Morris Dickstein: The 1950s at War and at Home
[Morris Dickstein is the author of Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Theatre at CUNY Graduate Center and the author of Gates of Eden and Leopards in the Temple, among other works. (Photo: Nancy Crampton)]
Last week I took in two riveting films from the 1950s that reminded me, if I needed reminding, of the enduring fascination and complexity of an era in American life that is still not well understood. Not surprisingly, these movies were made by directors who seemed marginal at the time, solid professionals who worked largely in genre films. Such work drew little cultural respect, yet by flying below the radar of positive thinking they managed to avoid the upbeat clichés of the period and the industry, clichés that in many ways still condition our thinking. As result they may reveal more about the mood of the times—perhaps even its unconscious mind—than more upholstered feature productions.
The director Anthony Mann is now best known for the films noirs he made in the late 1940s, and especially the great series of Westerns he made with Jimmy Stewart in the 1950s. His work has long since been rediscovered, and it is currently enjoying a thirty-two-film retrospective at the Film Forum in New York. The film I saw, Men in War (1957), shown on TCM to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the Korean War, was his only war movie and surely one of the most grim and depressing combat films ever made in the United States. This little tale seems so numbing and pointless that it’s hard to believe that it dealt with the Korean conflict, not the Vietnam War, which it eerily seems to anticipate. It is set in early September 1950 at a low point in the war, when South Korea had largely been overrun and United Nations forces were reduced to a small perimeter around Pusan. For the soldiers fighting, who seem like little more than enemy targets, survival is the issue, not war aims or victory.
The film tracks the fate of one platoon under the command of a lieutenant (Robert Ryan), and their situation mirrors the dire condition of the war as a whole. The platoon is lost and out of radio contact in no-man’s land, its one vehicle has broken down, and enemy snipers lurk everywhere. Yet somehow they must make it to Hill 465, fifteen miles away, where presumably they can link up with other American forces. To carry their weapons, equipment, and ammunition, they commandeer a jeep driven by a sergeant (Aldo Ray) who is trying to deliver his catatonic, shell-shocked colonel (Robert Keith) to safety—that is, out of the war. Ryan upsets Ray’s plans, and the tension between the two men drives the rest of the movie, like the dueling male rivalry at the heart of most of Mann’s Westerns.
Robert Ryan is one of great underrated actors of the period, usually playing insidiously charming or morally ambiguous figures who complicate any easy sense of good and evil. Here he plays what seems like the perfect officer, utterly devoted to his men and mission, always ready to put himself at risk. Aldo Ray, on the other hand, is an officer’s nightmare, a thick-necked bulldog, insolent and insubordinate from the first moment his jeep is stopped. But Ryan’s determination is streaked with fatalism—his knowledge that the mission is futile, that his men are doomed from start. And Ray’s intractable willfulness is powered by his filial devotion to his mute, helpless colonel, the only man who has ever called him “son,” and by his almost preternatural instinct for anticipating and outgunning the enemy that surrounds them. These mixed characters pose moral dilemmas familiar from the best Westerns.
In the end there are no Americans to link up with at Hill 465, the post has been overrun, and nearly all of Ryan’s men are killed in trying to take it, just as he anticipated. The only survivors are Ryan, wounded but still fighting, and Ray, who had lost his beloved colonel when the old man, in a desperate gesture, tried to join the fight. Together Ryan and Ray, using flame-throwers and grenades, rout the remnant of the opposition and capture the hill, a gesture as pointless, futile, and hollow as the war itself, as least as the film portrays it. If we are still tempted to think of the 1950s as complacent, smugly prosperous, and blandly optimistic, yet also Manichean in its cold war sense of friends and enemies, this film alone would be enough to disabuse us. Its bleak atmosphere is closer to Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” than to any heroic triumphalism. Even its title, pointing to men in war rather than at war (Hemingway’s phrase), suggests entrapment rather than agency. By 1957, the postwar feeling of economic and political dominance, always qualified by an undercurrent of anxiety, was clearly breaking down....
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Last week I took in two riveting films from the 1950s that reminded me, if I needed reminding, of the enduring fascination and complexity of an era in American life that is still not well understood. Not surprisingly, these movies were made by directors who seemed marginal at the time, solid professionals who worked largely in genre films. Such work drew little cultural respect, yet by flying below the radar of positive thinking they managed to avoid the upbeat clichés of the period and the industry, clichés that in many ways still condition our thinking. As result they may reveal more about the mood of the times—perhaps even its unconscious mind—than more upholstered feature productions.
The director Anthony Mann is now best known for the films noirs he made in the late 1940s, and especially the great series of Westerns he made with Jimmy Stewart in the 1950s. His work has long since been rediscovered, and it is currently enjoying a thirty-two-film retrospective at the Film Forum in New York. The film I saw, Men in War (1957), shown on TCM to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the Korean War, was his only war movie and surely one of the most grim and depressing combat films ever made in the United States. This little tale seems so numbing and pointless that it’s hard to believe that it dealt with the Korean conflict, not the Vietnam War, which it eerily seems to anticipate. It is set in early September 1950 at a low point in the war, when South Korea had largely been overrun and United Nations forces were reduced to a small perimeter around Pusan. For the soldiers fighting, who seem like little more than enemy targets, survival is the issue, not war aims or victory.
The film tracks the fate of one platoon under the command of a lieutenant (Robert Ryan), and their situation mirrors the dire condition of the war as a whole. The platoon is lost and out of radio contact in no-man’s land, its one vehicle has broken down, and enemy snipers lurk everywhere. Yet somehow they must make it to Hill 465, fifteen miles away, where presumably they can link up with other American forces. To carry their weapons, equipment, and ammunition, they commandeer a jeep driven by a sergeant (Aldo Ray) who is trying to deliver his catatonic, shell-shocked colonel (Robert Keith) to safety—that is, out of the war. Ryan upsets Ray’s plans, and the tension between the two men drives the rest of the movie, like the dueling male rivalry at the heart of most of Mann’s Westerns.
Robert Ryan is one of great underrated actors of the period, usually playing insidiously charming or morally ambiguous figures who complicate any easy sense of good and evil. Here he plays what seems like the perfect officer, utterly devoted to his men and mission, always ready to put himself at risk. Aldo Ray, on the other hand, is an officer’s nightmare, a thick-necked bulldog, insolent and insubordinate from the first moment his jeep is stopped. But Ryan’s determination is streaked with fatalism—his knowledge that the mission is futile, that his men are doomed from start. And Ray’s intractable willfulness is powered by his filial devotion to his mute, helpless colonel, the only man who has ever called him “son,” and by his almost preternatural instinct for anticipating and outgunning the enemy that surrounds them. These mixed characters pose moral dilemmas familiar from the best Westerns.
In the end there are no Americans to link up with at Hill 465, the post has been overrun, and nearly all of Ryan’s men are killed in trying to take it, just as he anticipated. The only survivors are Ryan, wounded but still fighting, and Ray, who had lost his beloved colonel when the old man, in a desperate gesture, tried to join the fight. Together Ryan and Ray, using flame-throwers and grenades, rout the remnant of the opposition and capture the hill, a gesture as pointless, futile, and hollow as the war itself, as least as the film portrays it. If we are still tempted to think of the 1950s as complacent, smugly prosperous, and blandly optimistic, yet also Manichean in its cold war sense of friends and enemies, this film alone would be enough to disabuse us. Its bleak atmosphere is closer to Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” than to any heroic triumphalism. Even its title, pointing to men in war rather than at war (Hemingway’s phrase), suggests entrapment rather than agency. By 1957, the postwar feeling of economic and political dominance, always qualified by an undercurrent of anxiety, was clearly breaking down....