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would have played with a newsreel, a couple of cartoons maybe, and a nice war bond display in the lobby. The prints of those movies still bear the legend “Buy War Bonds as You Leave This Theatre.” It was a good place to be. The best time I saw my parents together—or the only time—was when they took me to the movies. This was the audience that even the rebellious John L. Sullivan reconciled himself to after a spell on the chain gang.
    Moreover, the war years made classics: the history goes from Gone With the Wind to The Best Years of Our Lives , and along the way it takes in Casablanca, Road to Morocco (a bigger hit than Casablanca and equally uninterested in North Africa), Meet John Doe , and To Have and Have Not . These are emblems from a golden age eager for comfort, and it’s easy to assume that they conform to the code of the happy ending. But that’s not the case. Scarlett O’Hara is actually left alone, and we reckon she deserves it. The Best Years of Our Lives is wholesome and decent and it trusts to the good nature of ordinary people,but it admits how greed and opportunism had flourished in the war. In Casablanca our guy gives up his girl for higher causes. Meet John Doe is not just rueful, it’s close to ruined in its feeling for hysteria within the American dream. Road to Morocco knows that Hope and Crosby should never trust one another. The only one of those classics with an unequivocally serene ending is To Have and Have Not , which has Bacall shuffling off with Bogart into a cockamamie future, and so contrary to the Hemingway novel it claims as its source. It’s about as daft as the Road film, even if it’s also more insolent, sexy, and knowing than any other wartime romance.
    The rapture was short-lived. By 1950, attendance was down to 55 million people a week; by 1960, it was 30 million, or less than a sixth of the population. When the war ended there were many objections to the culture of the happy ending, for it seemed like a cruel lie as the truths of the war years were uncovered, from Dachau to the prospects for further wars in the bright light of Hiroshima. All over the world, there were promises to make cinema more “real,” or more aware of the world’s difficulties.
    The old culture of Hollywood had many dissenters. The Supreme Court, seeing monopolistic tendencies, separated production and exhibition. The fear of a Communist presence in America fixed on the movie industry to gain public attention. There were brave new films about the movie business—aware of fear, exploitation, and madness: Sunset Blvd., In a Lonely Place, The Bad and the Beautiful , and even Singin’ in the Rain , one of the cheekiest satires on Hollywood. There were also small crime films, as aware of the anxieties in America as the best pulp fiction— Detour, Crossfire, Force of Evil . In time, these pictures were called “film noir,” which had the defect ofcovering up their social criticism. In Crossfire , about a killing in the military prompted by anti-Semitism (it was homophobia in the original book), there is a throwaway scene, barely remembered now, with Gloria Grahame and Paul Kelly, that has a contempt for life as trenchant as Jim Thompson or Nathanael West. It was West who had known in 1939, in The Day of the Locust , that Hollywood was a depraved and deluding cultural center that deserved to be overthrown. The doubts were there. Norman Mailer, who had done some time in Hollywood and loved movies, wrote The Deer Park (1955), a scathing novel so much tougher than the pained hero-worship in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon .
    But the happy ending struggled on. There are always too many movies for safe generalizations. So Crossfire, In a Lonely Place , and Robert Aldrich’s savagely disenchanted Kiss Me Deadly were smothered by the blancmange of An American in Paris, The Greatest Show on Earth, Roman Holiday, The Glenn Miller