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Summary
Summary
From the author ofRomantic 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 Fiftiesis a masterful work of American film, and cultural, history.
Author Notes
James Harvey is a playwright, essayist, and critic. He is the author of Romantic Comedy, and his work has appeared in the New York Review of Books and The Threepenny Review. He lives in Brooklyn
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This impressionistic, illuminating and sometimes infuriating analysis of '50s films is an exquisite oddity: an investigation of popular culture that is as personal in its vision as it is scholarly in its range, as compulsively readable as it is detailed and exhaustive. Harvey's wide-ranging knowledge of films of the era dovetails beautifully with his ability to pinpoint "epiphanies" the recurring "fleeting scene of detail that carries such a sudden pressure of meaning and beauty... it could implode the movie screen." Rather then simply cataloguing films by themes or genre, Harvey (Romantic Comedy) takes on the far more difficult task of examining them through a prism of conflated, often conflicted views to attempt to understand their myriad sources and meanings. This ambitious project is at times enormously successful, as when he moves seamlessly through a discussion of the role of "the blonde" in '50s films, noting not only performances by Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Holliday, Grace Kelly, Gloria Graham and Kim Novak, but also the contexts in which their films were made, their personal lives and their public images. Other times as when he provocatively suggests that Marlon Brando, James Dean and Montgomery Clift projected a "homoerotic charge" he seems overwhelmed by the complexity and implications of his arguments, leaving the reader feeling shortchanged. Though ostensibly about "love," much of the book is actually about "gender"; Harvey draws on (but rarely mentions) a history and tradition of feminist film criticism. Yet when he spends a sustained amount of time on a film usually cult favorites like Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar or Robert Siodmack's Phantom Lady his analytic method produces extraordinary results. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Whatever you might be thinking, this isn't about onscreen amour, 1951-60. Instead it's a meditation born from Harvey's estimation that "the whole postwar period from the late forties to the early sixties" is an underappreciated era of American movies, a bridge between the glossy splendor of the tyrannical-big-studio era and late-'60s cinema. Quoting AndreBazin, the dean of all French film critics, Harvey notes that the "`revolution' in the postwar Hollywood movie was in subject matter, not style." His subsequent essays on the stars, films, and directors pay most attention to movies manifesting "recurring little `epiphanies'" --perfect little details that carry "such a sudden pressure of meaning and beauty" as to deeply affect thoughtful viewers. The individual chapters "Betty Grable to Doris Day," "Clift, Brando, Dean," and "Noir Heroines" are all great, but Harvey is at his languid best parsing director Douglas Sirk and producer Ross Hunter, not least for their Imitation of Life. Individual films, such as Vertigo and The Big Heat, also receive chapter-length consideration in this engrossing study. --Mike Tribby
Choice Review
Author of Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges (CH, May'88), a major work in the history and appreciation of American films, Harvey takes the title of the present book from a Pauline Kael interview: "In front of the screen, I'm still a kid. Movie love is abiding throughout life." He divides the book into four parts: the women, emphasizing film noir heroines and the blondes; the men, emphasizing boy/men such as Clift, Dean, and Brando; the movies; and the moviemakers such as Douglas Sirk and Ross Hunter. The 1950s is not strictly a decade for Harvey; it is the post-WW II era from film noir of the late 1940s to the films of the early 1960s. The author wants the reader to "experience" the movies, to "see them better." Free of theory and academic jargon and including a good selection of stills, the book considers such important movies as In a Lonely Place, Out of the Past, Christmas Holiday, Written on the Wind. Though Harvey's "movie love" is stronger than his writing love (the prose is careless in places and peppered with bad sentence fragments), his book is recommended for undergraduate and public library film collections. W. K. Huck emeritus, Idaho State University
Kirkus Review
A stimulating look at American films of the 1950s. In this conversational yet highly lucid collection of essays, Harvey (Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, 1987) discusses the ways movies shaped-and were shaped by-the cultural changes that followed in the wake of WWII. Mercifully, these are not the musings of a social historian but of a movie nut-and the loving detail lavished on each of the films analyzed at length, beginning with Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past and ending with Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life, reflects Harvey's infatuation with the medium. Although he is clearly a sophisticated guide to the decade and its movies, the author has little time for voguish theories borrowed from literary criticism and instead offers refreshing, common-sense insights. Typical of his style is his take on Brando's portrayal of Stanley Kowalski: he "felt at times like the kind of explosive truth-teller the culture will occasionally produce just when the cant and the banality seem most unchallengeable, someone who cuts through all the bullshit and to hell with it." Despite his enthusiasm for certain of Brando's early performances, Harvey recognizes the profound contrast between the emerging "boy" stars of the '50s-Brando, Dean, Clift-and their predecessors. While male leads had previously embodied the "antinarcissist idea of maleness," these new stars "instead of inviting us to grow up, were commiserating with us about failing to." In that respect, Harvey contends that the movies reflected the inward-turning mood of Americans during the Cold War. However, while the collection draws parallels between American society and its films, the primary focus remains on the movies themselves and the people who made them: Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Robert Siodmak, to name a few. A collection that will have readers scurrying to the video store.
Library Journal Review
For every "sanitized" movie that came out of the Fifties, there were others that shook up old formulas. Critic and essayist Harvey explores and ultimately eulogizes Hollywood films of this era, a time of transition when the Production Code was being scrapped and the studio system abandoned. His "loves" include archetypal blonde actresses (Kim Novak, Janet Leigh), Method actors (Brando, Dean, Clift), and directors who were either subtle craftsmen (Robert Siodmak, Max Ophuls, Douglas Sirk), master technicians (Hitchcock and Welles), or mavericks (Nicholas Ray). Harvey's close, sensitive readings of films as texts and his analyses of shots and characterization mean that the reader does not need to have seen the films to appreciate this work. Harvey affectionately delineates important nuances of the films he chooses to discuss even those he disdains and provides enough context to keep the discussions tight. His movie love is inspired and infectious. Recommended for academic libraries. Jayne Plymale, Univ. of Georgia, Athens (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. ix |
| Part 1 The Women | |
| 1. Noir Heroines | p. 3 |
| 2. Out of the Past | p. 14 |
| 3. Vertigo | p. 28 |
| 4. Betty Grable to Doris Day | p. 43 |
| 5. Marilyn Monroe | p. 59 |
| 6. Hitchcock's Blondes | p. 72 |
| 7. Janet Leigh and Psycho | p. 86 |
| 8. The Big Heat | p. 104 |
| Part 2 The Men | |
| 9. Clift, Brando, Dean | p. 121 |
| 10. Method Movies | p. 140 |
| 11. In a Lonely Place | p. 148 |
| 12. James Dean | p. 164 |
| 13. Nicholas Ray | p. 179 |
| 14. Bitter Victory | p. 193 |
| Part 3 The Movies | |
| 15. The Fifties | p. 215 |
| 16. The Reckless Moment | p. 227 |
| 17. Robert Siodmak | p. 249 |
| 18. Christmas Holiday | p. 267 |
| 19. Orson Welles | p. 285 |
| 20. Johnny Guitar | p. 311 |
| Part 4 The Moviemakers | |
| 21. Retrospective | p. 333 |
| 22. Written on the Wind | p. 343 |
| 23. Douglas Sirk | p. 360 |
| 24. Ross Hunter | p. 371 |
| 25. Imitation of Life | p. 394 |
| 26. Conclusion | p. 424 |
| Selected Bibliography | p. 429 |
| Index | p. 433 |
