Living Wide

At the end of World War II, regular moviegoing was an ingrained American habit, and the studio system sustaining it was to all appearances solidly grounded; in 1948 about 90 million people a week went to the pictures. Then came a convergence of troubles that initiated a shift of fortune. Within two years that number had declined by a third, and at decade’s end by more than half. The most obvious culprit was television, whose rollout, delayed by the war, was soon taking hold at the rate of a hundred thousand sets sold a week. Further disruption came from the House Un-American Activities Committee and the blacklisting and “graylisting” that followed its hearings in 1947 on Communist influence in the film industry. Concurrently, the Supreme Court’s antitrust decree in 1948 divested Hollywood studios of the theater chains that had long enabled them to dictate terms for screenings of their movies.

This erosion of top-down control was compounded by the growing clout of actors and their agencies, to the enragement of 20th Century-Fox’s head, Darryl F. Zanuck, who complained, “Last week, in this office, a goddamn agent started to tell me how a script should be rewritten,” and MGM’s Nicholas Schenck, who said, “We took Gable from a nobody, we lavished him with lessons and publicity…. Who taught him how to walk? Who straightened his teeth and capped them into that smile?”

And yet in the 1950s Hollywood “released more great films than in any other ten-year cycle in the history of American movies,” in the estimation of the prolific film and theater historian Foster Hirsch. It’s a view I too incline toward, though it is shared by little more than 3 percent of respondents to a recent poll.^* While Hirsch’s Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties is essentially celebratory, he feels the need to push back against “glib, patronizing, uninformed stereotyping”—stereotyping not just of the movies but of the era—and to defend films he fears might now be “ideologically scarred.” The suggestion of a split reaction, even a division of loyalties between past and present selves, mirrors in a way the internal struggles suggested by so many of the decade’s movies, which bear the traces of unseen combat and whose characters may be at war with themselves as much as with others. The system producing them was being shaken up by rapid change on all levels, from the power of studio chiefs to the increasingly influential tastes of drive-in audiences, who might well prefer Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956). Instability gave an unpredictable edge to the most minor western or crime picture. The old order persisted in many ways—above all in a magisterial command of technical resources and the inherited devices of classic Hollywood style—while the once broadly homogeneous audience splintered into distinct and less reliable subsets.

Whatever else it might be—by turns historical study, annotated syllabus for an intensive survey course, taxonomy of subgenres, trove of entertaining gossip, sporadic argument with off-screen interlocutors—Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties is at heart an implicit memoir, revisiting a staggering array of movies as life experiences. To read it is like joining an all-night conversation with someone who saw the movies when they came out and has a passionately held opinion about each one. Such a conversation always involves disagreements, often drastic; despite our shared love of Fifties movies, our lists of favorites would diverge at many points. I might have preferred that Hirsch had written a bit less on Method acting and more on the westerns that flourished so richly and variously, and that some additional directorial careers had received the close attention devoted to that of Douglas Sirk (a brilliant but hardly solitary figure), but that is to wish a long book even longer.

A mere list of what Hirsch aims to cover in some six hundred pages would exhaust the limits of a review. The scope gives him room to talk about films too rarely mentioned: Robert Siodmak’s labor relations drama The Whistle at Eaton Falls (1951); Hubert Cornfield’s stripped-down heist picture Plunder Road (1957); Desk Set (1957), the Hepburn and Tracy comedy of computerization; and Henry King’s Wait till the Sun Shines, Nellie (1952), a “dark and bitter fable” that undermines the small-town nostalgia it appears to celebrate. Hirsch’s tone is comfortably sprawling and amiably digressive. What holds the book together is the sense of personal investment in what he touches on, and he does try to touch, however fleetingly, on nearly everything—not only the films but the ambience and particulars of the world in which they emerged. In any life so wedded to movie watching, the border between spectacle and spectator is inevitably fluid—like those 3D moments when water seemed to pour from the screen to inundate the audience.

“I remember where I sat,” Hirsch confides at the outset, the location being the balcony of the Warner Hollywood Theatre, where he saw the newly released This Is Cinerama in April 1953. The memory unfolds at length in his opening pages, as if he were still processing its wonders: the “screen that seemed to stretch as wide and as high as the limits of human vision,” the “swerves and hurtles” of the roller coaster at Rockaway Playland, the converted B-52 bomber flying coast to coast while the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang “America the Beautiful.” (The extended cross-country flying sequence foreshadowed, as he notes, the Stargate finale of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.)

To a young viewer it must have seemed like seeing something built for eternity. But this particular moviegoing event cannot be duplicated. No theater anywhere is currently equipped to show the first Cinerama films in their original size and format. Although you can get the idea by watching a Blu-Ray restoration offering a “Smilebox” curved screen simulation, Cinerama was not about conceptions but about full-scale immersion. Like the other slightly less grandiose technologies that emerged around the same time (3D, CinemaScope), it granted entry into a parallel world of futuristic breadth and brightness and tactility, a world you felt you could walk through.

If Cinerama proved too cumbersome for narrative storytelling, and 3D’s initial popularity flamed out despite its potential as (in Hirsch’s words) “a means of heightening, enriching, and intensifying cinematic space,” CinemaScope (along with other wide-screen knockoffs and variants) became the decade’s visual symbol. Zanuck, who gambled the finances of 20th Century-Fox on the anamorphic lens that made CinemaScope possible, was instantly persuaded that “instead of depth and narrowness we need width and scope.” A Fox publicist picked up on the theme: “We live wide nowadays, preferring the ranch house to the two-flight. Our automobiles are longer and wider.” Newspaper advertising for the biblical epic The Robe (1953), the first CinemaScope feature to be released, promised:

The age of CinemaScope will come alive—as the imperial might of Rome crashes against the Word of God…. In panoramic scenes of flesh-and-blood reality and infinite depth, combined with pulsing color, you will be engulfed in the everlasting wonder of The Robe as it comes to the screen in all its awesome grandeur and glory.

Here as elsewhere Hirsch makes judicious use of the lingo of advertising and corporate memos to convey the atmosphere in which these productions were conceived and released.

It was a format made for copywriters. Also, as it turned out, for filmmakers, although the uses some made of it were far from the hieratic processions of The Robe. Sirk in All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Nicholas Ray in Bigger Than Life (1956) showed how the spaciousness of the wide screen, applied to close encounters in suburban interiors, could register claustrophobia and entrapment, or how the deployment of figures in a living room could make manifest the empty stretches separating them. The most banal contemporary settings—a diner, a bus depot, a hotel lobby—became epic, but by the same token the epic’s grandeur began to leak away into the merely desolate. Even the great outdoors in westerns like Anthony Mann’s The Man from Laramie (1955) or Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome (1959) could become not so much a panorama of unbounded space as a diagram of pressure points.

In the CinemaScope features released by Fox—singled out by Hirsch as neglected—the force of an individual director occasionally becomes clearly apparent, as with Samuel Fuller’s House of Bamboo (1955) or Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), but more often there is the impression of a powerful house style, promoted by Zanuck and influential on his successors after he stepped down in 1956. With their sustained long shots, choreographed movements within the frame, minimal close-ups, and avoidance of expressive visual flourishes, these works offer distinct optical pleasures regardless of genre or subject matter. They resemble immense, pointedly lit and composed canvases—history paintings of a sort—calculated (despite the occasional matte paintings and rear-screen projections) to instill a sense of solidity and objectivity, whether set in the imaginary India of The Rains of Ranchipur (1955), the Mexican wilderness of Garden of Evil (1954), or the little New England town of Good Morning, Miss Dove (1955).

In any event, for the generation that grew up with CinemaScope there was no going back from the novel pleasures of the wider screen. The movies that floridly showcased them—The Egyptian (1954), Land of the Pharaohs (1955), The Prodigal (1955), The Ten Commandments (1956)—were, aside from anything else, occasions to become lost in sheer vastness of sky, of plain, palaces, and encampments. These were archaic worlds transmuted into images of ultramodern luxuriousness. Also vast were the trim and tanned bodies sprawled across the screen like erotic theme parks. The biblical and historical epics, with their DeMillean mix of carnality and solemnity, were often mocked even in their heyday. As a devotee since the first release of Demetrius and the Gladiators in 1954, I am grateful for the serious attention that Hirsch accords not only to their feats of design and building but also to overlooked nuances of their scripts and the merits of so many of the actors weaving their way through those immense structures. He is eloquent in praise of Michael Curtiz’s The Egyptian (1954) as “a work of formal as well as thematic beauty,” muses on the political subtext in the blacklisted Albert Maltz’s uncredited contributions to the screenplay for The Robe, and pays deserved tribute to the “boldly stylized, semi-abstract settings” of The Silver Chalice (1954), a film more often maligned.

Only such miracles could stem or at least slow down the inroads of television, a medium that at the time really did seem more conceptual than actual. I can recall the wavering, bleached-out, black-and-white images of those early broadcasts. An episode of Captain Video seemed, appropriately enough, like a message intercepted from a remote asteroid belt whose urgent importance demanded attention despite the murky transmission. In due time the television images were bigger, sharper, and in color, but meanwhile, through all the blur and static, a cocoonlike intimacy was fostered. Going to the movies was a special event, but at home you could loll around any way you liked, peering into a private theater rather than gazing up at a monument.

The political shadings in The Robe that Hirsch attributes to Maltz—the framing of early Christians as “a persecuted minority who meet in secret cells,” the enlistment of Richard Burton’s Marcellus to infiltrate the cells and compile a list of members—would doubtless have been lost on viewers who weren’t looking for them. Blacklisting had ended many careers and driven some screenwriters to work behind pseudonyms or fronts, but hints of the subversive messaging the congressmen were so concerned about might still turn up where least expected. The most unassuming westerns could be full of surprises. The passionate denunciation of the Sand Creek Massacre embedded in Tomahawk (1951) is notable at a time when the event was passed over in school textbooks, and Silver Lode (1954) would suggest an anti-McCarthyist parable even if its villain (played with such snarling conviction by Dan Duryea) were not named McCarty. On closer examination, Tomahawk was cowritten by Silvia Richards, an apparently reluctant HUAC witness, and Silver Lode was the last screen credit of the writer Karen DeWolf, blacklisted after a career going back to the 1930s. Fifties movies would continue to be full of subterranean currents flowing in one direction or another.

Hirsch offers a serviceable recap of the HUAC hearings and their aftermath, and he cites as sources such indispensable studies as J. Hoberman’s An Army of Phantoms (2011) and Thomas Doherty’s Show Trial (2018), but his particular fascination is with the flurry of anticommunist features by which the studios affirmed their patriotic bona fides. These included most stridently The Red Menace (1949), I Married a Communist aka The Woman on Pier 13 (1949), I Was a Communist for the
FBI (1951), and My Son John (1952). The odd one out in the batch, as Hirsch notes, is Leo McCarey’s My Son John, which for at least half its length is as beautifully modulated a study of failed communication within a family as McCarey’s masterpiece, Make Way for Tomorrow (1937). Until the plot’s agenda takes full charge (John is a Communist agent and must be demonized, rapidly redeemed, and assassinated by his former comrades, while his mother nearly succumbs to madness), the interplay of Robert Walker, Dean Jagger, and the magnificent Helen Hayes is heartbreakingly precise and quite believable. The film was made under difficult circumstances—Walker died of a drug overdose before shooting was completed, and the ending had to be cobbled together by slapdash rewriting and the use of a double and some outtakes from Walker’s death scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train—but its contradictions were implicit from the start.

These films, with their mistrust of seemingly ordinary Americans who might be agents or (perhaps worse) dupes of a merciless foreign enemy, make for eerier viewing than they once did. It was fun to laugh at the grandiose voice-overs (“Pittsburgh, the strong heart of America’s industrial might, where the Commies had planted themselves to throw that heart offbeat”) and the one-note villains (“To bring about the victory of Communism in America we must incite riots, discontent, open warfare among the people!”). Yet I Was a Communist for the
FBI, from which the above quotes are taken, is undeniably effective not only as a brisk action picture but as a wrenching personal drama. Frank Lovejoy, as the supposed party member who must keep his real mission secret even from his family, undergoes a kind of martyrdom in the mix of anguish and pride he feels when his son recoils on learning he’s a card-carrying party member: “Keep your hands off me! Don’t ever come near me again!” He would have been ashamed if the boy had felt otherwise, assuring him at the final fadeout, “Even when you hated me I loved you for it.” As with many Fifties movies, situations and emotional dynamics that might once have seemed laughable remnants of a cultural moment never to return have acquired fresh plausibility in an era of surveillance and conspiracy mongering.

As it happens, Lovejoy also stars in a 1950 film occupying an opposite point on the political spectrum, The Sound of Fury (later retitled Try and Get Me!), directed by Cy Endfield not long before the blacklist forced him out of the country. To my surprise, Hirsch makes no mention of the film or of Endfield, although he does track the careers of other blacklist refugees like Joseph Losey and Jules Dassin, and delves into the more complicated stories of Elia Kazan and of Edward Dmytryk (who was condemned by HUAC, fled abroad, came back, did time, recanted, named names, and went on to a prolific Hollywood career). Of the postwar films that briefly signaled a progressive wave in Hollywood—among them Losey’s The Lawless (1950), Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949), Kazan’s Boomerang! (1947), and Dmytryk’s Crossfire (1947)—The Sound of Fury retains the harshest force.

We are dropped before the opening credits into the harangue of a blind evangelist whose face emerges in close-up out of total darkness: “I tell you friends, the world’s going to the devil in a dive bomber, and you’re divin’ with it!” But the crowd he calls on to repent is moving in a different direction, as with chaotic urgency they close up their shops or climb into their automobiles. It is the prelude to a lynching: the film is loosely derived from the notorious 1933 public hanging of two men jailed in a kidnapping and murder case in San Jose, California. The final sequence of the mob of thousands storming the jail, with pumped-up local frat boys leading the way, distills a collective bloodlust with an intensity unparalleled in 1950 and rare at any time. In the aftermath of January 6 it is yet another Fifties movie that becomes contemporary again.

The final horror follows a painfully meticulous account of the crime’s origin: the chance encounter of a luckless guy out of work and beset by domestic worries (Lovejoy) and a self-pampering sociopath played with scary precision by Lloyd Bridges. Lovejoy’s performance makes use of the most limited gestures and expressions to embody a Woyzeck of the trucking routes and bowling alleys, pent-up and almost incapable of speech. There is nothing quite like the moment when, anticipating arrest for the crime he abetted as if sleepwalking, he cries out like a frightened little boy caught misbehaving: “I’ve never been in trouble before, I don’t know what to do!”

Men had begun to fall apart on-screen more often than was customary. In Bigger Than Life, James Mason, addicted to the cortisone tablets pushing him toward a paranoid breakdown, stared at himself in a shattered mirror. In The Naked Spur (1953), James Stewart started to cry as his façade of tough vengefulness collapsed. In Fear Strikes Out (1957), Anthony Perkins as the baseball player Jim Piersall, oppressed by a domineering father, had a psychotic episode in the middle of a game. In Island in the Sun (1957), a West Indian plantation owner (Mason again) attempted suicide on learning he was of mixed-race heritage. In Written on the Wind (1956), Robert Stack, bedeviled by fear of infertility, descended into murderous alcoholic rage. Grant Williams in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), by the happenstance of chemical fallout, simply shrank, enacting a drama of male depletion and humiliation in the process.

Even the most heroic or brilliant faced hopeless odds and irresistible cravings. The sight of John Wayne leaning on his saddle in The Searchers (1956), powerless to save his family from massacre, conveyed a pain beyond resolution. In Forbidden Planet (1956), Walter Pidgeon, as the marooned space explorer Dr. Morbius, could only murmur disconsolately “My poor Krell…” upon grasping that the ancient superintelligent inhabitants of Altair-IV were annihilated by their unleashed unconscious urges—“Monsters from the Id!”—and sensing that his own repressions were putting his daughter in mortal danger. (In this outer space recasting of The Tempest, Prospero was Caliban.)

Women fell apart too, but under different kinds of pressure. Age, to begin with: Bette Davis spent most of All About Eve (1950) preoccupied with her age (she was forty-two at the time), while Gloria Swanson (at fifty) retreated into delusion rather than face her decrepitude in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Stars of the Thirties and Forties were cast in deglamorized vehicles—Loretta Young as a housewife endangered by her psychotic husband in Cause for Alarm! (1951), Esther Williams as a sexually harassed schoolteacher in The Unguarded Moment (1956), Merle Oberon as the driver responsible for a hit-and-run accident in The Price of Fear (1956)—roles calling chiefly for various stages of panic. Their male counterparts (John Wayne, James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Clark Gable) maintained an undiminished status.

The “woman’s picture” lost its primacy among genres. Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck affirmed their durability as masculinized western heroes in Johnny Guitar (1954) and Forty Guns (1957), while new idols like Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe didn’t get the kind of material that Davis or Crawford or Stanwyck would once have thrived on; Dorothy Dandridge’s career was cut short before she could build on her roles in Carmen Jones (1954) and Island in the Sun. (Monroe showed what she could do in that line as a deranged babysitter in Don’t Bother to Knock, from 1952, but the opportunity was not repeated.) Movies centered on women often involved addiction and madness. Susan Hayward as Lillian Roth in I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955), Dorothy Malone as Diana Barrymore in Too Much, Too Soon (1958), and Kim Stanley as a sex symbol hitting the skids in The Goddess (1958) all struggled with alcoholism, Stanley marking a high point in Fifties dramatics as she screams at her devoutly religious mother, “There ain’t no God! There ain’t no God!” Hayward went to the gas chamber in I Want to Live! (1958), and in Caged (1950) an initially naive Eleanor Parker, sent to a women’s prison as rugged as any milieu the Fifties had to offer, learned how to become a career criminal.

These are the kinds of films that would be revisited by myself and others in subsequent decades. We studied them as a pictorial encyclopedia mapping the culture we found ourselves in; some assumed it was a culture we were in the process of escaping from. Red Planet Mars or Invasion, USA rendered politicized religiosity and cold war dread as grotesque comic books. In Attack of the 50 Foot Woman we found an embodiment of latent female rage, in I Married a Monster from Outer Space an allegory of sexual estrangement. A succession of definitively stark black-and-white movies—The Big Heat, The Lineup, The Phenix City Story—exposed an inexorable core of violence. They seemed keys to what we had missed, as children, while watching a Disney picture—Lady and the Tramp or The Vanishing Prairie—or Donald O’Connor conversing with a talking mule in Francis Joins the
WACS, or another bubbly feature at Radio City Music Hall, It Started with a Kiss or Count Your Blessings.

Movies so often sink in deeper than imagined. The illusion of continuity with the past they can instill is almost too powerful to resist, assuming one wanted to. It is an impossible persistence, yet there we are: instead of the myth of the eternal return, the reality of the eternal rerun. Watching a DVD of Cult of the Cobra (1955), I retrieve the memory embedded in it of a rudimentary storefront movie theater in the Bahamas where I saw it at age seven, shocked that a bunch of noisy American servicemen in a nameless Asian country would desecrate the shrine of the serpent-worshiping Lamians, scared when the beautiful Faith Domergue showed up in New York City and changed into a cobra to kill each of the Americans one by one, and then moved when she couldn’t kill the last of them because she had fallen in love. I experience again the sadness I felt as the cobra changed after death into Domergue, lying motionless in a dark alley while the stupefied onlookers gaped down.

The Three Faces of Eve (1957) unreels, and as Joanne Woodward switches abruptly from submissive housewife to teasing party girl, I am the same nine-year-old in the same now-vanished movie theater on Middle Neck Road discovering, in an instant, new realms of bewilderment and fascination. On a visit to Mission San Juan Bautista in California I find myself standing on the precise spot where Kim Novak as the illusory Madeleine Elster took leave of James Stewart as the thoroughly obsessed Scottie Ferguson—“If you lose me, you’ll know that I loved you and wanted to go on loving you”—and it is as if an astral print of Vertigo (1958) were permanently screening there, the illusion of an illusion of an illusion.