Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 344
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9
978-0-7425-3041-6 • Paperback • February 2004 • $69.00 • (£53.00)
978-1-4617-0539-0 • eBook • February 2004 • $65.50 • (£50.00)
Beverly Merrill Kelley is full professor and founder of the communication department at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California.
Chapter 1 1 Introduction: A Tale of Two Cities, Parameters, the Language of Politics
Chapter 2 2 Populism in The Last Hurrah
Chapter 3 3 Elitism in Advise and Consent
Chapter 4 4 Fascism in A Face in the Crowd
Chapter 5 5 Antifascism in Seven Days in May
Chapter 6 6 Interventionism in The Green Berets
Chapter 7 7 Isolationism in The Steel Helmet
Chapter 8 8 Cold War Hawkism in The Manchurian Candidate
Chapter 9 9 Cold War Dovism in Dr. Strangelove; or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb
Chapter 10 10 Conclusion: Myth, Megaphone, Metaphor, Mirror, Microscope, and Magic Carpet
Chapter 11 Ideological Filmolgoy
Chapter 12 Selected Bibliography
In the 1950s and 1960s, the film world moved from black and white to color, and politics moved from black and white to shades of gray. Kelley tells this story with sociological sweep, but also with a good eye for characters. John Wayne, Sam Fuller, and Stanley Kubrick all come back to life to tell us about their times. It's a fine book about real art, real people, and real politics.
— John J. Pitney Jr., Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics, Claremont McKenna College
It is rare indeed to find a film text that is prepared to analyze American foreign policy, presidential politics, cultural theory, and social history with such a wide-ranging and lucid grasp of the material. Erudite, accessible, and often witty, Reelpolitik II will appeal to students, scholars in the field, and anyone who has any kind of interest in political and historical movies.
— Ian Scott, University of Manchester, England, author of American Politics in Hollywood Film
Beverly Kelley's Reelpolitik II is a masterpiece of both clever concept and detailed execution—a real tour de force that gives us a fresh vocabulary for understanding where we've come from, and perhaps where we are headed.
— William Knoke, author of Bold New World: The Essential Road Map to the Twenty-first Century
Not only the times, but the ideological currents come alive through Kelley's attention to telling detail. She has mastered the cinematic technique of depth of focus, foregrounding ideology and character against a background fill of layered historical detail, telling the story not only of the politics, but the movies as well. For students of politics, cinema, and history, this will prove a provocative melange of disciplines, braiding various dimensions of understanding into a single, fascinating interpretation of America in the 1950s and 1960s.
— Herbert E. Gooch III, California Lutheran University
Ms. Kelly provides film scholars and their students with an articulate engaging writing style coupled with an expertly crafted, thoroughly researched analysis, examining films chosen for their presumed political ideologies.
— Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Political ideologies in the 1950s and 1960s film are the topic of Beverly Merrill Kelley's Reelpolitik II, a discussion of political figures in film and how they fostered mythology and changes. From discussions of facism and antifacism sentiments in movies of the times to Cold War, isolationism, and interventionism in specific selected films, Reelpolitik II is simply outstanding.
— Midwest Book Review