The problems of analysing film genres are multiple and well documented, but it continues to be an important means of exploring and understanding Hollywood cinema. This is particularly true when addressing the 1950s, a decade in which a series of new or newly rejuvenated genres came to the fore and other popular genres faded away. Science fiction boomed, with the production of big hits, such as The Thing from Another World (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Fly (1958), and large numbers of less successful offerings, such as Phantom from Space (1953) and Teenagers from Outer Space (1959). Film noir remained popular with audiences throughout much of the decade, even if its status as a genre had not yet solidified. Musicals continued to draw crowds in the early years of the 1950s through films such as Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), but declined as the years passed, with Funny Face and Silk Stockings (both 1957) failing to make back their budgets. Due to the shifting fortunes of these new and established film categories, genre remains a key framework for understanding this period in Hollywood's history.

Much work in this area has connected film genres to the historical contexts within which they rose and fell. However, in The Cool and the Crazy: Pop Fifties Cinema, Peter Stanfield questions whether the bodies of films that genre criticism works with are too broad to expose and address the nuanced relationship between Hollywood productions and US society. His attention to smaller trends in cinema casts genres as sprawling, unwieldy structures that are of interest in relation to the development of their own internal conventions and formulas, but which reveal little about the production and reception contexts of individual films. Instead he argues that cycles, narrower groupings of films characterized by their similarity, ephemerality and topicality, are nimbler tools better suited to uncovering connections between cinema and society. The tension between repetition and change that has been key to genre studies emerges here in microcosm, observable in short bursts of thematically linked films that blossom and wither over a few brief years. These cycles comprise films that “were not made to be contemplated as art objects; few are worthy of extended analysis, but when we consider them in their commonality … we can learn much about the work they do, the pleasure they provide, and the world they and we exist in” (2). Informed by his observation that “contiguous events and activities inside and outside the institutions of filmmaking form film cycles,” Stanfield argues that “identifying [these events and activities] and then writing a descriptive analysis of how one cycle transforms itself into another will produce a history of film understood through its relationship to the topical” (13). Stanfield consequently traces connections between the recurring and mutating motifs of 1950s film cycles and their sociohistorical contexts.

There are numerous potential pitfalls in this approach, but Stanfield is careful to avoid producing a “reflectionist or symptomatic analysis that imagines unmediated or even allegorical correspondence between movies and their contexts” (4), instead preferring “to show how cyclical film production and events and concerns within the public sphere coincide, or not, as the case may be” (19). This approach, which is grounded in empirical evidence drawn from the films, the ancillary materials that surrounded them and broader discourses circulating in US society, leads The Cool and the Crazy to messier and less conclusive arguments than might otherwise have been advanced, but the book is much more persuasive for it. One of the strengths of Stanfield's work is his willingness to resist easy and superficially satisfying answers in favour of demonstrating the imprecise and often awkward ways in which cinema relates to public debates and social trends.

The cycles with which The Cool and the Crazy concerns itself include social-problem films, hot-rod movies, war films released after the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, and films about Prohibition-era gangsters and boxers. Many of these cycles were predominantly aimed at the teenage audience and each relates to an issue of prominence at the time. While Stanfield does not aim to be exhaustive in his coverage of trends in 1950s cinema, his book does offer a strong indication of the growing significance of youth culture to Hollywood over the decade. This reinforces observations made at the level of genre by authors such as Steve Neale and Thomas Doherty, who have identified teenagers as key consumers of cinema during the decade, increasingly and consciously targeted by Hollywood productions. While The Cool and the Crazy's historical narratives are staged against this same economic backdrop, the book uses its focus on seriality, similarity and difference within fleeting trends in 1950s cinema to zoom in on and more intimately situate such cycles alongside the sometimes equally fleeting debates that occurred about and inside this emerging youth culture. This careful and precise contextualization makes Stanfield's book a compelling account of the decade's film cycles, but it also provides a useful methodological model for researchers interested in applying the empirical focus of the “new film history” to unpicking the relationship between small bodies of films and the societies within which they are produced and watched.