This is absolutely spot-on. I can watch some of Hitchcock's glossier films of that era (North by Northwest, for instance) and feel nostalgia for an era I never knew. But I often joke about Ku Klux Klan lynchings being "just out of shot" in idyllic 1950s movies. Like any other decade, it was a mixture of good and bad.

In the UK in the 1950s, things were pretty crap, according to my father, because there was still rationing (a hangover from the war) for many years, and many other economic hardships.