Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher--Television

by Foster Hirsch

Overview

A fascinating look at Hollywood’s most turbulent decade and the demise of the studio system—set against the boom of the post–World War II years, the Cold War, and the atomic age—and the movies that reflected the seismic shifts

“The definitive book on 1950s Hollywood.” —Booklist

“Lavish. . . insightful, rich, expansive, penetrating.” —Kirkus


Hollywood in the 1950s was a period when the film industry both set conventions and broke norms and traditions—from Cinerama, CinemaScope, and VistaVision to the epic film and lavish musical. It was a decade that saw the rise of the anti-hero; the smoldering, the hidden, and the unspoken; teenagers gone wild in the streets; the sacred and the profane; the revolution of the Method; the socially conscious; the implosion of the studios; the end of the production code; and the invasion of the ultimate body snatcher: the “small screen” television.

Here is Eisenhower’s America—seemingly complacent, conformity-ridden revealed in Vincente Minnelli’s Father of the Bride, Walt Disney’s Cinderella, and Brigadoon, among others.

And here is its darkening, resonant landscape, beset by conflict, discontent, and anxiety (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Asphalt Jungle, A Place in the Sun, Touch of Evil, It Came From Outer Space) . . . an America on the verge of cultural, political and sexual revolt, busting up and breaking out (East of Eden, From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, Sweet Smell of Success, The Wild One, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Jailhouse Rock).

An important, riveting look at our nation at its peak as a world power and at the political, cultural, sexual upheavals it endured, reflected and explored in the quintessential American art form.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307958921
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/10/2023
Pages:	672
Sales rank:	61,818
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

FOSTER HIRSCH is a professor of film at Brooklyn College and the author of sixteen books on film and theater, including Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir, and A Method to Their Madness: The History of the Actors Studio. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

08/14/2023

Hirsch (Otto Preminger), a film professor at Brooklyn College, presents a thorough account of a transformative era in Hollywood history. The 1950s, Hirsch contends, marked “the beginning of the end of the studio era,” as the introduction of television bit into ticket sales and a 1948 antitrust case forced the major studios to sell their theater chains and reconfigure their business models. Hollywood developed new technologies to draw audiences back to movie theaters, including 3D and Cinerama, a format that used three projectors and a curved screen that stretched “as wide and as high as the limits of human vision.” Hirsch also notes that studios, which had previously made films for broad and multigenerational audiences, began targeting specific segments of moviegoers in the 1950s, leading to a surge in fare aimed at teenagers, such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Hirsch’s panoramic scope includes the scourge of the blacklist, the decline of film noir and movie musicals, and the rise of such new superstars as Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, managing the difficult feat of being exhaustive without becoming exhausting. Cinephiles will want to dig into this. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Sweeping, winningly eccentric . . . a study that manages to be both personal and comprehensive. A lot more fun than Netflix and chill, especially as related by Hirsch’s photographic memory . . . a big, ambitious film history book, broad, sweeping and somehow still intimate survey.” —Chris Vognar, LA Times

“Entertaining . . . A celebration.” —Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal
 
 
". . . Teeming . . . fascinating detail . . . in which moviegoing is treated as an experience, of which the movie itself is only a part . . . . Hirsch praises many good and often overlooked films . . . and explores idiosyncratic genres, such as ancient-world epics and low-budget sci-fi. When Hirsch is passionate about a movie, such as Douglas Sirk’s “Imitation of Life,” his fervor is matched by eloquence and an eye for detail . . . He discusses the wider culture of the time, finding in fifties America “the seeds of the counterculture revolution that erupted in the late 1960s,” with movies as a vital part of that trend . . . a wide-ranging critical history that can uncontroversially celebrate the best of these movies as key works of modern art." —Richard Brody, The New Yorker

 
“Hirsch reassesses many stereotypes about filmmaking in the 1950s, arguably the United States’ peak of social and political influence. Knowledgeable, astute, and sometimes provocative . . . remarkable.”—Frederick J. Augustyn, Jr., Library Journal
 
“A thorough account of a transformative era in Hollywood history . . . a panoramic scope . . . managing the difficult feat of being exhaustive without becoming exhausting. Cinephiles will want to dig into this.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

★ 09/29/2023

Prolific cinema scholar Hirsch (film, Brooklyn Coll.; A Method to Their Madness) reassesses many stereotypes about filmmaking in the 1950s, arguably the United States' peak of social and political influence. Technological innovations such as CinemaScope and VistaVision gained traction to challenge television, Hollywood's at-home rival. Hollywood diversified and continued to produce popular fare that tested introspective antihero vehicles. It also financed films such as Storm Warning, in which Ronald Reagan and Ginger Rogers battled the Ku Klux Klan, and Storm Center, with librarian Bette Davis fighting book banners. The book notes the aftermath of legal cases such as Olivia de Havilland's 1944 lawsuit to limit studio contracts, which cleared the way for greater experimentation by free agent actors, and the 1948 Hollywood antitrust case, which forced studios to sell off their own theaters and start selling films on an individual basis. Hirsch shares his opinions, including that Marlon Brando was Hollywood's greatest actor, and that Lillian Gish and Robert Mitchum gave their greatest performances in The Night of the Hunter. He proves to be knowledgeable, astute, and sometimes provocative in his assessments. VERDICT A remarkable analysis. Recommended for knowledgeable film lovers and for those seeking suggestions of mid-century film titles.—Frederick J. Augustyn Jr.

Library Journal

2023-07-13
A personal, wide-screen approach to the best and worst of times for movies.

Threatened by TV and the beginning of the end of the studio system, the 1950s was the “most turbulent decade in the history of the American filmmaking industry”—at least until 2020, writes film scholar Hirsch, author of Otto Preminger and A Method to Their Madness, among other books. In this dauntingly lavish book, which will impress film buffs but perhaps overwhelm general readers, the author neatly plumbs a wide range of topics. He profiles the ups and downs of some of the major studios, from the powerful Louis B. Mayer’s MGM (called an “industrial compound” by Elia Kazan) to Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin’s United Artists, which “nurtured” Stanley Kubrick. Hirsch deftly discusses many of the studios’ films and the actors and directors who worked for them. Hollywood hoped its new “intoxicating visual and aural pleasures” would encourage viewership: Cinerama, touted by the “intrepid world traveler” Lowell Thomas, 3-D, CinemaScope, VistaVision, and Todd-AO. Hirsch is a “cheerleader” for all of them. “In the race for survival,” he writes, “new content was as necessary as new formats,” and he surveys the studio’s high and low offerings, from fancy upmarket “art” fare to the explosion of exploitation fare (“even the detritus of the 1950s is of greater interest than the ephemera of other periods”) to “thoughtful, well-meaning, and non-exploitative” race films (Black, Asian, American Indian, etc.) and those dealing with antisemitism and homosexuality. Hirsch shows how the films from this era were multifaceted and engaged with the political and social issues of the time. He zeroes in on the careers of famous actors as they navigated the changing scene, from the older ones to the up-and-coming “Method-trained” ones. The author concludes with an insightful overview of the strong noir films of the decade, science-fiction films that featured Cold War political allegories, animated films, documentaries, and the fading musicals, epics, and overwrought melodramas.

A rich, expansive, and penetrating work of film and social history.

Kirkus Reviews