Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties

As much as I love films, I’ve often tended to dismiss Hollywood’s 1950s product as little more than overblown Ancient Rome epics (Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis), and saccharine-sweet romances like An Affair to Remember. *

Wrong!

This book is a revelation (or reminder) of how good the decade could be. Douglas Sirk’s awesomely subversive melodramas. The eye-popping spectacle of CinemaScope and Cinerama. Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion monsters. Doom-laden noirs such as Plunder Road, Storm Warning and Where Danger Lives. So much to celebrate.

The book’s more than fan worship though. It’s a history of how all the different studios reacted to the break-up of the Studio System. It offers a gripping analysis of the Red Scare, the Hollywood Ten and the blacklist that killed so many careers. It compares the careers of the ‘old’ stars such as Joan Crawford and Clark Gable with newcomers Marlon Brando and Sidney Poitier and Audrey Hepburn. It’s a history of change and adaptation; willing and unwilling.

And so many, many great films.

*I can’t sit through Ben-Hur. I don’t care how many Oscars it won. Or how much money it made. But… the chariot race is easily one of the best action sequences ever put on film anywhere by any director. More than 60 years after it was made, it’s still a stunner.