Triumph over Containment
232 pages, 6 x 9
37 b-w images, 21 color images
Hardcover
Release Date:15 Oct 2021
ISBN:9781978820920
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.
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.
Unabashedly autobiographical and unapologetically auteurist, Robert Kolker’s trip into the fever heat of 1950s American cinema is an eloquent and erudite delight.
Robert Kolker ingeniously uses George Kennan’s Cold War strategy of 'containment' as a metaphor to illuminate the complex interplay between movies and politics in this personal, yet incisive exploration of America’s pop culture in the 1950’s.
New Books Network: New Books in Film interview with Robert P. Kolker
ROBERT P. KOLKER is a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland in College Park. He is author of numerous books, including The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and the Reimagining of Cinema (Rutgers University Press), A Cinema of Loneliness, Film, Form, and Culture, and, with Nathan Abrams, Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of his Final Film. He is currently at work on a biography of Stanley Kubrick with Nathan Abrams.
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
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