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
(Knopf, 672 pages, $40)

If you listen to the Left, the 1950s were a decade of boring conformity (the poet Robert Lowell referred to it as “the tranquilized Fifties”) — and the movies of that era, one is told, were a reflection thereof. In a smart, juicy, jam-packed, and richly engaging new book, 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, Foster Hirsch proves otherwise. Now 80 years old, Hirsch is a veteran film professor and the author of a dozen earlier volumes on show business — including studies of film noir, the Actors Studio, Woody Allen, Laurence Olivier, film director Otto Preminger, composer Kurt Weill, and stage director Harold Prince.

Now, in this new work, Hirsch challenges the “glib, patronizing uninformed stereotyping” of the 1950s, arguing that “[b]eneath the supposed dullness, insipidity, and complacent prosperity of Eisenhower’s America was a country riven by conflict and discontent.” Hence, the cinematic record of the 1950s consist largely of “noir thrillers about defeat and mischance; domestic melodramas festering with secrets and sexual repression; apocalyptic science-fiction tales and westerns roiling with paranoid political subtexts.” 

And that was just the tip of the iceberg. As Hirsch reminds us, the 1950s gave us oodles of low-budget schlock (Plan 9 from Outer Space, 1957), highbrow biopics (Lust for Life, 1956), TV adaptations (12 Angry Men, 1957), stage adaptations (Death of a Salesman, 1951), and a surprising number of literary adaptations, from Moby Dick (1956) and A Farewell to Arms (1957) to War and Peace (1956) and The Brothers Karamazov (1958). Then there were the genre movies — like the Western High Noon (1952) and the science-fiction noir Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) — that were also political allegories. Hirsch covers it all. 

It was also a decade during which, in the face of the challenge of TV, almost all of the film studios went through major convulsions — and Hirsch devotes a rich, informative chapter to each of them. At MGM, longtime honcho Louis B. Mayer was replaced in 1951 by Dore Schary, who supplemented the usual big, splashy Metro spectacles — such as Quo Vadis (1951), An American in Paris (1951), The Prisoner of Zenda (1952), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and The Band Wagon (1953) — with grittier fare like Blackboard Jungle (1955), about juvenile delinquency, and cynical items like The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), about a megalomaniacal movie producer. Schary was fired soon enough, however, and by decade’s end the once mighty MGM was a quiet shell of its former self. 

Meanwhile, Howard Hughes’ mismanagement of RKO (which in 1941 had released Citizen Kane, no less) ended up with the studio lot being sold in 1957 to Desilu — that is, to the newly minted TV superstars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, both of whom, ironically, “had been minor contract players at RKO in the late 1930s and early 1940s.” If Paramount stayed in the black throughout the decade, it was thanks largely to the lightweight comedies of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. And if Fox survived, it was due in no small part to studio boss Darryl Zanuck’s commitment to the new CinemaScope process, which resulted in “colossal grosses” for The Robe (1953) and was at its best, in Hirsch’s opinion, in the widely forgotten and/or derided The Egyptian (1954), a film that’s one of my lifelong faves, and that Hirsch gratifyingly eulogizes as “a work of formal as well as thematic beauty” that’s deserving of “pantheon status.” 

CinemaScope was only one of several exciting new celluloid processes that Hirsch covers at length and that were developed with an eye to overcoming the TV threat. Some of these processes, to be sure, were more successful than others. How the West Was Won (1962) was made in Cinerama, which divided the screen into three vertical strips, the lines between which were always at least faintly visible; Hitchcock made Dial M for Murder (1954) in 3D, which required special glasses; Paramount’s in-house process, VistaVision, was first used in the megahit White Christmas (1954); and Oklahoma! (1955) was shot in the short-lived Todd-AO. 

The 1950s saw the waning of many acting careers, such as those of Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, and Joan Crawford, and Hirsch limns their later years with sympathy and insight. (His enthusiasm for Crawford’s 1952 film Sudden Fear made me seek it out. Not bad.) It also saw the rise of a new generation, including Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, whose careers — and acting styles — Hirsch analyzes perceptively. He also focuses on the rise of films about blacks (The Defiant Ones, 1958), Asians (Sayonara, 1957), and other minorities. Although he writes (in an apparent reference to the title of my 1993 book A Place at the Table) that “there was no place at the table for gay people in the 1950s,” he teases out the highly veiled references to the topic in movies like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). 

Hirsch devotes his most comprehensive coverage, perhaps, to the subject of communism, and he does a fascinating and highly responsible job of it. Discussing the major showbiz-related political events that shaped the decade — from the 1947 Waldorf Conference, at which the studio moguls agreed, after some exceedingly intense disagreement, to institute a Blacklist, to the notorious Hollywood hearings held in that year by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), to the formation of the star-studded Committee for the First Amendment, whose members flew, also in that year, to Washington, D.C., to stand up for free-speech rights — Hirsch proves to be a refreshing departure from the armies of film historians who treat Stalinists as heroes. 

Among other things, Hirsch observes that when screenwriter Philip Dunne, whom he describes as “probably the wisest and most prominent liberal anticommunist during the blacklist period,” tried to prevent the establishment of a Blacklist, he was operating from “what would prove to be a fatal misconception: that most of the nineteen who had been accused” of communism by HUAC “were not actually communists.” In fact, almost all of them were Reds — as was every single one of the Hollywood Ten, a group of industry bigshots who refused to testify before HUAC. 

Hirsch’s treatment of screenwriter Budd Schulberg and director Elia Kazan, both of whom “named names” to the HUAC and who’ve been demonized by historians ever since, is refreshing in its rejection of received left-wing opinion. Among those historians is Victor Navasky, whose 1980 book Naming Names Hirsch cannily describes as “itself a kind of blacklist — of informers who, having named names, ought to be, according to the author’s moral calculus, branded forever.” Hirsch quotes with admiration the conservative historian Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, who in Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s (1998), reports on a 1997 Blacklist commemoration sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at which actors, writers, and directors who’d defended Stalin, “the worst mass murderer in history[,] were … virtually deified.” 

Indeed, some movers and shakers in Hollywood didn’t just defend Stalin but glorified him. During the war, at least four films (rightly labeled “notorious” by Hirsch) had shamelessly whitewashed Soviet Communism — Mission to Moscow (1943), Song of Russia (1944), Counter-Attack (1945), and Lillian Hellman’s reprehensible The North Star (1943). After the war, the studio chiefs looked back on these propaganda pieces with embarrassment, and in the 1950s they reversed course dramatically, churning out one anti-communist picture after another. Although they’re all routinely dismissed by progressive critics as hysterical red-baiting, Hirsch explores them with critical dispassion and, in some cases, even ekes out some praise. He calls The Red Menace (1949), for example, “an essential film of the early postwar period” and singles out for special attention My Son John (1952), saying that it’s director Leo McCarey’s “most personal film” and “deserves a reappraisal.” 

I’d never seen My Son John, but I watched it after reading Hirsch’s pages-long account of it. Helen Hayes and Dean Jagger play the Jeffersons, a decent, pious small-town couple whose son John (Robert Walker), now working in government in Washington, D.C., turns out to be a Soviet spy. Hirsch admits that the film (which also features the terrific Van Heflin as an FBI agent) is “an overwrought piece of Christian propaganda infused with über-patriotic paranoia,” but he adds that it’s “a unique period piece that expresses with deeper conviction than any other anticommunist film of the time the fear and loathing with which communism was widely regarded…. [O]n its own terms [it’s] a disturbing work of art rendered with a conviction so deeply rooted, so unmovable, that it achieves a kind of transcendence.” 

This is admiration, if of a curious kind, and I share it. So, rather unexpectedly, it turns out, do many of Hirsch’s students, who, when he screens it for them, he says, “are almost invariably surprised that they are gripped by a story that takes place in a world and time so far removed from their own, and they always ask me about the ‘wonderful’ actress who plays Mrs. Jefferson.” Interesting. (Even more interesting is that the 1950s actor whom Hirsch’s film students overwhelmingly dislike is none other than Katharine Hepburn.) 

The most famous member of the Hollywood Ten (and the best-paid screenwriter in Hollywood) was Dalton Trumbo, who more than half a century after the Blacklist became the subject of a biopic (Trumbo, 2015), which I was glad Hirsch dragged into his discussion of Hollywood communism. I was especially gratified by Hirsch’s brilliant putdown of this despicable picture, which, as he puts it, “enshrine[s]” Trumbo “in political purity” while depicting his opponents as “satanic.” Trumbo, Hirsch powerfully asserts:

is as extremist, as unyielding, as lacking in nuance as the fiercest Red-baiting features of the early Cold War period. With knee-jerk liberalism, the film regards Trumbo and his political colleagues as victims and martyrs for whom adulation is the only possible response; about their stubborn allegiance to a brutal foreign government: silence…. Trumbo canonizes its protagonist, whose beatitude (along with that of his blacklisted brethren) is likely to remain unmodified for generations to come.

Alas. 

If I haven’t made it clear enough already, this is a superb book. Hirsch doesn’t approach films as an art-house snob or with a political agenda; he appreciates genre pictures on their own terms; he’s splendid at describing directing, camerawork, lighting, sets, acting styles, and much else. Going into it, I wondered if he’d mention any of the 1950s movies, some of them quite obscure, of which I’m particularly fond; he not only mentioned them all but had interesting things to say about each of them. (For instance, I was delighted by his absorbing account of The Prince and the Showgirl, a 1957 comedy starring Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe, which is usually either dismissed or forgotten.) 

Also, while I don’t share his disdain for the classic tearjerker An Affair to Remember (1957), I was delighted to discover that he shares my eternal puzzlement over the utterly ridiculous casting: “Does [Cary] Grant pass muster as an Italian roué, or [Deborah] Kerr as a svelte thrush?” Nope. Why couldn’t Grant’s character have been turned into an English roué? (It would’ve involved nothing more than a name change.) I have additional complaints. The first-act scenes on the transatlantic ocean liner seem never to end. And then there’s the coincidence of the ship docking at the exact port, Villefranche-sur-Mer, where Grant, then all of 57 years old, has a grandmother who’s still alive (played by Cathleen Nesbit, who in real life was 16 years his elder). Oh, well. I love the film anyway. But I can understand Hirsch’s distaste. 

I could go on and on about Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties. It’s equally fun to read Hirsch’s always intelligent takes on films you’ve seen and to be given a vivid introduction to movies you’ve never seen or perhaps never even heard of. And given that (as noted) the American 1950s and its cultural artifacts have long been treated by the establishment Left with scorn, it’s sheer pleasure to read a book about the movies of that decade by someone who treats them with respect, who’s given them serious thought, and who actually regards more than a few of them with something not unlike affection. In his concluding pages, Hirsch tells us that he’s working on a companion volume about the films of the 1960s. It’s an understatement to say that I greatly look forward to it.