Posting will be sparse the next couple of weeks as I try to power through this dissertation chapter. For those wondering what it is exactly I’m writing on, the diss is an analytical history of Hollywood’s social problem films from the 1940s and 50s… Gentleman’s Agreement, The Men, The Snake Pit, Defiant Ones, etc. This chapter’s about the popular press reception of those films; specifically, I’m looking at newspaper and magazine reviews from the time and reading them for markers of middlebrow reclamation of cinema as a “serious” medium. Their preference for films combining classical Hollywood narrative storytelling with serious uplift borrowed from the other arts was just one part of a cultural transformation mid-century, by which a rapidly expanded white collar class gave rise to “status panic” and a new middlebrow sensibility.
Just in case you were curious.
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