The Corporate Imaginary in John Ford's New Deal Cinema

Abstract

This essay examines the critiques of capitalism offered by John Ford's New Deal Cinema. During the period in question (1935–48), Ford's films offered three distinct political stances that reflected forces and transformations in the American political unconscious: in the early and mid-1930s, he built his criticisms of economic distress on a restrained corporatism that advocated a moral capitalism; in the late 1930s and early 1940s, this corporatism was radicalized by events outside the cinematic apparatus; and in the late 1940s Ford, like many working Americans, abandoned the critique of capitalism for an anticommunism that repressed class conflict in the name of a new and reinvigorated nationalism. This argument attempts to understand Ford's transformation by looking at the relation of his cinematic production to the history of the organized and unorganized laborers who constituted much of his audience.

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