An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War

by J. Hoberman

Overview

Acclaimed by the Los Angeles Review of Books as “the most detailed year-by-year look at Hollywood during the first decade of the Cold War ever published, one that takes film analysis beyond the screen and sets it in its larger political context,” An Army of Phantoms is a “delightful” and “amazing” (Dissent) work of film history and cultural criticism by J. Hoberman, one of the foremost film critics writing today, addressing the dynamic synergy of American politics and American popular culture.

By “tell[ing] the story not just of what's on the screen but what played out behind it” (The American Scholar), Hoberman orchestrates a colorful, sometimes surreal pageant wherein Cecil B. DeMille rubs shoulders with Douglas MacArthur, atomic tests are shown on live TV, God talks on the radio, and Joe McCarthy is bracketed with Marilyn Monroe. From cavalry Westerns, apocalyptic sci-fi flicks, and biblical spectaculars, movies to media events, congressional hearings and political campaigns, An Army of Phantoms “remind[s] you what criticism is supposed to be: revelatory, reflective and as rapturous as the artwork itself” (Time Out New York).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595588333
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	09/04/2012
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.14(d)

About the Author

J. Hoberman is the author, co-author, or editor of a dozen books, including The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (The New Press) and Film After Film (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?). He has written for Artforum, Bookforum, the London Review ofBooks, The Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times; has taught cinema history at Cooper Union since 1990; and was, for over thirty years, a film critic for the Village Voice. He lives in New York.

Read an Excerpt

From the Introduction:

The collective drama that An Army of Phantoms recounts was not restricted to America's movie theaters but played out in the press, comic books, popular music, ongoing FBI investigations, congressional hearings, and political campaigns. Thanks to the movies, however, this drama was elevated to a cosmic struggle against National Insecurity for possession of the Great Whatzit. The war was waged in desert surrounding Fort Apache and the streets of Hadleyville, as well as the hills of Korea and halls of Washington, D.C., and invoked all manner of imaginary beings. In the national Dream Life, this war was fought by archetypal figures: the Christian Soldier and the Patriot Roughneck were pitted against an Implacable Alien Other, as well as the Wild One, and sometimes themselves.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: From God's Mouth to Your Ear
Prologue: Mission for Hollywood—Stalingrad to V-J Day

I. Aliens Among Us: Hollywood, 1946–47
MGM's Manhattan Project: The Beginning or the End?
When HUAC Came to Hollywood …
Showtime (“Hooray for Robert Taylor!”)
Decision at the Waldorf: The Big Mop-up

II. Fighting for the Ministry of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, 1948–50
The Iron Curtain Parts and the Campaign Begins
Fort Apache, Our Home
Hollywood Alert: From Red Menace to Storm Warning
“The Saucers Are Real!” (And Guilty of Treason)
Sunset/Panic/In a Lonely Place
Countdown

III. Redskin Menace from Outer Space: America at War, 1950–52
Across Rio Grande … into Manchuria?
This Is Korea?
The Communist Was a Thing for the FBI!
Three Cases: Joseph L., Carl F., and Elia Kazan
Campaign '52: Take Us to Our Leader, Big Jim
High Noon in the Universe

IV. The PaxAmericanArama: Eisenhower Power, 1953–55
“No One on This Earth Can Help You”: Above and Beyond and Fantasies of Invasion
The Hammer, the Witch Trials, and Pickup on South Street
After Quo Vadis: Onward Christian Soldier, Watch Out for The Wild One
Marilyn Ascends, Joe Goes Down
Sh-Boom Them! (DeMillennium Approaching …)

V. Searchin': America on the Road, 1955–56
Coonskin Kids, or the Martians Have Landed
On the Brink of the Wild Frontier: Kiss Me Deadly, Rebel Without a Cause
Better Red Than Dead: Body-Snatched Prisoners of Comanche Mind Control
“That'll Be the Day!” The Spirit of '56

Epilogue: The Face of the Crowd
Sources
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Utterly compulsive reading … There’s something majestic about the reach of Hoberman’s ambitions … An Army of Phantoms may prove to be the definitive text on its subject.”
—Film Comment

“An energetic and adventurous book … scholarly, even encyclopedic, yet written occasionally in a style akin to the Hush-Hush columns of L.A. Confidential.”
—London Review of Books

“A welcome acknowledgment of how complicated the story of one particular period really is.”
—National Review

“An epic: an alternately fevered and measured account of what might be called the primal scene of American cinema.”
—Cineaste

“An important, overflowing and often compelling study of movie history … Smartly conceived, and its richness defies capture in a book review.”
—Ha’aretz

Editorial Reviews

Utterly compulsive reading … There's something majestic about the reach of Hoberman's ambitions … An Army of Phantoms may prove to be the definitive text on its subject.”
—Film Comment

“An energetic and adventurous book … scholarly, even encyclopedic, yet written occasionally in a style akin to the Hush-Hush columns of L.A. Confidential.”
—London Review of Books

“A welcome acknowledgment of how complicated the story of one particular period really is.”
—National Review

“An epic: an alternately fevered and measured account of what might be called the primal scene of American cinema.”
—Cineaste

“An important, overflowing and often compelling study of movie history … Smartly conceived, and its richness defies capture in a book review.”
—Ha'aretz

From the Publisher

Village Voice film critic Hoberman offers the first installment of a projected three-volume chronicle of American films during the cold war years 1946–1956. Since Hoberman sees politics "filtered through the prism of Hollywood movies—their scenarios, back stories and reception," he begins with 1950's Destination Moon, which anticipated the "space race" and called for a lunar military base, echoing a National Security Council proposal for a massive rearmament to counter the Soviet atom bomb. Onscreen antifascist heroism and more atomic associations mushroom through the early chapters. Surveying such anticommunist films as The Red Menace and The Iron Curtain, Hoberman covers witch hunts, House Committee on Un-American Activities tactics, racial dramas such as Pinky, message movies, the blacklist, protests, propaganda, HUAC humiliations, and the "Cold War's key fictional text," Orwell's 1984, all capped by a trenchant analysis of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. With exhaustive research into linkages between headlines and Hollywood, Hoberman skillfully probes movie metaphors and underlying themes in all film genres to show how cinema mirrored world events. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Hoberman (senior film critic, Village Voice; The Magic Hour: Film at Fin De Siècle) here delivers the second installment (after The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties) of a three-volume study of American film as viewed through the lens of politics. Hoberman's exhaustive research taps into the mainstream, entertainment, and alternative press coverage; House Un-American Activities Committee testimony; FBI files; and archival sources. He discusses the period from 1946 to 1956 in a minutely detailed and richly textured chronology that interweaves cinematic, political, military, and social history. The activities of motion picture producers, actors, and screenwriters swept up in the investigations of communist activity in the entertainment industry are paralleled with those of political and military personnel and set against the backdrop of the movies themselves—the plots, premieres, and reviews. VERDICT Serious readers will appreciate the attention to detail and thorough treatment of the subject. Recommended for film historians and Cold War scholars.—Donna L. Davey, New York Univ. Libs.

Library Journal

Sharp analysis of postwar-era Hollywood by a leading film critic and historian.

LongtimeVillage Voicemovie critic Hoberman (Cinema History/Cooper Union;Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds, 2010, etc.) published the second part of his projected Cold War trilogyThe Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixtiesin 2003; here he covers the politically tumultuous and often dangerous period that preceded it, from the end of World War II in 1945 through Eisenhower's first term, ending in 1956. It was an era when some of the canon's greatest movies appeared (High Noon,On the Waterfront, The Searchers) alongside some of the schlockiest kitsch (My Son John,The Next Voice You Hear,The Prodigal). Hoberman, whose historical narrative is as richly detailed as his movie lore, masterfully shows how Washington's anti-communist crusaders influenced the culture-makers in Hollywood in the projects they chose to develop. Both sides of the divide were especially motivated by paranoia, of communism on the right and on the left of Senator McCarthy and HUAC. Paranoia inspired some of the most interesting, multilayered films, including several of the aforementioned, as well as Don Siegel'sInvasion of the Body Snatchers, Elia Kazan'sPanic in the Streetsand Samuel Fuller'sPickup on South Street. Quoting period memoirs, FBI files, HUAC hearing transcripts and movie reviews from the mainstream and communist press, Hoberman argues that many of the themes of these movies—fear of alien invasion and the rescue of captives, to name two of the most pungent examples—were already deeply ingrained in the American national consciousness from its earliest days and continue to resonate today.The author's engaging prose will provoke many an urge to revisit the familiar and forgotten gems of a film era that was less placid than it pretended to be.

Urbane, witty cultural history.

Kirkus Reviews