On more than 300 pages the reader of Into the Dark most of all acquires one thing: a very strong visual impression of what film noir looked like. For the high-quality prints selected by Mark Vieira hold a powerful, dark beauty and tell of the fascination with film noir. Here is a good balance of […]
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Tag: 1950s United States
Bill Clifton: America’s Bluegrass Ambassador to the World by Bill C. Malone (2016)
The careers of most classical bluegrass musicians in the US more or less resemble each other, except for a few details. The typical biography finds them raised essentially in poverty, born into a family of four or five children, equipped only with the most basic schooling and after some amateur nights in between shifts in […]
Devil’s Music, Holy Rollers and Hillbillies: How America Gave Birth to Rock and Roll by James A. Cos
What historically led to the rise of American teenage youth culture and paved the way for rock’n’roll is the subject of James Cosby’s latest book. As examined against the subcultural background of post-war America, and the arrival of new musical impulses from African American culture, teenager’s unknown struggles for autonomy in an altogether anxious and […]
Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties by Bill Warren (2016)
The 1950s were a unique time when many aggressors, real and imaginative, seemingly threatened not only the people and the political system of the United States, but Earth itself. One product of these anxieties were science fiction movies that more often than not gave (not so pretty) faces and (not so nice) names to the […]
Columbia Noir: A Complete Filmography, 1940-1962 by Gene Blottner (2015)
Columbia Pictures, today a part of Sony Pictures Entertainment, has released literally tons of movies. Of those, Gene Blottner lists a selection of altogether 169 pictures, and they are all associated with film noir in one way or another, while they are from the genres of Westerns, science-fiction, drama, detective story, comedy or horror movie. […]
Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music by Barry Mazor (2015)
This very musical biography is the classical blueprint for a music biopic or future TV series, although this has not yet been realized by the film industry. Mazor’s extensive research project on music marketer and Okeh Records producer Ralph Peer is the exciting story of a young clerk working both in shipping and in his […]
Mitchum, Mexico and the Good Neighbours Era by Liam White (2014)
Luckily, there are a great number of famous noir films, and many good actors that left their mark on the whole genre. Nevertheless, author White approaches those films mainly as plain detective movies and drama, very much the way they were labeled when they came out. In his opinion there are certain features that can […]
Anxiety Muted. American Film Music … by Stanley C. Pelkey and Anthony Bushard (eds.) (2015)
In this volume the thirteen contributors research how in audiovisual media of the 1950s and 1960s (TV and cinema), the modern anxieties about conformity, urbanization, gender and family were represented audibly, that is, in sound of any kind or the lack thereof. This could be the soundtrack, music used in the media, but also all […]
Bending Steel. Modernity and the American Superhero by Aldo J. Regalado (2015)
By examining interviews, trade magazines and even testimonies, letters, memoirs and other personal data author Regalado seeks direct impact of the superheroes on the real lives of actual people. Or rather, he aims to find out just how “the big forces of American modernity shaped the lives of Americans on an individual level and how […]