Thomas Doherty reveals how and why Hollywood marshaled its artistic resources on behalf of the war effort and interprets the cultural meanings and enduring legacies of the motion picture record of the war years. He explains the social, political, and economic forces that created such genre classics as Mrs. Miniver, as well as comedies, musicals, newsreels, documentaries, cartoons, and army training films. He examines the Hollywood Production Code, government propaganda films, the portrayal of women and minorities in films of the period, and Hollywood's role in World War I and Vietnam. This revised edition includes new sections exploring the recent resurgence of interest in World War II films, including Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. Thomas Doherty reveals how and why Hollywood marshaled its artistic resources on behalf of the war effort and interprets the cultural meanings and enduring legacies of the motion picture record of the war years. He explains the social, political, and economic forces that created such genre classics as Mrs. Miniver, as well as comedies, musicals, newsreels, documentaries, cartoons, and army training films. He examines the Hollywood Production Code, government propaganda films, the portrayal of women and minorities in films of the period, and Hollywood's role in World War I and Vietnam. This revised edition includes new sections exploring the recent resurgence of interest in World War II films, including Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line.

In this lively cultural history, Doherty demonstrates that wartime Hollywood was not a rigidly controlled propaganda machine, as is often assumed, but an ad-hoc collaborative effort between the government and film industry.

About the Author
Thomas Doherty is associate professor of the American Studies Department and chair of the Film Studies Program at Brandeis University. He is author of Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934 (Columbia, 1999) and Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilizatzion of American Movies in the 1950s, and is associate editor of the film journal Cineaste.

Reviews
A wide-ranging, lively study which combines close readings of various key films with discussions of genre, ethnicity, and beauracracy... [A] vivid blend of polemic and social history. Times Literary Supplement This is a model social history of war movies-both a penetrating examination of Hollywood at war and a bracing argument about the effects of the war on the nature of Hollywood entertainment. Kirkus Reviews



Book Information
ISBN 9780231116350
Author Thomas Doherty
Format Paperback
Page Count 381
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press