Consumerism and Ethnicity
The rapid advance and diffusion of consumerism in the 1920s is reflected in the emphasis on the linkage of romance and consumerism in the cross-class romance films of that decade. Motifs in the many variations of the cross-class romance films included the
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Consumerism and Ethnicity
CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN THE CROSS-CLASS ROMANCE FILM The popularity of the cross-class romance film that began with the rise of the feature-length film around 1915 continued in the 1920s. Although the numbers of cross-class romance films dropped somewhat from the 115 that I found during the peak years 1915–1919, I found 99 of them from 1920 to 1928. The basic patterns did not change: in 80 of the films the wealthy protagonist was male; in 16 of the films the wealthy protagonist was female; and there were three films with two cross-class romances, one between a rich man and poor girl and another between a rich girl and poor man. In 82 of the films the cross-class romance was successful, usually ending in marriage or the promise of marriage. Only one of the 99 films was directed by a woman (Lois Weber), and although female script writers were credited in 61 films only 16 films were written exclusively by women. Of the total number of script-writing credits, 91 were female and 156 were male. One significant change with respect to genre, which reflected wider cultural changes as the decade progressed, was the increase in the number of cross-class romance comedies and the decline in the number of dramas. The number of comedies gradually increased in the first half of the decade, and between 1926 and 1929, there were more cross-class romance comedies than dramas. Of the cross-class romance films released in 1928,
© The Author(s) 2017 S. Sharot, Love and Marriage Across Social Classes in American Cinema, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41799-8_5
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S. SHAROT
I found only one drama and seven comedies. This trend would come to be reversed in the early 1930s. The themes common in the cross-class romance films from 1915 to 1919 continued to be common in the 1920s but, as the number of comedies increased and the number of dramas declined, certain themes became uncommon. One theme that became rare was that of the seduction and abandonment of a victimized poor girl by a predatory wealthy man.1 D.W. Griffith revived this plot in Way Down East (D.W. Griffith Productions, 1920), and although some critics had little sympathy for the plot, which they saw as an outmoded melodrama, they praised Griffith for making it into an absorbing entertainment.2 Similar reservations about the melodramatic nature of Griffith’s source material were made of The White Rose (D. W. Griffith Productions, 1923) in which a theology student and son of a wealthy southern plantation family first abandons and finally marries the cigar stand girl he had made pregnant. Whereas critics acknowledged that Griffith could make melodramatic “hokum” into acceptable entertainment3 they were less tolerant of other film makers who made what the critics regarded as outmoded melodrama. The reviewer for Variety criticized The Top of New York (Paramount, 1922) as a “crude and old fashioned affair” in which a poor working girl struggles against “the dishonorable plotting of her rich employer, trying to remain straight under the temptation of his
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