Word: 1950s
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...fantasies are shaped not only by the comforts of the cars but by their sheer tonnage as well. The organization man of the 1950s might have been satisfied with a workadaddy DeSoto; in the 1970s the aspiring hipster could relieve his mid-life crisis with an Italian sports car the size of a Shriner go-cart. Affluent Americans of the 1990s--so responsible at home, so productive in the workplace--want a car designed for war. With its four-wheel drive and tons of torque and booster-rocket horsepower, today's sports-utility vehicle would have come in handy...
That too represents an enormous psychological change from the 1950s. In the postwar boom, there was general agreement about shoring up the New Deal institutions that promised to protect people if there were another economic earthquake. That consensus was carried into the expansion of the 1960s but then rolled back in the 1980s. "Most people may want to see welfare reformed," says Mitchell, "but a by-product of that is the widespread notion now that you're on your own. The old social contract that there will be help in bad times is disappearing...
...vices. But--a point usually missed--the style was never an end in itself. At its best it conveyed an idea about how the rottenness of big cities touches everyone, high and low, respectable and raffish. Director Curtis Hanson, working off James Ellroy's bitterly brewed novel about corrupt 1950s cops, gets that wonderfully right in a smart, complex film that exuberantly mixes comic excess, melodramatic pressure, romantic rue and an almost casual murderousness...
...Diary of Anne Frank The hit play from the 1950s by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett is back on Broadway, fresher and more moving than one might ever have expected. Credit goes largely to adapter Wendy Kesselman, who has removed some of the sentimental uplift and restored a firm sense of time and place, and to director James Lapine, who keeps the tension high and emotions real...
...Last Night of Ballyhoo Alfred Uhry's comedy-drama could have been written in the 1950s, but that doesn't make its old-fashioned virtues any less appealing. The story of a Jewish family in Atlanta in 1939 has a keen sense of its milieu, raises tough issues of Jewish anti-Semitism and goes for honest sentiment, not sentimentality...