From the end of World War II in 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Cold War period ushered in new film genres that reflected and deflected political and social anxieties of the period. In general, cinema scholars view Cold War-era cinema as tending toward two essential aims: to be reliable expressions of American freedom in the face of Communist oppression; to reinforce individualism against collectivism as a distinctly American trait. Traditionally in cinema studies, Cold War films fall into two main categories, American “propaganda” to comply with the House Un-American Committee's (HUAC) anti-Communist agenda or as “allegories that offer disguised comment on American politics.” Film critics have interpreted 1950s sci-fi films and Westerns as fulfilling these cultural mandates, if not serving as warnings of complacency and complicity in the face of an ominous Communist, atomic threat. Communist-themed films hardly constitute the majority of films that Hollywood produced during this very inventive, genre-expansive period. Many of these popular film genres have received little notice by film scholars, as though transformative and emerging generic film innovations did not represent the Cold War period. Such a viewpoint relegates several decades to somewhat doctrinaire views of a major period in American filmmaking. This collection of essays not only wishes to expand historical and critical viewpoints but also wishes to display numerous recognizable and diverse approaches to emerging film genres during this period.

For American cinema, the Cold War supplied ample conflict and anxieties about the new postwar period, particularly with the intrusion of the federal government. Several fine studies have made detailed cases from recently accessible archival materials. Tony Shaw's Hollywood's Cold War (2007) examines the “state–private networks” of two image-makers, Hollywood and Washington, D. C., that imposed upon filmmakers a propaganda machine to promote doctrinaire capitalism: