As director and screenwriter, Richard Brooks adapted two popular, postwar Western novels about destructive financial conditions at the closing of the American frontier: Milton Lott's The Last Hunt (1954) and Frank O’Rourke's A Mule for the Marquesa (1964). Both novels confront human greed and excessive violence as inherently American traits, as well as part of its Manifest Destiny to achieve territorial and economic conquest. Both novels reveal the necessity of men to adapt to menacing natural and commercial environments in the West. Both novels focus upon the technical skills of hunting, whether bringing down bison or bringing down men. Both the novels and Brooks's adapted films—The Last Hunt (1956) and The Professionals (1966)—involve the sexual kidnapping of a woman as the central metaphor for ruthless capitalistic conquest of the American West. At work in the novels and films can be found an economy of adaptation that plays out in unchecked overconsumption and systems of brutal exchange. Economics of adaptation for America includes not just man in the wilderness, but also the wild within mankind. Risk, whether bringing buffalo hides to market or returning for pay a wife to her capitalist husband, does not function by the simple gain–loss mechanics of equilibrium, but rather by irrational, unpredictable greed and fear. Ironically for Brooks, the film productions took on extreme risk–reward consequences of their own, whereby he discovered that blood-guilt of American Western history did pay off at the box office, and that a heist-like caper would proffer significant financial and artistic gains. In some respects, then, Brooks's relationship to the industry oddly mirrored the economic fixations in the novels.

Brooks wrote the adapted screenplays for both The Last Hunt and The Professionals. As with his other adaptations from the fifties and sixties, such as The Blackboard Jungle (1955), The Brothers Karamazov (1958), Elmer Gantry (1960), and Lord Jim (1965), Brooks did not shy away from controversial and iconoclastic subject matter. The Last Hunt and The Professionals represent Brooks's attempts to redirect the image of the West, to reinterpret the underlying values of the Western, to create new archetypes of Western masculinity, and to critique assumptions about economic progress in American Western history.

A committed intellectual with a strong streak of independence, Richard Brooks acceded to the director's chair after spending a number of years as a screenwriter, first at Universal and Warners, then at M-G-M, where he became acquainted with producer Arthur Freed during the making of Any Number Can Play (1949, Mervyn Leroy), for which he wrote the adapted screenplay. Brooks would eventually sign a long-term contract with Metro. Impressed by Brooks, Freed encouraged him to make the move to directing, promoting the idea with head of studio Louis B. Mayer. Mayer eventually agreed, even though he reportedly discouraged Brooks from taking a position that he disingenuously dismissed as less important than that of screenwriter: “Anyone can direct, but not everyone can write.’ A friendship with actor Cary Grant, then signed to star in the M-G-M project that Brooks eventually wrote and directed as Crisis (1950), helped with this “promotion.”

The erstwhile screenwriter was also encouraged to refocus his career by Freed, who convinced Mayer that Brooks was well qualified by experience and temperament to take charge of projects rather than simply writing the scripts for them. This path to the director's chair was thoroughly traditional: a fortunate mix of unexpected opportunities, considerable talent, and a forceful personality. It also did not hurt that Brooks was not shy about having something to say, as he proved by writing The Brick Foxhole (1945), one of the best ex-serviceman WWII novels. The book is an acerbic and wide-ranging indictment of the destructive tensions in American society uncovered by the forced togetherness of military life. Though it deals only with the experiences of men stationed stateside, it is otherwise very much in the tradition of the better-known works by James Jones (From Here to Eternity), Irwin Shaw (The Young Lions), Leon Uris (Battle Cry), and Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead).

In addition to writing scripts for some forgettable productions (such as Swell Guy [1946], based on a Gilbert Emery play), Brooks learned much about the craft of directing by working closely with hands-on producer Mark Hellinger on The Killers (1946, uncredited) and Brute Force (1947), for which he received a screen credit. He collaborated with John Huston on the script for Key Largo (1948), adapting the Maxwell Anderson play, and as a result spent a good deal of time on set. During the production he struck up a close friendship with Humphrey Bogart, an experience that taught him a good deal about screen acting and the director's role in shaping performance.

In 1947, Abraham Levitt, along with his sons, transformed rural grazing land in Nassau County on Long Island into the tract-home, planned community of Levittown which would become a symbol of American middle-class values. The postwar invasion, really a mass white immigration of returning GIs to the suburbs, prompted Hollywood to develop a new cinema of distraction. Middle-class suburbia offered a fertile landscape on which to stage broad physical farces of upward mobility and all of its diversions and headaches – disastrous renovations, unruly appliances, financial woes, and the ever-present threat of adultery. Marriage, as both a social contract and amorous exploit, redefined modern gender roles through a series of comic vignettes on middleclass existence in these films. Central to all of these suburban romps were the visual distractions of mid-century modern architecture, interior design and its lively palette, and contemporary women's fashions from Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, all of which serve as pleasant diversions from toils and troubles of modern life. In these visual pleasures can be found an accepted system of consumption based upon economic and class identification. These suburban comedies, then, offer the visual enchantment of American modernity and gloss over its discontents.

Though patterned after Jack Benny's successful parody George Washington Slept Here (1942), even popular stars Cary Grant and Myrna Loy could not save Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House (1948) from losing a quarter of a million dollars in its first run in 1948. That year also signaled the beginning of the Cold War with the Berlin Blockade. Two years later, Father of the Bride (1950) would make six million dollars, nearly six times its production budget, probably because its tale of suburban excess held up a mirror to the foibles of the burgeoning American middle class. That film would start a trend in moneymaking suburban comedies for Hollywood throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, producing what can be classified as a film cycle. Even the most modest boxoffice returns proved profitable because audiences flocked to see gently absurd reflections of their own imagined lives. Profits ranged from three million for Rally Round the Flag, Boys! in 1958 to over twenty million a decade later for Yours, Mine and Ours (1968), twenty times its production budget.

From the end of World War II in 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Cold War period ushered in new film genres that reflected and deflected political and social anxieties of the period. In general, cinema scholars view Cold War-era cinema as tending toward two essential aims: to be reliable expressions of American freedom in the face of Communist oppression; to reinforce individualism against collectivism as a distinctly American trait. Traditionally in cinema studies, Cold War films fall into two main categories, American “propaganda” to comply with the House Un-American Committee's (HUAC) anti-Communist agenda or as “allegories that offer disguised comment on American politics.” Film critics have interpreted 1950s sci-fi films and Westerns as fulfilling these cultural mandates, if not serving as warnings of complacency and complicity in the face of an ominous Communist, atomic threat. Communist-themed films hardly constitute the majority of films that Hollywood produced during this very inventive, genre-expansive period. Many of these popular film genres have received little notice by film scholars, as though transformative and emerging generic film innovations did not represent the Cold War period. Such a viewpoint relegates several decades to somewhat doctrinaire views of a major period in American filmmaking. This collection of essays not only wishes to expand historical and critical viewpoints but also wishes to display numerous recognizable and diverse approaches to emerging film genres during this period.

For American cinema, the Cold War supplied ample conflict and anxieties about the new postwar period, particularly with the intrusion of the federal government. Several fine studies have made detailed cases from recently accessible archival materials. Tony Shaw's Hollywood's Cold War (2007) examines the “state–private networks” of two image-makers, Hollywood and Washington, D. C., that imposed upon filmmakers a propaganda machine to promote doctrinaire capitalism: