Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Wallace Fox and the B Film
- 1 Between Compliance and Resistance: Mapping the Careers of Wallace Fox and Nipo Strongheart in Early Hollywood
- 2 Indian Agents and Indigenous Agency at Universal: Wild Beauty (1946) and Gun Town (1946)
- 3 Neglected Western Traditions and Indigenous Cinema in the 1945–1946 Series Westerns of Wallace Fox
- 4 The Corpse Vanishes and the Case of the Missing Brides
- 5 “Like a crazy nightmare”: Noirish Vampirism and Deviance in Bowery at Midnight
- 6 Voices and Vaults: Pillow of Death
- 7 Wallace Fox and America’s “Career Girls”
- 8 She Made Her Own Deadline: Fox’s Brenda Starr, Reporter
- 9 Bathos in the Bowery
- 10 Infernal Devices: Wallace Fox’s Aeroglobe, Cosmic Beam Annihilator, and the Pit of Everlasting Fire
- 11 A Fox in the Wild: Ramar of the Jungle and the Crisis of Representation
- Index
9 - Bathos in the Bowery
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Wallace Fox and the B Film
- 1 Between Compliance and Resistance: Mapping the Careers of Wallace Fox and Nipo Strongheart in Early Hollywood
- 2 Indian Agents and Indigenous Agency at Universal: Wild Beauty (1946) and Gun Town (1946)
- 3 Neglected Western Traditions and Indigenous Cinema in the 1945–1946 Series Westerns of Wallace Fox
- 4 The Corpse Vanishes and the Case of the Missing Brides
- 5 “Like a crazy nightmare”: Noirish Vampirism and Deviance in Bowery at Midnight
- 6 Voices and Vaults: Pillow of Death
- 7 Wallace Fox and America’s “Career Girls”
- 8 She Made Her Own Deadline: Fox’s Brenda Starr, Reporter
- 9 Bathos in the Bowery
- 10 Infernal Devices: Wallace Fox’s Aeroglobe, Cosmic Beam Annihilator, and the Pit of Everlasting Fire
- 11 A Fox in the Wild: Ramar of the Jungle and the Crisis of Representation
- Index
Summary
Wallace Fox was a prolific film director, having made eighty-four films in the space of only twenty-six years (1927–1953). Fox directed a wide range of B-movies, as this volume explores, but one of his most distinctive achievements was the East Side Kids (ESK) series, which I believe is a more complex accomplishment than is sometimes acknowledged. It depicts Fox’s representation of the boys of the bowery as somewhat charming depictions of juvenile delinquents and their daily encounters with the community, the police (who are dominant across the ESK series in maintaining social and cultural order) and, of course, their interactions with one another, which lead to interconnected, symbiotic narratives of social critique and entertainment value. As I. C. Jarvie argues, “The cinema is both a social and an aesthetic occasion, and these two aspects are intertwined since its social character may (affect) art; and its artistic effects may (affect) society.” Hence the essential bond between social structure(s) and aesthetic effects in creative film, especially cinema that explicitly examines popular culture as its subject matter. Entertainment is clearly a dominant purpose of these films, yet not all of them derive from an exact generic formula and, I would suggest, there are a range of social issues woven into the fabric of the films. Is social and legal reconciliation at film’s end a goal or an inevitable by-product in the adjudication of these comedies? I do not believe that there is a simple assessment at hand, but I do think that there are strategic social purposes in play in these fine films. What holds the films together, individually and collectively, is the systematic integration of bathos and pathos as alternating, pulsating forces of energy that nourish narratives and serve as integral principles informing the ESK enterprise.
ESK was one of many films series to come out of Poverty Row, all of which worked with tiny budgets and very short shooting schedules, sometimes less than a week from beginning to end. It should be no surprise that plots are relatively simple with little explicit nuance. My goal is to briefly explore four ESK films: Bowery Blitzkrieg (1941, hereafter BB), Let’s Get Tough! (1942, hereafter LGT), Smart Alecks (1942, hereafter SA), and ‘Neath Brooklyn Bridge (1942, hereafter NBB).
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- Information
- ReFocus: The Films of Wallace Fox , pp. 180 - 206Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022