Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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With a celebrated conscience that writhed with guilt beside the swimming pool, Hollywood writers sang a song-of social significance. The loner of the '30s film-Gary Cooper, Gary Grant, Jimmy Stewart-always triumphed against Big Money, amid settings of dreamlike luxury, cluttered with butlers, white pianos and canopied beds. Like animated editorial cartoons, their opposition was always a vested-and usually watch-chained-interest on the order of Edward Arnold. The heroine-Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Arthur-spoke with a catch in her throat that accented her vulnerability. But she had a whim of iron, and when...
...what Jean Cocteau called the "petrified fountain of thought." Ghosts of America's past, they evoke the naivete, exuberance-and problems of a simpler society. To middle-aged Americans, they can also be embarrassments with commercials. Did the public truly love those painful Blondie pictures so much that Hollywood made 28 of them? How did Turhan Bey ever become a star? Did anyone really take Errol Flynn seriously in Desperate Journey, after he sabotaged German munitions plants, hijacked a Nazi bomber and shouted: "Now for Australia and a crack at those Japs...
...movies almost always portrayed U.S. dreams-and thus, indirectly, realities. Just as the peasant tales retold by the Grimm brothers spoke of common maidens who could spin gold from straw, Hollywood created its own folk stories from the yearnings of 1930s audiences. If I Had a Million, for example, tells of a quirky financier who sends million-dollar checks to strangers. A colorless clerk played by Charles Laughton receives his check in the mail, goes to the president of his company, sticks out his tongue and delivers a loud Bronx cheer. Blackout. In those precarious years, the vicarious thrill...
...cute, the late-show screen child seems like a kid who has stayed up past his bedtime. During the Depression parents somehow found their children easier to get along with -perhaps because they had a sense of sharing a common crisis. Children seemed comforting, or at least cheering. Hollywood fostered Jackie Cooper, Frankie Darro, Mickey Rooney, Our Gang and the apotheosis of innocence, Shirley Temple. "I class myself with Rin-Tin-Tin," she later said, referring to such films as Bright Eyes and Curly Top. "At the end of the Depression, people were perhaps looking for something to cheer them...
Just about the only benefit today's Negroes can trace to the standard Hollywood product is the current Black Power slogan, "Ungawa!"-a fake African chant from a Tarzan picture. Even in 1950 reruns, Negroes are chuckleheaded or criminal. In mystery pictures, it is a Negro who discovers the corpse and scampers away shouting "Feets do yo' stuff!" Says the comic: "I don't want any dark innuendoes." Chirps the chauffeur: "Anybody call me?" Even such all-black musicals as Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky patronized as they provided employment. "It's been...