[Peter Lev] The Fifties Transforming the Screen, 1950-1959 (djvu) {Zzzzz}

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.

Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (November 6, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0520249666
ISBN-13: 978-0520249660

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Part of a Landmark Series on Cinema
By Charles H. Harpole on June 19, 2008
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!