Movin' On Up: Revising Postwar Film and Television History

Toward the end of Paddy Chayefsky's 1953 television version of Marty, the title character, a thirty-six-year-old Italian-American butcher who still lives with his mother in a large, run-down house in the Bronx, suggests that they move to a "nice little apartment." His mother is outraged: "I don't sell this house, I tell you that. This is my husband's house. I had six children in this house." Marty submits to her will, as he does in most matters. But at the end of the play, Marty has resolved to call up the "dog" of a girl he's sweet on, Clara, despite what his mother and his friends think. It is easy to imagine that in the next few scenes of Marty's off-screen life he and Clara get married and move into that "nice little apartment" of his dreams.

One thing that is striking about Marty's dreams is how modest they are. He wants to get married, own his own butcher shop (in the 1955 film version) and buy a nice little apartment. And, while he was identified by New York Times critic Bosley Crowther as belonging to the "great urban middle class," looking back we would be more likely to see Marty as a working-class guy, who, for the most part, was comfortable with his station in life. He did not dream of white picket fences, station wagons, barbeques, or even a backyard.¹

Oddly, for a film that won four Oscars in 1955 (including Best Picture and Best Actor), Marty does not seem to square with the zeitgeist of the American 1950s; a time in which the great "middle majority" was anxiously striving, suburb-directed, and possessed of an insatiable appetite for new consumer goods. Marty, if he was indeed middle class, was never going to be middle class in the way that Ozzie Nelson and Ward Cleaver were middle class; he was never going to wear a cardigan sweater or sit in his den and smoke a pipe.

In recent years cultural historians have been steadily chipping away at the myths that Americans in the 1950s created for themselves. If Marty touched a chord, it was probably because not all Americans were anxious to move to the suburbs, start families, and stock their fall-out shelters. One of the strange things about the 1950s, however, is how impervious it seems to be to renarrativization. As Pamela Robertson Wojcik argues in The Apartment Plot, however "tempered" our nostalgia for the fifties has become, "the image of the ideal 1950s suburban home has remained largely intact" (16).

There are many reasons that prevailing myths about the 1950s have been so difficult to overturn, but one of the most important is television. Though it was an emerging medium in the 1950s, it quickly became a dominant one, and both our personal and our scholarly memories of the decade have been shaped by our memory of what was broadcast. The problem with the way that television has shaped our memory is that the most recirculated shows (I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver, for example) were not in every case the most popular or influential shows at the time. Leave It to Beaver, for example, first aired in October 1958. And yet Leave It to Beaver has come to stand for one of the quintessential representations of the entire decade of the 1950s.

Why has it been so difficult to produce historically faithful accounts of what was on television and how it influenced Americans who watched it? Simply put: because there...