Hollywood Changes

• Hollywood Changes

  Movies beginning to challenge racial stereotypes & attitudes
• The Defiant One (1958)


  • Black & white convicts chained together need to co-operate to survive
• Imitation of Life (1959)


  • Final scene demonstrates that the real heroine is not the white actress who has achieved fame but the black mother who has devoted her life to the actress' neglected daughter & her own ungrateful offspring who rejects her & tries ti pass as white- showing Hollywood gaining confidence in opposing prejudice
• South Pacific (1958)


  • Musical with 2 interracial romances- big box office hit in most of the US but was not well received in the South & nearly caused a race riot in Long Island in New York State
• Paths of Glory (1957)


  • Antiwar movie that helps explain Hollywood's reluctance to engage with challenges to conformity- critically acclaimed but did not do well in box office
• Hollywood Changes

  • Challenged traditional female roles
  • Challenged middle class conformity
• All that Heaven Allows (1955)


  • Upper middle class widow Jane Wyman shocks the country club set when she becomes involved with Rock Hudson- bohemian gardener who is younger than her
  • She rejects middle class materialism & hypocrisy when she chooses to marry Hudson
  • Significant that she does marry again-she still sees her greatest role as that of a wife
• Crime of Passion (1957)

  • Barbara Stanwyck plays a successful journalist suffocated by suburban life
  • Desperate for her husband to be 'somebody'
  • She has an affair with his superior & when he refuses to promote her husband, she shoots him dead
  • Feminist statement (some critics) Stanwyck's villainess doesn't get way with it as she is tuned in by her police husband