Newspaper Article

MOVIES AS A TALE, AND TOOL, OF SOCIETY

Carr, Jay

2000

Overview

Will Rogers, hazily remembered today as a kindly, folksy comedian, is recalled as the half-Cherokee populist he was, dispensing sharp- edged political comment and calling for the redistribution of wealth. Starting with the rich, double-edged title of his book, resonating as it does with idealism and noir sensibility, May argues that the Depression was actually a liberating influence on the American mind, freeing it from blind subservience to the establishment, which obviously didn't have all the answers, encouraging artists to junk European models and invent new ones, allowing hitherto marginalized voices to be heard in the new - and to some, shocking - gangster movies, working-girl comedies, and snappy musicals. New archetypes appeared, from two-fisted working-class protagonists (Cagney, Gable, Stanwyck, Davis) to sophisticated iconoclasts such as William Powell and Myrna Loy in \"The Thin Man.\" Not that the postwar ideal of consumerism and domesticity offered an entirely satisfying alternative. The anxiety resulting from the stifling postwar imperative to conform gave rise to film noir, May argues, with its outsider sensibility lurking in the shadows. (He might have added the films of Douglas Sirk, that master portrayer of postwar American domestic and social entrapment.) May genuflects to Billy Wilder (\"Double Indemnity\") and John Huston (\"The Asphalt Jungle\") for their subversive criticism of repressive postwar roles, and he notes the criminalization of desire that set the stage for the counterculture - a revolt that was prefigured in the rebellious archetypes of Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe.

• Publisher: Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC
• Subject: Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way / Books-titles / History / May, Lary / Motion picture industry / Nonfiction