A Lost Decade Gets Its Due

To those who didn’t experience them, the 1950s are mostly a lost decade, the foggy abyss separating the indelible 1940s (World War II) and 1960s (hippies, Camelot, Vietnam and Nixon).

In strong rebuttal, here comes “The Fifties,” a swell, smart Canadian documentary adapted for the History Channel, which is airing it as eight hours spread-eagled across six nights, beginning Sunday.

Adhering closely to David Halberstam’s fat nonfiction book of the same name, it’s fast-paced, quite wonderful stuff, zooming across the decade the way Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac hit the open road, and presenting its panorama of political, social and cultural trends against a background of ‘50s pop music. It’s like watching television in Johnny Rockets.

Here is just about everything you didn’t learn from “Grease,” from the sprawl of look-alike housing tracts sprung from New York’s postwar Levittown development to women in girdles, men in gray flannel suits, cars in tail fins and the U.S. up to its gut in burgers from California-bred McDonald’s, which one writer calls “Levittown on a bun.” And the odd coupling of Kerouac (thumping on his typewriter like a musical instrument) and Elvis Presley (defined here as “a black man’s soul inside a white man’s body”) fills much of Part 6.

The ever-emotive Halberstam himself does more of the talking than narrator Edward Herrmann, and the originators of the documentary are Alex Gibney and Tracy Dahlby. Their feats include an uncanny matching of vintage music to topics, as in having “The Great Pretender” by the Platters introduce the Commie-hunting demagoguery of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Their sense of irony surfaces, too, in having the documentary’s prevailing theme be Shirley & Lee singing “Let the Good Times Roll.” Actually, there are as many bad times as good in “The Fifties.”

That includes, in the two-hour Part 1, the symbolic white picket fence that enclosed the real estate of Levittown and other such massive housing sprawls in the racist early ‘50s that provided residential equality, but not racial equality. And it includes the controversial creation of the hydrogen bomb as a hedge against the Soviet Union, a speeding of the Cold War arms race that glorified Edward Teller while banishing to obscurity his great rival in the U.S. scientific community, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who after siring the atomic bomb was labeled disloyal for resisting the H-bomb.

The simple, clear-cut themes of good and evil in such movies as “High Noon” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”--where humankind is sapped of individuality--are offered here as vivid metaphors for the Red Scare paranoia that swept the period. McCarthy and his collaborators get the customary slap-down.

This was also the decade when TV shed its diapers, making the documentary’s omission of the period’s great quiz scandals all the more curious. However, those die-hards with selective memories who continue to portray the ‘50s as TV’s Golden Age need only to catch a bit of the blubbery, misery-laden “Queen for a Day” here to get a whiff of a dimmer reality.

Increasingly, Americans viewed themselves through TV’s prism in the ‘50s, and increasingly they aspired to meet impossible criteria for happiness and fulfillment being listed for them in ads by the mavens of Madison Avenue. It’s as a seller’s direct channel to the consumer that TV is at its most powerful and potentially insidious here, whether a sultry Julie London caressing a Marlboro in front of the camera as if making love to it or famed super-huckster Rosser Reeves using TV to market presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 the way he did Anacin and Viceroys.

And the way Ike’s White House later sold a timid media, and through them the nation, on anti-Communism driving a 1954 coup that toppled Guatemala’s democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz. Instead, as told in an especially compelling section of the documentary, the coup was instigated by the Dulles brothers and other top dogs in the Eisenhower administration, executed by the CIA through a phony invasion--and a puppet successor installed--to preserve the interests of the United Fruit Co. As rich and strong as Guatemala was poor and weak, the multi-tentacled firm controlled 40,000 jobs there and felt threatened by Arbenz’s planned economic reforms.

Herrmann describes the stagecraft: “In the capital city, the CIA broadcast a fictional account of the [military] advance, while the American Embassy played battle sounds on huge speakers on its roof and American planes swooped past the national palace.” Arbenz was soon history, and only then did the CIA allow in the mostly pliant press to cover his overthrow that the agency had secretly engineered. According to “The Fifties,” all for bananas.

“The Fifties” is strongest when locating and tracing connecting threads, dipping into the ‘40s to explain the ‘50s, for example, and seeing in secrecy shrouding the CIA-hatched Guatemala coup the roots of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and creeping U.S. involvement in Vietnam that would polarize the nation in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

However, much of “The Fifties” is told through the lives of the prominent figures it profiles, an especially witty and poignant mini-bio bringing to life “Peyton Place” author Grace Metalious, at once an amazing success story and terrible tragedy about a rebel-turned-lush who died broke at age 39 of liver disease. Another concerns famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, his public obsession with that topic belying his private life as a square, crew-cut, bow-tied Boy Scout of an academic.

Although the civil rights morality play has appeared more fully elsewhere, “The Fifties” does offer an intriguing take on basketball great Bill Russell’s unconventional role. And its retrospective on Emmett Till--a black 14-year-old from Chicago whose apparent flirtation with a white woman in Money, Miss., cost him his life in 1955--is at once moving and maddening. Despite overwhelming evidence against them, including testimony from an eyewitness, two white defendants were acquitted by an all-white jury that deliberated only 67 minutes. Later, protected by law from being retried for the same crime, these two goons admitted murdering Till, saying he was too uppity.

Thus does “The Fifties” affirm that nations are the sums of many layers of diverse experiences. And that the good times are rarely as good as you remember them.

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* “The Fifties” airs at 6 and 10 p.m. Sunday through Friday on the History Channel. The first night and last night are two-hour installments, the others are one-hour installments.