(3 of 5)
If the late show has a single classic hero, it is the outlaw with the gun. Bonnie and Clyde has its obvious origins in the old gangster films—there were 50 in 1931 alone. Little Caesar, Scarface and Smart Money mirror the hostile hustle of Prohibition years and parody Horatio Alger by putting the happy ending in the middle, then massacring the criminal-hero in the end. The private eye too was a fixture of the time. Alone, armed only with a wisecrack and a .38, he faced the forces of evil and escaped intact. Today, the hero has joined the organization; like everyone else, 007 has an employee number.
Long Journey
Nor is that the only alteration. Today, the word anti precedes such terms as hero and war. In the '40s, those words stood naked and unembarrassed as Hollywood took the entire American melting pot and put it into uniform: "Here are the volunteers, sir—Jorgenson, O'Brien. Goldberg, Van Jones, Milwitzski . . ."A generation of war heroes seemed to be Xeroxed from the recruiting posters: Alan Ladd, Gregory Peck, Van Johnson, William Hoiden. Not until the late '50s were leading men, like Rod Steiger, allowed to act humanly scared again.
The war also simplified villains even more than heroes. Before Pearl Harbor, the heavy was a foxy seducer, a neurotic thug or a fastidious mastermind ("I despise violence, but my assistant Hugo . . ."). The wartime villain was a wicked, witless German or a Japanese with Coke-bottle lenses on his sinister glasses. All this continued through the cold-war '50s, with their Slavic bad guys. Now the dominant heavies are a polyglot crew, their lunacy more important than their lineage.
Probably the most striking changes in American attitudes are reflected in the film progression of the teenager and the Negro. Before James Dean met Freud in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), adolescence in the movies was the period between acne and marriage. To modern teenagers, Henry Aldrich seems as remote as Henry VIII. In a day when, in certain quarters at least, student is synonymous with riot, nothing is more anachronistic than a conference in Dad's study or the dutiful screech, "Coming, Mother!" It seems inconceivable that Louis B. Mayer's fondest memories were of the Andy Hardy films. "In one," he recalled, "Andy's mother was dying—and they showed him standing outside the door. Standing. I told them: 'Don't you know that an American boy like that will get down on his knees and pray?' They listened—the biggest thing in the picture."