The Working Class in American Film: The Creation of Image and Cu ...

Hollywood trope of the rugged individualist and establishing a template for films that followed, primarily films from the right even though it was a film from the left.

In Part 3, I look at films released between the early and mid-1970s and explore how Hollywood began to take a more sympathetic look at the working class. The films discussed here offer working-class characters who are struggling to find their way in the changing world of the 1970s. These films come from both the right and the left. In Dirty Harry, a police detective sees the counterculture as something that needs to be eradicated. In Scarecrow, two drifters, one recently released from prison and the other “retired” from the Merchant Marines, find each other while searching for new lives in a world unfriendly to the working class. In The Last Detail (1973), the lives of three “lifers” in the Navy provide a look at the constricted world of the working class. Each of the films foregrounds the working class at a time when its members were under siege from internal and external pressures beyond their control.

One film explored in detail in Part 3, Joe, is more problematic. Joe stands alone as a film that examines the extreme working-class reaction to the counterculture. One of the first films of the era with a working-class protagonist, it demonizes both the working class and the counterculture in an effort to explore, I would say exploit, the differences between the two groups. Joe shows the darkest side of the working-class/counterculture binary. In doing so, it also brings the working class and middle class together onscreen for the first time, foreshadowing a similar marriage of interests in white communities across America during the decade. Joe also anticipates later films whose narratives and themes helped to define the working class of today. Ambiguity is a hallmark of all the films explored in Part 3 because uncertain times brought uncertain conclusions to each of the films. But a close inspection shows that the films from the left, The Last Detail and Scarecrow, offered a path forward for the working class and counterculture, while films from the right, Dirty Harry and Joe, did not. That path forward, which hints at potential collective action, was eschewed when Hollywood saw more profit potential in films that exploited the binary.