 Hollywood and the Cold War
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The rise of television
As television found its way into living rooms all over the world, the furniture was re-arranged to make the set the focus of attention.
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The period between the coming of sound and World War II was dominated by the studios. They controlled the production--including story, the role of the directors, and the selection of actors--distribution, and exhibition (they owned their own theaters). In the 1930s America went to the movies; by the end of the decade some eighty million people saw a movie every week. The studios provided them with the means to live out their fantasies, find heroes, and escape from the Depression.
One factor directly affecting the films of the 1930s was censorship. Hollywood movies in the late 1920s and early 1930s had become rather open in their use of sex, and the scandals in the private lives of the stars shocked the public even as it hungered for vicarious living.
Fear of government intervention and of the Depression forced the studios to censor themselves. They established the Hays Office under the directorship of Will Hays, former postmaster-general, and this office published a strict moral code for on-screen activities and language. The results stifled creativity, but the new moral tastes of the public were satisfied.
The stars captured the public's imagination as in no other time in American popular culture: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh, Edward G. Robinson, and Marlene Dietrich. The comics maintained the traditions of the silent comedians: Charlie Chaplin continued to make movies and was joined by the Marx brothers, Mae West, and W. C. Fields.
In 1940 David O. Selznick made a picture of Daphne Du Maurier's story, Rebecca. Alfred Hitchcock gave it masterly direction, which, coupled with beautiful performances by Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, and Judith Anderson, made it one of the important pictures of the year.
Bette Davis added to her reputation as one of Hollywood's best actresses with her performance in a screen version of W. Somerset Maugham's play, The Letter, which Warners produced in 1940.
John Ford directed two outstanding productions in 1940. One was John Steinbeck's saga of migrant workers, The Grapes of Wrath. Nunnally Johnson prepared the script for Twentieth Century-Fox.
Although 1946 was the most successful year ever at the box-office, Hollywood entered the Cold War era in a climate of unease. Considering that they were made in a period so commonly remembered for its placid, affluent certainties, the movies of the 1950s displayed unexpected anxieties, suggesting that, in Hollywood's representation of American culture at least, stability was only on the surface, and the desperate monsters of the undercurrent could at any moment emerge from beneath the dark waters.
If movies showed more concern with the insecurities of American life, one reason was that television had come to take over their role of celebrator of American virtues. As television relocated family entertainment inside the nuclear family's bunker, the suburban home, the movies found that their primary audience was becoming younger and more restless; so they responded quickly to its darker demands.
In the late 1940s Hollywood had its own industrial and ideological anxieties. In 1947 the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) chose to investigate "Cornmunist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry". Its accusations were without substance, but gained it publicity when its "unfriendly witnesses" were christened the "Hollywood Ten" by the press.
HUAC redirected the Hollywood fantasy into its own paranoid vision, and inaugurated a Cold War climate in the United States, in which attacks were launched on individuals on the flimsiest evidence by Redbaiting groups with no credentials beyond a belief in a "Cornmunist menace" under their beds and a list of people they thought "controversial". Industry personnel without studio protection who had past "controversial" allegiance shaving married someone who signed the wrong petition once in the 1930s might be more than enough - found it increasingly difficult, and finally impossible, to work.
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