Y'all in the family: The 1950s Hollywood domestic melodrama and the cinematic reconstruction of the southern family (Anthony Mann, Richard Brooks, Martin Ritt)

This dissertation explores a southern cycle of the Hollywood genre of domestic melodrama, prevalent in the 1950s. Taking as exemplary of this cycle four films made in 1958 and 1959, and all based on the works of Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams, I examine these films as remarkable for their frantic reconstruction of the American family at a time when, despite the Ozzie and Harriet filter through which so many still view domestic life in this decade, the stability of the family was genuinely embattled by various forces.; These four films, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), God's Little Acre (1958), The Long, Hot Summer (1958) and The Sound and the Fury (1959), demonstrate a curious return to what Fred Chappell1 terms the "South as Eden" approach of Hollywood filmmakers to the representation of the American South. This period, whose parameters may be described approximately as beginning with D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation in 1915 and ending with Disney's Song of the South in 1946, typically celebrated a genteel plantation family occasionally punctuating gracious utterances with sips from their mint juleps among ordered Doric columns. My contention here is that the transformation of these literary portraits of sometimes violent decay and always inexorable degeneration of the southern family into blithe sermons on the importance of hard work and unconditional love reflects the desire of the American audiences of the 1950s for order and containment in the domestic sphere. For over thirty years, the South had been represented, with few deviations, as a place of respite from modernity, a simplified and sometimes simpleminded portrait of agrarian utopia. That in particular these films were made under the conventions of the domestic melodrama, replete with its unresolvable tensions, dramatic hyperbole and absurdly forced resolutions, I argue, points to the unique importance of the preservation of the edenic southern family in the popular imagination at this time. In violating artistic intent and narrative logic to reconstruct these centerless southern homes, the filmmakers were responding to a consumer need for order in their own.; 1Chappell places all films about the South into one of two categories: "The South as Eden" or "The South as Hell." While, like Edward D. C. Campbell in The Celluloid South , I agree that Chappell thereby oversimplifies matters somewhat, his binary is nonetheless reasoned and useful.