Introduction

Landon I Introduction Introduction Philip J. Landon The first part of our special focus on the Cold War, focused primarily on films of the early cold war years. This issue continues its examination of the ways in which movies were influenced by the ideological and political conflicts of the Cold War years, but, places special emphasis on the later years of the Cold War. Neal R. McCrillis, in '"Simply Try for One Hour to Behave Like Gentlemen' : British Cinema During the Cold War, 1945-1960," reviews the impact ofthe ColdWar on British films and draws some illuminating distinctions between British and American ColdWar films. "British film makers, he argues, made few Red Scare films" like the American films Big Jim McClain (1952) and My Son John (1953). While a few films, such as Conspirator (1949), dealt explicitly with Soviet espionage in Great Britain, they did not see "fears of communist subversion" as a primary threat to British culture. The science fiction film The GiantBehemoth (1959) differs significantly from its American counterparts which, during the 1950s, often used alien invaders as metaphors for communist aggression. In The Giant Behemoth, the threats tend to be "concretely physical and scientific rather than subversive and cultural," and the greatest danger is that of "science run rampant rather than the Cold War Russian enemy." Cold War comedies, which did not gain favor in the United States until Dr. Strangelove was released in 1964, were popular in Britain throughout the 1950s, fromM?: Drake's Duck (1951), which lampooned the nuclear arms race, to The Mouse That Roared (1959), a satirical treatment of Cold War rivalries. Comedies like The Ladykillers (1955) reinforced "the conservative values of middle-class... Britain," but the threat to these values proved to be "the outside world ofrationalism, bureaucracy, and capitalism" rather then the Soviet Union. In general, British films of the Cold War era saw the dangers posed to post-WWII cultural conservatism as "internal social and political forces." In Hollywood films, however, the influence of Cold War ideologies was omnipresent, and the enemy was predatory Soviet communism. This influence often manifested itself indirectly and in films ofwidely diverse subject matter. This diversity is evident in three essays, one essay devoted to 1950s films with Oriental settings, one to a television series set in WWII, and one to a film set in the offices of a major television network. Brian T. Edwards' "Yankee Pashas: Containing Abundance in 1950s Hollywood Orientalism" explores not only the ways these films defined the Orient as a place of exotic excess, but also helped create a "generalized sense of fear of the Arab/Muslim other." Decades of films, from The Sheik (1921) through Five Graves to Cairo (1943) and Casablanca (1943), constructed a mythical Orient "where westerners lose their bearings, where what seemed to make sense in the West has no meaning." By 1950, Hollywood representations of Oriental excess, both material and sexual, became "meditations on more immediate political and social concerns." Yankee Pasha (1954) and The Land ofthe Pharaohs (1955) dramatized the need to contain , in "aproperly domesticated sphere," women who had found greater social and economic freedom duringWWII. Uncontrolled women also suggested the Soviet threat which "had been coded as feminine, uncontrollable, and ofquestionable sexuality." The same films also embody the anxieties about the material abundance of the Cold War years, abundance which became identified with the American Dream at the same time that it raised fears that it might weaken America's resolve to resist Soviet aggression. In "ABC-TV's Combat, World War II, and the Enduring Image ofthe Combat ColdWarrior," David Pierson explores the Cold War concerns underlying the weekly episodes of Combat, television's longest-running war drama (1962-1967). Although set in France during the last year of WWII, the series, Pierson notes, has no "firm geographic or temporal dimensions." Employing the familiar conventions of the war narrative, Combat focuses on a small infantry unit, America in microcosm, engaged in a battle to defeat a totalitarian enemy. Various episodes exemplify "many of the popular perceptions, attitudes, and myths concerning Cold War politics and policies in the early to mid 1960s America." The squad's central characters/leaders tend to represent...