Possessed - 1931

Possessed (1931) marked a turning point in Joan Crawford’s early career.  In one stroke, she transformed from playing devil-may-care flappers to playing tough, sadder-but-wiser women.  The giddy 1920s were over in 1931, and the rough decade ahead required gals made of sterner stuff.  Though she plays a kept woman in this movie, and therefore “possessed,” she is really self-possessed, choosing a life for herself on her own terms.

Directed by Clarence Brown (see more on Brown in this previous post), the film is a kind of rags-to-riches story more than it bears any moral fallout for a woman choosing to be a mistress rather than a career woman or wife.  This was the Pre-Code era, after all.  Like many films of this period, there is an unflinching depiction of modern life, both in the hardscrabble mill towns of the Great Depression and in Park Avenue society.   Survival in both realms requires a certain degree of cynicism.

We begin with the shrill reckoning of a factory whistle, and a swarm of slow-moving, sweaty-faced workers leaving the plant in Erie, Pennsylvania, and one of them is Joan.  It’s a paper box factory, and Joan is restless, tired of living in poverty, of “buying happiness on installment.”  She’s also tired, perhaps, of Wallace Ford, a concrete worker looking to get a big contract to settle himself in business.  He wants to marry her, but Joan wants more.

In my favorite scene in the movie, she pauses to watch a train slowly pull into the depot by the factory, with the giant smokestacks and industrial jungle as a backdrop.  The train is a magic carpet to anywhere else.  

She looks into the train windows and sees many life scenes in tableau—cooks preparing food, a maid in uniform ironing her lady’s unmentionables, a scantily clad woman preparing her toilette, a couple in evening clothes, slowly dancing to a photograph.  

At the end of it, is a charming drunk man played by Skeets Gallagher, also in evening clothes, hanging off the end of the lounge car, martini glass in hand.  He strikes up a conversation with Joan, amused by her, and playfully warns her away.

He offers her a sip of champagne.

Back home, Joan’s mother, played by Clara Blandick, whom you’ll remember as Aunt Em in The Wizard of Oz, is a careworn woman, angry at Joan for having her head turned by a wicked city fellow.  They fight over Joan’s desire to get away.  “If I were a man it wouldn’t frighten you,” she tells Ma, that she would be expected to go out into the world and get ahead, to get what she wanted.

Joan leaves the dirt of the factory town behind, goes to Park Avenue, New York City, finds the charming drunk man, now with a hangover, who does not remember her.  He wants her to go, but she has no place to go and wants suggestions.

“The East River is full of girls who took advice from guys like me.”  She wants to know how to get away, and he says she needs a rich man to help her but does not infer that he is that rich man, and offers, “Never tell them anything.  A man likes to think he’s Christopher Columbus discovering America.”  He is flippant but speaks with authority.

Two gentlemen appear, one of them in Clark Gable, who is a wealthy lawyer bent on a political career.  Joan does a little sneaking around to get to meet him.  She is warned away by Mr. Gable’s colleague, played by Frank Conroy, and charges that she is obviously a gold digger, and they are not fooled. Joan, true to her bold and honest nature, is glad they see that she is a gold digger, that she wants to take up with a wealthy man.  “I couldn’t waste my time if you weren’t.”

Gable is amused by her, perhaps even charmed at this early stage. Mr. Conroy tries to nip this in the bud: “She’s only after your money.”

Gable glances at Miss Crawford.  “Are you?”

“Yes.”  When she leaves with Gable, she throws Conroy an over-the-shoulder look.

Gable takes her to an expensive French restaurant.  She is out of place, but not in over her head.  Gable remarks, “I like women who know what they want.”

One of the delightful and fascinating aspects to the movie is that here we have two very strong leads who both capture our attention because they are both gorgeous people with a powerful screen presence and equally comfortable in their characters and with each other.  There is no scene stealing and no reason for it.

We jump ahead in time and Joan is ensconced in her own apartment but spends a lot of time at Gable’s palatial flat, in which she is the acknowledged mistress of the house as well as Gable’s mistress.  She comfortably orders dinner off a French menu, directs servants with confidence, is dressed and coiffed like a society woman, and even Gable’s pals now admire her, even wonder why he doesn’t marry her.

Mr. Gable had been married before and he is sour on marriage, because his ex-wife was unfaithful to him. 

But he holds Joan Crawford in high regard; he loves her, respects her and is proud of her, is sensitive to insults against her.  Perhaps it is a Pygmalion and Galatea scenario. To protect his political image, Joan poses as a divorcee friend, but the charade is easily seen through by a cheap floozy whom his buddy Frank Conroy has picked up—and Gable is disgusted that Conroy would not only cheat on his wife, but cheat with such a lowly, tacky creature. 

Joan, classy gal that she is, is kind to her, but the floozy only notices, “You certainly picked yourself a swell sugar daddy.”

Mr. Gable kicks Conroy and his mistress out, offended by them both.  Joan, despite having the good manners to treat the woman in a friendly way, is humiliated.  Despite improving herself in education on the finer things, on gracious life, she will always be regarded as low class.  

Gable is upset for her sake, but she bucks up, and he likes that.  He admires her moxie; perhaps in part because it relieves him of ever having to save her disgrace by marrying her.

Joan’s old beau from back home shows up, Wallace Ford, now an up-and-coming concrete contractor looking for business in the big city.  He is stopping by to secure a paving contract.

There is a tantalizing, suspenseful scene where Joan tries to hide the portrait photo of Gable on her mantle, and Gable, who arrives, tells him to call for an appointment to discuss the paving contract.  He tells Gable that he wants to marry Joan at last, now that he is a successful businessman.

Protecting Gable, Joan goes to Coney Island with Wallace Ford—and Gable at last has the sense to get quietly jealous—and the amusement park montage includes a ride on the merry-go-round and the reaching for the brass ring to complete our allegory.  Joan rides a carousel horse side-saddle.

Gable is now running for governor of the state, but his friends refute his intention to at last marry Joan because no one would really be fooled.  “It’s a sad thing to see you give up a brilliant future for a woman like that.”

Joan overhears, sneaks out of the apartment, pretends to reenter, and picks a fight with Gable.  When he says he wants to marry her, she says she is going to marry Wallace Ford, saying that he is her own kind.  Gable calls her a tramp and slaps her.

Gable need not worry about Joan’s nuptials; when Mr. Ford finds out she was Gable’s mistress, he responds, “I wouldn’t have you.”  He is disgusted by her, but he recants when he realizes his contract with the state is on the line, he offers to marry her if she fixes it.  Joan kicks him out.

The class warfare, the self-sacrifice, the struggle of an ex-gold digger to think of herself as anything else culminates in a convention scene where Gable makes a speech (against joining the League of Nations because we should mind our own business—we’ll be sorry for that), and a smear campaign hits the hall with questions and accusations about his mistress. 

Joan is there, watching Gable be heckled, and she defends Gable, leaving in tears. 

Back out in the rain, marching, broken-hearted and embarrassed through the city streets, Joan passes a line of campaign posters with Gable’s portrait on them, as if they are flickering messages to taunt her.  She climbs the steps to the El, and just before fadeout, Gable catches her.  They are together again, win or lose.

It is a very different kind of film from the other movie she made with the same title in 1947, which we discussed here last week.  It’s fun to watch Joan Crawford’s films from different eras and see how much she reflected the contemporary image of women.  Unlike many other actresses, historical pictures didn’t seem to fit Crawford’s style.  She was a woman of the twentieth century, hard-edged, realistic about restrictions placed on her, but stoically staring them down.  Triumph didn’t always mean winning; frequently it meant only having the strength to endure.  She had one of the most enduring careers in Hollywood.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

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My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.

 

Possessed - 1947

Possessed (1947) starring Joan Crawford presents a mixture of dreamlike quality and cold, hard, and even bitter reality.  There are times when her character seems to skillfully navigate these realms, and at other times is only helplessly tossed in the unexpected currents between them.  In some scenes, we don’t know where she is in control and where she is not, and that is perhaps the most interesting facet of this film and points to Crawford’s real skill as an actress.

This is my entry into the Classic Movie Blog Association’s “A Haunting Blogathon: In the Afterlife.”  See more great posts from these terrific bloggers here.

The movie begins in a fog (or smog)-shrouded Los Angeles with Miss Crawford stumbling in a trance on lonely city streets in the twilight.  She appears without makeup, emotionally wounded, whimpering the name “David,” like someone lost, searching.  She is almost somnambulant but perks up when she sees men who might be David, but turn out to be strangers, and she is in an agony of sorrow and worry.  These are real city streets, and we’ll note that in the scenes set in actual locations, Joan Crawford’s state of mind is weak and confused, but on the artificial soundstage sets, she is in full command of herself.  At least at first.

When she enters a drugstore (add this to our collection of movie drugstore scenes), she collapses and an ambulance is called. She is whirled through the real Los Angeles into a real Los Angeles hospital, rolled on a gurney through endless halls where our viewpoint is only the ceiling, with bright lights above and the faces of interns and nurses leaning over to peer at us.  An ER doc leans right into our face with his light.  Joan, and we, are ordered to be taken to “psycho.”

The Psychopathic Department is kept behind locked doors and Crawford’s room has windows on the bars, so for a moment we are taken back to the nightmare years when mental illness reduced one in the eyes of society to that of an animal—but this post-war noir captures an era where curiosity about mental health led to progressive, if admittedly slow, changes.  We see a grim, tired, elderly doctor, played by Stanley Ridges, take on Joan as a patient, with a young doctor to learn—and to whom he can spout medical jargon and plot exposition. 

As he gives her an injection of some psychotropic drug, he prods her to talk and we are inevitably launched into our first noir flashback.   There are, of course, several.

David is Van Heflin, a self-possessed scamp and free spirit, the kind who doesn’t like to be tied down—at least not by Joan Crawford.  They enjoy a cozy evening in his lakeside cabin, as he plays a Schumann piece for her on the piano.  He is an engineer with a gift for mathematics, clearly educated in the arts as well, but down to earth enough to be wryly dismissive of whatever bores or does not serve him.  Joan, whom he feels is smothering him, is beginning to fall into both categories.  Like many men of his generation, and certainly enough of them in noir films, he is jaded by the war.  “Blame it on the army, blame it on the war, blame it on anything you like,” he says as to why he wants to break up with her.  She doesn’t accept the explanation.

We may be both sympathetic and impatient with Miss Crawford, as we see early on her need to cling to him.  He wants to go away for good, and she is heartbroken.  Yet, she is not helpless.  Not yet.  The scene shifts and we see she is actually a nurse, on private duty to a wealthy man’s invalid wife.  The man is played by Ramond Massey.  He appears enigmatic at first, but will later show infinite patience and mercy.

 

The wife is demanding, accusing, and we may feel we are being set up for somebody wanting to knock her off to get her out of the way.

Unfortunately for Joan, Van Heflin continues to have a connection to her through Raymond Massey, when Mr. Massey, spending the summer with his invalid wife in a nearby lakeside home, hires him for an engineering job in Canada.  In a moment alone with Heflin, we are jolted by the shift in her personality from a competent nurse, crisp and efficient, to a suspicious, screaming and somewhat nutty woman accusing Heflin of seeing another woman.

 

We are wrenched back to the psych ward and Doc Stanley Ridges proclaims she has split personality with a persecution complex.  We dive back into another flashback.

Massey’s wife has drowned in the lake beside their vacation home.  Police drag the lake in the nighttime for her body, which is found.  At an impromptu inquest held in his home, the death is proclaimed accidental, as the woman liked to walk near the water, and was felt to be despondent.  Interrupting the proceeding is a teenage girl and a small boy.  They are Massey’s children, who have been away in boarding school.  The daughter, played by Geraldine Brooks, accuses Joan Crawford of killing her mother.  Her mother’s letters to her were full of accusations of Joan carrying on with Mr. Massey behind her back.

As with any good mystery or noir, there are these such incidents that pop up that make certain people look guilty, and then certain other people, and then we’re not sure we can trust anyone.  Geraldine Brooks plays a not-too-dissimilar role here as she played in Cry Wolf, also made in 1947 (covered in this previous post) – that of a sensitive, somewhat mercurial young woman at first angrily spurning and then being drawn with needy affection to an older sister-type newcomer to the fold.  She had a lovely quality of being believably earnest and making us concerned over her walking a tightrope between making wise decisions and foolish ones. 

But we are immediately distracted by the prospect that Joan could have bumped off her patient, though she seems to have no yearning to be with Mr. Massey and become Geraldine’s new stepmother.  Ah, but Mr. Massey wants her to stay and take care of his little son.  Then he wants her to be his wife.

Did he bump off the missus to have Joan?

Joan is still seething over the reappearance of Van Heflin in her life when he is hired by Massey and comes to confer with him in his richly wood-paneled study about drilling for oil in Canada.  Just as the oil and coal industry today and its minions decry solar and wind power in a jealous competition for profits, Heflin and Massey joke, “Here’s to oil and down with atomic energy.” 

Joan taunts Heflin when he treats her with sly civility but otherwise has no interest in her.  

She tells Massey she is quitting her job now that the invalid is dead—she knows she needs to get away from Heflin—but he abruptly asks her to marry him.  She laughs a little hysterically—more a sign of her increasingly brittle mental health than rudeness, but she accepts and acknowledges she does not love him.  Mr. Massey here begins an extraordinary role as a humble, kindly, and gentle husband who counts himself lucky to be with her. 

He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to kill anybody.  Did he kill his wife?

 

Geraldine is told of the coming nuptials and is not happy, but she concedes to Joan that her father told her how sick her mother was, and that her death was not Joan’s fault.  Joan, in a patient and magnanimous gesture—or maybe just looking for an out—declares she won’t marry Massey if Geraldine doesn’t want her to, and that makes Geraldine feel bad.  They make up, and we have another shift in the story.

The wedding reception is in the Massey’s mansion, and who arrives but Van Heflin, glib, confident, and apparently relieved Joan is somebody else’s problem.  With his smart-aleck greeting to her frosty one, we have to wonder if he’s back just to tease her, and if his cynical charm hides a mean streak.  He comes upon Geraldine Brooks.  She remembers him from when she was a little girl, actually having proposed to him when she was eleven.  Van is amused and interested and—uh-oh, Geraldine might be getting a little serious.  We will discover soon that Van is getting serious, too.

Joan is furious and warns Geraldine to stay away from Van, but not out of motherly concern.  She’s still obsessed with him, and in the sane moments when she’s on the arm of her husband as the new lady of the manor, we might briefly forget the depth of her obsession.  But something happens again, even a small look or gesture, and she beings to spiral into angst and fury.

 

In a very complicated and fascinating sequence, Joan, having left a concert hall after Van Heflin shows up to join the flirtatious Miss Brooks, and now alone in the mansion on a dark and stormy night, the tension from her obsession with Van Heflin manifests itself in hallucinations.  The clock is loudly ticking, driving her nuts.  Van brings Geraldine home, and after her laughing, “We fooled her, didn’t we,” Joan confronts her.  Geraldine is cold with her again, and again accuses her of killing her mother to be with Massey, and Joan shoves her down the stairs, killing her.

 

Joan is shocked, frozen at the sight of Geraldine’s body crumpled at the foot of the stairs below. 

Suddenly, the front door opens and Geraldine enters, home from the concert.  The entire previous scene happened only in Joan’s mind.  She’s losing it, and Geraldine is sweet to her, is concerned about her, but does not know what is wrong.  Joan knows what’s wrong. 

 

She’s cracking up.

Sent to a medical doctor by Massey, she is defensive and walks out of the office, but confesses to Massey that his first wife is haunting her.  Massey takes charge and brings her back to the lake house so she can face her torments and all the creepy shadows there.  At one point left alone, crying, she walks toward the camera, walking toward the door buzzer that seems to call her, “Louise…”  It sounds like bandleader Alvino Rey’s “Stringy” steel guitar talk box.  “Looo-w-e-e-z-ze…”  The sound stands your hair on end, and suddenly this movie has morphed from a film noir to a mystery to a horror film.  Joan screams, and Massey comes to the rescue, comforting her, demonstrating that his first wife’s ghost is not here.

 

She wails that she is afraid, and confesses that she killed his first wife, helping her to commit suicide.  It’s a powerful scene by Joan as she breaks down and cries.  Massey tells her she wasn’t even there when his wife drowned.  Joan was in the village on her night off. 

Joan is relieved but amazed she had nothing to do with the death, and thanks him profusely, and we sense that they might have a happily ever after ending with a genuinely consoling marriage.  Massey takes her to dinner and they are prepared to enjoy themselves at last—but wouldn’t you know it, Van Heflin’s there at the restaurant with Geraldine.  They are engaged. 

 

He is just as uncomfortable seeing Joan as she is of seeing him; her obsession for him has at last made him awkward rather than dismissive.

 

Joan gets pointedly chatty, non-stop, laughing, trying too hard, and the others notice.  When she is alone with Geraldine, she urgently tries to warn her off Van.  To Van she remarks, “I told you once I’ll do anything to keep you and I will.”  She has turned from begging to threats.

 

Massey, meantime, wants to get her some psychiatric counseling, but she accuses him of wanting to put her away.

She drops in on Van, this time with a gun.  She uses it.  But she does not say, “If I can’t have you, nobody can,” instead she says, “You’re not going to marry her.  You’re not good enough for her.”  True that.

 

Back to the psych ward with kindly Doc Stanley Ridges again, and she mumbles “David,” and then, “I killed him!  I killed him!”

 

Doc meets with Massey and discusses the long work of her recovery.  Joan is not responsible, he says, for her actions, but does not know if the jury will agree.  It is a new world of understanding of mental illness, a glimmer of light among the noir shadows.  Raymond Massey will stand by her, and see her through whatever happens.

 

Directed by Curtis Bernhardt, it’s a film of skillful twists and turns.  Joan Crawford soundly delivers one of the best performances of her career, turning manic, angry, fearful, sorrowful, and desperate in a tour-de-force of closeups that reveal a vulnerability she perhaps preferred to conceal in other movies with broader, more theatrical performances. 

 

As many film buffs know, this was not her first movie called Possessed.  We might call it Re-Possessed, as the first film, from 1931, quite different in tone and topic, featured Joan Crawford playing opposite Clark Gable.  There she is a girl from the wrong side of the tracks gaining a position in high society in the wicked city as Gable’s mistress. 

 

We’ll talk about that next week.

 

Have a look at more posts in the Classic Movie Blog Association’s “A Haunting Blogathon: In the Afterlife” from these great bloggers here.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

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My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.

 

It Can't Happen Here...again.

Kindly revisit my post on It Can't Happen Here, a novel, then a play, and almost a classic film.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

***************

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and soon, hardcover, from Amazon.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.

We Hold These Truths - a radio reprise

Major Hollywood stars of the day participated in this live radio broadcast dramaticizing the significance of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  At the conclusion, Jimmy Stewart, who had been narrating at the microphone, pulled back, whipped his headphones off, and burst into tears.

It was one week after Pearl Harbor.  This monumental broadcast was described in this previous post.  It's time for a reprise, a pivotal time just as dangerous to our country as our entry into World War II after the Pearl Harbor attack.  Listen to it.  This is what they were fighting for.  

This is what we are voting for.  The stakes were never higher.

Here is a portion of that original post from 2017:

Walter Huston is a blacksmith.   He doesn’t want anyone telling him he has to pray the way somebody else tells him.  Doesn’t like state religion.  Wants to make sure there won’t be any.

Others are suspicious of authority.  They know that just wanting law and order isn’t enough—Nero had such.   

Marjorie Main plays a woman whose husband died in the war.  She wants guarantees that he didn’t die in vain.

Edward Arnold is a bricklayer who argues that the work is unfinished.  There’s only a foundation and no house.

So many voices, so much dissent, so much yearning for rights.   We are taken on a journey not only through history, but through the minds and souls of this nation.

Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, James Madison lend their voices, and George Mason warning us not only about a monarchy, but a “tyrannical aristocracy” taking over, the monied class.

Now the First Congress begins sifting through the amendments to the Constitution and hammering them out for the future.  It’s not an easy job, but it’s important and they persist.  Stewart passionately narrates, cajoles, shouts.

Most profound is Orson Welles’ impassioned speech.  He takes over at this point and adds the other voices to the founders of the Bill of Rights – not just the men in Congress, but from the victims of the ages – “They had much help, the many nameless and unknown – from bleeding mouths, burnt flesh – from numberless and nameless agonies.  The delegates from dungeons, they were there.  The delegates from ashes at the bottoms of the stakes were there.”

We hear a voice, weak, pleading.

Orson continues, “The gallows delegates, whose corpses lifted gently in the breeze, they too…”

His voice grows booming, horrified:  “The Christians killed for being Christians, Jews for being Jews, the Quakers hanged in Boston town, they made a quorum also… The murdered men, the lopped off hands, the shattered limbs, the red welts where the whip lash bit into the back.  Must you know what they said?  Must you know how they argued?  Must you be told the evidence?

“Listen, then!”

We hear a blood-curdling scream.

“That was an argument for an amendment.”

They are words for our times, how shockingly, sickeningly current.

Traitor Trump, among his other vile crimes and deeds, has stated that he intends to suspend the Constitution.

Vote while you still have the right.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

***************

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and soon, hardcover, from Amazon.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.