Christmas is not just a day or a frame of mind as Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) imparts in Miracle on 34th Street (1947); Christmas is also a vehicle for national mythmaking as an idealising mirror for American cultural and political attitudes of a given moment. Via a case study on Hollywood Christmas films released between 1946 and 1961, Selling Out Santa offers an examination of political pressures on Hollywood in the post-war period and the cultural ramifications of federal involvement in the motion picture industry. As the House Committee on Un-American Activities opened hearings in 1947 and the FBI gathered reports on potential communist subversion in Frank Capra's Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Hollywood executives began to bend to the socially conservative pressures of this post-war moment. Using Christmas films as the core of this investigation to identify and analyse changes within the genre as they relate to and reflect changes in the wider cultural and political moment exposes for film scholars, students, and non-specialists how these federal and external pressures on Hollywood moulded these holiday favourites throughout the 1950s and set the social standard for decades of Christmas releases.
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Subtopic
North American HistoryIndex
LiteratureTable of contents
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 American Archetypes and Un-American Committees: Anti-Communism, the FBI, and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
- Chapter 2 Reflections of Reality: Social Problem and Psychological Films, 1947
- Chapter 3 The New All-American Christmas: Rebranding Christmas, 1949 – 1954
- Chapter 4 A Case Study for Christmas: Changing Attitudes towards Commercialism and Consumerism on Film, 1946 – 1961
- Chapter 5 Christmases Past and Future: Walt Disney and Frank Capra, 1940s–1961
- Conclusion
- Index
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Yes, you can access Selling Out Santa by Vaughn Joy in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & North American History. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.