Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties

“Sweeping, winningly eccentric . . . a study that manages to be both personal and comprehensive. A lot more fun than Netflix and chill, especially as related by Hirsch’s photographic memory . . . a big, ambitious film history book, broad, sweeping and somehow still intimate survey.” —Chris Vognar, LA Times “Entertaining . . . A celebration.” —Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal     "". . . Teeming . . . fascinating detail . . . in which moviegoing is treated as an experience, of which the movie itself is only a part . . . . Hirsch praises many good and often overlooked films . . . and explores idiosyncratic genres, such as ancient-world epics and low-budget sci-fi. When Hirsch is passionate about a movie, such as Douglas Sirk’s “Imitation of Life,” his fervor is matched by eloquence and an eye for detail . . . He discusses the wider culture of the time, finding in fifties America “the seeds of the counterculture revolution that erupted in the late 1960s,” with movies as a vital part of that trend . . . a wide-ranging critical history that can uncontroversially celebrate the best of these movies as key works of modern art."" —Richard Brody, The New Yorker   “Hirsch reassesses many stereotypes about filmmaking in the 1950s, arguably the United States’ peak of social and political influence. Knowledgeable, astute, and sometimes provocative . . . remarkable.”—Frederick J. Augustyn, Jr., Library Journal   “A thorough account of a transformative era in Hollywood history . . . a panoramic scope . . . managing the difficult feat of being exhaustive without becoming exhausting. Cinephiles will want to dig into this.” —Publishers Weekly