1945-1953: Generally a forgotten era?

[2jakes]

Aside from Korean war movies, the only one I can think of set in that time period is "The Last Picture Show". Can anyone think of any others?

Not in the same league as Chinatown but this film is memorable
for the good times which I enjoyed when I lived there
driving my 1946 Chevrolet truck along the orange groves and
vineyards.

 

[EngProf]

Since I was born in 1948 and turned five in 1953, I can personally testify that people (kids and adults) were terrified of the polio possibility in that era. It wasn't an urban legend to us, since my best friend's little brother got it - fortunately a mild case.
The idea of having to live in an "iron lung" scared the heck out of us, even as little kids.

What may have been an urban legend was that getting wet by swimming or other means was something that could cause (or increase the chances of getting) polio. I still remember that our parents went into panic mode when they caught us squirting each other with the garden hose.

As for the 1947-1953 era in general, it was mentioned in passing above that it was the era for film noir movies. To emphasize the point, some really great films were made in that time period. Ironically, a number of these were low-budget/"B" movies, so they had to shoot out on the street instead of in a studio. Since they couldn't afford rear projection to simulate driving in a car, they just put the camera in the back seat and away they went.

The net result of that realism is that the "cheap" noir movies hold up better today than a lot of bigger-budget pictures.

 

[2jakes]

I remember hearing about polio back in '53 with all the grownups
talking about it.
What terrified me the most was the painful shots that was required prior to attending elementary school.
Needles today have improved &
are not as painful.
Nevertheless, I still cringe when I
have to get one today.

 

[EngProf]

A follow-up to the praise for film noir:
Th original post in this thread had the statement: "I feel its one of the last truly wholesome times in American history - the heart of the Norman Rockwell era."

I tend to agree in general, but was struck by the opposite nature (un-Rockwell) of the film noir that was born and had it's best days in the 1945-1953 era.
In those movies everything happened at night, in the rain, or both. They were full of murder, duplicitous dames, double-crossing, crooks, con-men, and all sorts of bad people and events.

Consider just the 1947 movie "Kiss of Death" (the name itself is very un-Rockwell) in which Richard Widmark laughs maniacally as he pushes an old lady in a wheelchair down a stairway (even more un-Rockwell!).

It wasn't all fun and games in the 1945-53 time period.

 

[scotrace]

Fascinating. That was the relationship at the focus of the 1993 film Shadowlands, then? Debra Winger as Joy, and Anthony Hopkins as Lewis? That would be a "modern" film dealing with the 1945-1953 era.

Indeed. A wonderful tear-jerker of a film. My favorite line, which I've thought of often as it applies to my own life these days, is by Lewis. Something about "I'm no longer looking over the next hill, or around the bend. I'm here now, and it's fine."

 

[scotrace]

I remember hearing about polio back in '53 with all the grownups
talking about it.
What terrified me the most was the painful shots that was required prior to attending elementary school.
Needles today have improved &
are not as painful.
Nevertheless, I still cringe when I
have to get one today.

I became UNGLUED on shot days. You'd come to school, ready for whatever, and suddenly you're in line to get stuck with a giant needle. And the school nurse, always a scary broad, policing the line and taking pleasure in the weeping kids they were sending to slaughter. I can't believe they did that in school, without warning.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I tend to agree in general, but was struck by the opposite nature (un-Rockwell) of the film noir that was born and had it's best days in the 1945-1953 era.

Not really odd at all when you consider, as the Kefauver Committee found, that crime and corruption were in fact rampant in this "Rockwellian" era. Many of the thugs and hoods who had busied themselves with black marketing, counterfeiting ration books, and providing for the sexual needs of frustrated young men in Army camps had to find new fields of endeavor with the war over. The fact that there was so much that was corrupt during the period was so at odds with the gleaming vision of a glorious postwar America that ordinary people had been sold during the war led quite naturally to an increased level of cynicism in which everything was believed to be for sale and everyone had their price. The real world of the early postwar era was a world where you thought nothing of bribing the landlord to get an apartment, bribing the butcher and the grocer for first call on the meat and the sugar, and bribing the car dealer to bump you to the head of the list for a new Mercury. This was a world tailor-made for the noir fad.

Even religion had its price during these years. The National Association of Manufacturers essentially created a new religion out of whole cloth during the postwar years by orchestrating, thru a front called "The Religion in American Life Campaign", a nationwide "religious revival" built around the idea that the chief dogmas of capitalism were closely conflated with those of a so-called "traditional faith" to which America must return after its apostasies of the 1930s -- with results that would have had Christ himself reaching for his whip. That was a pretty noirish thing to do.

 

[PeterGunnLives]

Disney's animated movie adaptation of Alice in Wonderland was released during this period, specifically 1951.

And in the same year, there was also An American in Paris, with Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron.

 

[Bigger Don]

A follow-up to the praise for film noir:
Th original post in this thread had the statement: "I feel its one of the last truly wholesome times in American history - the heart of the Norman Rockwell era."

I tend to agree in general, but was struck by the opposite nature (un-Rockwell) of the film noir that was born and had it's best days in the 1945-1953 era.
In those movies everything happened at night, in the rain, or both. They were full of murder, duplicitous dames, double-crossing, crooks, con-men, and all sorts of bad people and events.

Consider just the 1947 movie "Kiss of Death" (the name itself is very un-Rockwell) in which Richard Widmark laughs maniacally as he pushes an old lady in a wheelchair down a stairway (even more un-Rockwell!).

It wasn't all fun and games in the 1945-53 time period.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042208/

 

[2jakes]

"It's a hard world for little things." ~ Rachel Cooper.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

The noirs were as much a European product as American. Many European film people fled to Hollywood to escape the Nazis and brought their sensibilities with them. The stark black-and-white photography with its slanted light and shadowplay was straight out of German Expressionism of the Weimar era. The cynical attitudes of the characters and plots, the nobody-is-really-innocent philosophy of the scripts was too gritty for prewar and wartime America but perfect for that audience of returning GIs. The fake innocence was just that: fake. These people, my parents' generation, had just been through the Depression and the most godawful war in history. They weren't innocent. They knew the score. As author James Ellroy puts it, the lesson of noir is, "You're f***ed."

 

[Fading Fast]

The noirs were as much a European product as American. Many European film people fled to Hollywood to escape the Nazis and brought their sensibilities with them. The stark black-and-white photography with its slanted light and shadowplay was straight out of German Expressionism of the Weimar era. The cynical attitudes of the characters and plots, the nobody-is-really-innocent philosophy of the scripts was too gritty for prewar and wartime America but perfect for that audience of returning GIs. The fake innocence was just that: fake. These people, my parents' generation, had just been through the Depression and the most godawful war in history. They weren't innocent. They knew the score. As author James Ellroy puts it, the lesson of noir is, "You're f***ed."

While it is often looked at now very derisively - the "conformity" of the '50s, the company man, suburbs, etc. - part of why all that was embraced is just what you said, that generation, my parents' generation, had gone to Hell and back. They were born in or right before the depression - lived / grew up through that destitution - only to be thrown into a world war where the young men where trained, shipped over seas and thrown in fox holes or told to jump out of planes into enemy territory.

After that, is it really surprising that they wanted a life that appears calmed, controlled, secure, "nice?" Of course it wasn't those things, but I think they were trying for those things after the maelstroms they had spent the prior two decades in. We can look back with contempt at its conformity, banality and seeming shallowness, but as they say about walking a mile in another man's shoes, I have respect for why they were striving for all that even if I personally don't want to live in that world.

 

[Fading Fast]

...Continuing on the above post

There is nothing - drug addiction, sexual infidelities, alcoholism, child abuse, broken homes, inter-racial relationships, bankruptcy, and on and on - that my father and grandmother didn't know all about by the '50s (they had seen all of that in the '30s and '40s), but the goal in the '50s seemed to be to keep the appearance of it all simpler, safer, more secure, better.

They had seen everything that the "kids" of the '60s thought they were discovering de novo. The '60s didn't shock my father and grandmother because they were seeing any of these things for the first time, they shocked them (or at least surprised them) because, prior, these things were intentionally kept hidden form the surface with the message being that these are bad things to avoid.

I'm a live and let live guy - very libertarian in my social leanings - so I'm all for do what you want. Drink, drugs, sex, gay marriage, marriage of three people, whatever - have at it, but I understand that there is a cost to that. Many will become victims of these freedoms / some were protected by the social constraints of the '50s.

As a firm member of the socially liberal group, I am not so willful that I fail to acknowledge the cost of these social freedoms or so arrogant as to dismiss the intent of some in the '50s to build a set of guardrails for our culture that did protect some of the weakest of our society from themselves.

Film Noir was, in part, the underbelly breaking through the surface narrative. Film-noir vices and realities were there in the '50s as they were there in every other decade and ever place where humans have built societies that have any freedom. I am no fan of the "Father Knows Best" narrative, but I am not so smug as to just dismiss it all, but instead, see it as a failed, but well-intended-by-some, attempt to improve society after the storm and stress of the depression and WWII.

 

[2jakes]

^^^^^^
I asked my grandma how bad was it living during the "depression" of
the 30's .
This question was a result from watching movies/documentaries
from that time period.

Basically, she told me that it was
rough times. But it wasn't as evident because it was all the
same in the neighborhood.
Mostly it was the rich folks that she read about in the papers that
had a rougher time dealing with
it after having lost much.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^^^^
I asked my grandma how bad was it living during the "depression" of
the 30's .
This question was a result from watching movies/documentaries
from that time period.

Basically, she told me that it was
rough times. But it wasn't as evident because it was all the
same in the neighborhood.
Mostly it was the rich folks that she read about in the papers that
had a rougher time dealing with
it after having lost much.

You wouldn't have had to ask in my house, as the Depression loomed large as a risk of returning and "edifying" talking point for my dad all the time. I grew up in the '60s and '70s in constant fear that we'd be plunged into a Depression, lose our house and not have food any day now. I still have that fear today, but after living with it for 52 years, I've learned to treat it as just another thing to worry about.

My Dad's family was what I guess was middle class before the depression hit -they had a small home (I've seen it, we'd drive by it growing up and my dad would tell me what it felt like to have to leave it at 7 years old - fun stories), a used car and a radio, but they were hardly living large. That said, they lost the home and moved into a tenement (I was in the tenement as my grandmother was still living there when I was growing up) that was not nice.

You are spot on that it sounds as if everyone was struggling just to get by, but there is no doubt that the hard step down my father and grandmother took defined who they were and what they thought and worried about the rest of their lives.

 

[LizzieMaine]

My grandparents survived the Depression on less than $500 a year -- with two kids, no electricity until 1939, and only cold running water. And they didn't live out in the woods -- they were right in town. When I was growing up we lived on, adjusted for inflation, even less money than that. Depression was the default for our town, not any kind of an anomaly. Growing up worrying about being evicted isn't a family legend I heard passed down around the supper table. It happened to me, personally, and it still affects me to this day.

On the question of media depictions, a lot of the Smiling Happy Middle Class Ethnically Indeterminate White People imagery carried over from pre-WWII Hollywood, where an industry largely founded by working-class Jewish immigrants went out of its way to bleach itself of anything reflective of its own background. Think of all the movies you saw full of clean-cut families in big airy houses with Hattie McDaniel or Louise Beavers chucklin' and grinnin' around the kitchen, and try to square that with the reality of the 1930s, in which America was overwhelmingly a working-class country full of families living on less than $1000 a year. Many of the same people who were producing this kind of stuff in the thirties were still part of the show-business hierarchy in the 1950s, and many of them, in the political and social climate of that period, had even more of a reason to slather their product in Hollywood's answer to Miracle Whip.

 

[2jakes]

You wouldn't have had to ask in my house, as the Depression loomed large as a risk of returning and "edifying" talking point for my dad all the time. I grew up in the '60s and '70s in constant fear that we'd be plunged into a Depression, lose our house and not have food any day now. I still have that fear today, but after living with it for 52 years, I've learned to treat it as just another thing to worry about.

My Dad's family was what I guess was middle class before the depression hit -they had a small home (I've seen it, we'd drive by it growing up and my dad would tell me what it felt like to have to leave it at 7 years old - fun stories), a used car and a radio, but they were hardly living large. That said, they lost the home and moved into a tenement (I was in the tenement as my grandmother was still living there when I was growing up) that was not nice.

You are spot on that it sounds as if everyone was struggling just to get by, but there is no doubt that the hard step down my father and grandmother took defined who they were and what they thought and worried about the rest of their lives.

I can understand your concerns growing up with such fears.

I grew up in the 50s.
I do recall my folks at times talk
about the bills.
They never had credit cards and
made the most of what they had.
And *Santa* always came through
in December for us .
Between the age of 3 to 6, I lived
with my grandma. That's where I
met jake. My grandma's dog.
He was the best friend who protected me from the bullies in
the neighborhood.
When I started elementary, I went
to live with my parents.
Both my parents worked to make sure there was food on the table.
Looking back, it is remarkable that
my father never drank or abuse
my mother. Something that was
common in the neighborhood.

My father never took me anywhere or teach me about things as a kid growing up. He did love me in
his own way by making sure I
never was hungry.

It was my uncle David, my grandma and ma that gave me
the love that I could feel by
doing things for me as a kid.
And without ever making me feel like, "what's in it for me?"

I believe that is where I got my
strength to take on the world as
I grew up to meet the 60s and
the rest.
It was later, I would realize how much my father did for us to
make sure that I had no fears
about the future.

 

[tonyb]

From an early age I knew that the faces we working class people attempted to present to the world contrasted sharply with our actual domestic lives, after the company had left and the doors were closed.

Domestic violence, drunkenness, economic insecurity -- such was our life. And while there were attempts to conceal those first two items, or at least make light of them, the latter entry was borne as a matter of real shame.

Knocking around one's wife and children was too often viewed as no one else's business, the head of the household's prerogative, patriarchy taken to where it will inevitably go. And drinking carried a certain cachet. But being poor was, in the often strained household of my youth, an almost unspeakable moral failing.

I'm still at something of a loss to explain why. The folks and their folks had been through the Depression, and were of "regular people" stock. And surely they knew that those ubiquitous media images of post-War affluence were mostly show biz, and at odds with their own experience and that of most people they knew.

In retrospect, I wish the folks had just told us that we wouldn't be doing or having certain things because we didn't have the money. Concealing that plain and simple truth left me feeling that I had to do without on account of being somehow undeserving.

 

[2jakes]

In retrospect, I wish the folks had just told us that we wouldn't be doing or having certain things because we didn't have the money. Concealing that plain and simple truth left me feeling that I had to do without on account of being somehow undeserving.

Perhaps they were trying to conceal the fact that they couldn't provide some things because
they couldn't afford it and didn't want to hurt your feelings.

My mother told me once that they did some dumb things as far as safety is concern with us
when we were young kids.

"It's a miracle you made it."
She would often tell me.

Bringing kids into this crazy world does not come with an
"auto-pilot" mode on how to raise kids the right way.

 

[LizzieMaine]

From an early age I knew that the faces we working class people attempted to present to the world contrasted sharply with our actual domestic lives, after the company had left and the doors were closed.

Domestic violence, drunkenness, economic insecurity -- such was our life. And while there were attempts to conceal those first two items, or at least make light of them, the latter entry was borne as a matter of real shame.

Knocking around one's wife and children was too often viewed as no one else's business, the head of the household's prerogative, patriarchy taken to where it will inevitably go. And drinking carried a certain cachet. But being poor was, in the often strained household of my youth, an almost unspeakable moral failing.

I'm still at something of a loss to explain why. The folks and their folks had been through the Depression, and were of "regular people" stock. And surely they knew that those ubiquitous media images of post-War affluence were mostly show biz, and at odds with their own experience and that of most people they knew.

In retrospect, I wish the folks had just told us that we wouldn't be doing or having certain things because we didn't have the money. Concealing that plain and simple truth left me feeling that I had to do without on account of being somehow undeserving.

We didn't make any such pretenses in my family -- we were what we were, and we disdained those who were in the same boat but thru pretense and Easy Kredit Terms thought they were convincing the world otherwise. Part of that comes from the fact that we were Methodists -- and the Wesleyan tradition does not teach that prosperity = righteousness, poverty = evil in any way. And part of it also comes from the fact that the neighbors could hear my mother screaming all down the block, and everybody in town knew what kind of a no-account shiftless fornicating ba***rd my father was, so there was really no point in trying to conceal it.

I've had to work most of my life alongside the bourgeoisie, and have had to learn to adjust to their expectations, when face to face, in terms of what I say and how I say it. Nice middle-class people, apparently don't call something a "rotten g. d. christley SOBing POS" out loud when they drop it on their foot. It's been a hard adjustment to make.