"A very important contribution both to cinema history and to early twentieth-century American history. . . . Higashi rewrites the history of early American cinema as a social history, situating it clearly in the development of American middle-class culture."--Richard Abel, author of The Ciné Goes to Town

"Cecil B. DeMille and the American Culture contributes significantly to scholarly understanding of the construction of the classic Hollywood cinema and, more generally, of consumer culture in the modern West."--Francis G. Couvares, Amherst College

Cecil B. DeMille And American Culture shows that he director best remembered today for overblown biblical epics was in fact one of the most remarkable pioneers in the film industry during the Progressive Era. In an innovative work that illustrates the intersection of cultural history with cultural studies, Sumiko Higashi describes how DeMille artfully introduced cinema--yet to achieve legitimacy as an art form--into middle-class culture.

Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture demonstrates that the director, best remembered for his overblown biblical epics, was one of the most remarkable film pioneers of the Progressive Era.

In this innovative work, which integrates cultural history and cultural studies, Sumiko Higashi shows how DeMille artfully inserted cinema into genteel middle-class culture by replicating in his films such spectacles as elaborate parlor games, stage melodramas, department store displays, Orientalist world's fairs, and civic pageantry.

The director not only established his signature as a film author by articulating middle-class ideology across class and ethnic lines, but by the 1920's had become a trendsetter, with set and costume designs that influenced the advertising industry to create a consumer culture based on female desire.

Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped material from the DeMille Archives and other collections, Higashi provides imaginative readings of DeMille's early feature films, viewing them in relation to the dynamics of social change, and she documents the extent to which the emergence of popular culture was linked to the genteel tradition.

Read Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era Online

Paperback: 264 pages
Author: Sumiko Higashi
Publisher: University of California Press (December 2, 1994)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520085574
ISBN-13: 978-0520085572

INTRODUCTION
In December 1913 Cecil B. DeMille abandoned a stage career that was his family legacy and boarded a train for California to assume a post as director-general of a recently organized film studio, the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company.

A year later, his indomitable mother, Beatrice, who continued to manage his debt-ridden finances and to make useful contacts in New York, wrote: "Who should walk into the office this morning but Mary Rinehart. She has a fine idea about a combination of Movie and play. . . if you want it pipe up quick. She is pretty valuable these days the only writer [sic ] except London and Tarkington who can and does get $6000 for the serial rights alone of a short story."

A business opportunity for a noted theatrical agent who was also a devoted mother, this episode illustrates the strategy developed by the Lasky Company, subsequently Famous Players-Lasky, to resituate cinema for "better" audiences with adaptations of literary works.

At the time the studio was founded, the motion picture industry was just beginning to showcase feature-length films in lavish downtown movie palaces to acquire cultural legitimacy. Indeed, an argument repeated in trade journals representative of industry discourse called for upgrading production and exhibition practices to attract "high-class" as opposed to "low-class" patrons to film theaters. ...

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