Paul Buhle and David Wagner
This book definitely fulfills its promise to examine the history of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and even to the relatively uninitiated reader, many films treated in this book have attained epic status in American film making and will resonate with readers. Unfortunately, the offhand mention of a known film or the occasional scanty paragraph about a famous actor cannot make up for this book's dealings in trivia, excusable because of its academic focus but which ultimately uphold the incredibly low standard set for ivory tower publishing. That this "untold story" concentrates mostly on relatively unknown films and the subtleties of screenwriting rather than the more accessible art of acting is, although surprising given the proletarian nature of the book's title, not the sole reason that reading this book feels rather like a laundry list of impressive name-dropping. Quite simply, the book comes across as a flamboyant excuse for the two authors to describe the leftward tendencies of every Golden Age Hollywood film they've ever seen, with a few foreign films thrown in for good measure. The writing is dull and hard to catalyze and movie descriptions, while well-done in this particular instance, simply do not translate well to print and cannot carry a book by themselves. Particularly galling is the inconsistency with which characters are named: in a given film description, a character can be interchangably referred to by name or by the actor's name, a mix-up which is invariably confusing and which makes readers focus on familiar names (James Cagney! Katherine Hepburn!) rather than related plot lines.
The plot lines of various noted films are also the only plot one can hope for in this tome. Rightly noted as encyclopedic, if the authors' knowledge extends beyond obscure titles and names they surely don't show it in this book. They have taken a fundamentally gripping and important story and carefully crafted it into a dull line of succession which, by its end, is untraceable because it lacks memorable beacons due to an absolute overflow of information. The book is a veritable tsunami of movie after movie but only rarely attempts a discussion of context or even importance. It is enough for the authors to note that a screenwriter mentioned was a member of the Communist Party or (far more often) note with implied derision their future as a "friendly witness" to HUAC, failing utterly to even mention what this means until the book's final chapter. What purports to be a history of a political sensibility becomes a dry timeline rather than the engaging story that it in fact is. There is a sense of the jockeying for control between studios and creators that lies beneath the whole text, but instead of exploiting this intriguing and complex story the authors instead rely on their lists and descriptions to carry the day (along with an unhealthy fondness for Abraham Polonsky, seemingly mentioned in every other sentence). They don't.
What is left is a dull text useful only to those who already possess a working knowledge of the Left and its struggles from the advent of sound picture (the mid-1920s) to the destructive influence of McCarthyism and its infamous witch hunts. If I hadn't been lucky enough to take a class in Cold War culture in college, I certainly would have been lost as the vibrant history of the midcentury American Left goes completely unnoticed and unregarded. There is nothing wrong with having a specific focus, but any history book that is going to be useful or even mildly entertaining needs context. Instead of offering even the most cursory of histories, the authors jump right into the muddle and mess and plod along accordingly. Their sense of a timeline is ridiculously inept as they jump around without any sense of rhyme or reason and mention certain films twice without even acknowledging they have done so. The book becomes a well-ordered mess, a cornucopia of movie history without a sense of plot or its own importance. This reluctance to provide an outline or even to discuss most of the films' connections to the Left beyond their authorship (how do the plots or characterizations relate? How do these considerations slide past censorship?) is increasingly frustrating as the authors continue to ignore facts that would be not only beneficial but crucial to the average reader. Radical Hollywood presetns an excellent and (hopefully) thorough list of films created by the Hollywood Left of the Golden Age, but ultimately cannot sustain interest through four hundred pages of lists and endless movie descriptions that cannot help but blend into one boring mass.
Grade: C+
The plot lines of various noted films are also the only plot one can hope for in this tome. Rightly noted as encyclopedic, if the authors' knowledge extends beyond obscure titles and names they surely don't show it in this book. They have taken a fundamentally gripping and important story and carefully crafted it into a dull line of succession which, by its end, is untraceable because it lacks memorable beacons due to an absolute overflow of information. The book is a veritable tsunami of movie after movie but only rarely attempts a discussion of context or even importance. It is enough for the authors to note that a screenwriter mentioned was a member of the Communist Party or (far more often) note with implied derision their future as a "friendly witness" to HUAC, failing utterly to even mention what this means until the book's final chapter. What purports to be a history of a political sensibility becomes a dry timeline rather than the engaging story that it in fact is. There is a sense of the jockeying for control between studios and creators that lies beneath the whole text, but instead of exploiting this intriguing and complex story the authors instead rely on their lists and descriptions to carry the day (along with an unhealthy fondness for Abraham Polonsky, seemingly mentioned in every other sentence). They don't.
What is left is a dull text useful only to those who already possess a working knowledge of the Left and its struggles from the advent of sound picture (the mid-1920s) to the destructive influence of McCarthyism and its infamous witch hunts. If I hadn't been lucky enough to take a class in Cold War culture in college, I certainly would have been lost as the vibrant history of the midcentury American Left goes completely unnoticed and unregarded. There is nothing wrong with having a specific focus, but any history book that is going to be useful or even mildly entertaining needs context. Instead of offering even the most cursory of histories, the authors jump right into the muddle and mess and plod along accordingly. Their sense of a timeline is ridiculously inept as they jump around without any sense of rhyme or reason and mention certain films twice without even acknowledging they have done so. The book becomes a well-ordered mess, a cornucopia of movie history without a sense of plot or its own importance. This reluctance to provide an outline or even to discuss most of the films' connections to the Left beyond their authorship (how do the plots or characterizations relate? How do these considerations slide past censorship?) is increasingly frustrating as the authors continue to ignore facts that would be not only beneficial but crucial to the average reader. Radical Hollywood presetns an excellent and (hopefully) thorough list of films created by the Hollywood Left of the Golden Age, but ultimately cannot sustain interest through four hundred pages of lists and endless movie descriptions that cannot help but blend into one boring mass.
Grade: C+
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