On the occasion of the paperback release of James Harvey’s illuminating book Movie Love in the Fifties (Da Capo Press, 2002), the Department of Film and Media presents a 10-film series devoted to the maverick movies of the period. Harvey notes how the retrospective and book are about Hollywood’s “post-classical” phase, ranging from noir thrillers of the late 1940s to domestic melodramas of the late 1950s, with their visions of living-room apocalypse—the mannerist moviemaking that arose with the decline of the studio and bloomed in the genre formalism of artists like Max Ophuls, Douglas Sirk, and Orson Welles. The “movie love” of the title refers not only to what was on movie screens in the 1950s—an increasingly anguished account of the relations between men and women—but to the author’s own “movie love”: how it felt then, and how it has changed since.
Organized by author James Harvey and Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film and Media.
With thanks to Columbia Pictures Repertory, Universal Pictures, and Turner Entertainment.