This dissertation analyses the Hollywood trope of the US-American family, its corresponding spatial location, the home, and the corollary notion of domesticity as one means of realizing the so-called US-American dream, in three films from the 1950s--The Night of the Hunter, Bigger than Life, and Imitation of Life. The driving question of this dissertation is why do assume the benevolence of parents toward their children. I argue these films undermine the assumed consequences of parental love and good intentions toward children, perhaps the most evident reasons why we assume the benevolence of parents. Rather, we will see that within the traditional family the competing roles of parents—they are fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, friends, colleagues, workers, people of color, white folks, and individuals with self-interest—cannot always be adjudicated so to avoid the suffering and ensure the well-being of children. In the argument of this dissertation, I contend that a formal aesthetic analysis of a film can be an interpretative mode of social criticism and as such prompts an ethical engagement. By conducting a close “reading” of a film I am not thinking of film as mere escapism and entertainment nor am I suggesting that film simply ventriloquizes popular culture. A film's aesthetic form can affirm and critique US-American identity, its accompanying institutions and mythology, and the widely accepted ethical theories and practices across the country; it shapes and reflects our normative practices and conventions.