FILM ANALYSIS

A detailed and thorough look at the film by Eddie Cooper, November 20, 2012

Film Analysis: Brother Can You Spare a Dime? (1975)
In the article “Great Depression and Realignment,” writer Theodore Eversole emphasizes The Great Depression by exemplifying it as an era in which America, in all its history, experiences the worst economic upheaval, and with it an unfathomable “sense of “doom and desperation” (Encyclopedia 1-3). Disheartening and rampant images generate from the periods between the Stock Market Crash of 1929 to WWIII in 1945, and are dominant in the film Brother Can You Spare a Dime (Phillipe Mora, 1975). Mora composes this nearly two hour compilation with over 400 shots of theatrical film, archival footage, newsreels, home movies and stills—interlacing it with a hodge-podge of popular and folk music from the period to document the phenomenon: hunger victims standing in breadlines, human chains of jobless laborers commandeering work yards, and despairing shots showing a homeless man enduring the meager and feral elements alongside a dilapidated makeshift tent, while another shantytown settlement located in the backyard of nation’s capital goes up in flames. ‘Brother’ offers at times more than the human eye can bear—one example accounts a man’s desperate attempt at suicide before he jumps from a towering building to his death. Contrarily, Mora promulgates moments of optimism and joviality using two narrative themes—entertainment and politics, plotting the forces against each other, often time joining them. Two pertinent players are Hollywood actor James Cagney as the malevolent Eddie Bartlett and the benevolent President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Consequently, Mora manipulates the integral segments of film footage to expose his clear motivation. I estimate that many of the film’s scenes, especially those of Hollywood features shown in Brother Can You Spare a Dime, underpins the value of entertainment in order to mitigate the harsh realities depicted of The Great Depression, as well as glorifies President Franklin Roosevelt through innocuous “flag-waving” and “beautiful people” propaganda methods.

The fleeting shots in ‘Brother’ are a compelling, but necessary relation to temporality and space. Mora prudently crafts anecdotes of the Depression, working from an array of spontaneous shots as if pages from a collection of history books, flipping back and forth between chapters as one would do while making sense of the facts. Establishing the tone of the era, Mora places title cards with appealing Art Deco captions—from “Hard Times Hit Parade-to-“Goodbye Mama, I’m Off to Yokohama—between film segments to create an abstract sense of chronology and continuity editing, and to accomplish cohesion in the narrative development. (“Brother’ successfully adapts the aesthetic style of Russian montage that Vertov uses in Man with a Movie Camera.) In addition, Mora fervently constructs an engaging storyline evolving from American economic hardship, FDR empowerment-to- Hitler and WWII defeat, and finally the regaining of economic viability.

Mora also addresses a gamut of ideological factors including: Classism, Capitalism, Patriotism, Heroism and the principles of Good vs. Evil, which he incessantly undermines. In one sequence, the plight between gun toting Steel Workers Industrial Union strikers and the police go from bad to worst; in another, the interrogation of accused attempted Roosevelt assassin, Guiseppe Zangara forces him to avow his innocence, J. Edgar Hoover’s remitting quest to rid society of Dillinger is heroic, and ambivalent Frank Taylor in Black Legion (1937), at gun point, reticently takes the oath of the Black Legion. A rash of technical editing devices bring depth to each shot—among them, music scores and audio effects become the leitmotif for the film—“Brother Can You Spare A Dime,” a Depression standard that Rudy Vallee, and later Bing Crosby sings, dubs over good time “actualities” of Chorines dancing in chiaroscuro lighting, and a bartender in uniform concocting cocktails in sync with the rattle of ice cubes. Finally, Bessie Smith’s “No One Knows When You’re Down and Out” harmonizes over a montage of “American New Wave” freeze frame-to-motion shots in the film’s first dust bowl segment, offering a momentary and dramatic tribute to victims (many of which are children) before the shots advance to individual commentaries of the events by wheat-belt inhabitants.

From the film’s opening, Mora exhibits his penchant for light-hearted humor, piecing together the first shot from a newsreel of a precocious Rooseveltian-looking youngster—bespectacled and wearing a Panama-style hat, as he recites the states of the union in animate and quick succession. Through the boy, FDR, who Mora covers at lengths later in the film, precariously enters the storyline ahead of the Brother Can You Spare a Dime title card. A montage, beginning with shots of charging horses and bison preludes the amusement of a surreal gargantuan stock ticker superimposing over people and the steps of the N.Y.S.E, a scene from the 1930’s Hollywood film The Roaring Twenties. Later, the ticker morphs into an imploding pyramid of securities that fade to a lugubrious dissolve of stock market victims and a showering of confetti. The sequence, which self-mocks Wall Street’s stricken financial industry, parallels the sound of a clanking stock ticker, virulent screams, and an implosion that acts as a metaphor for the Stock Market Crash and the genesis of the Depression. Hollywood’s glamorizes the Depression in the following scene when staccato anti-hero Eddie Bartlett enters a securities office and feigns on saving his bootlegging fortune from the pending decline of stock market prices after a securities broker coerces him into purchasing large sums of stock. Soon, fiction coalesces with “factual” accounts as Mora constructs reality of the Depression, linking “real-life” scenarios: the hands of a butcher changing the price of beef from 18-to-23 cents, an indigent woman and child looking into the window of a poultry shop at chicken she cannot afford and a wealthy women being escorted from her chauffeured car as images juxtapose with the film’s haunting symphonic leitmotif. Here, Mora shines light on these images to show the profound effects of the poor during the Depression. If Mora seems enthusiastic about the arrangements these shots it may be attributed to a previous comment made during an interview with Metro Magazine. He states:

“Any genre has its own rules, and it's fascinating to work in that genre and try to break those rules; to study a genre, and then subvert it to make it more entertaining (Martyn 97).

Mora continues to keep the sentimentality light in areas of ‘Brother,’ offering crosscutting between genres: gangster films, animation, and actual footage from real life events. One such instance shows a comical and less virile Cagney in Lady Killer (1933) taking a browbeating from the director as he portrays an American Indian riding a horse during filming. What follows is an animated caricature of Clark Gable wooing an ingénue before the surreptitious Groucho Marx discloses himself in cross-dress; and immediate after we see the “Once We Lived Like Millionaires” segment exposing the shot of a catastrophic flood in a small town (possibly Pudacah, Kentucky), reminiscent of a scene from Pare Lorentz’ The River.

When sentimentality completely reappears, it is in the form of surreptitious and innocuous “propaganda” fortified by the lyrics “Remember My Forgotten Man,” a song Joan Blondell sings and speaks in Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933). Influenced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s tribute speech, it’s the famous promise made in his first radio address as presidential candidate (Lawson 1). Mora skillfully inserts the somber, yet, powerful sequence as the primal piece of propaganda arsenal for FDR, only, at the expense of Hollywood. It’s followed by a series of inspirational newsreel speeches and a personal account of him holding a barrage of telegrams from supporters. FDR apparently builds abounding party rapport and proliferates patriotism based on the responses from observers in the crowd—he tosses out catch phrases like: “restore America to its own people,” join tireless with me in the work of advancing to a better order economic light,” and the legendary “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” winning public party support ubiquitously seen in archival footage and newsreels endorsements. Mora brings light to the issues concerning Americans with each shot or sequence covering FDR’s campaign and administration speeches. In most every instance, the rhetoric involving FDR’s speeches tie in with the responsibility of being an American or supporting his New Deal idealism (“FDA says: “...more than a political campaign, it is a cold war. Give me your help not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”)

The most obvious piece of FDR propaganda comes in a series of sequences—Al Jolson at the Motion Picture’s Division NRA parade, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Wild Boys on the Road (1933), Stand Up and Cheer (1933). Mora shows the Bugsy Berkeley’s production, a bird’s-eye view of dancers synchronously forming a behemoth version of the America flag, and then rotating it to disclose an image of FDR centering stars and stripes. Cagney makes an appearance at the end of the number, wearing a patriotic sailor suit as he turn and flashes a jovial wink into the camera; in Wild Boys on the Road (1933), a young runaway is honored a reprieve from the judge and offers him a job in fair exchange of “doing his part .” (A section of this passage is shown on the NRA poster with an eagle logo that hangs behind him.) A subsequent sequence from Stand Up and Cheer (1939), show a series of uplifting performances from studio extras (sailors, park rangers, policemen, nurses, and chefs) marching in unison as they celebrate the end of the Depression and the influx of National Renewal Administration created jobs. (NRA bas relief backdrops are seen in the distance.) A young Shirley Temple-Black leads the pack as they sing the title song “We’re out of the Red.” These sequences offer’s an assembly of star power that endorses FDR’s New Deal Policy—the NRA. Based on the previous images set forth—FDR’s strong political agenda for fostering solidarity and patriotism (“flag-waving), the presence of celebrities promoting likeminded ideas and goodwill (“beautiful people”), as well as the manner in which Mora places the shots in close proximity to each other, it is clear that he consciously manipulated the images to build a propaganda campaign celebrating FDR heroism.

Mora devotes 16% (23 minutes) of the footage in ‘Brother’ to political issues, specifically Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his 12 gallant years in the presidency—a stupendous undertaking by one man finding his way through a treasure trove of imagery to paint the “perfect” portrait of an American hero. Moreover, he spends what seems like an infinity gathering and selecting additional footage and images, sound and music, dedicating the remaining 74% of the film to exhibit a retrospect of America—how a nation climbs from the muddy abyss of malaise and poverty due to its insatiable desire to persevere, and Hollywood’s propensity to manufacturer entertainment and laughter to keep Americans steadfast despite the perils of Nazism, Hitler and WWII (Mora reserves these virulent images until the films poignant and climactic ending.)

In conclusion, during my endless hours of viewing and scrutiny of Brother Can You Spare a Dime, Mr. Mora’s far reaching visual sphere and complexity for conveying a story empowers me to seek new ways in the future in which I can provocatively relay messages through film. If there are three things I’ve learned from Mr. Mora, it is to laud good leadership, commemorate adversities, and revere the power of entertainment.