Postwar Stars, Genres,
and Production Trends

Perhaps the single most remarkable aspect of the postwar American cinema was the overall quality and vitality of the movies themselves. Despite the declining market and mounting outside pressures, Hollywood's output in the late 1940s was, by any standards, as strong as in any period in industry history. The war and the war-related flood of new talent brought a spirit of innovation and even a certain progressivism to Hollywood. Among the newcomers were the scores of European emigres who arrived in Hollywood before the war and had become established filmmakers. Their number also included the influx of new American talent during and just after the war, many of whom had new ideas about the cinema's potential as both a political and an artistic force-the New York dramatists Elia Kazan and Robert Rossen, for instance, who in films like...