ABSTRACT
In the aftermath of World War II, upwardly and physically mobile families were uprooted, and American commitment to the extended family (always more of a utopian fantasy than an actuality) waned. Indeed, even the nuclear family seemed threatened as increasing numbers of women left their homes to enter the work force. Sociohistorical and economic conditions began to allow questioning of the very institution on which American society was based, asking whether the family is a “natural” or a social collective, and Hollywood too moved in this direction as filmmakers working in a variety of genres turned to the family. In the postwar 1940s and in the 1950s, John Ford’s westerns came to rely heavily on the family milieu; the plot of The Searchers (1956), for instance, is organized around the reunification of the family. Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense thrillers, always concerned with romantic heterosexual couples, often focused on the endangered nuclear family during this period. Both The Wrong Man (1956) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) depict external forces pressuring a family unit and chronicle the resulting interpersonal conflicts. But the genre that most effectively and directly addressed this institution was the family melodrama. In Genre, Stephen Neale pointed out:
Generic specificity is a question not of particular and exclusive elements, however defined, but of exclusive and particular combinations and articulations of elements, of the exclusive and particular weight given in any one genre to elements which in fact it shares with other genres. Heterosexual desire…is of course by no means exclusive to the musical or to the melodrama. But the role it plays in these genres is specific and distinctive.1
