The New Yorker:

A new book evokes the secret cinematic revolution that took place in plain sight in the nineteen-fifties.

By Richard Brody

One major virtue of the film historian Foster Hirsch’s teeming new book, “Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties,” is to bring the output of this extraordinary decade back into the forefront of attention. (Concurrent with its publication, there is a series at Film Forum, “50 from the ’50s,” with Hirsch on hand to introduce some screenings.) Hirsch presents a panorama of the film industry at the time, anchored in the economic struggles that the studios were facing. The rise of television was drastically reducing moviegoing, and a federal antitrust suit (decided in 1948) had forced studios to divest themselves of movie theatres, a development that deprived them of guaranteed revenue. Hirsch’s account goes into fascinating detail on how studios were forced to reconsider their modes of production, the new technology they employed in doing so, and the internecine battles that these shifts entailed. He looks at the political and social conflicts that the movies confronted and the ones they skirted, the rise of a new generation of stars and the varied fates of long-established ones, and the widely varied artistry of filmmakers who found themselves working in a newly unstable system.

Hirsch writes himself into the story. Having been born in 1943, he is in a position to reminisce about his childhood and adolescent moviegoing experiences in a way that complements both his research and his critical assessments. The result is a kind of firsthand sociology, in which moviegoing is treated as an experience, of which the movie itself is only a part. He also considers how his views of movies of the fifties have changed since then, and the way in which that shift of perspective inescapably, though often tacitly, shapes his narrative of how the decade unfolded. He discusses the wider culture of the time, finding in fifties America “the seeds of the counterculture revolution that erupted in the late 1960s,” with movies as a vital part of that trend.

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