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The Way to Salvation: The Hollywood Blockbuster of the 1950s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Thomas H. Pauly
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Extract

The religious epic, which consistently dominated the annual list of top-grossing films throughout the 1950s, was spawned by the trying conditions that developed in the United States, and Hollywood in particular, during the aftermath of World War II. V-J Day sent the country on a short-lived spree from which it awoke with a hangover that was to last for years. If most anticipated the difficulties of finding jobs and housing, few foresaw the soaring inflation and crippling strikes that followed. To make matters worse, Soviet belligerence and the frightening spread of Communism soon intruded the prospect of another war and a possible nuclear holocaust. Mounting disagreement over appropriate solutions eroded belief that any would work. For many people, the best years of their lives, of which the war was once thought to have robbed them, began to appear as though they may well have been the best.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 5 , October 1980 , pp. 467 - 487
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

NOTES

1. Houseman, John, “Hollywood Faces the Fifties,” Harper's, 05 1950, p. 52Google Scholar, and Jowett, Garth, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), pp. 347–48.Google Scholar

2. See “The Dollar Assessment,” Time 45 (02 5, 1945), p. 53Google Scholar; “AFRA and Mr. DeMille,” The New Republic 112 (02 5, 1945), p. 164Google Scholar; “De Mille's Dollar,” Newsweek 25 (02 5, 1945), p. 41Google Scholar; De Mille, Cecil B., Autobiography, ed. Hayne, Donald (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959), pp. 384–87.Google Scholar

3. De Mille, , Autobiography, pp. 396–97.Google Scholar

4. De Mille, Cecil B., “Stand Up and Be Counted,” Vital Speeches 12 (11 1, 1945), 48Google Scholar; “House United,” Vital Speeches 13 (12 15, 1946), 151Google Scholar; and “While Rome Burns,” Vital Speeches 14 (06 1, 1948), 495.Google Scholar

5. See Geist, Kenneth L., Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978), pp. 173–206.Google Scholar

6. De Mille's politics and filmmaking techniques had generated such ill will by 1950 that Joseph and Harry Feldman began their defense of him: “The ‘hate De Mille’ cult has swelled to such proportions that he is regarded today by many critics as the worst director in Hollywood, and his very name has been anathematized in ‘advanced” film circles,” “Cecil B. De Mille's Virtues,” Films in Reuiew, 1 (12 1950), 1.Google Scholar See also Lardner, Ring Jr., “The Sign of the Boss,” The Screen Writer, 1 (11 1945), 1–12.Google Scholar

7. De Mille, , Autobiography, p. 399.Google Scholar

8. An ad in the 1944 Film Daily Yearbook (p. 298)Google Scholar announced that Mervin Le Roy would direct The Robe and that Ross would handle the production through RKO. Delays necessitated by war restrictions, followed by spiraling production costs and changing audience tastes, caused RKO to waffle, and Ross took his property to J. Arthur Rank in England, but he too proved reluctant after the whopping $3 million costs incurred by his lavish production of Caesar and Cleopatra. Remarkably, The Robe did not appear in movie houses until almost twelve years after its success as a bestseller.

9. Between 1947 and 1950 the percentage of social problem and psychological films being made dropped from 28 percent of the total to 11.7 percent. John Cogley, Table 15 in Report on Blacklisting I: Movies (Fund for the Republic, 1950), pp. 282, 284.

10. Variety, 12 6, 1944, p. 5, and April 14, 1948, p. 9.Google Scholar

11. Motion Picture Herald, 10 16, 1948, p. 31.Google Scholar

12. Variety, 01 3, 1951, p. 1.Google Scholar

13. Variety, 07 5, 1950, p. 5.Google Scholar

14. Variety, 04 2, 1947, p. 52. The play closed in four weeks.Google Scholar

15. Variety, 04 28, 1948, p. 25.Google Scholar

16. Wood, Michael, America in the Movies (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 184.Google Scholar

17. Governmental statistics cited in A. Roy Eckhardt, The Surge of Piety in America: An Appraisal (New York: Association Press, 1958), p. 22. For a recent discussion charting the scope and magnitude of this religious revival, see Miller, Douglas T. and Novak, Marion, “Ain't Nobody Here but Us Protestants, Catholics, and Jews,” in The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (New York: Doubleday, 1977). pp. 84–195.Google Scholar

18. Marty, Martin E., The New Shape of American Religion (New York: Harper, 1958), p. 15.Google Scholar See also Eckhardt, , Surge of Piety.Google Scholar

19. Quoted in Theoharis, Athan, “The Rhetoric of Politics: Foreign Policy, Internal Security, and Domestic Politics in the Truman Era 1945–1950,” in Bernstein, Barton J., ed., Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 213.Google Scholar

20. Quoted in Adler, Les K., “The Politics of Culture: Hollywood and the Cold War,” in Griffith, Robert and Theoharis, Athan, eds., The Specter (New York: New York Viewpoints, 1974), p. 259.Google Scholar

21. Marty, , New Shape, p. 20.Google Scholar

22. Variety, 01 3, 1951, p. 1.Google Scholar

23. Crowther, Bosley, The Lion's Share: The Story of an Entertainment Empire (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1957), p. 295.Google Scholar

24. The Robe actually premiered in October 1953, but its popularity continued well beyond the spring 1954 hearings.