Screen Decades – serie

The 1940s was a watershed decade for American cinema and the nation. At the start of the decade, Hollywood - shaking off the Depression - launched an unprecedented wave of production, generating some of its most memorable classics, including Citizen Kane, Rebecca, The Lady Eve, Sergeant York, and How Green Was My Valley. Hollywood then joined the national war effort with a vengeance, creating a series of patriotic and escapist films, such as Casablanca, Mrs. Miniver, The Road to Morocco, and Yankee Doodle Dandy. By the end of the war America was a country transformed. The 1940s closed with the threat of the atom bomb and the beginnings of the Hollywood blacklist. Film Noir reflected the new public mood of pessimism and paranoia. Classic films of betrayal and conflict - Kiss of Death, Force of Evil, Caught, and Apology for Murder - depicted a poisonous universe of femme fatales, crooked lawyers, and corrupt politicians.

The 1940s was a watershed decade for American cinema and the nation. At the start of the decade, Hollywood - shaking off the Depression - launched an unprecedented wave of production, generating some of its most memorable classics, including Citizen Kane, Rebecca, The Lady Eve, Sergeant York, and How Green Was My Valley. Hollywood then joined the national war effort with a vengeance, creating a series of patriotic and escapist films, such as Casablanca, Mrs. Miniver, The Road to Morocco, and Yankee Doodle Dandy. By the end of the war America was a country transformed. The 1940s closed with the threat of the atom bomb and the beginnings of the Hollywood blacklist. Film Noir reflected the new public mood of pessimism and paranoia. Classic films of betrayal and conflict - Kiss of Death, Force of Evil, Caught, and Apology for Murder - depicted a poisonous universe of femme fatales, crooked lawyers, and corrupt politicians.

America in the 1950s was a place of sensational commercial possibility coupled with dark nuclear fears and conformist politics. Cold war hysteria and anti-communist witch hunts influenced a culture already falling under the spell of suburbia, television and a brave new world of luxury goods.Throughout the decade Hollywood was under siege: from the Justice Department pressing for big film companies to divest themselves of their theatre holdings; from the middle classes, whose retreat to family entertainment inside the home drastically decreased the film-going audience; and from the House Un-American Activities Committee, attempting to purge the country of dissenting political views. This tumultuous decade also saw some of Hollywoods most talented filmmakers - John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray and Billy Wilder - producing some of the best-loved movies in the history of cinema, including From Here to Eternity, Sunset Boulevard., Singin' in the Rain, Shane, Rear Window, and Rebel Without a Cause.

The 1970s was a decade of social upheaval that challenged the foundations of American culture: the killing of students at Kent State and Jackson State universities, the riots at Attica state prison, the Munich Olympic tragedy, Watergate, the Supreme Court's decision to legalize abortion, the end of American involvement in Vietnam, the signing of the Camp David Peace Accords, the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, and the taking of American hostages in Iran. The director-driven movies of the 1970s reflected this turmoil, experimenting with narrative structures, offering a gallery of scruffy anti-heroes, and revising traditional genre conventions. American Cinema of the 1970s examines the range of films that marked the decade, including Chinatown, Jaws, Rocky, Getting Straight, Love Story, Shaft, Dirty Harry, The Godfather, Deliverance, Enter the Dragon, The Exorcist, The Conversation, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Saturday Night Fever, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Apocalypse Now.