Critic Tracks Media in 1950s

In director William A. Wellman’s 1950 film “The Next Voice You Hear,” radio broadcasts were God’s chosen intermediary with mankind. The role of mass media in that film, and others from the period, reflected Hollywood’s growing role in American society in the 1950s, said James Hoberman, senior film critic for the Village Voice newspaper, at a seminar yesterday.

Speaking to a small gathering of film aficionados at the Carpenter Center, Hoberman offered a preview of his next book, which will focus on the role of “movies as political events and political events as movies” in the 1950s.

Hoberman, a visiting lecturer on visual and environmental studies, said the book will focus on the films that he believes reflect the angst that gripped America during that decade. The book will be a prequel to his 2003 work “The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties.”

“I focus on movies that have a greater degree of intentionality,” Hoberman said. “I get a lot of ideas by looking at the movies and the production story of the movies, what makes something evolve the way it did.”

Hoberman showed the audience a clip from “The Next Voice You Hear,” which is featured prominently in the introduction to his next book.

In that film, a traditional 1950s family hears a series of messages from God on the radio. The movie uses the messages from God to emphasize the power of mass media in American life, Hoberman said.

The Hollywood producers during the Cold War were growing aware that their movies provided a social function, Hoberman said.

Action and war films during the early 1940s had catered to an excited, militant public. In the 1950s, that action was replaced by the tranquility of the homestead amid fears of nuclear war.

Only a miracle, such as the voice of God in “The Next Voice You Hear,” could quell those fears, Hoberman said.

Hollywood also found itself on the defensive from a religious revival that was fueled by those same fears.

The movie industry, however, viewed its films as breaking the monotony and repetitiveness of the lives of Americans, Hoberman said.