The years 1934-37, during which Dos Passos undertook three film projects, were critical in Dos Passos’s literary career and political thought. He believed that capitalism was another of the monolithic forces of the machine age, like the military, that could eradicate individual self-determination. But he saw increasing danger in Stalin’s repressive regime and what he considered American Communists’ subordination of workers’ interests to Party ideology. His nascent political ambivalence emerges in the first two volumes of U.S.A., The 42nd Parallel (1930) and 1919 (1932). By 1934, when he accepted a short-term contract as screenwriter for Paramount, he was engaged in work on the third volume, The Big Money (1936), and his experiences while working on a film vehicle for Marlene Dietrich, The Devil Is a Woman (1935, dir. Josef von Sternberg), solidified his conviction of the complicity between the Hollywood “dreamfactory” and capitalism to stoke American consumer culture. While the manuscript of the Paramount film shows signs of Dos Passos’s aesthetics, it is The Big Money’s film-inflected narrative representation of the corruption of the industry that articulates the impact of both the formal and the cultural dynamics of film on his work.
Status of Consumer Organization under the Framework Act of Consumers - The investigation of status quo and agenda through study on the history of Consumer organization -
