1950s Film Culture

Spate of formulaic films produced in the 1950s film culture outperformed in questioning social stereotypes than TV. Though NAACP protested against the negative representation of African Americans in Hollywood since 1930s, the films in the following decade dealt with class conflict and effects of economic scarcity. The subpoenas of the Hollywood Ten in 1947 was a clear indication that the power of film images worried both HUAC and the compilers of the industry blacklist Red Channels. But the films dealing with class and race conflict dominated the early 1950s till spectaculars like religious epics and consumer films took the centre stage. Thus social films give way for religious and consumer films. Films like The Men and Bright Victory

Genre based Science-fiction and westerns can be viewed in one way as escapist-those transporting audience away from the cold war anxieties but these anxieties were reinforced in public safety films like Pattern for Survival (1950). Science fiction films conveyed the complexities of the atomic age without requiring a clear-cut moral message. The Thing From Another World (1951) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) are excellent examples. Western genre underwent change in the 1950s with the strong masculinist myth of the West got challenged and it foregrounded new themes. Westerns such as The Searchers (1956), Gunman’s Walk (1958) and The Unforgiven (1960) dealt with problems of miscegenation and white supremacist attitudes of integration of races. Westerns centrally dealt with race and also the ways in which rugged masculinity of the West was under siege from 1950s domesticity. The war novels of Norman Mailer The Named and the Dead and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity tackled the links between racial arrogance and masculine bravado and the film musical The King and I (1956) and the Hong Kong based melodramas Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) and The World of Suzie Wong (1960) dealt with issues gives a more

With its exotic setting in Hong Kong these films arouses fantasy but Hong Kong according to Gina Marchetti also offered a “place where a postwar American identity can be defined against an emerging Asian communism and the decay of European colonialism” (110)/(qtd in Halliwell 179). Gina Marchetti sees Hong Kong as a luminal space between West and East in which cold war oppositions could be smoothly played out in a mixed-race love story setting which avoided the stigma that could otherwise happen if set in Deep South or the Midwest. The plethora of films that explored social issues were Salt of the Earth (1954), Storm Center (1956), On the Waterfront (1954), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Man on a Tightrope (1953) and Tea and Sympathy (1956). Another film that garnered the attention was Cry the Beloved Country (1957) which dealt with social and political issues. It was difficult in the early 1950s to take an explicit stance in political and social issues so Hitchcock along with Wells and Ray opted