DRIVE-INS & B-MOVIES \ 2 of 4

The other thing that happened: television.


Hollywood, fearing that television was going to end their thirty-year reign as the cheap American entertainment pastime, was pulling out all the stops to keep audiences going to the movies.


They made movies bigger, taller, wider. They made Biblical epics, and Broadway musical movies, and they had Elvis! But they also pumped out a lot of product on the cheap, with the intention of making a lot of money, fast. And American drive-ins were where most of these films found their audience.


The operative word with all of these B-pictures, was “exploitation.” Exploitation of the audience: their fears, their passions, their prejudices. And…exploitation of Hollywood itself: its actors and actresses, its writers and directors, its deep-seated drive to make money…at any cost.


What were Americans afraid of in the 1950s?


Communists. Nuclear war. The changing demographics of their cities and towns. And always…the fear of unemployment, poverty. Most people living in the 1950s had lived through the Great Depression. No one wanted to go back to that way of life.


And all B-movie stories exploit thematic fears.


Cowboys versus Indians? That’s the American Civil Rights movement.


Aliens versus Earthlings? That’s Russians versus Americans.


Monsters versus Men? That’s our fear of fear.


The generation who heard President Roosevelt’s say, “All we have to fear is fear, itself!” was, indeed, afraid…of being afraid.


B-movies in the golden age of the drive-in reflected America at its worst. And though these films look harmless in retrospect, they also represent a kind of creeping cynicism that would ultimately be their downfall.

con't.