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Movie Love in the Fifties
James Harvey
Knopf
November 2001
On Sale: October 23, 2001
464 pages
ISBN: 0394585917
EAN: 9780394585918
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
From the author of Romantic Comedy (“brilliant, meticulous,
a monumental work of scholarship” —Margo Jefferson, New
York Times), a fresh, illuminating look at the films of the
1950s. Harvey begins by mapping the progression from 1940s film
noir to the living-room melodramas of the 1950s. He shows
us the femme fatale of the 1940s (Barbara Stanwyck, Joan
Bennett) becoming blander and blonder (Doris Day, Debbie
Reynolds) and younger and more traditionally sexy (Marilyn
Monroe, Grace Kelly) in the 1950s. And he shows us how
women were finally replaced as objects of desire by the new
boy-men—Clift, Brando, Dean, and other rebels without
causes. Harvey discusses the films of Hitchcock (Vertigo), Ophuls
(The Reckless Moment), Siodmak (Christmas Holiday), and
Welles (Touch of Evil, perhaps the single greatest
influence on the “post-classical” movies). He writes about
the quintessential 1950s directors: Nicholas Ray, who made
movies in the old Hollywood tradition (In a Lonely Place,
Johnny Guitar), and Douglas Sirk, who portrayed suburbia as
an emotional deathtrap (Imitation of Life, Magnificent
Obsession). And he discusses the “serious” directors, such
as Stanley Kramer and Elia Kazan, whose films exhibited
powerful new realism. Comprehensive, insightful, written with intelligence,
humor, and affection, Movie Love in the Fifties is a
masterful work of American film, and cultural, history. --
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