Harris Feinsod
Northwestern University
Harris Feinsod is assistant professor of English and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. He is author of The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (Oxford, 2017). He is currently at work on a book entitled “Into Steam: The Global Imaginaries of Maritime Modernism, 1890-1945,” from which this talk is drawn. His related essays on maritime cultural history have been published in American Literary History and n+1, and other recent essays appear in American Quarterly, Centro, Iowa Review, and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition (2012), for which he served as assistant editor.
This panel explores Hollywood’s phantasmagoric C19 through the double- consciousness of the late 1930s and1940s, as economic depression opened onto to a climate of international fascism, genocide and world war. How did the... [ view full abstract ]
This panel explores Hollywood’s phantasmagoric C19 through the double- consciousness of the late 1930s and1940s, as economic depression opened onto to a climate of international fascism, genocide and world war. How did the 19th century come to signify the ideologies, dreams, and anxieties of an American culture on the brink? This historical precipice enabled what arguably is Hollywood’s richest creative period. With the Great Depression and the advent of sound cinema, through the end of the Second World War, Classic Hollywood imagined the 19th century through an explosion of genres. This session focuses on the proto-Civil War race melodrama (Bette Davis’s Jezebel); the shanghaied sailor trope (in pictures staring Valentino, Chaplin, Keaton and directed by John Ford ); and Barbara Stanwyck's lesser known films, which offer revisionist perspectives on myths of national original. Panelists and our respondent, a literary film scholar with expertise in silent comedy, seeks to initiate a conversation about how the 19thc functioned in the classic Hollywood imaginary.
Harris Feinsod leads off with 'Global Noir': Shanghaied Sailors in Ford and Welles"At least as early as J. Grey Jewell’s report Among Our Sailors (1874), one of the late-nineteenth century’s many forms of labor abuse entered popular imaginaries in the figure of the “shanghaied sailor”: the sailor drugged in port, dumped on an outgoing vessel, and impressed to work in unfit conditions. A fact of predatory urban seaports like San Francisco’s ‘Barbary Coast’ until 1915, it also emerged as a lively device of Progressive Era culture in narrative fiction by Frank Norris and Tani Joji; in silent films starring Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino; in “true crime” histories by Herbert Asbury; and in the modern drama of the young Eugene O’Neill. In these narratives, shanghaied sailors allegorized forms of steam-age globalization understood in terms of the global subject’s deferment and disconnection, rather than his or her accelerated experience of connectivity. However, by the eve of World War II, John Ford’s shadowy, noir-ish adaptation of O’Neill’s cycle, The Long Voyage Home (1940), represented a new stage in the representation of the shanghaied sailor. Ford cast a young John Wayne (affecting a startlingly unconvincing Swedish accent) as the shanghaied sailor Ollie, consolidating in this figure an ambivalent understanding of ascendant American power. This paper considers this Progressive Era archaeology of the shanghaied sailor as it was adapted into Ford’s “noir forties,” and it concludes with a reading of Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and the “global imaginary” of film noir as it took up interpretations of the shanghaied sailor figure.
