Hollywood's America by Steven Mintz & Randy Roberts & David Welky

Author:Steven Mintz & Randy Roberts & David Welky
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118976524
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

Peter Roffman and Jim Purdy, “The Red Scare in Hollywood,” in The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair and Polities from the Depression to the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 284–293. Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press.

Chapter 16

Movies Grow Up

Hollywood and Politics Caught in the Cold War Crossfire

Jennifer Holt

World War II changed everything in America. Women and African Americans found new economic opportunities in wartime factories. American industrial strength soared to new heights. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki confirmed America's status as the world's most powerful country. At the same time, Americans watched in fear as the Soviet Union tightened its communistic grip on eastern Europe.

The war had exposed humanity's dark side. Images of devastated cities and horrific concentration camps seared the collective mind. Returning soldiers embraced a new cosmopolitanism born from their experiences overseas. Moviemakers, sensing this grittier, more worldly spirit, offered a steady flow of gloomy film noirs (The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Asphalt Jungle) and pessimistic tales of veterans struggling to adapt to peacetime (The Best Years of Our Lives, The Blue Dahlia). They also released “issue pictures” that tackled controversial subjects with a frankness rarely seen in pre-war films. Pinky centered on a black girl “passing” as white. Gentleman's Agreement decried anti-Semitism. Crossfire, released by RKO in 1947, epitomized postwar cinema. As Jennifer Holt demonstrates, this noir-ish murder mystery merged the twin themes of the unhinged war veteran and anti-Semitism. This production also revealed the emerging cold war's creeping influence over the screen.

The powerful euphoria and optimism that gilded the surface of post-WWII America fueled the country's high-gloss image on both global and local scales. The United States had emerged as the world's preeminent and undisputed superpower. The war machine had revived the US economy and more than doubled the gross national product (from $90 billion in 1939 to $212 billion in 1945). Initially, Hollywood appeared to be one of the many industries to benefit from the war effort and further revel in the afterglow of victory overseas. The studio system hit its peak in 1946, selling over 4 billion tickets and releasing 400 films. According to Thomas Schatz, the industry's overseas outlook was still “remarkably upbeat” immediately following the war, with foreign revenues at a record $125 million in 1946 and holding strong in 1947 at an estimated $120 million.

Almost immediately, however, these gleaming facades would lose their luster. Within two years of the war's end, the cultural and political tensions that had been simmering in the US exploded; the hopeful optimism that had characterized post-war American society was swiftly replaced by the slow-burning fear, suspicion and paranoia that would sustain the Cold War. Foreign policy and public attention became obsessively focused on the newly vilified Soviet Union, monopolizing atomic weaponry, and containing the “Communist threat” as outlined in the Truman Doctrine. American society was experiencing a rebirth of alienation and racism at home, with women and people of color struggling against the oppressive forces of cultural “containment.”

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