ABSTRACT
Europe has built a larger and more spacious wing of its imaginative literature on the foundations of class conflict than has America. This makes sense, as Europeans have tended to be more tortured and therefore more fascinated by class than have Americans. From a sociological perspective, movies are particularly instructive in the ways that they portray class, because, as Marx long ago noted, perceptions of class are just as important as the material conditions that make those perceptions possible. In the 1940s and 1950s, movie moguls such as Louis Mayer, Adolph Zukor, and the Warner brothers wooed moviegoers with an idealized and glamorous image of American society, making many films that portrayed the wealthy in a favorable light. Considering the multiplicity of characters in American movies, it is reasonable to suppose that it would be difficult to develop meaningful categories for coding them by social and economic status.
