1. My Man Godfrey (1936)
No one's going to mistake this consummate screwball comedy for a protest film, but it makes no bones about putting class differences on the front burner right from the credits, which pan from the bright lights of an Art Deco Manhattan skyline to the city dump, home to its titular protagonist William Powell and other victims of the Depression. There, Powell first meets Carole Lombard, part of a high-spirited scavenger hunt whose items include a "forgotten man." Powell pushes Lombard's sister into a pile of ashes, then plays along long enough to call the high-society types "nitwits" for treating the poor like objects. Then the hilarious twists and turns kick in, but the film never loses sight of the fact that since 1929, the distance between Park Avenue and the dump has shrunk considerably.
2. The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946)
After World War II ended, many veterans were reticent about the horrors they'd witnessed. Some had been irrevocably changed physically or mentally by their experience; others had a difficult time getting back into the fold. By even broaching the subject, William Wyler's Oscar-winning The Best Years Of Our Lives was an act of courage, but more than that, it was a cathartic expression of feelings that had simmered under the surface of American life. In its story of three servicemen returning to small-town Boone City after the war—one having lost his hands, the others struggling to adjust to their jobs and changed families—Wyler's moving drama acknowledges that the process of coming home doesn't end with the ticker-tape parade.
3. Medium Cool (1969)
Few narrative films have the fortune, good or bad, to wind up in the middle of history, but it couldn't have taken cinematographer-turned-first-time-feature-director Haskell Wexler by surprise. He decided to shoot Medium Cool in Chicago in 1968 in part because of predictions that the protests and uprisings sweeping the world would hit the Democratic Convention that summer. The convention violence serves as the climax of a film that documents the volatile social climate of the day—racial unrest, social inequality, and a free-floating fed-up feeling—while critiquing the very process of capturing reality on film. The good vibes have given way to anger and discontent, and there's no solid ground on which to stand. It's 1968 boiled down to two hours.
4. Hearts And Minds (1974)
Decades before Fahrenheit 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth, Peter Davis' controversial Vietnam essay Hearts And Minds proved that it was possible for a documentary to go from reporting news to becoming news. Davis' wide-ranging film explores the roots of American imperialism in Vietnam and the consequences for Americans and the Vietnamese alike, sketching a line between the excesses of the military-industrial complex and the winner-takes-all hyper-aggression of high-school football. Also like Fahrenheit and Truth, Hearts And Minds became a flashpoint in a culture war. After co-producer Bert Schneider read a "Greetings of friendship to all American people" from the North Vietnamese government during his acceptance speech for the film's Best Feature Documentary Oscar, his actions were denounced by Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, John Wayne, and other members of Hollywood's old guard.
5. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Though a decade removed from the McCarthy folly, America was still entrenched firmly enough in the Red Scare that John Frankenheimer's political thriller The Manchurian Candidate caused a major stir. The story concerns a Medal Of Honor winner who's captured and brainwashed during the Korean War. He returns home as a "sleeper agent," triggered into action through hypnotic suggestion and manipulated into assassinating a senatorial candidate who's running against a McCarthy-esque figure. The film's politics are a matter of some debate—though any reading that pegs it as anything other than a critique of McCarthyism faces an uphill battle—but it had the courage to ask previously taboo questions. Jonathan Demme's underrated 2004 remake cleverly updated the premise for the times by substituting corporations for Communism, speculating about who's really in control in the 21st century.
6. Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964)
Based on Peter George's novel Red Alert, Stanley Kubrick's devastating Cold War satire was initially intended to be a deadly serious cautionary tale about two nations on the brink of nuclear disaster. (Presumably, that movie would have looked a lot like Fail Safe, which was released by the same studio eight months later.) However, a short ways into the writing process, Kubrick and his collaborators started to see the bleak irony in concepts like Mutually Assured Destruction, an idea that the United States and the Soviet Union would never engage in nuclear warfare because both sides would be demolished. In the film, the arms race comes to its natural end with something called the "doomsday machine," a Soviet device that automatically retaliates a nuclear attack by basically destroying every living thing on the planet. The film reaches absurd heights in the War Room, when lunatics like George C. Scott's boorish general start throwing out sunny-day scenarios like one that would only leave 10 to 20 million Americans dead: "Now, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed."
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