Product Description

Seeing is Believing is a provocative, shrewd and witty look at the Hollywood fifties movies we all love - or love to hate - and the thousand subtle ways they reflect the political tensions of the decade. Peter Biskind concentrates on the films everybody saw but nobody really looked at, classics such as Giant, Rebel Without a Cause, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and shows us how movies that appear politically innocent in fact bear an ideological burden. As we see organization men and rugged individualists, housewives, and career women, cops and docs, teen angels and teenage werewolves fight it out across the screen, from suburbia to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, we understand that we have been watching one long dispute about how to be a man, a woman, an American - the conflicts of the time in action.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #337195 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

From the Publisher
The classic study of fifties movies, culture and society by the best selling author of EASY RIDERS RAGING BULLS

About the Author
Peter Biskind, former executive editor of Premiere, is the author of The Godfather Companion and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he has written for amongst others The New York Times, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone.

Customer Reviews

Riveting dissection of U.S. 50's cinema
Having read Biskind's brilliant slice of American film culture, 'Easy Riders, Raging Bulls', I was pleased to see this book reissued by Bloomsbury (the original was in 1983). This has an extra foreword and a complementary cover to 'Easy Riders...'

The book discusses a number of U.S. films of the Fifties- from an ideological (thus cultural, thus political, thus social) perspective. Texts ar given intuitive readings against the backdrop of McCarthyism/Communist Paranoia/the encroachment of Dean-Kerouac pop culture/the atom bomb/the cold war etc. The first chapter looks at Henry Fonda- it would be nice for Mr Biskind to publish another tome between this era and 'Easy Riders...': what would he have made of Fonda's role in 'Once Upon a Time in The West'?...The second chapter takes in war films of the era, the most famous is 'From Here to Eternity'. Chapter Three , entitled 'Us & Them', looks at the Communist paranoia through texts such as 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' (Don Siegel, co-scripted by Sam Peckinpah). The subsequent chapter twists on this theme ('the enemy within')taking in key-texts such as 'On the Waterfront', 'Rebel Without a Cause' & 'The Searchers' (nice to see a book that mentions Sam Fuller lots- I refute Rod Steiger's claim that "he was s**t"; plus 'I was a Teenage werewolf' is a b-movie classic!). The final chapter takes in gender identity of the period (would have liked to have seen a section on Minelli's 'Home from the Hill')- hitting on 'Giant', 'Mildred Pierce' & Sirk's 'All That Heaven Allows'. The Conclusion gives a brilliant overview of the period of 50's shifting to the 60's- mentioning 'Psycho' in relation to identity. Biskind refs texts such as 'Bonnie & Clyde' & 'Dr Strangelove' and the 50's is put into historical context. It would be intriguing to know what Mr Biskind thinks of David Lynch's fascination with the 50's, part. 'Blue Velvet' & 'Mullholland Drive'.

An excellent book that will direct you to seeing and understanding American films of the Fifties.

Enjoy!