Part of a Landmark Series on Cinema | The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950-1959 (History of the...

book: The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950-1959 (History of the American Cinema) | Peter Lev

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	• The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950-1959 (History of the American Cinema) Peter Lev University of California Press, 2006 - 396 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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In the Middle

This is a good book, but it could have been a better book.

The main text, by Peter Lev, is very good. He clearly appreciates the movies of the Fifties, yet he is not uncritical of their shortcomings. Lev writes about the ups and downs of the major and minor studios and makes this business history informative and interesting. He also describes the major genres of the Fifties (except for sci-fi) and he does a superb job of discussing key films in those genres.

The problem lies with the "expert" chapters on special topics, such as the blacklist, censorship, the response to TV, and sci-fi films. These chapters are not written by Lev but by experts. The result is that Lev's narrative is interrupted by huge chunks of convoluted academic prose that make the reader wish that Lev had been trusted to write the whole book himself. Lev's part of the book soars. The expert chapters bring it crashing down to earth.

The Fifties came in the middle of the Twentieth Century, and "The Fifties" is about the middle of this history of American film series in terms of quality. It isn't one of the best books, but it isn't one of the worst either. The annoying thing is that it could have been better.

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Part of a Landmark Series on Cinema

The Fifties is part of the landmark series created and edited by Charles H. Harpole. Each volume covers about a decade and was conceived as a readable scholarly history, each with the same coverage: the stylistic and economic factors of American feature, documentary, and avant garde cinema. The goal is to be comprehensive, judicious, and well researched without losing the love of the movies. The illustrations are particularily good in that they are often real frame enlargements or are not published elsewhere. The U.Calif. Press paperbacks are reproductions of the Scribner $70 hardbacks and thus are a bargain.
Look for the other 9 books of the Series and enjoy!

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Completing the landmark, award-winning, ten-volume series on the first century of American film, The Fifties covers a particularly tumultuous period. Peter Lev explores the divorce of movie studios from their theater chains; the panic of the blacklist era; the explosive emergence of science fiction as the dominant genre (The Thing, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, War of the Worlds); the rise of television and Hollywood's response to the new medium, as seen in widescreen spectacles (The Robe, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur) and mature Westerns (High Noon, Shane, The Searchers). The richly detailed text elucidates a number of emerging trends as Hollywood, with its familiar stars and genres, reached out as an industry to the newly acknowledged "teenage" generation with rock and roll films, and movies as diverse as Rebel Without a Cause and Gidget.

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