Tag: America in the 1950s

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Since I am avoiding Oppenheimer and Barbie, I went back into the archives. While reading Arthur Miller’s The Price, I conjured YouTube and watched 1948’s All My Sons, where Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster brought a tragedy by Henrik Ibsen to Middle America. I continued my sortie into post-war American cinema with Clash by Night, a 1952 Fritz Lang film based on a 1941 play by Clifford Odets. Considered a strong melodrama, it is a very watchable film dealing with emotions and relationships in post-war America in a semi-noir setting. (more…)

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Jack Cashill
Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities
Nashville: Post Hill Press, 2023

Everyone with whom I’d spoke knew exactly why they left. It’s just that no one bothered to ask them. — Jack Cashill

Jack Cashill, who worked for both the Newark, New Jersey and Kansas City, Missouri housing authorities, has written an excellent book about white flight from the great cities of the North from the perspective of the “ethnic” whites: Roman Catholic Italians and the Irish, in particular. (more…)

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The vision of fifties America as a sunny, prosperous world full of stable values and families has no truck with Billy Wilder. Having spent some time in the Weimar Berlin of his youth as a paid dancer for women, he got used to being used and rented out, if anyone can ever get used to it. He packed his cynicism with him when he came to America and easily fit into Hollywood. To Wilder, everyone has a price, and their most noble values and visions are up for grabs. (more…)

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Invaders from Mars is a sci-fi film said to encompass all of the paranoia of the 1950s. Director Cameron Menzies realizes this film as the horror of a child trapped in a nightmare. David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt), wakened by horrific thunder, looks outside his window and sees a flying saucer land and submerge itself underground. (more…)

Edmund Dulac, “The Buried Moon” from The Red Cross Fairy Book, 1916.

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He had me at: “It was still the South, he knew it for a certainty when they passed an aged negro in overalls hobbling down along the highway toward no conceivable destination. The land was cursed. God, he loved it.” [1] Tito Perdue, author of the two novels here reviewed, The Smut Book and Cynosura, is a proud Southerner who has enjoyed skewering the sacred cows of these, our cursed times since he became a writer in the early 1980s. (more…)