This rag gets you closer to the real 1950s than The Reader’s Digest. In addition to its obsessions with adultery, interracial dating and closeted homosexuality among celebrities, Confidential was also dedicated to exposing Commies in positions of authority anywhere. Humphrey Bogart famously said that everybody read Confidential but nobody admitted it — they claimed that their maids brought it into the house.
The ulcer-cure article is significant, as were the ads the magazine regularly ran offering techniques for appearing more manly. This was the era of film noir, all right, and Confidential charted what Auden called The Age Of Anxiety with precision.
This front page really captured me,
and especially the “Two Week Ulcer Cure”.
I feel like it was the real 50s, because it’s the real always.
Brought me back, specifically, to two episodes of “One Step Beyond”,
which I hope never to see again:
“Vanishing Point” from 1959 and “Anniversary of a Murder” from 1960.
Those little half-hours, with their almost unbearable intensity of emotion, expressed in excruciating closeups of people in anguish, are evidence
that the period was full of repressed, and not so repressed, pain.
This “Confidential” cover: can’t get it out of my mind.
The real always, yes — which is why film noir still speaks to us, while some of the cheerier expressions of 50s culture feel a bit dated.