Review by Choice Review
In the opening of his book, Lingeman, (senior editor at The Nation) states that he thinks of it as "a memoir in the form of history." This telling comment reveals both the book's strengths and its limitations. Covering much of the same ground Tom Engelhardt did in The End of Victory Culture (CH, May'95, 32-5266), Lingeman tells a somewhat meandering tale that alternates between personal reminiscences from his richly interesting life to observations of what he calls the "noir culture" that arose in the US between the end of WW II and the start of the Korean War five years later. Lingeman's authorial voice is equal parts raconteur and academic; his narrative generally engages the reader, but sadly falls short of adding a great deal of insight into the cultural history of the period. Wheeler Winston Dixon's Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia (CH, Sep'09, 47-0169) is just one of several outstanding scholarly books that have covered Lingeman's historical thesis in greater depth. In sum, Lingeman's story reads well, but it does not add considerably to understanding of the early days of the Cold War. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; general readers. D. C. Maus State University of New York College at Potsdam
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
First, let me dispel the curse of the two-book review. These ambitious works of cultural history are in no way a forced pairing. Both "The Entertainer" and "The Noir Forties" examine political and sociological shifts in America at large, viewing Hollywood as a generator of dreams that at once mirrors and shapes the collective unconscious - as well as a company town run by despotic bosses. The books highlight different decades. Margaret Talbot concentrates on the 1930s, when her father, the actor Lyle Talbot, reached his peak of orbiting with the stars. Richard Lingeman deals with the moods of paranoia and insecurity following World War II. Even here, however, differences fade as both authors show a keen sense of context, the way two decades reach backward and forward and Hollywood repeats itself with variations. The studio heads were ever weak-kneed in the face of pressure. They caved in to a public outcry over morals in the Depression years by rigidly enforcing a puritanical Production Code. In the struggles to form guilds and later unions, actors were repeatedly crushed by the moguls, often in collusion with the mob. Embracing rather than resisting the sweeping tide of anti-Communism in the 1940s and '50s, the studios invented the blacklist, and virtually invited the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities - another form of mob intimidation - to investigate their own writers. One last uncanny parallel is the centrality to both narratives of the Midwest, an area with its own distinct character and peculiarities. Lingeman, an editor at The Nation and the author of biographies of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, was born in Indiana and is a veteran of the Korean War. He has a natural sympathy for farm and small-town boys caught up in the horrors of battle. And Lyle grew up in Nebraska, where he plied his trade in the raunchier alleyways of show business. Lingeman's experiences with the Army Counter Intelligence Corps from 1954 through 1956 begin and conclude "The Noir Forties," but otherwise his is straight history, while "The Entertainer" is more memoir, interweaving Talbot's family story with the portrait of Lyle as actor and emblem. The youngest child of her father's fifth and most enduring marriage (an understatement as the others seem to have expired before they ever began), Margaret, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker, was born in 1961 to a man old enough to be her grandfather. As a little girl she wasn't interested in his stories of the '20s and '30s, as unimaginably distant as the Middle Ages, but fortunately he lived long enough to spark his daughter's interest and reportorial skills. Talbot père comes across as a sort of Zelig-with-personality, a life-embracing man whose career spans, and illuminates, the first 60 years of the 20th century. When opportunity knocks, Lyle is already halfway through the door, cheerfully ready to adapt to every new form and possibility popular culture throws his way. From midway barker in a local carnival to bumbling magician to hypnotist's subject to traveling roadshow mainstay to actor in a theater troupe specializing in melodrama, Lyle is there. He moves on when these Victorian specialties become passé. And when the talkies beckon, handsome Lyle is ready for his close-up. He may have lacked introspection, as his daughter repeatedly reminds us (hardly unusual for an actor), but he "knew enough about acting to appreciate that this was a new era in which personality, passion and good looks mattered more than perfect elocution or grandiosity." At the same time, he was a consummate professional, whose main concern was to give patrons their money's worth, being "one of that generation of actors that did not expect to live like royalty." He landed in Hollywood in the early '30s, that sparkling pre-Code blip in film history when movies were wild and sexy, sin and violence went unpunished and the star system was in its infancy. He signed on at Warner Brothers, the scruffiest studio, makers of fast-paced and unpretentious grabbed-from-the-headlines movies rooted in urban grit and glamour. Warners' star-making machinery whirled into gear, first touting Lyle as a Gable type. With his slick black hair, broad face and easy grin (not to mention good teeth and a readymade marquee name), he actually looked more like Gable than Gable - at least the pre-makeover Gable. Perhaps because "Lyle often conveyed a bit of foppishness, a juvenile quality," as she puts it, the arbiters of image subsequently decided he was more the sophisticated indoor type. When partnered with Kay Francis ("Mary Stevens, M.D.") and Carole Lombard ("No More Orchids") or Bette Davis ("Fog Over Frisco"), he comes across as puppy-dog eager to please. In real life, his taste in women ran to smart and somewhat outrageous dames who would do and say things he wouldn't dare. He thus makes a perfect, pliable partner to those headstrong divas riding the winds of the previous decade's enfranchisement and social liberation. Shrewdly and with dispassion, Talbot analyzes the factors that may have prevented him from becoming a major player - possibly (as he thought) his activities as a founder of the Screen Actors Guild, or more probably (in her view) the lack of that ineffable something that makes for star quality. His looks were a little too regular, his affable personality registered no hint of conflict or contradiction - or what Talbot calls "the paradoxical quality that often makes a star." By my reading, Warners - and he - never did quite settle on his type. When playing the lover, he looks like a lounge lizard; when portraying a gangster, he resembles a Boy Scout. When was the last time you saw a bank robber neatly packing a suitcase before going on the lam ("Heat Lightning")? His is simply not the face you want to keep watching, or remember afterward. The one exception is his memorable role as a sleazily handsome lowlife in the Warners gem "Three on a Match," where he lures Ann Dvorak away from her husband and into a life of sex, drugs and child abuse, shocking even by early '30s standards. He counted himself lucky to have regular work, hardly a fate worse than death when you consider the odds. Talbot cites a trade paper's tracking of the year 1934: out of a hundred newcomers given contracts, only seven became stars, a few others became steady workers and the rest descended into footnotes much smaller than Lyle's. (And that doesn't factor in the multitudes who auditioned and failed.) Lyle went on to have a Broadway success and a career in television, as well as a crowningly happy family life. But at a certain point in this account, his good fortune becomes too much of a good thing, especially when supplemented by dozens of back stories to which Talbot is irresistibly drawn. Every girlfriend, every gig, receives the full-dress treatment, every domicile an economic and architectural history. We get disquisitions on orphans, freak shows, the treatment of children at the turn of the century, fan clubs, dance marathons, the dangers of early Hollywood, the evolution of movie theaters. Talbot is generous and scrupulous with attributions, and some of her detours are fascinating (like Lyle's stint working with the low-rent director Ed Wood). But cumulatively they begin to weigh the reader down, excess cargo on a flight that should have been as buoyant as its main character. Her assessments of movies are sharp and engaging, without being strikingly original. (However, her reappraisal of "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet," in which Lyle played the good-natured neighbor, is a fine piece of cultural revisionism.) But I can't allow to pass unchallenged her assertion that "the pre-Code era produced only a few really great talking pictures." It's true that the current vogue is for bypassing the classics to unearth scrappy, unsung movies, whose very imperfections testify to an earlier, freewheeling period Hollywood will never see again. Still, "really great" is the wrong term if it can't include "Scarface," "The Public Enemy," "Trouble in Paradise," "Morocco," "Shanghai Express," "What Price Hollywood?" "Dinner at Eight," "Little Women" and the early films of Busby Berkeley and Mae West. To Richard Lingeman's disadvantage, there is nothing unsung about film noir, those harsh and lurid little tales reeking of European-style fatalism. The genre has been the subject of a whole range of books, some of them superb, tracing the many tributaries feeding these pools of bile in a cinema that leans too persistently toward the sun. Lingeman's point of entry is through his own years as a veteran, and he understands firsthand the sense of displacement, the frightening and disorienting experience of being thrown into an alien culture (for him, Japan) and then thrust back upon the shores of a homeland that seems almost as alien. But movies, as it turns out, play a relatively small role in a book that's more interested in the always perilous struggle of America's liberals and progressives. Lingeman's discussion of films is never less than interesting, and he understands the paradox of a politically repressive period leading to some of the most inventive films ever made, often with subliminal blacklisting themes. But the heart of his writerly energy is the New Deal and its aftermath. A whole chapter is devoted - and devoted seems the right word - to the quixotic career of Henry Wallace. It's not hard to see where Lingeman's passion lies, though he tells us only indirectly. Even his personal memories are carefully impersonal. Along with movies, "The Noir Forties" contains fine summaries of other arts - Lingeman is especially good on the exuberant mishmash of populist forms of music that emerged after the war. But without a strong thematic engine to provide a sense of structure, without a protagonist - be it movies or music or Wallace - there is simply too much information floating freely. At times I felt I was slogging through an undergraduate textbook, but without the clear timeline and emphases to guide us and tell us what's important. I think I learned a lot about labor and management, and the struggles over wage and price controls, about the F.E.P.C. and the O.P.A. and the O.W.M.R. But please don't give me a test. Talbot concentrates on the '30s, when her father was a celebrity, Lingeman on the paranoia of the '40s. Molly Haskell's most recent book is "Frankly, My Dear: 'Gone With the Wind' Revisited."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 16, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Lingeman inquires into America's shift from New Deal liberalism to conservatism through the lenses of America's late-1940s cultural and political scenes. He strives to see the change in society's mood, whether induced by military demobilization, labor strikes, or Roosevelt's succession by Truman, as it was reflected in the period's signature movie genre, film noir. Summarizing the plots and productions of numerous titles, from the famous (Double Indemnity) to the less widely known (Detour), he juxtaposes noir's expressions of alienation and cynicism, for example, against societal indicators of anxiety and divorce. Mixing in polls of popular complaints about prices and housing and reviews of popular songs and pulp fiction, Lingeman eventually devises an end-point of sorts with the ascendance of anticommunism, the blacklisting of Hollywood figures, and the exhaustion of film noir's creativity. A work that never resolves whether it's film history, political history, or lamentation for liberalism, Lingeman's survey becomes everything by turns. Film noir is its attraction, and noir aficionados will decide whether Lingeman's allied subjects, including his army service, interest them--or flip by them in the hunt for the next noir critique.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this candid reappraisal of America's postwar era, Lingeman (Don't You Know There's a War On?), a veteran senior editor of the Nation, covers the years between the end of WWII and the beginning of the Korean War, focusing specifically on the shift of the American mood during this time from one of vague apprehension to a pointed distrust of the nation's stability. The author shows how this decline into a noir sensibility was abetted by the homecomings of battle-scarred veterans, anxiety over future international conflicts, and the vicious anticommunist crusades in Hollywood and Washington, D.C. In "unlocking the psychology" of the general mood, Lingeman traces how this dark disposition manifested in literature, music, and film, but the book's greatest triumph is in its depiction of the gradual change in the American populace's collective journey from the pessimism of the Great Depression, through the hope of a burgeoning postwar middle class, to a climate of fear in the McCarthy era and on into the cold war. Lingeman served the U.S. for two years in the '50s as a counterintelligence operative in Japan, and this "historical enlargement of [his] smaller personal memories" is an insightful and illuminating blend of history and cultural criticism. (Dec. 4) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Lingeman (senior editor, Nation; Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street) shows his skills in this cultural history of the years just after World War II and into the 1950s (in spite of the title). Hollywood films serve as his anchor, and his thesis is that the real America was not MGM but film noir. Some films Lingeman refers to are well known, e.g., Double Indemnity, but he examines plenty of B films. His wide-ranging book moves beyond mere film studies to take in such markers of the era as radio's Your Hit Parade, the Korean War, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the labor troubles of 1946, and Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign. Despite the breadth of topics, nothing here feels shallow or rushed. Particularly good is the author's parallel discussion of The Best Years of Our Lives, the 1946 Best Picture Oscar winner, and the real-life struggles of returning veterans-the shortages of housing and jobs, class issues, and the difficulties many had readjusting to peace. Likewise, he sees The Day the Earth Stood Still as a prism for examining fears of nuclear war. VERDICT There's a lot of material here and it all flows together seamlessly. This is a great book for buffs of both film and history persuasions.-Michael Eshleman, Hobbs, NM (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Paranoia and anomie in late-1940s America. As World War II drew to a close, American liberals hoped that the New Deal and a win-the-war culture would culminate in an era of peace and cooperation, advancing the interests of the common man. Instead, the nation got the Cold War and the McCarthy era. The Nation senior editor Lingeman (Double Lives: American Writers' Friendships, 2006, etc.) attempts to explain the transition in national mood during the time, from the euphoria at the end of the war to the anti-communist paranoia that followed. This was the heyday of film noir, inexpensive productions dealing in themes of violence, obsession with chance and death and existential despair. Lingeman attributes these films' popularity to a correlation between these themes and the contemporary national psyche, elegantly using them as an accessible window into the spirit of an era struggling to digest the horrors of war, the dislocations of conversion to a peacetime economy and anxieties about the Soviet Union. As he surveys the politics of the period, Lingeman's sympathies are clearly with the left. He gives much attention to union activity but struggles with the role of domestic communism, cheerfully asserting that "the most militant and effective unions in the South were Communist-led ones," but bristling at denunciations of "alleged Communist infiltration of unions." He describes at length the quixotic third-party candidacy of Henry Wallace in 1948, doomed in part because it welcomed communist participation, and the slow demise of various peace groups. Lingeman appears to view American foreign policy in this period as a lost opportunity in which progressives like Wallace could have forged a lasting peace with the Soviet Union had they not been sidelined by hard-liners in both parties, while he excuses or minimizes Stalin's provocations in Europe and Korea. The film criticism is more rewarding than the doctrinaire leftist exposition of the period's history.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
