Cinema

Cinema and Society

Movies, like crime itself, played an important role in the formation of America's cities at the start of the twentieth century. Between 1896 and 1906, the motion picture became a popular and respectable feature of vaudeville acts and entertainment halls; by 1910, weekly attendance at movie houses in Manhattan alone reached nearly one million viewers.

The tremendous popularity of storefront theaters created a cultural crisis that led to the regulation of cinema through licensing and censorship. In 1907, the Children's Aid Society brought suits against various New York City cinemas for “imperiling the morals of young boys” (Czitrom 1992: 532). At issue was the showing of a film called The Unwritten Law, based on the Stanford White–Harry Thaw murder case of the previous year. The scenes judged unfit for children included the drugging of a woman by Stanford White and the later shooting of White on a roof garden.

Another movie was denounced for showing the interior of a Chinese opium den, leading one police magistrate to proclaim, “If any man should show that picture to my child I would kill him. The police should close every one of them.” (Czitrom 1992: 532). The issue of controversial movie content was so heated that on December 3, 1907, New York State Supreme Court Justice James A. O'Gorman enforced an 1860 “blue law” and forced the closure of cinemas on Sundays.

While crime continued to figure prominently in cinema during the early 1900s, moviemakers sought to lighten the controversy by portraying crime in a farcical or sardonic manner. The Great Train Robbery (1903) was the first blockbuster of “cine-crime,” depicting the criminal justice system as hypocritical and accepting of the criminal underworld; it featured the first cinematic gunshot, when a cowboy points his gun barrel straight at the camera and pulls the trigger. In The Kleptomaniac (1905), the realities of the American class system are depicted when a fashionable woman who shoplifts from a department store is let go by the judge, while a poor mother who steals from the grocer to feed her daughter receives no mercy.

Police corruption is clearly depicted in A Raid on a Cock Fight (1906) when an arresting officer pockets betting money he confiscated. Cinema's cynicism about criminal justice practitioners is also evident in Monday Morning in a Coney Island Police Court (1908), in which sleeping police officers must be awakened by a custodian, attorneys are portrayed as baggypants clowns, and the judge uses his huge gavel to knock everyone on the head (Czitrom 1992). While such farcical portrayals may have been good fun, it is likely that they served as well as clever cinematic commentary on those who persisted with demands for censorship in spite of the huge popularity of the movies.

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