Hollywood and the Working-Class Hero: Diamonds in the Mean Streets of Boston

From its early days, Hollywood has had a complex relationship with the working class, both in the production of film and its depiction of their lives. Dwight MacDonald once said that for the movie industry, working-class life was like the dark side of the moon. Early silent films often dealt with working-class heroes, and this continued in the early days of its rise. Ross (1998), in fact, argues that silent films before World War I often portrayed working-class life in sympathetic terms, including addressing organized labor’s struggles and even promoting the labor movement. Since then, Ross argues (along with many others), that we have moved to largely negative images of the working class that, often in the guise of gritty realism or naturalism, depict violent, base, unredeemable characters that struggle for meaning and happiness against the powerful with little success. There are, of course, notable exceptions like Norma Rae (1979), Salt of the Earth (1954), Rocky (1976), and On the Waterfront (1954), but the dominant image of the working class has been largely negative from the moment characters began to speak.