Improbable Ethnic Hero: William Powell and the Transformation of Ethnic Hollywood

Abstract

History as Ghetto. One crucial question posed by contemporary cultural theoreticians from Louis Althusser to Fredric Jameson has to do with the specific relation of cultural artifact to historical truth. How is one to account for the disparity between history and its representation, or between history and its lack of representation by hegemonic groups that have a stake in maintaining an official story? More pertinent for film scholars, how do the events on the film screen explicate-how are they explicated by-events on the larger, cultural stage, when both arenas are as much defined in the gap as in the praxis? Jameson states the problem and its necessity in its most accessible form: It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and its necessity.' When speaking about the cultural role of the ethnic, historians derive a number of possible, practical consequences of the problematics of political nonrepresentability. For some, the absence of ethnic or subculture representation in history and criticism is lamentable, but correctable (Lary May's Screening Out the Past). For others, the absence of overt subculture representation is proof of either the sterility of the mainstream culture (Michel Foucault), or the impotence and final incommensurability of ethnic cultures (John Cuddihy's Ordeal of Civility), depending on the critic's allegiance or particular neurosis. When addressing American film, it is possible to make a different kind of assertion: the absence of direct, proportional representation of the immigrant as complex character and lead player, and the substitution instead of ethnic stereotypes, is interesting when one takes into account that the medium is to a great extent dominated by immigrants and children of immigrants. The consensus among most historians of American film, from Louis Jacobs to Lary May, is that the number of immigrants-and their children, America's new ethnics-who worked in Hollywood in creative, technical, and economic capacities has been and continues to be extremely disproportionate.2 Of the thirteen founders of the Big Eight studios, for example, eleven were born outside the United States. The last two, Harry Cohn and Jesse Lasky, were the son and grandson, respectively, of immigrants.3 Add to this the fact that by