An Army of Phantoms

January 24, 2011
Village Voice film critic Hoberman offers the first installment of a projected three-volume chronicle of American films during the cold war years 1946–1956. Since Hoberman sees politics "filtered through the prism of Hollywood movies—their scenarios, back stories and reception," he begins with 1950's Destination Moon, which anticipated the "space race" and called for a lunar military base, echoing a National Security Council proposal for a massive rearmament to counter the Soviet atom bomb. Onscreen antifascist heroism and more atomic associations mushroom through the early chapters. Surveying such anticommunist films as The Red Menace and The Iron Curtain, Hoberman covers witch hunts, House Committee on Un-American Activities tactics, racial dramas such as Pinky, message movies, the blacklist, protests, propaganda, HUAC humiliations, and the "Cold War's key fictional text," Orwell's 1984, all capped by a trenchant analysis of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. With exhaustive research into linkages between headlines and Hollywood, Hoberman skillfully probes movie metaphors and underlying themes in all film genres to show how cinema mirrored world events.

February 1, 2011

Sharp analysis of postwar-era Hollywood by a leading film critic and historian.

Longtime Village Voice movie critic Hoberman (Cinema History/Cooper Union; Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds, 2010, etc.) published the second part of his projected Cold War trilogy The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties in 2003; here he covers the politically tumultuous and often dangerous period that preceded it, from the end of World War II in 1945 through Eisenhower's first term, ending in 1956. It was an era when some of the canon's greatest movies appeared (High Noon, On the Waterfront, The Searchers) alongside some of the schlockiest kitsch (My Son John, The Next Voice You Hear, The Prodigal). Hoberman, whose historical narrative is as richly detailed as his movie lore, masterfully shows how Washington's anti-communist crusaders influenced the culture-makers in Hollywood in the projects they chose to develop. Both sides of the divide were especially motivated by paranoia, of communism on the right and on the left of Senator McCarthy and HUAC. Paranoia inspired some of the most interesting, multilayered films, including several of the aforementioned, as well as Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Elia Kazan's Panic in the Streets and Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street. Quoting period memoirs, FBI files, HUAC hearing transcripts and movie reviews from the mainstream and communist press, Hoberman argues that many of the themes of these movies—fear of alien invasion and the rescue of captives, to name two of the most pungent examples—were already deeply ingrained in the American national consciousness from its earliest days and continue to resonate today. The author's engaging prose will provoke many an urge to revisit the familiar and forgotten gems of a film era that was less placid than it pretended to be.

Urbane, witty cultural history.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 1, 2011

Hoberman (senior film critic, Village Voice; The Magic Hour: Film at Fin De Siecle) here delivers the second installment (after The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties) of a three-volume study of American film as viewed through the lens of politics. Hoberman's exhaustive research taps into the mainstream, entertainment, and alternative press coverage; House Un-American Activities Committee testimony; FBI files; and archival sources. He discusses the period from 1946 to 1956 in a minutely detailed and richly textured chronology that interweaves cinematic, political, military, and social history. The activities of motion picture producers, actors, and screenwriters swept up in the investigations of communist activity in the entertainment industry are paralleled with those of political and military personnel and set against the backdrop of the movies themselves--the plots, premieres, and reviews. VERDICT Serious readers will appreciate the attention to detail and thorough treatment of the subject. Recommended for film historians and Cold War scholars.--Donna L. Davey, New York Univ. Libs.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2011
In something of a prequel to his 2003 The Dream Life, which juxtaposed the events of the tumultuous 1960s with the movies of the decade, longtime Village Voice film critic Hoberman here views the Cold War alongside the concurrent output from Hollywood. Following WWII, studios swiftly turned from churning out wartime propagandaincluding numerous movies extolling our Soviet allyto scrubbing their films of any politically liberal sentiment, as congressional hearings on Red infiltration of the motion-picture industry and the subsequent blacklist roiled the industry. Nuclear jitters and the Korean War provided subject matter, while the repressive political and social atmosphere was addressed more covertly in westerns, SF, and, above all, the darkly paranoid film noir thrillers. Hobermans cinematic credentials are a givenhes been film critic at the Village Voice for more than three decadesbut his astute observations on the larger historical and cultural scene are as solid as his takes on the eras provocation movies, which make one oddly nostalgic for the days when Hollywood dealt with ideaseven wrongheaded onesrather than churning out inoffensively mindless pap.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)