Seeing Is Believing
Subtitle: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties
Edition: 1st Owl Books Ed edition
Publisher: Owl Books
Published: September 11, 2000
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 384
ISBN-13: 9780805065633
Subjects: United States; Pop Arts / Pop Culture; Motion pictures; Performing Arts/Dance; United States - 20th Century/50s; Popular Culture - General; Film & Video - History & Criticism; Film - History & Criticism; Films, cinema; History / General; USA; c 1945 to c 1960; History; Political aspects
First sentence: We are presented with a shot of the massive facade of the Supreme Court Building in New York's Foley Square.
Description: "Seeing Is Believing is a look at the Hollywood fifties movies we all love - or love to hate - and the thousand subtle ways they reflect the political tensions of the decade. Peter Biskind concentrates on the films everybody saw but nobody really looked at, classics such as Giant, On the Waterfront, Rebel Without a Cause, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and shows us how movies that appear politically innocent in fact bear an ideological burden.

As we see organization men and rugged individualists, housewives and career women, cops and docs, teen angels and teenage werewolves fight it out across the screen, from suburbia to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, we understand that we have been watching one long dispute about how to be a man, a woman, an American - the conflicts of the time in action."--BOOK JACKET.