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The Noir Forties: The American People From Victory to Cold War, by Richard Lingeman
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From one of our finest cultural historians, The Noir Forties is a vivid reexamination of America’s postwar period, that “age of anxiety” characterized by the dissipation of victory dreams, the onset of the Red Scare, and a nascent resistance to the growing Cold War consensus.
Richard Lingeman examines a brief but momentous and crowded time, the years between VJ Day and the beginning of the Korean War, describing how we got from there to here. It evokes the social and cultural milieu of the late forties, with the vicissitudes of the New Deal Left and Popular Front culture from the end of one hot war and the beginning of the cold one—and, longer term, of a cold war that preoccupied the United States for the next fifty years. It traces the attitudes, sentiments, hopes and fears, prejudices, behavior, and collective dreams and nightmares of the times, as reflected in the media, popular culture, political movements, opinion polls, and sociological and psychological studies of mass beliefs and behavior.
- Sales Rank: #1102761 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-12-04
- Released on: 2012-12-04
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
Lingeman inquires into America’s shift from New Deal liberalism to conservatism through the lenses of America’s late-1940s cultural and political scenes. He strives to see the change in society’s mood, whether induced by military demobilization, labor strikes, or Roosevelt’s succession by Truman, as it was reflected in the period’s signature movie genre, film noir. Summarizing the plots and productions of numerous titles, from the famous (Double Indemnity) to the less widely known (Detour), he juxtaposes noir’s expressions of alienation and cynicism, for example, against societal indicators of anxiety and divorce. Mixing in polls of popular complaints about prices and housing and reviews of popular songs and pulp fiction, Lingeman eventually devises an end-point of sorts with the ascendance of anticommunism, the blacklisting of Hollywood figures, and the exhaustion of film noir’s creativity. A work that never resolves whether it’s film history, political history, or lamentation for liberalism, Lingeman’s survey becomes everything by turns. Film noir is its attraction, and noir aficionados will decide whether Lingeman’s allied subjects, including his army service, interest them––or flip by them in the hunt for the next noir critique. --Gilbert Taylor
Review
"Lingeman's discussion of films is never less than interesting, and he understands the paradox of a politically repressive period leading to some of the most inventive films ever made.... Along with movies, The Noir Forties contains fine summaries of other arts-Lingeman is especially good on the exuberant mishmash of populist forms of music that emerged after the war."
New York Times Book Review
"When I skimmed through the pages, I began to relax-and felt enchanted. It was another world. Lingeman evokes a mood, place, time, and a feeling that only someone who'd been there can. Incredible writing....Remarkable insight. Thank you for giving the world this gift."
Oliver Stone, Academy Award-winning film director, screenwriter, and producer
"Lingeman's writing is clear and readable.... Both lovers of film noir and fans of social and cultural history will find this an excellent read."
Portland Book Review
"The Noir Forties is a rather eclectic book which employs elements of autobiography, history, and cultural studies.... [A] provocative book."
History News Network
"[A]n innovative fusion of autobiography and conventional history against a backdrop of noir."
Columbia Journalism Review
"[A] richly textured and deeply felt book."
Los Angeles Review of Books
"A journalist of eclectic accomplishment...Lingeman is at home with his subject.... [E]ngaging."
Washington Independent Review of Books
"[Lingeman] has an interesting mind."
Books & Culture
"[The Noir Forties] does help us understand that time-and our time."
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"[S]eamlessly written and stuffed full of original scholarship.... Lingeman beautifully blends the arts and music into his sweeping analysis of the politics of the period. Thus the 'voices of the people'- including artists-are heard here."
U.S. News & World Report
"[E]nlightening.... [Lingeman] excels at portraying the uncertain postwar mood and the way that films noir were uniquely able to capture that mood."
Barnes & Noble Review
"There's a lot of material here and it all flows together seamlessly. This is a great book for buffs of both film and history persuasions."
Library Journal, starred review
"In The Noir Forties, Richard Lingeman offers a vivid reexamination of the cultural, psychological, and political tenor of the 'age of anxiety.' Lingeman powerfully evokes the milieu of the late forties....The Noir Forties captures an incisive slice of American life during a period of quiet but seismic change."
History Book Club
"Lingeman attributes [noir] films' popularity to a correlation between these themes and the contemporary national psyche, elegantly using them as an accessible window into the spirit of an era struggling to digest the horrors of war, the dislocations of conversion to a peacetime economy and anxieties about the Soviet Union."
Kirkus Reviews
"[A] candid reappraisal of America's postwar era.... [T]he book's greatest triumph is in its depiction of the gradual change in the American populace's collective journey from the pessimism of the Great Depression, through the hope of a burgeoning postwar middle class, to a climate of fear in the McCarthy era and on into the cold war.... [A]n insightful and illuminating blend of history and cultural criticism."
Publishers Weekly
"Lingeman takes us past the platitudes about 'the Greatest Generation' to chart the painful transition from the collective ethos of the New Deal and wartime unity to the anxieties of the Cold War and a renewed rightwing offensive against working Americans. Compelling and enlightening."
Stephanie Coontz, author of A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s
"This is an astonishing creation, a poignant, beautifully written history and memoir of a forgotten era. Richard Lingeman aptly calls it the Noir Forties, and his stylish prose blends the personal with delightful vignettes of American culture and politics. It is an elite brand of people's history. Lingeman's is a voice from the foxhole, soft-spoken and gentlemanly, but no less biting and acerbic than H.L. Mencken's."
Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and journalist. Co-author with Martin J. Sherwin of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
"Reading Richard R. Lingeman's masterful account of how America moved from its hottest to its coldest war, is more fun than going to the movies. Part memoir, part cultural, political and social history, his penetrating look at the post-war years through the lens of the noir films of the forties, is wholly original, a literary coup."
Victor S. Navasky, Publisher Emeritus of The Nation and author of Naming Names and The Art of Controversy
"By combining a thoughtful exploration of Hollywood's dark vision of a violent and immoral society with a penetrating overview of the nation's shift to the right during the late 1940s, Richard Lingeman helps us understand how the US could abandon its early post-war dream of peace and social justice for the conflict-ridden reality of the Cold War. It's a chilling narrative that speaks all too forcefully to our present grim situation."
Ellen Schrecker, author of Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
"Richard Lingeman's lively and wide-ranging political and cultural survey captures the curious mix of self-confidence, ambition, anxiety, and moral exhaustion that defined the national psyche in the years between VJ-Day and the onset of the Korean War. Lingeman is a sympathetic chronicler of the generation that fought the Second World War. As we say farewell to the last surviving World War II vets in the decade to come, The Noir Forties will keep alive the world they encountered and made in the five years that followed the war, years when they were young and brave and seeking and healing."
Maurice Isserman, professor of history at Hamilton College, author of If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left
"Richard Lingeman ingeniously uses the noir films of the 'forties to plumb the unconscious of the national psyche and give us a deeper understanding of this pivotal period. Salted by his wry reminiscence of serving as a counter-intelligence agent in Japan, the author weaves his own experience of the era into a fascinating narrative."
Dan Wakefield, author of New York in the Fifties
About the Author
Richard Lingeman is the longtime Senior Editor of The Nation, as well as a biographer, historian, and satirist. He began his career as an editor at Monocle magazine, and spent nine years at the New York Times Book Review as an editor and daily reviewer. He is the author of Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, and Double Lives: American Authors' Friendships, among other titles. He lives in New York City.
Most helpful customer reviews
24 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
Out of the Past
By The Ginger Man
In Noir Forties, Richard Lingeman documents the difficult American transition from post-war euphoria to stateside adjustment, illustrating the anxieties of the time through the filmmaker's lens. The author argues that no one knew what to expect after the victory over the Axis powers. During World War I, President Wilson sold a messianic vision in his Fourteen Points. FDR, on the contrary, referred to the second war as one of survival. Mindful of Wilson's failure to create his own new world, FDR refused to blueprint the future for fear of confusing the war effort. Lacking a postwar vision, "most Americans reverted to the personal and parochial," according to Lingeman. This absence of national purpose was compounded by FDR's death in 1945.
A Gallup poll showed that 62% of Americans feared a serious Depression within 10 years. GIs returned home to experience "reconversion jitters," finding shortages of jobs, food and housing. More importantly, they experienced an ambivalent reception from those who had stayed at home. Gratitude at veterans' service was combined with resentment towards their special claims and fear that they would commit violence in the US. In this unstable environment, the goal was to recover the past rather than to build an uncertain future.
As conservatives and the business community sought to roll back the New Deal at home and Communism abroad, a desire for conformity, tranquility and material wealth developed, leading ultimately to cold war consensus.
"All these moods merged into a vague sense of gloom and pessimism," says Lingeman. He argues that a special genre of American film captured this feeling. Film Noir expressed subconscious reactions to troubling social changes while reflecting the personal anxieties of the late forties. Rather than presenting an intellectual puzzle as in more traditional crime movies, noir films showed protagonists in downward struggles driven by personal flaws. Director John Houseman noted the prevalence in postwar crime films of an "outsider figure lacking confidence and alienated from the values and aspirations of mainstream society." Such scenarios resonated with returning vets or striking workers.
Lingeman does a good job of identifying how noir films fulfilled this need. Out of the Past and Asphalt Jungle told the story of a man trying to reintegrate into his old life, waylaid by his violent past. In The Blue Dahlia, a returning vet finds that his wife has been unfaithful and becomes a suspect in her death. Scarlet Street and Criss Cross also appeal to veterans who carried home suspicion about their wife's actions while away. Crossfire is a movie about discharged soldiers that is "seething with repressed violence." Double Indemnity shows that a normal citizen can be capable of an act of violence under the right condition. Femme fatales were featured in Laura and Gilda reflecting male anxiety about the stronger role of women at home during the war. DOA tells the feverish story of a man trying to find his own murderer after being given slow-acting poison. This mirrors the soldier's feeling that he is a dead man walking.
Noir Forties is solid social and cultural history. Lingeman combines an exhaustive understanding of American film with a strong feel for what transpires in politics and business. He has a marked liberal bias which is obvious in his distress at the end of New Deal liberalism as well as skepticism about the Red Scare. But this ideological stance is never hidden and can be taken into account by the reader. Lingeman also does a wonderful job conveying images as in an "R" rated take on VJ Day and a description of the repatriation of caskets to New York harbor.
The book provides new insight into an already well-documented period. It entertains while it it informs and tries to warn the reader when it subtly preaches.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
The Noir Forties, a review
By William H. Young
A mainly political review of this tumultuous decade, written by an unreconstructed liberal who also happens to be a movie buff. Lingeman makes no apologies for his ideological leaning, a refreshing change from the many histories of the 1940s that strive for cold objectivity and bring little color to the period. Conservative readers will doubtless be annoyed by his support for Roosevelt, the New Deal, and Truman, while lambasting a "do nothing" Congress (Truman's phrase) that worked strenuously to block most progressive measures, especially in the postwar years. Lingeman buttresses his arguments by analyzing a bevy of Hollywood movies--including many that fall into the film noir category, bleak black-and-white exercises in pessimism that had considerable commercial success and reflected public anxieties about the Forties.
The author takes his text to the 1950 invasion of South Korea by its northern neighbor. He voices strong doubts about the wisdom of this war and how it brought to the front a fearful national awareness of a potential Communist threat. Added to this uneasiness, he discusses the paranoia that ran rampant Congress and led to witch hunts and loyalty oaths, culminating in the rise of McCarthyism and general distrust of anything remotely "red."
Written in an engaging style, history lives in The Noir Forties, a new look at how the decade shaped the remainder of the twentieth century.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
A highwayscribery Book Report
By Stephen Siciliano
"The Noir Forties" promises less than it delivers.
By his own admission, author Richard Lingeman was counseled to shorten his manuscript, but you may find he did not achieve good enough a pruning.
Or, sometimes less is more. The author has an engaging idea about the collective American mind in the years immediately after World War II. Lingeman's proposal is to draw lines linking the particulars of that mind-state and what it projected onto movie screens in late 1940s America.
In films like "D.O.A.", "Double-Indemnity" "Blue Dahlia," and others, the writer says, "The war's psychological shocks reverberated through the popular culture, most prominently in the films noir that proliferated in the late '40s...."
Lingeman notes that strikes, a desperate rush for security, continued wartime rationing, the readjustment pains of 14 million veterans, were all moods that, "merged into a vague sense of gloom and pessimism, the reverse image of traditional American optimism and faith in the future. It tempered the victory dreams of postwar abundance, which seemed ephemeral to a generation scarred by the Depression."
In the book's best moments, the author weaves policy and news both big and small with films noir that serve as literary and cinematic parallels. The fun thing to do is watch the movies as he brings them up for discussion.
Having developed the idea a bit further, perhaps examined a few more films and drawn a more developed argument to completion, Lingeman might have had a sweet, pocket-sized seller that was attractive to a cross section of film fans/students and American politico/cultural buffs.
But it's his book and his call, and the author decided upon a path that winds into the "rouge" fifties of anti-communist propaganda films, the Korean War, and McCarthyism.
Mr. Lingeman served in the Korean War and a lot of what he presents in "Noir" is clearly of personal import to him.
A writer with "The Nation," his progressive analysis of President Franklin Roosevelt's absent vision for a post-war world, Harry Truman's capitulation to the country's most rancid and conservative forces, and the Red Scare, are all fine and good, especially if you have never delved into such topics in the kind of detail a knowledgeable journalist and political writer would.
Just know that's what your buying, that the focus on film fades (though is not completely abandoned), as the book goes on, replaced in its stead by something closer to a harrowing account of the shabby treatment endured by liberals, veterans, unions, and responsible scientists during what was, for many including the author, a kind of dark age.
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