| After the end of World War II, Hollywood studios began producing a cycle of films aimed at social problems like racism, alcoholism, and the adjustment of veterans to civilian life. As a group, they were a significant historical and industrial trend, winning both box-office success and critical prestige. The Depression years had its own socially relevant film cycles, yet something was different about the postwar examples of the genre. Whereas previous topical content spread across a number of genres and conceptions of the "sociological," the postwar films were received as "social problem films" and began to share a coherent notion of what a social problem is. Where film scholars have paid attention to these postwar films, they have tended either to discount them as a historical aberration or else to see them as a lingering effect of a Depression-era zeitgeist. However, a materialist history of the genre demonstrates how three concurrent trends in the postwar United States actually fostered the genre's postwar development. First, developments in the film industry changed the economic market for prestige films, putting a premium on social relevance as a marker of "quality" in a changing marketplace. Second, changes in the U.S. political economy brought about a social problem discourse that not only encouraged the production of films about "social issues" but also made such statements identifiable as a coherent entity. Third, changes in the American class structure brought a cultural legitimization of the cinema as an art, as well as a middlebrow reception of feature cinema; both shaped the cultural marketplace of prestige in the reception of Hollywood films. Taken together, these historical foundations suggest how the specific form of liberalism represented by the problem film came to occupy such a prominent place in Hollywood's output in the two decades after 1945. |
