The good news here is that Biskind (chief editor, American Film)
sees the films of the 1950s as reflecting "an era of conflict and
contradiction" - in contrast to the more monolithic view ("an era
of political and cultural uniformity. . . a nightmare of
repression") on display in such studies as Nora Sayre's Running
Time (1982). The not-so-good news is that Biskind's film-analyses,
emphasizing "the decade's warring ideologies," are often
unconvincing and only occasionally illuminating - since they rely
on arbitrary, jargon-y pigeonholing, lean toward exaggeration, and
take such a narrowly political approach. In each of several areas
(war movies, westerns, sci-fi, gangster/delinquency films,
battles-of-the-sexes), Biskind finds that 1950s films are
right-wing, left-wing, or "centrist"/"pluralist" - which can take
both "corporate liberal" and "conservative" forms. Thus, the
corporate-liberal 12 Angry Men "is more interested in consensus
than in justice," while the left-wing High Noon denounces
consensus. And, in some of the genres, this comparative-ideology
approach - touching on attitudes toward conformity, individualism,
elitism, populism, etc., with reference to 1950s sociologists -
works well enough on its own terms. Frequently, however, the
elaborate labeling - which also includes such buzz-phrases as
"therapeutic imperialism" - becomes strained and murky: in sci-fi,
for instance, "conservative films fell in line behind their
corporate-liberal allies for the final fade-out. In The Thing, this
means that although the blood-sucking carrot from another world was
a head-over-heart veggie robot Red monster from the superego one
minute, it is an extremist heart-over-mind monster from the id the
next." Throughout, with a few inevitable exceptions, there's
virtually no reference to esthetic, commercial, or personal
elements in the filmmaking. (Like Sayre, Biskind sees On the
Waterfront as "a weapon of the witch hunt" - with allusions to Elia
Kazan's HUAC past.) And Biskind merely posits, never explores, the
influential impact of all these films ("They told us what was right
and what was wrong"), sometimes giving the impression of a purely
academic exercise. Still, if pedantic and itself implicitly
ideological, this selective survey offers a welcome antidote to
simplistic generalizations - especially in Biskind's complex view
of sex-roles (Giant, All That Heaven Allows) and in the groundwork
he provides for the polarization to come in the Sixties. And,
though the text tosses cliches and cutesy sarcasm in with the
dialectical jargon, it's lively enough to reward browsing by film
buffs as well as students of cultural politics. (Kirkus Reviews)
A look at the Hollywood movies of the 1950s and the thousand subtle ways they reflect the political tensions of the decade. It covers films like
Giant,
Rebel Without a Cause and
Invasion of the Body Snatchers to show how politically innocent movies in fact do bear an ideological burden. As we see organisation men and rugged individualists, housewives and career women, cops and doctors, teen angels and teenage werewolves fight it out across the screen, from suburbia to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, we understand that we have been watching one long dispute about how to be a man, a woman, and an American.
Click here to read the Introduction.
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