The History Channel Presents The Fifties (1997)

Landon | The History Channel Presents The Fifties (1997) Philip J. Landon University of Maryland, Baltimore County [landon@charm.net] The History Channel Presents The fifties (WfI) Alex Cibney and Tracy Dahlby, director; Nancy Button, producer; Charlie Mayday, executive producer for the History Channel. The Fifties. The History Channel. (Nov. 30 - Dec. 5, 9 p.m. EST) The Legierchildren and a friend, as theytestthe escape hatch ofa preservation bomb shelter. 56 I Film & History Regular Feature | Film Reviews The press release for TAe Fifties, the mini-series recently aired by the cable History Channel, promises viewers "the most in depth documentary series about the era which bridged the end ofWWII with the New Frontier." It is certainly the longest, the most ambitious , and the most entertaining documentary account of the era. In adapting David Halberstam's 1993 bestseller The Fifties for television, directors Alex Gibney and Tracy Dahlby have preserved Halberstam's view that beneath the deceptively placid surface ofthe 1950s — with its emphases on economic security, social conformity, and upward mobility — there ran counter-currents ofdissent and rebellion, ofideological struggle, and ofsocial discontent which burst to the surface during the turbulent 1960s. Although Halberstam's more complex reading of American life in the 1950s may be familiar to students ofthe period and can be found, for example, in StephenJ. Whitfield's excellent introduction to the political climate of the 1950s, The Culture ofthe Cold War (1991, 2nd ed. 1996), and in Elaine Tyler May's influential analysis ofmiddle-class family life, Homeward Bound, (1988), the era has been popularized as an age ofinnocence and prosperity during which traditional family values, civility, and old-fashioned patriotism flourished. This nostalgic image ofthe 1950s may owe more to reruns of Father Knows Best, to films like Back to the Future (1983), and to a longing for a simpler and less fragmented America than to historical reality , but it has captured the popular imagination and, in turn, helped shape contemporary social and political discourse. The History Channel offers its millions ofviewers a much more balanced interpretation ofthe era which gave birth to the Cold War, rock-and-roll, the civil rights movement, suburbia, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. The series is made up of seven segments beginning with a two-hour episode, "The Fear and the Dream" which opens with the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the end of the Second World War and lays out some of the cultural and ideological conflicts and contradictions which would define the next fifteen years: it traces the sustained economic expansion which financed the baby boom and the birth of the Levittown; it covers the beginning of the Cold War, the development of the hydrogen bomb, Senator Joseph McCarthy's hunt for communists in government , and the Korean War. The episode ends with the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who won the presidency by convincing the voters that he could conclude a stalemated war abroad and end the divisive political battles at home. Each of the subsequent episodes is devoted to a topic which identifies an aspect of 1950s that belies the decade's reputation for bland conformity. "Selling the American Way" traces the rise of television as the nation's most powerful advertising medium and explains how that medium served to sell consumer goods and politicians to the American public, as well the ways was used to conceal some of the darker aspects of the Eisenhower Administration's foreign policy. "Let's Play House" examines the difference between the idealized portrait of domestic life seen in television sitcoms and the discovery that home life, no matter how comfortable , left breadwinners unsatisfied and housewives even more unsatisfied. The first indications of the coming sexual revolution are the subject of episode four, "A Burning Desire." It covers the revelations of the Kinsey Report and the public reaction to them; the cultural significance of Marilyn Monroe, the reigning sex symbol whose image helped Hugh Hefner to establish the Playboy empire; and the development of the "pill" that would give women far greater sexual freedom. The demand for equal rights by black Americans is the subject of "The Rage Within" the fifth episode of the series. As might...