Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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ways visible primarily to industry insiders, by 1955 the major Hollywood
companies, in varying degrees, had begun to cooperate with the broadcast
television industry and to become increasingly involved in production for TV
alongside the making of movies for the big screen.
JAMES DEAN
On the one hand, Hollywood was looking to widescreen production, churn-
ing out musicals for the screen, and attempting to launch epic movies. On the
other hand, Hollywood producers had begun looking for new kinds of stories
for the screen and for new stars to play the main characters in those stories. In
the early 1950s, Hollywood movies had deepened their connections with the
Broadway stage and especially with some of the powerful social dramas being
produced for it. In addition, an increasing number of the dramatic movies
produced in Hollywood were seeking a more naturalistic look, and shooting
on location was becoming commonplace.
The movies of the early and mid-1950s that were recognized as signifi-
cant had a penchant for darker themes than those of Classic Hollywood, and
for more realistic portrayals of characters and stories set in more challenging
social circumstances. In this vein, Rebel without a Cause (1955) was a “problem
picture” that hearkened back to similar themes in some Warner Bros. movies
of the 1930s and the principles of what was called “social conscience” drama.
The screenplay by Stewart Stern, as French critic and filmmaker Eric Rohmer
wrote in the prestigious journal Cahiers du Cinema, identifiably fell neatly into
the five acts of classical dramatic structure. The initial exposition of the movie
sets up three teenage children, Jim (James Dean), Judy (Natalie Wood), and
Plato (Sal Mineo), each in conflict with their families. In act 2, Jim befriends
the lonely Plato and is taunted by Buzz. This is followed by the third act,
which has the “chicken race” with its fatal climax; act 4, where Jim and Judy
discover their love and Plato shares in that discovery, and the final tragic act in
which Plato is shot by the police and dies. Nonetheless, in spite of the classical
dramatic structure that Rohmer found in the movie, the ambiance of suburban
Americana and troubled adolescence gave Rebel without a Cause a distinct feel-
ing for contemporary society.
Although it was a color film, rather than black-and-white, Nicholas
Ray and the director of photography, Ernest Haller, managed to achieve a
documentary feel to it, in part by using subjective point-of-view shots and
unusual camera angles to draw the viewer into the characters’ subjective sense
of their experiences more fully. In the early 1950s, Hollywood saw a decided
increase in the number of features produced in color, beyond the traditional
Declining Audiences and Initial Responses 143
use of color for musicals and comedies, but there was no industry-wide shift
over from black-and-white production to color. Color production of dramatic
features was not yet common and was certainly not dominant. Because Rebel
without a Cause was a social problem film about adolescents, the decision at
Warner Bros. to do it in color was far from a given; many in the movie indus-
try would have argued that black-and-white was still a more reasonable choice
for this serious material.
Additionally, Warner Bros. produced and released the movie in wide-
screen aspect ratio (1.66:1), typical of the growing inclination in Hollywood
to produce nearly any feature film in this format, rather than the traditional
Academy aspect ratio of 1.33:1. Widescreen was an agreed-upon strategy as
the studios sought to further distinguish the experience of seeing a movie in a
theater from that of watching something at home on television, even though
many filmmakers believed widescreen was appropriate to the material of only
some movies, not to all.
The Warner producer for Rebel without a Cause was David Weisbart,
William Ziegler was the editor, and Leonard Rossman composed the music.
Beyond the more formal dramatic values of the screenplay, the approach of
the director, cinematographer, and editor to the movie’s style was to facilitate
the identification of teenage viewers with the characters’ feelings of alienation
and loneliness.
Rebel without a Cause was released in the United States at a time of chang-
ing attitudes about youth, adolescence, parental authority, and social problems.
Warner Bros. had purchased the rights to Dr. Robert Linderer’s case notes
about a teenage psychopath in the late 1940s, and studio executives had been
discussing a possible movie based on those notes since then. Then in 1955,
studio executives decided that the time was right for such subject matter. It
was Ray who suggested to the studio that Stern, a young writer from televi-
sion, would have just the right sensibility to develop the script for Rebel without
a Cause from Linderer’s notes.
Why did Warner Bros. think that the time was right for this movie? This
decision was based on the perception that audiences for movies were not just
decreasing in size but also changing considerably in their composition. By the
mid-1950s, television had triumphed with the middle classes and the middle
aged, increasingly leaving moviegoing as a regular habit to adolescents and
young adults. The audience for movies was becoming demonstrably younger,
consisting of markedly more people who were single than married, and no-
ticeably beginning to shift toward a composition that had more males than
females. For moviemakers, these audience patterns were important. Their
meaning for Hollywood was contradicted, of course, by the big-budget road
show movies of the period that could still appeal to family audiences.
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To recognize patterns in moviegoing and shifts in the composition of
audiences was one thing; trying to figure out what movies to make to appeal
to the changing audiences was another issue entirely. It was thought that the
contemporary ambiance of suburban Americana and troubled adolescence
gave Rebel without a Cause a distinct feel for contemporary society that would
simultaneously interest teenagers as well as older audience members concerned
with social change. Surely, too, James Dean’s sudden tragic death in an auto
accident just before the release of the movie added to its interest and appeal for
adolescent and young adult moviegoers. Teenage and young adult audiences
for Rebel without a Cause found self-identification and sociological realism as
reasons to enjoy the movie, in addition to its dramatic strengths.
The trade industry magazine Boxoffice, in its review of the movie, raised
the concerns of those movie theater owners who still perceived their audience
as older and more traditional:
Just how the average ticket buyer will receive the picture probably will
depend upon individual conceptions of just what causes and constitutes the
current, much publicized confusion and lawlessness that reportedly plagues
the teenage generation. To those who think that the problem incorporates
heavy psychiatric connotations and is so hydra-headed that the run-o’-mill
layman and parents have no conception of underlying motivations, doubts,
and influences, the film may make sense. Others, and presumably they will
be the vast majority, may be prone to opine that the story has few, if any,
believable characters, situations, or passages of dialogue. Thus handicapped
by the script’s utter implausibility, which is alleviated not one whit by the
strained direction of Nicholas Ray, Dean’s delineation is far below the
arrestingly high standards set in East of Eden. His supporting cast, both its
juvenile and adult components, are projected with even less effectiveness.
Rebel without a Cause was a touchstone for Hollywood’s debate over the com-
position of its audience and what movies to make for that audience. It was a
question that would confront the motion picture industry in the United States
for the next fifteen years.
THE BRIEF STARDOM OF JAMES DEAN ENDS
Dean’s other role, in Giant, a 1956 release in which he played opposite Eliza-
beth Taylor under the direction of George Stevens, made him a Hollywood
legend posthumously. Giant was a more popular movie with general audi-
ences, drawing attendance well beyond the late adolescent and young adult
Declining Audiences and Initial Responses 145
crowd that had patronized Rebel without a Cause. Giant became Warner Bros.’s
largest grossing release up to that time.
Cinema history, however, has not been particularly kind to Giant. At
three hours and eighteen minutes, it is deemed by most critics to be far too
long, and further, it is burdened under its own weight of struggling to say
something meaningful about the vast topics of racism, greed, and vulgarity in
America. The ugliness of such traits are encompassed visually in the great Vic-
torian mansion that Texas oil baron Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson) shares with
his wife, an exuberant and high-spirited girl from the East named Leslie (Eliza-
beth Taylor), who after a fashion does manage to domesticate her husband by
at least partially civilizing this extraordinarily rich and uncouth master of the
Texas plains. Their son (Dennis Hopper) has become a doctor and is married
to a Mexican woman (Elsa Cardenas). A high point of the film is the scene at
Sarge’s Roadhouse, when Bick rises to defend his daughter-in-law and grand-
son from the bigotry of Sarge, who doesn’t want them in his place. Bick loses
the fistfight, but gains the viewer’s respect and marks himself as a man who has
grown and matured emotionally in spite of his obvious limitations.
Giant was an adaptation from a novel by Edna Ferber, an author who
had a string of box office successes from adaptations of her novels into movies,
including Show Boat, Saratoga Trunk, So Big, and Dinner at Eight. Savvy about
Hollywood and experienced in the movie business, Ferber partnered with
Stevens and Henry Ginsberg (who formerly was head of production at Para-
mount) to form a company called Giant Productions, which sold the film’s
rights to Warner Bros. for a percentage of the movie’s eventual profits. Such
an arrangement was emblematic of the changing conditions of Hollywood
production in the post-1948 period of transition. Financing and ownership of
projects was undergoing a shift, and the large studios were downsizing their
staffs, laying off actors and technical specialists who started becoming freelanc-
ers, and increasingly renting their production facilities to others in addition
to continuing to use those facilities for the declining number of actual studio
movies that were wholly financed and owned by the studios.
Even following his success in Rebel without a Cause, the young actor James
Dean was paid only $21,000 for his role in Giant as oil driller Jett Rink, a sum
that was less than that paid to character actor Chill Wills for his supporting
performance in the same movie. When Dean was killed in an automobile ac-
cident before the film was completed, Stevens had already consumed 114 days
in production to shoot an astronomical 875,000 feet of film. Stevens won the
Best Director Oscar for his efforts, and the film received a total of ten Oscar
nominations, including Best Picture.
Critical accolades for Giant filled the press in 1955, from the New York
Times to the American Communist Party’s Daily Worker. The Hollywood Reporter
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was lavish in its praise for the movie: “Giant in size, giant in ambition, giant
in the human emotions that are generated by the massive forces of nature and
human development . . . this picture readily takes its place with the handful
of screen epics.” Several critics praised the screenplay by Fred Guiol and Ivan
Moffat as being better than the original Ferber novel on which it was based.
The popularity of this epic kept it as Warner Bros.’s top-grossing film for over
two decades, until 1978’s high-concept hit Superman.
NATURALISM AND SENTIMENT
The Academy’s Best Picture selection for 1955 was a sentimental story about
a modest butcher from the Bronx, filmed in black-and-white, and was a
direct contrast to Giant. Marty was based on a successful play originally writ-
ten for television by Paddy Chayefsky, and it was produced at a time when
establishment Hollywood was continuing its rhetoric of demeaning television
even while beginning to shift some of the resources of the big Hollywood
companies toward production for television. Directed by Delbert Mann,
whose greatest recognition had come from his role as a director of teleplays
for broadcast television, Marty was a production of a company headed by ac-
tor Burt Lancaster, who partnered with Hollywood veteran Harold Hecht
and completed the movie for theatrical distribution by United Artists. Marty
was filmed in eighteen days on a budget of $350,000, at a time when the
entire feature film industry appeared to be pitting its redirection and recovery
on widescreen spectaculars and even more extreme visual techniques such as
3-D. Initially, United Artists hesitated to even release Marty into movie the-
aters. In spite of this caution and the industry concerns on which that caution
was based, Marty was a solid commercial success. As film historian Peter Lev
points out, appearing as it did in the midst of a Hollywood movie industry
committed to distinguishing itself from television, Marty stands out as a glaring
example of what is called “counterprogramming.”
Screenwriter Chayefsky found his dramatic subject in the lives of ordi-
nary, working-class people. The protagonist is a homely butcher, a thirty-
four-year-old bachelor who lives with his mother. The movie’s famous and
quotable exchange between him and his friends—“What do you feel like
doin’ tonight?” “I don’t know, what do you feel like doin’ tonight?”—is
supposed to evoke identification from nearly anyone in the audience who has
ever spent a lonely and dull evening.
Not only did Marty capture the Best Picture Oscar from the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but it also won the coveted grand prize
at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival in France, which was gaining international
Declining Audiences and Initial Responses 147
attention and acclaim. In the original Playhouse 90 version of Marty for televi-
sion, the title role was clearly a Jewish character. The screenplay for the feature
film altered this to a character intended to be Italian-American, a role that
Ernest Borgnine carried off as a thwarted, but likable, working-class hero.
Feeling that he’s probably too ugly to find a future wife, it takes Marty
some effort and resolve to decide to dance at a ballroom frequented by singles
with a decidedly plain schoolteacher named Clara (Betsy Blair). Like the cin-
ematic tradition of Italian neorealism, rather than attaining clear narrative clo-
sure, Marty ends with a simple and small decision by the protagonist to phone
the schoolteacher he met at the dance hall. Such simplicity, falling far short of
the emphatic story resolutions often found in Classic Hollywood movies, gave
rise to praise from many serious critics of cinema.
Marty brought a veneer of unembellished naturalism to the screen,
celebrated the lives and loves of plain people, and captured a certain simple
charm. Its greatest strength may have been in its decided dissimilarity to the
spectacular visuals, epic themes, and casts of thousands that seemed ever more
common in Hollywood features of the mid-1950s. More subtly, the lead
role, and Borgnine’s performance in it, portrayed Marty’s troubled concerns
over what his buddies might think of this romance, as well as his mother’s
emerging jealousy toward her potential future daughter-in-law, even though
Marty’s mother had long been harping on him to find a girl and marry. Marty
conveyed the kind of psychological nuance as a character study, and the sort
of naturalism in its production design, that would eventually take hold in
certain currents of what is called modern American independent film later in
the twentieth century.
THE SEARCHERS
More than a few movie critics have argued that The Searchers (1956) is the
greatest of Hollywood westerns, while noting that it also inspired movies in a
variety of genres, from Taxi Driver to Star Wars to Hardcore. Peter Fonda, for
example, has said that it was an inspiration for the 1969 feature Easy Rider,
which he coproduced, cowrote, and costarred in. A 1979 article by Stuart
Byron in New York magazine observed that The Searchers had become so re-
vered by critics and directors that it might be called “the cult movie of the
New Hollywood.”
John Wayne plays a Civil War veteran who returns briefly to his fam-
ily, who are brutally murdered by the Comanche. He sets out in earnest in
search of his niece who has been abducted by the Comanche. In outline,
the film tells a grim tale, periodically punctuated by director John Ford’s
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broadly comic moments. With Winton C. Hoch as cinematographer, The
Searchers starred Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, and Ward Bond, as well as a
young Natalie Wood.
In 1956, Wayne was a screen presence seesawing precariously between
being the favorite Hollywood whipping boy of many critics and a box office
phenomenon. Contemporary critics treated The Searchers with notices that
hardly crowned it as a definite masterpiece. Boxoffice cited “the top-lining
performance by John Wayne [as] the unquestioned best of his long and im-
pressive career,” but steered clear of abundant praise for the entire movie. The
review in the New York Times dismissively called it: “A rip-snorting Western,
brashly entertaining as they come.” The emergent grand journal of serious
movie criticism, Cahiers du cinéma, was content to give its release a taut, three-
line, unsigned notice. Pauline Kael, often a contrarian voice among respected
and widely read movie critics of the period, dealt with it fairly harshly: “A
peculiarly formal and stilted movie. . . . You can read a lot into it, but it isn’t
very enjoyable.”
Moreover, from its debut, the movie’s unflinching depiction of venge-
ful violence did not necessarily sit well in some quarters. Ethan Edwards’s
(Wayne’s character) meandering, obsessive, five-year quest to find his niece
and bring her back from captivity among the Indians is engaging, but also
disturbing. The famous opening and closing shots of the movie, with Ethan
in the doorway at beginning and end, signify that he is and always will be an
outsider. Monument Valley, photographed in Technicolor in all its splendor, is
also used visually as a metaphor to portray Ethan’s internal self—contradictory,
disturbed, paranoid.
Ethan’s mission, accompanied by his nephew (Jeffrey Hunter), is to
take revenge on the Comanche for brutally killing his brother, his brother’s
wife, and one of their daughters, but it also seems that his intention is to
kill his tainted niece (Natalie Wood) who has lived with the Indians for
years, becoming one of them. When he finally gets her, there is a moment
in which the viewer thinks he will kill her, but instead he picks her up and
carries her back home. This act of forgiveness frees her, but it is unclear that
he has gained grace.
WIDE, EXTRAVAGANT, EXOTIC
Mike Todd—movie producer, promoter, and showman—played a major role
in the Hollywood embrace of widescreen production during the 1950s. An
original partner in the Cinerama Corporation, Todd formed the Magna Cor-
poration with industry veteran Joseph M. Schenk in 1953 to exploit a 65mm
Declining Audiences and Initial Responses 149
widescreen process that he had developed and named “Todd-A-O.” The
company’s first movie production, a screen version of the musical Oklahoma
(1955), was swiftly overshadowed by its next, Around the World in Eighty Days,
which took the Best Picture award from the Academy for 1956.
Around the World in Eighty Days was a producer’s movie with a ven-
geance: a large, brash, and jolly improvisation, loosely adapted from a Jules
Verne novel, with a cast finally said to number seven thousand. As the review
in Newsweek wrote, it was a work that reflected Todd’s “wholehearted, play-
ful, almost unadult enthusiasm.” The trade journal Hollywood Reporter waxed
in similar vein, with even greater detail and even more hyperbole:
one of the greatest shows ever seen on screen . . . a combination of a three-
ring circus, a vaudeville show with all headline acts, and a trip on a magic
carpet to the most exotic and novel places all over the world.
Todd anchored the movie’s cast of thousands with headliners David
Niven in the role of Phileas Fogg and the Mexican comedian Cantinflas as
Passepartout. The story follows an adventurer around the globe, interspersed
with diverse cameo appearances by established film stars, including Marlene
Dietrich, Frank Sinatra, and Buster Keaton. The movie’s $7 million budget,
which Todd had quickly raised, provided for filming in Paris, the Middle
East, Pakistan, Siam, Hong Kong, and Japan. Based on a Verne’s story of a
trip around the world to claim a large prize offered by the Reform Club of
London in 1872, the movie was a three-hour widescreen blend of Keystone
Cops comedy, travelogue, and the lampooning of Victorian manners. Highly
successful at the box office as a Warner Bros. release, it was clearly a Mike
Todd film—so much so that Todd’s personality and reputation eclipsed Mi-
chael Anderson, the director.
A FORERUNNER OF THE BRITISH INVASION
In 1957, The Bridge on the River Kwai, number 13 on the American Film
Institute’s first list of greatest American movies, won the Academy’s Oscar for
Best Picture for 1957. It was filmed in Ceylon, was directed by David Lean,
and starred William Holden, Alec Guinness, and Sessue Hayakawa. The film
was released to the world as “The Big Movie with Meaning.” Its “meaning,”
however, proved to be controversial.
The story is about of a group of British POWs in the Pacific Theater
during World War II whose morale is restored when their officer-in-charge
(Guinness) leads them in their forced labor of building a railroad bridge. The
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movie drew much negative attention in the press. The first bone of contention
raised by critics was that this plot appears based on an assumption, which some
found to be racist, that the Japanese were incapable of building the bridge
themselves, so that the ostensibly superior Brits had to undertake the project.
The bridge, once completed, would aid the Japanese militarily, which invited
criticism of the movie from another perspective—namely, that it celebrated
as its hero a man who was a collaborator and served the interests of the Japa-
nese military. The story was apparently based on actual events, and Guinness’s
character on Sir Philip Toosey, a British colonel who was accused of aiding
the Japanese in the torture of men under his command.
The majority of the cast for The Bridge on the River Kwai was British, and
the same was true for the production crew. The production funds, however,
came from a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, and the producer was a Hol-
lywood veteran, Sam Spiegel. The screenplay was written by two Americans,
Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, both of whom were blacklisted in Hol-
lywood at the time and living in England; it was nearly thirty years before the
Writers Guild of America formally corrected the credits in the records, having
originally attributed the screenplay incorrectly to Pierre Boulle, who had actu-
ally only written the novel on which the screenplay was based.
Like Carol Reed, who had directed The Third Man in 1949, Lean was a
master at movie work combining cast and technical talent from Britain and the
United States. In the case of The Bridge on the River Kwai, the movie marked
the practice of Hollywood studios financing what might be most accurately
considered British productions that would be common for the next decade.
The distributor for The Bridge on the River Kwai, Columbia Pictures, became
the most prominent Hollywood studio to engage in, and benefit from, such
production deals with British filmmaking entities, putting up the finances and
handling North American distribution, while utilizing actual studio facilities
and production personnel from the United Kingdom. During the 1960s, this
connection to British production resources would function fabulously for Co-
lumbia, producing solid earnings at the box office and gathering Oscar awards
and favorable commentary from critics, as well.
TWELVE ANGRY MEN
Produced by Henry Fonda and Reginald Rose and associate producer George
Justin, Twelve Angry Men (1957) was the first undertaking of Fonda’s new pro-
duction company, Orion. As moviegoing had declined throughout the 1950s
and the major studios struggled, the Hollywood industry opened itself more to
Declining Audiences and Initial Responses 151
films being produced by independents and to actors starting production com-
panies. With a story and screenplay by Rose, director Sidney Lumet teamed
with Boris Kaufman as director of photography, art director Robert Markell,
editor Carl Lerner, and sound engineer James A. Gleason. An Orion-Nova
production (Nova was Rose’s company), the film was released through United
Artists. Twelve Angry Men stars Henry Fonda, with Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley,
E. G. Marshall, Jack Warden, and Martin Balsam. The film was shot in just
twenty days. Originally, the project had been conceived as a fifty-minute play
intended for live telecast on CBS-TV.
Virtually the entire film was shot in the confines of a jury room in a New
York courthouse. The ninety-five minutes the movie runs is the actual length
of time it takes the twelve angry men—the jury—to reach a verdict; there are
no flashbacks and no scenes outside the room of deliberation. As the review
in Variety explained:
The twelve angry men in this Henry Fonda–Reginald Rose production are
a jury, a body of peers chosen to decide the guilt or innocence of a teenager
accused of murdering his father, locked in a jury room faced with the re-
sponsibility of condemning or freeing the defendant. What will they do?
The jurors begin with eleven votes for a guilty verdict and one for not guilty;
the trial ends with all twelve voting not guilty.
Even though Twelve Angry Men had not done well at the box office, it
was critically acclaimed and nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Lumet’s book
Making Movies listed its production cost at only $350,000, and at that cost,
making a profit on the production was relatively easy. In theatrical distribu-
tion, the movie fared much better abroad than it did in North America, and,
on that basis, was reported by the Hollywood Reporter to have earned a slight
profit. Its popularity overseas, especially in Western Europe, is notable. It even
won the grand prize for 1957 at the Berlin Film Festival. Nonetheless, the
characters could be considered quintessentially American types, with Fonda
playing an architect, Warden a dedicated baseball fan, and Cobb a bigoted,
youth-hating brute, while Marshall thinks of himself as the infallible man and
Joseph Sweene’s character is older and blessed with patient wisdom.
The review in the New Yorker pointed out that Twelve Angry Men reflected
an increasingly popular area of public concern in the United States in the late
1950s—juvenile delinquency—and that Rose’s screenplay presented a version
of an increasingly commonplace theory of the late 1950s, attributing juvenile
delinquency to a young person’s maladjusted home life and upbringing.
A. H. Weller in the New York Times offered that it was “difficult to recall
a more incisively revealing drama.” The Hollywood Reporter review by James