ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a critical tension characterizes entertainment cinema’s relationship to middle-class culture during the studio era. One of the greatest difficulties with assessing the role of the middlebrow in Hollywood is the term itself. To proclaim a film ‘middlebrow’ is to invoke a position of class superiority, and critiques of the term focus on its pejorative baggage. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn therefore shows how both the spectator’s and the critic’s superior cultural taste and knowledge constitute the middlebrow. As a potential compromise between ‘middlebrow’ and ‘middle-class’, Pierre Bourdieu offers a third term, moyen, which is translated as middlebrow. The increasing availability today of older films has made more apparent the limitations of canonical historiography. The fact that 1940s Hollywood films so often provided their own discourse on class and taste formation means that a conceptualization of them as naive instances of status panic is inadequate.
