Children on the Silver Screen

Steven Mintz

For more than a century, Hollywood has been our society's most important educator.  The movies shaped our ideas of beauty, glamour, femininity, masculinity, and America's role in the world, and were instrumental in defining and disseminating ethnic and racial stereotypes. The movies also shaped our images of childhood.

There have been heart-warming infants, wide-eyed waifs hungering for a home, curly-haired cherubs, and savvy street urchins. Among girls, we have had an assortment of Pollyannas, princesses, tomboys, bobby-soxers, and prepubescent Lolitas and prostitutes, not to mention an endless stream of Cinderellas.  Among boys, we've had mischievous scamps, rambunctious ragamuffins, little rascals, angry and alienated adolescents, and, more recently, a parade of pranksters, burnouts, stoners, and homeboys.

The movies are not merely a form of popular entertainment. Like a seismograph, the movies record shifts in the public mood. The screen offers an indelible record of the public's shifting anxieties, aspirations, fears, and fantasies. The movies both reflect and promote cultural change.

The subject of children and film can be approached from multiple directions.  We can look at the shifting representation of children in film or at child stars or at the business of children's films. We can concentrate on films that foreground children, many of which are aimed at adults, or we can look at the films that children of various ages actually watch, including cartoons and the handful of films, like "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), that have become part of the shared imagination of generations of children. An important but understudied topic involves the ways that children absorb and respond to movies and how they use movie characters, themes, and plot elements in their play.  In this brief overview, I will look primarily at how the movies depicted children over the past century and how these changes reflect broader social and cultural shifts.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Victorian image of the child as a little angel gave way to a new ideal. The new standard, as Gary Cross has suggested, was spunky, sassy, naughty, willful, and cute.  The movies drew this image from the earliest comics.  First came the Yellow Kid, the first American comic strip character and the prototype for Dennis the Menace, Bart Simpson, and other gap toothed rascals and troublemakers. Then came Buster Brown, the little rich kid with a blond pageboy haircut who was always getting into mischief, but a milder brand than the Yellow Kid.

Today, many movie kids act like adults.  When the movies' first century began, the most influential screen kid was played by an adult. Mary Pickford embodied the new ideal of childhood.  She was naughty and coquettish, but also innocent and sweet. Mary Pickford grew older in real life but played ever younger children on the screen.

The first true child stars did not appear until the 1920s. The first was six-year-old Jackie Coogan, now best remembered as Uncle Fester in "The Munsters," who appeared in "The Kid" (1921) with Charlie Chaplin. There was also Baby Peggy Montgomery, the precursor for Shirley Temple.  Few recognize her name today, but she made banner headlines when she signed a three picture $3.5 million contract.  Her life served as the basis for "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962).

Beginning with the birth of the nickelodeon, adults worried about the movies' impact on children. Some Progressive era reformers praised movies as a benign alternative to dance halls and city streets and thought they could serve a valuable educational function. Others, however, viewed nickelodeons and movie theaters as breeding grounds of delinquency and sexual promiscuity. Settlement House founder Jane Addams called the nickelodeon "a house of dreams," and described how, after seeing a western, a nine-year-old and a thirteen-year-old boy bought a lariat and a gun, and ambushed a milkman, nearly killing him. In 1907, the Chicago Tribune threw its editorial weight against the movies, declaring that they were "without a redeeming feature to warrant their existence...ministering to the lowest passions of childhood." That year, Chicago established the nation's first censorship board, to protect its youthful population "against the evil influence of obscene and immoral representations."

It was not, however, until the late 1920s, that social scientists conducted the first serious studies of movies' effects on children. With support from the Payne Fund, a private foundation that financed research on children, nineteen psychologists and sociologists from seven universities investigated film's impact on children's conduct, attitudes, and emotions. The researchers wanted to know the extent to which the movies' unique featuresÑthe darkness of the theater and the intense emotionality and hypnotic quality of the imagesÑhad on children's sleep patterns, their school work, moral standards, delinquency, and ideas about race and world affairs.  The project's funders had their own agenda: to demonstrate that the movies "constituted a serious menace to public and private morals." The studies were sober, if methodologically flawed, attempts to understand the movies' impact. The researchers found that children attended movies more frequently than adults and that even very young children attended movies unchaperoned. They also discovered, on the basis of a content analysis of 1,500 films, that virtually no movies were produced exclusively for children, identifying just one such film in 1930. The investigators found that children had an impressive ability to recall information from the movies; that movie-going influenced children's attitudes toward race, ethnicity, and crime; that films featuring violence or horror interfered with children's sleep; and that frequent movie-goers performed worse in school than their classmates. A summary volume, entitled Our Movie-Made Children, provided a misleading, but popular, digest of the studies' findings. The volume, which went through seven printings between 1933 and 1935, asserted that the movies fueled cravings for an easy life and wild parties, and contributed significantly to juvenile delinquency.  The movies, according to the Payne Studies, helped explain the far-reaching transformations taking place in young peoples' lives. Like later moralists, their focus was on the mass media rather than on the broader institutional changesÑsuch as the expansion of an age-segregated realm of youth, cut off from the world of adulthoodÑthat were at the heart of the emergence of a modern youth culture.

The Great Depression brought many new images of childhood. The Depression sparked fears of a lost generation of children, like the street smart Dead End Kids, who might fall into crime and be susceptible to demagogues.  But there were also efforts to sentimentalize boyhood, like the Little Rascals, the urban offspring of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, also idealized versions of girlhood, notably the March sisters in "Little Women" (1933).

It was during the Depression that Walt Disney became synonymous with children's movies and that his films developed their trademark traits. The Disney studio self-consciously reworked fairy tales, myths, and classic children's stories, erasing elements that it considered inappropriate for kids and making the stories more didactic and moralistic. Thus, for Pinocchio (1940) to become a real boy, he must prove himself "brave, truthful, and unselfish."  "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937) emphasized proper gender behavior. Foreshadowing later Disney films, the heroine finds fulfillment in housework and makes marriage her life's ultimate goal.

The most popular child star of the 1930s was Shirley Temple, who topped the box office every year from 1935 to 1938. She was America's little darling, tap-dancing and singing through the Depression in fifty shorts and features by the time she was eighteen. Part of her attraction was her cuteness, charm, dimpled cheeks, and bouncing curls. She was adults' ideal girlÑathletic, flirtatious, independent, even-tempered, and infectiously optimistic. She was undeniably talented: she could sing, dance, act, and melt the heart of the grouchiest sourpuss. Escapist fantasy, too, was part of her appeal. Lacking a mother in almost all of her movies, she was free from domestic constraints. But her appeal went beyond escapism. In many films, she served as a "spiritual healer" who resolved family disputes, bridged class differences, and restored adults' confidence in themselves. Oblivious to class and racial differences, she moved easily between poor and wealthy homes without ever being greedy or envious.

At the end of the decade, a new cinematic stereotype appeared, supplanting even Shirley Temple in popularity.  This was the all-American teen, personified by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in the Andy Hardy movies, which focused on middle-class teenagers' crushes, infatuations, and humorous and embarrassing mishaps. Such "Kleen Teens" as Deanna Durbin, Roddy McDowell, Dickie Moore, Lana Turner and Jane Withers provided the caricature that the troubled, misunderstood, and alienated teen characters of 1950s films rebelled against.

During World War II, a highly sentimental view of childhood appeared on the screen, one which bore little resemblance to children's actual wartime experiences.  A deeply romanticized view of childhood was apparent in movies like "National Velvet" (1944) and "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" (1945), and, shortly after the war, in "Miracle on 34th Street" (1947).

The 1950s marked the beginning of the end of innocence. Before World War II, the mystery and otherness of childhood had been rarely depicted by the movies. It would not be until the 1950s that we would see depraved children, anticipated in "Mildred Pierce" in 1945, then realized in "The Bad Seed" (1956) and such later films as "Children of the Damned" (1964) and "The Exorcist" (1973), and not until the 1970s that we would see children depicted as precocious, miniature adults, as in "Harold and Maude" (1971), or as emotional footballs, in "Kramer v. Kramer" (1979), or the death of childhood innocence in Louis Malle's "Pretty Baby" (1978). Few American films before the 1960s explored children's psychological life or tried to see the world through children's eyes; but many, like the Our Gang comedies and Walt Disney cartoons, tried to depict the world of a child's imagination.

During the 1950s, amused condescension gave way to concern and bewilderment. No longer were portraits of children exclusively images of wholesome naughtiness, mooning boys, and puppy love. Kids increasingly became a vehicle for exploring the confusions of modern society. The cute child was replaced by the evil child, like Rhoda Penmark, the eight-year-old pig-tailed murderer in "The Bad Seed" (1956). The movies also brought to the screen rebellious and alienated adolescents, as well as the world of leather-clad juvenile delinquents, switch blades, and drag racing

During the 1960s, there were attempts to recapture an image of childhood innocence, evident in such movies as "Mary Poppins" (1964), "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" (1968), "The Sound of Music" (1965), "40 Pounds of Trouble" (1962), and "Oliver!" (1968). But there were also more psychologically nuanced portraits of childhood. "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962) viewed racism through the eyes of a child. "The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds" (1972) portrayed the psychological and emotional abuse of a child.

During the 1950s and 1960s, specific genres of movies were, for the first time, marketed directly to the young, including science fiction films, motorcycle and juvenile delinquent movies, and beach blanket and surfer films.  After 1970, the targeting of children and adolescents became much more intensive and self-conscious.  One recurrent formula involved a teenage outcast mocked by her popular, style-setting classmates, who has a makeover and ends up going to the high-school prom with the handsomest boy in the football squad. Yet we have also had deeply disturbing images of youthful depravity.  The movies portrayed kids as demons in such films as "Carrie" (1976) and "The Exorcist" (1973), as prostitutes in "Pretty Baby" (1978) and "Taxi Driver" (1976), and as incipient murders in "Basketball Diaries" (1995).  Portraits of indifferent, uninvolved, unobservant, and uncomprehending teachers and clueless, disconnected, self-deceived, and self-absorbed parents became much more common. The impact of family breakdown and disconnection was a particularly popular theme, apparent in movies as diverse as "WarGames" (1983), "ET: The Extra Terrestrial" (1982), and the "Home Alone" films. 

A number of the most memorable recent American films dealing with childhood paint particularly unsettling portraits of the psyche and culture of the young.  There was "River's Edge" (1986), based on the true story, which looks at how a group of working-class northern California teens responds after one of the boys murders his girlfriend. It paints a picture of emotionally numbed kids disconnected from the adults around them. There was "Thirteen" (2003), which shows an adolescent world of body piercing, self-mutilation, tattoos, sexually provocative clothing, underage sex, and casual drug use.  And there was the Columbine-inspired "Elephant" (2003), which portrays high schools as a brutal Darwinian world of cliques and taunting and tormenting culminating in violence.

Today, children's entertainment is a cornerstone of the American movie industry. Movies catering to the young are Hollywood's most profitable sector. Popular children's films range from cheery animated musicals to shadowy fantasies making extensive use of intense, cutting-edge computer graphics.  If one wishes to move beyond gender stereotyped Disneyfied films or sanitized versions of Roald Dahl's subversive novels or John Hughes' portraits of growing up suburban or big budget magical fantasies like the Harry Potter movies, one must turn to foreign films.  Films like "Innocent Voices" (2004), a wrenching documentary-like exploration of the effects of El Salvador's civil war on an 11-year-old, show broader historical events through the eyes of a child.  Like such earlier foreign films as "Pixote" (1981), "Sugar Cane Alley" (1983), "Fanny and Alexander" (1982), "The Wild Child" (1970), "Small Change" (1976), and "Pather Panchali" (1955), "Innocent Voices" addresses themes crucial for the history of childhoodÑsuch as the gendered experience of childhood and coming of age-- in an insightful and nuanced way alien to contemporary Hollywood film.