Manhattan Melodrama's “Art of the Weak”: Telling History from the Other Side in the 1930s Talking Gangster Film

Journal of American Studies

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 101-118

  Munby, Jonathan ^a  

^a LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 85012506783     PISSN: 00218758     EISSN: 14695154     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875800024348     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. A prime “nativist” defence group, The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), published the first edition of their Manual for Citizenship in 1921 (at the time of the first anti-immigration act) as a service to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (and which is still in use today). In its recommendations to those who take the “Oath of American Citizenship” the DAR emphasize that “You are not an ‘Italian-American’” or “any other kind of hyphenated American”
2. See Chapter 4 of my dissertation, “Screening Crime in the USA, 1929 to 1958: From Hays Code to HUAC; From Little Caesar to Touch of Evil” (University of Minnesota, 199;) for further detail on the censorship war waged over the first talking gangster films.
3. Cagney and Robinson switched sides, as it were, in G-Men (1935) and Bullets or Ballots (1936), respectively.
4. W.R.Burnett, “The Outsider,” in Pat McGilligan ed., Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 49-84.
5. The violence of this death may have been underscored by the casting of George Sidney in the Rosen role. He was most closely associated on screen with his comic role as Nathan Cohen in the popular Cohens and Kellys Jewish-Irish comedy series. Audiences used to seeing Sidney in this more jovial part, as recently as late 1933 (The Cohens and Kellys in Trouble), may have been doubly disturbed to see him the object of a riot killing.
6. Powell and Loy play out The Thin Man series as members of the upper-class. Yet it is essential to these films that these protagonists bear an awkward relationship to their class-resenting its formal codes and often involved in cases which expose the seamy underside to being rich and famous.
7. Gary Carey, All the Stars in Heaven: The Story of Louis B. Mayer and M.G.M. (London: Robson Books, 1982), 193.
8. Kenneth L. Geist, Pictures Will Talk: the Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewiz (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978), 64-69. Mankiewicz does note that W. S. Van Dyke directed only the first half of the film-being replaced by Jack Conway, who is uncredited. Mankiewicz argues this change was not the product of a disagreement over political views. Rather it was characteristic of producer David O. Selznick, who was out “to destroy the power and concept of the director as the one who makes the film “(68n).
9. Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers’ Wars (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1972), 36.
10. This is not an unusual way to resolve the gangster dilemma-Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) uses a similar device-the priest (Pat O'Brien) persuades the gangster (James Cagney) to fake being a coward when he goes to the chair, in order to destroy the East Side kids’ identification with him. Here, however, in a post-Code gangster film it is less clear as to whether the gangster genuinely makes a sacrifice-in the end we are left unsure as to whether he “faked” cowardice or indeed “cracked.”
11. Andrew Bergman, We're in the Money: Depression America and its Films (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
12. Chronotope: “Literally, ‘time-space.’ A unit of analysis for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented. The distinctiveness of this concept as opposed to most other uses of time and space in literary analysis lies in the fact that neither category is privileged; they are utterly interdependent. The chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring.” Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, “Glossary,” in Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist trans., Michael Holquist ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 425.
13. Originally, in 1934, the censors’ main attention fell not on the film's obvious but general reflection of the political trajectory of Franklin Roosevelt, but on whether the film cut too close to the bone in terms of certain incumbent political figures in the state of New York-such as La Guardia and Charles S. Whitney-who might have seen their political careers directly critiqued in the plot. La Guardia would have been uncomfortable with the suggestion that his rise to power in New York had been supported by gangsterdom. Whitney would have seen the film as a reflection of how his own political success had been predicated on his successful prosecution of gangland bosses during his tenure as District Attorney. Symptomatically, the Code was invested in protecting the industry from those who had power to intervene in film release and distribution-especially in such important box-office states like New York. (MPAA/PCA File Manhattan Melodrama, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.)
14. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Steven Rendall trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 37.
15. Originally., 37.
16. Originally., 36.
17. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “T h e Culture Industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, John Cumming trans. (New York: Continuum, 1972) (original edition, Dialektik der Aufkldrung, 1944).
18. Warren Susman, “The Nature of American Conservatism,” in his Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 57-74.
19. Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xxxiv.