THE AMERICAN FILM F. D. KLINGENDER The frightened bourgeois retires to a dream world in his leisure moments to escape from the terrors of a reality filled with the battlecries of contending classes. He is left to speculate on the abstract attributes of that fictitious shadow "man in general." This shadow without substance moves in a phantom world of abstract emotions and passions, hopes, ambitions, disappointments and successes. The films produced in Hollywood up to the end of the Hoover presidency played all the possible variations of this seductive tune. We can understand the shock to a public for whom this type of subject appeared as the only possible one for a film, when the basic class reality of modern existence was for the first time unmasked in the post-revolutionary Russian film. Before 1932 the occasions when American producers discarded the Hollywood wish dream sphere in favour of a subject even remotely connected with social reality were exceedingly rare. Films such as Five Star Final, and especially I am a Fugitive from the ChainGang, exposing some particular example of social injustice with passionate sincerity, were altogether exceptional. All this, however, rapidly changed with the advent to power of the Roosevelt regime, the function of which was the extraction of American capitalism from the extreme depths of the crisis. To understand the changes that have occurred in the American film since that time it is necessary first to appreciate the significance of their economic and political background. The crisis had hit America with full force after a protracted period of illusionary prosperity which appeared to vindicate the claims of super-capitalism to have within itself the possibility of providing a prosperous existence for all. The first phase of the crisis, before Roosevelt was elected, rudely scattered this illusion and brought unparalleled distress to an immense number of people who had previously accepted it for gospel truth. The first task of the Roosevelt administration was, therefore, the deflection of mass indignation, then at its highest, from a criti 197