I thoroughly enjoyed this book. In it, Peter Biskind examines a host of films from the fifties (and a few from surrounding years), putting them onto the sociological equivalent of an analyst's couch, so to speak. Through the aperture of these movies, all the conflicting social forces that were vying with one another in the U.S. during 1950s can be seen at work: Liberalism versus conservatism, individualism and personal freedom versus community and conformism, expanding opportunities for women versus reactionary antifeminist backlash, and lots more.
For the most part Biskind presents a convincing case that the movies he looks at stake out this or that position on this or that spectrum of conflicting social opinions and trends, but I'm certainly not saying that I agreed with all of his points. A thinking, critical reader is always unlikely to agree with everything they find in an opinion-packed, interpretation-packed book like this one. In particular, I was profoundly unconvinced by Biskind's argument that the 1954 giant-ant movie Them! carried an anti-feminist subtext. But disagreements like this were the exception rather than the rule for me, and in any case I always found his discussions and analyses to be interesting, engaging, and entertaining.
As an example, here's a passage I particularly enjoyed from a section on the James Dean vehicle Rebel Without a Cause (1955): "With its trilogy of sick families, Rebel touches all the bases. Parents are criticized for being too strong and too weak, too authoritarian and too permissive, for being absent when the kids need them and smothering them with affection when they don’t. If it’s bad to treat teen-agers like children, it’s also bad to treat them like adults. In Rebel, parents can’t do anything right."
Quite a bit of the book is devoted to examining gender roles -- how views about these roles were changing during the 50s, and how a range of movies portrayed and commented, either positively or negatively, on this change. The book's evisceration of the savagely anti-feminist Mildred Pierce (1945) was a particular delight for me in the text.
So again, this is a deeply interesting, engaging, and entertaining book!
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