INFORMACIÓN ADICIONAL

Beginning with the Second World War years of the 1940s and extending through the 1950s, “home” stood for the utopian myth of a coherent, homogeneous popular culture. Road films made in these two decades thus project a different set of values for the road than one finds during the Great Depression or, more dramatically, after Easy Rider (1969). Films from this era equate “America” with popular entertainment, the nation’s traveling showbiz culture that brought “home” to the road, as best exemplified by the USO shows during the war.

A comment made by John Hersey while reporting on a military campaign for Life in 1942 is emblematic of the value that “home” had for the wartime imagination of soldiers who were, in effect, forcibly put on the road. “Perhaps this sounds selfish,” Hersey remarks. “It certainly sounds less dynamic than the Axis slogans. But home seems to most marines a pretty good thing to be fighting for. Home is where the good things are – the generosity, the good pay, the comforts, the democracy, the pie” (60). Variations of this exaggerated appreciation of “home” were inserted into many American films made during the war years.1 _{Since You Went Away (1944), for instance, begins by declaring in a title card: “This} is the story of the Unconquerable Fortress: the American Home.” Of course, today that movie cliché is significant for its irony. While “home” may have been where all the good things were, the war itself – fought to preserve “home” in whatever material incarnation a soldier fondly remembered it – actually caused a radical disruption of US society. The extensive relocation of American men and women both domestically and abroad during the 1940s because of the war helped to efface what had previously been strong regional identities and values regarding family life and gender roles. Furthermore, it began the process of broadening the national culture toward that homogeneous image of “America” taken for granted during the 1950s and splintered in the late 1960s.

In the 1940s, the road readily served the movies as a symbolic route for tracing a unified national identity in the face of the regional, racial, ethnic, and class differences that the war made apparent, and, even more pointedly, for showing how popular culture gave the United States its coherence as “America,” everyone’s “home.” For while representing what GIs had left behind, as Hersey points out, “home” also reminded them that, along with all the other hardships and sacrifices of wartime, they were geographically excluded from the nation’s popular culture – excluded, this is to say, from “the hundreds and the thousands of little and big things, tragic, funny, profound, silly, vital, unimportant, American things” that had occurred throughout the duration of the war, “those years from the spring of ’42 to the summer of ’45,” Paul Gallico observed, addressing the returning soldier, “while you were gone.” Writing for a collection of essays summarizing those missing years for veterans, Gallico reviews “things you would have talked about, shuddered or marveled at, laughed about, repeated, or discussed with your friends”: not just the obvious topics like catastrophes, scandals, and murders, but also “new customs, fads and fashions, popular songs, books, plays, movies, radio shows and the people who made them” (28). Other essays in the volume fill in these blanks, focusing separate chapters on newspapers, broadcasting, advertising, publishing, the stage, comic strips, and film to give popular culture parity with the book’s accounts of the nation’s governance and social upheaval during the war years.

The “little and big things” characterizing the Americannness of the home front in the GI’s absence served to project a utopian representation of national unity that effaced the various divisions of US society. As a central element in this patriotic ideology of “home,” popular entertainment was especially meaningful in displacing the war as the nation’s common ground. Movies were imported for exhibition in makeshift cinemas erected at army bases, often months before their theatrical release in the states, and each unit had its own local radio station, transmitting shows like Mail Call, Command Performance, and Jubilee from V-discs – 106 radio programs were recorded on long-playing records and shipped abroad each week – that were explicitly represented as bringing “a touch of home” to American soldiers. The intent of these programs, as Lena Horne told her listeners on Jubilee (an all-African-American program), was to “send you week after week the kind of entertainment that you used to look for back home” (Mugge). In a documentary about entertainment in the war years, Dorothy Lamour remembers that, when soldiers on leave visited the Hollywood Canteen, the stars “made them feel at home.” She says the same about the armed forces radio shows: “it was almost like they were home,” she recalls in one interview (Mugge); “it was like someone from home entertaining them,” she concludes in another (“Bob”).

Army camps could even imitate Hollywood barnyard musicals by putting on a show for themselves. The Special Services Branch supplied so-called “blueprint specials,”

handbooks instructing soldiers how “to reproduce within the military a version of the civilian theatre world” (Bérubé: 69). The most famous – because most professionalized – of such military revues was This is the Army with songs by Irving Berlin. It played four months on Broadway in 1942 before going on the road in the US, Europe, North Africa, the Pacific and, ultimately, Burbank, where Warners turned it into a movie in 1943 (69–70). That the quintessential military road show This is the Army concluded its international tour on a studio backlot was in perfect accord with the movies’ project of defining home through show business. Flag-waving musicals like Paramount’s Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), Warners’ Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943), MGM’s Thousands Cheer (1943), and Universal’s Follow the Boys (1944) offer a thin narrative excuse for putting on what is virtually an all-star revue for a diegetic audience of GIs. As Gerald Mast points out about Follow the Boys, the show within that film, as in other wartime musicals like it, mixes styles of entertainment and integrates its cast of performers (though segregating their appearances) in order “(to assure] us that we are all alike, different but the same, one nation, one people of peoples, divisible but indivisible, in contrast to enemies perceived as racial and racist” (227). Fixing show culture (the revue) and the road (the GIs in the diegetic audience) to home (Hollywood as the locus for authenticating the distinct American idiom of US popular entertainment), these musicals reproduce the ameliorating logic of the USO.

Formed in 1941 after the US had initiated a peace-time draft, the USO was “established to become the G.I.’s ‘Home Away From Home” (“Proud”), whether in local communities or, increasingly throughout the war, in touring shows at the front. As promotional literature from 1944 depicted it, “The story of USO camp shows belongs to the American people, for it was their contribution that made it possible. It is an important part in the life of your sons, your brothers, your husbands, your sweethearts. When they marched off to war it helped them to take with them something of home that wasn’t GI.” More to the point, the USO amounted to “the biggest enterprise American show business has ever tackled. The audience was millions of American fighting men, the theatre’s location: the world, the producer: USO camp shows” (“Our Story”). Through its various activities the USO brought show business to the theaters of war and addressed soldiers as consumers of the popular culture that represented their absence from America and “home,” thereby making Americanness synonymous with show business. Speaking to the Hollywood Victory Committee at the start of the war, George Raft established the comparison right away: “Now it’s going to be up to us to send to the men here and abroad real, living entertainment, the songs, the dances, and the laughs they had back home” (Mugge). One of the first activities of the committee in its support of the USO was the formation of the Victory Caravan in 1942, fifty major Hollywood stars in a cross-country railroad tour selling war bonds.

Most of all, though, it was the touring acts that, in taking home on the road, equated the nation with showbiz. USO camp shows were “designed in their export to remind soldiers of home” (Tynes), nurturing in troops a sense of patriotic identification with America through popular entertainment. As Look magazine put it at the time: “For the little time the show lasts, the men are taken straight to the familiar Main Street that is the goal of every fighting American far away from home” (Movie Lot: 82). Reflecting on the war, Maxene Andrews remembers about the tours and radio broadcasts: “The entertainers brought home to the boys. Their home” (Mugge). In their appreciative letters to entertainers, GIs apparently felt the same way. “It really brought to us, home,” one solider wrote of Bob Hope’s show, “right there in the middle of a damn big ocean.” Another wrote after watching Hope’s show in Algiers: “for a few seconds, I was back home” (“Letters”). In 1944 Hope published (with Carroll Carroll’s assistance) an account of his European tour and entitled it I Never Left Home, explaining: “everywhere I went, I met people from places I knew or had played vaudeville or had lived. And I kept running into people I knew who were now in uniform. So it was like I never left home” (Marx: 189).

Like the war, road movies, of course, are all about men and women leaving home – but then so is show business, particularly as represented by the many backstage musicals that celebrate the formation of a community of performers while on the road, stress the importance of self-sacrifice for the good of the show, and follow the route to success and fame in Hollywood or on Broadway. Musicals have discernible road elements – so that, as Corey Creekmur argues elsewhere in this book, they can usefully be understood as inversions of the outlaw-couple road movie – but not many actually make the road itself central to their narratives. Rather, they invoke the road in a montage of showbiz labor (as in backstage musicals) or as a means of transportation to another setting (as when Jane Powell travels to Brazil in Luxury Liner, 1948, and Nancy Goes to Rio, 1950). Calling attention to the way that road films of the 1940s and 1950s invariably travel across the US either to or from Hollywood, this essay examines how the road and show business interact differently in films produced during these two decades to represent America as a utopian space in which the nation’s citizens – comprising what Bennet Schaber terms, in another of this volume’s essays, “the people” – feel “at home” on the road by discovering, through their travels, the popular culture they all share. Simply put, whereas the 1940s road film associates the road with the production of popular entertainment to ensure its utopian ethos, the 1950s road film achieves the same end by associating the road and entertainment with consumption. The deployment of show business as a trope of national unity in this era’s road movies thus traces an important shift in cultural value for “home” and “showbiz” as well as for the road itself.