For many years 1950s US films like Reefer Madness and I was a Communist for the FBI have been reliable money raisers for radical and progressive organisations. Deadly serious when they were first made — a grotesque mix of anti-communist hysteria and over-the-top paranoia — viewed 40 years later they have become hilarious comedies that undermine the very values they so clumsily advocated.
American Supermarket, a new six-part series on SBS television, each Sunday in December at 7 p.m., promises the viewer the chance to see how the "American Dream" was sold to ordinary people back in the '40s and '50s. Combining old industrial films, commercials, government documentaries, eduational films and military training films, the series promises to be an entertaining experience.
Each episode deals with particular aspects of the "American way". It takes us on a journey through the golden world of crass consumerism in the '50s. In episode two (December 13) we enter Doctor Strangelove's land, where anti-communist hysteria takes on almost religious overtones. The people of the United States wait on the edge of their seats for an inevitable Soviet atomic attack while "Reds" plot in every small town and village throughout the US, and every country in the world, to overthrow "democracy".
Later episodes look at sex, drugs, marriage and an assorted range of oddball products, fads and ideas that made America what it is today.