Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties

May 1, 2023

Maybe the 1950s seem gray and conformist, but in Hollywood (Disney notwithstanding), it meant more upheaval than we ever knew: Cinerama, CinemaScope, and VistaVision emerged along with sagas and glittery musicals; anti-heroes, dance-in-the-street teens, socially relevant themes, and viscerally troubled characters hit the screen; and the studio system and the production code collapsed. Brooklyn College film professor Hirsch clues us in. Prepub Alert.

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August 1, 2023
A personal, wide-screen approach to the best and worst of times for movies. Threatened by TV and the beginning of the end of the studio system, the 1950s was the "most turbulent decade in the history of the American filmmaking industry"--at least until 2020, writes film scholar Hirsch, author of Otto Preminger and A Method to Their Madness, among other books. In this dauntingly lavish book, which will impress film buffs but perhaps overwhelm general readers, the author neatly plumbs a wide range of topics. He profiles the ups and downs of some of the major studios, from the powerful Louis B. Mayer's MGM (called an "industrial compound" by Elia Kazan) to Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin's United Artists, which "nurtured" Stanley Kubrick. Hirsch deftly discusses many of the studios' films and the actors and directors who worked for them. Hollywood hoped its new "intoxicating visual and aural pleasures" would encourage viewership: Cinerama, touted by the "intrepid world traveler" Lowell Thomas, 3-D, CinemaScope, VistaVision, and Todd-AO. Hirsch is a "cheerleader" for all of them. "In the race for survival," he writes, "new content was as necessary as new formats," and he surveys the studio's high and low offerings, from fancy upmarket "art" fare to the explosion of exploitation fare ("even the detritus of the 1950s is of greater interest than the ephemera of other periods") to "thoughtful, well-meaning, and non-exploitative" race films (Black, Asian, American Indian, etc.) and those dealing with antisemitism and homosexuality. Hirsch shows how the films from this era were multifaceted and engaged with the political and social issues of the time. He zeroes in on the careers of famous actors as they navigated the changing scene, from the older ones to the up-and-coming "Method-trained" ones. The author concludes with an insightful overview of the strong noir films of the decade, science-fiction films that featured Cold War political allegories, animated films, documentaries, and the fading musicals, epics, and overwrought melodramas. A rich, expansive, and penetrating work of film and social history.

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August 14, 2023
Hirsch (Otto Preminger), a film professor at Brooklyn College, presents a thorough account of a transformative era in Hollywood history. The 1950s, Hirsch contends, marked “the beginning of the end of the studio era,” as the introduction of television bit into ticket sales and a 1948 antitrust case forced the major studios to sell their theater chains and reconfigure their business models. Hollywood developed new technologies to draw audiences back to movie theaters, including 3D and Cinerama, a format that used three projectors and a curved screen that stretched “as wide and as high as the limits of human vision.” Hirsch also notes that studios, which had previously made films for broad and multigenerational audiences, began targeting specific segments of moviegoers in the 1950s, leading to a surge in fare aimed at teenagers, such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Hirsch’s panoramic scope includes the scourge of the blacklist, the decline of film noir and movie musicals, and the rise of such new superstars as Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, managing the difficult feat of being exhaustive without becoming exhausting. Cinephiles will want to dig into this.

September 1, 2023
At just over 650 pages, Hirsch has written the definitive book on 1950s Hollywood. From the end of the studio system to innovations like 3-D and Cinerama (the precursor to IMAX), and from blacklisting and McCarthyism to introducing new subjects such as racial identity (most written by white men) and homosexuality (never positively presented), Hirsch incorporates facts and anecdotes about every aspect of film during this period. Told in five parts, Hirsch fills the pages with years of film expertise on individual actors both established (Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis) and new (Marilyn Monroe, Sidney Poitier, James Dean) as well as directors. Some of the most interesting chapters deal with the various film genres of the time, like film noir, musicals, epics, melodramas, revisionist westerns, and sf. He also discusses the change in movie-going audiences from pre-WWII to postwar, including marketing movies to specific ages like teens. Hirsch covers so much material in one book that it becomes repetitive at times due to the overlap of content. Regardless, this is an excellent book for libraries with a large film history collection.

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