Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal

Abstract

Saverio Giovacchini's Hollywood Modernism focuses on the “struggles and contradictions” of the Hollywood community in the 1930s and 1940s. The book proposes “a social history” of Hollywood by focusing on the various networks of European refugees and transplanted New Yorkers whose political activity during this turbulent time eventually became a subject of national concern. Like another recent book, Gerald Horne's Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists (2001), Hollywood Modernism attends to a wealth of primary print sources and has little to say about the meaning of specific movies or the quality of certain movie directors. This is a welcome intellectual move, one that has come to characterize the best recent work in film history. Giovacchini depicts Hollywood as a company town where ideas and ideologies compete for the attention of workers who share in the making of a single, albeit glamorous, product. Hollywood circa 1930–1945 seems as a result much like contemporary Washington, D.C. It is a place of competing interests, a place that runs on collaboration and compromise.