The New Decade for Film-Makers:
The counter-culture of the time had influenced Hollywood to be freer, to take more risks and to experiment with alternative, young film makers, as old Hollywood professionals and old-style moguls died out and a new generation of film makers arose. Many of the audiences and movie-makers of the late 60s had seen a glimpse of new possibilities, new story-telling techniques and more meaningful 'artistic' options, by the influences of various European "New Wave" movements (French and Italian) and the original works of other foreign-language film-makers.
These surprise hits in the previous decade were mostly from untested new and younger producers, directors, and actors:
Young viewers and directors, who refused to compromise with mediocre film offerings, supported stretching the boundaries and conventional standards of film even more in this decade. Although the 50s and 60s were noted for wide-screen epics on CinemaScopic silver screens (and lighter formulaic, squeaky-clean fare such as Pillow Talk (1959) or Beach Blanket Bingo (1965)), the 70s decade was noted for films with creative and memorable subject matter that reflected the questioning spirit and truth of the times. Films that had done well in the 1960s, such as The Sound of Music (1965) would not fare well in later years with the same stars and genre, such as Star! (1968).
Other films that were backed by the studios reflected the tumultuous times, the discontent toward the government, lack of US credibility, and hints of conspiracy paranoia, such as in Alan J. Pakula's post-Watergate film The Parallax View (1974) with Warren Beatty as a muckraking investigator of a Senator's death. The Strawberry Statement (1970), derived from James S. Kunen's journal and best-selling account of the 1968 student strike at Columbia and exploited for its countercultural message of activism by MGM, echoed support of student campus protests. Although the film was expected to do well, it flopped - along with other films in a second exploitative deluge or wave of hip youth films.
Many other copy-cat or derivative films that failed with audiences (after Easy Rider's success) included:
- Richard Rush's Getting Straight (1970) about a returning Vietnam vet (Elliott Gould) attending college and mediating a campus riot
- Antonioni's American-made R-rated Zabriskie Point (1970) about youth rebellion (ending with a desert orgy)
- director John Avildsen's low-budget, exploitational and violent urban drama Joe (1970) that eventually grossed $20 million - with the tagline "Keep America Beautiful" presented an ugly view of countercultural life; Peter Boyle in a career-launching film starred as an enraged, intolerant, narrow-minded and bigoted blue-collar, hard-hat metal factory worker named Joe Curran; he continually felt threatened and hated all marginalized types of people: ("queers," hippies, blacks, etc.), and spouted his racist views (typical of blue-collar reactionaries in the early unsettled times of the 70s regarding the counterculture) about drug users, hippies in communes, and liberals: ("These kids s--t on ya. They s--t on your life. They s--t on everything you believe in. They s--t on everything"); the film also featured a debut role (with some nudity) for Susan Sarandon as Melissa Compton - a drug-addicted hippie flower-girl in Greenwich Village who was the daughter of a wealthy advertising executive; she OD'd on amphetamines as a result of her corruptive boyfriend Frank's drug-dealing; the loud-mouthed and brash Joe would soon become friends with Frank's murderer, Melissa's Madison Ave. executive-father Bill (Dennis Patrick), leading to a tragic freeze-framed ending (similar to the shocking massacres in the endings of Easy Rider (1969) and Bonnie and Clyde (1968) - this time murdered hippies!)
- Stuart Rosenberg's unfunny comedy Move (1970) with Elliott Gould as a married New Yorker who wrote pornography
- Stanley Kramer's political drama R.P.M. (1970) (aka Revolutions Per Minute) starring Anthony Quinn as a West Coast liberal college Professor "Paco" Perez who faced campus turmoil and unrest from activist radicals when he became the university's President
- Paul Williams' socio-political drama The Revolutionary (1970), with Jon Voight headlining as the title character known only as "A" - a print-shop worker who became radicalized and violent
- writer/director Dennis Hopper's incoherent follow-up film The Last Movie (1971) - it was a tremendous embarrassment and well-publicized fiasco for Universal Studios that illustrated the dangers of giving in to auteurism
1960s social activism often turned into an inward narcissism, and yet this uncertain age still gave rise to some of the finest, boldest, and most commercially-successful films ever made (partially due to an increased experience with marketing and advertising), such as the instant Oscar-winning blockbuster The Godfather (1972) by a virtually untested director, William Friedkin's horror classic The Exorcist (1973), Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Lucas' Star Wars (1977).
There was a remarkable diversity of themes in the films of the 70s ranging all the way from youth countercultural films, to right-wing crime films (praising vigilantism), to blaxploitation films, anti-war films (and black comedies), feminist and women's liberation films, kung-fu (and martial arts) action films, and everything in-between. The film industry reflected the rampant social change and controversies raging in the country (including but not limited to gay rights, civil rights, women's rights, the environment, and the youth-hippie movement, etc.)
The First Satellite-Delivered National Cable TV Network, 1972-75
The growth of cable TV was regarded as a serious threat to advertiser-supported broadcast television networks, independent stations, and movie theaters. These older institutions were protected by Federal Communications Commission rulings that restricted cable systems from importing distant television signals. After cable deregulation in the early '70s, one of the earliest subscription-based cable networks was The Green Channel. After Time Inc. backed it in 1972, the name changed to HBO (Home Box Office), and the channel began using microwave transmission when the Service Electric Company offered the programming over a small Wilkes-Barre, PA CATV system.
Its debut included a hockey game and the first commercial-free airing of Sometimes a Great Notion (1970). The three-year-old company, basing its revenues on subscribers, bet HBO's future on satellite programming distribution and signed a six-year, $7.5 million contract to allow access to RCA's recently-launched communications satellite Satcom I in 1975. HBO inaugurated its satellite-delivered cable service nationwide with the live transmission of the Ali vs. Frazier boxing match ("Thrilla in Manila") in October 1975. The move made HBO the first successful, satellite-delivered pay cable service in the U.S.
The Search for a Blockbuster and Blockbuster TV Marketing
Much of the focus was on box-office receipts and the production of action- and youth-oriented, blockbuster films with dazzling special effects. But it was becoming increasingly more difficult to predict what would sell or become a hit. Hollywood's economic crises in the 1950s and 1960s, especially during the war against the lure of television, were somewhat eased with the emergence in the 70s of summer "blockbuster" movies or "event films" marketed to mass audiences, especially following the awesome success of two influential films:
Both films were masterfully-made, non-controversial genre films - and presaged what would be coming in the years and decades to come. Although the budget for Jaws grew from $4 million to $9 million during production, it became the highest grossing film in history - until Star Wars. Both Jaws and Star Wars were the first films to earn more than $100 million in rentals.
[The average ticket price for a film in 1971 was $1.65, and by 1978 cost about two and a half dollars in first-run theatres. Second-run film theatres could charge less and often dropped their admission price to $1.00. The average film budget by 1978 was about $5 million - increasing dramatically to $11 million by 1980 due to inflation and rising costs. Therefore, production of Hollywood films decreased precipitously in the late 70s, e.g., down to 354 releases in 1978 compared to the previous year's total of 560.]
New Markets for Hollywood's Products:
The emergence of ancillary markets for Hollywood's products emerged during this decade:
- cable television - the first pay/premium television channel, Home Box Office (HBO), was founded in 1972; in 1975, HBO demonstrated the popularity of its programming and became the first in the television industry to use satellites for regular transmission of programming, with its "Thrilla in Manila" boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier
- the success of HBO in the mid-'70s spurred the growth of cable TV. Soon after, new satellite-delivered basic and premium cable TV networks were successfully competing against the major TV networks in the late '70s and early '80s, including movie channels such as Viacom's Showtime (1976, with satellite broadcast in 1978), Warner Amex's The Movie Channel (1979), Time/HBO's Cinemax (1980), The Disney Channel (1983) and American Movie Classics (AMC) (1984).
- to maximize profits from weekend audiences, the industry decided to move major film openings from mid-week to Fridays, in 1973
- pay cable television was able to allow profanity and sex beyond what could be offered on commercial network television - outrageous comedian George Carlin's first comedy special was aired on HBO as On Location: George Carlin at USC (1977) with cautionary disclaimers about the use of strong language; it was the first of many HBO comedy concert broadcasts
- multi-plex theaters - the proliferation of multi-screen chain theaters in suburban areas, replacing big movie palaces, meant that more movies could be shown to smaller audiences; the world's largest cineplex (with 18 theaters) opened in Toronto in 1979
- publicity/celebrity magazines - after Life Magazine discontinued its weekly publications in 1972, People Magazine - first published as a weekly magazine in March of 1974 (with Mia Farrow on its first cover), took over the role of celebrity watching and film promotion for the industry
- Hollywood realized that it could increase its profits by advertising its new releases on television - first shown to be successful with the massive TV marketing campaign (of $700,000 for three nights of nationwide prime-time TV ads on all the networks) for Jaws (1975). Universal called it "the biggest national TV spot campaign in industry history." The film was also booked into almost 500 theatres for its opening weekend - a record!
- Gone With the Wind (1939) first aired on network TV in 1976 and drew a huge audience over two nights - about 34 million people - the largest ever film audience to watch a feature film on television
The Home Video Revolution: A Short History
- earlier in the previous decade, Ampex in 1963 offered the first consumer version of a videotape recorder at an exorbitant price of $30,000; other iterations would follow, such as Sony's introduction of the videocassette recorder (VCR) in 1969, and the introduction of the U-Matic in 1972
- in 1972, the AVCO CartriVision System was the first videocassette recorder to have pre-recorded tapes of popular movies (from Columbia Pictures) for sale and rental -- three years before Sony's Betamax system emerged into the market. However, the company went out of business a year later
- the appearance of Sony's Betamax (the first home VCR or videocassette recorder) in 1975 offered a cheaper sales price of $2,000 and recording time of up to one hour; this led to a boom in sales - it was a technically-superior format when compared to the VHS System that was marketed by JVC and Matsushita beginning in 1976
- Consumers had a choice of two playing/recording formats in the late ’70s: VHS (Video Home System) or Sony’s Betamax.
- in 1976, Paramount became the first to authorize the release of its film library onto Betamax videocassettes. In 1977, 20th Century Fox would follow suit, and begin releasing its films on videotape
- in 1977, RCA introduced the first VCRs in the United States based on JVC's VHS system, capable of recording up to four hours on 1/2" magnetic videocassette tape (with a flip-up cover at its front), or 2 hours with better quality
- by the late 70s, Sony's market share in sales of Betamax VCRs was below that of sales of VHS machines; consumers chose the VHS' longer videocassette tape time and larger tape size, over Sony's smaller and shorter tape time (of 1 hour) [Note: by 1987, about 90 percent of the $5.25 billion market of VCRs sold in the United States were based on the VHS format.]
- video sales - the first films on videotape were released by the Magnetic Video Corporation (a company founded in 1968 by Andre Blay in Detroit, Michigan, the first video distribution company) - it licensed fifty films for release from 20th Century Fox for $300,000 in October, 1977; it began to license, market and distribute half-inch videotape cassettes (both Betamax and VHS) to consumers; it was the first company to sell pre-recorded videos; M*A*S*H (1970) was Magnetic's most popular title
- video rentals - in 1977, George Atkinson of Los Angeles began to advertise the rental of 50 Magnetic Video titles of his own collection in the Los Angeles Times, and launched the first video rental store, Video Station, on Wilshire Boulevard, renting videos for $10/day; within 5 years, he franchised more than 400 Video Station stores across the country
- in 1978, Philips introduced the video laser disc (aka laserdisc and LD) -- the first optical disc storage media for the consumer market; Pioneer began selling home LaserDisc players in 1980
- eventually, the laserdisc systems would be replaced by the DVD ("digital versatile disc") format in 1997 and within a decade entirely replaced VHS systems; the last stand-alone JVC VHS VCR was produced in October of 2008.
Initially considered a threat to movies because consumers could tape off-the-air, the technology was re-evaluated once studios discovered lucrative sales and rentals from taped versions of their commercially-released movies. This was a new income stream that actually promoted and stimulated business. VHS video players, laser disc players and the release of films on videocassette tapes and discs multiplied as prices plummeted, creating a new industry and adding substantial revenue and profits for the movie studios. All of the major Hollywood studios had their own video divisions (e.g., Warner Bros. formed Warner Home Video in the late '70s), and by the late '80s in the U.S., income from video rentals was double that of the theatrical box office. Also, independent film-makers and producers could now market their films more effectively by distributing tapes and discs for viewing.
It was clear that the advent of new ways of viewing films: (via subscription cable TV, via videocassette or laserdisc) meant that film audiences could now watch, record, or rent films that previously were difficult to see. A new wave of collecting massive libraries of films developed amongst consumers who intently followed each week's new releases, and interest in film-watching burgeoned. However, one major negative side-effect or downside to home-viewing was that the concept of a 'collective audience' attending a film together in a theater was being supplanted by the isolated viewer. Theater attendance would begin to drastically decline in the next decade due to the home video invasion.
Pornography and Videotape Revenues:
One film-related industry that side-benefited from the development of the VCR (and VHS) was the pornography industry - no longer would adult-movie viewers have to visit seedy X-rated film theatres to view porn films, and this resulted in sky-rocketing profits from the sales and rentals of X-rated videotapes.
[Note: It has been widely claimed, although strongly disputed, that the VHS system won the marketing war against Sony's Betamax system, partially due to Sony's prohibition of pornographic X-rated content on its tapes. In fact, porn was available on Betamax, but it was true that there was a lot more porn produced on VHS than Betamax. However, it was also true that porn revenues - although large - made up only a small fraction of the total revenue of annual video revenues - including both rentals and sales.
Changes from Traditional Hollywood Movie Studios:
The established Hollywood movie studios (except for Universal and Walt Disney's Buena Vista) no longer directly controlled production. Although studios still dominated film distribution, other areas including production, filming and financing (in whole or part) were increasingly in the hands of independent studios, producers, and/or agents. A new generation of movie stars, including Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Dustin Hoffman - were more skilled as "character actors," who could adapt and mold their screen images to play a number of diverse roles.
The cheaper cost of on-location filming (using Cinemobiles or film studios on wheels) encouraged more location shoots, or filming in rented production facilities. Faster film stock, lightweight cinematographic equipment, and the influence of the cinema vérité movement brought less formal styles to American productions. The functions of film makers were beginning to merge - there were actor-producers, director-producers, writer-producers, actor-writers, and more.
The low-budget boxing film was one of the first major feature films to utilize the revolutionary "Steadicam" developed by inventor Garrett Brown. Bound for Glory (1976) marked its first use. It was a hand-held camera that produced fluid, unjerky motion shots - during the choreographed bouts and the scene in which the boxer jogged up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
"Movie Brats" Mentored by 'King of the B's' Roger Corman:
With more power now in the hands of producers, directors, and actors, new directors emerged, many of whom had been specifically and formally trained in film-making courses/departments at universities such as UCLA, USC, and NYU, or trained in television. Roger Corman supported this new breed of youthful maverick directors, referred to by some as "Movie Brats" or "Geeks." The AIP studio (and Corman himself) was responsible for giving a start and apprenticeship experience to many upcoming filmmaking cineastes and actors, emphasizing low-budget film-making techniques and exploitative elements.
Corman hired the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, Paul Bartel, and Robert Towne. He gave many of these novices their first career-breaking employment opportunities, as actors, producers, directors, writers, members of film crews, etc. He encouraged them to produce personally-relevant and creative works of art, and new genre interpretations. This support revived the notion of auteurism (the belief that the director was most influential and responsible for creating a film's ultimate form, meaning and content).
For instance, Peter Bogdanovich's directorial debut was for Targets (1968), made for AIP. And Francis Ford Coppola directed (and scripted) Corman's horror-thriller film Dementia 13 (1963) - it was Coppola's first mainstream picture. Jack Nicholson appeared in a number of early Corman movies, including his screen debut in The Cry Baby Killer (1958) and later a small role in The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) - about a carnivorous pet plant. One of Martin Scorsese's earliest-directed films (and his first commercially-conventional film) was Corman's Boxcar Bertha (1972) with Barbara Hershey and David Carradine as two Depression-era outlaw folk heroes. Writer/director Jonathan Demme's directorial debut was for Corman's Caged Heat (1974) -- a memorable women-in-prison film with lots of sex, nudity, action and violence. And Monte Hellman's two westerns Ride in the Whirlwind (1965) and The Shooting (1967) both starred Jack Nicholson (who also co-wrote and produced the first film).
Corman offered cinematic advice: use a fast-moving camera to provide speedy action, avoid cliches, add some minor social commentary, use visually-engaging screen compositions, sex (and nudity), tongue-in-cheek humor, and some sort of gimmick. Some of the new directors excelled with an audio-visual approach to filmmaking, where style, ear-splitting soundtracks, and action were sometimes more important in films than content.
The new American wave of film-makers were also influenced by unconventional works from the Italian Neo-realists, or the French New Wave artists, as stated earlier. Films made outside the traditional Hollywood mold from younger talents, with great works of character development, and sometimes with more violence and sex, were beginning to win critical praise and bring in tremendous revenues.
Old guard veterans were perplexed by the rapid change and lost some of their cutting edge or clout with a change in movie audience compositions. The once-provocative writer/director Billy Wilder could only come up with one hit in the 1960s decade (the popular odd-couple comedy The Fortune Cookie (1966)) while everything else fizzled (e.g., two romantic comedies including Irma La Douce (1963) with Shirley MacLaine as a Parisian prostitute, and the Dean Martin vehicle Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) - surprisingly 'condemned' by the Catholic League of Decency for its debauchery). And then in the 70s, Wilder had four unimpressive and mediocre films (the heavily-edited and recut The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), Avanti! (1972), The Front Page (1974), and Fedora (1978)). He ended his notable film-making career with the slight farce Buddy, Buddy (1981) - another effort with Jack Lemmon.
Another Golden Age veteran Vincente Minnelli also suffered in the new more youth-oriented decade with only two films in the 1970s before ending his directorial career: the musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) starring Barbra Streisand, and the poorly-received drama A Matter of Time (1976) starring his own daughter - singer/actress Liza Minnelli.
Alfred Hitchcock:
As a footnote to the decade, director Alfred Hitchcock (without ever winning a Best Director Oscar) returned to England after his disappointing films Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969) to make his first British film in almost two decades - Frenzy (1972). His first Hollywood film had been Rebecca (1940), and his last film was in this decade - the lightweight thriller Family Plot (1976).
George Lucas
His second film that he co-wrote and directed, the low-budget American Graffiti (1973) was a warm-hearted, rites-of-passage film about a number of California teenagers (unknowns who became future stars including Harrison Ford, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips, and Richard Dreyfuss, among others) in the early 60s who pointlessly cruised down the main strip of their small town [Modesto, CA] in hot-rods one long summer night - accompanied by a non-stop soundtrack of rock 'n' roll hits (opening with Bill Haley and the Comets). The film's tagline or slogan encouraged nostalgia: "Where were you in '62?" Teenage archetypes included the hot-rod loving delinquent (Paul Le Mat), the brainy student (Richard Dreyfuss), the stereotypical class president (Ron Howard), and the nerd (Charles Martin Smith).
In 1971, Lucas formed his own film company, Lucasfilm Ltd., in San Rafael, California that soon evolved into a number of specialized companies. Before his next major hit (Star Wars (1977)), Lucas organized Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), a post-production facility in Marin County to advance the area of special effects, modeling, sound design, computer-generated effects, and other ground-breaking techniques.
John Carpenter
Carpenter became noticed, especially after his highly-successful, low-budget slasher film Halloween (1978) - it was his third feature film and the highest-grossing independent film made in the US up to that time. The hard-to-kill, masked, knife-wielding stalker Michael Myers suspensefully pursued a young, small-town babysitter Jamie Lee Curtis (later becoming the 'Queen of Horror') on Halloween night in a small mid-western town. In its wake, the profitable and stylishly-made film (often seen from the point of view of the killer), with its spooky recognizable soundtrack, spawned a mini-horror film boom, with many lesser 'psycho-slasher' or teen-scream films appearing into the 1980s.
Bob Rafelson
In the 70s, Rafelson also directed a follow-up film The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) with Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern and Ellen Burstyn, and the quirky Stay Hungry (1976) with Sally Field and Jeff Bridges (and a very early performance by Arnold Schwarzenegger). His next notable film was the sexy remake The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange.
Alan Pakula
Pakula's best films in the 70s were Klute (1971) - a superb detective thriller about the stalking of a tough New York hooker (Jane Fonda won an Academy Award for her performance), and the compelling political melodrama All the President's Men (1976) about two young, non-conformist, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post news reporters Woodward and Bernstein (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman) who bucked the system and investigated the 1972 Watergate break-in, burglary, and subsequent cover-up. Pakula also directed the believable and gripping political conspiracy thriller The Parallax View (1974) - casting Warren Beatty as a journalist investigating a presidential candidate's assassination. Burt Reynolds starred with Jill Clayburgh in Alan Pakula's popular adult romantic comedy Starting Over (1979).
Film History of the 1970s
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Page 2
Martin Scorsese
Scorsese went on to direct the realistic, semi-feminist melodrama Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) with Ellen Burstyn as a struggling single mother and diner waitress in Phoenix, Arizona. The big-budget musical New York, New York (1977) was one of Scorsese's more conventionally-commercial films in the 70s decade - a failed attempt to bolster interest in the musical genre.
Scorsese's grim Raging Bull (1980), with De Niro in an Oscar-winning performance as self-destructive boxer Jake LaMotta, was considered one of the ten best films of the next decade. The film brought Scorsese his first Best Director Oscar nomination.
De Palma's often-gory horror melodramas and Hitchcockian-like thrillers, which mimicked the 'suspense master's' menacing scare tactics (and themes of voyeurism, obsession, and guilt), brought greater commercial attention. His first real mainstream film was the low-budget Sisters (1973), with homage to Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), starring Margot Kidder as a beautiful and tormented 'Siamese twin' and a score by Bernard Herrmann (Hitchcock's own favorite composer). He often incorporated reconstructions of famous scenes (from other films) into his own films, although some accused him of direct copying.
- Obsession (1976) (similar to Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)) with Cliff Robertson and Genevieve Bujold
- The Fury (1978), about another telekinetic child
- Dressed to Kill (1980) (also similar to Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)) with Michael Caine as a transgendered and psychopathic Manhattan psychiatrist attending to a sexually-unsatisfied Angie Dickinson (who was slashed to death not in a shower but in an elevator); the film was labeled misogynistic
- Blow Out (1981), a mystery about an assassination, regarding sound-effects audio technician Jack Terri (John Travolta) who inadvertently witnessed the 'accidental' killing of the governor - a promising presidential candidate, and found evidence of a conspiracy - a film that was a cross between Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966)
De Palma would continue his streak of film-making into the 1980s, with his violent and bloody Cuban drug lord saga Scarface (1983) (from an Oliver Stone script) with Al Pacino as a Cuban gangster, the soft-core Body Double (1984) - with homage to Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958) - with a grisly power-drill murder scene, The Untouchables (1987) (from a script by David Mamet, based on the TV show) - an epic action-drama about Prohibition-Era Al Capone crusader Eliot Ness in Chicago and noted for its train station sequence that recreated the scene of a runaway baby carriage during a gunfight (similar to Battleship Potemkin's (1925) Odessa Steps sequence), and the Vietnam War film Casualties of War (1989) with Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox. By the end of the decade, he had scored both failures and hits (i.e., The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and Mission: Impossible (1996)).
Peter Bogdanovich
His beautifully-photographed black and white The Last Picture Show (1971) was another melancholic rites-of-passage film. It was R-rated for its very candid sex scenes, including both a nude skinny-dipping indoor pool party, and a deflowering scene in a motel. It was an outstanding, evocative, nostalgic adaptation of Larry McMurtry's 1966 novel about two aimless, high-school seniors from blue-collar families in the small northern Texas town of Anarene in the early 50s. It also served as an elegy for a dying town and its way of life. [Although it became more commonplace, the deliberate use of black and white was considered unusual at the time.] Bogdanovich used a cast of promising young actors including Timothy Bottoms as Sonny and 20 year-old Jeff Bridges as Duane (as two football heroes), and Cybill Shepherd as the sexy, flirtatious town beauty Jacy.
He also directed Paper Moon (1973) - an engaging off-beat comedy of a wily, Depression Era con-man named Moses Pray (who sold Bibles to mourning widows) with his scheming and tough accomplice daughter (pairing real-life father-actor Ryan O'Neal and his nine-year old daughter Tatum O'Neal - who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her substantial role). Tatum smoked non-tobacco 'lettuce cigarettes' in her role as the young grifter named Addie. Bogdanovich was assisted by Orson Welles who suggested that the black and white photography be shot through a red filter, adding higher contrast to the images.
But then, critical and financial failures abounded for Bogdanovich in the mid-70s and after - Daisy Miller (1974), At Long Last Love (1975), Nickelodeon (1976), Saint Jack (1979), They All Laughed (1981), Mask (1985), and The Last Picture Show's unsuccessful sequel Texasville (1990).
Robert Altman
Although he had been a director since the early 50s, his first profitable and artistically successful, breakthrough film was the trend-setting, savagely irreverent black comedy M*A*S*H (1970), an adaptation of Richard Hooker's best-selling book. This great and daring farce satirized the war movie genre (and the Vietnam War itself) with its story of a group of doctors (including Elliott Gould as Trapper John and Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye) during the Korean War at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. Altman's anti-authoritarian, cynical film was the Grand Prix winning film at Cannes, and he received a nomination as Best Director - his first of five Academy Awards nominations. The popularity of M*A*S*H spawned the long-running TV series with hip characters "Hawkeye" Pierce and "Trapper" John McIntyre. [Note: M*A*S*H was released at the same time as two traditional war films: Patton (1970), and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970).]
Further films in the decade -- he made over a dozen varied films during the 70s, with a large number of box-office duds -- included the flawed, off-beat comedy Brewster McCloud (1970), the revisionist, Depression-era romantic caper/gangster film Thieves Like Us (1974), the saga of two gamblers (Elliott Gould and George Segal) in California Split (1974), the surrealistic 3 Women (1977), the improvisational black comedy satire A Wedding (1978), and the futuristic sci-fi fable Quintet (1979). Two of Altman's other ill-fated failures were Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976), and his filming of Popeye (1980) with Robin Williams in his first major film role.
Film History of the 1970s
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Page 3
All of Francis Ford Coppola's earlier 60s films were flops. He made his first film at UCLA (Tonight For Sure (1961)), served an apprenticeship with famed B-film director Roger Corman (e.g., The Terror (1963), Dementia 13 (1963), and Battle Beyond the Sun (1963)), made his commercial directorial debut with You're a Big Boy Now (1966), co-scripted Is Paris Burning? (1966), directed the entertaining, fanciful musical comedy Finian's Rainbow (1968) with Fred Astaire, and then from his own script directed his fourth feature film - the dramatic road film The Rain People (1969).
In 1969, Coppola established his own production company, American Zoetrope - used for the production of co-founder George Lucas' THX 1138 (1971) and American Graffiti (1973). [Note: THX 1138 (1971) was a feature-length version of Lucas' earlier short-subject experimental film (titled Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB) that he made as a student at USC in 1967. The short film provided him with a stepping stone to Warner Bros. as an intern working on Coppola's film The Rain People (1969).] In addition, Coppola's Oscar win as co-screenwriter for Patton (1970) gave him the break he needed for future, big-budgeted opportunities.
The first big hit of the early 70s was Paramount's and Francis Ford Coppola's overpowering and absorbing, grand-scale gangster film - the Best Picture winner The Godfather (1972). The explicitly violent, complex, and majestic saga of the Brooklyn-located Corleone crime family that was based on Mario Puzo's pulpish best-seller presented so many memorable scenes and mythic overtones: the opening wedding sequence, the horse's head in a bed, the "I believe in America" speech, the Don's collapse in the garden, and Sonny's (James Caan) death at a tollbooth. This first film of the three-part epic became the first film to gross $100 million domestically, although its arrival was denounced by Italian-Americans protesting its violence and the association of the 'Mafia' with their ethnic group. Brando, who won his second Oscar, had shrewdly negotiated for only $100,000 and a percentage of the film. The influential film also brought Al Pacino to film stardom as boyish war hero and mob boss Michael - propelling the Lee Strasberg-trained actor from off-Broadway obscurity to prominence.
William Friedkin
A former network television director, young film director William Friedkin found recognition for his early films The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968) and The Boys in the Band (1970). He then had two of the biggest hits of the early 70s - first, the hard-hitting, urban crime/cop thriller The French Connection (1971) - with Gene Hackman cast as a brutal and racist 'good' cop (Doyle) with cop-partner Russo (Roy Scheider) pursuing a ruthless but refined drug dealer (Fernando Rey). Friedkin's film featured a tense subway chase culminating in one of the most exciting, hair-raising 90 mph car chases ever filmed through busy New York streets.
Friedkin's unnerving film spawned two sequels and quickly encouraged an entire cycle of similar occult-horror films (with more sequels), such as:
- The Omen (1976)
- The Amityville Horror (1979)
Friedkin's over-budget suspense-thriller Sorcerer (1977) was a box-office failure. He ran into more difficulty during the filming of the controversial Cruising (1980), a film starring Al Pacino as a rookie undercover cop searching Manhattan's gay S&M underground to find a psychotic serial killer who preys on hardcore, leather-bar patrons. Outraged gay activist groups protested the depiction of homosexuals as sadomasochistic, sex-crazed, and demented.
An American Film Institute graduate, twenty-eight year old Terrence Malick scored his directorial / producer / writer debut with the moody, disturbing, nihilistic and lyrical drama Badlands (1973) about disenchanted youth, with teen-lovers on the run Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek (who provided the narrative voice-over) in the lead roles. It was based upon the murder spree of late-50s real-life criminals Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. Elements of the film have been widely copied since, e.g., True Romance (1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994). Five years later, Malick directed the beautifully-visualized, tragic love story Days of Heaven (1978) - and then didn't direct another film until two decades later - The Thin Red Line (1998).
Michael Ritchie
His best two satires were Smile (1975), a sardonic, humorous view of the callousness of a competitive Miss Teen USA beauty pageant with Annette O'Toole and Bruce Dern, and Semi-Tough (1977), a comedy about the hypocrisies of professional football and self-improvement fads. Ritchie's most popular film was The Bad News Bears (1976) about a rambunctious group of foul-mouthed Little Leaguers (The Bears) with star player Tatum O'Neal and their cigar-chomping, beer-guzzling coach (Walter Matthau).
Paul Mazursky
Michael Cimino
Hal Ashby
Ashby won an Oscar for Best Editing for In the Heat of the Night (1967) and then made his directorial debut with the social comedy The Landlord (1970), at the same time as the Kent State Massacre and the release of Altman's irreverent M*A*S*H (1970). It told the story of 29 year-old Elgar Enders (Beau Bridges) who left his privileged WASP home (and his ditzy mother played by Best Supporting Actress-nominated Lee Grant) and purchased a dilapidated tenement in a black ghetto in a changing, Brooklyn neighborhood and became its spoiled slum landlord, with many lessons to be learned. Ashby also opened the decade with the macabre and eccentric black comedy Harold and Maude (1971) about an inter-generational romance between a life-affirming septuagenarian survivor of the death camps (Ruth Gordon) and a suicidally-morbid, 20-something, suicide-obsessed young man (Bud Cort). Over the years, this odd and original film would acquire a huge audience of cultish admirers.
He also directed the adult bedroom comedy Shampoo (1975), a top hit of the mid-1970s co-produced and co-scripted by Robert Towne and Warren Beatty. It was significant for its time period surrounding Election Day in 1968 (the coming age of Nixon) when 60's idealism was rapidly vanishing. It starred Warren Beatty as George Roundy - a flirtatious, 34 year-old, long-haired Beverly Hills hairdresser. In the course of the film, George was a major seducer of women, including his ex-girlfriend Jackie (Julie Christie), Felicia (Lee Grant who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar) - the wife of a prominent Republican politician and wealthy businessman named Lester Karp (Jack Warden), his own model-girlfriend Jill (Goldie Hawn), AND Felicia's teenaged daughter Lorna (a precocious Carrie Fisher pre-Star Wars! in her film debut). The frenetic world of the deceitful, hedonistic, dim-witted and narcissistic George eventually collapsed in on him - leaving him personally and financially bankrupt. By film's end, he inarticulately described what he had accomplished to Jill: "Let's face it, I f--ked 'em all. I mean, that's what I do. That's why I went to beauty school. I mean, they're always there and I-I just can't I-I, you know, I - I don't know what I'm apologizing for. So, sometimes I f--k 'em.... I don't know - I mean, that's it! It makes my day. I mean, it makes me feel like I'm gonna live forever."
Ashby's Bound for Glory (1976) chronicled the life of folk singer Woody Guthrie. In the same year as Cimino's The Deer Hunter, Ashby directed the perceptive and melodramatic Coming Home (1978) about the problems of returning veterans (gung-ho husband Bruce Dern) and a woman torn between two men - it won the Best Actress (Jane Fonda as a volunteer in a veterans' hospital), Best Actor (Jon Voight as a paraplegic Vietnam vet), and Best Original Screenplay Oscar awards. Ashby's next film, the poetic Being There (1979), adapted from Jerzy Kosinski's novel and with Peter Sellers' last great film role as a simple-minded gardener ("I like to watch") named Chauncey Gardiner, satirized naivete and wisdom-as-innocence in the world of wealth and power politics.
Steven Spielberg
George Lucas in the Early and Late 70s
Born in Modesto, California in 1944, George Lucas got his start in film-making while attending USC, where in 1967 he famously created a short experimental sci-fi film that he eventually remade as THX 1138 (1971). After graduating, he co-founded American Zoetrope with UCLA grad Francis Ford Coppola. During an internship with Warner Bros., he was a production assistant for Coppola's Rain People (1969), and the Rolling Stones' documentary Gimme Shelter (1970). His next film project was the teenage-oriented film American Graffiti (1973) - produced through his own newly-formed LucasFilm and Universal. It was a nostalgic ensemble film that looked back fondly on his small-town California roots in Modesto, and concentrated on a subculture of teens. It was purposely set in 1962 before all the turmoil that came later in the decade (i.e., the assassinations of JFK, MLK Jr., and Robert Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the protests and counterculture, etc.). It was wildly popular with young audiences, featured a rock and pop-song soundtrack, car-racing (one of Lucas' early loves), and it launched the careers of many future stars, including Harrison Ford, Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, and many others.
After Star Wars, the first in a scheduled nine (now six) films in the entire epic, Lucas gave up the director's chair to executive-produce and script-write the first sequel The Empire Strikes Back (1980) by director Irvin Kershner, and to executive-produce and co-author the screenplay for the third in the trilogy, Return of the Jedi (1983) by director Richard Marquand.
Through his company LucasFilm, Ltd., Lucas also executive-produced Steven Spielberg's "Indiana Jones" series of three adventure movies, beginning in 1981 and lasting through the end of the decade (with a fourth film added in 2008):
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Page 4
John Cassavetes - Independent Auteur
- A Child is Waiting (1963)
- Faces (1968), his fourth feature (made in 16 mm) that began filming in 1966 - an over two-hour long study of infidelity in which he cast his wife Gena Rowlands as one of the lead characters, a high-class call girl named Jeannie Rapp; the film has been noted as the first independently-made and distributed American film to reach mainstream audiences
- Husbands (1970)
- Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)
- A Woman Under the Influence (1974), one of his most brilliant films (for which he was nominated as Best Director) with Best Actress-nominated Gena Rowlands in the lead role as mood-swinging, lower middle-class housewife Mabel Longhetti whose increasing madness led to her institutionalization
- The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)
- Gloria (1980)
The 'Detective' and Crime Film Genre: Right-Wing Cop Action Films
Throughout his impassioned, unrestrained and fanatical search for the killer, the heavy-handed and embittered Callahan was reprimanded by his authoritarian, bureaucratic superiors (the Mayor, the DA, etc.) for not following 'the book' and for illegally overstepping his procedural bounds by ignoring victims' rights. By film's end after killing Scorpio, the heroic Dirty Harry threw away his badge. Critic Pauline Kael labeled the film "fascist" and "deeply immoral" for its strident political views, since the film took a non-PC political stance - the POV of crime victims (rather than criminals) by its endorsement of autonomous vigilantism.
Four successors to Dirty Harry (1971) that starred Eastwood were:
- Magnum Force (1973), d. Ted Post, more violent but less stylistic, with Harry taking on an avenging, black-clad police death squad involved in vigilantism
- The Enforcer (1976), d. James Fargo
- Sudden Impact (1983) - director/star Clint Eastwood's reprising of his formulaic role as an independent cop
- The Dead Pool (1988), d. Buddy Van Horn
Similar to "Dirty Harry," Charles Bronson (as NYC architect Paul Kersey) sought vengeance as an angry, emotionless vigilante in Michael Winner's controversial thriller Death Wish (1974). Kersey was not present in his Manhattan apartment when his wife Joanna (Hope Lange) was lethally assaulted by hoodlums (and his daughter Carol was raped at the hands of one of the thugs, portrayed by Jeff Goldblum). Kersey sought extra-legal street justice for himself when the impotent police failed to solve the case, and he began to take pleasure in punishing muggers and other criminals, sometimes by posing as a vulnerable target but in fact setting up a predatory attack. Kersey soon found himself the target of NYPD Lt. Frank Ochoa (Vincent Gardenia) who was in pursuit of the vigilante responsible for numerous killings.
The original film led to three similar sequels in the 1980s:
- Death Wish 2 (1982)
- Death Wish 3 (1985)
- Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987)
The Start of Clint Eastwood's Growing Influence:
Clint Eastwood was transformed when he made an impressive debut as director in the psychologically-shocking, suspenseful, and violent Play Misty for Me (1971) about a KRML Radio disc jockey threatened by an obsessed fan who kept calling for her favorite song. He also starred as easy-going trucker and bare-knuckle fighter Philo Beddoe who was upstaged by an orangutan named Clyde in the C&W comedy Every Which Way But Loose (1978). Its success led to the inevitable sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980). Eastwood also starred in Siegel's suspenseful prison break-out film Escape From Alcatraz (1979). He also began directing, producing, and acting in westerns in the 70s - a career move that he maintained into the 90s, during a time when most directors avoided the unpopular genre:
- High Plains Drifter (1973)
- The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
- Bronco Billy (1980)
- Pale Rider (1985)
- Unforgiven (1992)
Urban Crime Thrillers, Militancy and Graphic Violence:
Its sequel by director John Frankenheimer - French Connection II (1975) brought back Gene Hackman as the tough-nosed NY cop still in pursuit of international heroin dealers in Marseilles. Sidney Lumet's Serpico (1973), based on the book by Peter Maas, was the true story of dedicated, honest New York cop Frank Serpico (Al Pacino) (nicknamed Paco) who fought against vast corruption in the city by blowing the whistle on others who took payoffs. William Friedkin also directed Pacino in Cruising (1980) as an undercover cop investigating grisly murders in NY's gay community. The headlines of a fact-based 1972 story about a defiant folk-hero - a bi-sexual bank robber in a desperate hostage situation, became the basis for Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Its unlikely story pitted nothing-to-lose hustler Sonny Wortzick (Al Pacino again) in a failed NYC bank raid against the authorities - to fund his boyfriend's (Chris Sarandon) sex change operation.
Sam Peckinpah's ultra-violent Straw Dogs (1971) provoked controversy with charges of gratuitous violence, and The Getaway (1972) with hard-bitten convict Steve McQueen in the lead role, was another typically-violent film. Michael Caine starred in the UK crime film Get Carter (1971) as the title character - a London gangster trying to avenge his murdered brother.
Sydney Pollack's suspenseful political thriller Three Days of the Condor (1975) involved a researcher (Robert Redford) who discovered all of his co-workers dead after lunch - and a conspiracy within the CIA, and decided the only way to survive was to give his story to The New York Times.
Walter Hill's gang film set in a surrealistic New York City entitled The Warriors (1979) was worrisome for its instigation of violent gang warfare and feuding. Actual gang violence, including shootings, rumbles, and stabbings occurred during some showings of The Warriors (1979) and Michael Pressman's Boulevard Nights (1979), about East LA gang life in a Latino barrio.
The Continuing James Bond Series:
There were five additional entries in the Bond series in the decade, with a new actor (Roger Moore) in the role of agent 007 beginning in 1973:
- Diamonds Are Forever (1971), the 7th Bond film in the series, again with Sean Connery as Bond (his 6th appearance, and last Bond film for 12 years), and Jill St. John and Lana Wood as the 'Bond Girls,' and Charles Gray as the villain (Ernst Stavro Blofeld); directed by Guy Hamilton
- Live and Let Die (1973), the 8th film, and the first with Roger Moore as the special agent; fast-paced, entertaining, and violent; also with Jane Seymour as the 'Bond Girl' and Yaphet Kotto as the villain, Mr. Big [Moore was selected for the role of Bond because of two previous roles: as Robin Hood-like Simon Templar in the mid-1960s British TV series The Saint, based on the Leslie Charteris books, and as international playboy Lord Brett Sinclair in the early 70s British TV series The Persuaders]
- The Man With the Golden Gun (1974), the 9th film, again with Roger Moore; also with Britt Ekland and Maud Adams as the 'Bond Girls' and Christopher Lee as the villain, Scaramanga; directed by Guy Hamilton
- The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), the 10th film, and Roger Moore's third Bond film; with Barbara Bach as the 'Bond Girl', Curt Jurgens as the villain (Karl Stromberg) and Richard Kiel as Jaws
- Moonraker (1979), the 11th film, an expensive one with an outer-space theme, also with Roger Moore; with Lois Chiles as the 'Bond Girl', Michel Lonsdale as the villain (Drax) and Richard Kiel as the menacing 'Jaws'
African American Film-Makers in the Early 1970s:
Black actors and film-makers had always played a part in early American film history, as either stereotypical or typecast characters (maids or mammy figures, porters, comic-relief characters, "Uncle Toms," etc.), or in the films of black film-makers such as producer/director Oscar Micheaux (with his low-budget, usually all-black "race films") and others. In the 1950s and 1960s, Dorothy Dandridge (the first African American screen siren), Harry Belafonte (the first African American male sex symbol), and Sidney Poitier (the first black superstar) became Hollywood's black superstars. Roles for blacks began to slowly increase in scope and change with the advent of concurrent social changes. A number of black athletes entered the cinematic arena to perform in generic action films, including O.J. Simpson, Jim Brown, and Fred Williamson.
African-American film-makers also began to make inroads in the late 60s, beginning with Gordon Parks Sr.'s brilliantly-photographed first directorial film The Learning Tree (1969) - an autobiographical account (or coming-of-age film) of a boy growing up black in 1920s Kansas, and realizing the consequences of race. [Note: Parks was a former photojournalist with Life Magazine, and the first black mainstream Hollywood director. Parks' film was a major milestone - he was the first African-American film-maker to direct a motion picture that was released by a major US studio.]
Independent film actor/director/writer Melvin Van Peebles was another of the earliest African Americans to work within the Hollywood studio system. Peebles' second film (and first Hollywood film) was the message movie-comedy Watermelon Man (1970), starring Godfrey Cambridge in a dual role as a Los Angeles insurance agent in 1968 named Jeff Gerber. Originally a suburban white racist and physical fitness enthusiast who became black overnight, he began to experience the hostility toward blacks in America.
Then came actor/director Ossie Davis' crime-comedy Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), an action, police detective and buddy film. Two plainclothes Harlem police detectives: Coffin Ed (Raymond St. Jacques) and Grave Digger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge), sought to investigate a fraudulent fund-raising scam on poor Harlem blacks known as "Back to Africa," run by corrupt black nationalist preacher Reverend Deke O'Malley (Calvin Lockhart). The illicit funds were hidden in a bale of cotton. The film ultimately became the precursor to other popular buddy-cop films, such as Lethal Weapon (1987) and its franchise series (1987-1998), and a series of Bad Boys (1995) films. Director Mark Warren's Come Back Charleston Blue (1972) about a vigilante named Charleston Blue in Harlem, served as the sequel to Cotton Comes to Harlem.
Actor Sidney Poitier directed the revisionist western Buck and the Preacher (1972), his first Hollywood film. The title characters were: wagon-master Buck (Poitier) who led former African-American slaves (now aspiring homesteaders) from the South to the frontier after the Civil War to become land-owners and farmers. He was partnered with con-man Preacher (Harry Belafonte) to combat bands of white rogue agents led by villainous Deshay (Cameron Mitchell) who attacked the wagon trains and threatened to return the black settlers back to the South.
The Rise of Action Blaxploitation Films:
The successful independent film (budgeted at $500,000), with a gospel soundtrack by Earth, Wind & Fire, was released by independent distributor Cinemation, and aimed at urban black audiences, and began its run by playing in only two theatres (in Atlanta and Detroit). It caused tremendous controversy for its militancy, sex, anti-white sentiment, revenge-themes, and violence, although it became one of the most important black American films of the decade (eventually earning revenue of $10 million). Its most controversial scene was the rape of the director's son Mario by a middle-aged prostitute. [Note: Mario Van Peebles' film Baadasssss! (2004) told the story of how his father, Melvin, contributed to modern independent black filmmaking with his 1971 film.]
The earliest 'blaxploitation' films featured smart-ass 'jive' dialogue, street obscenities, muscle-bound black heroes, brutal action and fight scenes, car chases, gun play, some nudity, Afros and snappy duds, and despicable villains. On the down side, the aspirations of blacks were seen within the dregs of society in the inner city - demeaning role models such as pimps, drug dealers, mobsters, hitmen and super-sexual males without much intellectual acuity. Even some black groups such as the NAACP and CORE created backlash by opposing the militant, reprehensible exploitational black movies that glorified negative stereotypes and reinforced white attitudes toward black culture.
After the first few of these mostly B-films hit the screens, many other lesser, formulaic, and sometimes edgier, audacious "blaxploitation" films with black actors in stereotypical film roles began to flood the market - designed specifically for the newfound market of African-American film audiences. Some of the films were classic cult favorites, although others were low-budget, very poorly made and of inferior quality, such as The Black 6 (1973) starring six black NFL players who rode around as a motorcycle gang.
Starting in the early 1970s, over 200 major films would be released by major and independent studios to profit from the black movie-going audiences. In some cases because of the small number of African-American actors, black athletic superstars (Jim Brown, Rosie Grier, Fred Williamson, and Vida Blue) and others (comedian Richard Pryor got his start in these films as did Antonio Fargas) were recruited and cast in the lead or supporting roles:
- Black Gunn (1972) - from Columbia Pictures, an action flick starring Cleveland Brown's fullback turned actor Jim Brown as Gunn - an LA nightclub owner who sought revenge for the murder of his ex Vietnam Vet younger brother Scott (Herb Jefferson Jr.) (involved with militant blacks who robbed money from racist Mob gang members, led by boss Capelli (Martin Landau))
- Blacula (1972) - R-rated (for violence) - the first black horror film
- Hammer (1972) - the sports-themed film that used ex-football player Fred Williamson's (who played for the Oakland Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs) grid-iron nickname "Hammer" - it was loaded with fight scenes featuring Williamson as B.J. Hammer, a muscle-bound, side-burned dock worker and boxer, who spouted an incredible line to his girlfriend Lois (Vonetta McGee) about what he did when he first moved to the city: "I cut my teeth playing big-time city games like Smack the Fag, Hump the Whore and Dodge the Needle, so ain't no jive-time jelly-belly cat gonna rip me off"
- The Harder They Come (1972), the first successful film from Jamaica, starring Jimmy Cliff, and introducing reggae music and Rastafarian culture to the US
- Hit Man (1972) - with Bernie Casey as enforcer 'hit man' Tyrone Tackett, featured lots of nudity including a memorable sex scene with sexy porn star Gozelda (Pam Grier); this blaxploitation classic was a modified adaptation of Ted Lewis' novel Jack’s Return Home that previously inspired the seminal gangster film Get Carter (1972, UK)
- Slaughter (1972), from American Independent Pictures (AIP), an excessively-violent glorification of Harlem drug trafficking with Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown in the title role as an ex-Green Beret combating the Mob; followed by the sequel Slaughter's Big Rip-Off (1973)
- Super Fly (1972) - directed by Gordon Parks Jr., with Ron O'Neal as a stylish, flashy-dressing, NYC cocaine pusher (and user) named Youngblood Priest, who drove a "hog" vehicle (Cadillac El Dorado) while out to complete one last major underworld drug deal or score in Harlem before he can "get out of the life" (in other words, go straight); it turned out that 'dirty' cops led by the white deputy police commissioner Riordan were using Priest as the middleman in ther drug dealings; with a funky Curtis Mayfield score (a soundtrack that outgrossed the film!) including the hit singles Super Fly, Pusherman and Freddie's Dead; the film inspired urban fashions (coke-spoon jewelry, perms, etc.) as Shaft (1971) had done; it was remade as Superfly (2018)
- Trouble Man (1972) - an action-crime drama featuring actor Robert Hooks as "Mr. T." - described as "Cold Hard Steel! He'll Give You Peace of Mind... Piece by Piece!" and "His friends call him Mr. T. His enemies call for mercy!"- and with memorable soundtrack by Marvin Gaye
- Black Caesar (1973), from writer/director Larry Cohen, modeled after the Warners' gangster classic of 1931, with Fred Williamson as Tommy Gibbs, who grew up to be a criminal kingpin: "The Godfather of Harlem", and with a memorable James Brown soundtrack (including "Down and Out in New York City"); followed by sequel Hell Up in Harlem (1973)
- The Black 6 (1973), with lots of pro-football stars as Vietnam Vets - members of a motorcycle gang, including "Mean" Joe Greene, Carl Eller, Gene Washington, Willie Lanier, Ben Davidson and Mercury Morris
- Hell Up in Harlem (1973), AIP's sequel to Black Caesar (1973), again by writer/director Larry Cohen, with the tagline: "Black Godfather is back...and there's gonna be Hell up in Harlem"
- The Mack (1973), about Bay Area (Oakland) pimp and drug dealer John "Goldie" Mickens, (Max Julien), with Richard Pryor in a minor role as sidekick Slim [Note: The film's title was derived from the French and later Louisiana Creole patois term "maqereau" for pimp]
- The Spook Who Sat By the Door (1973) - by director Ivan Dixon, and considered so very shocking, controversial, and incendiary (after record box-office business at inner-city theatres) that the FBI allegedly demanded its withdrawal from distribution, claiming it would incite race wars and riots
- Black Belt Jones (1974), a martial arts blaxploitation film with Jim Kelly as a karate expert fighting the Mob
- Three The Hard Way (1974) - a low-brow action thriller by director Gordon Parks Jr., about three 'blaxploitation' heroes (Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, and Jim Kelly) who went after rich, genocidal white supremacists with an evil scheme to release diseased water into the public utility systems of three major cities that would only affect the black population
- Truck Turner (1974), a crime thriller starring Isaac Hayes as ex-football player turned bounty hunter (Truck Turner), whose prey was an LA pimp, and ultimately against crime syndicate leader Harvard Blue (Yaphet Kotto)
- Willie Dynamite (1974), another blaxploitation film that glamorized the black pimp - starring Roscoe Orman (later portrayed "Gordon" on Sesame Street) as Willie Dynamite, a flamboyant, fur-decorated coat-wearing NYC pimp with gold platform shoes and a lime green pants suit, who drove a purple Cadillac (with leopard skin seats), and kept his 'bitches' in line with harsh treatment
- The Candy Tangerine Man (1975), directed by Matt Cimber, with the tagline: "Git Back JACK--Give him no JIVE...He is the BAAAD'EST Cat in '75"; starring John Daniels in a duo-role as Ron - a conservative family man living in Los Angeles, and his alter-ego - a Sunset Boulevard pimp known as the Black Baron, who drove a distinctive yellow and red Rolls Royce; the film was a modified version of The Mack (1973)
- Coonskin (1975) (aka Streetfight), by writer/director Ralph Bakshi, both animated and live-action, and originally released by Paramount Pictures; it told about a black rabbit from the South who became a drug-dealer on the ghetto streets of Harlem; due to its controversial nature, it was boycotted by CORE during a NYC premiere screening
- Dolemite (1975), the first of two Dolemite films, by director D'Urville Martin, starring pioneering, non-PC black comedian Rudy Ray Moore as the superstudly title character - with the tagline: "With his all-girl army of Kung Fu Killers" - with "bone-crushing, skull-splitting, brain-blasting action!"; Moore's Dolemite comedy sequel was The Human Tornado (1976), followed by Moore's fantasy-horror comedy Petey Wheatstraw (1977) (aka The Devil's Son in Law)
Female Blaxploitation Stars:
A female version of the action sub-genre developed, often starring a vengeful heroine, notably Pam Grier, Rosie Grier's cousin, who was dubbed the "Queen of Blaxploitation." As a sexy super-mama toting a gun, she appeared in a number of hard-hitting films as the star:
- Black Mama White Mama (1972) - a violent female subversion of The Defiant Ones (1958)
- Coffy (1973) - her biggest hit, with Grier as free-spirited, sexy Nurse "Coffy" Collin seeking revenge on drug pushers responsible for her 11 year-old sister's heroin addiction; with the tagline: "...The baddest One-Chick Hit-Squad That Ever Hit Town!"
- Foxy Brown (1974) - a remake of Coffy, and director Jack Hill's 4th and final film with Grier
- Sheba, Baby (1975), PG-rated, and the last of Grier's run of B-movies with AIP
- Friday Foster (1975), based upon an early 1970s Chicago Tribune syndicated comic strip (the first with an African-American woman as the leading character), with Grier portraying a more subdued, tame and squeaky-clean character - a media-magazine photographer in Washington DC; also starring Yaphet Kotto as private detective Colt Hawkins, Scatman Crothers as Noble Franklin, and Eartha Kitt as designer Madame Rena
And former October 1969 Playmate Jeannie Bell starred in Roger Corman's and New World Pictures' TNT Jackson (1974) - a merging of kung fu and blaxploitation, in a plot about a karate expert (Diana 'T.N.T.' Jackson) searching for her brother in a section of Hong Kong known as "Yellow Town." Its tagline was: "SHE'S A ONE MAMA MASSACRE SQUAD." In the action thriller's most remembered scene, TNT was captured and confronted by drug-dealing mobster Ming (Max Alvarado), who threatened to burn her bare chest with his cigar, but then changed his mind ("Such a waste! Perhaps this will not be necessary"). She was able to escape, turned off the lights, and - while completely topless with only panties (that changed color) - fought off a darkened room full of male criminals after taunting them: "You want it black? You got it black."
The Lasting Influence of Blaxploitation Films:
The success of blaxploitation films brought some opportunities for blacks in the industry to work in Hollywood, although the vast majority of these films were still distributed, produced, and controlled by non-blacks. It also led to an onslaught of other black exploitation genres, blending the black urban tales with other genres. What followed were numerous remakes or lesser imitations ranging from black westerns to martial arts/kung fu films to horror, drama and gangster films.
The cinematic blaxploitation craze weakened and substantially died in the mid-to-late 1970s, but then experienced a slight revival in the 1990s, with Keenen Ivory Wayan's parody film I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988), star/director Eddie Murphy's Harlem Nights (1989), Mario Van Peebles' New Jack City (1991) and black western Posse (1993), and Larry Cohen's Original Gangstas (1996), reuniting stars from the earlier era including Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Ron O'Neal, and Richard Roundtree. Grier also starred in Quentin Tarantino's homage to the period - Jackie Brown (1998), and Samuel Jackson appeared in black director John Singleton's remake Shaft (2000).
In retrospect, all of the blaxploitation films set the stage for future directors such as Spike Lee, John Singleton, and F. Gary Gray, and future stars such as Richard Pryor. For example, director Michael Schultz' entertaining urban comedy Car Wash (1976), with a script by Joel Schumacher, was a look at a day-in-the-life of the Los Angeles Dee-Lux car wash, starring Richard Pryor and other rising black stars. It was followed by Schultz' similar farce Which Way is Up? (1977) also with Richard Pryor (in a triple role).
The movement also contributed to the rise of Hip Hop music, influenced fashion, aided the development of the rap subculture, and produced other movies like the Beverly Hills Cop series and Pulp Fiction (1994).
Other Offshoots:
Inevitably, as blaxploitation films disappeared, alternative African-American films emerged, including other kinds of action films, comedy, and social dramas. Two black films more in the mainstream included 20th Century Fox's and blacklisted director John Berry's romantic drama Claudine (1974), starring Best Actress Oscar-nominated Diahann Carroll as the 36 year-old title character Claudine Price - an unwed and poor Harlem resident in the early 1970s who was on welfare with six children - and illegally on the side was a domestic maid. Her romance with garbage collector Roop (a young James Earl Jones) turned problematic for many reasons. Also popular was Paramount's Mahogany (1975), directed by Motown music chief Berry Gordy. It was the perfect cinematic vehicle for The Supremes' singer Diana Ross as an aspiring fashion designer named Tracy living on the South side of Chicago. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song ("Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You're Going To)").
Changes in the Ratings System: The Dawn of the X Rating
Major changes in the Production Code had already occurred in the previous decade when the Motion Picture Production Code was replaced by a ratings system in 1968. This
Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge (1971) was declared obscene by a 1971 Georgia ruling and banned in some areas of the country for its frank exploration of the sexual attitudes and problems of two modern Americans (Jack Nicholson as Jonathan and Art Garfunkel as Sandy), from their days as college roommates through middle-age. The Supreme Court overturned the state's ruling in 1974. William Friedkin's The Boys in the Band (1970) broke a Hollywood film barrier by honestly dealing with the subject of homosexuality. Jane Fonda won the Best Actress Oscar for Klute (1971) for her performance as Bree, a prostitute who was stalked by a psychopath. The last name of a small-town detective (Donald Sutherland) who investigated the disappearance of a friend and became involved with Bree, was Klute!
Pornography became a mainstream, legitimate curiosity with the screening of Gerard Damiano's exploitation fantasy Deep Throat (1972) with Linda Lovelace, although the film generated legal actions and challenges in many localities. Its initial, low-budget investment of $24,000 brought in receipts totalling at least $20 million (before the rental and video markets' profits), easily making it the most successful pornographic film of all-time. A soft-core X (or R)-rated series of films with abundant erotic nudity also came to US screens from France, beginning with Just Jaeckin's Emmanuelle (1974), starring Dutch-born actress Sylvia Kristel, and followed by the equally provocative, well-photographed sequel by Francis Giacobetti titled Emmanuelle, The Joys of a Woman (1975).
British director Stanley Kubrick faithfully adapted Anthony Burgess' novel for his X-rated A Clockwork Orange (1971, UK) about juvenile droogs (led by Malcolm McDowell as Alex) on a rampage. The Warner Bros. film was a violent, perceptive dark satire of the future that juxtaposed rape and brutality to classical music and the euphoric tune Singin' in the Rain. Kubrick was forced to re-edit the controversial film in order to receive an R-rating. Soon after the film's release, Kubrick withdrew it from distribution in the UK to effectively suppress its exhibition after copycat violence.
Woody Allen's Comedic Era:
Turning more serious and introspective, Allen directed the somber Interiors (1978) - a film with Bergman-esque qualities. The film, a portrait of a family's disintegration, was less well-received. At the conclusion of the decade, Allen directed and starred in another of his best, most accomplished and deepest films, Manhattan (1979) - one of his biggest hits to date. It was a beautifully-photographed black-and-white, sardonic comedy about a group of sophisticated but neurotic Manhattanites with their attendant foibles, loves, angsts, and frustrations in the search for happiness and fulfillment. The film, filled with George Gershwin music, featured Allen as a 42 year-old comedy writer in a relationship with a 17 year-old high-school student (Mariel Hemingway) in his most favorite hometown. At the end of the decade, he directed the autobiographical Stardust Memories (1980), about a successful director who suffered a mid-life crisis.
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Mel Brooks:
Absurdist Monty Python Films:
- And Now for Something Completely Different (1971), a series of TV vignettes and comedy sketches
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) (their first feature film) - a spoof of Arthurian legends, with Knights who Say 'Ni' and a carnivorous rabbit
- the satirical (and sacrilegious to some viewers) Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), with a reluctant Messiah in ancient Palestine named Brian Cohen (Graham Chapman) and his misled disciples, and noted for the line of dialogue: "Blessed are the cheese-makers"
- Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983)
Other Comedies:
Playwright Neil Simon wrote the original screenplay for Murder By Death (1976) as a lightweight spoof of fictional film detectives and sleuths such as Miss Marple, Nick and Nora Charles, Sam Spade, Hercule Poirot and Charlie Chan. Director Robert Mulligan's Same Time, Next Year (1978) was an adult-themed romantic comedy about a long-running marital affair (once annually) between Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn. And another comedy House Calls (1978) told of a hospital romance between widowed doctor Walter Matthau and recent-divorcee Glenda Jackson.
Traditional comedies also did well. Blake Edwards revived his original The Pink Panther (1964) in a series of 70s-80s Inspector Clouseau/Pink Panther films. Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) reappeared in two sequels: The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) -
- The Return of the Pink Panther (1975)
- The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)
- Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978)
- The Trail of the Pink Panther (1982)
- Curse of the Pink Panther (1983)
Genre Films Refashioned for the 70s: Westerns
Widening cracks in the American dream after the 60s were reflected in a number of disturbing, skeptical, pessimistic and provocative revisionist westerns, that questioned the mythical vision of the Old West. Traditional western films in the 1970s were being transformed -- classic frontier heroes of the past were being replaced by more realistic visions of the frontier, by more violent depictions, by more authentic portrayals of racism and prejudice against Native Americans, and by "urban" cowboys who could take the law into their own hands (such as Clint Eastwood's detective Dirty Harry (1971)). Symbolically, this was evidenced, in part, by the deaths in this decade of two influential directors who had placed their personal imprint upon the western genre during Hollywood's classic past:
John Wayne, the genre's greatest icon, gave his final feature film performance after almost 50 years in cinema (mostly in westerns) in over 140 lead roles, with his last lead role as aging/dying Western gunslinger John Bernard Books in director Don Siegel's The Shootist (1976). 72 year-old Wayne died shortly thereafter of lung and stomach cancer in June, 1979. The western also starred Lauren Bacall as fiesty widow Mrs. Rogers, and future director Ron Howard as the hero-worshipping son. Wayne had won his sole career Oscar at an Oscars ceremony in the spring of 1970 for his Best Actor-nominated performance in True Grit (1969), defeating "urban" cowboys Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman for their nominated roles in John Schlesinger's X-rated Midnight Cowboy (1969).
- his lyrical and atypically offbeat The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) with Jason Robards and Stella Stevens
- Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Peckinpah's revisionist elegy for the old-style western, ending with a duel between the legendary western heroes and one-time partners - James Coburn as Pat Garrett and Kris Kristofferson as Billy the Kid
- the bizarre, grim and nihilistic Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) about a bloody, bounty-hunting odyssey through Mexico for the head of a two-timing Mexican gigolo
Other film-makers that produced revisionistic westerns during this decade included Robert Altman (McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976)), and Clint Eastwood (The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)).
Genre Films Refashioned for the 70s: War Films and Dramas
Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) was an excellent documentary examination of the attack on Pearl Harbor from both the Japanese and American points of view. Midway (1976) re-created the famous sea battle of World War II - enhanced with "Sensurround." Ted Post's Go Tell the Spartans (1978) was one of the earliest US anti-war films to realistically confront the reality of the Vietnam War - in a story set in Vietnam in 1964 about a doomed platoon and its leader (Burt Lancaster). After his great successes with both Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and The Graduate (1967), Mike Nichols' surrealistic black comedy Catch-22 (1970), based on the best-selling novel by Joseph Heller, observed the absurdity and idiocy of war.
Coincidentally, James Bridges' topical thriller film The China Syndrome (1979) about a narrowly-avoided global disaster, starred Michael Douglas and Jane Fonda (the third highest box-office star of the year) as a TV news team and Jack Lemmon as a nuclear power plant employee. It opened about two weeks before the potentially-deadly 'melt-down' accident at the nuclear power plant Three Mile Island (near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) on March 28, 1979 - and benefited from the unexpected publicity.
Genre Films Refashioned for the 70s: Film Noirs and Crime Films
Polanski was arrested for statutory rape in 1977 on charges of luring a 13-year-old girl (later revealed to be Samantha Geimer) to the home of actor Jack Nicholson under the pretext of photographing her for a French fashion magazine, and then drugging her with a Quaalude tranquilizer, and raping her. In early 1978, Polanski fled the country to France just hours before he was to have been sentenced in a California court for his admitted unlawful sexual relations, and has remained a 'fugitive' ever since.
Arthur Penn's enigmatic thriller Night Moves (1975) with Gene Hackman and Melanie Griffith (in an early role) also captured the mood of the post-Watergate era - a time of America's lost innocence. Writer/director Paul Schrader's Hardcore (1979) was a variation of John Ford's western The Searchers (1956) (and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976)), the story of a morally-righteous, Michigan businessman's (George C. Scott) search for his runaway daughter Kristen (Ilah Davis) involved in pornography and prostitution in California - with the assistance of a likeable hooker named Niki (Season Hubley), and most famous for his anguished cry "Turn it off! TURN IT OFF!" when he sees her in a sordid, low-budget porno film.
Buddy Films:
Other buddy films in the 70s (and later decades) included some spin-offs:
- Sean Connery and Michael Caine in John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
- George Burns (in his first film in decades) and Walter Matthau as two old-time vaudevillians who hated each other (Lewis and Clark) in Herbert Ross' The Sunshine Boys (1975), an adaptation of Neil Simon's play
- Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Washington Post reporters uncovering Watergate in All the President's Men (1976)
- Arthur Hiller's buddy film comedy Silver Streak (1976) with Gene Wilder as a harmless book editor who witnessed a murder during a cross-country train trip (and then pretended to be black) and Richard Pryor as a petty thief; its success led to the equally-successful sequel Stir Crazy (1980)
Musicals and Dance Films:
Musicals were also big hits - Fiddler on the Roof (1971) was a successful box-office hit faithful to the long-running Broadway play, with Chaim Topol as Tevye - a Jewish dairyman in a small Czarist Russian village (in a role that Zero Mostel made famous). In the same year, an unconventional remake of an earlier musical, The Wiz (1971) starred Richard Pryor as the Wizard of Oz, Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, and Diana Ross as Dorothy.
Fosse's largely semi-autobiographical, Best Picture-nominated All That Jazz (1979), which won four Oscars (Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, and Best Adapted Score) from its nine nominations, was a frenzied combination of choreography, flashbacks, and surrealism, with Roy Scheider as Joe Gideon (based on Fosse himself working on the production of the musical Chicago in 1975) - a work-obsessed, self-destructive Broadway choreographer and director. Many of the characters were either based on people in Fosse's life or characters who essentially played themselves. It was notable for Gideon's early-morning greeting in front of a mirror: "It's show time!", and for his by-pass surgery scene. [Note: Rob Marshall's version of Fosse's play, Chicago (2002) won the Best Picture Oscar.]
Bette Midler starred in the lead role (based on rock star singer Janis Joplin) in The Rose (1979). The successful theatrical re-release of The Sound of Music (1965) in 1973 demonstrated its tremendous long-term popularity. The hit Broadway rock opera from Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jesus Christ, Superstar (1973) came to the screen in 1973 and modernized segments of Jesus Christ's (Ted Neeley) life. Coincidentally, it was released to the screen the same year as composer Stephen Schwartz's and director David Greene's Godspell (1973), co-written by John-Michael Tebelak, and derived from the musical play "Godspell: A Musical Based on the Gospel According to St. Matthew," but taking place on the streets of New York. Another rock opera Tommy (1975), by controversial director Ken Russell, featured the Who. Milos Forman followed up his remarkable Oscar sweep for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) about a rabble-rousing inmate (Jack Nicholson) in a mental hospital battling an icy and repressive nurse (Louise Fletcher), with Hair (1979) - an adaptation of the Broadway hit musical about the hippie generation. One of the most celebrated concert films was director Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz (1978) - the final live performance by The Band, and guest performers Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and Joni Mitchell.
(1) director John Badham's Saturday Night Fever (1977) that combined disco fever, the hit music of the Bee Gees, and a star-making vehicle for John Travolta in his first film role (he had been a TV star on Welcome Back, Kotter) as Brooklyn-dwelling Tony Manero - with tight white polyester pants dancing to You Should Be Dancing and other dance songs; Travolta's dance instructor Deney Terrio would go on to host a popular TV series titled Dance Fever (from 1979-85); the film was based on an article by rock journalist Nik Cohn
(2) Grease (1978), a zesty, nostalgic musical spoof of the 50s, developed from a long-running Broadway hit, was the highest grossing film of its year, and again starred Travolta (as Danny Zuko) and pop singer Olivia Newton-John (as Sandy)
The Buddy Holly Story (1978), another popular music-related film, starred a convincing Gary Busey as the rock & roll star from Lubbock, Texas who became famous for the song "Peggy Sue," and who tragically died in a 1959 plane crash.
Sequels and Re-Makes Fever:
Early foreshadowings of things to come surfaced in the 70s - the popular sequel or re-make. Buena Vista's Herbie Rides Again (1973) followed The Love Bug (1969). Disney's Benji (1974) also encouraged the follow-up film For the Love of Benji (1977).
Tom Laughlin's biker film Born Losers (1967) introduced Billy Jack - a half-Indian fighter that the writer-director-star worked into a series of action films. The successor was Billy Jack (1971), again starring Tom Laughlin (who both produced and directed), and The Trial of Billy Jack (1974), followed by Billy Jack Goes to Washington (1977) - the last completed film in the series.
The western adventure film A Man Called Horse (1970), noted for its gruesome Sun Vow initiation ceremony, starred Richard Harris as English aristocrat Lord John Morgan who lived among the Sioux. It led to two sequels: The Return of a Man Called Horse (1976) and Triumphs of a Man Called Horse (1983).
Barbra Streisand's role as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl (1968) was brought back in Funny Lady (1975). Hitchcock's 1935 espionage classic, remade with Kenneth More in 1959, was again remade as The Thirty-Nine Steps (1978) and closely based on the original John Buchan novel, with Robert Powell replacing Robert Donat as on-the-run Richard Hannay character. Jack Clayton's period drama The Great Gatsby (1974), with Robert Redford in the lead role as the self-made millionaire and Mia Farrow as socialite Daisy, was the third film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic 1925 novel. [The second version in 1949 starred Alan Ladd in the title role.]
Major sequels of much earlier classics included the following:
- producer Dino de Laurentiis' $24 million inferior remake of the 1933 classic, King Kong (1976) with Jessica Lange in the Fay Wray role and Charles Grodin as the Robert Armstrong character
- Barbra Streisand with Kris Kristofferson (as a fading star) in a rock version of A Star is Born (1976) - the third version of the film
- the H.G. Wells mad-scientist classic, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1976), starred Burt Lancaster as the eponymous scientist engaged in genetic research; it was earlier filmed as The Island of Lost Souls (1933) with Charles Laughton, and later remade by director John Frankenheimer as The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) with Marlon Brando
- Heaven Can Wait (1978), a re-make of the comedy/drama Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)
The success of outer space-oriented films, such as Star Wars (1977), generated the 11th James Bond space-motif adventure Moonraker (1979) (with Roger Moore). MGM brought back twenty-nine years of its past glory in That's Entertainment (1974) with documentary-style screen highlights of its greatest musicals. (A sequel quickly followed in 1976.)
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Literary-Based Films:
British and Australian Directors:
English filmmaker John Boorman's Deliverance (1972), a rites-of-passage drama adapted from James Dickey's novel, was about a group of four civilized Atlanta businessmen (with Burt Reynolds as a macho, cross-bow-wielding member of the group named Lewis) who canoed into the Appalachian wilderness and found themselves threatened and assaulted by backwoodsmen. (Its theme song "Dueling Banjos" became a huge hit, and its tagline asked: "What Did Happen on the Cahulawassee River?")
- an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's novel entitled Women in Love (1970)
- The Music Lovers (1971) about the life of Russian composer Tchaikovsky
- the shockingly excessive The Devils (1971) about demonic possession, with Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed
- The Boy Friend (1971) - a tribute to Busby Berkeley's Hollywood musicals with Twiggy
- a hyper-wild visualization of Peter Townsend's rock opera Tommy (1975) - Russell's first commercial hit
- the depiction of Franz Liszt as a sex-obsessed rock star in Lisztomania (1975)
- another screen biography - this time of a silent screen idol Valentino (1977) with dancer Nureyev in his debut film role, opposite Michelle Phillips
From Australia, Gillian Armstrong created the period piece My Brilliant Career (1979) - a feminist tale in turn-of-the-century Australia. Peter Weir directed the mysterious, beautiful and moody Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and the unsettling The Last Wave (1977). And Bruce Beresford directed The Getting of Wisdom (1977) set in a Melbourne girls' boarding school, and the riveting Boer War-South Africa courtroom drama Breaker Morant (1980). Finally, Mel Gibson was propelled into stardom in George Miller's post-nuclear, action-adventure film Mad Max (1979) as a vengeful policeman whose family was attacked by a motorcycle gang.
Big-Budget, Escapist Entertainment:
A number of films of the 70s commented little about the political and social scene - they were just sheer escapist entertainment on a large scale. The trend was toward bigger, more expensive films - with no guarantee of quality. These youth-oriented films and their sequels were aimed at less discriminating and demanding younger audiences - juveniles roughly between ages 12 and 24. Amazingly, some of the record-breaking films of the 70s relied more on special effects than leading stars:
- William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973) with a head-revolving, demonically-possessed Linda Blair
- Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) with a mechanical great white shark
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) with a giant alien spaceship
- George Lucas' Star Wars (1977) - the fourth episode subtitled 'A New Hope,' with James Earl Jones as the voice for David Prowse's character, and Peter Cushing as the Grand Moff Tarkin
- Richard Donner's big screen, British-made Superman (1978) was the most expensive film of the 70s decade, at $55 million - lead star Christopher Reeve brought back the popular DC comic-book character and hero of the 50s TV series, and Gene Hackman starred as Lex Luthor. [Marlon Brando's 10-minute appearance for his role as Jor-El cost a record fee of about $3.5 million and earned him top billing in the credits - it was the most expensive cameo in film history to date.]
- emerging British director Ridley Scott, after his earlier war drama and debut feature film The Duellists (1977), directed the very scary monster film Alien (1979) - it was publicized with a chest-bursting scene and the line: "In space, no one can hear you scream" and featured a part cockroach/part shark alien creature designed by Swiss artist H. R. Giger, that terrorized the crew of the Nostromo spacecraft
Hollywood's Disaster and Calamity Films: Famed Producer/Director Irwin Allen
A commercially-inspired subgenre of adventure films developed in the 70's to thrill audiences with mega-disaster, big-budget extravaganzas (and subsequent spoofs) filled with magnificent special effects, perilous situations, outlandish rescues, laughable gimmicks, and large star-studded casts. Disasters could be either man-made or natural. They would often receive numerous special/visual effects Oscar nominations, but were often neglected for their acting performances. See Filmsite's section on disaster films for more information.
The disaster movie craze was also triggered by producer Irwin Allen's incredibly-successful The Poseidon Adventure (1972) with a gross of $93 million - an exciting tale (with many stars including Gene Hackman and Shelley Winters) about a capsized luxury liner from a tidal wave - the SS Poseidon. A sequel followed: Allen's Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979). Producer Irwin Allen also exploited the popular subgenre with The Towering Inferno (1974) about a high-rise skyscraper fire (a feature film uniquely co-created by two rival studios: 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros.). From its eight Oscar nominations (including Best Picture!), it won three awards: Cinematography, Film Editing, and Song, and starred Steve McQueen as the fire-chief.
Another spectacular disaster film from director Irwin Allen was The Swarm (1978), about threatening killer bees arriving in the US from South America. Allen also produced the disaster dud When Time Ran Out... (1980) about the eruption of a resort island volcano, with Jacqueline Bisset, William Holden, and Paul Newman - it was Allen's final feature film production.
Other films followed the trend:
- a Los Angeles quake magnified by low-frequency tremors termed "Sensurround" in Universal's Earthquake (1974), starring Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner, among others [Rollercoaster (1977) was also screened in Sensurround]
- Richard Lester's thrilling Juggernaut (1974)
- Robert Wise's widescreen drama The Hindenburg (1975)
- Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) - about the dangers lurking beneath the surface
- John Frankenheimer's Black Sunday (1977) - with a plot involving the Super Bowl Stadium and a Goodyear blimp
- Meteor (1979), about a gigantic meteorite hurtling toward Earth
Science-Fiction Films of the 70s:
Besides the splashy, big-budget Spielberg-Lucas sci-films of the decade, there were other speculative, innovative, and thought-provoking examples in the genre:
- a popular, clever, mostly successful and serious five-film series of classic simian films (spanning 1968 to 1973) about apes that have evolved into an intelligent society, derived from Pierre Boule's novel Monkey Planet, originating with Planet of the Apes (1968)
- director Robert Wise's tense The Andromeda Strain (1971) adapted from Michael Crichton's best-selling novel about a strange bacterial agent
- the sci-fi disaster film The Omega Man (1971) with Charlton Heston as the sole survivor of germ warfare unleashed on Earth, who struggled to survive in the city of LA over-run by mutant scavengers
- special-effects genius Douglas Trumbull's directorial debut film - the speculative Silent Running (1972)
- Richard Fleischer's dark futuristic Soylent Green (1973) in which Charlton Heston as an investigating cop revealed the source of people's food in the year 2022 in Manhattan
- Michael Crichton's Westworld (1973) told about a holiday resort named Delos where androids malfunctioned (Yul Brynner starred as a deadly robotic gunslinger)
- John Boorman's visually surreal Zardoz (1974) with Sean Connery
- the satirical sci-fi thriller The Stepford Wives (1975) told of women who were replaced by perfect homemaker robots (who wore flowery dresses and cooked gourmet meals) in order to please their husbands
- Norman Jewison's ultra-violent Rollerball (1975) with James Caan as brutal sports champion Jonathan E.
- Michael Anderson's dystopic view of society in the year 2274, Logan's Run (1976), starring Michael York (as a Sandman) and Jenny Agutter who flee the city to Sanctuary (the ruins of Washington DC inhabited by Peter Ustinov) after learning about the after-30 euthanistic policies of their society
- Peter Hyams' Capricorn One (1977) about a faked NASA Mars landing and mission (with OJ Simpson as one of the astronauts!)
- Disney's dark sci-fi adventure film The Black Hole (1979), one of the studio's earliest PG films, was an attempt at challenging or duplicating Lucas' Star Wars, although it only succeeded with its dazzling special effects and John Barry score
- a TV and Star Wars-inspired Star Trek - The Motion Picture (1979) - the first adaptation of the successful TV show, with Captain Kirk (William Shatner) now an Admiral, reunited with Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley) on the starship Enterprise
- legendary director Stanley Donen's and John Barry's Saturn 3 (1980), a serious science-fiction film that was ignored and bombed at the box office, starring Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett (at the height of her popularity from the TV series Charlie's Angels, and with a brief topless scene that brought the film most of its attention) located on a research space station near Saturn where they are developing hydroponics-grown food for a struggling Earth
The Biggest Stars of the 70s Decade:
Stars in the 1970s that continued to be popular or rose in star power included Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, John Wayne, Elliott Gould (due to his appearance in M*A*S*H (1970)), Dustin Hoffman, Lee Marvin, Jack Lemmon, Barbra Streisand, Walter Matthau, George C. Scott, Ali MacGraw, Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, Marlon Brando, Goldie Hawn, Ryan O'Neal, Burt Reynolds, Robert Redford, Charles Bronson, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Tatum O'Neal, Sylvester Stallone, Diane Keaton, Robert DeNiro, John Travolta, Richard Dreyfuss, Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda, Peter Sellers, Roger Moore, and Jill Clayburgh.
An Unusual Decade:
This was a most interesting decade, beginning with the sappy saccharine romance of the much-talked about Love Story (1970), directed by Arthur Hiller - a phenomenally successful film at the box office, but universally panned by critics for its manipulative, melodramatic appeal ("Love means never having to say you're sorry") between the two stars Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw. This was also the decade in which the world's first eight-plex theatres began to open - in Atlanta in 1974, and the decade in which rock 'n roll icon Elvis Presley died -- August 16, 1977.
And the decade was filled with such surprise winners and oddities, such as:
- the influential Taiwanese film from director King Hu, A Touch of Zen (1969), a landmark martial-arts epic masterpiece that was the first ever Chinese language film to win a major western film festival award (at Cannes in 1975) and would prove influential to future generations of film-makers such as Ang Lee
- Michael Wadleigh's Woodstock (1970) - a documentary-style chronicling (with some split-screen effects) of the 1969 rock concert held in up-state New York, and including Jimi Hendrix's famous guitar solo; with a film crew including a young Martin Scorsese and his future trusted editor Thelma Schoonmaker
- The Great White Hope (1970) - loosely based on the story of Jack Johnson (Jack Jefferson in the film, portrayed by James Earl Jones), about the first black boxer to become world heavyweight champion
- Robert Mulligan's teenage coming-of-age film Summer of '42 (1971) about three boys in a New England resort, including 15 year-old Gary Grimes who came of age by engaging in an affair with the pretty wife (Jennifer O'Neill) of a pilot in WWII
- Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971), Roald Dahl's adaptation of his own novel about an eccentric candy-maker (Gene Wilder) who held a contest involving five golden tickets
- the horror film Willard (1971) with Bruce Davison starring as the repressed title character who trained and used rats (named Ben and Socrates) to kill his enemies; its sequel Ben (1972) featured a Michael Jackson title song hit
- John Waters' gross-out cult film Pink Flamingos (1972), with cross-dressing Divine starring as Babs Johnson
- the overlooked - and slightly overbaked police drama Electra Glide in Blue (1973), James William Guercio's sole directorial effort with Robert Blake as an Arizona motorcycle cop
- the big-budget version of the popular Chinese genre of martial arts, the fast-paced action/thriller Enter the Dragon (1973) propelled 32 year-old kung fu artist Bruce Lee to major posthumous American stardom shortly after his tragic and mysterious death in July, 1973 - it was Lee's biggest US success and last fully-completed role; it was also the first kung fu film produced by a major Hollywood studio
- the romantic comedy of a politically-mismatched couple (Robert Redford as a rich and conservative writer and Barbra Streisand as a supporter of those blacklisted in Hollywood) in Sydney Pollack's The Way We Were (1973) - its popularity was enhanced by Streisand's hit version of the title song
- the gimmicky horror film Wicked, Wicked (1973), filmed entirely (except for the credits) in distracting split-screen "Duo-Vision", to allow the audience to see both the hunted (a resort's guests) and the hunter (a serial killer); with Tiffany Bolling
- the notorious, low-budget, backwoods cult horror film classic of the decade - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) - a popular slasher film by Tobe Hooper about a group of Texans that encountered a family of cannibals, with Gunnar Hansen in the role of serial killer Leatherface; this film was an indication of the increasing violence in films [the film's title was immortalized in an early song by the Ramones, heard on the radio during the film]
- the socially-satirical portrait of a hedonistic Beverly Hills hairdresser (Warren Beatty) in Shampoo (1975) who was romancing three women (Lee Grant, Carrie Fisher, and Goldie Hawn) during the Nixon election period
- The Sunshine Boys (1975) marked a film career comeback for comedian George Burns (who came out of retirement and hadn't been in a feature film since Honolulu (1939)) - the role gave Burns a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and re-energized his career
- the madcap musical comedy The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) was the story of a stranded engaged couple (Brad and Janet - Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon) who encounter mad scientist Dr. Frank N. Furter (Tim Curry) and his "Time Warp" group of Transylvanians - it would become a cultish audience phenomenon in midnight shows after its first midnight showing in the spring of 1976
- Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975) based on a Thackeray novel, with Ryan O'Neal in the lead role as an 18th century gambler
- the hyper-active stunts and fast car chases in Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
- director Herbert Ross' romantic comedy The Goodbye Girl (1977), with a script by Neil Simon, was an unexpected hit and brought an Oscar to Richard Dreyfuss
- the first Muppet feature film aptly titled The Muppet Movie (1979), one of the highest grossing live-action children's films ever made, noted for its disparate collection of characters such as Kermit (frog), Miss Piggy (pig), and Fozzie (bear)
- director Robert Benton's Best Picture-winning drama Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) about a messy custody battle between stars Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep for a child and the challenges of single fatherhood
- stars Jane Fonda and Robert Redford paired again in The Electric Horseman (1979)
- director Ted Ketcheff's North Dallas Forty (1979) showcased the dark side of professional football, involving drug use and alcohol, with stars Mac Davis (as a quarterback) and Nick Nolte (as a wide-receiver)
- ...and former B-movie actor, good-guy cowboy star and New Right champion in politics Ronald Reagan would soon rise in Presidential politics and become the first movie star ever elected President
Future star (and California governor) Arnold Schwarzenegger made his screen debut in a minor film in 1970 and later starred in Pumping Iron (1977), a documentary about professional body-building in preparation for the Mr. Universe contest.
Film Critics on Television:
Chicago Sun-Times reviewer Roger Ebert and Chicago Tribune critic Gene Siskel began to co-host and present their quarrelsome film reviews on public television (Chicago's local PBS station WTTW) in 1978, with a series called Sneak Previews. The hugely successful show, with "Thumbs Up" and "Thumbs Down" trademarked ratings, was immediately syndicated nationwide. It soon became the highest-rated series in the history of public broadcasting.
New Independent Studios:
In 1978, five disgruntled United Artists executives left the studio over a disagreement about lack of control, and formed Orion Pictures. (The group of executives were represented by the five stars depicted in the constellation of Orion - the new corporation's logo.) At the end of the decade in 1979, brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein, first finding success as rock concert promoters in the early 70s while students at the Univ. of Buffalo, became film distributors and formed the independent studio Miramax (derived from the combination of their parents' names: Miriam and Max), after purchasing and renovating a run-down, second-run movie theater in Buffalo, N.Y., and turning it into a profitable college art house. The brothers launched Miramax in 1979 with its headquarters in Tribeca.
The first hit film distributed by the newly-launched studio was the British comedy The Secret Policeman's Other Ball (1982) directed by John Cleese. Bought at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, it was a collection of footage from benefit rock concerts in London (with comedy provided by the Monty Python Flying Circus troupe) to support the human rights organization Amnesty International. The film, including Rowan "Mr. Bean" Atkinson’s hilarious headmaster skit, Billy Connelly singing country music, and Pete Townshend's acoustic versions of "Pinball Wizard" and "Won't Get Fooled Again," grossed $6 million.
[Note: Since 1993, Miramax (and Dimension, one of its subsidiaries to produce and distribute innovative genre films, that was headed by Bob Weinstein) had become a part of the Walt Disney Company. And Orion was sold to MGM in 1997.]
Looking Ahead:
Many reviewers and historians have concluded that the 70s was a very complex, pluralistic and unique era in film-making, due to its many socially-conscious themed films, lots of conflicting viewpoints and visions about America from distinctive auteur-directors, and the questioning of norms and what had come before. A new era was dawning that would emphasize the marketing, advertising and budgeting of films, the search for blockbusters, the dominance of the powerful studios over independent film-makers, and the prominence of "high concept" - the idea that a film should be able to be pitched with a succinctly stated premise. This idea took hold most clearly in the 70s with the novel approach taken by Jaws (1975) - with its visual-ad poster (a shark poised to attack swimmers above with the tagline: "Don't go in the water!").
The premise of 'high-concept' was to easily convey the film's main premise (with the broadest appeal possible) so that it could be easily sold to the marketplace. However, many films in the 1970s couldn't easily be reduced to one sentence or image, since it was difficult to compress rich character development, cinematography, acting, or other artistic qualities of a film into a short phrase. Trends would be changing with the rise of test-marketing, expensive ad campaigns, more bottom-line predictability, and the massive release of first-run films nationwide - accompanied by concentrated TV and print ads.
By the early 1980s, the 60's era of music, free love, youthful idealism, and friendship that had extended into the 70s was clearly over. By now, the hippies (a baby boomer generation) of the 60s had become a new crop of angst-ridden, suburban-dwelling yuppies. They could only nostalgically look back to the 60s and ask what had happened to their lives. Audiences clearly identified with and revered films such as The Big Chill (1983), by writer/director Lawrence Kasdan. It featured a catchy Motown soundtrack of hit songs (by The Temptations, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles) celebrated by successful, upwardly-mobile, thirty-something college grads from their days 15 years earlier at the University of Michigan, who gathered together for a weekend funeral-reunion in a summer vacation house in South Carolina. The many stars of the ensemble film - Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Mary Kay Place, Jo-Beth Williams, Meg Tilly and William Hurt reflected upon the good ol' days (and the promise of what might have been but hadn't materialized), smoked dope, cooked together and paired up for sex in unpredictable ways. The film's two taglines were highly appropriate: "In a cold world you need your friends to keep you warm," and "How much love, sex, fun and friendship can a person take?"
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Foundations of the Prolific Film Industry:
Films really blossomed in the 1920s, expanding upon the foundations of film from earlier years. Most US film production at the start of the decade occurred in or near Hollywood on the West Coast, although some films were still being made in New Jersey and in Astoria on Long Island (Paramount). By the mid-20s, movies were big business (with a capital investment totaling over $2 billion) with some theatres offering double features. By the end of the decade, there were 20 Hollywood studios, and the demand for films was greater than ever. Most people are unaware that the greatest output of feature films in the US occurred in the 1920s and 1930s (averaging about 800 film releases in a year) - nowadays, it is remarkable when production exceeds 500 films in a year.
Even the earliest films were organized into genres or types, with instantly-recognizable storylines, settings, costumes, and characters. The major genre emphasis was on swashbucklers, historical extravaganzas, and melodramas, although all kinds of films were being produced throughout the decade. Films varied from sexy melodramas and biblical epics by Cecil B. DeMille, to westerns (such as Cruze's The Covered Wagon (1923)), horror films, gangster/crime films, war films, the first feature documentary or non-fictional narrative film (Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922)), romances, mysteries, and comedies (from the silent comic masters Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd).
The Major Film Studios: The Big Five
1920-1930 was the decade between the end of the Great War and the Depression following the Stock Market Crash. Film theaters and studios were not initially affected in this decade by the Crash in late 1929. The basic patterns and foundations of the film industry (and its economic organization) were established in the 1920s. The studio system was essentially born with long-term contracts for stars, lavish production values, and increasingly rigid control of directors and stars by the studio's production chief and in-house publicity departments. After World War I and into the early 1920s, America was the leading producer of films in the world - using Thomas Ince's "factory system" of production, although the system did limit the creativity of many directors. Production was in the hands of the major studios (that really flourished after 1927 for almost 20 years), and the star system was burgeoning.
Originally, in the earliest years of the motion picture industry, production, distribution, and exhibition were separately controlled. When the industry rapidly grew, these functions became integrated under one directorship to maximize profits, something called vertical integration. There were eight major (and minor) studios (see below) that dominated the industry. They were the ones that had most successfully consolidated and integrated all aspects of a film's development. By 1929, the film-making firms that were to rule and monopolize Hollywood for the next half-century were the giants or the majors, sometimes dubbed The Big Five. They produced more than 90 percent of the fiction films in America and distributed their films both nationally and internationally. Each studio somewhat differentiated its products from other studios. See History of Film Studio Logos.
The Big-Five studios had vast studios with elaborate sets for film production. They owned their own film-exhibiting theatres (about 50% of the seating capacity in the US in mostly first-run houses in major cities), as well as production and distribution facilities. They distributed their films to this network of studio-owned, first-run theaters (or movie palaces), mostly in urban areas, which charged high ticket prices and drew huge audiences. They required blind or block bookings of films, whereby theatre owners were required to rent a block of films (often cheaply-made, less-desirable B-pictures) in order for the studio to agree to distribute the one prestige A-level picture that the theatre owner wanted to exhibit. This technique set the terms for a film's release and patterns of exhibition and guaranteed success for the studio's productions. [Monopolistic studio control lasted twenty years until the late 1940s, when a federal decree (in U.S. vs. Paramount) ordered the studios to divest their theatres, similar to the rulings against the MPPC - the Edison Trust.]
The Minor Film Studios: The Little Three
Three smaller, minor studios were dubbed The Little Three, because each of them lacked one of the three elements required in vertical integration - owning their own theaters:
"Poverty Row" Studios and Other Independents:
Other studios or independents also existed in a shabby area in Hollywood dubbed "Poverty Row" (Sunset Blvd. and Gower Street) where cheap, independent pictures were made with low budgets, stock footage, and second-tier actors. It was the site of Harry and Jack Cohn's new business, the C.B.C. Film Sales Company (later becoming Columbia Pictures). Many of the films of the independents were either horror films, westerns, science-fiction, or thrillers:
- Disney Studios - specializing in animation; Walt and Roy Disney originally opened their first studio in 1923 in Los Angeles in the back of the Holly-Vermont Realty office, and called it Disney Bros. Studio; in a few years, they opened a new facility in downtown LA; in the late 30s, they relocated to a 51-acre lot in Burbank, and changed their name to Walt Disney Productions
- the Monogram Picture Corporation - Rayart Pictures, which had taken over the old Selig Studio in Echo Park in 1924, became Monogram Pictures in 1930; it was founded by W. Ray Johnston to make mostly inexpensive Westerns and series (Charlie Chan, the Bowery Boys, etc.)
- Selznick International Pictures / David O. Selznick - it was formed in 1935 and headed up by David O. Selznick (previously the head of production at RKO), the son of independent film producer Lewis J. Selznick, the founder of Selznick Pictures
- Samuel Goldwyn Pictures - headed up by independent film producer Samuel L. Goldwyn
- Republic Pictures - founded in 1935 by the merger of smaller 'poverty row' studios: Consolidated Film Industries, Mascot, Monogram and Liberty, and headed by Herbert Yates of Consolidated
Extravagant Movie Palaces:
Grauman's Theatres:
- Million Dollar Theater (on S. Broadway in downtown Los Angeles),
The first movie palace in Los Angeles, opened in February, 1918 with 2,345 seats, and premiered the William S. Hart western film The Silent Man (1917) - Egyptian Theatre (on Hollywood Boulevard)
Opened in 1922 with 1,760 seats; it was the first major movie palace outside of downtown Los Angeles, and noted as having Hollywood's first movie premiere; its opening film was Robin Hood (1922) that starred Douglas Fairbanks; the theatre's creation was inspired by the discovery of King Tut's tomb that same year - Chinese Theater (on Hollywood Boulevard)
With 2,258 seats, opened in Hollywood in May, 1927 with the premiere of Cecil B. De Mille's King of Kings (1927)
Star Imprints at Grauman's:
Grauman, dubbed as "Hollywood's Master Showman," established the tradition of having Hollywood stars place their prints in cement in front of the theater to create an instant tourist attraction ever since. (Legend has it that during the theatre's construction, silent screen actress Norma Talmadge accidentally stepped into wet cement and inspired the tradition. Grauman immortalized his own footprints, and invited Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks to do the same.) Listed below are the first 10 stars, beginning in the spring of 1927, to imprint themselves (with handprints, footprints, or signatures) in the concrete of the Chinese Theatre's forecourt:
- Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Apr. 30, 1927
- Norma Talmadge, May 18, 1927
- Norma Shearer, Aug. 1, 1927
- Harold Lloyd, Nov. 21, 1927
- William S. Hart, Nov. 28, 1927
- Tom Mix and Tony (his horse), Dec. 12, 1927
- Colleen Moore, Dec 19, 1927
- Gloria Swanson, 1927 (specific date unknown)
- Constance Talmadge, 1927 (specific date unknown)
- Charlie Chaplin, Jan, 1928
Pickford and Fairbanks:
She was married to another great star, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. Their wedding in late March, 1920 was a major cultural event, although it was highly controversial since both of them had to divorce their spouses so they could marry each other. She was presented with a wedding gift - "Pickfair" [the first syllables of their last names], a twenty-two room palatial mansion (former hunting lodge) in the agricultural area of Beverly Hills - marking the start of the movement of stars to lavish homes in the suburbs of W. Hollywood and the making of Hollywood royalty. [The couple remained married from 1920-1935.] Strangely, Mary Pickford's downfall began after she bobbed her long curly hair, one of moviedom's first fashion trends, in 1928.
Another first occurred in 1926 - a Hollywood film premiere double-featured two films together: Fairbanks' The Black Pirate (1926) with early two-color Technicolor (and the superstar's most famous stunt of riding down a ship's sail on the point of a knife) and Mary Pickford's melodramatic film Sparrows (1926). Fairbanks scored again at the close of the decade with The Iron Mask (1929). The first and only film that co-featured both stars was a talkie version of The Taming of the Shrew (1929). Pickford's Coquette (1929), her first all-talking film, won her an Academy Award, but she retired prematurely four years later.
Other 1920s Box-Office Stars:
The top box-office stars in the 1920s included Harold Lloyd, Gloria Swanson, Tom Mix, Norma Talmadge, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Colleen Moore, Norma Shearer, John Barrymore, Greta Garbo, Lon Chaney, Sr., Clara Bow, and "Little Mary" Pickford.
Young screen actress, platinum blonde starlet Jean Harlow was also 'discovered' and soon contracted with aviation millionaire/movie mogul Howard Hughes to replace the female lead in his soon-to-be-released, re-made sound version of Hell's Angels (1930), another exciting WWI film about British flying aces.
Janet Gaynor:
Janet Gaynor was also honored in the same year with an Academy Award for her exquisite acting in German director F. W. Murnau's first American film - the beautiful Fox-produced Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), often considered the finest silent film ever made by a Hollywood studio. Murnau's succeeding films were The Four Devils (1928) and Our Daily Bread (1930), with his last film the sensual semi-travelogue documentary Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931) shot with documentarist Robert Flaherty. (A week before Tabu's premiere in early March 1931, Murnau died in a car accident.)
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Rudolph Valentino (1895-1926):
In 1926, his death came at the untimely age of 31, due to a perforated ulcer and peritonitis. Crowds in New York, mostly female mourners, verged on mass hysteria as they tried to view his body. [One of Valentino's legacies was that a brand of popular condoms was named after his role in one of his most famous films.] Native-born director Clarence Brown, who had directed Valentino in The Eagle (1925) also directed imported actress Greta Garbo in Flesh and the Devil (1927), Woman of Affairs (1928), and turn-of-the-decade Anna Christie (1930).
German Expressionism and Its Influence:
Expressionism was marked by stylization, dark shadows and dramatic chiaroscuro lighting, visual story-telling, grotesque characters, distorted or slanted angular shots (of streets, buildings, etc.) and abstract sets. Leading directors utilizing these new unconventional, atmospheric and surrealistic dramatic styles included G.W. Pabst (known later for directing American actress Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box (1929)), Paul Leni (who directed the 'old dark house' film The Cat and the Canary (1927) and Universal's The Man Who Laughs (1928) with Conrad Veidt), F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang.
In the early 1920s, three nightmarish, German expressionistic films were to have a strong and significant influence on the coming development of U.S. films in the 30s-40s - notably the horror film cycle of Universal Studios in the 30s, and the advent of film noir in the 1940s:
- Robert Wiene's surrealistic fantasy/horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919-20, Germ.) (aka Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari) starring Conrad Veidt - the earliest and most influential of German Expressionistic cinema
- F. W. Murnau's classic vampire film (the first of its kind) with actor Max Schreck - an adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula novel titled Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horrors (1922, Germ.) (aka Nosferatu, Symphonie des Grauens)
- Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922, Germ.) (aka Doktor Mabuse der Spieler) introduced the director's evil genius character
- -- Lang's Metropolis (1927, Germ.) has generally been considered the last of the classic German Expressionistic films
Imports From Abroad:
Destined to encourage the viewing of foreign-language films, English subtitles were put on the German musical Two Hearts in Waltz Time (1930) (aka Zwei Herzen im Dreiviertel-Takt) by Herman Weinberg. It was the first film to be subtitled for release in the United States.
Director Ernst Lubitsch's first American comedy The Marriage Circle (1924) about marital infidelity in Vienna, was later remade as the musical One Hour With You (1932). With his classic, sophisticated "touch," Lubitsch boldly confronted the pre-Hays code of censorship with So This Is Paris (1926).
Later in Germany, Fritz Lang's last major silent film was the futuristic drama Metropolis (1927) - the expensive film enriched cinema in years to come with its innovative techniques, futuristic sets and Expressionistic production design, and allegorical study of the class system. Murnau's notable silent film weepie classic The Last Laugh (1924) told its entire story about a proud but demoted hotel doorman (Emil Jannings) through visualization, innovative camera movements (with only one inter-title), stylized mis-en-scene, a subjective point-of-view, and optical effects. Both Lang's Metropolis and Murnau's The Last Laugh were filmed by the pioneering German cameraman Karl Freund.
Murnau also filmed Moliere's 17th century satire Tartuffe (1925) as a movie within a movie, and Goethe's tragedy Faust (1926) with stunning chiaroscuro, images of medieval castles, huge mountains and Faust (Gosta Ekman) flying with Mephisto (Emil Jannings). Faust was the film that gave Murnau a contract with Hollywood's Fox Studios. The dark films of Josef von Sternberg in the late 1920s ushered in the gangster film: Underworld (1927), The Drag Net (1929), and The Docks of New York (1929).
Austrian-born director Erich von Stroheim's style was more harsh and European than the works of other imported directors. He had begun as an assistant director to D. W. Griffith. His specialty was the melodramatic portrayal of a decadent Europe with audacious scenes of sexuality. His brooding and expensive Foolish Wives (1922) was the longest commercially-made American film to be released uncut at 6 hours and 24 minutes in Latin America, but it was severely edited to a 10-reel version for general release. Von Stroheim's admired nine-hour, 42-reel silent masterpiece Greed (1924) (a detailed adaptation of Frank Norris' novel McTeague) was screened only once in its original form for newly-formed MGM executives including Irving Thalberg, and then severely cut down to its current length of 133 minutes (about 10 reels). Reportedly, the 32 reels of edited negatives were melted down by MGM to extract the valuable silver nitrate from the film stock. The same difficulties of extravagant over-spending and interminable length also plagued his film The Wedding March (1928).
And at the end of the decade, the influential and creative film The Man with the Movie Camera (1929, Soviet Union) from experimental cameraman/director Dziga Vertov, employed some of the first uses of the split screen, montage editing, and rapidly-filmed scenes in its view of Moscow.
Comedy Flourished: Arbuckle, Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and More
It was a great era for light-hearted silent comedy, with the triumvirate of humorists: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, and the early popularity of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle until a scandal destroyed his career in 1921.
In 1917, Arbuckle formed his own production company ("Comique Film Corporation") with producer Joseph Schenck which afforded more creative control, hiring Buster Keaton to star in his first film The Butcher Boy (1917). He used his 'fatness' as part of his sight gags, and his slightly-vulgar but sweet and playful character became extremely popular with younger audiences. By 1919, he had secured at $3 million/3-year contract with Paramount Pictures to star in 18 silent films - the first multi-year, multi-million dollar deal for a Hollywood studio. It has been little mentioned that Arbuckle mentored and aided Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin as they entered the film business, before his own downfall in the early 1920s.
Chaplin also appeared in The Pilgrim (1923) - in which he mimed the David and Goliath story, and in the classic The Gold Rush (1925), a story with pathos and wild comedy about a Lone Prospector in Alaska. Chaplin was presented with a special Academy Award "for versatility and genius in writing, acting, directing, and producing" for The Circus (1928). Chaplin's comedies were matched by the acrobatics and dare-devil antics of silent comic Harold Lloyd, who appeared as a gallant, 'never-say-die' All-American "Boy" (with glasses) in Safety Last (1923) - famous for his harrowing climb up the side of a tall building, Girl Shy (1924), The Freshman (1925), and The Kid Brother (1927).
Baby-faced Harry Langdon's best feature film in a short four-year film career, The Strong Man (1926), was director Frank Capra's feature-film debut. The film predated Chaplin's City Lights (1931) by several years with its plot of a meek man in love with a blind woman. Langdon also starred in two other hits: Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926) and Capra's Long Pants (1927) that would place him the same league as his three other comic contemporaries: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy appeared in their first film as a slapstick comedy team - a Hal Roach studio comedy Duck Soup (1927), and then performed in director Clyde Bruckman's Putting Pants on Philip (1927). The Marx Brothers debuted in their first film together in 1929, The Cocoanuts (1929).
And bulbous-nosed master comic W. C. Fields first juggled in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway in New York City from 1915-1921. In the mid-20s, he moved to Hollywood and wrote, directed, and starred in films. His first film was the one-reel Pool Sharks (1915). After appearing in the Broadway musical Poppy, he starred in D.W. Griffith's screen version of the circus film, renamed Sally of the Sawdust (1925). (It was later remade as Poppy (1936), with Fields in the same role.)
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Griffith, Vidor, and Gish:
[After being declared an historic landmark in 1973, it was rebuilt in the late 70s by funds established by singer/cowboy Gene Autry, rocker Alice Cooper, and Playboy head Hugh Hefner.]
The largest grossing silent film up to its time was King Vidor's WWI tale - an epic, anti-war film and romance story from MGM The Big Parade (1925), starring matinee idol John Gilbert. Vidor's enduring classic silent film of Everyman, The Crowd (1928), a realistic "slice-of-life" tale of a faceless, underpaid, hard-working clerk who never seemed to get ahead in the big city of New York during the Jazz Age, was under-appreciated at the time of its release. Lillian Gish collaborated with Swedish director Victor Seastrom for two films: Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic The Scarlet Letter (1926) and The Wind (1928), one of the last great silent films.
Expensive Epics and Cecil B. DeMille:
- Rex Ingram's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) (that launched Valentino's career as a star)
- master showman Cecil B. DeMille's Joan the Woman (1916), The Ten Commandments (1923) and The King of Kings (1927)
- the expensive spectacle of MGM's and Fred Niblo's colossal Ben-Hur (1926)
All of these lavish and grand films foreshadowed their epic remakes during the mid-fifties and early sixties and in later years. The silent era Ben-Hur (1925) was the greatest and most legendary spectacular of its kind, budgeted at a record $3.9 million - the most expensive silent film ever (it made $9 million at the box-office) and the most expensive film made in the 1920s. Hollywood experimented with an early form of Technicolor for some color sequences in DeMille's big-budget, $1 million epic The Ten Commandments (1923) and also in Ben-Hur (1925).
Always noted as a showman, Cecil B. DeMille's name was forever associated with extravagant production values and biblical spectacles (with rich doses of orgies and bathing scenes) that he first filmed in the 1920s. He also adapted to the times with patriotic war-time films, such as Till I Come Back to You (1918), sophisticated romantic comedies such as Old Wives For New (1918) and the racy romantic farce Don't Change Your Husband (1919) with Gloria Swanson, and sexy melodramas such as the risque The Affairs of Anatol (1921).
Westerns and Prototypes of Other Genres:
The prototype standard for later spooky, haunted "old dark house" mysteries was The Cat and the Canary (1927), a film re-made numerous times in future years. And one of the first in the gangster film genre was Josef von Sternberg's Prohibition-era Underworld (1927). Famous American movie dog, German shepherd Rin Tin Tin starred in over 20 films during the 20s silent era, including Warners' Rinty of the Desert (1928) and the transitional talkie-film Frozen River (1929). Detective Charlie Chan's introduction (as portrayed by Japanese actor George Kuwa) was in the 10-part serial House Without a Key (1926).
The Birth of the Talkies:
By the late 1920s, the art of silent film had become remarkably mature. Although called silents, they were never really silent but accompanied by sound organs, gramophone discs, musicians, sound effects specialists, live actors who delivered dialogue, and even full-scale orchestras. There would be two competing sound or recording systems developed during the early 'talkie' period: sound-on-disc, and sound-on-film.
In 1925-26, America technologically revolutionized the entire industry, with the formation of the Vitaphone Company (a subsidiary created by Warner Bros. and Western Electric). Warner Bros. launched sound and talking pictures, with Bell Telephone Laboratory researchers, by developing a revolutionary synchronized sound system called Vitaphone (a short-lived sound-on-disc process developed in 1925 that quickly became obsolete by 1931). This process allowed sound to be recorded on a phonograph record that was electronically linked and synchronized with the film projector - but it was destined to be faulty due to inherent synchronization problems. Originally, Warner Bros. intended to use the system to record only music and sound effects - not dialogue. The process was first used for short one- and two-reel films, mostly comedies and vaudeville acts.
Most of the studios started to convert from silent to sound film production - a tremendous capital investment. Thousands of existing theaters had to be rewired for sound at great expense. In the mid 1920s, Warners invested over $3 million in outfitting its 'picture palaces' to show Vitaphone films, and went into debt because of it.
In 1926, William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation responded to Warners' success with its own similar and competing, advanced Movietone system - the first commercially successful sound-on-film process developed in conjunction with General Electric. It added a 'soundtrack' directly onto the strip of film and would eventually become the predominant sound technology. [This system would soon replace the inflexible Vitaphone system because it was easier to synchronize the sound.]
The first feature film released using the new Fox Movietone system was Sunrise (1927), directed by F. W. Murnau -- the first professionally-produced feature film with an actual soundtrack. Fox's Movietone system was also premiered in early 1927 with the showing of director Raoul Walsh's 12-reel comedy-drama war film What Price Glory? (1926) (originally released in November, 1926, and then re-released in January, 1927 with synchronized music and sound effects). They also released a Fox-Movietone News newsreel of the Lindbergh takeoff on May 20, 1927 from New York for his flight across the Atlantic toward Paris - the first sound news film. The first talking picture made in Hollywood was a Fox-Movietone 5-minute short titled They're Coming to Get Me (1927).
The Jazz Singer: The World's First 'Talkie'
The sound era was officially inaugurated when audiences saw Russian-born American vaudeville star Al Jolson, and first heard him improvise a song's introduction: "Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You ain't heard nothin' yet," after the film's first musical interlude - a song called Dirty Hands, Dirty Face. Jolson proved his boast by continuing to sing Toot, Toot, Tootsie. They were further astonished by his talking to his mother (Eugenie Besserer) in an extemporaneous way after singing Blue Skies, and the film's final song Mammy. Jolson was chosen for the role (after it was turned down by Eddie Cantor) since he had already performed three songs in Warners' experimental short film April Showers (1926), and because he was, in real-life, a cantor's son who had first sung in a synagogue as a child.
The other major film studios (Paramount, Loew's, First National and UA) realized the expensive and challenging ramifications of the sound revolution that was dawning, and that talkie films would be the wave of the future. In May 1928, to avoid an inevitable patent war, they signed an agreement with Western Electric to analyze the competing sound systems within the next year and jointly choose a single, standardized sound system.
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The Golden Age of Hollywood: From 1930 to 1948
- young 'platinum blonde' star Jean Harlow appeared in her first major role in Howard Hughes' World War I aviation epic, Hell's Angels (1930); the "Blonde Bombshell" was signed by MGM in 1932 and soon became a major star
- enigmatic silent star Greta Garbo (originally named Greta Lovisa Gustafsson), part of MGM's galaxy of stars and nicknamed "The Divine Garbo" and "The Swedish sphinx," spoke her first immortal, husky, Swedish-accented words in director Clarence Brown's MGM film Anna Christie (1930). (As a floozy, she spoke: "Gimme a vhiskey, ginger ale on the side. And don't be stingy, baby") - it was Garbo's first talkie (advertised as "GARBO TALKS!")
- the first of Hollywood's dramatic prison dramas (a new subgenre) was produced by MGM, The Big House (1930), directed by George Hill
- B-actor John Wayne made his debut in his first major role in a western directed by Raoul Walsh, The Big Trail (1930) - one of the first films shot in Grandeur, Fox's experimental wide-screen 70mm format. Both the film and the new process flopped; it would be nine more years before his star-making appearance in Stagecoach (1939)
- Broadway actress Helen Hayes made her screen debut in The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931) and won the Best Actress Academy Award for her first talkie
- MGM stars Clark Gable and Joan Crawford starred together in the risque pre-Code film Dance, Fools, Dance (1931), the first of eight features that teamed them together
- the best-known Charlie Chan actor, Warner Oland, played the detective for the first time in Charlie Chan Carries On (1931)
- RKO won its sole Best Picture Academy Award for the western Cimarron (1931)
- in 1930, the Motion Picture Production Code, administered by Joseph I. Breen (and former Postmaster General Will Hays) set film guidelines regarding sex, violence, religion, and crime (not yet strictly enforced until the Production Code Administration (1934))
- the first daily newspaper for the film industry had its debut in 1930, The Hollywood Reporter
- Katharine Hepburn made her screen debut in A Bill of Divorcement (1932)
- Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller made his screen debut as the vine-swinging ape-man in Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932)
- Curly-topped, dimpled child star Shirley Temple appeared in her first films, an Our Gang type series of shorts titled Baby Burlesks (1933)
- the first appearance of the cartoon character Popeye was in the Betty Boop cartoon from Paramount and Max Fleischer, Popeye the Sailor (1933)
- the world's first drive-in theatre opened in Camden, N.J. in June, 1933; the fourth drive-in was located on Pico in Los Angeles, CA and opened in September, 1934
- the first Three Stooges comedy film (the first of their 190 slapstick comedy films that lasted through 1959) with Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Curly Howard, was released by Columbia, the short Woman Haters (1934) (with all the dialogue in rhyme)
- Walt Disney's 8-minute The Wise Little Hen (1934) featured the first appearance of Donald Duck
- the longest Hollywood talkie released up to that time, MGM's The Great Ziegfeld (1936), at 2 hours, 59 minutes
- MGM star Spencer Tracy won consecutive Best Actor Oscars in the late 30s for his appearances in Captains Courageous (1937) and Boys Town (1938) - this wouldn't happen again until Tom Hanks won back-to-back Oscars in the 90s for Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994)
Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich:
Dietrich would soon go on to star in many other films - usually with characters that were variations on Lola - jaded femme fatales. Dietrich was 'discovered' and appeared in her first Hollywood feature film, Morocco (1930), again as a nightclub singer with co-star Gary Cooper as a French legionnaire. Dietrich was subsequently promoted by Paramount Studios as a 'continental' German rival to MGM's imported star Greta Garbo. A few years later, Dietrich collaborated further with von Sternberg in Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932) (with Dietrich as a demure wife who is transformed into a cabaret star), The Scarlet Empress (1934) (with Dietrich as Russia's Catherine the Great), and in The Devil is a Woman (1935) (as a money-hungry, seductive vamp). Dietrich and von Sternberg made a total of seven films together. By 1946, von Sternberg was the uncredited assistant to director King Vidor for Duel in the Sun (1946).
The Sound Era's Coming-of-Age:
Rouben Mamoulian, a successful Broadway director, refused to keep the cumbersome sound cameras pinned to the studio floor, and demonstrated a graceful, rhythmic, fluid, choreographed flowing style in his films - first with his directorial debut 1929 film Applause (1929) (and later with Love Me Tonight (1932)), one of the first great American musicals starring legendary Roaring 20s torch singer Helen Morgan in her first film role. Applause also introduced a revolutionary sound technique: a double-channel soundtrack with overlapping dialogue.
Mastery of techniques for the sound era were also demonstrated in the works of director Ernst Lubitsch, who advanced the action of his films with the integrated musical numbers. The first filmic musical was Lubitsch's first talkie, the witty and bubbly The Love Parade (1929/30) with Jeanette MacDonald (in her debut film) and Maurice Chevalier (in his second picture) - the recipient of six Academy Awards nominations (including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor). After directing three more musical comedies in the next three years, including Best Picture-nominated One Hour with You (1931/32) with the same leads, Lubitsch filmed his last musical, The Merry Widow (1934) with equally naturalistic musical expressions and the winner of the Best Art Direction Academy Award.
After 1932, the development of sound-mixing freed films from the limitations of recording on sets and locations. Scripts from writers were becoming more advanced with witty dialogue, realistic characters and plots. Hecht adapted Noel Coward's work for Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933), starring Gary Cooper, Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins, and Dudley Nichols adapted Maxwell Anderson's play for director John Ford's screen version Mary of Scotland (1936).
Two-Color and Three-Color (Full-Color) Technicolor Development:
The first film (a short) in three-color Technicolor was Walt Disney's animated talkie Flowers and Trees (1932) in the Silly Symphony series. [However, others claim that the first-ever color cartoon was Ted Eschbaugh's bizarre Goofy Goat Antics (1931).] In the next year, Disney also released the colorful animation - The Three Little Pigs (1933). Its optimistic hit theme song: "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" (based upon the tune of Happy Birthday) became a Depression-era anthem. It was one of the earliest films displaying 'personality animation' - each of the three pigs had a distinctive personality.
In 1934, the first full-color, live-action short was released - La Cucaracha (1934).
In the late 30s, two beloved films, The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone with the Wind (1939), were expensively produced with Technicolor - what would the Wizard of Oz (with ruby slippers and a yellow brick road) be without color? And the trend would continue into the next decade in classic MGM musicals such as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Easter Parade (1948). Special-effects processes were advanced by the late 1930s, making it possible for many more films to be shot on sets rather than on-location (e.g., The Hurricane (1937) and Captains Courageous (1937).) In 1937, the Disney-produced Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was the first feature-length animated film - a milestone. The colorful Grimm fairy tale was premiered by Walt Disney Studios - becoming fast known for pioneering sophisticated animation.
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The Domination of the Studio System:
- 20th Century Fox (formed in 1935 from the merger of Twentieth Century Pictures, founded by Joseph Schenk, and the Fox Film Corporation)
- MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) (led by Louis B. Mayer)
- Paramount
- Warner Bros.
- RKO Radio
Three other minor studios were close behind:
- Columbia (headed by Harry Cohn from 1932)
- Universal
- United Artists
Republic Pictures (founded in 1935) and Monogram were relegated to B-picture status, and Disney was a specialized studio for animation. [The stylized logos of some of the studios have remained similar over many decades: Warners (shield), Universal (globe), and Fox (searchlights).]
MGM's Studio Dominance in the 30s:
By 1934, MGM had over 60 big-name actors under contract. MGM had the largest 'stable' of stars of all the studios, including: Joan Crawford (originally a shopgirl named Lucille Le Sueur), Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, William Powell, Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Jean Harlow, Robert Montgomery, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, the Barrymores, and Spencer Tracy.
One of its greatest early hits was the star-driven, profitable Best Film-winning Grand Hotel (1932), set in an opulent hotel in Berlin with extravagant art direction by Cedric Gibbons. The characters in the popular melodrama included the following highly-paid contract actors: Swedish star Greta Garbo as a ballet dancer, John Barrymore as a jewel thief, Joan Crawford as a young stenographer, Wallace Beery as a tyrannical, braggart businessman, and Lionel Barrymore as a terminally-ill bookkeeper. It also thrived with its Tarzan series of adventure/jungle films, Tom and Jerry cartoons, Gone With the Wind (1939), and The Wizard of Oz (1939).
Other Major Studios:
20th Century Fox was known for its musicals (especially in the 40s with Betty Grable), and prestige biographies (such as Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)). Fox Studios also capitalized on its association with Shirley Temple after the mid-30s - singlehandedly, she made over $20 million for Fox in the late 30s.
Universal prospered with noted director Tod Browning, westerns, W.C. Fields and Abbott and Costello comedies, the Flash Gordon serials, and its archetypal, low budget horror films such as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931) and The Wolf Man (1941).
Warner Bros. was male-dominated and fast-moving, and noted for gritty, cutting-edge, realistic films or biopics, war films, Westerns, and socially-conscious, documentary-style films. The studio also churned out Golddiggers musicals almost every year (beginning in 1929) in the decade, and in the 40s - Bugs Bunny and other cartoons. In the early 30s, Warners also inaugurated the crime-gangster film, with its Little Caesar (1930), The Public Enemy (1931), Scarface (1932), and The Roaring Twenties (1939). The studio thrived with director Michael Curtiz, and famous "tough guy" stars including: James Cagney, Paul Muni, Humphrey Bogart, and Edward G. Robinson. Its female stars were equally forbidding, and included Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Lauren Bacall, and Ida Lupino.
The Biggest 30s Stars:
Films were made with specific stars in mind who often played familiar character types, including the decade's biggest stars: Clark Gable, Paul Muni, Janet Gaynor, Eddie Cantor, Wallace Beery, Mae West, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Astaire and Rogers, Claudette Colbert, Dick Powell, W. C. Fields, Joan Crawford, Marie Dressler, James Cagney, Bing Crosby, Jeanette MacDonald, Barbara Stanwyck, Johnny Weismuller, Gary Cooper, Norma Shearer, Robert Taylor, Myrna Loy, Tyrone Power, Alice Faye, Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Veronica Lake, and Katharine Hepburn. Many audiences enjoyed the juvenile company of Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland, and Mickey Rooney. There were also a number of British stars in the decade, including Ronald Colman, Basil Rathbone (the Sherlock Holmes of the screen), Charles Laughton (an Oscar-winner in 1933 as King Henry VIII), C. Aubrey-Smith, and Leslie Howard.
The Greatest Directors of the Era:
Producer Samuel Goldwyn's most fruitful collaboration was with director William Wyler. Examples of their "quality cinema" and stylish melodramas include: Dodsworth (1936), These Three (1936), Dead End (1937) (that introduced the Dead End Kids), and Wuthering Heights (1939) (and The Little Foxes (1941) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) in the next decade).
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Early Gangster Films at Warners:
Always an early adopter, Warners launched the gangster genre with Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar (1930) - a star-making role for Edward G. Robinson as snarling, fast-talking mobster Caesar Enrico Bandello who met his inevitable fate with the words, "Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?" William Wellman's The Public Enemy (1931) starred a swaggering, cocky urban gangster portrayed by James Cagney (in his first film after a stint as a song-and-dance man in vaudeville) - in a film most-remembered for the scene in which the hoodlum abusively stuffed a grapefruit half into Mae Clarke's face, and the scene of Cagney's death at his mother's door.
Universal's Horror Films:
The studio had its greatest success with its cycle of classic horror films. Actually, the horror film releases were the first modern horror movies (a resurrected genre), beginning with Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) (expressionistically filmed by Karl Freund). The film starred Bela Lugosi in a star-making role as the vampire Count Dracula, a creation of Irish writer Bram Stoker in his 1897 novel Dracula. [Dracula would become the most frequently-portrayed character in horror films.]
The first of eight films to co-star Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff was the surrealistic The Black Cat (1934). James Whale was coerced into making more horror films for Universal, including The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and then in 1935, the now-talking MONSTER was presented with a Bride Monster (but she screeched her rejection of a Mate) in director Whale's superior horror-comedy sequel Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
Clark Gable - Example of a Mega-Star:
Tragically, Gable appeared in only one film - No Man of Her Own (1932) - with his own wife Carole Lombard (she died in an airplane crash in early 1942). Among the films that increased Clark Gable's popular pre-eminence in films was director Frank Capra's hit It Happened One Night (1934) (in which his removal of a shirt revealed his bare chest and the absence of an undershirt - setting the US underwear industry into a tailspin). In a strange twist of fate, Gable had been loaned out to Columbia to make It Happened One Night (1934) and ended up winning his first (and only) Best Actor award with the rival studio.
Other films that propelled Gable further into stardom, upon his return to MGM, were Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), The Call of the Wild (1935), one of MGM's most successful films and one of the earliest 'disaster' films - San Francisco (1936) (known for its spectacular 20-minute earthquake sequence), Test Pilot (1938), and of course, Gone with the Wind (1939) with Gable's most famous leading role as roguish Rhett Butler in Margaret Mitchell's best-selling story.
The Effects of the Depression on the Film Industry:
During most of the Depression Era, Hollywood responded with expensive, mass-produced entertainment or escapist entertainment. The best example of an all-star production heavily bankrolled by the studios was MGM's Best Picture-winning Grand Hotel (1932), with "Garbo" (speaking her oft-quoted line: "I want to be alone"), John Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, and Lionel Barrymore. The film set a pattern for future films, telling stories about the lives and destinies of several individuals - including a vivacious office stenographer, a brusk unethical businessman, a ballerina dancer, a gentleman jewel-thief, and a lowly terminally-ill bookkeeper - that were woven together into a whole.
The Decline - and Resurgence of Musicals: The Emergence of Busby Berkeley
By 1932, Hollywood studios had glutted the public's tired appetite and their overexposed song-and-dance epics (often sacrificing plot and character development) went into a commercial decline, coinciding with the height of the Great Depression. Audiences bypassed many of the musical films that were being cranked out, and preferred to watch other genre creations, such as the early gangster films: Public Enemy (1931) and Little Caesar (1930), the comedy film Min and Bill (1930), or the Best Picture-winning western film Cimarron (1931). The novelty of sound had worn off and the popularity of musicals suffered.
The first of Berkeley's choreographed-directed musicals for Warner Bros. was Lloyd Bacon's backstage show 42nd Street (1933). The successful musical inspired the Gold Diggers series of films with more of Berkeley's trademark choreographing: Mervyn LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) (that included "We're in the Money" with coin-clad chorus girls, "The Shadow Waltz" with swirling chorines playing neon violins, and the moving, anti-Depression number "Remember My Forgotten Man"), Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935) (famous for Berkeley's "Lullaby of Broadway"), and In Caliente (1935).
The first of three film versions of A Star is Born (1937) was the non-musical one in the late 30s - it starred Janet Gaynor and Fredric March in the poignant, weeper/melodrama. [The best of all three versions was the musical re-make A Star is Born (1954) starring Judy Garland and James Mason.]
The romantic pairing of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in the first of their eight films together began in 1935 with their performances in Naughty Marietta (1935).
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Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: The Dance Duo
The best dance/musicals of RKO's famed dance team for RKO in the 1930s (of their 9 films for RKO) included:
- Top Hat (1935) (featuring the music of Irving Berlin)
- George Stevens' Swing Time (1936) (featuring the music of Jerome Kern, "Never Gonna Dance," "The Way You Look Tonight," "A Fine Romance," "Pick Yourself Up," and Astaire's only film/dance number performed in blackface as a tribute to black dancer Bill Robinson: "Bojangles of Harlem")
- Follow the Fleet (1936), with their serious dance number, "Let's Face the Music and Dance"
- Shall We Dance? (1937) (featuring the music of George Gershwin)
Astaire and Rogers collaborated together in ten films during their immortal dance era.
Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis:
In 1938, Bette Davis again demonstrated her star status with her portrayal of a selfish Southern belle in William Wyler's Jezebel (1938), a role she was given (again as consolation) after failing to win the coveted role of Scarlett O'Hara in the following year's epic, Gone With The Wind. For Davis' performance, she won her second Best Actress Award. In the following year, she starred in two of her best-known roles: in Dark Victory (1939), and The Private Lives of Elizabeth & Essex (1939). One of the most famous weepers of all time, King Vidor's Stella Dallas (1937) starred Barbara Stanwyck as the sacrificial-mother figure.
Comedian-director Charlie Chaplin survived the arrival of sound by deliberately remaining silent in his two comedy films in the 30s. [He did not perform in a film with a speaking role until the 1940s.] One of his finest films as The Tramp, City Lights (1931) featured a soundtrack and sound effects, but its dialogue was provided by title cards. Chaplin, again as the pantomiming Little Tramp with co-star Paulette Goddard, satirized the dehumanizing industrial society in his still-silent production of Modern Times (1936) - considered the last great silent film. It had synchronized sounds (various noises) and included a nonsense song that Chaplin actually sang with gibberish. The masterful film symbolized how technology, mass production, and machinery could literally suck victims into its gears. Other silent film comedians, such as Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd did not survive into the 30s.
Other 30s Comedians:
Mae West
W. C. Fields
Silent film star and vaudeville comedian W. C. Fields often portrayed an iconoclastic, hen-pecked, put-upon, middle-aged husband, who would imbibe to escape from his troubles. His opponents includes wives, girlfriends, children, bankers, and various minority groups. He starred in two of his greatest films in this decade, both low-budget films:
The Marx Brothers
Laurel and Hardy
The popular comedic pair Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy first appeared together in the two-reel comedy short A Lucky Dog (1922), filmed in 1917, although they were not the typical Laurel and Hardy pair - yet. Under contract to Hal Roach, they made their feature film debut as prisoners in the 56 minute comedy Pardon Us (1931). They also starred in the Oscar-winning short subject The Music Box (1932). Their best film is often considered to be Sons of the Desert (1933) in which they starred as loyal lodge members and hen-pecked husbands who fail to deceive their wives. Among their many films, they also portrayed two sets of twins in the comedy of errors Our Relations (1936), and starred in a delightful slapstick western Way Out West (1937).
The Popular Thin Man Series:
- The Thin Man (1934), d. W.S. Van Dyke - with four Academy Award nominations (no wins)
- After the Thin Man (1936), d. W.S. Van Dyke - a Best Picture nominee (the first sequel nominated for Best Picture)
- Another Thin Man (1939), d. W.S. Van Dyke
- Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), d. W.S. Van Dyke
- The Thin Man Goes Home (1945), d. Richard Thorpe
- The Song of the Thin Man (1947), d. Edward Buzzel
The Sherlock Holmes Series: Beginning Late in the Decade
Fox Studios was responsible for launching the classic Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes mystery series, popularized in the 1940s by Universal Studios with almost a dozen further installments. The first of fourteen appearances, pairing Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, was in Fox's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and soon after in Fox's follow-up The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939).
Screwball Comedy: (See the comedy film genre)
The best screwball comedies (madcap farces), with their typical frenetic pace, physical slapstick humor, and quick one-liners, included four films from Howard Hawks:
- Twentieth Century (1934), adapted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur from their Broadway play hit, with stars John Barrymore and Carole Lombard
- the very funny battle-of-the-sexes Bringing Up Baby (1938)
- His Girl Friday (1940), with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, another comedic remake of The Front Page (1931)
- I Was a Male War Bride (1949), with Cary Grant in hapless pursuit of an Army Lieutenant (Ann Sheridan)
The best performers in the screwball comedy genre were: Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne, Melvyn Douglas, and Cary Grant.
Other examples of great screwball films include Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933), Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey (1936), Richard Boleslawski's Theodora Goes Wild (1936) (Irene Dunne's first starring comedy), William Wellman's Nothing Sacred (1937), Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937) with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, and George Cukor's Holiday (1938).
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Young Stars:
Young star Mickey Rooney appeared only in the supporting cast as a character in the first film featuring the 'Hardy Family' of Carvel (a small, idealized American town) - A Family Affair (1937). The Hardy Family household was led by Judge Hardy played by Lionel Barrymore. After two more films, You're Only Young Once (1937) and Judge Hardy's Children (1937), Rooney's character was spring-boarded to leading man status in the first of the long-running Andy Hardy film series for MGM, beginning with Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938). It was the first of the Hardy films to have Andy's name in the title, and it was the fourth of sixteen films stretching over more than two decades (until 1958) that now starred Mickey Rooney (as a well-to-do teen who would often get into trouble). As the major star of the series, Rooney had various young teenage co-stars including Lana Turner and Judy Garland.
The same year, Rooney (as a reformed juvenile delinquent) co-starred with Spencer Tracy (as a kindly priest) in the classic MGM drama, Boys' Town (1938). In 1938, Rooney won one of two Oscars given that year to young stars, the other going to Deanna Durbin.
The Dead End Kids:
In contrast to the cheerful and effervescent antics of well-to-do teen Andy Hardy (Mickey Rooney) and co-star Judy Garland, the street punks (or juvenile delinquents) named the Dead End Kids (Gabriel Dell, Leo Gorcey, Billy Halop, Bobby Jordan, Huntz Hall, Bernard Punsley) were from the other side of the tracks - in NYC's urban tenements and waterfront slums, although they were actually professional actors. The scampish teens were known for their unruly wisecracking, and their toughness (with a soft heart). After their introduction in Dead End (1937), they also appeared in six full-length features for Warner Bros. from 1938-1939:
- William Wyler's and Goldwyn's Dead End (1937) - their first film, with Humphrey Bogart (who appeared in three of the Kids' films through 1938); Sidney Kingsley's caustic drama about young hoodlums was translated from the Broadway stage to the screen (with a screenplay by Lillian Hellman), with the stage cast of "Dead End" kids reprising their roles; nominated for four Academy Awards
- Warner Bros.' Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)- with James Cagney and Pat O'Brien as two slum boys who grew up and took very different directions in their lives
- Crime School (1938) - with the kids in a reform school run by a mean and sadistic superintendent
- The Angels Wash Their Faces (1939), with Ronald Reagan as a crusading DA
- They Made Me a Criminal (1939) - well-known choreographer/director Busby Berkeley's second film for MGM
- Hell's Kitchen (1939)
- On Dress Parade (1939) - the final entry in the long-running series
The Kids also made numerous movies for other studios, evolving into Monogram Pictures' The East Side Kids (in 21 pictures), Universal's Little Tough Guys (in 12 movies), and of course, their most famous role as The Bowery Boys (in 48 films).
Adventure Films, Epics, and Westerns:
Adventure films stirred audiences like Best Picture Award winner Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) (the first (and best) of three film versions), a commercially-successful film shot on location, brought a merciless Captain Bligh (Charles Laughton) into conflict with Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable), producing the popular catch-phrase: 'Mr. Christian - Come here!' The most expensive serial to date, Universal's Flash Gordon (1936), starring Buster Crabbe, premiered its first chapter in 1936.
The film, the first to be heavily promoted on the radio, starred Fay Wray as the love interest - an attractive object of the giant ape's desire, held in his clutching hands just before he met his spectacular death in a last stand on top of New York's Empire State Building. The classic, futuristic sci-fi film from British producer Alexander Korda's London Films - Things to Come (1936), envisioned the future from the perspective of the 1930s.
The western film genre was honored when the panoramic pioneering film Cimarron (1931) won the Best Picture Academy Award - the first and only Oscar RKO Studios ever received. By the late 1930s, Gene Autry became the cinema's most popular cowboy, after appearing and starring in his first B-western feature film, Republic Pictures' Tumbling Tumbleweeds (1935).
The Hays Production Code: The Hays Office
Backed by the Catholic church and their Catholic Legion of Decency (founded in 1934 by a council of Catholic American Bishops), and the Wall Street financiers who supported the studios, former Postmaster General Will Hays headed up Hollywood's self-regulatory Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) that was founded in 1922. It created the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) in 1927 (under the command of stringent Catholic Joseph Breen), issued a definitive Motion Picture Production Code in March, 1930, and created the Production Code Administration (PCA) (also headed by Breen) in 1934. The "Pre-Code" years refers to the five years before the Code took effect, between 1930 and mid 1934. When the code became official, Hollywood would operate under the constraint of a rigid set of mandates.
Regulations of the code included censorship of language, references to sex, violence, and morality. The conservative and repressive code required, among other things, no promiscuity, no venereal disease, no excessive violence or brutality, twin beds for married couples, no ridicule of ministers of religion, the prohibition of various words ("sex", "hell", and "damn"), and no clear depictions of rape, seduction, adultery or passionate, illicit sex. There was to be no "excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embracing, suggestive postures and gestures." Sinful activity (such as criminality or sex outside marriage) could often exist in a film IF it was punished or if it ended in misery.
All films would be submitted for a "seal of approval" - and if a film was unacceptable and denied a seal, it was not to be exhibited in theaters, and the studio would be fined $25,000. Many films were either suppressed, or severely mutilated or censored to fit the seal's requirements, but until 1934, restrictions on content were mostly evaded and ignored. In the early days of the Depression in the early 1930s, the desperate Hollywood studios used the open sexuality of platinum blonde Jean Harlow and the outrageous bawdiness of Mae West to increase their profits. The Hays Office and church leaders would soon interpret their screen behaviors as obscene and lacking in morals.
The Code Challenges Gangster Films:
Especially after Warners' early cycle of gritty crime and gangster films, including Little Caesar (1930), Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932), this distinctive genre of films was required to be cleaned up, to display social consciousness, to combat the depiction of the criminal as a folk hero, and to include platitudes that crime-does-not-pay. They were also supposed to show no details of how crimes were committed, and criminals were not allowed to be seen killing lawmen (including bank guards or detectives). The "classical" gangster film was forced to evolve into other genre variations including: "gangster-as-cop" films (typified by G-Men (1935)), and "Cain-and-Abel" sagas (such as Manhattan Melodrama (1934) and Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) in which swaggering gangster Rocky Sullivan (James Cagney), who was the 'bad guy' product of his environment, was executed in the final chilling scene for his crimes).
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Directors from Foreign Shores:
The first major non-American Oscar recognition was for Hungarian-born director-producer Alexander Korda's British-made costume drama entitled The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) - the ground-breaking biopic film received a Best Picture nomination and won the Best Actor award (for Charles Laughton). Consequently, the success helped to resurrect England's film industry and led to other Korda classics with his newly established London Films (an offshoot of UA Studios): The Four Feathers (1939), The Thief of Bagdad (1940), That Hamilton Woman (1941), and The Jungle Book (1942), but the director was unable to garner any further Best Picture Oscars.
Following the British success of the historical-biographical film The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), other studios (both in the UK and in Hollywood) followed suit with similar biopic films - treatments of historical characters in the mid to late 30s:
- Rouben Mamoulian's Queen Christina (1933)
- John Adolfi's Voltaire (1933)
- Paul Czinner's Catherine the Great (1934)
- Alexander Korda's Rembrandt (1936)
- Michael Curtiz' costume drama The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)
William Dieterle's Best Picture-winning The Life of Emile Zola (1937) and Best Actor-winning The Story of Louis Pasteur (1937), with Paul Muni's memorable performances in both character studies, initiated a series of engrossing screen biographies of famous scientists, doctors, and inventors into the late 30s and 40s.
Literary Works Made into Films:
- William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1932) with Myrna Loy
- Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1934) from director Victor Fleming with Wallace Beery as Long John Silver
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) with Basil Rathbone as the detective and Nigel Bruce as his assistant Dr. Watson
- Henry Hathaway's Peter Ibbetson (1935) based on George du Maurier fantasy-romance novel
- MGM's The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) about the romance between poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
- Tom Brown's School Days (1940) based on Thomas Hughes' classic novel about life in a Victorian boys school
- Shakespeare films (the famed Max Reinhardt version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), and MGM producer Irving Thalberg's and director George Cukor's Romeo and Juliet (1936) with aging Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer as the two star-crossed lovers)
- MGM's Best Actress-winning The Good Earth (1937) based on Pearl Buck's story
- The last of Thalberg's productions, two Dickens classics (Cukor's marvelous adaptation of David Copperfield (1935) and producer David O. Selznick's A Tale of Two Cities (1936))
- Producer Samuel Goldwyn's Wuthering Heights (1939) and Selznick's Gone with the Wind (1939) (see below)
- Four Rudyard Kipling-inspired stories (Wee Willie Winkie (1937) with Shirley Temple, Captains Courageous, George Stevens' action-adventure classic Gunga Din (1939) inspired by Rudyard Kipling, and director William Wellman's The Light That Failed (1939))
The Greatest Year for Films Ever: 1939
1939 boasted other great classic films of enduring quality: The Roaring Twenties (1939), Destry Rides Again (1939) - Marlene Dietrich's come-back film, Only Angels Have Wings (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Beau Geste (1939), the all-female The Women (1939), a re-make of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) with Charles Laughton, and The Old Maid (1939) with Bette Davis.
As a footnote to the decade, three of the best directors in the decade of the 1970s were born in the year 1939: Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, and Peter Bogdanovich.
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Hollywood During the War Years:
The early years of the 40s decade were not promising for the American film industry, especially following the late 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, and the resultant loss of foreign markets. However, Hollywood film production rebounded and reached its profitable peak of efficiency during the years 1943 to 1946 - a full decade and more after the rise of sound film production, now that the technical challenges of the early 30s sound era were far behind. Advances in film technology (sound recording, lighting, special effects, cinematography and use of color) meant that films were more watchable and 'modern'. Following the end of the war, Hollywood's most profitable year in the decade was 1946, with all-time highs recorded for theatre attendance.
The world was headed toward rearmament and warfare in the early to mid-1940s, and the movie industry, like every other aspect of life, responded to the national war effort by making movies, producing many war-time favorites, and having stars (and film industry employees) enlist or report for duty. The US government's Office of War Information (OWI), formed in 1942, served as an important propaganda agency during World War II, and coordinated its efforts with the film industry to record and photograph the nation's war-time activities. Tinseltown aided in the defensive mobilization, whether as combatants, propagandists, documentary, newsreel or short film-makers, educators, fund-raisers for relief funds or war bonds, entertainers, or morale-boosters. Films took on a more realistic rather than escapist tone, as they had done during the Depression years of the 30s.
The Quintessential 40s Film: Casablanca
War-Related Films Abound:
The 40s also offered escapist entertainment, reassurance, and patriotic themes, such as William Wyler's war-time film Mrs. Miniver (1942), starring Walter Pidgeon and Oscar-winning courageous heroine Greer Garson as husband and wife. It was a moving tribute and account of courageous war-besieged Britishers reliving the trauma of Dunkirk and coping with the war's dangers in a village. Alfred Hitchcock, who had recently migrated to the US, directed Foreign Correspondent (1940), ending it with a plea to the US to recognize the Nazi menace in Europe and end its isolationist stance.
William Wellman's The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) - immortalized WWII Pulitzer Prize-winning combat correspondent Ernie Pyle (Burgess Meredith) and his experiences with the men of Company C of the 18th Infantry and their role in the invasion of Italy, John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945) with star John Wayne in a story about the Pacific Ocean's PT boats, Delmer Daves' Destination Tokyo (1943), Zoltan Korda's exciting epic Sahara (1943) (with Humphrey Bogart as heroic desert tank driver Sgt. Gunn), and Lewis Milestone's intense, unglamorous war films of struggle, resistance, and occupation: Edge of Darkness (1943), The North Star (1943), The Purple Heart (1944) and the excellent A Walk in the Sun (1945).
British director Michael Powell and Oscar-winning scriptwriter Emeric Pressburger joined forces for the war drama 49th Parallel (1941), the war adventure One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1941), and the superb character study classic The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943). The Royal Navy (and Lord Mountbatten) was paid tribute in writer/co-director and star Noel Coward's WW II drama In Which We Serve (1942), co-directed with David Lean in his first directorial effort. It was the most celebrated and patriotic British war film of the era. Director Carol Reed's pseudo-war documentary The Way Ahead (1944) followed the training of soldiers to fight against Rommel's Afrika Korps.
After the war, William Wyler directed a provocative, dramatic Best Picture-winning film about the plight of three returning G.I. veterans (Dana Andrews, Fredric March, and Harold Russell) to the homefront. The multi-Oscar winning picture The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) was produced by Samuel Goldwyn and photographed by Gregg Toland. Non-professional, disabled veteran Harold Russell won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in the film. In two of the film's memorable scenes, Hoagy Carmichael taught double-amputee Russell to play Chopsticks on the piano, and Russell displayed his vulnerabilities to his fiancee (Cathy O'Donnell). Lightening up the wartime mood was Cary Grant who portrayed Captain Henri Rochard, a French soldier in Howard Hawks' gender-bending farcical comedy I Was a Male War Bride (1949), who was obliged to dress as a woman to marry an American female soldier (Ann Sheridan).
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Anti-Fascist Films:
Chaplin's next film was another departure from his Little Tramp character - Monsieur Verdoux (1947) (in which Chaplin directed, produced, wrote, scored, and starred). A satire about a woman-murdering Parisian bank cashier, it received a Best Original Screenplay nomination. It bombed at the box-office upon release due to anti-Communist hysteria directed at Chaplin and the film's banning - Chaplin pulled it out of circulation for many years.
German-born Ernst Lubitsch directed the anti-Nazi farce of a theatre couple outwitting the Nazis in To Be Or Not To Be (1942). It starred Jack Benny as Polish actor Joseph Tura, and was noted for the line: "So they call me 'Concentration Camp' Ehrhardt." Shortly before the film's release, one of its stars, Hollywood's beloved Carole Lombard (blonde wife of Clark Gable), died at the age of 33 in a tragic airplane crash near Las Vegas on January 16, 1942.
Biggest Box-Office Stars and Films:
Twelve-year-old child actress Elizabeth Taylor (born in the UK in 1932 to American parents) became a star after making Lassie Come Home (1943) and National Velvet (1944), her fifth film. The latter film featured a long-shot horse named Pie and Mickey Rooney as a homeless, stubborn ex-jockey. In her first major film role, Jennifer Jones became a star and won an Oscar for her portrayal of a pious St. Bernadette Soubirous who experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in The Song of Bernadette (1943).
Tyrone Power gave an outstanding performance as heroic Don Diego Vega, son of a 19th century aristocrat and better known as Zorro, combating villainous Captain Esteban Pasquale (Basil Rathbone) in The Mark of Zorro (1940). And in the same year, Errol Flynn starred as swashbuckling privateer Captain Geoffrey Thorpe, better known as The Sea Hawk (1940) in director Michael Curtiz' rousing film. Errol Flynn also starred as pugnacious Irish boxer James J. Corbett, based on his autobiography The Roar of the Crowd in director Raoul Walsh's biopic Gentleman Jim (1942). In another version of Alexander Dumas' novel, Gene Kelly made a foursome as D'Artagnan, joining Athos (Van Heflin), Aramis (Robert Coote), and Porthos (Gig Young) in the Technicolored costume adventure The Three Musketeers (1948).
The most-remembered and career-best film ever made by actor/future President Ronald Reagan was Kings Row (1942). After losing his legs from amputation after a train yard accident, his character posed the famous, horrifying question: "Where's the rest of me?" Humphrey Bogart didn't become a major Hollywood star until 1941, until after he had played the role of a gangster in The Petrified Forest (1936) (in a role he had played on Broadway), and then when he appeared in his first starring role in High Sierra (1941), and also in director John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941). Angela Lansbury made her film debut in Gaslight (1944) (aka The Murder in Thornton Square), with Ingrid Bergman slowly being driven insane by her husband Charles Boyer.
Basil Rathbone regularly starred in the 1940s as the popular, modernized fictional detective originally created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as in Universal's Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942), Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943), and The Scarlet Claw (1944) - with his loyal sidekick Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce).
The Tarzan franchise of films, begun in the early 30s, continued into the 40s. Johnny Weissmuller appeared only twice more with Maureen O'Sullivan in MGM's Tarzan's Secret Treasure (1941) and Tarzan's New York Adventure (1942). Weissmuller's further exploits in only six more RKO films included: Tarzan Triumphs! (1943), Tarzan's Desert Mystery (1943), Tarzan and the Amazons (1945), Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946), Tarzan and the Huntress (1947), and Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948).
Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon starred as Marie and Pierre respectively in Madame Curie (1943), about the discovery of radium. Master showman Cecil B. DeMille directed hunk Victor Mature in the Biblical epic Samson and Delilah (1949), also starring Hedy Lamarr. Britain's biggest sex-symbol in the late 1940s was Diana Dors, whose first notable screen performance (as Charlotte) was in David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948) with Alec Guinness as Fagin. And Best Actress-winning Olivia De Havilland starred as the title character in William Wyler's The Heiress (1949), adapted from Henry James' novel Washington Square, with Montgomery Clift as a jilted, inheritance-seeking suitor.
In 1947, Elia Kazan and others formed the Actors Studio in New York City - a rehearsal group to produce the first generation of "method" actors under the direction of Lee Strasberg. Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and James Dean were soon to emerge from this approach to acting. In the same year, Universal Pictures Studios merged with the independent production company International Pictures, forming the new Universal-International Studio. The new studio pledged higher-quality productions by eliminating serials and B-movies, and it introduced greater use of Technicolor and double features.
A Brief History of the B-Movie:
The term B-Movie refers to an off-beat, low-budget, second-tier film, usually from an independent producer. The low-prestige films were usually shot quickly with little-known, second rate actors or directors. Traditional B-films are characterized by short run times, reduced budgets, recycled actors and footage, and cheap production values. They were created as a contrast to A-pictures, characterized by first-class, big-budget films with high-level production values and star-power.
Standard B-Movies were predominent from the 1920s to the late 1940s, at a time when the studios owned their own theaters. (In the late 40s, the studios began to lose control of their theaters.) The independent or Poverty Row studios (such as Monogram and Republic) made B-movies almost exclusively. The less expensive B-movies were often the the second film (or the 'lower half') of a double-feature, and paired with an A-feature.
The vintage B-movie began to decrease in the 50s, or morphed into inferior B/W TV series. When drive-in theaters and cheap cinemas arose in the 1950s, a whole new group of grindhouse B-pictures emerged, with sensational and catchy titles, campy acting, cheesy special effects, and gratuitous violence and sexuality (especially after the Hays Code production restrictions began to be lifted in the late 60s). Some B-movie production devolved into exploitation films with increased nudity and violence. B-movies are not to be confused with cult films, although some B-films attained cult status (such as Edgar G. Ulmer's film noir Detour (1945)).
Examples of the Enduring Effects of B-Movies:
- Promising actors also often began their careers in B-movies, such as John Wayne; other western stars in B-films included Roy Rogers, Hoot Gibson, and Gene Autry
- B-movie serials, such as Flash Gordon, the series of Universal horror films (The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)), Fox's Charlie Chan mysteries, Monogram's Bowery Boys comedies, and Universal's Ma and Pa Kettle and Sherlock Holmes were all prominent and notable examples
- B-movies were often influential on future filmmakers, such as Jacques Tourneur's and RKO director Val Lewton's Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943) from the 40s
- Typical low-budget, sci-fi B-movies of the 50s included The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes (1955) and Teenagers From Outer Space (1959)
- They were often testing grounds for up-and-coming directors, such as Fred Zinnemann, Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Edward Dmytryk, Robert Wise, and Richard Fleischer. Some of the more recent directors got their start in exploitation B-movies, such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, and Ron Howard. Many B-movie products were made by producer Roger Corman of American International Pictures (AIP) and New World Pictures
Mostly B/W Films in the 40s:
At the end of the decade, acetate-based film was replacing unstable cellulose nitrate stock (which had already caused the deterioration of many older films).
Orson Welles: Boy Wonder and The Greatest Film Ever: Citizen Kane
Welles also acted as the enigmatic Harry Lime character, and provided the famous "cuckoo clock" speech, in director Carol Reed's British noir classic The Third Man (1949) (produced by Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick). It was set in war-ravaged Vienna and featured unsettling zither music. Reed's The Fallen Idol (1948) was another of his adaptations of Graham Greene stories. After the financial failure of Welles' film noir The Lady from Shanghai (1948), he moved to another studio (Republic Pictures) to star in, produce, and direct Shakespeare's classic tragedy Macbeth (1948). After the release of the low-budget, expressionistic film that wasn't entirely successful, Welles left for Europe and exiled himself away from Hollywood for ten years.
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The Birth of Film Noir:
The first, clearly definitive example was one of the best hard-boiled detective pictures ever made - director John Huston's remarkable debut film The Maltese Falcon (1941). [This was the third version of the film mystery.] The film about a treasure search for a black bird, adapted from Dashiell Hammett's novel, marked a turning point for actor Humphrey Bogart - it made him a star as private eye gumshoe Sam Spade. The chiaroscuro lighting of Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) by cinematographer Gregg Toland, and the Neo-realism of European film-makers also had an influence on the burgeoning stylistic art form. Film noir became prominent in the post-war era, and lasted in a classic "Golden Age" period until about 1960 - marked by Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958).
The Most Notable Film Noirs in the 'Classic' Period of the 40s:
- Frank Tuttle's This Gun For Hire (1942), a dark revenge film that made Alan Ladd a star and spotlighted his 'peek-a-boo' blonde co-star Veronica Lake
- Billy Wilder's classic thriller/film noir Double Indemnity (1944), from crime novelist Raymond Chandler's adaptation of James M. Cain's novella about insurance fraud, corruption and adulterous murder, with Barbara Stanwyck as a deadly blonde, Fred MacMurray as the agent, and Edward G. Robinson as a dogged insurance investigator
- Laura (1944) with its haunting theme song and alluring Gene Tierney
- Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet (1944), with musical song/dance actor Dick Powell playing against type as world-weary private detective Philip Marlowe
- Edgar G. Ulmer's "Poverty Row" Detour (1945)
- director Michael Curtiz' Mildred Pierce (1945) - this 'women's' noir gave Joan Crawford her first (and only) career Oscar as Best Actress for her role as a self-sacrificing mother, and a revitalized career
- Gilda (1946) with Rita Hayworth's notorious black-glove strip-tease "Put the Blame on Mame"
- Howard Hawks' plot-convoluted and impenetrable The Big Sleep (1946) with Humphrey Bogart as the hard-boiled detective hero Philip Marlowe (in his second film with off-screen young wife Lauren Bacall) in an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's first novel involving blackmail, murder, and more
- director/star Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake (1946) - another tale about detective Philip Marlowe in a story adapted for the screen by Raymond Chandler
- Tay Garnett's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) was an adaptation of James M. Cain's novel about a plot to murder the cafe-owner husband of Lana Turner by her lover John Garfield
- Fritz Lang's Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1946)
- Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946) (with the screen debut of actor Burt Lancaster and a star-making role for actress Ava Gardner) and Cry of the City (1948)
- Robert Rossen's boxing noir Body and Soul (1947) with John Garfield as a champion boxer forced to decide whether to throw a big fight
- Edward Dmytryk's noirish political drama Crossfire (1947) told about the social issue of anti-semitism prejudice, in its flashback story regarding an investigation (by Robert Mitchum and Robert Young) into the mysterious murder of a Jew by a bigoted GI soldier (Robert Ryan)
- Delmer Daves' Dark Passage (1947), with Bogart as the main character (again paired opposite Lauren Bacall) who has undergone plastic surgery - the film was noted for its 'subjective camera' (viewing through the 'eyes' of the bandaged patient) for the first half of the film
- Henry Hathaway's crime-noir Kiss of Death (1947) - with the screen debut of Oscar-nominated Richard Widmark as a homicidal psychopath
- Jacques Tourneur's intricate double-cross murder/romance - the penultimate noir thriller Out of the Past (1947) with femme fatale Jane Greer
- Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil (1948) with John Garfield
- the classic boxing drama, Champion (1949) - a star-making film for Kirk Douglas
- Raoul Walsh's film noirish gangster film White Heat (1949) with James Cagney as a mother-fixated, sadistic killer who blew himself up on an oil tank in the fiery climax, screaming: "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"
- Robert Wise's The Set-Up (1949), with Robert Ryan as an aging boxer, dealt with corruption in the sport of boxing
- Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night (1949)
Gangster Films Revival:
The "Road" Comedies:
- Road to Singapore (1940)
- Road to Zanzibar (1941)
- Road to Morocco (1942) - the best of the series
- Road to Utopia (1946)
- Road to Rio (1947)
- Road to Bali (1952)
- The Road to Hong Kong (1962)
Comedy Films: Comedy Teams and Pairs
Ski-nosed Bob Hope also starred in some of his best comedies during the decade, including My Favorite Blonde (1942) with Madeleine Carroll, the spy spoof They Got Me Covered (1943), The Princess and the Pirate (1944) with Virginia Mayo, The Paleface (1949) (Hope's first color film) with Jane Russell as Calamity Jane, and its sequel The Son of Paleface (1952).
The famed comedy team, the Marx Brothers were to retire from the movies as a screen team in 1941 with their last film, MGM's The Big Store (1941). However, they later signed with United Artists to make the independent feature A Night in Casablanca (1946), and they also appeared in a 'comeback' film, their final film as a team - Love Happy (1949) with a little-known Marilyn Monroe. And bawdy screen siren Mae West made her last film (for over 25 years) with the satirical musical The Heat's On (1943). Laurel and Hardy's last Hollywood film was The Bullfighters (1945), capping a career stretching back to their first film, Slipping Wives (1926). Film comedy lost one of its classic masters with the death of W.C. Fields in 1946. His last scripted film and starring role in a feature-length film was in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), and he made his final film cameo appearance in the musical comedy Sensations of 1945 (1944) - also the final starring film role for dancer Eleanor Powell.
The romantic comedy Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) starred Claude Rains in the title role and Robert Montgomery as Joe Pendleton, a sax-playing prize fighter who was supposed to survive a plane crash, but was prematurely sent to Heaven - and needed to find a new body on Earth. Similarly, Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait (1943) was the story of a 70 year-old playboy (Don Ameche) who would have to tell his life story to the devil, including his unfaithfulness to his forgiving wife (Gene Tierney).
Cary Grant played the 'son of a sea cook' with lethal Brewster family aunts Abby and Martha in Frank Capra's macabre comedy Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). One of Cary Grant's most under-rated film was Mr. Lucky (1943), as a gambling casino boat owner, who redeems himself by his love for a virtuous young woman (Laraine Day). He was also miscast as a playboy sentenced by judge Myrna Loy to date her sister - an infatuated teenaged Shirley Temple in the romantic comedy The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947). In the next year, he played the role of a New York adman who moves to the Connecticut countryside to do some disastrous home improvement in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948).
Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell co-starred and battled together in Howard Hawks' fast-talking romantic comedy His Girl Friday (1940) - one of the all-time great screwball comedies. [This was a wild and innovative retooling of director Lewis Milestone's The Front Page (1931).]
Hepburn and Tracy:
Katharine Hepburn also played the role of socialite Tracy Lord opposite hand-picked Cary Grant as estranged husband C. K. Dexter Haven in the romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story (1940) - her comeback film (from being seen as 'box-office poison') that she had originally performed on the Broadway stage.
Escapist, Nostalgic Entertainment:
Other films either provided escapist entertainment or nostalgically seemed to look back to a lost era in America, such as the biographical story of the song-and-dance team of the Cohans, featuring Best Actor-winning James Cagney as legendary vaudevillian George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). The musical comedy Holiday Inn (1942) featured Bing Crosby's first crooning of White Christmas, and Fred Astaire's and Bing Crosby's first screen appearance together. Director Vincente Minnelli's third film Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) was the first of three films he made to showcase Judy Garland. Bing Crosby reprised his earlier, Best Actor-winning Catholic priest role as Father Chuck O'Malley of Going My Way (1944) in the sequel The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), with Ingrid Bergman as Sister Benedict.
British actor Charles Laughton starred as a haunting, restless ghost walled up in a castle in MGM's comedy The Canterville Ghost (1944), from an Oscar Wilde fantasy story. Life with Father (1947) followed the exploits of the Day family (headed by strict William Powell) in a turn-of-the-century household, and George Stevens directed the feel-good drama I Remember Mama (1948). Audiences thrilled to see Mighty Joe Young (1949) - a semi-remake of the classic gorilla movie King Kong (1933) with the same special-effects production team of the original (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack).
Frank Capra's "Capra-Corn" Films:
Three Controversial Films:
The steamy box-office success of Forever Amber (1947), a colorful costume romance-drama with brunette star Linda Darnell as a bleached blonde 17th century English beauty (Amber St. Clair), was severely 'condemned' by the Legion of Decency for glorifying "immorality and licentiousness." And director Victor Fleming's final film - the Technicolored Joan of Arc (1948), noted as the most expensive film of the 40s decade at $8.7 million and also a major flop, was also controversial because its lead star (32 year-old Ingrid Bergman) - playing a teenaged peasant girl/saint - was revealed to be having an affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini. She was blacklisted and driven from Hollywood to live abroad - until making her return to the screen in the mid-50s with Anastasia (1956).
Producer/promoter Kroger Babb's (self-dubbed as "America's Fearless Young Showman") low-budget, heavily-promoted Mom and Dad (1944) was one of the most successful exploitation films of all time. Besides being socially-significant as a sex-hygiene film about the dangers of venereal disease and the results of premarital sex, it was the 3rd highest grossing film during the 1940s, and easily recouped its $62,000 in expenses. About 300 prints of this feature drama were made and road-showed for more than two decades, with screenings divided by gender. Each print (with a tacked-on live-birth sequence) traveled with a lecturer named Elliot Forbes -- an "eminent sexual hygiene commentator" -- (and two assisting nurses) who promoted the film's "educational" value, lectured during intermission about the importance of contraception ("sensible sex"), and profitably sold sex manuals in the theaters. Time Magazine remarked that the ad campaign for Mom and Dad "left only the livestock unaware of the chance to learn the facts of life."
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Val Lewton and Horror:
Further horror masterpieces pairing the talents of Tourneur and Lewton included one of their earliest productions - the modestly-budgeted, artistic horror thriller I Walked With a Zombie (1943). It was set on the voodoo-infested island of Haiti and derived from the classic Jane Eyre tale. The last film in Tourneur's trio of films with Lewton was the truly terrifying The Leopard Man (1943) with a frightening off-screen 'leopard' attack on a young girl. Lewton also went on to produce The Seventh Victim (1943) (directed by Mark Robson) and the sequel The Curse of the Cat People (1944) (directed by Gunther Von Fristch and Robert Wise).
Universal's Horror Films and More:
The frightening horror film Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1942) featured two of Universal Studios' classic monsters, portrayed respectively by a miscast Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney, Jr.. Universal's House of Dracula (1945), the sequel to House of Frankenstein (1944), starred Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Wolf Man (again), and John Carradine as the vampire. There were four sequels to the original 1932 Mummy film (starring Boris Karloff as Kharis) between 1940 and 1944, with Lon Chaney, Jr. in three of the four films: The Mummy's Hand (1940), The Mummy's Tomb (1942), The Mummy's Ghost (1944), and The Mummy's Curse (1944).
One of the scariest films of the 40s was the haunted house classic The Uninvited (1944), starring Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey as a brother and sister who move into a mysterious house on the Cornish coast and soon detect cold spots and the smell of mimosa.
The First Appearance of Major Cartoon Characters:
Animated films' cartoon characters Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, Mighty Mouse, and Casper (among many others) made their film debuts in the 40s decade. The short film A Wild Hare (1940) introduced the wise-cracking, carrot-chomping Bugs Bunny, soon to be one of Warner Bros' biggest stars. Tom & Jerry, created by Hanna & Barbera, were debuted by MGM in Puss Gets the Boot (1940). (Tom was called Jasper and Jerry didn't have a name yet.) Woody Woodpecker first appeared in the cartoon Knock, Knock (1940) distributed by Universal Studios, in which he bedeviled another Lantz character Andy Panda. The next year, the popular Woody became a starring character in The Cracked Nut (1941), and began to replace the waning Oswald the Rabbit. A caped super-rodent named Mighty Mouse was introduced in the Terrytoons short The Mouse of Tomorrow (1942), noted for saying: "Here I come to save the day!" Paramount's theatrical cartoon The Friendly Ghost (1945), debuted the character of Casper. The characters of the RoadRunner ("Accelerati Incredibulis") and the Coyote ("Carnivorous Vulgaris") were debuted in the short animated film Fast and Furry-ous (1949).
The Golden Age of Disney Feature Film Animation:
Disney's charming live-action feature film (with animated sequences) Song of the South (1946), was based on the Uncle Remus' tall-tale stories of Brer Rabbit by Joel Chandler Harris. Although it was a commercial success, the film was criticized by the NAACP in 1946 for "the impression it gives of an idyllic master-slave relationship", but was still nominated for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, and received an Oscar for Best Song ("Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah") - and an honorary Oscar to African-American James Baskett for his portrayal of Uncle Remus.
Captain Marvel:
Also appearing in 1941 was the first film appearance of a comic strip and comic book hero - Captain Marvel (Tom Tyler), in an episodic serial entitled The Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941). It was one of the finest comic-to-film adaptations ever made.
Preston Sturges' Social-Comedy Satires:
Sturges made a string of brilliant screwball comedies and witty satires including eight signature films (seven were comedies) between 1940 and 1944, his peak period of production:
- The Great McGinty (1940), a political satire with Brian Donlevy; noted for its Oscar-winning Best Original Screenplay [it was the first time a film in Hollywood opened with the credit: "Written and Directed By"]
- Christmas in July (1940), a screwball comedy of errors tale with Dick Powell and Ellen Drew, skewering advertising and consumerism
- The Lady Eve (1941), Sturges' great masterpiece - a tale of sexual politics, starring worldly, gold-digging con artist Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) and her masculine prey - a naive millionaire explorer named Charles Pike (Henry Fonda); sometimes considered the last classic screwball romantic comedy of Hollywood's Golden Age
- Sullivan's Travels (1941), Sturges' most ambitious and best film, a reflexive critique of Hollywood film-making in its story of a big-time director (Joel McCrea) of comedies who took a road-trip as a tramp with a wise-cracking peekaboo blonde (Veronica Lake) to experience life among the downtrodden poor; in a chain gang, he experiences an epiphany while watching a cartoon, and returns to Hollywood to realize his comedic calling
- The Palm Beach Story (1942), a sophisticated story about an independent, luxury-loving wife (Claudette Colbert) who left her struggling, poor inventor-husband (Joel McCrea) for a trip to Palm Beach to enjoy the good life with a millionaire (crooner Rudy Vallee)
- The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), an irreverent and iconoclastic film (during the heyday of the Hays Code!) about an unwed pregnancy; it riskily told the scandalous story of Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton), a small-town party girl impregnated after an drunken encounter with a soldier, who can't remember the soldier's name beyond the recollection of Ratsky-Watsky; her meek boyfriend Norval's (Eddie Bracken) attempts to save her reputation put him in jail; the film ended with Trudy giving birth to sextuplets on Christmas Eve - a great media event; this was the first film advertised on TV in a 30-minute promotion in 1944; comedian Jerry Lewis remade the film as Rock-a-bye Baby (1958)
- Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), the first of Sturges' two most authentic portraits of war-time America (both with Oscar-nominated screenplays), a satirical comedy of heroism and patriotism -and Sturges' own personal favorite film; about a rejected Marine recruit (Eddie Bracken) and war hero who is erroneously welcomed home and can't admit the truth
- The Great Moment (1944), an out-of-character, serious historical biopic with Betty Field and Joel McCrea as the dentist who pioneered anesthesia - the off-beat film was shot two years earlier and then drastically re-edited by Paramount, leading to a dispute and falling-out between the film-maker and the studio
After Sturges left Paramount in 1944 to find independence, he became embroiled with financial difficulties and suffered creative exhaustion. He only completed four more pictures (until his death in 1959). He also directed/wrote the box-office flop The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947) (aka Mad Wednesday), co-produced with Howard Hughes (and the first and only film by California Pictures), starring silent film star Harold Lloyd (after almost a ten-year hiatus and in his final film) in the lead role portraying an unemployed, inhibited clerk who was enlivened and redeemed by a special alcoholic drink termed the Diddlebock. One of Sturges' final films was the successful comedy Unfaithfully Yours (1948), about a symphony conductor (Rex Harrison) who fantasized about killing his allegedly unfaithful wife (Linda Darnell). Sturges' last American/Hollywood film was the western comedy The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (1949) with Betty Grable, and he directed his final film in Europe, The French, They Are a Funny Race (1956).
1940s Westerns:
Howard Hughes' notorious and independently-produced adult-western The Outlaw (1943) faced close scrutiny by the Hays Office (and Joseph Breen), due to its exploitation of star Jane Russell's prominently-uncovered 36D" chest in her debut film by Hollywood huckster Russell Birdwell. Salacious advertising with lines such as: "What are the two great reasons for Jane Russell's rise to stardom?" added to the lurid sensationalism and kept the film from being widely circulated. In addition, pin-up shots of big-busted Russell rolling around in the hay had the desired effect at the box office (especially among WWII GIs). One of the film's most vulgar stunts, also orchestrated by Birdwell, was to have skywriting planes fly over San Francisco where they spelled the film's title followed by two giant circles -- each dotted in the center. Hughes defied the Hayes Production Code (reportedly this was the first US film to do so), and sued the MPAA organization, but eventually backed down. Hughes postponed its opening until 1943 when it was given a limited release (one-week run), then withdrew it, and re-released it three years later in 1946 in a cut version, and then again in 1947. The eventual release of the mediocre, fictional film ended up as an example of triumphant ballyhooing and film marketing.
A Cecil B. DeMille Western-style "Gone With The Wind" epic with Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones as libidinous rivals/lovers, Duel in the Sun (1946), nicknamed "Lust in the Dust," was released by David O. Selznick. At seven million dollars, it was the costliest film to date. A Western-style "Mutiny on the Bounty," Howard Hawks' Red River (1948), often considered one of the greatest westerns ever made, was a straight-forward, visually-striking tale of a cattle boss father/adopted son controversy (John Wayne vs. Montgomery Clift) during the first cattle drive up the newly-opened Chisholm Trail. Another of the best westerns ever made was William Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) about two drifters (Henry Fonda and Henry Morgan) who witness the vigilante lynching of three innocent men.
John Ford's Westerns:
During the 1940s, director John Ford embarked on his most prolific era with an expanded string of classic Westerns to chronicle America's pioneer past. His award-winning (and most-nominated) films were his three social dramas in the 40s, not his westerns:
- The Long Voyage Home (1940)
- an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about a Depression-era migrant family The Grapes of Wrath (1940) (with Ford winning the Best Director Oscar)
- the Best Picture-winning, Welsh mining, family-based drama How Green Was My Valley (1941) with Roddy McDowall as a young Huw in a hard-working South Wales family
Ford then filmed a classic western about Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and the OK Corral titled My Darling Clementine (1946) featuring Victor Mature as Doc Holliday. His three entries at the end of the decade, in a celebrated "Cavalry Trilogy" each with his favorite male lead (John Wayne) were:
- Fort Apache (1948)
- She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), with a sole nomination and win for its cinematography (Winton Hoch)
- Rio Grande (1950)
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40s Musicals:
- Thrill of a Romance (1945) with aquatic star Esther Williams
- Anchors Aweigh (1945), with Frank Sinatra's first major screen appearance and featuring Gene Kelly's dance with an animated mouse
- The Harvey Girls (1945), a musical set in a 19th century Fred Harvey Restaurant with Angela Lansbury and Judy Garland as stars, and with an Oscar-winning song: "Atcheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe"
- State Fair (1945)
- The Dolly Sisters (1945)
- Up in Arms (1945)
Hollywood enjoyed its greatest financial year in history in 1946. An all-time peak in annual box-office receipts, at $4.5 billion, was achieved. The best of Broadway revues was remembered in Ziegfeld Follies (1946), with William Powell reprising his role as the great Broadway impresario. Cameos and appearances by many stars, such as Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Red Skelton and Lucille Ball, populated the film.
Arthur Freed was the driving force behind MGM studios and the growth of the musical genre in the 40s and 50s. Gene Kelly made his official screen debut as a song-and-dance man in director Busby Berkeley's (and producer Freed's) hit musical For Me and My Gal (1942), opposite Judy Garland (her first film with her name billed alone above the title in the credits).
Entertainer Al Jolson and bandleader Paul Whitehead starred as themselves in Rhapsody in Blue (1945), the life story of American composer George Gershwin (played by Robert Alda - Alan Alda's father), noted for writing An American in Paris. The musical biography Night and Day (1946) was the life account of songwriter Cole Porter (Cary Grant), and featured Mary Martin singing "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." Cornel Wilde starred as the Polish composer Frederick Chopin in Columbia Pictures' hit musical biopic A Song to Remember (1945), with Merle Oberon as George Sand and Stephen Bekass as Franz Liszt.
The hugely-successful The Jolson Story (1946) was an energetic film biography of one of America's most popular vaudeville entertainers of the 1920s, known for singing: "Mammy!", "California, Here I Come," and "Swanee". The film was followed by a sequel: Jolson Sings Again (1949) with Larry Parks again in the lead role.
The hit Broadway comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942) was adapted for the screen and directed by William Keighley for Warners - it starred Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, and Monty Woolley (as the unwelcome title character Sheridan Whiteside). Claude Rains starred in Universal's Technicolor musical remake of the original horror film The Phantom of the Opera (1943) as the title character violinist Enrique Claudin, forced to wear a mask to cover his disfigurement, and madly in love with opera singer Christine (Susanna Foster). Betty Grable's legs were prominently displayed in the musical Mother Wore Tights (1947), a turn-of-the-century story about a vaudeville family, starring Dan Dailey.
A non-musical version of the future The King and I (1956), the romantic drama Anna and the King of Siam (1946), starred Irene Dunne as Western teacher Miss Owens and Rex Harrison (in his screen debut) as the Thai monarch. [This film was remade with Jodie Foster as Anna and the King of Siam (1999).]
The biggest hit film of 1944 was the heart-warming, Oscar-winning musical comedy Going My Way (1944), starring Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald as conflicting members of the Roman Catholic clergy. [The film was first screened on 65 different military bases on April 27, 1944, as a way to support the war effort.] Its equally-popular sequel released the following year, The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), starred Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman. Life With Father (1947) was a screen version of the hit Broadway play of a turn-of-the-century New York family. Danny Kaye starred as the title character - a hapless daydreamer who imagines himself in heroic adventures, in the fantasy musical comedy The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) - known for the sound of his imaginary life-saving machine ("ta-pocketa, pocketa"). Judy Garland was at the height of her talents in MGM's In the Good Old Summertime (1949), a musical remake of The Shop Around the Corner (1940), about two anonymous pen pals.
"Soundies":
From 1940-1946, soundies (short black and white musical films) were produced. They were pre-cursors to present-day music videos, and were designed to be played on coin-operated, 16 mm rear-projection machines like jukeboxes, called Panorams, that were located in nightclubs, diners, roadhouses, bars, restaurants and other public places. Besides musical numbers representing many different musical styles (swing, big band, jazz, blues, country and western, hillbilly, Gospel, Latin American, Hawaiian, dance, musical comedy, and more), soundies would often include cheesecake sequences of women in bathing suits, vaudeville acts, or strip-tease/burlesque routines. Because they were produced during the war years, they also featured war bonds appeals and other patriotic jargons.
Films of Social Concern and Realism:
"Liberal" Hollywood crusaded against injustices and inequities in moving films of social concern:
- John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940), based on John Steinbeck's novel, was beautifully filmed by cinematographer Gregg Toland; it told of the struggle of a displaced, poverty-stricken American migrant family (including ex-con Tom Joad played by Henry Fonda) who left Oklahoma's dustbowl for California
- in the comedy The Talk of the Town (1942) with a serious edge and social conscience, Cary Grant played the role of a man unjustly framed for murder by a corrupt local government
- the ground-breaking drama of a tormented alcoholic writer named Don Birnam (Best Actor-winning Ray Milland) with writer's block was presented in Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945)
- William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) provided a view of the difficulties confronted by a cross-section of returning American veterans
- Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement (1947) was a powerful indictment of anti-Semitism in America as was Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire (1947)
- The Snake Pit (1948), starring Olivia De Havilland as a patient suffering from paranoia and amnesia, was a socially-conscious melodrama and controversial expose concerned with the treatment of the insane in an overcrowded mental asylum
- the touching drama Johnny Belinda (1948) treated the story of the rape of a deaf-mute woman with honesty
- social demagoguery and dirty politics were confronted in Robert Rossen's Best Picture-winning All The King's Men (1949) - about the rise and fall of the corruptible politician Willie Stark (Oscar-winning Broderick Crawford)
There were four gripping Hollywood dramas in particular that dealt seriously with the subject of contemporary race relations, that were released in 1949:
- Clarence Brown's Intruder in the Dust (1949)
- Alfred Werker's Lost Boundaries (1949) featured white actor Mel Ferrer as a light-skinned African-American
- director Mark Robson's The Home of the Brave (1949) told the story of a guilt-ridden black veteran (James Edwards) in psychiatric treatment after a traumatic war experience
- director Elia Kazan's Pinky (1949) tackled the subject of racial prejudice and inter-racial romance for a light-skinned black woman named Pinky (white actress Jeanne Crain)
Hitchcock and Other British/Foreign Influences:
After many great British films in the 1930s (The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), for example),
- the atmospheric Rebecca (1940) (produced by David O. Selznick), was Hitchcock's first American film; the film was Hitchcock's only film to win the Best Picture Academy Award; it was famous for its opening line: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," and for its pairing of Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier
- Foreign Correspondent (1940)
- Suspicion (1941)
- Saboteur (1942) with a suspenseful war theme
- Lifeboat (1944), adapted from a John Steinbeck story, about the stranged survivors of a torpedoed freighter, including Tallulah Bankhead (as a fashion journalist)
Hitchcock also made some superb psychological thrillers: the favorite of all of his films was Shadow of a Doubt (1943) about a psychopathic 'Merry Widow' killer named Charlie (Joseph Cotten) in a small California town. Hitchcock's psychoanalytic, post-war mystery Spellbound (1945) (produced by David O. Selznick) contained Dali's surrealistic dream sequence and featured psychiatrist Gregory Peck suffering from amnesia. The spy thriller Notorious (1946) was a dark foreboding story of an espionage scheme to trap a Nazi agent. These films reflected post-war acceptance of a darker style of film-making. It wasn't until Rope (1948) that Hitchcock switched to color, in an experimentally-ambitious film seamlessly put together with ten-minute extended takes.
- Great Expectations (1946)
- Oliver Twist (1947)
Lean's melodramatic tear-jerker Brief Encounter (1946), heightened by Rachmaninoff's piano concerto, told a story of unfulfilled romance between a married middle-class woman (Celia Johnson) and a doctor (Trevor Howard) - at a railway station tearoom.
French director Jean Cocteau directed the classic live-action, love drama La Belle et La Bete (Beauty and the Beast) (1946) - a remarkable, visually surrealistic, and unique re-telling of the fairy tale. And Marcel Carne's post-war romantic drama masterpiece Les Enfants Du Paradis (1945), a bittersweet tale set in 19th century Parisian theatre and secretly filmed during the Nazi occupation, was acclaimed for its lyrical beauty and doomed passion.
British Comedy Stars and Ealing Studios:
The most popular British film star comic of the late 1930s and early 1940s (of the pre-TV era from the mid-30s to the mid-40s) was George Formby, noted for playing a ukulele, morale-boosting during the war years, singing songs with double-entendres, and repeating the catchphrase: "Turned out nice again." His notable films included Keep Your Seats Please (1936), Keep Fit (1937), and It's In the Air (1938). Another of the most favorite British comedians was Will Hay. In films from Ealing Studios, his most famous character was an incompetent school master with a pince-nez, often playing opposite toothless Moore Marriott and fat Graham Moffatt. The last film Will Hay co-directed was My Learned Friend (1943) before his death at the end of the decade.
British film comedy reached its creative zenith in the 40s with productions made by the short-lived Ealing Studios. One of Ealing's most whimsical political satires in the late 1940s was Passport to Pimlico (1949), starring Margaret Rutherford and Stanley Holloway in a tale about a district in South London that was determined to belong to Burgundy, France. Another British black comedy from Britain's Ealing Studios, Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) featured Alec Guinness in eight roles in the film, and was considered the best comedy of its year. Director Alexander Mackendrick's Ealing release of Whiskey Galore! (1949) (aka Tight Little Island) was also well-revered. The independent studio would become well-known for its late 40s and early 50s comedies, such as The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951), and The Ladykillers (1955).
Laurence Olivier and Other Prominent British Stars:
British actress Deborah Kerr's first Hollywood success was in her debut US film The Hucksters (1947).
Powell and Pressburger:
- the whimsical The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
- A Canterbury Tale (1944), set not in the 14th century, but in wartime Britain
- the surreal Scottish romance I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)
- A Matter of Life and Death (1946) (aka Stairway to Heaven)
- the provocative and rich-colored Black Narcissus (1947) about a group of sexually-repressed nuns in a convent in the Himalayas
- the tragic love story and ballet film The Red Shoes (1948), one of the greatest films ever made in the UK
Later, their psycho-voyeuristic horror-thriller film Peeping Tom (1960) was controversial for its twisted view of a homicidal, psychopathic photographer.
Italian Neo-Realism:
Other representative Neo-realism examples included: Rossellini's Paisan (1946), De Sica's Shoeshine (1946), Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero (1947), Visconti's La Terra Trema (1948), Rossellini's Stromboli (1949), and De Sica's Umberto D (1952). Italian Neo-Realism, portrayed by film-makers Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica, lasted until 1952.
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The Hollywood Ten and Blacklisting:
- Lester Cole - screenwriter
- Dalton Trumbo - screenwriter
- Edward Dmytryk - director
- Herbert Biberman - director/producer
- Alvah Bessie - screenwriter
- Ring Lardner Jr. - screenwriter
- John Howard Lawson - screenwriter
- Albert Maltz - screenwriter
- Samuel Ornitz - screenwriter
- Robert Adrian Scott - producer/writer
For their refusal to cooperate, the Ten were considered criminals and jailed for up to one year, and fined $1,000 for contempt of Congress. They were also unofficially 'blacklisted' by the US film industry.
Over 300 movie industry figures and blacklisted stars had their careers ruined between 1947 and 1952, when the HUAC investigation ended in the mid-1950s. Film stars and industry figures such as Myrna Loy, Orson Welles, Jules Dassin, Sterling Hayden, Zero Mostel, Gregory Peck, Katharine Hepburn, Gene Kelly, Danny Kaye, Larry Parks, Joseph Losey, Frank Sinatra, John Garfield, Paul Muni, Sylvia Sydney, Anne Revere, Arthur Miller, Howard Da Silva, Robert Rossen, Lionel Stander, Fredric March, Edward G. Robinson, Judy Holliday, Jose Ferrer, Charlie Chapin, and Melvyn Douglas were either:
- falsely accused of having Bolshevik connections or being Communist sympathizers
- investigated as suspected "communists"
- alleged to be part of a Hollywood "Communist Fifth Column" for refusing to answer questions
In 1957, Robert Rich (later discovered as a pseudonym for blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo) won the Best Original Screenplay Academy Award for The Brave One (1956) - under his real name, Trumbo was officially presented with the award in 1975. Blacklisted industry members were not eligible for Oscar nominations until 1959. And it wasn't until 1960 that Dalton Trumbo (one of the original "Hollywood Ten" who was declared an "unfriendly witness", jailed for "contempt of Congress," and forced to use a pseudonym after being released from jail) was openly hired by executive producer Kirk Douglas to script and receive screenwriter credits for writing the screenplay for Kubrick's film Spartacus (1960). Otto Preminger also gave Trumbo a chance to adapt Leon Uris' novel for the film Exodus (1960) and to receive proper credit as screenwriter.
The End of the Decade, and the Beginning of the End of the Studio System:
At the end of this decade, reeling from depression, war, problems of the return to peacetime, and the ominous arrival of the atomic bomb, the world was a more cynical, chaotic, economically-unsure and film-noirish place. Studios were also forced to re-evaluate their roles and approaches, with lawsuits that stripped the studios of their lucrative practices. By the late 1940s, the motion picture industry surely faced its period of greatest crisis and challenge, with the depressing bleakness of the Cold War on the horizon.
Hollywood suddenly found itself with many threatening forces at the close of the 40s and the start of the next decade:
- the coming of television forcing potential moviegoers to remain at home
- blacklisting and McCarthyism
- a 1945 studio labor union strike that raised salaries 25% for studio employees
- a short-lived 75% import duty, from 1947-1948, that restricted the import of all US films into the UK
- the gradual decline of theatre-attending audiences
- inflation that raised film production costs
- anti-trust rulings by the US government against the studios
Block-booking of films was declared illegal and studios were forced to divest themselves of their studio-owned theatre chains by the Paramount Decrees (an action of the US Justice Department and an anti-monopoly decision of the US Supreme Court in 1948 against the Big Five major film studios and three minor studios). The court's anti-trust decision in U.S. vs. Paramount mandated that the production and exhibition functions of the film industry had to be separated.
Now that the studios would have to achieve box-office success based not on their marketplace strength but on the quality of their films - now sold by a film-by-film and theater-by-theater basis - the stability of the studio system of marketing was severely threatened and began to crumble. Studios would be gradually reduced to production and distribution organizations, forced to give up or divest themselves of their vast theater holdings, and prohibited from 'block booking', fixing admission prices, and forcing their lesser products onto independent exhibitors. They were pressured to usher in an era of competition, free agent stars and auteur directors, and many of them were forced to begin selling film rights to pre-1948 films to television to bolster profits.
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The Dawning of the 50s:
One of the decade's best comedies was Harvey (1950), with James Stewart as a lovable, eccentric drunk named Elwood P. Dowd whose best friend was an imaginary, six-foot-tall rabbit. Another of the most popular films in the late 50s was Leo McCarey's romantic drama An Affair to Remember (1957), the story of an ill-fated romance between Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant due to an automobile accident, delaying a rendezvous at the top of the Empire State Building in New York City. It was a remake of the director's own tearjerker film Love Affair (1939) with Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer. The same story would inspire the making of Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle (1993) with leads Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (who had first appeared together in Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)), and Love Affair (1994) with real-life couple Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.
The New Teenage, Youth-Oriented Market:
The 50s decade also ushered in the age of Rock and Roll and a new younger market of teenagers. This youth-oriented group was opposed to the older generation's choice of nostalgic films, such as director Anthony Mann's and Universal's popular musical biopic The Glenn Miller Story (1954), starring James Stewart as the big band leader, duplicated in Universal's follow-up musical biography The Benny Goodman Story (1956) with Steve Allen (his film debut in a serious dramatic role) as the talented clarinet player. They preferred Rock Around the Clock (1956) that featured disc jockey Alan Freed and the group Bill Haley and His Comets (singing the title song) and many others (such as the Platters, and Freddy Bell and The Bell Boys) - it was the first film entirely dedicated to rock 'n' roll. It was quickly followed by two more similar films featuring Alan Freed (as Himself) -- Don't Knock the Rock (1956) and Rock, Rock, Rock (1956). Both films argued that rock-and-roll was a new, fun, and wholesome type of music. However, the adult generation continued to regard the new youthful generation (and the rise of juvenile deliquency) with skepticism and fear, as illustrated in the film adaptation of Maxwell Anderson's stage play, The Bad Seed (1956). The thriller demonstrated that evil could reside in a young, cute serial killer (played by Patty McCormack).
The rock and roll music of the 50s was on display, along with big-bosomed star Jayne Mansfield as a talentless, dumb blonde sexpot in writer/director Frank Tashlin's satirical comedy The Girl Can't Help It (1956). Marilyn Monroe's foil Tom Ewell starred in the film as the protagonist. It was the first rock and roll film to be taken seriously, with 17 songs in its short 99 minutes framework. Great rock and roll performers included Ray Anthony, Fats Domino, The Platters, Little Richard and his Band (featured in the title song), Gene Vincent and His Bluecaps, Eddie Cochran (with his screen debut) and others. American youth wanted to hear their popular groups in their films that they chose to view, including Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Ritchie Valens, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Gene Vincent, and The Platters.
Sometimes, to appeal to the new juvenile market, actors were miscast, such as clean-cut crooner Pat Boone in April Love (1957), playing a juvenile delinquent who was sent to his uncle's Kentucky farm for rehabilitation. The title song, however, became a big hit for the singer/actor. By the last year of the decade, the youth market in all its forms was worth $10 billion a year. Tragedy also struck in the last year of the decade, when pop idols 22 year old songwriter and singer Buddy Holly, 17 year old Latino singer Ritchie Valens, and 28 year old J.P. Richardson (aka radio DJ "The Big Bopper") were killed in a light plane crash on February 3, 1959 in an Iowa cornfield, while on a "Winter Dance Party" tour. [Both singers were later honored with biopics: The Buddy Holly Story (1978) and La Bamba (1987), and also by Don McLean's 1972 hit song American Pie.]
Another film, that came later in the decade, that also exploited the new teenage market's non-conformist attitudes, was Jack Arnold's exploitative juvenile delinquent film, High School Confidential (1958), featuring drugs in a high school dope ring, lots of 50's slang words and hep-talk, Russ Tamblyn as an undercover cop posing as a student, switchblade fights, drag races, Mamie Van Doren as Tamblyn's nympho aunt, and Jerry Lee Lewis singing the title song in its opening.
Two Early 50's Youth Films and Their Influential Actors:
Two other youth-oriented actors and their films in the mid-50s would portray the potentially-scary, self-expressive, and rebellious new teenage population.
A young Marlon Brando (1924-2004) was trained by Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio in New York in raw and realistic 'method acting,' and influenced by Stella Adler. He starred in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway (opposite Jessica Tandy as Blanche) in 1947, and would later repeat his work on film in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and receive an Oscar nomination. He also contributed a memorable role as a self-absorbed teen character. He played Johnny - an arrogant, rebellious, tough yet sensitive leader of a roving motorcycle-biking gang (wearing a T-shirt and leather jacket) that invaded and terrorized a small-town in Laslo Benedek's controversial The Wild One (1954) (banned in Britain until a decade and a half later). The film was noted for one line of dialogue, typifying his attitude: "What are you rebelling against?" Brando's reply: "Whadda ya got?" A nasty Lee Marvin led a rival gang of bikers named The Beetles.
[Brando's photo as biker Johnny later appeared on the front-sleeve of the famed mid-late 60s Beatles' album: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Brando's new style of acting would be forever emulated by future generations of actors, including Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn, and later Russell Crowe.)]
2. James Dean: The 'First American Teenager'
It was followed by Nicholas Ray's best-known melodramatic, color-drenched film about juvenile delinquency and alienation, Warner Bros.' Rebel Without a Cause (1955). This was the film with Dean's most-remembered role as mixed-up, sensitive, and defiant teenager Jim Stark involved in various delinquent behaviors (drunkenness, a switchblade fight, and a deadly drag race called a Chicken Run), and his archetypal scream to his parents: "You're tearing me apart!"
Dean also starred in his third (and final) feature, George Stevens' epic saga Giant (1956) set in Texas, and also starring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Dennis Hopper. (The 24 year-old actor was killed in a tragic car crash on September 30th 1955 while driving his Silver Porsche 550 Spyder -- affectionately nicknamed 'The Little Bastard', around the time that Giant was completed and about a month before Rebel opened. Dean was on his way to car races in Salinas on October 1st. The crash occurred at the intersection of Routes 41 and 46 near Paso Robles at Cholame, and he died enroute to the hospital.) [Note: Dean's two co-stars in the film also experienced untimely deaths: Sal Mineo (as Plato) was stabbed to death at age 37, and Natalie Wood (as Judy) drowned at age 43.] In his honor, James Dean was awarded two post-humous Best Actor nominations: for his role as rebellious Cal Trask in East of Eden (1955) and as oil-rich ranch-hand Jett Rink in Giant (1956).
Elvis 'The Pelvis' Presley: The King of Rock 'N Roll
He was also featured as an actor in many money-making films after signing his first film deal in 1956. His screen debut was in Fox's Civil War drama Love Me Tender (1956) (originally titled The Reno Brothers), with a #1 single hit song ballad. He also appeared in Paramount's Loving You (1957) (noted for his first screen kiss, and for being his first Technicolor film), and then in his MGM debut film Jailhouse Rock (1957) - generally acknowledged as his most famous and popular film. Next came director Michael Curtiz' and Paramount's King Creole (1958) (his third and last B/W film and his own favorite) in a role as a New Orleans teen rebel (acclaimed as one of his best acting roles) before the decade ended. His induction into the Army in 1958 was a well-publicized event. After his Army stint, he also starred in G.I. Blues (1960), in Don Siegel's western Flaming Star (1960) (with only two songs) as a half-breed youth, in the southern melodrama Wild in the Country (1961), and in other formulaic 60's films (i.e., Blue Hawaii (1961), Kid Galahad (1962), and his biggest box-office hit Viva Las Vegas (1964)). By the 70s, his film roles had deteriorated, and although he returned to stage performances and revived his singing career, he was physically on the decline until his death in August, 1977 of heart disease and drug abuse.
American Releasing Corporation (ARC) - Renamed American International Pictures (AIP) (1956): Roger Corman
| ARC (1954-1956) | ARC (1954-1956) | AIP (1956- ) |
The first release from ARC was the B-movie crime thriller-drama The Fast and the Furious (1954) (Corman's second production) that featured a car chase and starred Dorothy Malone and John Ireland. Another early ARC release was the western Outlaw Treasure (1955) - in fact, a number of the earliest Corman ARC releases were westerns, including Five Guns West (1955), Apache Woman (1955) with Lloyd Bridges, The Oklahoma Woman (1956) and Gunslinger (1956).
Cheap Teen Movies
[Note: It must be acknowledged that not all cheap teen movies were made by AIP in the 50s, for example, The Blob (1958), featuring Steve McQueen in his first starring role as a high-schooler, was about a meteorite that oozed a disgusting, gooey substance that ate people. There was also Ed Wood's debut transvestite shock film Glen or Glenda (1953).]
Other significant film subjects for ARC and Corman were science fiction/horror films, such as The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955), Day the World Ended (1955), The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1955), and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). ARC only released one film noir during this early period: Female Jungle (1955) - notable as sexpot Jayne Mansfield's first film.
Once ARC changed its name to AIP, Corman and other major producers specialized in lots of sensational science-fiction/horror films, teen-oriented exploitation films, and B-film crime dramas, such as:
The Threat of Television:
Hollywood was obviously fearful of television's dawning in the early 1950s. Indeed, the studios forbade their movies and stars from appearing on the small screen at all. Fearful of losing audiences to the screens in their living rooms, Hollywood enticed filmgoers with expensive epics, gimmicky 3D releases, stereo sound, enhanced color technology and widescreen formats such as CinemaScope, VistaVision and Panavision. Bwana Devil (1952) was the first full-length 3D talkie.This is Cinerama (1952) was the first to use a wrap-around, widescreen format, and The Robe (1953), the first movie released in CinemaScope, was recorded in four-track stereo.
All of the major Hollywood studios fought television with what they called "theater television": closed-circuit screenings of TV programs in movie theaters. Since the Big Five studios owned extensive theater chains, this strategy was easily implemented. The Theater Television Network, founded in 1951, aired shows in participating theaters where audiences were provided with costlier programs incorporating political news coverage, prizefights, NCAA games, etc. Although over 100 U.S. theaters had installed theater television by 1952, the phenomenon faded shortly thereafter. And years before HBO, Cinemax or Showtime, an early version of subscription/pay television (called "pay-see" or "toll-video" by Variety) in the late 40s to early 60s equipped regular TV sets with coin-boxes or punch-card systems that, when activated, allowed customers to unscramble the relevant broadcast signal to view special content. Technological and financial issues combined with the threat of government regulation doomed this direct-pay system to failure.
Film attendance declined precipitously as free TV viewing (and the increase in popularity of foreign-language films) made inroads into the entertainment business. In 1951, NBC became America's first nationwide TV network, and in just a few years, 50% of US homes had at least one TV set. In March of 1953, the Academy Awards were televised for the first time by NBC - and the broadcast received the largest single audience in network TV's five-year history. By 1954, NBC's Tonight Show was becoming one of the most popular late-night TV shows. Expensive promotional TV advertising for the scifi flick The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) marked one of the first times that film advertising successfully exploited television to drive people to movie theaters nationally.
A number of Hollywood's independent producers created television shows in the late '40s and early '50s. Low-budget westerns (The Roy Rogers Show, The Lone Ranger, etc.), crime/mystery shows (Mark VII Production's Dragnet, MPTV's Adventures of Superman, etc.), and sitcoms (I Love Lucy and Our Miss Brooks). At first, filmed programs ran second to high-quality live dramas, but eventually, pre-recording became the standard mode of production thanks to the profitability of reruns and syndication. By 1953, many major studios became actively involved - notably Disney (with its weekly ABC Disneyland in 1954 promoting the Disneyland theme park and recycling already-released products, and its afternoon TV show The Mickey Mouse Club in 1955). Other TV shows became popular:
- the early sitcom I Love Lucy (on CBS, beginning in 1951); its stars Lucille Ball and husband Desi Arnaz had founded Desilu Productions in 1950
- the family show The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (on ABC, from 1952-1966)
- The Donna Reed Show (on ABC, from 1958-1966)
- The Honeymooners (from 1951 and after)
- Lassie (on CBS, from 1954-1971)
- Gunsmoke (on CBS, from 1955-1975) with James Arness as Matt Dillon
- This is Your Life (on NBC, from 1952-1961)
In the 1955-56 season, the ABC TV show Warner Brothers Presents was the first television program produced by Warner Brothers Pictures, and marked the introduction of the major Hollywood studios into television production. It was a survival tactic for the studios to pioneer in television series production. In the same year, Twentieth Century-Fox Hour played on CBS (from 1955-1957) and MGM's documentary series MGM Parade on ABC. And later, in the mid- to late 50s, Warner Bros. studios produced more TV shows, such as their first hit series Cheyenne (1955-1963 with Clint Walker), Maverick (1957-1962, first with James Garner) and 77 Sunset Strip (1958-1964). By the end of 1957, more than 100 Hollywood-produced television series were being broadcast or in production. By 1960, Hollywood dominated prime time.
In the mid-1950s, major studios began to sell and release older black-and-white B-movies (and film rights) to television for broadcast and viewing, albeit primarily to individual stations, not networks. The first Hollywood feature film to be broadcast on US television (on November 3, 1956), during prime-time, was The Wizard of Oz (1939). In 1961, NBC became the first network to premiere recently released, major studio films on the tube. Its popular weekly show Saturday Night at the Movies, was immediately duplicated by the other networks, and by 1968, every night of the week featured a prime-time movie. This phenomenon lasted through the ’70s, triggering Hollywood to produce its own made-for-TV movies and miniseries beginning in the mid-’60s. The first made-for-TV movie, broadcast on NBC, was See How They Run (1964).
TV stars became cross-over film stars - the first was Charlton Heston. In early 1950, Western cowboy star Gene Autry was the first film star to announce his appearance in a sponsored TV series. The feature-length, color version of Dragnet (1954), with popular detective TV star Jack Webb (serving as director, producer, and star) as dead-pan LAPD Sgt. Joe Friday, was the first film based on a TV show - the then-popular B/W TV show of the same name ran from 1951-1959. It was memorable for its "Dum, de Dum Dum" theme music (that first made an appearance in the Miklos Rozsa soundtrack for the film noir The Killers (1946)), and the disclaimer: "Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent."
One positive side-effect of the growing influence of American television in the 50s was that it was becoming the proving ground for many aspiring directors. Some of the directors who began in TV in this decade were to make some of Hollywood's best movies in the 60s:
Delbert Mann's direction of Paddy Chayefsky's script (initially written as a TV play and produced for NBC Television Playhouse and aired in 1953 with Rod Steiger) for the black and white Marty (1955) about a romantically-insecure and lonely Bronx butcher (Best Actor-winning Ernest Borgnine) who found love with someone his friends called a 'dog'. It was a big winner on the film screen - it was the first American film chosen at the Cannes Film Festival as Best Picture since the award was instituted, and it won four major Academy Awards, including Best Picture from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Coincidentally, two of the biggest films at the start of the decade, director Henry King's Twelve O'Clock High (1949) about the stress experienced by American bombing units in England, and Delmer Daves' Broken Arrow (1950), an "adult-Western" of the blood-brother relationship between an Indian agent (James Stewart) and Apache chief Cochise (white actor Jeff Chandler), would both become episodic TV series in future years.
Along with Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow (1957), Broken Arrow was notable for having a sympathetic depiction of the Native American culture and concerns - the first film to be shot from the Indians' point-of-view for many years. This revisionist effort would be followed years later by the politically-correct, award-winning Dances With Wolves (1990).
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Hollywood's War Against Television:
The width-to-height aspect ratio of most Hollywood films before the 50s was 4:3 (or 1.33:1), similar to the boxy-size of a television screen. [However, it should be noted that there were early experiments in wide-screen formats as early as the late 1920s, such as in French director Abel Gance's epic Napoleon (1927), with its Polyvision and 3-screen projection, or in Fox's 70mm. wide-gauge "Grandeur" system first used in Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930). Both systems were aborted attempts, and turned out to be uneconomically viable at the time.]
So in its war against television, the film industry had three major campaigns involving technical advances with wide-screen experiences, color, and scope:
- Cinerama
- 3-D and Smell-O-Vision
- CinemaScope
- Other Widescreen Formats and Processes
Cinerama (1952-1962)
- Cinerama Holiday (1955)
- The Seven Wonders of the World (1957)
- the Lowell Thomas production of Search for Paradise (1958)
- The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962)
- the last Cinerama-released film, How the West Was Won (1962)
[In the 60s, MGM and UA also produced films including Khartoum (1966), It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1965), and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) in 70 mm. Ultra Panavision for Cinerama screens, dubbed Super Cinerama or Cinerama 70mm. In 1963, the world's largest Cinerama screen - Cinerama Dome - was 90 feet wide and unveiled in Hollywood.]
3-D Movies
The first full-length 3-D feature sound film was UA's cheaply-made jungle adventure Bwana Devil (1952)) by writer/director Arch Oboler, and starring Robert Stack - its taglines advertised: "A Lion in Your Lap" and "A Lover In Your Arms." The film depicted man-eating lion attacks upon the builders of the Uganda Railway. [Note: The first feature-length 3-D film was The Power of Love (1922).]
The 3-D effect was also used in many different genres:
- in horror films (Warners' and B-film maker Andre de Toth's House of Wax (1953) with horror master Vincent Price, a remake of Warners' The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)) - the first 3-D horror film to be in the top ten box office hits in its year of release, Vincent Price portrayed the owner of a macabre wax museum in his first horror film, House of Wax (1953)
- in musicals (George Sidney's Kiss Me Kate (1953))
- in romantic musical comedies (The French Line (1953) starring busty Jane Russell) - one provocative tagline touted: "It'll knock BOTH your eyes out"
- in westerns (Douglas Sirk's Taza, Son of Cochise (1954))
- in science fiction (the cheaply-made Robot Monster (1953), and It Came From Outer Space (1953) - the first 3-D science fiction film) - and shortly thereafter, in The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), a story of a Gill-Man set in the Amazon
- in thrillers (Hitchcock's 3-D version of Dial M For Murder (1954))
Aroma-Rama and Smell-O-Vision
Other short-lived film fads in this decade and afterwards, that were designed to tear viewers away from their TVs, included Charles Weiss' 1959 system of pumping "Oriental" scents into the theatre through the air-conditioning system - it was dubbed Aroma-Rama. Aroma-Rama was prominently used in Carlo Lizzani's Behind the Great Wall (1959), an Italian documentary about Red China narrated by Chet Huntley. In fact, this olfactory approach to expanding the movie-going experience actually had lesser-known precedents in 1906 (rose oil permeated Forest City Pennsylvania's Family Theatre during a Rose Bowl game newsreel), in 1929 (lilac oil was spread through the ventilation system of a Boston theater during the opening credits of the love story Lilac Time (1928)), and in the 1940s (various scents were distributed during the double-bill The Sea Hawk (1940) and Boom Town (1940) in a Detroit theater).
Smell-O-Vision was a similar process that came slightly later in 1960, developed by the Swiss-born Hans Laube, in which 30 different smells were injected into a movie theatre's seats when triggered by various points in the film's soundtrack. Only one film was made with this gimmicky process - Michael Todd Jr.'s' Scent of Mystery (1960) (aka Holiday in Spain). [Two decades later, director John Waters paid homage to this concept with his patented system dubbed Odorama for his B-film melodrama Polyester (1981). It used scratch-and-sniff cards and a number-system on-screen to alert an audience member when to respond.]
CinemaScope
The dramatic costume epic told the story of a Roman tribune Marcellus (Richard Burton) who was converted to Christianity by Pythagoras (Victor Mature), his slave. Two other early efforts in CinemaScope were Beneath the 12 Mile Reef (1953) and How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). The CinemaScope wide-screen system would last for the next fourteen years.
Other Wide-Screen Formats and Processes - Milestones
- - Paramount's VistaVision (used in Hitchcock's well-known thrillers To Catch a Thief (1955), his own re-make The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958), and North by Northwest (1959), and in DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956))
- - SuperScope (RKO's answer to Fox's CinemaScope), and WarnerScope (Warners' answer to Fox's CinemaScope)
- - MGM's Camera 65 (later called Super Panavision-70 and Ultra Panavision-70)
- - Panavision
- - TechniScope
- - Todd-AO 70 mm (producer Mike Todd's pioneering, independently-owned system); Super Technirama 70 mm. was a Todd-AO-compatible 70mm format
The following are milestones in the wide-screen formats:
- first VistaVision film - director Michael Curtiz' and Paramount's hit film White Christmas (1954), an Irving Berlin musical with its most-famous scene of Bing Crosby singing the title song; in the story - a follow-up remake of the earlier hit Holiday Inn (1942), Bob Wallace (Bing Crosby) and song-and-dance partner Phil Davis (Danny Kaye) put on a Christmas show to save a Vermont lodge while paired up with the Haynes Sisters: Betty (Rosemary Clooney) and Judy (Vera-Ellen)
- first film in SuperScope - the western Vera Cruz (1954), and later, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
- first film in WarnerScope - Santiago (1956) (aka The Gun Runner , and later Raoul Walsh's The Naked and the Dead (1958)
- first film in MGM's Camera 65 (or Ultra Panavision 70) - Raintree County (1957)
- Ben-Hur (1959) was a Camera 65 picture - the first film shot with Panavision lenses to win the Best Cinematography Academy Award
- first Todd-AO used successfully in Fred Zinnemann's Oklahoma! (1955), Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Josh Logan's South Pacific (1958), and Porgy and Bess (1959)
- first film in Super Panavision-70 - The Big Fisherman (1959), followed by Exodus (1961) and West Side Story (1961)
- first films in Super Technirama - Sleeping Beauty (1959), Solomon and Sheba (1959), Spartacus (1960), King of Kings (1961), and El Cid (1961)
- first film in Ultra Panavision-70 - Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)
- first film in TechniScope - A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
However, Hollywood definitely lost the struggle, because wide-screen films were enormously expensive and risky to make. And it could not find a perfect antidote to reverse TV's capture of movie audiences. The number of feature films released fluctuated each year and often declined - reflecting the financial woes of the movie industry. Eventually, Hollywood gave up the idea of shooting films on 65 or 70 mm film, and reverted back to cheaper alternatives, such as shooting on 35 mm and using special lenses for projection.
Low-Budget Showman: William Castle (1914-1977)
The horror genre was enhanced with his House on Haunted Hill (1959) with Vincent Price as the eccentric host of the haunted house with a vat of acid in the basement. [By the time the film was remade about 40 years later by director William Malone as House on Haunted Hill (1999), the offer to guests to spend a night in the house was upped from $10,000 to $1 million.] One of Castle's outrageous techniques for this film, his "Emergo" 3-D system, pulled an inflatable plastic, glow-in-the-dark skeleton over film audiences to scare viewers during the film's conclusion. Castle promoted "Illusion-O" for his production of 13 Ghosts (1960), advertised as "13 Times the Thrills! 13 Times the Chills! 13 Times the Fun!" Audience members were given red-and-blue colored 'ghost-viewers' (hand-held pieces of cardboard) in order to see (or not see) the ghosts on-screen in the haunted house. His film Homicidal (1961) was promoted with a "Fright Break," a 45-second timer during the film's climax. The voice-over advised the audience of the time remaining in which they could leave the theatre and receive a full refund if they were too frightened. However, those who wished to leave had to endure the humiliations of a "Coward's Corner" set up in the lobby and bathed in yellow light - something even worse than remaining to watch the rest of the film.
At the start of Castle's Mr. Sardonicus (1961), he personally introduced the tale as "full of gallantry, graciousness and ghouls," and then reappeared in the film's conclusion to ask the audience about their preference for the evil Sardonicus' fate. The gimmick allowed audiences to vote in a “Punishment Poll" - each audience member was given a card with a glow-in-the-dark thumb they could hold either up or down to decide if Mr. Sardonicus would be cured or die at the end of the film. [Joe Dante's Matinee (1993), a tale set in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, was about a Castle-like showman (portrayed by John Goodman) named Lawrence Woolsey who was promoting his latest gimmicky horror film, Mant!, in Key West, Florida.]
Extravagant, Expensive, Hollywood Epics:
Other epics in mid-decade were Michael Curtiz' Biblical spectacle The Egyptian (1954) and Desiree (1954) with Marlon Brando as an inept Napoleon. Producer/director Howard Hawks' larger-than-life Land of the Pharaohs (1955), co-scripted by William Faulkner and starring Joan Collins as an evil Egyptian princess, was designed to lure television viewers away from their sets with its extravagance and cast of thousands. The exotic adventure film King Solomon's Mines (1950), based on a novel by H.R. Haggard, starred Stewart Granger as diamond-hunting Allan Quartermain with husband-seeking Deborah Kerr in the African jungle (filmed on location). Two films based on Jules Verne's novels starred James Mason: Disney's sci-fi adventure 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), with Kirk Douglas as a 19th-century whaler and James Mason as Captain Nemo in a submarine named the Nautilus, and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) with Mason as a professor leading an expedition into an Icelandic volcano that led them to an underground world where living dinosaurs still existed.
(1) DeMille remade his own 1923 silent film for his final powerful film, re-creating the solemn Biblical epic with special effects such as the miraculous parting of the Red Sea (with 300,000 gallons of water), Charlton Heston as Old Testament prophet Moses, Yul Brynner as the stubborn Pharaoh ("So let it be written, so let it be done"), and a cast of thousands - The Ten Commandments (1956). [Former falsely-accused, blacklisted actor Edward G. Robinson performed in a comeback role as Dathan in the film.]
(2) George Stevens' Giant (1956) was a sprawling epic about a wealthy Texas family of cattle ranchers spanning a twenty-five year period, with big name stars James Dean (in his final film release), Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor.
(3) And Mike Todd's epic travelogue film version of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days (1956), the second Todd-AO production, was reportedly one of the largest film projects ever made in Hollywood. It employed every means of transportation for wagering Phileas Fogg (David Niven) to circle the globe in 80 days to win a bet, including trains, boats, and a balloon. The film included scores of cameo roles, thousands of extras and costumes, a cavalcade of animals (and their animal handlers), and a whirlwind global journey - and it won five Academy Awards (including Best Picture - and in retrospect has been widely considered one of the poorest Best Picture winners).
Other lengthy, wide-screen, full-color blockbuster epics were guaranteed to follow: War and Peace (1956) (with Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda) and Anthony Mann's El Cid (1961) (featuring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren).
William Wyler directed the award-winning remake of Ben-Hur (1959) with its celebrated, live-action chariot race, a much-celebrated film in 65 mm big-screen format that won 11 Oscars out of twelve nominations (more than any other movie in Academy Award history to that time). At $15 million, it was the most expensive film ever made up to its time, and the most expensive film of the 50s decade. It told the story of Prince Judah (Charlton Heston) who was cruelly sent into slavery after an accident, and returned to seek revenge on his oppressors. A similar Roman epic at the end of the decade, Kubrick's Spartacus (1960) starred Kirk Douglas in the title role as a gladiator and the leader of a slave revolt.
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Films About Hollywood Itself and the Stage:
Nicholas Ray directed the brooding, biting film noirish story of a borderline, often-violent, hot-tempered Hollywood screenwriter (Humphrey Bogart) suspected of murder in In a Lonely Place (1950). And George Cukor's widescreen A Star is Born (1954), the second version of this classic film, contrasted the rising Hollywood stardom of a singer/actress (Judy Garland in her own comeback from depression and drug abuse) and the decline of her washed-up alcoholic husband/mentor (James Mason).
Robert Aldrich's The Big Knife (1955), a screen adaptation of Clifford Odets' 1949 stage play, presented a devastating look at Hollywood's ruthless search for fame and power in its tale of actor Charles "Charlie" Castle (Jack Palance), struggling with his personal life and estranged wife Marion (Ida Lupino). He was forced by his domineering, tyrannical, blackmailing studio boss Stanley Hoff (Rod Steiger) (and his slimy assistant Smiley Coy (Wendell Corey)) to renew a 7-year contract. The dark film noir ended with tortured Castle's extra-marital affair, the studio's silencing-murder of starlet Dixie Evans (Shelley Winters), and his own suicide (off-screen).
Although not about Hollywood, writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's literate satire about backstage intrigue, All About Eve (1950), with Marilyn Monroe in a bit role as an aspiring starlet, starred Bette Davis as aging theatre star Margo Channing. The film was noted for its witty, barb-infested script, and famous for Davis saying: "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night", and Anne Baxter as the ambitious assistant title character. It was honored with a record 14 nominations (5 of which were acting nominations) and six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. And Tony Curtis starred in two films about performers: magician Houdini (1953) opposite his real-life wife Janet Leigh as wife Bess Houdini, and director Carol Reed's Techni-colored Trapeze (1956) - about two acrobatic rivals (ex-real-life acrobat Burt Lancaster against aerialist Tony Curtis) in a competitive romantic love triangle with Gina Lollobrigida.
Ingrid Bergman gave an Oscar-winning performance (it was her second Oscar) as the lost princess in Anastasia (1956), claiming to be the last survivor of the Russian royal family. The film represented a comeback for Bergman, who had been exiled from Hollywood after a scandalous, overblown affair with Italian film-maker Roberto Rossellini.
United Artists Corporation:
Marilyn Monroe: Sex Symbol and Movie Star
She had her first screen test and signed her first studio contract with Twentieth Century Fox in mid-1946 for one year and appeared in bit roles (including the musical comedy The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947), Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! (1948) and the juvenile delinquent melodrama Dangerous Years (1947)), and then in 1948 for six months with Columbia Pictures - where she experienced her first co-starring role as a showgirl in the low budget musical Ladies of the Chorus (1949). Eventually, Monroe returned to 20th Century Fox, signing a seven-year contract with the studio in 1950. She had two early memorable bit roles as the naive "niece" (mistress) of a corrupt lawyer in John Huston's superb crime-noir drama The Asphalt Jungle (1950) from MGM, and as an ambitious would-be Hollywood actress in Joseph Mankiewicz's acclaimed All About Eve (1950) from Fox. Her first lead role was in the Fox thriller Don't Bother to Knock (1952) as a mentally-unstable babysitter.
- in Henry Hathaway's Technicolor film-noir thriller Niagara (1953), Marilyn starred as a sexy, murderous honeymooner named Rose Loomis; the film's tagline advertised: "A raging torrent of emotion that even nature can't control!"
- in Howard Hawks' musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), she appeared (with Jane Russell) as a delightfully-scheming blonde showgirl and gold-digger named Lorelei Lee, and performed the classic "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend"
- in Jean Negulesco's comedy How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), she was one of three husband-hunting, gold-digging glamour girls (with Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable) who rented a penthouse to attract wealthy suitors
Director/co-writer Billy Wilder cast the blossoming blonde sex symbol of the 1950s in two excellent comedies: the slightly salacious The Seven Year Itch (1955) as a lust-fantasy object (known as The Girl) for Tom Ewell, and enduringly known for the billowing white skirt scene above a breezy subway grating (publicized as much more risque in press shots), and then as ditzy, busty ukelele-strumming singer Sugar Kane in the hilarious classic, screwball, gender-bending farce Some Like It Hot (1959) - one of the sharpest, best-casted films of all time with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as dress-wearing band members named Daphne and Josephine (and Monroe won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy).
[Marilyn, who had previously been married to James Dougherty in 1942 (and divorced in 1946) eloped with baseball player Joe DiMaggio in 1954 in a short-lived union, and then married playwright Arthur Miller in mid-1956 (a four-year marriage that ended with a Mexican divorce in 1961).]
After starting her own motion picture company, Marilyn Monroe Productions, in 1956, she appeared in two of the company's productions as a kind, but no-talent saloon singer floozie in Bus Stop (1956) (with another Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress) and in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) opposite Sir Laurence Olivier as an icy Eastern European monarch. She also starred in George Cukor's third musical Let's Make Love (1960) (Marilyn's 27th picture) with Yves Montand (with whom she had an affair during filming), and her last completed film was director John Huston's troubled production of The Misfits (1961) opposite aging star Clark Gable. One film was left unfinished, Fox's and director George Cukor's Something's Got To Give (1962), a remake of the Cary Grant film My Favorite Wife (1940) co-starring Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse. [The film has since been reconstructed from existing film footage at 37 minutes. It includes her nighttime skinny-dipping scene in a backyard pool - it would have been the first nude scene in an American film by a major star. It was revamped and recasted with Doris Day and James Garner as Move Over, Darling (1963).] She died at age 36 on August 5, 1962 in her Los Angeles bedroom, presumably from a drug overdose, but circumstances surrounding her death have proved mysterious, with some claiming 'foul-play' due to alleged affairs with the Kennedys.
Combat-War Films and Anti-Communist Films in the 50s:
At the dawn of the decade, several dramatic World War II films made a comeback: Twelve O'Clock High (1949), Battleground (1949) an action film about American infantryman fighting during the Battle of the Bulge, and John Wayne as a tough, stereotypical Marine Sergeant in The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). The Desert Fox (1951) starred James Mason as German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel ("The Desert Fox"), the famed tank commander in war-torn North Africa who was ultimately defeated by Montgomery.
By the time the Korean War was over by mid-decade and the peaceful Cold War period continued, more combat and war-related films were box-office hits:
- Battle Cry (1954) - based on Leon Uris' novel about Marines on their way to war in the Pacific
- The High and the Mighty (1954), a gripping, airplane-in-flight-disaster film starring John Wayne (who whistled the theme song) as the copilot and Robert Stack as the Captain; it prophetically invented the disaster film genre and foreshadowed its craze in the 1970s
- Herman Wouk's novel was adapted as The Caine Mutiny (1954), with Humphrey Bogart on trial as an incompetent Lt. Comm. Queeg, defended by attorney Jose Ferrer
- co-directors John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy and Joshua Logan made the comedy/drama Mister Roberts (1955) about life on-board a World War II cargo ship named The Reluctant; the film was based on the Broadway play of the same name, and starred lots of acting veterans (James Cagney, Henry Fonda, and William Powell in his last film role) and a young up-and-coming Jack Lemmon
- To Hell and Back (1955) with decorated World War II GI and war hero Audie Murphy playing himself as an infantryman on the battlefront
- James Stewart as a US Air Force pilot in Strategic Air Command (1955)
- The Sea Chase (1955), a World War II adventure with John Wayne as the captain of a German freighter
The fear of the Communists continued to appear on-screen, mostly in blatantly anti-Communist, propagandistic films that are mostly fascinating from a social-historical point of view: R. C. Springsteen's The Red Menace (1949), Leo McCarey's My Son John (1952), Jerry Hopper's The Atomic City (1952) - a thriller set in Los Alamos, and Lewis Allen's A Bullet for Joey (1955). At the end of the decade, the story of a young girl in hiding before being discovered with her family and sent to a concentration camp was filmed in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).
The Musical Genre Reached New Heights in the 50s:
This decade also witnessed the prodigious rise of colorful, escapist, lavish, classic musicals (mostly from MGM and its production genius Arthur Freed, and from directors Stanley Donen and Vincente Minnelli) that benefited from wide-screen exposure, including such films as:
- Irving Berlin's smash-hit musical Annie Get Your Gun (1950) with Betty Hutton as the legendary sharp-shooting character Annie Oakley, and numerous Irving Berlin songs: "There's No Business Like Show Business" and "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better"
- An American in Paris (1951)
- the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein musical Show Boat (1951), with the story of an inter-racial marriage that causes friction on-board the riverboat, and the singing of "Ol' Man River" by William Warfield
- Singin' In The Rain (1952), the classic film noted for Gene Kelly's dance in a downpour, and Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh"
- The Band Wagon (1953)
- Calamity Jane (1953), with Doris Day as the tomboyish title character opposite Howard Keel as Wild Bill Hickok, honored with a Best Song Oscar for "Secret Love"
- Kiss Me Kate (1953), a play within a play and musical version of The Taming of the Shrew, with songs including "Too Darn Hot" and "Brush Up Your Shakespeare"
- Lili (1953) with its hit song "Hi Lili, Hi Lo"
- Brigadoon (1954), a Lerner and Loewe musical starring Gene Kelly, about a Scottish village that appeared only once every 100 years
- Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) with its exuberant dancing
- Guys and Dolls (1955), the screen adaptation of Frank Loesser's 1950 Broadway hit (based upon Damon Runyon's stories) with Marlon Brando cast in the unlikely lead role as Sky Masterson, and Frank Sinatra as Nathan Detroit
- Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1955) - with Gordon MacRae as Curley and in love with Shirley Jones as Laurey
- The King and I (1956) - the filmic version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1951Broadway musical hit, with Best Actor-winning Yul Brynner as the bald King of Siam ("Etcetera"), and Deborah Kerr as the Western teacher Anna
- High Society (1956) - the musical remake of The Philadelphia Story (1940) that featured Cole Porter songs and Grace Kelly in her final film
- Carousel (1956), a delightful Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, with Gordon MacRae as a carnival barker who must come back from Heaven to redeem himself and see his teenaged daughter's graduation - and
- South Pacific (1958) - another R & H showcase; this one included the songs "Happy Talk," "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair," and "Some Enchanted Evening"
- Damn Yankees (1958) (originally titled What Lola Wants in the UK), based on the story of Faust, and starring male heart-throb Tab Hunter as a baseball fan who made a deal with the Devil
- Porgy and Bess (1959) - directed by Otto Preminger, with George Gershwin music, and African-American stars including Sammy Davis, Jr. as Sportin' Life, and Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge in the title roles
Some of director Vincente Minnelli's best musicals were made in the 50s:
- An American in Paris (1951), the award-winning musical with a climactic "jazz ballet" finale brilliantly choreographed by Gene Kelly
- The Band Wagon (1953)
- Brigadoon (1954)
- Gigi (1958) - a Best Picture and Best Director victor starred Leslie Caron, Louis Jourdan, and Maurice Chevalier ("Thank Heaven for Little Girls")
Although Fred Astaire had ended his dancing partnership with Ginger Rogers, he danced with other partners in The Band Wagon (1953) (with Cyd Charisse), in Daddy Long Legs (1955) (with Leslie Caron), in Funny Face (1957) (with Audrey Hepburn), and in Silk Stockings (1957) (again with Cyd Charisse).
Adult Themes Explored:
With television aimed at family audiences, the movies were freer to explore realistic adult themes and stronger or previously taboo subjects, such as in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) with veiled hints at homosexuality, or voyeurism in Rear Window (1954) (with James Stewart as a wheel-chair bound photographer). George Stevens' A Place in the Sun (1951) demonstrated the tragic struggle of class differences, as social-climbing Montgomery Clift was convicted of the murder of his pregnant, working-class girlfriend (Shelley Winters) while romancing rich socialite Elizabeth Taylor. Thought daring at the time of its release, Josh Logan's Picnic (1955) starred attractive drifter William Holden who arrived in a Kansas town and romanced Kim Novak at the start of Labor Day picnic celebrations. A Summer Place (1959), with Percy Faith's recognizable theme song, was infamous for its scene of Sandra Dee's mother dragging her to the doctor for a pregnancy test after a beach overnight with lover Troy Donahue.
Marlon Brando Revolutionized the Screen with Method Acting:
Other films with adult-oriented content in the 50s included the stage-to-screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) set in New Orleans, with Oscar-nominated Marlon Brando (he had performed in the successful 1947 Broadway play) in a star-making, emotional role as dirty, sweaty and erotic T-shirt-wearing Stanley Kowalski. (Jessica Tandy, who had played fragile Southern belle Blanche DuBois in the stage production, was replaced by Vivien Leigh - a perfect counterpart to Brando's animalistic, swaggering role.)
In his films of the early 50s, Brando brought a raw naturalistic realism to the screen - a new style termed Method Acting that he had acquired at the Actors Studio in New York, also exemplified in the acting of Montgomery Clift and James Dean in the era. (Although A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) was condemned by the Legion of Decency for its bold content, it pushed back the boundaries of the Production Code while hinting at homosexuality, nymphomania, and rape. Brando would forever be identified with the iconic tight T-shirt he wore in the film.)
Brando's greatness as an actor in the early 50s was honored with four successive Best Actor nominations:
- Best Actor nomination: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), famous for his bellowing of "Stella-a-a-a" at the foot of the stairs, and for his brutish, masculine performance
- Best Actor nomination: Viva Zapata! (1952), with Brando as the Mexican revolutionary; also directed by Elia Kazan from John Steinbeck's screenplay
- Best Actor nomination: for director Joseph L. Mankiewicz' Julius Caesar (1953) with Brando as a mumbling Marc Antony
- Best Actor nomination and win (Brando's first): On the Waterfront (1954) - director Kazan also won an Oscar; with Brando as a failed boxer and stooge for a corrupt longshoreman's union
In the late 50s, Brando was also nominated a fifth time for his performance in Sayonara (1957), an early film with the theme of intermarriage between an Asian and American and the resulting prejudice, with Brando as a Korean War major romantically involved with a Japanese Kabuki dancer (Miiko Taka).
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Films With a 'Social Conscience': Stanley Kramer
Other powerful films from the fearless director/producer Kramer, exhibiting a strong social conscience and a serious 'message' about sensitive subjects were:
- Champion (1949), directed by Mark Robson, a boxing expose-drama with Kirk Douglas (who earned his first Oscar nomination)
- Home of the Brave (1949), a ground-breaking film exposing racial prejudice and racism in an Army platoon during WWII
- The Men (1950), directed by Fred Zinnemann, produced by Kramer, noted for the screen debut of Marlon Brando as a disabled veteran
- Death of a Salesman (1951), directed by László Benedek but produced by Kramer, a screen adaptation of Arthur Miller's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, with Fredric March in an Oscar-nominated performance as the tragic middle-aged title character Willy Loman; blacklisted Broadway play actor Lee J. Cobb was denied the role, although Mildred Dunnock recreated her stage role as Willy's wife Linda
- The Caine Mutiny (1954), directed by Edward Dymtryk and produced by Kramer, starring Humphrey Bogart in his Oscar-nominated role as paranoid Captain Queeg
- The Wild One (1954), about youth rebellion in the guise of black-jacketed bikers led by the iconic Johnny (Marlon Brando)
- The Defiant Ones (1958), another film about racism, about a black and white prisoner (Sidney Poitier, the first black actor to star in mainstream Hollywood films in non-stereotyped roles, and Tony Curtis) who escaped from a prison chained together; the film's award-winning script was co-written by blacklisted writer-actor Nedrick Young; the film brought Kramer his first Best Director nomination
- the thought-provoking, grim, anti-nuclear film about the futility of nuclear war, On the Beach (1959), a doomsday account (based on Nevil Shute's novel) of survivors (Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins, Fred Astaire) in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear attack, with Gregory Peck as a stalwart submarine commander
- Inherit the Wind (1960) - a dramatization of the John Scopes 'Monkey Trial' regarding evolution, religious conservatism, and creationism, pitting courtroom figures (Fredric March and Spencer Tracy) against each other
Later, Kramer also tackled anti-Semitism and the atrocities of Nazi war crimes (the Holocaust) with Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and race relations (and inter-racial marriage) with Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). Another Kramer film, Bless the Beasts and the Children (1971), was about animal rights. In his entire career, Stanley Kramer's 35 pictures received much critical and financial acclaim, and received 85 Oscar nominations (and 16 Academy Awards).
Director John Sturges' Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) was a suspenseful, modern-day western/drama about a one-armed stranger (Spencer Tracy) confronting a town's awful, racist secret. Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957) (with Andy Griffith and Lee Remick in their screen debuts) examined how easily the media could manipulate and dupe the public. And Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) satirized 50s morals, advertising, sex, and the growing power of television.
Hitchcock's sombre and noirish The Wrong Man (1956) examined the plight of Henry Fonda as a family man unjustly accused of armed robbery. Another definitive film noir was Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953) - it was an example of a sub-genre of criminal/gangster-syndicate films, along with Joseph H. Lewis' The Big Combo (1955), Phil Karlson's The Brothers Rico (1957), and Burt Balaban and Stuart Rosenberg's CinemaScope Murder, Inc. (1960).
Censorship Challenges: Otto Preminger
Since the mid 1930s, films exhibited a seal and number, showing that they were in compliance with the Motion Picture Production Code Administration (better known as the Breen Office because of the PCA's head Joseph Breen). The Hays Production Code was amended in 1951 (its first major revision since 1934!) with content restrictions for the film subjects of drugs, abortion, prostitution, and kidnapping. The constraints of the system were increasingly criticized by the mid-1950s, because filmmakers were forced to make changes in their films in order to qualify for a seal of approval, but some filmmakers were willing to take risks.
UA's stark black and white The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), under director/producer Otto Preminger's direction and starring Frank Sinatra, was also denied a production seal by the Motion Picture Association of America because the film dealt with the forbidden subject of drug (heroin) addiction. It was a test of the 'morals code' ruling on drugs. UA Studios resigned from the MPPDA and submitted the film to state censorship boards instead. Otto Preminger's legal drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959) (with Stewart as a crafty defense lawyer) dealt with another taboo subject - rape. It featured real-life lawyer Joseph Welch (famous for asking in the Army-McCarthy hearings - "Have you no decency at last, sir?") as the presiding Judge Weaver. [By the beginning of the next decade, Preminger was able to release the controversial Advise and Consent (1962), a drama about power politics and homosexuality (and Charles Laughton's last film).]
Darryl Zanuck's first independent production, Island in the Sun (1957) was daring for its time, since the Hays Code banned miscegenation. It offered two inter-racial romances between John Justin and Dorothy Dandridge, and Harry Belafonte and Joan Fontaine. The film provided the first scene in a US film where a white woman (Joan Fontaine) was kissed by a black man (Harry Belafonte). As the 50s progressed, there were other indications that the production code was weakening. Best Supporting Actress nominee Carolyn Jones played the role of a "nympho" in The Bachelor Party (1957), and four consecutive Best Actress Oscar winners portrayed "easy women" or prostitutes:
- Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve (1957), about a patient with several distinct personalities (one a loose party girl) suffering from a rare and controversial psychiatric condition, and being treated with hypnosis by doctor Lee J. Cobb
- Susan Hayward in I Want to Live! (1958)
- Simone Signoret in Room at the Top (1959)
- Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8 (1960)
Doris Day's Films and Other Romantic Musicals and Comedies:
The first in a long line of fluffy, light-hearted adult sex comedies in the early 60s appeared in the final year of the decade. The light-hearted, witty Pillow Talk (1959) starred the steadfastly-virginal Doris Day and Rock Hudson (the first of their three films together) - portraying two perfectly matched people who battled it out in a war between the sexes. Delbert Mann's Lover Come Back (1961) and Norman Jewison's Send Me No Flowers (1964) were other vintage Hudson-Day comedies. Doris Day also starred with other leading men in romantic comedies or dramas, such as Ronald Reagan in The Winning Team (1952), James Cagney in Love Me or Leave Me (1955), Richard Widmark in The Tunnel of Love (1958), an aging Clark Gable in Teacher's Pet (1958), David Niven in Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960), and Cary Grant in That Touch of Mink (1962).
The romantic drama Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), with Frank Sinatra singing the film's Oscar-winning theme song, told the story of three secretaries (Maggie McNamara, Jean Peters, and Dorothy McGuire) who traveled to Rome looking for romance with Louis Jourdan, Clifton Webb, and Rozanno Brazzi. Rosalind Russell starred as the title character in Auntie Mame (1958), recreating her stage role in a play that was based on Patrick Dennis' book about his eccentric relation. It was noted for her statement of her life's philosophy: "Life is a banquet—and some poor suckers are starving to death." A witchy Kim Novak with a cat named Pyewacket cast a love spell on publisher James Stewart in the fantasy comedy Bell, Book and Candle (1958).
Intelligent 50s Westerns:
- Delmer Daves
- Budd Boetticher
- Anthony Mann
Writer/director Delmer Daves filmed Broken Arrow (1950) - one of the first Westerns to show the Indian perspective (although white actor Jeff Chandler played the role of Cochise), the first-rate 3:10 To Yuma (1957) (the best of the High Noon imitations), Cowboy (1958), and The Hanging Tree (1959).
The third new director was Anthony Mann who typically teamed up with James Stewart in five films including the episodic, 'psychological' western Winchester '73 (1950) (the film that helped popularize Westerns for the entire decade), Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Far Country (1954), and The Man From Laramie (1955). Other excellent Mann westerns included The Tin Star (1957) and The Man of the West (1958), with Gary Cooper as a former outlaw plagued by his past.
Three other intelligent and popular Westerns were Fred Zinnemann's anti-HUAC western High Noon (1952) for which Gary Cooper won a Best Actor Oscar by portraying an archetypal loner/marshal taking a showdown stand for justice against the bad guys as the clock tensely ticked towards noon. [Ironically, he was one of Hollywood's actors who cooperated with the HUAC and targeted "Communist sympathizers" in the industry.] High Noon was marked by Grace Kelly's first starring role as the lawman's new bride, and an innovative real-time structure. The second Western film was George Stevens' mythic classic Shane (1953), a new kind of Western which featured an individualistic, existential loner/hero gunslinger. The third Western was John Ford's greatest masterpiece The Searchers (1956), possibly the greatest Western ever made.
At the end of the decade before his classic The Magnificent Seven (1960), John Sturges directed Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) and The Last Train from Gun Hill (1958). And from Japanese director Akira Kurosawa came The Seven Samurai (1954) - a 16th century style 'western' tale of seven hired professionals commissioned to defend a small farming village.
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The Cold War Era and Its Influence on Science Fiction Films:
Another popular hit was Robert Wise's intelligent and pacifistic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) with the tagline: "From Out of Space, a Warning and an Ultimatum" - a story about a spaceship that landed on the Ellipse in Washington, DC. Emerging from the strange craft were two aliens: a pacifist named Klaatu and robotic enforcer-assistant Gort - with a clear warning. [The film was remade in 2008 by director Scott Derrickson, starring Keanu Reeves as Klaatu.] Rudolph Mate's and producer George Pal's When Worlds Collide (1951) featured more special effects in a race-against-time and the world's extinction. Byron Haskin's The War of the Worlds (1953) (another George Pal-produced film) was adapted from H.G. Wells' 1898 book about a Martian invasion that was finally defeated by lowly bacterial germs. (It also was a sensational radio show in 1938 when Orson Welles adapted it for that medium.) Director William Cameron Menzies' Invaders From Mars (1953) was about a 12 year-old boy (Jimmy Hunt) who saw people disappear into the ground (where Martian aliens had set up a base) and whose parents had been reprogrammed into strange-acting zombies. Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956) showed the destruction of the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building by alien spacecraft, with special effects by Ray Harryhausen.
The first in a long series of Britain's Hammer Studios low-budget, horror films was the internationally-successful The Quatermass Experiment (1955) - it inspired a boom and revival of the classic horror and sci-fi genre that was being threatened by a glut of teen-oriented horror films. At the other end of the spectrum of 'serious' science fiction was Ed Wood's campy, hilarious classic Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959).
MGM's ambitious science-fiction film inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest, Fred Wilcox's Forbidden Planet (1956), featured marvelous production values and a much-loved sci-fi icon, Robby the Robot on the planet Altair-IV, where the Krell civilization was destroyed by creatures from the Id. The original sci-fi horror-film The Fly (1958) effectively told of matter teleportation experiments that went awry, and the capture of the fly-sized human in a spider web crying "Help me, help me."
Godzilla (or Gojira):
Japan's contribution, following the Hiroshima bombing - and Harryhausen's inspiring Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953), was to create the rampant, giant green, four-hundred foot monster Godzilla, who debuted in Toho Studios' and Ishirô Honda's Gojira - King of the Monsters (1954). [The name of the monster was a combination of "gorilla" and "kujira," meaning whale.] It was a cautionary story about the effects of nuclear weapons following the dropping of bombs on the Japanese homeland at the end of WWII, and during a time of underwater nuclear testing in the South Pacific. The film led to an American release a few years later (Godzilla - King of the Monsters (1956)) with significant alterations, after renaming, dubbing in English and recutting (removing all political content), and starring American actor Raymond Burr (before gaining fame for Perry Mason) as reporter Steve Martin.
Other science fiction monsters would soon follow from the team of Honda and producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, such as Rodan (1956) - a giant pterodactyl, Ghidrah (a three-headed monster), and Mothra (1962) - a giant caterpillar. The two did not make another Godzilla movie until King Kong vs Godzilla (1963), in which the two gargantuan monsters fought with each other in Tokyo. Godzilla also fought against Mothra in Godzilla vs. Mothra (1964), and against a 3-headed monster named Gidrah in Monster Zero (1965) (aka Ghidrah, The Three-Headed Monster (1965)). The ultimate monster film was Honda's Destroy All Monsters (1968) with all of Earth's giant monsters (Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, Angilas and Minya) threatening the cities of the world.
Due to its success, Honda was also called upon to direct the next year's All Monsters Attack (1969) (aka Godzilla's Revenge) - a 'best-of' compilation. The Godzilla monster would later return in the mid-80s as Gojira (1984) (aka Godzilla 1985: The Legend is Reborn) - a remake of the 1956 classic, in the mid-90s as Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995), and at the turn of the century with Godzilla 2000 (1999) (the first Japanese Godzilla movie since the 1985 installment to receive a US theatrical release). The ultimate films in the US series were Roland Emmerich's big-budget Godzilla (1998), and the 50th Anniversary film Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) - reprising the giant monster's battles with many of its old foes.
Disney's Feature-Length Animations and All-Live Feature Films:
Disney Studios' first all-live action feature film was Treasure Island (1950) - an adventure tale of gold and pirates based on Robert Louis Stevenson's novel. They also produced the exciting Jules Verne fantasy with Captain Nemo (James Mason) and innovative, Academy Award-winning special effects in Richard Fleischer's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). Its live-action, family film hit, Old Yeller (1957) was a popular, sentimental boy-and-dog tale with Tommy Kirk. Their final live-action fantasy of the decade was the hit family comedy The Shaggy Dog (1959) with Fred MacMurray.
Fairy tales, such as The Ugly Duckling, The King's New Clothes and Thumbelina, were creatively blended into RKO Radio's Hans Christian Andersen (1952), with Danny Kaye in the title role as the village cobbler and famed Danish writer and storyteller.
Greatest Stars of the 50s:
The biggest box-office stars of the 1950s were: John Wayne, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Betty Grable, James Stewart, Abbott and Costello, Clifton Webb, Esther Williams, Spencer Tracy, Randolph Scott, the team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, Gary Cooper, Doris Day, Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, Alan Ladd, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, June Allyson, William Holden, Clark Gable, Glenn Ford, Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly, Burt Lancaster, Glenn Ford, Kim Novak, Frank Sinatra, Jane Wyman, Yul Brynner, Cary Grant, Debbie Reynolds, Pat Boone, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot, and Rock Hudson.
James Stewart:
Studio control of stars significantly eroded when James Stewart signed a precedent-setting independent (or free-lance) contract to share in the box-office profits (45% of the net profits) of the Anthony Mann western Winchester '73 (1950), and for the film version of the stage comedy Harvey (1950). In fact, for all his Universal Studios films (including Bend of the River (1952), and The Far Country (1954)), Stewart took no salary in exchange for a large cut of the profits -- a very lucrative deal. As a result, he earned increasingly high salaries, became a pioneer of the percentage deal (a performer accepted a reduced or non-existent salary in exchange for a percentage of the box office profits), and was the industry's top box-office star by mid-decade. For Winchester '73 (1950) alone, Stewart earned between $500,000 and $600,000.
Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor:
The lovely, just-married (to hotelier Nicholas Conrad Hilton, Jr.), 18 year-old violet-eyed Elizabeth Taylor appeared in Vincente Minnelli's Father of the Bride (1950). [Taylor divorced Hilton in early 1951 and married actor Michael Wilding in early 1952.] She also co-starred opposite Montgomery Clift and experienced illicit love in director George Stevens' A Place in the Sun (1951) (adapted from Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy), and mid-decade reunited with the director for Giant (1956). Toward the end of the decade, she starred in two Tennessee Williams' adaptations, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) as a sexually-deprived Maggie (the "Cat") opposite Paul Newman as husband Brick, and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) as a lobotomy-threatened New Orleans debutante. [In early 1957, Elizabeth Taylor divorced Michael Wilding and married Mike Todd - who died in a New Mexico plane crash in March, 1958. She soon married the recently-divorced Eddie Fisher (from Debbie Reynolds) in 1959 (and divorced in March, 1964).]
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis:
The Golden Age of British Comedy:
England experienced a "Golden Age of Comedy" in the 50s following the war, with a series of celebrated, intelligent and whimsical comedies, many with superb character actors Alec Guinness or Peter Sellers in the starring roles. They were produced by Michael Balcon's Ealing Studios and called "Ealing comedies." [Balcon took over the studio in 1938 and ran the independent, craft-oriented studio until 1955.] Almost all of the comedies portrayed a slightly rebellious, small-time crook interested in mocking the authoritarian establishment. The social commentary films included the following four works, all starring Alec Guinness:
- director Robert Hamer's black-hearted comedy about inheritance, Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) with the versatile Guinness (in his third film) playing the parts of all eight D'Ascoyne family victims, and Dennis Price as the unscrupulous murderer intent on acquiring the family fortune
- director Charles Crichton's light-hearted caper comedy The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) (winner of the Academy Award for Best Screenplay) again with Alec Guinness as the unsuspecting bank clerk Mr. Holland who masterminds a scheme to rob the Bank of England, melt down the gold bank bars and cast them into miniature Eiffel Towers - but his plan is thwarted by a group of French schoolgirls; the film also featured a brief appearance by a young Audrey Hepburn
- director Alexander Mackendrick's satirical comedy The Man in the White Suit (1951) with Guinness as an absent-minded, obsessed amateur inventor in the textile industry
- Mackendrick's droll and farcical comedy The Ladykillers (1955) with Guinness as bumbling criminal mastermind Professor Marcus planning a train robbery with a gang of thieves (Peter Sellers in an early role, Herbert Lom, and Danny Green), all living in the boarding house of octogenarian Katie Johnson; this was the last of the great Ealing comedies; [the film was remade by the Coen brothers in 2004 with the same title, featuring Tom Hanks as the eccentric 'brain' of the larcenous outfit]
In 1954, the British film companies (Ealing, Rank, and London Film Productions-Korda) began to supply their feature films to US television networks - they were the first films to be made available. [Ealing Studios closed in 1955. A plaque at the studio described what Ealing Studios had accomplished over almost two decades: "Here during a quarter of a century, many films were made projecting Britain and the British character.] Small US producers, such as Monogram and Republic, followed suit and before long thousands of B-pictures and serials like Flash Gordon became available to American TV audiences.
The first in a long-running series of low-budget British comedies, Carry On Sergeant (1958), inspired the institution of middle-class, low-brow, wacky humor (with double entendres and one-liners) that finally stretched out to over 30 films in the next few decades. A few of the prominent actors who would reappear in later installments included Charles Hawtrey and William Hartnell.
Other British Influences:
UK-born Peter Sellers' popularity was enhanced in the United States after he starred in Jack Arnold's comedy The Mouse That Roared (1959). John Osborne's groundbreaking, popular British play was brought to the screen by director Tony Richardson as Look Back in Anger (1959), with Claire Bloom, Edith Evans, and Richard Burton (as an "angry young man") in the cast. This UK film led to a 'new wave' decade of realistic, "kitchen sink" British dramas in the 60s. The famed Universal monster Frankenstein appeared for the first time in color, in Hammer Studio's version The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) directed by Terence Fisher, with Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein, and Christopher Lee as the Monster. This film marked the advent of a long cycle of the studio's stylistic gothic horror films, with Lee also playing the famed Dracula vampire, as in Fisher's Horror of Dracula (1958) the next year.
In the same year as Hitchcock's ground-breaking and disturbing Psycho (1960), master British cinema-maker Michael Powell made a dark, disturbing and shocking thriller Peeping Tom (1960) in vivid Technicolor, one of the earliest "slasher" films. It was about a voyeuristic, psychopathic cameraman with a phallic-knife in the foot of his tripod that he used to kill young women. The film's tagline was: "Terror Meets Art in a Deadly Game of Cat and Mouse."
Notable Directors of the 50s and Their Cinematic Masterpieces:
- Rio Grande (1950), the third cavalry film in Ford's famed trilogy
- The Quiet Man (1952), Ford's own favorite film, a gloriously photographed film in the director's native Ireland
- The Searchers (1956), possibly the greatest Western ever made, and Ford's greatest film in the Western genre. John Wayne (famous for repeating: "That'll be the day") played the lead role as a fanatical, racist searcher and loner seeking revenge during an obsessive quest over many years for his Comanche-kidnapped niece (Natalie Wood)
In the decade, versatile producer/director Howard Hawks was uncredited as director for Christian Nyby's sci-fi The Thing (1951), directed sex symbols Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in the musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and Joan Collins in the grandiose historical epic Land of the Pharaohs (1955), and then made Rio Bravo (1959) with a combination of established western stars (John Wayne, Walter Brennan, and Ward Bond) and newcomers (Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, and Claude Akins).
Established director/actor/writer John Huston made a number of fine dramas of various genre types in the 50s:
- the crime caper classic The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
- the successful adventure/romance The African Queen (1951), adapted from a novel by C.S. Forester, was set mostly on a jungle river in Africa during World War I and featured a prim missionary woman (Katharine Hepburn) and a booze-soaked river rat (Humphrey Bogart) in an odd-couple relationship
- the Civil War battle tale The Red Badge of Courage (1951), a veiled anti-Korean War treatise based on Stephen Crane's novel, with real-life hero Audie Murphy as reluctant soldier Henry Fleming
- the biopic of Toulouse-Lautrec (Jose Ferrer) in Moulin Rouge (1952) with a celebrated can-can sequence in a French nightclub
- Beat the Devil (1953), an off-beat comedy (with Humphrey Bogart's final role for Huston)
- an adaptation of Herman Melville's whale-story Moby Dick (1956) with Gregory Peck as the crazed Captain Ahab
- Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) with Robert Mitchum as a WWII sergeant and Deborah Kerr as a Catholic nun stranded on a South Pacific island
- a remake of A Farewell to Arms (1957) with Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones
George Cukor's priceless comedy Born Yesterday (1950) was an update of the best-loved stage production featuring Oscar-winning Judy Holliday as dumb blonde Billie Dawn. [Through the decade, Holliday also starred in Cukor's It Should Happen to You (1954) (with Jack Lemmon in his screen debut) and Vincente Minnelli's The Bells Are Ringing (1960).] In his latter years, prolific director Michael Curtiz was still making films in the mid-50s, such as the buddy film and black comedy We're No Angels (1955), with Humphrey Bogart (his final film with Curtiz), Peter Ustinov, and Aldo Ray as three escaped convicts from Devil's Island. (The film was remade with Robert De Niro and Sean Penn in 1989.) And John Sturges directed The Old Man and the Sea (1958), an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's brief novel starring Spencer Tracy as a fisherman off the coast of Cuba who struggled with a hooked marlin bigger than his boat.
Chaplin's Swan Song Films:
In his final film in which he served as writer and director, Universal's unfunny romantic comedy A Countess From Hong Kong (1967), Chaplin appeared with only a short cameo (as a nameless, seasick, white-haired elderly steward). It allowed him to direct Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, but the romantic comedy was a large flop. It was the first (and only) color film (and widescreen film) that Chaplin ever made, and the only one funded by a major studio. It featured a worldwide smash song, "(Love) This Is My Song," written by Chaplin and sung by Petula Clark. His first return visit to the US was to attend a 1972 tribute ceremony at the Academy Awards, where he was honored with a special Honorary Oscar for his lifetime career of achievement ("for the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century").
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