I liked the cut of Foster Hirsch’s jib when he cocked an eyebrow at Katherine Hepburn’s achievements. “But oh, she could be hard to take,” he moans in his wonderful Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher–Television, and please make allowances for the ungainly title. Praising her for managing “her career and her image” with greater shrewdness than Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, he rejects Hepburn’s crowd-pleasing choices after her brush with obloquy in the late ’30s: after The Philadelphia Story (1940) she paired up with the solid, stolid Spencer Tracy and not once looked back. “There was a price to pay for maintaining her aura of indomitability and for choosing roles in which other characters, as well as the audience, are compelled to salute her celestial magnificence,” he writes, shutting the coffin lid.
He’s not wrong, but he’s not right either (to my surprise he praises without reservation her work in Suddenly, Last Summer and Long Day’s Journey into Night). An impressive tome that bumps against a 600-word limit needs cheek to pepper up its erudition, and Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties has erudition — research — to spare. Readers will learn more about Louis B. Mayer, Daryl F. Zanuck, Harry Cohn, and the other Olympians of the studio pantheon than they expected — or wanted. Hirsch patiently explains 3D, Todd-AO, CinemaScope and its El Cheap-O dilution SuperScope, and other responses to the incursion of television on studio revenue. The chapter on the blacklist details the humiliations to which actors, directors, and scriptwriters subjected themselves before the spittle-flecked hysteria of HUAC members; the undertones of anti-Semitism, Hirsch argues, are unmistakable too.
Dismissing shibboleths about the decade’s somnolence, Hirsch makes fresh insights. On Invasion of the Body Snatchers: “Can a film be two things at once: a right-wing allegory about communsit takeover and a left-wing satire of American conformity? Yes, I think it can, and I think it is.” On the lineage of films (Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock Around the Block) created by Blackboard Jungle‘s box office success: “However sketchilyl, the films bear contemporary witness to the major cultural shift of Black music crossing over into mainstream white culture.” I want to watch Band of Angels (1957), a Civil War picture starring Yvonne de Carlo as a slave and, in a variant on Rhett Butler, Clark Gable as her kindly master; I can’t wait to rent Storm Warning (1950), in which Ginger Rogers’ (!) visit to a small town reveals the extent of KKK influence and what little the DA played by Ronald Reagan (!!) can do about it. And I must know if on my sixth or seventh viewing I will assert the following about Fred Zimmermann’s Best Picture winner and Howard Hawks’ Gen X-beloved hangout romp: “I revere High Noon; I find Rio Bravo insufferable.”
Three weeks ago I noted The Anatomy of Fascism and its contemporary parallels.
My November reading:
Graham Greene – Orient Express
* Ernest Hemingway – The Sun Also Rises
Don DeLillo – The Silence
Robert Ferrell – The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge
Foster Hirsch – Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher–Television
Noah Isenberg – We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Legend and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Film
Robert O. Paxton – The Anatomy of Fascism
Ian Kershaw – The Global Age: Europe, 1950–2017
Claude A. Clegg III – The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama
L.P. Hartley – The Go-Between
* William Shakespeare – The Tempest
Robert Glück – About Ed
J.L. Carr – A Month in the Country
Humanizing The Vacuum 