1950's Cinema
1950’s Cinema Patrick Gallagher There is an idea that the 1950’s were a frivolous happy-go-lucky time in American History. This is a concept that has been enhanced by shows like Happy Days. A stalwart of prime time in the mid 1970’s, Happy Days may have had a case to make, at least relatively. After the jarring that the nation took from Kennedy’s assassination, the Vietnam War, and the deceit of Richard Nixon, maybe things like McCarthyism, Segregation and Korea didn’t seem so bad in comparison. The other man has always had it harder. A quick glance at a history book dismisses this notion immediately. Just a few years had passed since a world war, and all throughout the 50’s the U.S. was embroiled in the opening stages of the cold war. China fell to Communist control in 1949, just as the Soviets, our World War II allies, were beginning to be perceived as a threatening demon hiding behind an Iron Curtain. Soon enough, the invaders were in our midst. The career diplomat Alger Hiss was branded a Soviet spy in a sordid case that captured the public imagination and advanced the career of Richard Nixon. Witch hunts became the order of the day, and in 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy took advantage of the powerful new medium of television to showcase hearings designed to expose the infiltration of Communists into all aspects of American life. The McCarthy hearings were the culmination of six years of government inquiry into the "Communist influence" in Hollywood. In 1948, the "Hollywood Ten," a group of screenwriters including Dalton Trumbo, Herbert Biberman, and Ring Lardner, Jr., were suspended without pay by the studios. By the mid–1950’s, more than 200 writers, directors, and actors were blacklisted and unable to work in Hollywood. Cinema in the 1950’s was in a large way responding, however subtly, to the events that were going on around it. One of the most scathing films of the 1950’s was Nicholas Ray’s domestic drama Bigger Than Life, which was released in France as Derrière le Miroir ("Behind the Mirror"), a title that aptly reflects the film’s assault on the stultifying nature of "normal" American life.