mass-communication-theory

THE EMERGENCE OF CRITICAL
AND CULTURAL THEORIES OF
MASS COMMUNICATION
CHAPTER 8
Moviegoers in the late 1950s and early 1960s could see the same type of Hollywood
spectacular they had become familiar with before World War II. The Ten
Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), El Cid (1961), Spartacus (1960), and
Cleopatra (1963) were gigantic productions filled with color and grandeur. But a
different kind of movie was appearing on theater screens with increasing frequency.
In the United States, these were called message movies, and they depicted an America
that was not universally fair and democratic, a jarring message for the world’s
mightiest power. Hadn’t the United States and its allies just made the world safe
for democracy?
The Men (1950) focused on the difficult lot of injured GIs returning home.
Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, both released in 1955, provided
stark, pessimistic views of the alienation of youth. Twelve Angry Men (1957), Imitation
of Life (1959), and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) challenged prejudice and
racism in the “Land of the Free.” The Pawnbroker (1964) examined the clash of
class and culture in urban America. In Great Britain, message movies became the
basis of a powerful cinematic movement, the British New Wave. Room at the Top
(1959), The Entertainer (1960), A Taste of Honey (1961), The L-Shaped Room
(1962), and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962)—dark, brooding
films—“emphasized the poverty of the worker, the squalor of working-class life,
the difficulty of keeping a home and keeping one’s self-respect at the same time,
[and] the social assumptions that sentence a person with no education and a
working-class dialect to a lifetime of bare survival…. In the midst of this gray
world, the directors focus on a common man reacting to his surroundings—bitter,
brutal, angry, tough” (Mast and Kawin, 1996, p. 412).
Anger might have run deeper in England than in the United States, but these
films reflected a disillusionment and frustration common to both countries. Soldiers—especially
minorities and working-class people—and women who had served
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