GreenCine | article

To those born after 1960, the Eisenhower years must seem like an endless episode of I Love Lucy or Father Knows Best: Repressed, stodgy, as wild as wingtips. Nothing could be further from the truth. The 1950s was the most progressive decade in the "American Century." New consumer innovations made everyday life seem like the "World of Tomorrow" exhibit at Disneyland.

The single most influential piece of domestic legislation enacted in this century, the Interstate Highway Act, built a road network that changed the way America lives. Television, for better or worse, became a fixture in households, changing the way Americans thought, learned, spoke, ate, made love, everything.

And, of course, there was another innovation - the hydrogen bomb, routinely tested to keep America's latest foreign menace - the Reds - in line. The resultant "fall out" drills made it seem as if America's garden party could end in hellfire at any minute.

In hindsight, now that the Communist menace has dissipated in public consciousness, its worth noting that the most influential person of the decade was not Joe McCarthy, or Dwight Eisenhower - it was a kind of dorky-looking guy from the Midwest named Hugh Hefner. In 1952 he took $5,000 of start-up money and created a "men's magazine" called Playboy. Debate continues as to whether Hefner was a visionary or a sexist pig. There's no debate about his business acumen, or his keen timing.

He parlayed his five grand into a multi-million dollar empire, all based on a simple concept: packaging sex in a way that moved it from the grindhouse to the coffee table. Well, that was the theory, anyway. Ozzie Nelson really kept Playboy in the desk drawer in his den, where Ricky and his buddies pawed over it surreptitiously. But once Playboy was in the house, the mission was accomplished for Hefner and the advertisers who provided his fortune.

What kind of Man Reads Playboy? Not a degenerate, but a consumer of the best newfangled gadgets, gizmos, and attitude that American ingenuity could provide. Sex was the wrapping paper: only this time around, it was being sold as healthy, worldly, and sophisticated.

In the early 1950s many grindhouses became "art houses." The transformation began in the settling dust of WWII, when international geopolitics, and the arts, were being redefined in the after math of catastrophic warfare. Victorious Americans were treated to lavish Hollywood spectacle.

Major studios, feeling pressure from that fledgling invention, television, offered up technical wizardry- Cinemascope, 3-D, you name it - to lure customers from the insidiously accessible Philco anchored in the living room. Europe was a different story. Having bombs rain on your cities and towns puts things in a bleaker perspective. While Americans celebrated new superpower status, Europeans glumly set about picking up the pieces. Post-war European movies reflected this world-weariness.

The Italians, particularly Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio DeSica, created a new brand of filmmaking, neo-realism, which disdained the slickness and gloss of traditional movie storytelling for a gritty, unflinching style that spoke of the struggles of common people in an unthinkably cruel world. These weren't escapist entertainments; they were art.

At first, foreign films were booked mainly into "ethnic" theaters situated in the various immigrant enclaves in big American cities. But the anti-Hollywood approach of neo-realist directors started to capture the imagination of a younger set, particularly in university towns. There was much to discuss in these films, in terms of both style and content.

The Italian films that made it to the United States weren't admired solely for the fresh storytelling technique. The earthy sex appeal of actresses such as Anna Magnani and Silvana Mangano had much to do with their success. Arthur Mayer, who imported many of these films to the U.S., bluntly stated in his 1952 book Merely Colossal, that his biggest successes "...were with the pictures whose artistic and ideological merits were aided and abetted at the box office by their frank sexual content."

In Bitter Rice (1949), Mangano burned forever into American consciousness the image of the earthy, voluptuous peasant. Tromping through muddy fields, skirt hem tucked into her waist band, she displayed the most erotic thighs movie audiences have ever seen. Anna Magnani was already in her forties when she played in Rossellini's L'Amore (1948). The film is in two segments and the second, "The Miracle," stirred up considerable controversy.

Magnani portrayed a simpleton impregnated by a drifter (Federico Fellini) she thinks is St. Joseph. She gives birth to a child she believes is the "son of God." Obviously, the Legion of Decency had to do something about these provocations. It branded Bitter Rice "a serious threat to Christian morality and decency."

Martin Quigley, still hammering out the hard line in his Motion Picture Herald, called The Miracle an insult to traditional religious beliefs and suggested it was actually a communist plot to subvert American values. Cardinal Spellman of The New York Catholic Archdiocese attacked it as 'a vicious insult to Italian womanhood." While New York film critics lauded Rossellini's film as the best of the year, a 30-month battle waged over whether the film, prohibited in New York, violated the religious freedom of Christians.

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