Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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project to the studio as an “American take on the King Arthur tradition,” and
Montgomery Clift was first envisioned by Stevens to play the title role. He
selected Joe De Yong, who had grown up in Wyoming, as a technical adviser,
in order to assure authenticity in the look of the movie. The film’s nearly $2
million budget was based on a projected forty-two shooting days.
Stevens, who once was quoted as saying that he made movies “for a truck
driver in Indiana,” understood what pleased the audience, and Shane certainly
exhibited those qualities. However, Shane is also a movie well appreciated by
critics that has withstood the test of time. The Starrett family hires Shane as a
ranch hand, but in the end Shane leaves, riding off into the mountains, even
though the deeper social theme in the movie is that there is really no place left
for gunslingers like him on an American frontier that is abandoning its rugged
individualist traditions.
WALKING ON THE DARKER SIDE
Although much historical interpretation of Hollywood in the early 1950s
portrays the entire motion picture industry as running scared because of the
threat of McCarthyism, viewed in hindsight this characterization appears exag-
gerated. American politics of the early years of the Cold War impacted how
Hollywood was changing less than did the vast sociological changes of the
postwar era and the rapid rise of competition to the movies from television.
The urban populations of the nation were moving to the suburbs, and streams
of young families were relocating from the Midwest to California.
The great movie palaces built in the 1920s were in downtown locations
everywhere, but potential audiences for movies were moving away from
downtown. From the early 1950s to the late 1960s, suburbanization would
cause a great many downtown and inner-city areas to deteriorate. Cities across
the United States experienced the decline or outright closure of all sorts of
retail stores and service businesses. Their downtown areas frequently became
business centers that were essentially abandoned after the workday was over
and were surrounded by increasingly impoverished, high-crime inner-city
neighborhoods. Additionally, the typical lifestyle of American suburbia was
hostile to the interests of the movies. Young families, paying new home mort-
gages and frequently owning two cars, found a night at the movies increasingly
expensive, preferring instead to enjoy the numerous diversions the suburbs
provided for family socializing and recreation or turning to the at-home en-
tertainment center of their television set, which provided entertainment for
the entire family free of charge.
As television sets came to be found in nearly every home and apartment
by the mid-1950s and television programming expanded, the medium’s hold
Postwar Unravelings 133
over the loyalties of the nation’s mass audience solidified. Television became
the standard entertainment staple of middle-aged, middle-class Americans.
Nonetheless, a great many movies continued with themes, characters, and
stories typical of Classic Hollywood even as it became apparent that TV
satisfied middle-brow tastes just as well and far more cheaply. Much of Hol-
lywood production held on doggedly to what had worked in the past. Other
movies, however, began to lean toward exploring harsher portrayals of cin-
ematic realism, confronting more complex social problems, and increasingly
focusing on the underside of urban life and America’s respected social and
public institutions.
From Here to Eternity, directed by Fred Zinneman for Columbia Pictures,
is as dark in its mood as it is cinematographically, portraying risky love af-
fairs and, more importantly, a corrupt and brutish U.S. military on the eve of
World War II. As one critic expressed it: “Filming a book so openly scath-
ing about the peacetime army was regarded by many as foolhardy, if not
downright subversive.” Nonetheless, From Here to Eternity was adapted from
a best-selling novel by James Jones that enjoyed mass readership in the period
immediately following the war. Its popularity as both a book and then a movie
suggests that the decade following World War II was not so conventional or
conservative as some portraits of the period might lead us to believe.
The Hollywood Production Code Office predictably exercised its censo-
rial edicts over the character of Captain Holmes’s wife, played by Deborah
Kerr. In the novel, she had an eight-year-old son, who was cut from the
movie’s screenplay. As one pundit put it, by 1953 the Production Code was
able to accept that a wife might be an adulteress, but not that an adulteress
could be a mother! The Code also demanded that the movie turn the book’s
raunchy brothel into a serviceman’s social club where soldiers drank, danced,
flirted with girls, and held their hands, but nothing else.
The Life “Movie of the Week” article about From Here to Eternity pointed
out that Jones’s novel seemed to violate every Hollywood taboo. For the
screen adaptation, not only were all of the direct references to prostitution
eliminated but all of the novel’s references to homosexuality as well. Still,
considering the era, the movie was quite a steamy melodrama, brought to life
on the screen by Burnett Guffey’s crisp black-and-white cinematography and
the taut screenplay written by Daniel Taradash. Kerr’s romantic writhing on
the beach with her lover, First Sgt. Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster), when
captured as a still photo, became an iconic representation of passion and lust
for the early 1950s.
While the novel’s references to prostitution and homosexuality were
deleted, much of the brutality of the military described in the novel was
portrayed in the movie; for example, Maggio (Frank Sinatra) dies in the arms
of Warden (Lancaster) in a moving scene, after being tortured by the sadistic
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noncommissioned officer named Fatso (Ernest Borgnine). Producer Buddy
Adler and screenwriter Taradash also agreed to an unusual rollup in the cred-
its to placate critics in the military; it read: “These conditions can not and do
not exist today.” Still, the U.S. Navy banned From Here to Eternity from being
shown at its bases or on its ships. The movie, however, was just as critical of
the U.S. Army, which had cooperated in its production, and the Department
of the Army permitted the film to be shown at all its installations. Although
surrounded by an exotic island locale of Hawaii, the characters and their story
exist entirely within the closed environment of the U.S. military.
From Here to Eternity was an actors’ movie, distinguished largely by its
cast and their performances. Ernest Borgnine was absolutely convincing as the
vicious brig captain, and both he and Montgomery Clift, as Pvt. Robert E.
Lee Prewitt, who transfers into the unit and defies authority as often as he can,
delivered stellar performances. For decades, legend has surrounded the casting
of Frank Sinatra for the role of Maggio, for which he won an Oscar as Best
Supporting Actor. That legend was perpetuated in Francis Ford Coppola’s
movie The Godfather (1972), which many interpreted as representing an in-
cident supposedly drawn from Hollywood history whereby mob friends of
Sinatra’s won him the role in Eternity by threatening a studio boss, decapitating
his prize racehorse, and placing the horse’s severed head in his bedroom. What
can be verified historically, however, is far less chilling and closer to how Hol-
lywood normally worked. According to Columbia Pictures studio executive
Martin Jurow, Sinatra, desperate to get back into making movies as his singing
voice began to age, agreed to be paid only $10,000 for the role of Maggio,
and Columbia Pictures readily accepted the opportunity to obtain the services
of such a well-known talent at such a low price.
From Here to Eternity won the Academy’s Best Picture Oscar for 1953,
beating out the other four nominees—Julius Caesar, Roman Holiday, Shane, and
The Robe. This was a movie that justly could be called cynical and that was
very critical of institutions deeply respected in mainstream American culture at
the time; yet it was embraced by the mass audiences of the early Cold War era
as well as by the business establishment of the motion picture industry.
REAR WINDOW
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window was produced at Universal. The direc-
tor was quoted as saying: “If you do not experience delicious terror when
you see Rear Window, then pinch yourself—you are most probably dead.”
The screenplay was by John Michael Hayes, based on a short story by Cornell
Woolrich entitled “It Had to Be Murder.” Robert Burks, A.S.C., was the
director of photography. One of Hitchcock’s favorite themes was at play here:
Postwar Unravelings 135
how much people are driven to know their neighbors’ business, and how as-
suredly that desire leads to trouble.
The movie opens with the camera traveling slowly past photographer Jeff
Jefferies’s (Jimmy Stewart) perspiring face to reveal that he is in a wheelchair,
as the camera continues to move to take in a temperature reading on the ther-
mometer, travels down Jefferies’s leg cast, observes a stack of magazines and a
smashed camera, and then pans to the wall to focus on a moment-of-impact
crash photograph taken at the Indianapolis Speedway. These shots establish
him as a daring photographer who had suffered a broken leg while taking
those very photographs that are now hanging on his wall. This elaborate open-
ing sets up a movie that is dedicated to exploring voyeurism, especially by the
disabled Jefferies, who is confined to his Greenwich Village apartment and has
fallen into the habit of spying on his neighbors.
Rear Window is a Hitchcock thriller with no on-screen violence and
never an on-screen corpse. Instead, it is a movie about a compulsive love-
infatuation, structured by dream logic. Jefferies’s position in the film, of
course, interests those who see in the movie a situation that duplicates any
movie audience in a theater, since all movie watchers may be considered
voyeurs who sit immobilized in their chairs gazing through a rectangular
“window” created by the screen. Nonetheless, the Stewart character—like the
movie viewer—doesn’t just simply observe; he projects into the lives of his
neighbors his own imagined plots and narratives, and eventually he begins to
suspect that he is seeing the evidence of a murder.
In addition to Stewart, Rear Window also starred Grace Kelly, Thelma
Ritter, Raymond Burr, and Wendell Corey. Hitchcock considered this his
most “cinematic” movie, an interesting observation for someone who had
once said that any movie functioned as a mechanical apparatus that evoked
conditioned responses in its viewers. It was one of his most successful mov-
ies at the box office, too, almost universally applauded and appreciated at the
time of its release. Rear Window was one of five films Hitchcock made for
Paramount between 1954 and 1960, each of which was a solid commercial
success. Rear Window, for example, produced for $1 million, earned well over
$5 million in its North American distribution.
LOCATION FILMING, METHOD ACTING, AND NATURALISM
An Elia Kazan production, produced by Sam Spiegel for Columbia Pictures,
On the Waterfront captured the Academy’s Best Picture vote for 1954. As
directed by Kazan, using a screenplay written by Budd Shulberg, the movie
featured an accomplished cast with Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, Eva
Marie Saint as Edie Doyle, Rod Steiger as Malloy’s older brother “Charley
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the Gent,” Lee J. Cobb as the mob boss of the docks, and Karl Malden as a
crusading parish priest. The story is about the ex-boxer Terry Malloy, who is
a hanger-on, through his brother’s connections, to the mob that controls the
docks and the longshoremen who toil on them. With Boris Kaufman as the
director of photography and Richard Day as the movie’s art director, On the
Waterfront was filmed on location in Hoboken, New Jersey, at the docks and
in the immediate areas adjacent to them. Utilizing the bleak light of a North-
eastern winter for atmosphere, the “look” of this film creates a pervasive and
agonizing tale of intimidation and fear.
This muted visual naturalism underscores part of the movie’s claim on
realism, and the method performances—especially Brando’s—gives further
support to that claim. Method acting was based on the theories of Konstantin
Stanislavski, and a school where it was prominent, the Actors Studio, was
founded in 1947 by Kazan and two others and became a main center for
training talent for both stage and screen in the United States. The premise
behind method acting—although originally intended primarily to help keep
stage actors in touch with their characters and fresh in their approach to per-
formance through many weeks of rehearsals and subsequent performances of
plays—proved most appropriate for guiding performance in front of the cam-
era and for the American screen. Method acting, indeed, became definitive of
the approach to screen acting in the United States from the mid- to late 1950s
and showed its endurance as an idea throughout the remainder of the twenti-
eth century. The approach, whereby an actor does process work to dig deep
into his or her past experiences to discover moments of emotional connection
with the character’s situation, has been reinforced through generations. In one
form or another, a version of it is found across the second half of the twenti-
eth century in a range of screen talents: James Dean, Dustin Hoffman, Gene
Hackman, Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Jane Fonda, Meryl
Streep, Glenn Close, and many more.
At various turns, Brando’s performance in On the Waterfront is memo-
rable, beginning with his famous dialogue in the backseat of a taxicab with
his brother Charley, whom he accuses of having been in collusion with the
mob when Terry was talked into taking a dive in a prizefight that, had he
won, would have qualified him to challenge the champion in that division: “I
coulda been a contender.” Nearly as famous is the bit of “stage business” that
Brando invented when picking up Edie’s glove, as they first walk together
through a park and playground, then sitting on a child’s swing and carefully
pulling the glove over his own masculine hand while he chats with her. In
the screen role that a number of critics have called his most effective, Brando’s
Terry is rebellious but insecure, lacking conviction but somehow finally find-
ing courage and honor.
Postwar Unravelings 137
As Terry Malloy, Brando provided a model for the American working-
class male character in feature films for nearly the entire second half of the
twentieth century. This performance is a benchmark. Behind it, of course, lay
both the actor’s and Kazan’s interpretation of the movie as not being a social
documentary, but rather being Terry’s personal story, a subjective account of
a personal journey toward redemption and dignity. The rest of the cast sur-
rounded Brando with stellar performances of their own, which underscored
Kazan’s approach to the material. Saint as the angelic, but still believable, Edie
won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and Cobb, Malden, and Steiger all were
nominees for Best Supporting Actor for the 1954 Academy Awards.
For decades, a great many movie critics and academic commentators have
chosen to interpret On the Waterfront as a metaphor justifying informers, since
Terry finally gives investigative prosecutors what they want and testifies in
court against the mobsters. He does so, however, after they have murdered his
brother (and further humiliated the body by hanging him up on a meat hook).
This connects nicely to historical interpretations of the Cold War blacklist
period in Hollywood and the notion that the moviemaking community was
obsessive about the conflicts over the House Un-American Activities Com-
mittee’s investigatory hearings at the time. However, while often asserted, the
idea that On the Waterfront’s main story line serves as a parable for testifying to
investigators about Hollywood colleagues with past links to the Communist
Party remains unproven.
Although both Kazan and Shulberg were prominent figures at the HUAC
hearings and both had named names of past Communists to the HUAC in-
vestigators, Shulberg insisted that his screenplay was, after all, based on a well-
known set of Pulitzer Prize–winning articles on union corruption and mob
infiltration of the longshoremen, written in 1949 for the Scripps-Howard
newspaper chain. He argued that the comparison of their cooperative testi-
mony to HUAC and the plot of the movie was entirely fanciful. Although a
good deal of the controversy over Communist infiltration of labor unions and
guilds in the motion picture industry may have inspired friendly testimony to
HUAC, the lasting value of On the Waterfront transcended any possible politi-
cal references and is found in the stunning performances of the cast members
who made their characters so riveting.
SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN
MGM had been the wealthiest and most prestigious studio of Classic Hol-
lywood. During the 1950s, MGM held on to its preeminence in one specific
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genre of production by making the most lavish and accomplished of screen
musicals. Arguably the greatest of these was Singin’ in the Rain, produced by
the master of the screen musical, Arthur Freed, and codirected by Stanley
Donen and the movie’s star, Gene Kelly.
Singin’ in the Rain attempted to put together the same basic ingredients
as MGM’s 1951 hit An American in Paris, which had won the Best Picture
Oscar that year. Those ingredients consisted of a smash hit song (“Singin’
in the Rain,” with lyrics by Freed himself and Nacio Herb Brown), along
with a large dose of nostalgia, prompted by Freed and executed by longtime
MGM art director Cedric Gibbons and set decorator Edwin B. Willis, to
serve a script set in the earliest years of synchronous sound movie produc-
tion in Hollywood. The screenplay, written by Betty Comden and Adolph
Green, structures Singin’ in the Rain as a film-within-a-film and was intended
from its inception as a celebration of Hollywood and a showpiece demon-
strating how successful the surface gloss of Classic Hollywood filmmaking
could still be. Requisite for any screen musical of the early 1950s, the movie
was produced in Technicolor, with Harold Rossen as its director of pho-
tography. For one of the movie’s most renowned production numbers, the
camera department mixed milk with water to enhance the visual quality and
effect of the glistening “rain.”
The movie’s stars were Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor playing two
pals, Don Lockwood and Cosmo Brown, respectively, who come to Holly-
wood from vaudeville seeking fame and fortune. Don gets a job as a stuntman
on a western and rises to silent-movie stardom, eventually ending up playing
opposite the beautiful Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), just as The Jazz Singer is
being released and silent movies are coming to an abrupt end! Lina falls for
Don and decides on her own that they are to be married, but his heart is soon
taken by Kathy Selden, played by Hollywood newcomer Debbie Reynolds. In
addition, the cast included dancers Cyd Charisse and Rita Moreno.
For MGM, it might have seemed a risk to cast the novice Reynolds with
the established veteran Kelly, but the Hollywood contract player system was
still intact. Studios like MGM still recruited talent like hers with the goal of
nurturing that talent while reserving its handsome paychecks for more estab-
lished stars. Although her role was prominent in Singin’ in the Rain, Reynolds
was paid just $300 a week for it.
Although an homage to Classic Hollywood, Singin’ in the Rain is an
entirely lighthearted tribute that satirizes the trials and tribulations of early
synchronous sound film production. A box office success and an audience
favorite, it also has registered positively with subsequent generations of film
historians and academic film critics, and not in the least because of its many
references to movies, their history, and the process of making them. Unlike
Postwar Unravelings 139
a great many movie musicals, this is a very funny movie, indeed, with the
humor sparked by the performance of O’Connor, who was on loan to MGM
from his home studio, Universal.
SUMMARY
In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. Congress
began investigations into Communists and communist influences in Holly-
wood. These hearings continued for half a dozen years, divided Hollywood
between professionals friendly to HUAC and those vehemently opposed to it,
and resulted in a blacklist of ten men who refused to cooperate with HUAC
and were found to be in contempt of Congress. However, it is difficult to
document the actual impact of these investigations on Hollywood moviemak-
ing in the period.
At the end of the 1940s and during the first half of the 1950s, Hollywood
faced eroding business prospects caused by the quickly declining popularity of
movies with mass audiences. Much of Hollywood’s leadership, however, held
to making familiar movies and treating the period as if little had changed from
the era of Classic Hollywood. Some movies from the early 1950s did shift
toward harsher themes, however, and the aesthetic of realism made distinct
advances during the period.
For a brief time, there was an unusually close relationship between the
Broadway stage and Hollywood movies. The resulting crossover of actors be-
tween stage and screen work is a source for the inception of a distinct acting
style in movies that appeared in this era and is known as “the method.”
These were troubling years for Hollywood. Beneath the surface of the
movie industry’s façade, some filmmakers were turning inward to make mov-
ies about filmmaking and Hollywood; for example, although very different
films, Sunset Boulevard and Singin’ in the Rain were both self-consciously mov-
ies about making movies.
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By the mid-1950s, Hollywood appeared to be in a state of free fall, pri-
marily due to the declining audience for movies. What had been a weekly
attendance of roughly ninety million at movie theaters in the United States in
1946 plummeted to barely forty million by 1960. Even though the population
of the nation was growing, in less than a decade and a half, the movie theater
audience in the United States experienced a decline of more than 50 percent.
The official rhetoric of Hollywood and its establishment was that movies were
better than ever, and that television was a vastly inferior mode of entertain-
ment. In reality, Hollywood’s responses to the declining audience and the rise
of television were more complex.
By the mid-1950s, the overt choice of the movie industry’s production
sector was to utilize technology—a variety of widescreen formats, for ex-
ample, and, briefly, even the production and exhibition of movies in 3-D—to
differentiate the experience of watching a movie in a theater more fully from
watching television. The exhibition sector of the industry, however, could
hardly react at all. Movie theaters were closing at a steady rate, and the only
kind of exhibition that was actually increasing was the decidedly inferior, and
limited, business of outdoor drive-in theaters, whose numbers were increas-
ing. As for distribution, with the domestic market for movies declining, the
overseas sale of American movies in non-Communist countries was becoming
an increasingly important part of Hollywood’s business.
With little public fanfare, the studios were cutting back their production
staffs in all departments, eliminating long-term player contracts, and begin-
ning to look to outside sources for music while eliminating their own studio
orchestras. Hollywood motion picture production was well on its way to
becoming predominately freelance. With no fanfare at all, but rather in covert
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Declining Audiences and Initial Responses