Cold War Film and Television in the 1950s

Abstract

Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s refracted American life through the lens of the Cold War. Ideologies became visible.¹ Political and nuclear anxieties surfaced in a spate of “Red Menace” dramas, films noir, and science fiction “invasion” films, of which Ray Bradbury’s It Came from Outer Space in 1953 was a prime example. Meanwhile, television as a commercial medium emerged in the immediate post-war years, and “live” broadcast transmissions, as early as 1947, like the phenomenally popular children’s program, The Howdy Doody Show, brought reassuring “family values” into American living rooms. For an older demographic, action pictures on the nation’s drive-in movie screens got bigger, faster, and more dangerous, as far as stunt men like Richard Farnsworth were concerned … For a standard text on Hollywood in the 1950s, see Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).