I mean, we’ve all discussed how we have our idea of the 1950s, 1960s, etc. The “cultural '60s” might not begin until 1963 or later and not end until 1972 or 1973 (it all depends on what cultural or political markers we user), but we have a stereotype, regardless of accuracy.
We also have the period-movies/shows and even time-travel ones for the decades from 1950s-1980s.
It doesn’t seem to me as strong, but we even have those for the 1920s and 1930s (though, again, stereotypes and reality are necessarily the same). Can’t speak much the 1930s ones (gangsters and Depression,mostly, from the ones I’ve seen) but the 1920s ones usually focus more glamour, wealth, the “roaring aspect.”
But the late 1940s are kind of no-man’s land to me. It seems like the popular memory/concept of the 1940s is WWII. It sometimes includes the time before the US entered and everyone worrying about the future, but it’s dominated by the time the US was at war. The second of half of the 1940s seems pretty ignored in mainstream/mass-appeal fiction. We seem to just skip from the end of WWII straight to the 1950s. So, am I overlooking any obvious fiction set in the era or perception of said era?
The movie The Best Years of Our Lives comes to mind. It is kind of like the Deer Hunter for showing what the war veterans (WWII) faced/dealt with coming home.
It was a bit before my time, but I think it was kind of a bleak time. There was the huge celebration for the end of the war. But along with kicking off both the nuclear bomb age and the cold war, I think it was a pretty tense time.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit takes place in 1947, with the demise of L.A.’s streetcar system and the birth of the freeway as period-appropriate plot points.
There’s a Currier & Ives/Charles Dickens traditional of Christmas, but there’s also a post-WWII/pre-rock & roll era Christmas Tradition. Miracle on 34th Street, Christmas in Connecticut, Holiday Affair, and of course that one with Jimmy Stewart.
When I think late 1940s I think of film noir, bobby soxers and the R&B music that directly led to what we recognize as rock and roll (Good Rockin’ Tonght by Roy Brown, that kind of stuff).
And a whole lot of people were busy getting married and having babies. Hence, the baby boom. The suburbs were being built. Woman stopped working and stayed home. Men started working in developing industries. It was a huge transition time.
"(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66" was written by Bobby Troup and recorded by Nat King Cole in 1946. The Great American Road trip and the pop culture icons of The Mother Road came of age in the post-war 40s.
Noir is the first thing I think of when it comes to movies of the late '40s. I’ve seen a lot of them late at night over the last ten years. They usually feature actors like Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Raymond Burr, and John Payne at the start of their careers, along with established stars like Bogart, Raft, and Robinson often playing against type.
The women in supporting roles sometimes surprise me with what was considered attractive in clothing and makeup in those days. Also, they never seem to do much, other than pleasing and worrying about their men.
One thing I especially like is seeing Southern California and the Southwest before the population explosion and suburbia of the '50s, and the “renewal” that started in the '60s. And those period automobiles—Buicks, Chevys, Olds, Nashes. Nothing like the “fuel efficient, planet-friendly” tin cans flogged today. They were cars that real men drove!
Ditto. But the comedy was very distinctive, too. Comedy teams like Abbott and Costello and Martin and Lewis. Most of the radio shows that were recorded and rebroadcast for later generations come from that time; Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Burns and Allen. Like the Sixties, the late Forties kind of incorporates part of the following decade up until the advent of Rock n Roll, the Mickey Mouse Club and the cultural domination of the teenager.
I was going to write almost exactly the same thing but figured I’d give someone else the chance.
I sometimes watch movies like At War With the Army and wonder why they were considered funny. The dialog was often written by the same teams that produced lame sitcoms in the '50s and '60s, something that was satirized later in The Dick Van Dyke Show. On the other hand, there were gems like Your Show of Shows and The Honeymooners on early TV, and I still laugh when I watch Amos ‘n’ Andy, Burns and Allen, and The Jack Benny Program, even though they’re largely retreads of old radio shows.
Anyone interested in the period’s world of entertainment should read Nick Tosches’ biography of Dean Martin Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams. It covers everything from nightclubs to Vegas, from movies to early television, from the '40s up into the '70s.
some of it is comparable to us now like there’s inflation and recession of sorts as the industries came off of WW2 and rationing … a president that wasnt overly popular but was trying to guide us through the sudden rise of the USSR and the iron curtain not to mention rebuilding Europe also things like HUAC was rearing its head a lot of African American vets who were mostly treated as human beings in Europe were coming back and they weren’t going to go back to the status quo
but it was rather a tumultuous transition … people wanted a 20s-like “return to normalcy” hence they elected boring ol’ eisenhower …
I wouldn’t call Eisenhower “boring.” At the time, he was the most popular US general since Grant, and he got the job done. His only real rival for the presidency was MacArthur, and he torpedoed his chance of getting elected by giving one of the worst political speeches ever.
I think of the late 1940s as the beginning of McCarthyism. This was before there was even any reaction to it as happened in the early 1950s. By the mid-1950s McCarthyism became unpopular and began to disappear. In the late 1940s, McCarthyism was rampant and not even generally opposed:
The over-riding vibe from that movie for me is disappointed hope. I don’t know if that was what many people felt after the end of WW2, but you’d expect escapist fantasy in response. Maybe it was too short a period to really get a coherent Not-At-War social culture going.
Thanks for the info on specific fiction that takes place in the era.
Certainly I agree the cold war came to be a thing in the late 1940s, but I don’t think that’s really part of the pop-culture perspective. I could certainly be wrong about that (especially given famous events like the Berlin Blockade), but I don’t feel people immediately think of that, the way they do the McCarthy hearings or rock and roll or Sputnik or Duck and Cover for the 1950s.
Here’s my theory about this, however ill-informed or flat-out wrong it may be…
The prevailing culture of most decades seems to bleed into the first couple years of the next decade. For example, the very early 60s were pretty much indistinguishable from the 50s in many aspects of music, culture, haircuts, general lifestyle, etc. It wasn’t until '63, '64, when Dylan and the Beatles came on the scene, the Vietnam War was looming larger in the public consciousness, and youth culture began to gel, that the decade of the ‘60s’ as we now picture it really formed.
I think this holds true of most of the decades of the 20th century: 20s, 30s, 60s, 70s, 80s, etc. When we imagine the prevailing culture of each decade, we’re picturing more or less the latter two-thirds to three-quarters of that decade.
But the 40s were very different. That decade was marked by a very sharp divide between the first and second half-- 40-45 were the war years (yes, I know it wasn’t until the end of '41 that the US got into the war, but we were still affected by the war in Europe). So when we think of the 40s, we think of WWII, the war effort, savings bonds, collecting scrap copper, victory gardens, etc. etc.
The second half of the 40s began the post-war boom: optimism for the future. The baby boom. The booming economy. The rise of suburbia. The beginnings of the space age. So, my theory is that the second half of the 40s gets lumped together in our popular memory with the 50s.
