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Title details for Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties by Foster Hirsch - Available

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
Foster Hirsch
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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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 10, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593788196
      • File size: 1038135 KB
      • Duration: 36:02:46

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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