Why is blowing things up a sign of suck? I was watching some pre-code films a couple of months ago, Frisco Jenny among others. Among other things I'm glad improved technology has wrought are much better scenes of things blowing up. And watching people get shot has improved substantially.
I can't recall if I posted about this, but if you have a chance, there was a great article on pre-code and the rise of formulaic plots in this article at NYRB, When Hollywood Dared, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=22790
I also saw Bogart's Black Legion recently which was interesting in so far as the film portrays manual laborers at a factory as anti-intellectual. Initially, they are not suspicious of immigrants because of their immigrant status but because of their bookishness and studiousness. Such individuals were seen as kissing up to the boss, trying to get over on others by subverting the older foreman based labor system. In that system, the American dream was that you worked at your job, exhibited superior technical competence at it through dedication and hard work. The reward would be to move into a supervisory position.
When the young and inexperienced Polish immigrant gets the job instead of Bogart's character, Frank, the film explores how this resentment is exploited by the Black Legion to recruit people to its white supremacist ideals. The film, interestingly, also brings up the fact that it wasn't just the immigrants bookishness that got him the job. Rather, it was because his bookishness enabled him to invent a device that saved the company money.
The resentment is both about anti-intellectualism and about a company rewarding money saving over loyalty and dedication - something the workers believe used to happen in the older foreman based workplace, that was being overtaken by a new ethos that placed profits over people.
Interestingly, white supremacy is about defining a white race against its other: Polish, Italian, and Irish immigrants. When Frank is taking an oath of allegiance to the Black Legion, he is shown kneeling, reading the oath with a gun to his head. He reads the lengthy oath and stumbles through difficult words, obviously uncertain as to what some of them meant.
The Black Legion was based on events that happened in the auto industry in the u.s., although the film takes pains to claim that no such connections should be made and that it was, supposedly, entirely fictitious. In the film, the mainstay of the Black Legion are small business owners threatened by competitors with "unpronounceable last names" who engaged in cut-rate business practices. A customer is shown asking about the price of an item. When the owner says it will cost $5, the customer says that they can go to The Cut Rate and get it for a fraction of the price. The store owner is outraged that the immigrant business owner doesn't follow established rules -- in this case, not offering goods at steeply reduced rates. (I was reminded of Capra's big bad bank vs small good savings and loan schtick.)
So, the film suggests that it is the petty-bourgeois with the means and wherewithal to provide meetings rooms and organizational resources. That they, in turn, recruited from factory workers to populate their ranks and that there was something slightly pyramid scheme about it in so far as the members much pay dues, purchase $50 handguns at the low, low price of $14.95. This isn't presented as if the Black Legion was subsidizing the rest of the cost. Rather, it is presented as a kind of huckster pyramid scheme: as if the gun is described as being valued at the MSRP of $50 but you can have it young man for a mere $14.95! When Frank balks explaining that he can pay $6 in dues but that he can't afford the $14.95 for the gun (which is cover for the fact that, initially, he doesn't want to carry a gun), he's threatened and told that he has no choice. Not making the purchase would be counted as a sign of disloyalty. As Frank learned during the oath, any sign of disloyalty would be punished by death.
(Which is interesting, of course, since that is something that we are rarely told about the KKK. It was not just fueled by white supremacist resentment.)
As a post-code film, however, it falls into the same formulaic pattern that is described by O'brien in the NYRB article.