The Fifties: Transforming the Screen 1950-1959 (review)

Peter Lev's The Fifties is an entry in the History of American Cinema series published by the University of California Press, most of the volumes of which cover one decade in American film history. (Published entries in the series now extend through Volume 10, which covers the 1980s.) By focusing on the 1950s, Lev's volume necessarily pays considerable attention to sf cinema, though the scope is quite broad, encompassing films noirs, Westerns, Biblical epics, social-problem dramas and a variety of other kinds of films that were important in American film of the decade. As well as a history of American films in the 1950s, the volume is also a history of the American film industry in that decade. As such, it covers the impact on the American film industry of a number of important social, political, economic and technological phenomena. Perhaps because of this broad scope, The Fifties is a hybrid volume: five of its twelve topical essays were written by outside contributors, while seven were written by Lev himself. As a result, it is a bit uneven and lacks a certain overall sense of narrative coherence. It does, however, do a good job of conveying a great deal of information about this crucial decade in American film history, when the studio system started to unravel from within and the film industry experienced unprecedented pressures from without.

The topical essays include two survey essays by Lev on 'Genres and Production Trends', one for each half of the decade. These essays are in many ways the heart of the volume's coverage of actual films in the 1950s, and they do a good job of presenting some of the highlights of American cinema during the decade, even if space limitations mean that they discuss relatively few films in any detail and give short shrift to some phenomena and subgenres. Film noir, for example, probably deserves more coverage than it gets here (and might have been a good topic for a separate essay of its own). Similarly, Disney films of the decade were a far more important element of American popular culture than their minimal coverage in this volume would indicate. Other essays on the film industry cover such specific topics as HUAC and the Blacklist, the globalisation of the film industry in the 1950s and the impact of television on American film; these essays join Lev's two on trends in American cinema over the decade to present an excellent overview of the evolution of film as an industry during this crucial period.

One of the highlights of the volume is Brian Neve's 'HUAC, the Blacklist, and the Decline of Social Cinema', which presents a thoughtful account of the (mostly negative) impact of the anticommunist purges of the 1950s on the American film industry. Here, Neve supplements his account of the HUAC hearings and the subsequent blacklist with discussions of a number of actual films and filmmakers (particular attention is paid to the complex case of Elia Kazan) influenced by the political climate of the decade. Especially valuable is Neve's account of Herbert Biberman's Salt of the Earth (US 1954) as an attempt on the part of filmmakers to offer direct resistance to the pressures exerted by this repressive climate.

For readers of this journal, however, the crucial entry in The Fifties is Victoria O'Donnell's essay, 'Science Fiction Films and Cold War Anxiety'. Among other things, this essay stands out as the only one dealing with a specific genre during the decade, which has the virtue of spotlighting sf film but also potentially marginalising it to a sort of cultural ghetto. The latter is a special danger in light of the fact that O'Donnell does very little to link the discussion in her chapter to the material contained in the other chapters, making sf cinema seem like a self-contained phenomenon that operated independently of the film industry as a whole. Conversely, the other essays...