Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties

July 12, 2015 @ 7:17 pm

Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties

Peter Biskind

Language: English

Pages: 384

ISBN: 0805065636

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Seeing is Believing is a provocative, shrewd, witty look at the Hollywood fifties movies we all love-or love to hate-and the thousand subtle ways they reflect the political tensions of the decade. Peter Biskind, former executive editor of Premiere, is one of our most astute cultural critics. Here he concentrates on the films everybody saw but nobody really looked at--classics like Giant, On the Waterfront, Rebel Without a Cause, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers--and shows us how movies that appear to be politically innocent in fact carry an ideological burden. As we see organization men and rugged individualists, housewives and career women, cops and doctors, teen angels and teenage werewolves fight it out across the screen from suburbia to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, we understand that we have been watching one long dispute about how to be a man, a woman, an American--the conflicts of the period in action.

A work of brilliant analysis and meticulous conception, Seeing Is Believing offers fascinating insights into how to read films of any era.

Politics and Cinema

Head-On (BFI Film Classics)

What is Film Noir?

Comedy Incarnate: Buster Keaton, Physical Humor, and Bodily Coping

The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen

In a Lonely Place (BFI Film Classics)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

make peace, he might as well fight to the death. Not only has Jeffords succeeded in dividing and conquering the Apaches, single-handedly doing what the United States Cavalry failed to do in ten years of warfare, he has “turned” Cochise’s head as well as his heart. Jeffords has got his hooks into the chief so deep he doesn’t know which end is up. Cochise has begun to use white man’s reasoning as his own. His speech about the realities of power (“A big wind comes and the tree must bend or it will

the race by sealing selected specimens in mine shafts are pure madness. “Reality” has deserted the corporate liberals. The conservative, on the other hand, gum-chewing Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), is only marginally saner than Strangelove. In his heart he knows that Ripper is right. Ripper is the right-wing vigilante who would have made Billy Mitchell proud. He defies the organization in A-1 style, only here he’s not a hero but a psycho. Sixties audiences who saw the film over and over

class, no class issues can be at stake. And with class thrown overboard, the way is cleared for a priest (Father Barry), the government (the Crime Commission investigators), and a woman (Edie Doyle) to establish the terms that will define and circumscribe the drama: God, country, and family. The stage has been set, we know which side we’re on, we have seen the face of the enemy; the only question that remains is “how?”—how to bring the mob to its knees. The problem faced by the center is that no

Driscoll he wants out. He’s evened the score, having engineered the deaths of two of the men who killed his dad and put the third in jail. Now he wants to marry Cuddles, settle down, and since he doesn’t have a personal grudge against Connors, he’s content to leave him to the Crime Commission. “With Gela on ice, that wraps it up. You’re on your own,” he tells Driscoll. But Driscoll says it won’t work. “You’ll never be able to start from scratch unless you help us get Connors out of the way.” And

gets the drop on him, he finds out that he’s wrong. They’re all war heroes, veterans of the big battles of World War II. And since in this film the war isn’t over, these boys are right at home. If they can’t protect baby Joyce, no one can. “Amateurs” are okay, whereas “professionals” are gangsters and “experts” are opportunists.* Like Bannion, they act for personal, unofficial reasons, but they cannot act without Bannion, which is to say, they need a leader. Once again, justice is served by a

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