Triumph over Containment

American Film in the 1950s

Robert P. Kolker

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781978820920
• eBook ISBN: 9781978820944
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: 20th Century History

The long 1950s, which extend back to the early postwar period and forward into the early 1960s, were a period of "containment culture" in America, as the media worked to reinforce traditional family values and suspected communist sympathizers were blacklisted from the entertainment industry. Yet some brave filmmakers and actors still challenged the status quo to produce indelible and imaginative work that delivered uncomfortable truths to Cold War audiences. 
 
Triumph Over Containment offers an uncompromising look at some of the era's greatest films and directors, from household names like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick to lesser-known iconoclasts like Samuel Fuller and Ida Lupino. Taking in everything from The Thing from Another World (1951) to Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), acclaimed film scholar Robert P. Kolker scours a variety of different genres to find pockets of resistance to the repressive and oppressive norms of Cold War culture. He devotes special attention to two quintessential 1950s genres—the melodrama and the science fiction film—that might seem like polar opposites, but each offered pointed responses to containment culture. 
 
This book takes a fresh look at such directors as Nicholas Ray, John Ford, and Orson Welles, while giving readers a new appreciation for the depth and artistry of 1950s Hollywood films.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. On Containment, Screen Size, and the Lightness and the Dark
• 2. “It Was Like Going Down to the Bottom of the World”: John Garfield and Enterprise
• 3. “I’m a Stranger Here Myself”: Nicholas Ray and Ida Lupino
• 4. “Love, Hate, Action, Violence, and Death … in One Word: Emotion”: Joseph Losey and Samuel Fuller
• 5. “Put an Amen to It”: The Old Masters—Welles, Hitchcock, Ford
• 6. Looking to the Skies: Science Fiction in the 1950s
• 7. “How Can You Say You Love Me …?”: Melodrama
• Conclusion: “Complete Total Final Annihilating Artistic Control”—Stanley Kubrick Explodes Containment
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author