Making an American Citizen

The story is strongly told. The title amply explains the picture, how a foreigner, accustomed to treating his wife as a beast of burden and of beating her as he would a beast, has the American spirit whipped into him. He began on his wife at the Battery, and was shown his mistake. In the tenement a neighbor gave the husband further lessons when the wife was abused; in the country, where the couple take up their home, a farmer uses a horse-whip. That being insufficient, six months on the stone-pile are given the newcomer. As the embryo citizen emerges from the correctional institution the reformation is about complete. He is shown under improved circumstances and now he is considerate of his wife. Lee Beggs plays the immigrant and Blanche Cornwall the wife. The two make a strong team. Their work is impressive and forceful. - The Moving Picture World, November 9, 1912

The version of the film I saw only ran for ten minutes and didn't have any intertitles, but then it didn't need to because the story is so simple to follow. I don't really think I missed out on much, losing those six minutes, because the film is essentially the same incident - burly Russian peasant Ivan, newly arrived on America's shores, beating his poor wife - who we first meet hitched up to Ivan's cart next to the donkey - only to find himself set straight by outraged US citizens repeated three times. Ivan finally learns his lesson after six months hard labour and emerges from prison a transformed man, loving and appreciative of his wife.

This isn't a very funny film and, if it weren't for the fact that the accompanying soundtrack was of a humorous (but anachronistic) country and western style, the film could just as easily be viewed as a melodrama. It somehow seems all the more surprising, given its crude stereotyping, that the film was made by Solax, the company owned by French immigrant Alice Guy and her British husband Blache.

Although there was probably something of a good intention behind the story, this movie is far too heavy-handed to make its point effectively, and is too insensitive to its characters to make it enjoyable to watch. It attempts to show us how a rather brutish immigrant must adjust himself to some of the principles of life in America, but the characters are stereotyped, the story sometimes lacks plausibility, and it really doesn't present anything or anyone in a positive light. A few of the technical aspects may have been done well for the time, but the story itself just has too many noticeable defects for the movie to be worthwhile.

Alice Guy-Blaché's Solax one-reeler, "Making an American Citizen" reminds me of the more-recent Borat movies, particularly the sequel, "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm" (2020), in that the stereotypical Eastern (Borat from Kazakhstan and the Ivan here presumably from Russia or a likewise once-Soviet state) male chauvinist learns the supposed American way of not abusing women so much. Both were meant to be at least somewhat comedic. This old silent film hardly seems amusing to these modern eyes, but then neither does Borat. The major difference with "Borat," I suppose, is that Sacha Baron Cohen meant to include criticism of American politics (particularly the then-current presidential administrations) along with his mocking of racial others, whereas Guy's film is a full-bodied embrace of the largely-supported policy in the United States at the time of the melting-pot assimilation of immigrants for a homogeneous society.

"Making an American Citizen" is more interesting, though, given that American nickelodeon audiences of the day are reputed to have been largely comprised of recent immigrants, and, indeed, Guy herself had not long ago emigrated from France. Rather than seeing a reflection on screen of themselves or their cultures, such as even a contemporary melodrama, to cite another film I've recently seen, "The Colleen Bawn" (1911), might've done for Irish-Americans, it seems to me that Guy's film would've more likely worked on the level of an Americanized, whether more-recent or long-since immigrated, and Western joke at the expense of the ethnic, yet-to-be-assimilated other. Quite debasing humor in that sense. At every step of the way on Ivan's experiences in the nation of immigrants, his abuse of his wife is counter-forced by an American man violently correcting him in the way of Americanisms, until--even in 1912--three strikes get him a stink on a chain gang.

As Alison McMahan points out (in her book "Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema"), the film's defense of abused women also mostly addresses the male spectator, with brief moments of the wife retaliating offering temporary exceptions. Otherwise, "Making an American Citizen" isn't one of Guy's better-made pictures. The acting here is especially broad and includes some awkward frontal stagings for the camera, which only moves--and hardly ever cuts to another shot within scenes--when the characters clumsily wander out of frame. It's interesting, however, for the subject matter and the historical audience it was intended to address.

This is an early attempt at a Marxist feminist propaganda film. Like most feminist claims the scenario is not credible to the point of the ridiculous. "The Man" is seen in the opening using his wife, the oppressed woman as an actual pack animal to draw his cart. In various other scenes he beats her and uses her as a slave to do all the hard work while he takes it easy.

But in America (the land of opportunity for feminists), the tables are turned on him. His wife (like women throughout our history) doesn't have to use force or violence herself to attain her goal (domination of the man). She enlists the aid of other men to do violence on him and force him in the end to submit to her will and to comply and be the obedient one - "the model husband".

The attempt is to paint feminism as a liberating force for "oppressed" women. However, the ultimate message is that women don't have to commit acts of violence themselves. They will always have dutiful men to do their dirty work for them. In addition, whether they are acting on her behalf or acting against her, all men are depicted as violent by the feminists. A bigoted view of men no matter how one looks at it.