| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

John Bodnar. Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003. Pp. xxxiv, 284. $42.95.
In terms of class consciousness, Hollywood's vision tilts upward with envy or down the middle with complacency: aristocrats in tuxes and diaphanous gowns waltzing through Art Deco staterooms or bourgeois families of Rockwellian mettle rubbing elbows around a bountiful dinner table. Except for the gritty guttersnipe at Warner Brothers in the 1930s or the occasional lazy-eyed boxer or coal miner's daughter thereafter, in American cinema, a working-class hero is not something to behold.	1
Undaunted by the social-cinematic inequities, cultural historian John Bodnar sets out to examine that subsection of Hollywood "dramas or depictions of real life in which working people were protagonists of consequence" (p. xvii). No closed shop, his union local welcomes truckers, farmers, factory workers, teamsters, gangsters, postwar brutes, angry patriots—all the sundry and "complex ways which Americans imagined working people" on the motion picture screen from the early sound era to the 1980s. The author's decision to include gangsters in his workforce may be problematic, but so magnetic an activist is impossible to resist.	. . .

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