We can be uncharitable to the past. It makes us feel appropriately enlightened to assume a certain naïveté about how people used to live—how they dressed, how they ate, how they thought. Thus we tend to paint history with broad brushstrokes.
Films can tell an especially false tale. The American movies we watch from the era often referred to as the golden age of Hollywood (some call them “classics”), spanning the 1930s to the early 1960s, speak to us from sharply circumscribed boundaries.
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