| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film. By John Bodnar. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xxxvi, 284 pp. $42.95, ISBN 0-8018-7149-2.)

Blue-Collar Hollywood challenges us to get out of our doctrinaire, ideological rut as we consider the potential of movies to arouse the thoughts and feelings of the Americans who viewed them. In this intriguing and wide-ranging study of motion pictures from the 1930s to the 1980s, John Bodnar calls for new, more complex paradigms. He suggests that many of our investigations of blue-collar Americans have been limited by simplistic viewpoints. Researchers frequently analyze movies through the framework of dichotomies. They judge films in terms of their left or right perspectives, prolabor or procapitalist outlooks, racist or antiracist inclinations, and feminist or antifeminist bias. Bodnar directs our attention to "a more comprehensive understanding of the cultural representation of common people in the movies" (p. xxi). Movies typically did not address ideology directly, he notes, but their stories suggested attitudes about liberalism, democracy, and "illiberalism" (p. 225). Bodnar claims Hollywood also provided valuable perspectives of the "female frame on social reality," but these portrayals were "somewhat indifferent to the political outlooks of both the left and the right" (p. 27).

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