From Dead Ends to Cold Warriors

Constructing American Boyhood in Postwar Hollywood Films

By Peter W.Y. Lee

Rutgers University Press

After World War II, studies examining youth culture on the silver screen start with James Dean. But the angst that Dean symbolized—anxieties over parents, the “Establishment,” and the expectations of future citizen-soldiers—long predated Rebels without a Cause. Historians have largely overlooked how the Great Depression and World War II impacted and shaped the Cold War, and youth contributed to the national ideologies of family and freedom. From Dead Ends to Cold Warriors explores this gap by connecting facets of boyhood as represented in American film from the 1930s to the postwar years. From the Andy Hardy series to pictures such as The Search, Intruder in the Dust, and The Gunfighter, boy characters addressed larger concerns over the dysfunctional family unit, militarism, the “race question,” and the international scene as the Korean War began. Navigating the political, social, and economic milieus inside and outside of Hollywood, Peter W.Y. Lee demonstrates that continuities from the 1930s influenced the unique postwar moment, coalescing into anticommunism and the Cold War.

A specter was haunting mid-twentieth century Hollywood – the specter of the rebellious boy. Peter W.Y. Lee ably shows how US filmmakers of the period created a cast of culturally potent boy characters to arbitrate conflicts of age, gender, race, class, and political ideology at the dawning of the American Century. From Dead Ends to Cold Warriors is required reading for historians of youth, film, and the early Cold War. Mischa Honeck, author of Our Frontier Is the World, The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy

PETER W.Y. LEE is an independent historian specializing in American history and youth culture. He has published widely on comic books, film, and television. His most recent edited volume is Peanuts and American Culture: Essays on Charles M. Schulz’s Iconic Comic Strip.

List of Figures
List of Tables
Foreword
Chronology
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Are the Kids All Right?
1          The Family in Trouble, 1920-1945
2          Gable is Able: Re-Creating the Postwar Family
3          Curbing Delinquency: Hot Rods and Hotrodding
4          Whitewashing the Race Cycle in 1949
5          The International Picture
Conclusion: Revising the “Deanlinquent”
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index

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