The Noir Forties

October 15, 2012
In this candid reappraisal of America’s postwar era, Lingeman (Don’t You Know There’s a War On?), a veteran senior editor of the Nation, covers the years between the end of WWII and the beginning of the Korean War, focusing specifically on the shift of the American mood during this time from one of vague apprehension to a pointed distrust of the nation’s stability. The author shows how this decline into a noir sensibility was abetted by the homecomings of battle-scarred veterans, anxiety over future international conflicts, and the vicious anticommunist crusades in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. In “unlocking the psychology” of the general mood, Lingeman traces how this dark disposition manifested in literature, music, and film, but the 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. Lingeman served the U.S. for two years in the ’50s as a counterintelligence operative in Japan, and this “historical enlargement of smaller personal memories” is an insightful and illuminating blend of history and cultural criticism.

Starred review from November 15, 2012

Lingeman (senior editor, Nation; Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street) shows his skills in this cultural history of the years just after World War II and into the 1950s (in spite of the title). Hollywood films serve as his anchor, and his thesis is that the real America was not MGM but film noir. Some films Lingeman refers to are well known, e.g., Double Indemnity, but he examines plenty of B films. His wide-ranging book moves beyond mere film studies to take in such markers of the era as radio's Your Hit Parade, the Korean War, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the labor troubles of 1946, and Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign. Despite the breadth of topics, nothing here feels shallow or rushed. Particularly good is the author's parallel discussion of The Best Years of Our Lives, the 1946 Best Picture Oscar winner, and the real-life struggles of returning veterans--the shortages of housing and jobs, class issues, and the difficulties many had readjusting to peace. Likewise, he sees The Day the Earth Stood Still as a prism for examining fears of nuclear war. VERDICT 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.--Michael Eshleman, Hobbs, NM

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2012
Paranoia and anomie in late-1940s America. As World War II drew to a close, American liberals hoped that the New Deal and a win-the-war culture would culminate in an era of peace and cooperation, advancing the interests of the common man. Instead, the nation got the Cold War and the McCarthy era. The Nation senior editor Lingeman (Double Lives: American Writers' Friendships, 2006, etc.) attempts to explain the transition in national mood during the time, from the euphoria at the end of the war to the anti-communist paranoia that followed. This was the heyday of film noir, inexpensive productions dealing in themes of violence, obsession with chance and death and existential despair. Lingeman attributes these 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. As he surveys the politics of the period, Lingeman's sympathies are clearly with the left. He gives much attention to union activity but struggles with the role of domestic communism, cheerfully asserting that "the most militant and effective unions in the South were Communist-led ones," but bristling at denunciations of "alleged Communist infiltration of unions." He describes at length the quixotic third-party candidacy of Henry Wallace in 1948, doomed in part because it welcomed communist participation, and the slow demise of various peace groups. Lingeman appears to view American foreign policy in this period as a lost opportunity in which progressives like Wallace could have forged a lasting peace with the Soviet Union had they not been sidelined by hard-liners in both parties, while he excuses or minimizes Stalin's provocations in Europe and Korea. The film criticism is more rewarding than the doctrinaire leftist exposition of the period's history.

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November 1, 2012
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 themor flip by them in the hunt for the next noir critique.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)