Heroes and happy endings by Christine Grandy

Author:Christine Grandy [Grandy, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Entertainment, Film, History & Criticism, Performing Arts, History
ISBN: 9781526111203
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2016-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

While World War II would change the face of the popular villain in the twentieth century, villainy had a much more dynamic and contemporary life throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In popular film and fiction audiences responded to the villains they had known and villains they thought they knew in the faces of politicians, businessmen, and respected figures. The sheer array of villains and the banal and ordinary unknowability of villains in government and business fostered a climate of paranoia in popular novels and on the screen. This, if anything, spoke to the widespread diffusion of cynicism about profiteering following World War I and a reworking of the 1919 Profiteering Act into the Goods and Services (Price Control) Act when war broke out. Under this new Act, local committees again reported to a central committee but were encouraged and empowered to fix prices on goods and food. The Act was passed through Parliament relatively easily, ushering in large-scale rationing. The Times trumpeted its passage with the subheading ‘New powers against profiteering’.121 Tensions related to profiteering were obviously easily evoked at the outset of a new world war, indicating the extent to which it remained an issue throughout the 1920s and 1930s. When the 1919 Profiteering Act deployed the language of villainy, it likely did not anticipate the role it would play within politics or mass culture. Yet mass culture preached, through the figure of the knowable and unknowable villain, constant vigilance against wealthy businessmen and the politicians who failed to keep them at bay. Villainy, after all, could lurk in the most comforting of faces.

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