Noel Brown

‘A New Movie-Going Public’: 1930s Hollywood And The Emergence Of The ‘Family’ Film

For the majority of its silent era—from its growth into a mass amusement in the 1900s until its transition to sound in 1929—it was widely accepted that Hollywood was, as its advocates insisted, a ‘family’ institution. As North American cinema began to transcend its primitive origins, producers and exhibitors consciously chose to expand their market beyond a core working-class consumer-base by representing their medium as a ‘family’ amusement; this usefully ambiguous word asserted suitability for every member of the family, whilst simultaneously implying appeal for all elements of the broader social sphere. Then, as now, the so-called ‘family audience’ symbolised respectability, profitability and mass cultural acceptance. The idea of the ‘family audience’ was apparently common currency in the trade long before it slipped into common usage. Trade paper Variety employed it with regularity from its inception in 1906, but as far as I can ascertain, it was not used in the New York Times—the nation’s most popular daily—before 1917. The key point, though, is that while the nebulous perception of North American commercial cinema as a ‘family’ institution had long been established by the time it made the transition to sound, the ‘family film’—by which I mean a featurelength production explicitly designed for the joint consumption of adults and children, and received as such—had yet to materialise on a broad scale. This article explores one of the primary sites of discourse surrounding Hollywood cinema in the immediate post-sound period, namely the veracity of its identity as a ‘family’ medium. It is well documented that in the aftermath of the integration of sound, the major Hollywood studios assumed a more overtly ‘adult’ trajectory in their production strategies. As we know, protests from prominent civic and religious organisations led to the formation of the Motion Picture Produc-

The Feel-Good Film: A Case Study in Contemporary Genre Classification

“Feel-good film” has become one of the most widespread typologies in popular discourses on cinema in recent years. Although primarily North American in application, the “feel-good” label has been a...

Individualism and National Identity in Disney's Early British Films

Abstract: This article centers on a series of live-action Disney movies filmed and set in Britain, and released between the early-1950s and late-1960s: The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), The Sword and the Rose (1953), Rob Roy, The Highland Rogue (1953), Kidnapped (1960), and The Fighting Prince of Donegal (1966). Through close analysis of this group of films, it examines the extent to which these Anglo-American productions successfully negotiate a mid-Atlantic path between British and North American customs and ideologies, arguing that, while derived from British historical, literary, and folktale narratives, ultimately they reflect and embody complex and characteristically American values of freedom and individualism.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Missing Children: Genre, Auteurship, and Audience Address

The title of this essay is provocative, seeming in some respects to run against the prevailing themes and inflections of this book. In what sense are children “missing” from Hitchcock’s films? Most obviously, in a purely literal sense, children appear prominently in a mere six Hitchcock films: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Sabotage (1936), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and The Birds (1963). To these six films we could add the highly suggestive cameo appearances in The Manxman (1929), Young and Innocent (1937), The Wrong Man (1957), and Marnie (1964). Finally, more abstrusely—but also more significantly in their centrality to the story—we should include the unseen, implied children of Psycho (1960), Frenzy (1972), and, to a lesser extent, Spellbound (1945). Altogether, this amounts to 13 films, from a total of 54 that Hitchcock directed in his long and illustrious career.