1001 NIGHTS AT THE MOVIES: PART 4

                The late 40’s encompassed the glorious hey-day of the old studio system.  With North America riding a celebratory wave of post victory euphoria, box office receipts shot to an all-time high in 1946. As the decade closed, standards of technical mastery in all movie-related crafts took on new levels of polish. Television’s impending threat was still only a faint rumble in the distance.  I believe  the phrase “movies are better than ever” became Hollywood’s battle cry in the 50’s, but certainly a proud, confident movie industry – never shy about self-promotion -  had been implicitly generating  that message since day one. And in the late 40’s movie-going was still undoubtedly America’s favorite pastime. Bing Crosby was the number one box office star of the era, holding top spot from ’45 to ’48, with  frequent screen partner Bob Hope beating him out by a nose  in ’49. Grable, Gable, Bogart, Cooper, Abbott & Costello, John Wayne, Cary Grant and Esther Williams all graced popularity polls of the time. Toplining mainstream studio product, they generated mountains of money.  Not just in America but abroad as well. American movies and American movie stars were, it seems, what the whole world wanted. And with foreign markets no longer shut down by World War 2, American films asserted their international dominance as never before. 

                Westerns remained as popular as ever, with John Wayne assuming the superstar status that would fuel an unprecedented decades-long run of box office success.  Roy Rogers and Gene Autry continued to rule the B western range. While A-list Stars like Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, who had flourished in all genres for years, now concentrated their efforts almost exclusively on westerns – and with enviable success.

                All the studios continued to turn out musicals but MGM clearly solidified its regal prominence in the field. Artistically energized by producer Arthur Freed and director Vincente Minnelli (not to mention an unparalleled musical talent pool  -Garland, Kelly, Astaire, Sinatra and tons of other gifted performers), Metro’s best musicals blissfully reinvigorated the genre. Ice champion Sonja Henie had popularized competitive and recreational skating in a series of successful Fox musicals a few years earlier. And at Metro – from the mid-40’s on - beautiful Esther Williams did the same for swimming. Henie had won several Olympic championships before transitioning into films. Williams, a top competitive swimmer in her teens, saw her hopes for Olympic gold dashed when WW2 shut down the 1940 event. Her entry into films was all but accidental. But once they saw what they had, MGM built her into one of the era’s most imposing box office attractions.Headlining a string of hits that lasted well into the 50’s, Williams kept profits flowing into Leo the Lion’s coffers with gratifying regularity.

Esther Williams in 40's color - a match made in heaven

                Abbott & Costello, firecrackers at the box office during the war, found a second wind in the late 40’s when they started grappling with Universal’s monster brigade, initially in “Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein”, a sensation in its day – and now fondly regarded as an essential classic. Bob Hope remained a dominant force in screen comedy, as popular a solo attraction as he had been when teamed with Crosby. But sophisticated romantic and social comedies, like the ones crafted by Sturges and Lubitsch a few years earlier, seemed unable to take root in the late 40’s atmosphere. Films like “The Bachelor and The Bobbysoxer”, “I Was a Male War Bride” and “Sitting Pretty” were all comedy hits in their day, but haven’t aged well. Watch “It Had to be You” with Ginger Rogers and Cornel Wilde to see just how many ways a late 40’s attempt to resurrect screwball could go wrong . Somehow Hollywood seemed to have  lost the recipe, repeated attempts proving stubbornly out of tune with the postwar world. The dim bulb antics of Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule were popular but definitely represented a lowering of the comedy bar.

                In the years before World War 2, Warner Brothers’ “Captain Blood” “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and (best of the bunch) “The Sea Hawk” had enshrined Errol Flynn as king of the swashbucklers. His best films lifted the period adventure to exhilarating new heights. Fox gave Flynn a serious swashbuckling  rival when Tyrone Power duelled his way across the screen in “The Mark of Zorro”.  Though  successful in multiple genres, both actors regularly - and gracefully - employed sword and cutlass to embellish their popularity. After the war, their studios saw fit to construct lavish new swashbucklers around both. Power dazzled in “Captain from Castile” ( filmed in Mexico) and “Prince of Foxes”, lovingly shot amid splendid historic Italian locations. Certainly one of the most beautiful black and white movies ever made. Flynn ended the period with one of his greatest vehicles, the elegant and elegiac “Adventures of Don Juan”. Other studios and other stars got into the game, including onetime member of the U.S. fencing team Cornel Wilde (“Bandit of Sherwood Forest”), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (in Max Ophul’s superb “The Exile”) and – in an unlikely but effective bit of casting – Larry Parks, doing a 180 after his epically popular turn as Al Jolson, was “The Swordsman”. This was a marvelous Scottish swashbuckler helmed by Joseph H. Lewis, the inventive and exciting director who – a couple of seasons later - was to give the world the matchless “Gun Crazy”. Elegant Louis Hayward, who’d already enjoyed prewar swashbuckler success in James Whale’s “The Man in the Iron Mask”, also returned to the genre. Few handled a sword or wore doublet and hose with as much dash. Nor could many match his way with flowery swashbuckler dialogue. 1948’s “The Black Arrow” featured him in a Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation, first of many to flourish in the years immediately following.

                The now famous rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford reasserted itself with a vengeance in the late 40’s. As the 30’s progressed, Bette's popularity had risen meteorically; Joan’s commercial shine, on the other hand,  was dimming.  Davis became the screen’s top dramatic star – and a huge box office draw - during the war years. While Crawford’s status continued to erode (in a series of admittedly shaky vehicles) to the point where MGM cancelled her contract in 1943. Joan’s legendary determination served her well, though, when she convinced Jack Warner to sign her. Bette was ensconced as Diva #1 on the Warner lot. But when Joan’s initial vehicle “Mildred Pierce” unleashed a geyser of box office gold (and won her a Best Actress Oscar), battle lines for studio supremacy were drawn. Crawford’s phoenix-like rise (which continued with “Humoresque” and “Possessed”) coincided with a sudden string of weak Davis vehicles.  So that by the end of the 40’s it wasn’t exactly clear who was queen bee on the lot. Little did any of the participants know that all the sturm and drang – onscreen and off - would soon be swept aside by the sudden rise of a new – and decidedly different - Warners’ discovery, Doris Day.  Her sunny persona would soon become the studio’s brightest box-office beacon.

Joan Means Business

                One of the most exciting developments of the period, movie-wise, was the wave of groundbreaking movies from abroad that began to appear on North American screens. They seldom made giant inroads at the box office (even in their home countries). But their exciting, gloves-off approach, jolted into being by the social and political shakeups of World War 2, offered revolutionary themes, approaches and techniques that would ultimately change movies forever. The Italian neo-realist movement introduced an unvarnished, tell-it-like-it is style – one that used real locations and largely non-pro casts to stunning effect. De Sica (“Ladri di Biciclette”)and Visconti (“La Terra Trema”) became household names among intellectuals and artists. Roberto Rossellini astonished the worldwide artistic community with “Roma-Citta Aperta” and “Germania Anno Zero”. Ambitious Hollywood performers yearned to be part of the movement. An awed Ingrid Bergman deserted Tinseltown to work with him on a series of Italian masterpieces. She also sent morally judgmental Americans into self-righteous conniptions when she left her husband to live with (and eventually wed) Rossellini . For almost a decade, a sulking Hollywood establishment wanted nothing to do with their former golden girl. France dazzled the world with Marcel Carne’s sweeping “Les Enfants du Paradis” and the spellbinding Cocteau fantasy “La Belle et la Bete”. Not to mention less celebrated but similarly impressive items like Rene Clement’s gripping “Les Maudits” and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s emotional refugee epic “Manon”.

                                                           

 Aside from the outright art films, Europe also revived a genre that would inspire a major Hollywood trend in the 50’s. Italy had introduced the sword and sandal (or peplum) film in the early teens. Hollywood enjoyed isolated, but spectacular, successes with the genre in the 20’s. And the early 30’s had seen  DeMille lending characteristic glitz to a couple of splashy ancient world epics. But since then very little. 1937’s costly, but crude and bombastic Mussolini-backed ancient Roman spectacle “Scipione l’Africano” had attracted little attention outside Italy’s borders. But in 1949 Italian film-maker Alessandro Blasetti took Europe by storm with “Fabiola”, a film that out-peplumed all previous peplums. Aside from the spectacle, it also happens to be a very good film. Stars Henri Vidal and Michele Morgan are both superb – and the whole thing is wildly compelling. Though the picture didn’t make it to American shores till ’51 (dubbed and badly truncated), Hollywood film-makers were eager to duplicate its European success in America.  DeMille himself was first off the mark with “Samson and Delilah’ - nowhere near as good as “Fabiola”. But its barn-burning box office success led to the long string of Biblical epics that became monumental staples of 50’s Hollywood.

                Many of the foreign films that made their way to North American shores were already in English – the King’s English to be exact. British movies were not unknown in North America.  In Canada, which - as a member of the British Commonwealth -  had a direct pipeline of films coming from the U.K,  they were already staples. Many in the U.S. had seen prestigious Alexander Korda productions like “The Private Life of Henry VIII” and “The Thief of Bagdad”; also some of Hitchcock’s 30’s thrillers received fairly wide distribution on this side of the Atlantic. But – for the most part – British films were unknown to Americans. During the war, the air in Britain buzzed with an understandable sensation of turbulent  change. The hostilities had sent  Brits abroad in vast numbers  and many came back with a new sense of their place in the world and in society. The wartime atmosphere of urgency certainly affected the artistic community, jump-starting a level of pride and passion in British film that galvanized the industry. Result: a golden age of quality film-making that lasted into the 50’s. Directors like David Lean, Carol Reed, Cavalcanti and Robert Hamer helped spearhead the new movement, producing films whose excellence all but demanded worldwide recognition. Perhaps the most illustrious standard bearers were film-making team extraordinaire Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger. Splendid, artistically ambitious productions like “A Canterbury Tale” gave new stature to the whole industry. And when the team  worked in color, they seemed able to get more brilliance out of that process than anyone had before.  In the midst of all this, Britain’s top studio head, J. Arthur Rank, made no secret of his determination to build a group of stars who could rival Hollywood’s in popularity and glamour. To most people’s surprise, he actually succeeded. Brits embraced a whole new firmament of homegrown superstars -  James Mason, Margaret Lockwood, Stewart Granger, Jean Simmons, Alec Guinness, Phyllis Calvert,  Deborah Kerr, John Mills– many of whom eventually reached positions of great prominence in Hollywood. The artistic boom that had begun during the war was in full, glorious bloom by 1947. Suddenly the British cinema was alive with excitement, classics and near-classics turning up every other month.  “The Wicked Lady” “Great Expectations” “I See a Dark Stranger” “Carnival” "Odd Man Out” “They Made Me a Fugitive”, “It Always Rains on Sunday” “Black Narcissus”, “The End of the River” “The Brothers”, “Daughter of Darkness”, “The Red Shoes”, “The Rocking Horse Winner”. “Kind Hearts and Coronets” and “The Third Man”.  All titles I love -  and it’s a  list that only skims the surface of what British cinema had on offer in the late 40’s. Subjects were wide-ranging, with excellence achieved in every category - hard-hitting crime and social issue pictures, fantasy, period drama and comedy. Universal leased the Rank Organization films for American distribution and many of them generated solid profits stateside. But the two British films that really lit box office fires in North America were Olivier’s Oscar winning “Hamlet” and Powell and Pressburger’s “The Red Shoes”, the passionate ballet film that won over even non ballet fans with its across the board mastery. Though it's not true to say there were no good British films in the 50’s, there was nothing like the proliferation of quality evident in the late 40’s. The biggest British stars were mostly lured to Hollywood – and for the U.K. most proved irreplaceable. Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth More and Norman Wisdom had their staunch fans – but on their own could hardly replace all the names that had repaired to California.  Somehow the atmosphere of excitement and artistic aspiration seemed to have drained from the industry. British cinema was soon defined by Doctor in the House and Carry On comedies and flagwavers reverently rehashing World War 2. Things were to be dramatically recharged in the 60’s – with directors like Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Richard Lester emerging , James Bond conquering the world and the rise of a whole new raft of exciting stars; this was the era when giant talents like Albert Finney, Julie Christie, Michael Caine, Vanessa Regrave, Peter Sellers and Peter O’Toole popped into the public consciousness – and stayed there.  But the treasure chest of cinema splendor Britain produced in the late 40’s left a permanent glow - one that still marks the period as a very special time in British cinema history.

Googie Withers in "It Always Rains on Sunday" - "No, haven't seen him"

                             Reactions to the end of the war were, of course, varied. Some hoped to just forget the massive upheavals and revel quietly in trouble-free times – trying, in effect, to embrace their perception of simpler times and recapture a sense of security and stability. But others, transformed by the decade’s events, felt the need to build a better world, one less marred by hatred and hostility. They sought to right longstanding wrongs. And Hollywood began – to some extent at least – to embrace this trend.  In the immediate post-war years audiences were confronted with several high profile films addressing  topics  up to then all but taboo onscreen –alcoholism, mental illness, anti-Semitism and racism.  Billy Wilder’s “Lost Weekend”, about an alcoholic and the havoc and heartbreak he wreaks, was a sensation in 1945, with Ray Milland, previously tagged as a light romantic comedian, scooping up an Oscar for his startling dramatics. Hollywood’s efforts at tackling mental illness were generally less adroit with   psychiatry often laughably simplified and misrepresented. In picture after picture, triggered memories of a single event, once confronted, provided instant magical cures for abnormal behaviour. Some used psychiatry as a little more than a source of colorful clues and solutions in Agatha Christie type mysteries. Scriptwriters rammed tortured snippets of Freud into dialogue that sounded absurd, no matter how much dignity Leo Genn or Morris Carnovsky intoned it with. Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” mixed dime-store Freud with visual injections of Dali, the result big boxoffice  but intellectually worthless.  Pictures like “The Locket” and “Dishonored Lady” positioned psychiatric analysis as little more than an exotic accessory for glamorous leading ladies.  Darryl Zanuck, head of 20^th Century Fox, was motivated to create something a little more substantial in the way of social problem films. Better than anyone else, he managed to find a balance between serious exploration of controversial subjects and solid, entertaining drama. Fox produced three social issue films in the late 40’s that all attracted major critical and commercial success. “Gentleman’s Agreement” offered Gregory Peck as a reporter investigating deeply entrenched anti-Semitism in postwar America -  effectively underscoring the fact that one of the key tenets of Nazism was far from absent in America. The film may seem timid by today’s standards but for late 40’s audiences it was an explosive eye-opener – and doubtless did much to help eradicate that particular brand of prejudice. Zanuck’s 1948 film about mental illness,” The Snake Pit”, with Olivia de Havilland, was another enormous hit, though – looking back – it’s hardly better than other studios’ melodramatic attempts to grapple with psychiatry. But perhaps the film’s massive distribution did help lessen the stigma attached to mental illness.  Which is, of course, a good thing. In 1949 Zanuck addressed anti-black racism with “Pinky”. Modern commentators tend to focus on the film’s drawbacks rather than its achievements. I think it’s excellent. Some tend to mock the unlikely casting of Jeanne Crain, Fox’s resident girl next door, as a young black woman passing for white.  Ignoring the fact that, under Elia Kazan’s direction, she gave the performance of her career (Oscar nominated, too). The film’s taut, intelligent script puts its heroine through the wringer, forcing her to make tough but credible decisions.  “Pinky” was a brave project to undertake.  But it turned into one of the studio’s great financial successes. And – judging from the fact that it’s still a compelling watch (and was seen by such a wide audience in its day) – it seems certain “Pinky” must have awakened a lot of minds to the harrowing injustice of racial prejudice. The film’s main cast was essentially female – with Ethel Barrymore and Ethel Waters billed second and third behind Crain – all three playing strong, determined women. So the film also functioned as something of an ode to female empowerment. Other studios entered the fray with “Lost Boundaries” and “Intruder in the Dust”(starring the great Juano Hernandez), both  excellent. And though neither found audiences quite as wide as “Pinky”, all did an admirable job spreading an important message.

                Beyond any other genre, the one most firmly associated with the 40’s is Film Noir. That name came from film enthusiasts in France and only decades later took hold in America.  But it’s certainly an adroit, poetic capsule description for the wave of fatalistic dramas that dominated late 40’s screens. Light and shadow criss-cross dramatically, as implacable forces chase men and women toward doom-laden, violent fates. The Depression, followed by the War had produced a generation for whom the world seemed anything but a safe place. One false move and the earth was likely to open up and swallow you. Noir scripts were laced with cynicism and uncertainty. Trust was something unlikely to be rewarded. Even sunny suburbs were vulnerable to the threatening tentacles of crime and depravity. Following the lead of the neo-realists, studios began shooting on real locations, giving crime sagas  a verisimilitude heretofore unknown. The tacky production values and woebegone locations used by Poverty Row studios often worked in their favour. With no studio largesse to conjure up lush settings and magazine cover fashions, the tawdriness – seen today – seems to deliver a truer picture of how people really lived in the era.  Yet, Noir worked at both ends of the scale. Big studio cameramen, taking the principles of German expressionism as a jumping off point, created masterpieces of light and shadow, chiaroscuro lighting adding infinite levels of hypnotic, doom-laden potency to the best noirs of the period. Even encumbered by the presence of Robert Cummings - always inappropriate in drama – Arthur Ripley's labyrinthine "The Chase" successfully used camera movement, production design, vivid supporting performances and sheer atmosphere to enthrall. Top level scripts in the right hands produced masterpieces like “Nightmare Alley”, “Cry of the City”, “Act of Violence” “The Naked City”, “They Live By Night”, “Criss Cross” and “The Third Man” – stunning looking and emotionally profound.   Noir’s heyday extended into the 50’s.  Its influence – on film and on the public’s consciousness - has been permanent. The settings may be specific to the years when they were filmed – but the feelings and fears inspired by the genre remain permanently relevant and powerful.

Now on with the continuing list: