Triumph Over Containment: American Film in the 1950s

The 1950s never quite recede from memory. A time for nostalgia and a reminder of the terrors of political repression, the time of McCarthy and anti-Communist witch hunts, but also of the Beats, the abstract expressionists, and Rock ‘n’ Roll, the postwar decade keeps being present, and nowhere more than in its films. Gangster films, noirs, Westerns, science fiction, and melodramas spoke not only to the decade in which they were made, but to us now about the decade whose turmoil they chronicled. Triumph Over Containment offers a close look at the imaginative work of filmmakers and the films that broke through the oppressive climate of Hollywood and the blacklist in the 1950s. Author Robert P. Kolker covers the films of the 1950s with a focus on major and minor filmmakers read against a politics of containment and fear. Films such as No Way Out at the beginning of the decade, The Searchers in the middle, and Imitation of Life at the end addressed issues of race, sometimes in radical terms. Films like Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo examined the male angst and gender insecurity that ran like a disruptive current throughout the 1950s. Men suffered, women were objectified or demonstrated maternal strength. Religiosity bloomed in overblown biblical ‘epics.’ The very shape of the movie screen expanded against the threat of television. American film addressed a culture in turmoil in a startling variety of ways, straining against the constraints and containment of the Blacklist and the Production Code. Triumph Over Containment shows how they triumphed.