Selling Out Santa
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Vaughn Joy
About this book
Christmas is not just a day or a frame of mind as Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) imparts in Miracle on 34th Street (1947); Christmas is also a vehicle for national mythmaking as an idealising mirror for American cultural and political attitudes of a given moment. Via a case study on Hollywood Christmas films released between 1946 and 1961, Selling Out Santa offers an examination of political pressures on Hollywood in the post-war period and the cultural ramifications of federal involvement in the motion picture industry. As the House Committee on Un-American Activities opened hearings in 1947 and the FBI gathered reports on potential communist subversion in Frank Capra’s Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Hollywood executives began to bend to the socially conservative pressures of this post-war moment. Using Christmas films as the core of this investigation to identify and analyse changes within the genre as they relate to and reflect changes in the wider cultural and political moment exposes for film scholars, students, and non-specialists how these federal and external pressures on Hollywood moulded these holiday favourites throughout the 1950s and set the social standard for decades of Christmas releases.
Topics
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Frontmatter
I -
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Acknowledgements
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Contents
VII -
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Introduction
1 -
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Chapter 1 American Archetypes and Un-American Committees: Anti-Communism, the FBI, and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
14 -
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Chapter 2 Reflections of Reality: Social Problem and Psychological Films, 1947
45 -
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Chapter 3 The New All-American Christmas: Rebranding Christmas, 1949 – 1954
69 -
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Chapter 4 A Case Study for Christmas: Changing Attitudes towards Commercialism and Consumerism on Film, 1946 – 1961
120 -
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Chapter 5 Christmases Past and Future: Walt Disney and Frank Capra, 1940s–1961
162 -
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Conclusion
220 -
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Appendix – COMPIC Files
226 -
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References
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Index
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