Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema

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x Preface

1967: In the Heat of the Night

1968: Oliver!

1969: Midnight Cowboy

1970: Patton

1971: The French Connection

1972: The Godfather

1973: The Sting

1974: The Godfather, Part II

1975: One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

1976: Rocky

1977: Annie Hall

1978: The Deer Hunter

1979: Kramer vs. Kramer

1980: Ordinary People

1981: Chariots of Fire

1982: Gandhi

1983: Terms of Endearment

1984: Amadeus

1985: Out of Africa

1986: Platoon

1987: The Last Emperor

1988: Rain Man

1989: Driving Miss Daisy

1990: Dances with Wolves

1991: The Silence of the Lambs

1992: Unforgiven

1993: Schindler’s List

1994: Forrest Gump

1995: Braveheart

1996: The English Patient

1997: Titanic

1998: Shakespeare in Love

1999: American Beauty

2000: Gladiator

2001: A Beautiful Mind

2002: Chicago

2003. The Lord of the Rings: Return of

the King

2004: Million Dollar Baby

2005: Crash

2006: The Departed

2007: No Country for Old Men

2008: Slumdog Millionaire

100 GREATEST AMERICAN FILMS (1996)

The second list of movie titles is the “100 Greatest American Films,” as-

sembled by the American Film Institute for all movies made between 1896

and 1996 from the votes of working professionals in the cinema of the United

States. The 100 selected films were:

1. Citizen Kane (1941)

2. Casablanca (1943)

3. The Godfather (1972)

4. Gone with the Wind (1939)

5. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

6. The Wizard of Oz (1939)

7. The Graduate (1967)

8. On the Waterfront (1954)

9. Schindler’s List (1993)

10. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

11. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

12. Sunset Boulevard (1950)

13. The Bridge on the River Kwai

(1957)

14. Some Like It Hot (1959)

15. Star Wars (1977)

16. All About Eve (1950)

17. The African Queen (1951)

Preface xi

18. Psycho (1960)

19. Chinatown (1974)

20. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

(1975)

21. The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

22. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

23. The Maltese Falcon (1941)

24. Raging Bull (1980)

25. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

26. Dr. Strangelove (1964)

27. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

28. Apocalypse Now (1979)

29. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

(1939)

30. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

(1948)

31. Annie Hall (1977)

32. The Godfather, Part II (1974)

33. High Noon (1952)

34. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

35. It Happened One Night (1934)

36. Midnight Cowboy (1969)

37. The Best Years of Our Lives

(1946)

38. Double Indemnity (1944)

39. Doctor Zhivago (1965)

40. North by Northwest (1959)

41. West Side Story (1961)

42. Rear Window (1954)

43. King Kong (1933)

44. The Birth of a Nation (1915)

45. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

46. A Clockwork Orange (1971)

47. Taxi Driver (1976)

48. Jaws (1975)

49. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

(1937)

50. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance

Kid (1969)

51. The Philadelphia Story (1940)

52. From Here to Eternity (1953)

53. Amadeus (1984)

54. All Quiet on the Western Front

(1930)

55. The Sound of Music (1965)

56. M*A*S*H (1970)

57. The Third Man (1949)

58. Fantasia (1940)

59. Rebel without a Cause (1955)

60. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

61. Vertigo (1958)

62. Tootsie (1982)

63. Stagecoach (1939)

64. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

(1977)

65. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

66. Network (1976)

67. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

68. An American in Paris (1951)

69. Shane (1953)

70. The French Connection (1971)

71. Forrest Gump (1994)

72. Ben-Hur (1959)

73. Wuthering Heights (1939)

74. The Gold Rush (1925)

75. Dances with Wolves (1990)

76. City Lights (1931)

77. American Graffiti (1973)

78. Rocky (1976)

79. The Deer Hunter (1978)

80. The Wild Bunch (1969)

81. Modern Times (1936)

82.

Giant (1956)

83. Platoon (1986)

84. Fargo (1996)

85. Duck Soup (1933)

86. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

87. Frankenstein (1931)

88. Easy Rider (1969)

89. Patton (1970)

90. The Jazz Singer (1927)

91. My Fair Lady (1964)

xii Preface

92. A Place in the Sun (1951)

93. The Apartment (1960)

94. GoodFellas (1990)

95. Pulp Fiction (1994)

96. The Searchers (1956)

97. Bringing Up Baby (1938)

98. Unforgiven (1992)

99. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

(1967)

100. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

AFI invited more than 1,500 leaders from across the U.S. film community—

primarily screenwriters, directors, actors, cinematographers, producers, editors,

and studio executives—to choose the hundred greatest movies from a list of

four hundred nominated films.

Thirty-four of the movies on this American Film Institute list duplicate the

titles of the Oscar-winning Best Picture selections. To create this list, AFI dis-

tributed ballots to a jury of 1,500 motion picture industry leaders, consisting of

film artists, including directors, screenwriters, actors, editors, cinematographers,

production designers, sound technicians, and others, as well as to a limited num-

ber of select film critics and film historians. AFI’s guidelines permitted write-in

votes, thereby allowing jurors to nominate films not already on the list.

AFI asked its 1,500 jurors to use the following criteria in making their

selections:

• Feature-length fiction films only (narrative format typically over sixty

minutes in length)

• American films only (English language film with significant creative

and/or financial production elements from the United States)

• Critical commendation (formal commendation in print, including

awards from organizations in the film community and major film fes-

tivals)

• Major award winner (recognition from competitive events, includ-

ing awards from organizations in the film community and major film

festivals)

• Popularity over time (including figures for box office adjusted for infla-

tion, television broadcasts and syndication, and home video sales and

rentals)

• Historical significance (a film’s mark on the history of the moving im-

age through technical innovation, visionary narrative devices, or other

groundbreaking achievements)

• Cultural impact (a film’s mark on American society in matters of style

and substance)

• Legacy (also enjoyed apart from the movie and evoking the memory

of its film source, thus ensuring and enlivening both the music and the

movie’s historical legacy)

Preface xiii

100 YEARS . . . 100 MOVIES:

THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

In 2006, the American Film Institute conducted a follow-up survey to cel-

ebrate the tenth anniversary of its original list of 100 Greatest American Films.

This voting, again, was based on the ballots of 1,500 motion picture industry

professionals. One major reason for this “updating” of the list was for the

voters to consider feature films released since 1996. In all, forty-three films

released between 1996 and 2006 were nominated for consideration, but only

four of them—The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2000), Saving

Private Ryan (1998), Titanic (1997), and The Sixth Sense (1999)—made the list.

A second reason was to allow for an expansion of the list of the original one

hundred titles produced by AFI and published in 1997. Twenty-three new

film titles appear for the first time on this second AFI list, which was published

in 2007. In A History of American Movies, the two AFI lists are treated as being

of equal value and importance.

1. Citizen Kane (1941)

2. The Godfather (1972)

3. Casablanca (1942)

4. Raging Bull (1980)

5. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

6. Gone with the Wind (1939)

7. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

8. Schindler’s List (1993)

9. Vertigo (1958)

10. The Wizard of Oz (1939)

11. City Lights (1931)

12. The Searchers (1956)

13. Star Wars (1977)

14. Psycho (1960)

15. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

16. Sunset Boulevard (1950)

17. The Graduate (1967)

18. The General (1927)

19. On the Waterfront (1954)

20. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

21. Chinatown (1974)

22. Some Like It Hot (1959)

23. The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

24. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

25. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

26. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

(1939)

27. High Noon (1952)

28.

All About Eve (1950)

29. Double Indemnity (1944)

30. Apocalypse Now (1979)

31. The Maltese Falcon (1941)

32. The Godfather, Part II (1974)

33. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

(1975)

34. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

(1937)

35. Annie Hall (1977)

36. The Bridge on the River Kwai

(1957)

37. The Best Years of Our Lives

(1946)

38. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

(1948)

39. Dr. Strangelove (1964)

40. The Sound of Music (1965)

41. King Kong (1933)

42. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

xiv Preface

43. Midnight Cowboy (1969)

44. The Philadelphia Story (1940)

45. Shane (1953)

46. It Happened One Night (1934)

47. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

48. Rear Window (1954)

49. Intolerance (1916)

50. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship

of the Ring (2001)

51. West Side Story (1961)

52. Taxi Driver (1976)

53. The Deer Hunter (1978)

54. M*A*S*H (1970)

55. North by Northwest (1959)

56. Jaws (1975)

57. Rocky (1976)

58. The Gold Rush (1925)

59. Nashville (1976)

60. Duck Soup (1933)

61. Sullivan’s Travels (1941)

62. American Graffiti (1973)

63. Cabaret (1972)

64. Network (1976)

65. The African Queen (1951)

66. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

67. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

(1966)

68. Unforgiven (1992)

69. Tootsie (1982)

70. A Clockwork Orange (1971)

71. Saving Private Ryan (1998)

72. The Shawshank Redemption

(1994)

73. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance

Kid (1969)

74. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

75. In the Heat of the Night (1967)

76. Forrest Gump (1994)

77. All the President’s Men (1976)

78. Modern Times (1936)

79. The Wild Bunch (1969)

80. The Apartment (1960)

81. Spartacus (1960)

82. Sunrise (1927)

83. Titanic (1997)

84. Easy Rider (1969)

85. A Night at the Opera (1935)

86. Platoon (1989)

87. Twelve Angry Men (1957)

88. Bringing Up Baby (1938)

89. The Sixth Sense (1999)

90. Swing Time (1936)

91. Sophie’s Choice (1982)

92. GoodFellas (1990)

93. The French Connection (1971)

94. Pulp Fiction (1994)

95. The Last Picture Show (1971)

96. Do the Right Thing (1989)

97. Blade Runner (1982)

98. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)

99. Toy Story (1995)

100. Ben-Hur (1959)

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE THREE LISTS

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s list of Best Pictures re-

flects immediacy, and the opinions and biases of a particular point in time.

The American Film Institute’s lists reflect hindsight, taking into account how

movies have held up over time and how influential they have been. There are

many other lists of favorite films or greatest films, as voted on by the public or

Preface xv

selected by critics or assembled by organizations interested in promoting film.

None of these other lists, however, is based primarily on the votes of working

professionals in the motion picture industry, with representation of the cre-

ative talent in all of the crafts that contribute to filmmaking. These working

professionals understand and appreciate the art, the craft, and the business of

the movies better than anyone else, and this history of the Hollywood feature

film recognizes that fact.

This essential history of Hollywood is based on close attention to the

180 movies found on one or more of these three lists. Other movies may be

alluded to or mentioned, but this is a story told through the fewer than two

hundred films that the Academy and AFI have designated as having particular

significance.

Being about movies, this book is also largely about the people who make

movies: the creative impulses they feel, how they work, with whom they col-

laborate, and how they adapt to the complicated circumstances surrounding

the making of Hollywood movies. The other group of people who figure in

this history are the viewers who make up the audience for movies. Who it is

that makes up the audience—and when and how the audience changes—has

great influence on which movies are actually made and released.

At the same time, A History of American Movies is also about structures

and practices within the workings of the American cinema. For nearly five

decades, from the 1920s through the 1960s, movies were strongly identified

with the studios that produced them. During Hollywood’s Classic Era, nearly

any movie could be thought of as being from a particular studio—a typical

Warner Bros. production, for example, or a lavish film produced in charac-

teristic MGM style. Since the 1960s, movies have been increasingly identified

with the names of their individual directors. Either sort of identification may

be helpful, but it is never sufficient to account consistently for the imaginative

spark and dominant influence that resulted in a specific motion picture.

The question of who the dominating force is on any particular movie

must always be treated as an open one. A producer, a director, a screenwriter,

an actor, a director of photography, an editor, or even a production code

administrator, a production designer, or someone else working on the movie

or deciding on its distribution and exhibition may be the most important

single figure for that particular movie. There are theories that seek to ascribe

responsibility for the effectiveness of movies in general: for example, the auteur

theory, which asserts that the movie’s director is always the most dominant

figure in the making of a movie, or the Schreiber theory, which holds that the

most important figure is the writer of the screenplay on which any movie is

based. What is missed by these theories of attribution is that the cinema is

a collaborative art, and that the story of any particular movie is in how the

xvi Preface

specifics of the collaboration have played out for that particular film and how

we can assess who played what role most successfully in that movie’s effective-

ness. Even when the Hollywood studio system was at its height, the movies

produced at a particular studio could not necessarily be reliably attributed to

the studio rather than to the particular creative personnel or actors involved

in their making.

Often, the market for movies is interpreted by critics as demonstrating

only how popular taste undermines artistic intention and integrity. If we ac-

knowledge, however, that any market functions as a system of communication

from which we gain insight into audience expectation and its relationship to

creativity, the role of popular taste in cinema is seen far differently. Moreover,

Hollywood’s blend of art and commerce is hardly unique. For centuries in

the western world, art, everywhere and in every era, has had to exist within a

system of valuation and exchange that justifies its continuation.

Getting the record straight is the biggest challenge in telling this story.

Nonetheless, what happened and how it happened always remains an easier

part of history than explaining why something happened. Drawing inferences

about what particular movies might mean in terms of bigger issues in society

and culture often is great fun, but doing so is highly problematic. For that rea-

son, indulging in such speculation has been dampened here. In the long run,

there is much more value and genuine pleasure in understanding the authentic

history of Hollywood movies as it actually happened.

There are no photographs in this book. Still photographs are common

in books about movies, but they do little to convey what motion pictures are

about. The operative word here, of course, is motion. Movies are about mo-

tion, not frozen still images.

Nearly every movie mentioned in these pages may be purchased or

rented on DVD. A goal of this book is to encourage its readers to expand

their knowledge of Hollywood film and its history by seeing some of the

movies they have heard about but have not yet seen. Keep in mind, however,

that at the end of the day, much of the experience of movies still is about the

aesthetic of power created by the large screen, and the dynamic of reception

that is part of the excitement of watching a movie in a theater with strangers.

Newer technologies are fabulous for spreading film literacy, but the experi-

ence of moviegoing as it has existed through most of Hollywood’s history still

has to be imagined.

Quotes from contemporary criticism published in newspapers, magazines,

and trade journals—written at the time a movie was first released—are cited

throughout A History of American Movies to provide a sense of how a particular

movie was perceived and appreciated at the time of its original release to the

public. The content and tone of comments from contemporary critics provide

Preface xvii

an insight into how a movie was being thought about at the time of its first

release. The emphasis is on reviews published in major newspapers such as the

New York Times and Los Angeles Times, the national weekly news magazines

Time and Newsweek, and the major motion picture industry trade journals,

including Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and Boxoffice. Writing by academics,

historians, or critics attempting to frame an understanding of a movie for later

generations is quoted less frequently.

Unless otherwise indicated, all the quotations and notes cited in document-

ing the production and reception histories of the movies written about in this

book are found in the extensive file holdings under each movie’s specific title at

the Douglas Fairbanks Center for the Study of Motion Pictures/Margaret Her-

rick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, located at La

Cienega and Olympic boulevards in Beverly Hills, California.

Finally, I thank three people who have kindly reviewed this book and

contributed their corrections to it: my teaching colleague, Bill Neff; my friend,

cinematographer Andrew Laszlo, ASC; and my dear wife, Victoria O’Donnell,

who is a widely published scholar in communication and the media.

Part I

CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD, 1927–1948