Auteur critics of liberal persuasion have habit of making over their pet directors into political and cultural radicals, of making them seem more subversive than they really are. Thus, one critic repeatedly compares Samuel Fuller to Brecht and Mailer, and writes that Fuller assaults the social preconceptions of his audience.1 Another critic sees Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life as a profoundly upsetting exposure of middle-class aspirations . . . Each emblem of the American Dream . . . is systematically turned on its head.2 While both Fuller and Ray are critical of certain aspects of fifties America, to see them as fundamentally subversive to its central institutions is the reverse of the truth. Such reading of their films is encouraged by the independent, even rebellious stance adopted by Fuller, Ray, and other directors of this period, and it is flattering both to them and their admirers (we feel better about spending so much time with Underworld USA if we see it as social criticism), but in the end it is misleading, obscuring rather than revealing the relationship between film, individual talent, and ideology. A moment's reflection will disclose, for example, that Bigger Than Life in no sense makes radical critique of American middle-class values. Ed Avery (James Mason), demented by cortisone treatment, becomes spokesman for elitist and authoritarian antidemocratic values, entirely at odds with the dominant Dewey-Spock progressivism of fifties child-rearing and educational theory. If Avery's malady is expressed by his delusions of grandeur (he feels ten feet tall), his behavior constitutes warning to keep your place, keep your aspirations in line, don't rock the boat, be like everyone else-which was, after all, characteristic impulse of the fifties, examined in Whyte's The Organization Man, questioned in Lindner's Must We Conform? and recommended in Reisman's Individualism Reconsidered. Avery's bloated ego threatens the integrity of the family which formed the backbone of the fifties consensus. Nicholas Ray's career began promisingly in the late forties with They Live by Night (1947), spanned the fifties, and petered out ingloriously in the early sixties with King of Kings (1961) and 55 Days at Peking (1963). It was prolific career: he contributed with distinction to almost every genre except the musical, and it serves as sensitive barometer of the changes in the cultural climate of Hollywood during the cold war. Moreover, as serious director concerned with social problems, the corpus of his work provides some insight into the nature and limitations of social criticism, Hollywood style. Ray's films share with other films of the fifties fondness for psychological and occasionally mythic categories which replaced the social and political ones of the thirties and forties. Johnny Guitar (1953) shows this tendency at work within single film. Early in the film, the conflict between Vienna (Joan Crawford) and Emma (Mercedes McCambridge), is portrayed as both political and psychological one. The political dimension concerns the economic antagonism between old entrenched money (the big ranchers and the bank) on the one hand, and new money (the railroad and the entrepreneurial enthusiasm of Vienna) on the other. Reinforcing this clash of interests is the traditional resistance of the big landowners to the westward movement of civilization, with the attendant evils of nesters and barbed wire. The psycho-