"This Side of Despair investigates the ways the most severe economic catastrophe in American history impacted America's mass art form, the movies. Drawing from the methods of historicist inquiry that have developed over the past two decades, and especially the New Historicism, this book looks closely at not just the film industry as a business enterprise, which has become the current vogue, but at the product of the art form itself: what appears on the screen. In ways that have not previously been ventured, this book explores the intimate relationship between film and the economic and political texts that unfolded throughout the Depression. What results is a statement on the connections between economics and art, and more specifically, between near economic calamity and a burgeoning new art form."--Jacket.