Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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162 Chapter 9
ANNOUNCING THE CINEMA OF SENSATION
Compared to Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, The Apartment could be considered
a more conventional movie. The film of 1960 that marked the greatest de-
parture from past Hollywood movie practice was Psycho, directed by Alfred
Hitchcock. At a time when lesser directors were asserting themselves in the
role of producer and taking over their own films from an increasingly en-
feebled studio system, Hitchcock likewise did so in Psycho in a manner that
pointed toward major changes in the aesthetics of the American feature film.
Ranked at number 14 on the American Film Institute’s 2006 list, it could
be argued that the importance of the movie for modern American film was
groundbreaking. Psycho has been called “the movie that cut movie history
in half,” and the precise moment at which that division occurs is the shower
scene in the Bates Motel when Janet Leigh’s character, Marion Crane, is
stabbed to death.
A Paramount release, Psycho displayed Hitchcock’s bent to go against
Hollywood conventions. The shower sequence, although filmed so as to show
only her back and not reveal any frontal nudity, challenged the Production
Code by presenting a naked female figure on-screen and, at the same time, cut
against the grain of Hollywood assumptions about story and actors by killing
off the movie’s star about a third of the way into the film. These issues were
considered daring and were written about at the time.
The more telling matter for movie history, however, was the way in
which the shower scene was conceived of by Hitchcock, photographed by
cinematographer John L. Russell, and edited by the veteran who had collabo-
rated with Hitchcock on several previous films, George Tomasini. Hitchcock
carefully storyboarded all his films, but the shower scene in Psycho displayed an
unusually adroit collaboration between the director, photographer, and editor.
Moreover, it announced the arrival of sensation on the Hollywood screen as
a major aesthetic component of the American feature film.
Historically, since the time of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation
(1915), Hollywood movies had relied upon salient elements of sentiment and
spectacle at the core of their appeal to audiences. With the shower scene in
Psycho, sensation was added to sentiment and spectacle as the fundamental
ways in which movies appeal to viewers as art. The importance of that ad-
dition did not take hold immediately, but by the end of the decade of the
1960s, powerful, visceral sequences in feature films that drew the viewer in
emotionally with graphic depictions—often of violence—were established as
an important aesthetic in Hollywood movies.
Hollywood on the Ropes 163
SPARTACUS
Stanley Kubrick’s awesome epic Spartacus is over three hours in length. For
it, Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten on the blacklist, brilliantly
adapted a privately published, stream-of-consciousness novel by another
blacklisted writer, Howard Fast. In reality, Trumbo had already been rescued
from the blacklist, having written The Brave One (1956, directed by Irving
Rapper), for which he won a screenwriting Oscar under his pseudonym,
Robert Rich. Still, Trumbo’s hiring under his own name by producer Kirk
Douglas is considered to have effectively shattered the Hollywood blacklist.
In Spartacus, Douglas stars as the gladiator who leads his fellow slaves in a
revolt against Rome. His costars are Laurence Olivier, Tony Curtis, Jean Sim-
mons, Peter Ustinov, John Gavin, and Nina Foch. The cost of the production,
$12 million, was actually more than the producing studio was worth at the
time (MCA bought Universal Pictures for $11.25 million that year). Russell
Metty, A.S.C., was the director of photography for Spartacus, the production
designer was Alexander Golitzen, and it was edited by Robert Lawrence.
Bosley Crowther’s New York Times reviews expressed his disdain for
sprawling biblical epics like Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments, and he
called Spartacus “heroic humbug—a vast, panoramic display of synthetic Rome
and Romans.” For many years, the film enjoyed a certain camp reputation (the
line “I am Spartacus” has echoed across generations of American teenagers).
Spartacus was a Bryna production, with Edward Lewis as the line pro-
ducer for Douglas’s company. Lewis served as the torpedo who hired Kubrick
to direct after Anthony Mann was fired, in part because Kubrick was much
younger and considered more malleable. Kubrick had also directed Douglas
in Paths of Glory (1957).
Touted at the time by the AFL-CIO as the most expensive movie ever
made “under Union conditions of employment,” Spartacus has survived into
the early twenty-first century with a reputation that places the movie squarely
in the midst of the ensuing culture wars that have separated the liberal left from
the conservative right in the United States since the end of the 1960s. When
the American Film Institute restored a print of Spartacus in 1991, critic Henry
Sheehan wrote in an article for the Los Angeles Times:
Spartacus, re-released in a new print this week with additional footage, is
less a depiction of those historical events [the slave revolt against Rome a
century before Christ] than a formal and political broadside concerned with
the state of the world and the blather of Hollywood around 1960. Despite
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serious failures of rhetoric, it marks a significant transition in which the old
Hollywood Left, beaten to a bloody pulp and left for dead by the studio
blacklist [of the 1950s], arose for one more gallant charge and passed its
banner into younger hands. . . . [Now] Spartacus returns at another moment
of resurgent liberalism.
In a 1991 review in New York magazine, David Denby called Spartacus
more a perverse joke than a great movie. . . . Julius Caesar (John Gavin)
looks down at Crassus in the baths and asks, “Is it me you want or the
garrison at Rome?” . . . The movie is hip; it openly embraces what other
pagan epics treat sanctimoniously. The pre-Christian Rome is a sensual
society, fleshy and bloody, in which people’s bodies are pressed upon one
another and available for sex or murder.
A WELL-WORN STRATEGY: BROADWAY TO BIG SCREEN
The arrival of the cinema of sensation with Psycho hardly registered with Hol-
lywood in 1960; its impact was delayed until later in the decade. The Apartment
was widely viewed as a disappointment that was not equal to director Billy
Wilder’s Some Like It Hot from a year earlier. Spartacus was pigeonholed as an
epic and was not yet recognized by anyone for its possible place in a larger
shift for Hollywood.
At the beginning of the 1960s, the studios were rattled and recognized
the need for new directions, but they were still in the hands of a management
that believed in the old traditions. The 1961 Oscar-winning Best Picture,
West Side Story, for example, was developed in a manner that coincided with
the methods of Classic Hollywood by adapting a successful Broadway stage
musical for the screen. As a dominant force in Hollywood, and with the best
track record in the business for packaging successful movies in the early 1960s,
Mirisch Brothers was behind West Side Story and, once more, had partnered
with United Artists for its distribution. With its book by Arthur Laurents,
music by Leonard Bernstein, and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, the musical was
based on Romeo and Juliet, yet set among rival teenage gangs battling for turf
on the west side of midtown Manhattan. This gave it a contemporary feel and
provided ample room for oblique social commentary.
Jerome Robbins had directed the Broadway stage version successfully and
was enlisted to direct the movie, but he was dismissed several weeks into pro-
duction at the insistence of executives at United Artists, who objected to the
slow pace of his work, his excessive perfectionism, and the fact that the movie
Hollywood on the Ropes 165
production so quickly had fallen behind schedule. Robbins was replaced with
the Hollywood veteran Robert Wise, who was granted broad artistic control
over the project and also was credited as a producer on West Side Story.
In spite of a cast that many industry insiders considered weak—the movie
starred Natalie Wood, who was not known for her singing voice, along with
Richard Beymer, Russ Tamblyn, and George Chakiris, who were hardly
top-rung stars—West Side Story won ample praise from critics and was an
enormous box office success. It was so popular that in 1966 NBC offered
Mirisch Brothers $3 million for the rights to a single national telecast of it.
So confident was Mirisch that it could demand more, that it promptly turned
NBC’s offer down.
Moreover, the success of West Side Story was not limited to the domestic
North American market. Wise had insisted that the songs in the movie not
be translated into other languages or sung in other versions by other artists,
but rather that they be left in the original and shown in the movie with writ-
ten subtitles in other countries. It worked. Foreign audiences loved West Side
Story; it broke attendance records at many movie theaters around the globe,
including one cinema in Paris, where it showed daily for 219 weeks (just
over four years!). For years, it had been common wisdom in Hollywood that
musicals, no matter how successful on Broadway or as movies with American
audiences, could not draw much box office in international distribution. West
Side Story was the exception, and that exception turned Hollywood toward
extensive production of big-budget musicals for the next half-dozen years.
LIBERAL SENTIMENTS
In July 1960, the first—and only—novel by an unknown author named
Harper Lee, who had grown up in Alabama, appeared in bookstores. It de-
scribed a small Southern town in the 1930s through the eyes of two children.
By the time Hollywood adapted it to the screen two years later, the book had
sold more than six million copies in the United States. To Kill a Mockingbird
seemed to be the kind of popular fiction that Hollywood traditionally regarded
as promising property for adaptation to the screen, and, two individuals who
were among the emerging legions of Hollywood professionals turning their
hand to producing—Alan J. Pakula and stage and screen director Robert
Mulligan—purchased the rights to it. They hired Horton Foote to write a
screenplay and then produced the movie based on that screenplay with addi-
tional financial backing from Universal, the studio that distributed it. Mulligan
garnered an Oscar nomination as Best Director for his work, with Russell
Harlan, A.S.C., as his director of photography.
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Set in the town of Macomb, Alabama, in 1932, the only well-known
star in the movie, Gregory Peck, plays a local attorney named Atticus Finch,
a widower with a six-year-old daughter named Scout (Mary Badham) and a
ten-year-old son named Jem (Phillip Alford). Their father’s defense of a black
man wrongly accused of raping a white woman becomes the center of the
movie’s story, but to a large extent the essence of To Kill a Mockingbird is to
give a view of the town and its characters through the eyes of the two chil-
dren, Scout and Jem, whose vision is clear and innocent.
When a white farmer named Robert E. Lee Ewell, who’s a drunkard,
accuses a hardworking and honest Negro, Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), of
raping his nineteen-year-old daughter Mayella, the local judge (Paul Fix) ap-
points Atticus Finch to be Tom’s defense attorney. The defense is clear-cut
and the evidence supports it, but the lengthy courtroom scene plays out with
all the bigotry of racial tensions in the rural South never far removed. The
all-white jury finds Tom guilty, in spite of the evidence that indicates that
Mayella’s own alcoholic father is the actual rapist. The sentence is handed
down as guilty, and when Tom attempts to escape being sent to prison, he is
shot and killed by a deputy sheriff. The drunken Ewell seeks vengeance against
Atticus, stalking his children as they return from a party at their school one
evening. Boo Radley, a young schizophrenic who is regarded as the town
loony, intervenes. Boo kills Ewell in protecting the children, but Radley’s act
is ruled justifiable homicide by the local sheriff.
Critics like James Power, writing in the Hollywood Reporter, praised To
Kill a Mockingbird as a fine film and one that was certain to be well loved by its
audiences. In particular, Harlan’s low-key camera work was cited for creating a
look and feel to the film that made it all the more believable to audiences, and
the performances of the child actors were highlighted as unusually natural and
convincing. As Powers summarized it, “The rest of the cast is also fine, play-
ing with a realism that simulates life without distorting it.” Elmer Bernstein’s
gentle score, using the piano for nostalgic effect, although it provides a soft
background, sometimes covers their lines and makes them sometimes difficult
to understand. This is because they were speaking in a Southern dialect, and
they were doing so without the strength of vocal projection found in adults,
especially in the early parts of the movie. Sticking to his central theme, Powers
emphasizes that To Kill a Mockingbird is “a product of American realism, and it
is a rare and worthy treasure.”
As a beleaguered mainstream Hollywood film industry tried to recover
its ever-dwindling audience, which had been declining steadily since the late
1940s, the appeal of an aesthetic of “realism” was one of the hopes that critics
advanced and executives throughout the motion picture industry embraced.
Yet another idea that slowly but surely came into vogue among critics was that
Hollywood on the Ropes 167
Hollywood movies needed to turn away from their rather predictable practice
of casting well-known stars in grand spectacles and epics. Hence, well-known
critic Arthur Knight could write in his Saturday Review article on To Kill a
Mockingbird that its small excellences and verisimilitude were such “that it re-
quires the somewhat solid presence of Gregory Peck to remind us that it was
made in Hollywood at all.”
Yet, the Southern town where the movie was filmed was a re-creation,
built on fifteen acres of Universal’s back lot under the supervision of Alexan-
der Golitzen and Henry Bumstead. The realism that movie critics were talk-
ing about may have come partially from the look of the “town” created by
the movie’s art directors, but more likely came from the range of characters
who were assumed to be accurate depictions of a cross-section of small-town
Southern life.
The movie was a nominee, and considered a top contender, for a Best
Picture Oscar, but it lost that year to Lawrence of Arabia. To Kill a Mockingbird
was the official entry of the United States at the Cannes Film Festival, and it
won Mexico’s equivalent of the Academy Award, the Onix, as Best Foreign
Picture. The realism that many Hollywood professionals and critics found in
To Kill a Mockingbird surely had less to do with the movie’s naturalist aesthetic,
which was marginal, than with the fact of when it was released. Because of
its story and its themes and because it was released in the midst of the civil
rights struggles for racial equality in the early 1960s, when national attention
was focused on segregation in the Deep South, the movie was then—and has
remained—a favorite of audiences, Hollywood professionals, and critics.
Not long before his death, Peck noted that if he was remembered at all,
Atticus Finch would be the only role he would be remembered for. Through
the end of the twentieth century, school classes in the United States were still
watching the movie and using it as a springboard to discuss equality, justice,
and race, even though critics had emerged who focused on its flaws of viewing
racism essentially through the majority perspective of whites.
LAWRENCE OF THE WIDESCREEN
The team of Sam Spiegel as producer and David Lean as coproducer and di-
rector teamed to make the Academy Award–winning Best Picture for 1962,
Lawrence of Arabia. Much as they had with their 1958 success, The Bridge on
the River Kwai, Siegel and Lean joined with Columbia Pictures to package the
production, and the Hollywood studio held release and distribution rights for
the movie in North America. The production company of record was listed
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as Horizon Pictures of Great Britain. The screenplay was renowned British
playwright Robert Bolt’s first movie script. Lawrence of Arabia is one of the
films from this era that is considered American despite the fact that some of its
financing and most of its production talent was actually British.
Mainstream critical reviews of Lawrence of Arabia at the time of its release
in the United States were mixed. The New York Times, for example, dispar-
aged this three-and-a-half-hour portrait of the British desert fighter T. E.
Lawrence, played by Peter O’Toole, calling Lawrence’s crises of confidence
and identity, against a backdrop of nationalistic revolution in the Middle East,
a “camel opera.” A later New York Times review, published at Oscar time the
next spring, was kinder. So, too, have been the assessments of the movie by
subsequent generations of critics and historians.
The cinematography of Frederick (Freddie) Young is frequently cited as
one of the best examples of utilizing widescreen effectively, in order to convey
the vastness, harshness, and beautiful subtlety of the desert that is central to the
viewer’s perception and understanding of this movie. In addition to Young’s
mastery of visual composition, the editing by Anne Coates is frequently
credited with creating a pacing and point of view that take the viewer into
Lawrence’s state of mind as he encounters the heat, harshness, and loneliness
of the movie’s locale. Aside from critics and historians, prominent filmmakers
of a later generation, notably Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, have cited
their discovery of Lawrence of Arabia as young adults or adolescents as inspiring
to their own later work.
THE BRITISH AT THE OSCAR PODIUM
Although Lawrence of Arabia correctly might be thought of as a British pro-
duction, it was listed as American, making 1963 the first time in a decade
and a half that a movie not classified as American had won the Best Picture
Oscar. Produced by Woodfall Pictures in England, Tom Jones was picked
up by United Artists for North American release. Based on an eighteenth-
century novel by Henry Fielding, with the screenplay written by John Os-
borne, Tom Jones, as adapted to the screen under the direction of Tony Rich-
ardson, proved to be a lusty and rollicking celebration of the various pleasures
of the senses, from excessive eating to uninhibited sex. Even with a cast that
included Albert Finney, Susannah York, Hugh Griffith, Diane Cilento, and
Joyce Redman, Tom Jones still was produced for under a million dollars.
Its box office success and its Best Picture triumph at the Academy Awards
further stimulated interest for Hollywood investment in pictures made abroad,
especially in Great Britain, even though it proved to be Richardson’s only hit as
Hollywood on the Ropes 169
a director. In 1963, however, its innovations were considered notable. Some of
his techniques drew such positive attention in the United States in 1963 because,
although Richardson had drawn them from the French “New Wave” directors,
American audiences were not acquainted with them. Over time, however, Tom
Jones has come to be regarded less for its cinematic style and innovations and
more as an icon reflecting changing attitudes toward sex and sexuality.
HOLLYWOOD AT ITS LOW POINT
The Academy’s Best Picture award went to the quasi-British Lawrence of Arabia
for 1962 and the fully British Tom Jones for 1963. These Academy Awards
might have been considered emblematic of the era for Hollywood, but in
reality they hardly touched on the crisis that confronted Hollywood in 1963.
In addition to the many successful British screen productions playing in the
United States, movies of the French New Wave were reaching the United
States and making waves of a cultural sort among American college-age audi-
ences and on the screens of the increasing number of “art cinemas” in Ameri-
can cities. Attention was also being given to the movies of Italian directors
like Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini. For the first time since the
1920s, Hollywood’s position in the world of cinema was shaky.
How shaky the Hollywood movie industry was in the early 1960s, how-
ever, could best be seen in the runaway catastrophe of Cleopatra, produced and
released with an initial loss for its studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, of $30 mil-
lion. One of the great studio names in the Hollywood, Twentieth Century-
Fox survived this calamitous loss only by selling off its vast real estate holdings
between Beverly Hills and Westwood for development as a commercial,
residential, and business community known as Century City. And the troubles
at Twentieth Century-Fox were only the tip of the iceberg for the American
movie industry. A modern-day record low number of Hollywood-produced
feature films was set in 1963 at 143 (sometimes the figure is calculated at closer
to 160, but even that would be a post–silent era low). Compare that figure
to the roughly four hundred to five hundred features produced and released
annually in Hollywood during the Classic Era of the 1930s and 1940s, and the
depths to which the American movie business had fallen becomes clear.
SATIRIZING THE COLD WAR
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and Hollywood reached
its lowest point in production output and cultural importance since 1920. In
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cinema history, two significant movies that challenged commonly held beliefs
about the Cold War bracketed 1963. They were The Manchurian Candidate
(1962) and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb (1964). The former is about an American prisoner of war programmed
by Communist interrogators in Korea to return to the United States and as-
sassinate the American president. The latter was a biting satirical comedy, a
spoof of military and political leadership, and a send-up of the entire Cold
War mentality.
The Manchurian Candidate was based on a novel by Richard Condon
and was coproduced by Frank Sinatra, who also starred in the picture in the
role of a Korean War veteran named Maj. Ben Marco. After returning home,
Marco is tortured by nightmares that a Congressional Medal of Honor recipi-
ent, Raymond Shaw (played by Laurence Harvey), has been brainwashed and
programmed to kill his fellow platoon members and to eventually assassinate
the president of the United States. Shaw’s father-in-law is a ranting McCar-
thyite senator (James Gregory), and his mother is a political meddler (Angela
Lansbury); both these ties help Shaw to gain access to the inner circles of
Washington power. The director, John Frankenheimer, recruited from New
York City after directing a number of dramatic successes for television, deftly
balanced the elements of a searing political satire with a nail-biting thriller.
Ironically, United Artists was so concerned about the script that Sinatra
had to call upon his personal friendship with President Kennedy, of whom
Sinatra was a supporter, to enlist the president’s approval for the studio to sup-
port the project in development. Once made, the movie evoked ire on both
the political right and left and eventually came to be considered hauntingly
inappropriate for exhibition following the actual assassination of President
Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
By then, however, Sinatra and his partner George Axelrod were already
wrangling with United Artists. The Hollywood environment after the studio
system proper had disintegrated was fraught with arguments, accusations, and
litigation between the various movie producers and producing companies on
the one side, and the distributors on the other. In this atmosphere, a new
branch of entertainment law practice flourished, as did conflicts over a movie’s
earnings. Sinatra exercised his ownership rights over The Manchurian Candi-
date and withdrew the movie from circulation at the end of 1963. It was not
shown again for twenty-five years, but when it was, in 1988, it was lavishly
praised and celebrated as an accomplished and courageous feature, a delicious
black comedy mixing melodrama and satire that was well ahead of its time.
Although it was out of circulation for so long, The Manchurian Candidate had
had its impact on Hollywood. It was a commercial failure in 1962–1963, but
many in the motion picture industry were able to recognize that the movie
Hollywood on the Ropes 171
indicated that the standards of what moviegoing audiences would accept on-
screen were changing.
Dr. Strangelove was a more popular and commercially successful film. A
satirical comedy that ridiculed the Cold War mentality, it was directed by
Stanley Kubrick, an expatriate American who had been living in the United
Kingdom for a number of years, and starred British actor Peter Sellers (per-
forming several roles), so it was another of those movies from this era that
might have been considered British rather than American. Still, it was financed
and produced from Hollywood, and its American pedigree has been upheld.
When the U.S. Library of Congress appointed a board in 1989 to preserve the
most important American movies, the first feature film from the 1960s that
was chosen was Dr. Strangelove.
A finely crafted film dealing with a deadly serious topic, global nuclear
war, the movie was a side-splitting and irreverent comedy that found enthusias-
tic audiences, especially among college-age moviegoers. The venerated critic at
the New York Times, Bosley Crowther, called Dr. Strangelove “the most shatter-
ing sick joke I’ve ever come across.” He meant this in an entirely negative way,
but in hindsight his complaints about the movie ring out as testimony to the
generation gap that was emerging in American culture during the mid-1960s.
In its spoof of American political leadership and the military, Dr. Strangelove
found a young adult audience and catered to adolescent humor with character
names like Jack D. Ripper, Merkin Muffley, and Dimitri Kissoff.
For a floundering Hollywood, Dr. Strangelove might have been a beacon
pointing to where much of the audience for movies now was. However, the
lure of appealing to broader generational tastes still remained stronger, and the
identification of an emerging moviegoing audience dominated by late adoles-
cents and young adults had not yet become clear.
TURNING TO THE RELIABLE
The Hollywood of 1963 was battered but not beaten. While the major studios
had been in decline for almost a decade and a half, the studio bosses, many
of them quite elderly, were still wedded to a concept of screen entertainment
that seemed classic. It was Jack Warner, a mogul who had survived the movie
business for nearly four decades, who okayed Warner Bros.’s $17 million
investment in 1964’s Best Picture, My Fair Lady. The movie’s star, Audrey
Hepburn, earned a million dollars for this single performance, even though
Marni Nixon actually performed all her songs in the movie while Hepburn
lip-synced them. Not that it really mattered for audiences. Jack Warner’s deci-
sion to feature Hepburn in this musical appeared to be a stroke of genius. By