Hollywood's working class: Class and class conflict in the Hollywood cinema, 1927--1941

The early American sound cinema with its main production facilities in Southern California, was the site of significant labour conflict. Synchronized sound cinema required the infusion of significant amounts of new capital into the film industry. It is this development that completed the 20-year transformation of the Hollywood film industry into a mature oligopoly. This process led to increased pressure on the wages and working conditions of the many thousands of cultural workers employed in the industry. This dissertation outlines a number of significant aspects of these developments, including the drive to unionize the people who worked in this industry and the influence of the political left in America on the unionization drive. It also outlines the extent to which American film narrative, in the period between 1927 and 1941, was able to give representation to the issues affecting both Hollywood's workers and American workers in general.; Drawing on the materialist analytical framework provided by The Frankfurt School, British Cultural Studies and the work of Douglas Kellner, this dissertation consists of: a review of the theoretical literature on Hollywood's role as a mass culture industry and of the existing historical and economic analyses already produced about the Hollywood film industry in this period (1927--1941), as well as critical readings of a number of representative films from the period which deal with the issues of class and class conflict. These readings examine films that depict class and class conflict by applying a blend of auteur analysis, genre analysis and an awareness of how the Production Code Administration affected the content of movies after 1934. In this way, it offers evidence that the intersection of artists (workers) and commerce in a large industrial setting produced a significant body of film texts which spoke about the state of labour relations in this period in a variety of indirect ways.