The Cold War, with all of its threats and visions of mass destruction and apocalyptic scenarios appears far away these days. However, when the menace of nuclear weapons that possibly would be launched if wrong decisions were made by a few incompetent men in the military back in the 1960s, stories, novels and mostly movies […]
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Tag: Cold War
Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism by Paul S. Hirsch (2021)
Comic books as media today would not raise much attention if they featured heavy use of violence or representations of vigilantes who take the law into their own hands. On the contrary, the media now is deeply absorbed into the popular canon of the US. “The comic book, whether in the form of a collectible […]
Demographic Angst: Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s by Alan Nadel (2017)
Alan Nadel, probably best known for his expert writings on the Atomic Age and American everyday life in the 1950s, has come up with another study of that period. A time when not just the permanent fears of a hot war or Soviet invasion were present, but also strange (or possibly communist) activities from your […]
Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America … by Steffen Hantke
The 1950s and 1960s were the decades when science-fiction movies boomed and during that time not so much technology, but disgust, shock, fear, basically all aspects of horror and horror movies, were used instead to give science fiction movies a certain direction by presenting miniature or giant creatures, mutants and every kind or harrowing creature […]
Invasion USA: Anti-Communist Movies of the 1950s and 1960s by David J. Hogan (2017)
With motion pictures as one of the most powerful instruments to display the enemies’ (i.e. the USSR’s) efforts to destroy the trust of the American people in their country in the mid-1950s, a number of movies by US studios were produced. The plots centered mostly around Soviet spies, communist agents or Americans, who had lost […]
Film Fatales: Women in Espionage Films … by Tom Lisanti and Louis Paul (2016)
Intelligence work for centuries has been an important part of a nation’s security. Over the years, the profession of “the spy” was developed and particularly during the Cold War those people – no matter from which side of the Iron Curtain – were interested in securing their respective country an advantage in information or technology. […]
The Red and the Black: American Film Noir in the 1950s by Robert Miklitsch (2017)
Film noir in the 1950s is a very special period in the genre‘s/style’s history, since for some experts film noir ended just then, while for others it almost died then and had finally vanished completely in the early 1960s. (To resurface as neo-noir in the early 1980s). In the book at hand the author tries […]
Apocalypse Then: American and Japanese Atomic Cinema, 1951-1967 by Mike Bogue (2017)
„Both America and Japan produced a number of science fiction movies in the 1950s and 1960s directly or indirectly tied to the nuclear threat. … American […] films tended to suggest that it was possible to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle. However, the Japanese science fiction films of the same era were […]
Music in the Age of Anxiety: American Music in the Fifties by James Wierzbicki (2016)
What may come to mind first when we think about the music of the 1950s in the US are probably the styles of Rock’n’Roll, Doo Wop and Rhythm and Blues. Wierzbicki however, in his study points to the many other musical forms that evolved in that decade, since changes and developments in American politics, society, […]