Two takes on the l950's

    Historians look back on the l950's and often say, "It wasn't a bad time in North America."  They're probably right. Inflation and unemplyment remained low. And millions of people left dour inner cities and moved out to booming suburbs.
     But not everything was hunky dory. It certainly wasn't for Marcus Messner, the main character in Philip Roth's 2008 novel 'Indignation'. For him the early 1950's was a nightmare. At first, working in his father's kosher butcher shop in Newark, New Jersey was great and Marcus thrived. But then Marcus goes to college, first at a local college, and then to escape his uptight father, to a college in Winesburg, Ohio.
    At Winesburg College, Marcus , a Jew, runs afoul of a very Christian administration. Soon, he's on his way to the Korean War to fight the Chinese. Philip Roth's obsessions nearly always revolve around sex and being a Jew. 'Indignation' is no different in both respects. The paranoia in this book overwhelms a little too muc. But the l950's with its incredible anti-communism, and fear of nuclear war was a very paranoid decade.
    "I was angered, I was humiliated," Messner recalls during a nightmare interview with the Winesburg dean. "I was resentful." Who wouldn't be resentful after being questioned the way Messner is? He certainly gets a grilling from the dean. 'Indination' is history as a powerful nightmare. At times Roth may be rigid in advancing the plot to a terrible ending. Still, he has written a powerful work.
    Now we move north to Canada in the early 1950's. Back then if you said the words "Canadian film" most movie enthusiasts would groan and head for the exits. But this is no longer true. Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan and others have made many fine films.
    Now comes 'Edwin Boyd: citizen Gangster', starring Scott Speedman, Kelly Reilly and Kevin Durand. Directed by Nathan Morlando, the film unfolds the career of Edwin Alonzo Boyd, a famous bank holdup robber in early 1950's Toronto. It's a good film but a little too dour.
    Boyd is a bus driver who walks away from his job, He wants to be an actor and tries to get into the Lorne Greene Acting School. Greene was a famous Canadian actor back in the 1950's. But Boyd doesn't have the $45 entrance fee.
     "He's been lazy all his  life," hos father, a former cop, tells Boyd's hard pressed wife, played well by Kelly Reilly. Maybe, but Boyd, played by Scott Speedman is a veteran of world war two. The film suggests he has a social conscience and is outraged at the way some veterans were treated at war's end.
    Still, crime desn't always pay and surely not on l950's Toronto. The film travels through a grim surly Toronto that's cold and often blanketed in snow. Unlike a l960's film like 'Bonnie and Clyde', bank robbing is not a glamorous but dangerous activity. 'Edwin Boyd" reminds one more of Robert Altman's l970's flick 'Thieves Like Us'.
    The prison escapes can amaze you. But in the end you can't escape the law. Defiance in any form is doomed, which is a very l950's style message., for both Mark Messner and Edwin Boyd.