ABSTRACT
This book should end with the comforting assurance to which recourse has been made in so many films, when the maltreated and bemused hero smiles bravely, if wanly, from his hospital bed. ‘He's going to be all right.’ But whether in this instance he is going to be is another matter. A past president of the CEA put it this way at the beginning of the new decade. ‘Something is sure to survive; but the cinematograph industry that I have known since my boyhood isn’t.’ Not that everyone has been feeling so desolated. Penelope Houston, for instance, was able to speak of ‘the immense vitality of 1959’ and of ‘its amazingly confident contrast to the decade's earlier years’.
