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Performing the Accident on Purpose

Theodore Dreiser and James Cain

in Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance

In the early twentieth century, insurance crime emerged as a social phenomenon that signals not only a sociological shift in criminality but also indicates a radical change in thinking about the ... More

In the early twentieth century, insurance crime emerged as a social phenomenon that signals not only a sociological shift in criminality but also indicates a radical change in thinking about the nature of accidents. This chapter focuses on two novels that reveal how literature is involved in the production of chance: Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) and James Cain's Double Indemnity (1936). Dreiser and Cain literalize the production of chance with their depictions of criminal accident fraud. For Dreiser, this signaled the end of his own realist project. For Cain, however, it raised the possibility that accident production might function as a valuable mode of public performance art in America's emergent welfare state. Cain's Double Indemnity is a classic example of a related subgenre of crime fiction, the falsified accident novel, in which crime masquerades as a matter of chance. Dreiser's An American Tragedy represents the accident as a criminal plot. In different ways, the two novels spell the end of an earlier phase of realism.Less

Dreiser, Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair

in Cinematic Fictions: The Impact of the Cinema on the American Novel up to World War II

This chapter begins with a discussion of Theodore Dreiser's interest in cinema, and then considers Sergei Eisenstein's film adaptation of An American Tragedy, which was praised by Dreiser but ... More

This chapter begins with a discussion of Theodore Dreiser's interest in cinema, and then considers Sergei Eisenstein's film adaptation of An American Tragedy, which was praised by Dreiser but rejected by Paramount. It also describes Eisenstein's project with Upton Sinclair to make the film Que Viva Mexico!, which resulted in a shorter film released under the title Thunder Over Mexico in 1933.Less

Film translation in Sweden in the early 1930s

Christopher Natzén

in The Translation of Films, 1900-1950

The main focus of this chapter is how the Swedish film industry settled on subtitling as its method of film translation in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The early 1930s saw a gradual shift towards ... More

The main focus of this chapter is how the Swedish film industry settled on subtitling as its method of film translation in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The early 1930s saw a gradual shift towards favouring subtitling over dubbing and intertitles. Subtitling was further promoted as new methods for providing the subtitles on the film were developed. A second focus in the chapter is the heightened media sensitivity brought on by dubbing and how this may be related to distributors’ experiments in film translation during the early years of conversion to sound. As the years progressed, a consensus developed in Sweden in favour of subtitling, which was perceived as unobtrusive, since it masked the technical construction of the film medium for those spectators who knew the spoken language in the film.Less

The Demise of Protestant Moral Reform Politics

P. C. Kemeny

in The New England Watch and Ward Society

In the 1920s the Watch and Ward Society suddenly and dramatically lost its role as custodian of morally acceptable literature. In the early 1920s the organization enjoyed a string of victories, ... More

In the 1920s the Watch and Ward Society suddenly and dramatically lost its role as custodian of morally acceptable literature. In the early 1920s the organization enjoyed a string of victories, including the disbarment of the Suffolk Country (Boston) district attorney. A series of controversies in the second half of the decade, however, led to its demise. These controversies began with the Watch and Ward Society’s arrest of H. L. Mencken in the spring of 1926 for selling a banned issue of the American Mercury and continued with the suppression of such popular works as Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and the conviction of a well-respected Cambridge bookdealer and his assistant for selling D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. These controversies helped galvanize a coalition of avant-garde writers, their publishers, and civil libertarians who succeeded in discrediting the Watch and Ward Society and revising Massachusetts’s obscenity law.Less

Introduction: Dietrich’s Face and the Talking Picture

James Phillips

in Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle

Sternberg’s films are famous for their close-ups of the female face. This Introduction discusses the way in which Dietrich’s face functions in his early sound films. Whereas silent cinema charged the ... More

Sternberg’s films are famous for their close-ups of the female face. This Introduction discusses the way in which Dietrich’s face functions in his early sound films. Whereas silent cinema charged the human face with carrying the plot or at least with taking up the narrative slack between intertitles, sound film with its additional resources for expounding the narrative opens a space for a face that is inscrutable. Sternberg’s films release the face for spectacle without thereby surrendering it to the gaze of the moviegoer: in its independence of the enclosed world of a narrative, Dietrich’s face is in a position to look out and back at the spectator. Contrasting Morocco with An American Tragedy (in which Dietrich does not appear), the Introduction argues that there is thus an image of autonomy that Sternberg and Dietrich construct and that contributes an (often overlooked) ethical dimension to their cinema of spectacle.Less