Changing Societies: The Red House, The Hanging Tree, Spencer’s Mountain, and Post-war America
Changing Societies: The Red House, The Hanging Tree, Spencer’s Mountain, and Post-war America
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns argues that the clash between different cultures is a key element of the films of Delmer Daves. He offers a dialectical account of these cultural clashes, suggesting that Daves dramatises social progress by conceiving it as the passage from one social stage to another that supplants, in an act of improvement, the preceding one. Through analysis of three of his films from three different decades and representing three different genres – The Red House, The Hanging Tree, and Spencer’s Mountain – Berns demonstrates the sustained and consistent authorial concern that Daves felt for the betterment of society. What was required, Daves felt, was a community constantly willing to work to achieve social concord. In this regard, Berns’ analysis is one that is contextualised in America’s post-War years, representing a period in which hope was held out for a better society.
Keywords: Culture, Society, Progress, Post-War America, Community
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