Cold War Fantasies: Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy (review)

Hollywood workings, offers instead little more than a cascade of enthusiastic clichés about it: “Movies were always magical to me” (the title of the volume); “the star system was wonderful”; the unmanageable Marilyn Monroe had that “extra thing you get from a star”; and Julia Roberts is a “star in the true meaning of the word.” And with equally clichéd sentiments, actress Janis Paige positively gushes with admiration and gratitude for the studio age and for the parent-like management it provided for her career and even her personal life: “Believe me, it was the golden age….They treated me so wonderfully.” More than a set of professional circumstances, that golden age to Paige represented a real cultural epoch of a broad sort: “We’ll never see it again. It has to be treasured and respected just because our morals were different.” It was an age when audiences “had to use their imagination” in handling the implied sexuality of such famous scenes as the double cigarette lighting between Paul Henreid and Bette Davis in Now, Voyager. Sure, such sentiments are formulaic, but, echoed so much as they are among the various profiles of this book, they come close to validating themselves as real cultural mythology if not cinematic analysis. This is not to say that the volume is entirely devoid of real informational or cinematic value. There are, of course, anecdotes of biographical interest. We learn from actress Jane Withers (a less remembered peer of Shirley Temple’s), for instance, that James Dean had a penchant for a favorite shirt (pink) strong enough to keep it from the laundry for many consecutive days at a time, and producer/director Stanley Kramer’s anecdote about Dean’s confession of utter pretense in adopting his famously tough attitude as a bit of public self-promotion while having coffee with Mrs. Kramer in a Hollywood drugstore reveals a much softer private self than it could ever be inferred from his mythological character. There is also a touching account of a nearly fatal disfiguring automobile accident that thwarted the promising comeback prospects of actress Paula Raymond (and how many hapless others), and an episode or two of some casting-couch dynamics (more cultural mythology) for both her and Jane Greer (Greer’s with Howard Hughes). Then there is Fred Zinnemann’s profile (alas again, at the very end of the volume)—a refreshingly substantive and intelligent assessment of cinematic cultural values (probably the volume’s only one) offered with an ingratiating modesty that gives the lie to every stereotype of egotistic directors. (Some antimythology, here.) Finally, it is worth recognizing the incredibly comprehensive footnotes provided at every subject’s mention of any Hollywood figure of note. They constitute nothing less than an incidental encyclopedia of Hollywood’s golden age, and, along with the comprehensive filmographies provided for each interview, they easily establish the utility of Verswijver’s volume as a true reference work. Robert Cirasa Kean University Rcirasa@kean.edu Ronnie D. Lipschutz. Cold War Fantasies: Film, Fiction, and Foreign Policy. Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. 256 pages; $23.95.