The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  But these talents might never have been assembled or needed without the American songbook. These were years in which the nation and the world were singing the works of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and so many others, including Arthur Freed himself, who wrote the song “Singin’ in the Rain.” Was that the background of radio and live theater, or was it the weather we call confidence and optimism?

  Why did the musical at M-G-M end? The studio was not the same by the mid-1950s. Its founding figures had died or retired. Louis B. Mayer was fired in 1951 and replaced by Dore Schary, who said he was looking for social realism. Production was in decline, and the studio was tempted by blockbusters that carried the company. In 1959 the studio had one of its last big hits, Ben-Hur, a reprise of the way it had started out. That Charlton Heston version cost $16 million and grossed $90 million. It won eleven Oscars, yet it’s harder to watch now than the version from 1925. We don’t want to hear what these earnest biblical folk are saying.

  For the musical’s demanding schedules, Judy Garland was too unreliable. Astaire was getting to be sixty, thirty years older than Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. Gene Kelly’s best years were passing. The songwriters were fading away (though their songs are still loved). Plus, music changed. Just as the movie musical had been sustained by radio and sheet music, so now pop music broke out in the excitement of rock and roll and a teenage audience who reckoned the old musicals were elderly, quaint, and sentimental.

  Still at Metro, Arthur Freed was driven to make some wretched dramatic films. Kelly, Garland, and Astaire all sought to be regular actors. A future was being set up where people not alive when they were made might take delight in a retrospective of musicals from 1940 to 1960. In war, cold war, and a new, existential distress, a legend of happiness had been created by those films. You can feel Scorsese’s nostalgia for it in New York, New York. It had been a way of singing in the rain.

  I don’t mean to take the musical over the state line and into noir. If you are old enough, you don’t forget Donald O’Connor’s “Make ’em Laugh” in Singin’ in the Rain or “The Night They Invented Champagne” in Gigi, or every other innocent celebration in the M-G-M musical. But young people don’t know those songs, so their wistful moments and soliloquies become more affecting once you hear loss in the melody. It’s hard to find a more hushed intimacy than Gene Kelly singing “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” in An American in Paris, or Astaire coaxing Charisse out of her coldness and repression in “All of You” in Silk Stockings. The lasting virtue of those songs, and the dances, is their hesitancy on a perilous brink of inner life. It’s as if, from somewhere, some sensibility is saying, well, sure, the musical is swell and lovely, but don’t you feel warning signs?

  Kelly and Astaire kept in search of talented and tireless partners, but two of their finest moments are alone: in The Band Wagon, Astaire’s character worries that his career and his agility may be over in the song “By Myself,” and in Singin’ in the Rain, Kelly’s title number is just a man on a street, with some puddles, an umbrella, and a passing cop. Kelly sees the droll side of this situation, and Donen gives the climax a soaring crane shot. But both numbers speak to being alone, and that is the nagging presence in noir pictures and in a movie culture beginning to realize what was slipping away.

  It was not at M-G-M, but at Warners that a tragic musical was attempted: the 1954 remake of A Star Is Born, directed by George Cukor. So much is wrong but provocative in that film. Judy Garland is supposed to be an ingenue who becomes a star, but Garland was at Warners after being fired from Metro. She was only thirty-two, but this was her swan song. Then there is the poignant marvel of James Mason as Norman Maine, a painful version of the fallen-star story. All of this is done in dark colors and a wide-screen frame where space is a kind of solitude. Then recollect Judy’s first song, “The Man That Got Away.” Did no one notice how the song foreshadowed the suicide of Norman Maine and a Hollywood where stardom might be a cruel game played with vulnerable people? The studio boss in the picture, Oliver Niles (Charles Bickford), is an unlikely angel, but Matt Libby (Jack Carson), the publicist, is as vicious as they come. And when we see Maine or Mason in the alcoholic sanitarium, we can forget the alleged bliss of stardom. Here’s another noir tradition: watch out what you wish for; it can destroy you.

  “The Man That Got Away,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”—do they share a wistful lilt? It could be, because Harold Arlen wrote the music for both. There are songs that have a common tonal character, just like the look of noir. We can no more get those refrains out of our heads than think of noir without shadowed faces. They are like good-luck tokens: “[I] whistle a happy tune, so no one will suspect I’m afraid”(from The King and I). Some musicals still cling to that brave principle, and some of us have seen The Sound of Music 137 times. But in practice we know how hard it is to shake our fears, despite the refrains, and there is hardly a worthwhile noir picture without some wreck being alone with the music and the camera, worried by the dark or where the music is coming from. Think of Bernard Herrmann’s plaintive saxophone melody keeping Travis Bickle company in his cab in Taxi Driver, sighing of loneliness and romance, dread and desire.

  Part II

  Sunset and Change

  Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter

  Sometime in 1951, David O. Selznick was strolling through a movie studio with the writer Ben Hecht. They had been friends since the 1920s, and Hecht had served Selznick often—on Viva Villa!, Nothing Sacred, and Spellbound, as well as other fast, uncredited doctoring jobs, such as Gone With the Wind, where Hecht stepped into the perilous hiatus of January 1939, when director George Cukor was removed, and endeavored to reorganize the script. Hecht had been on $3,500 a day then, and he earned that money by locating Sidney Howard’s original script, the one Selznick had rewritten to death, and saying it seemed pretty good.

  By 1951, Selznick had sold off his share of Gone With the Wind for immediate cash, when there was so much more to come. The one-time independent had let it all be traded back to his father-in-law and M-G-M. He had also given up his first wife, Irene Mayer, and married Jennifer Jones, in a campaign to prove she was a great star. Some people in town said he was crazy and always had been. The double success of Wind and Rebecca (1940) had masked that for a long moment. But by 1951 he was in debt, at a loss on how to proceed, and downcast. He pointed to the empty stages and told Hecht, “Hollywood’s like Egypt. Full of crumbled pyramids. It’ll never come back. It’ll just keep crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.” Even in melancholy, he was still making pictures.

  Selznick was crazy perhaps, foolish often, but seldom without insight. In his premature despair (things would get worse), he looked back on the past and lamented, “A few good movies. Thirty years—and one good movie in three years is the record. Ten out of ten thousand. There might have been good movies if there had been no movie industry. Hollywood might have become the center of a new human expression if it hadn’t been grabbed by a little group of bookkeepers and turned into a junk industry.”

  Movies without an industry? That was his most radical thought, yet he was never the man to bring that about. He had believed in Hollywood. Even now, in pessimism, his numbers were wild. In 1950 alone, Hollywood had offered All About Eve, The Asphalt Jungle, Born Yesterday, In a Lonely Place, Winchester ’73, and Sunset Blvd.—not a bad year.

  In hindsight, Sunset Blvd. looks like the start of a new adulthood, or the peeling away of “Hollywood” nonsense. Billy Wilder was at his peak in the years just after the war, and an archetype of the cynical smartness that has always flourished in Hollywood; it is wisdom done as a wisecrack. He got into pictures in Berlin and he was one of a group of friends who worked on People on Sunday (1930), that open-air un-Germanic view of a summer’s day in Berlin, a group that included Fred Zinnemann, Curt and Robert Siodmak, and Edgar G. Ulmer.

  In
1933, Wilder arrived in Los Angeles with talent and nerve, and shaky English. Under the aegis of his model, Ernst Lubitsch, he wrote scripts—Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), Midnight (1939), Ninotchka (1939), Ball of Fire (1941), and Hold Back the Dawn (1941). (The last two got Oscar nominations.) Then, in partnership with Charles Brackett, he formed a production team at Paramount that delivered Double Indemnity (1944) and The Lost Weekend (1945). These are innately American pictures (dealing with insurance and alcoholism), but judged to the inch, sexy, bitter, and pulpy. Wilder would be known later for comedy, and Double Indemnity has an early flight of taunting dialogue between Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck that is not from James M. Cain, but sounds like Raymond Chandler, who wrote the script with Wilder. The couple are flirting on first meeting, and MacMurray is verging on dangerous ground, using insurance as foreplay to seduction.

  Stanwyck snaps back at him: “There’s a speed limit in this state—forty-five miles per hour.”

  “How fast was I going, officer?”

  “I’d say about ninety.”

  “Suppose you get down off that motorcycle and give me a ticket.”

  “Suppose I give you a warning instead.”

  “Suppose it doesn’t take?”

  “Suppose I have to rap you over the knuckles.”

  “Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.”

  “Suppose you put it on my husband’s shoulder.”

  “That tears it,” admits MacMurray.

  Does anyone in life talk in that heady rhythm of hardboiled, literary, and sexy? People in movies did for a decade or two. Wilder and Chandler didn’t get on too well as cowriters, but the supposing is transcendent. Cain said the picture had things he wished he’d thought of. Yet it’s faithful to his novel in that Walter and Phyllis—the leads, the stars—are unmistakably rotten. Their chance at redemption is zero—and not many Hollywood pictures had boasted of such scant hope, let alone in September 1944, when Double Indemnity opened and when guys overseas might be telling themselves, “At least my wife has the insurance policy on me.”

  But Wilder was European, too. He joined the army’s Psychological Warfare Division and revisited a devastated Berlin. Wilder was Jewish and he knew the gamble in survival: his mother and grandmother had died at Auschwitz. Disruption and displacement were everywhere he looked. When he came back to America his marriage ended (not that he wasn’t to blame for that). He feared his partnership with Brackett was going stale. He was irritable and restless and he could see not just that Hollywood was withering, but that it was increasingly cut off from the larger world it believed it fed.

  So in 1948 the idea dawned for a Hollywood picture—not as brave or team-spirited as Selznick’s 1937 A Star Is Born, not comic and reassuring like Sullivan’s Travels (1941), but more of an autopsy. Wilder imagined the role of a silent-screen star who is in retreat, alienated from the new Hollywood. She has a name full of echoes, Norma Desmond, and she lives in a mansion on Sunset Boulevard set back from the road, a lost world. Wilder was so clever, but he wasn’t “right” straightaway. His first thought was to give Mae West the part; she was horrified at the offer. Then he turned to Mary Pickford. In her late fifties, Mary was intrigued—if Norma could be the big role. But a young writer, D. M. Marshman, Jr., had suggested Norma ought to be a little off to one side. The real focus of the film should be a younger, failing screenwriter, Joe Gillis, who gets involved with her. It was to be a film about that man, and Montgomery Clift was lined up as Joe.

  Now Clift could do brittle and unsound (he would be Morris Townsend in William Wyler’s film of The Heiress, 1949), but the public preferred him romantic. You can weigh the tonal shifts in casting if you imagine Sunset Blvd. with Monty Clift; it becomes his tragedy. In fact, Clift cried off the risky venture. He didn’t think it would do him much good to be seen as the young gigolo to an older woman. (This fear was sharpened because, in life, Clift was filling that very role with the torch singer Libby Holman.)

  So Clift was gone, and Gloria Swanson arrived as Norma. Swanson had been DeMille’s big star in the 1920s. She was forty-nine in 1948 and hadn’t made a picture for seven years. But she was alert, businesslike, and as sane as Norma was crazed. An old friend, the director George Cukor, persuaded her to play Norma. Then genius passed by—or was it luck? William Holden, thirty in 1948, was under contract at Paramount. He was good-looking, with a quick, friendly smile and a begging voice—yet he had a flaw Wilder noticed, a feeling that he was not to be trusted. The role of Joe Gillis made the actor, and Holden clarified the picture, because it’s not enough that Norma Desmond is demented. Joe Gillis has given up the ghost, so death awaits him. He stands for the defunct system as much as she does.

  Later on in the 1950s, Alfred Hayes wrote a novel about a screenwriter a lot more successful than Gillis but just as disenchanted. The book is called My Face for the World to See, and the unnamed scenarist has seen through the whole sham:

  But it seemed to me, or at least it had seemed to me in the last few years I had been coming and going from this town, there was something finally ludicrous, finally unimpressive about even the people who had all the things so coveted by all the people who did not have them…I thought I could speak with a certain minor authority on the matter because now for several months a year I earned a salary somewhat in excess of what they paid an aged vice-president of a respectable bank.

  As in Wilder’s best work, the coups in Sunset Blvd. come so fast you don’t think about plausibility. The plot line is exact. The talk is honed. To have Gillis telling the story after his own death is a surprise; his being facedown in the pool is comic. Holden’s sleazy charm was a new trick, and Swanson is an unrestrained and alarming Snow Queen, but sympathetic, too. There was more than the public grasped. When Wilder cast Erich von Stroheim as Norma’s former husband and director, an edge of cruelty crept in—and Stroheim needed the job. So when Norma runs one of her old movies for Joe, why not use footage from Queen Kelly, the unreleased picture from 1929 that marked the romance between Gloria and her financier, Joseph Kennedy, which had been directed by von Stroheim? With von Stroheim’s butler operating the projector?

  Sixty years later, Sunset Blvd. is a milestone. But it upset some people in 1950. It had cost $1.75 million (Wilder was paid $300,000), but the first-run rentals were only about $2.0 million. The film’s ending was pitiless. The sardonic touch troubled conventional viewers, bank vice presidents, and movie bosses. (Wilder had to cut a sequence where Joe is telling the story to the other corpses in the morgue!) After a preview screening at Paramount, where the picture was admired by many of the younger people, Louis B. Mayer strode up to Wilder and told him, “You bastard, you have disgraced the industry that made you and fed you.” To which Wilder replied, “Fuck you.”

  There was a hush in the lobby. Mayer was still a force in the business—but only just. The next year, after twenty-six years in charge of M-G-M on the West Coast, Mayer resigned, having been pushed to the brink by Nick Schenck, the head of its parent company, Loew’s.

  So Wilder seems to win in that confrontation. But not in a sweep. Sunset Blvd. was nominated for eleven Oscars, including Best Picture and Director. But it won only for the script, the art direction, and Franz Waxman’s score. Official Hollywood flinched from so acid a view of itself. Best Picture went to All About Eve, and the direction Oscar to Joseph L. Mankiewicz, for the same film. Of course, Eve and its lead character, Margo Channing, agree that show business is a nest of vipers, but a place where we’re happy to revel in the great talk and the assurance that Margo (or Bette Davis) is going to be all right, a state of mind that began to run out on Davis herself not long after the glory of All About Eve.

  Something was happening more challenging than David Selznick’s vague fears of change. In Sunset Blvd. there is a piercing moment—it is still quoted—in which Joe Gillis meets Norma Desmond and realizes who she is, or was:

  “You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures—
you used to be big.”

  She turns on him in fury. “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

  That remark was intended to cater to the superiority of the audience: it was a way of signaling that Norma was crazy, and that “big” indicated megalomania. But our pictures were getting smaller, and the big screen had competition. The black-and-white imagery of Wilder’s film (by John Seitz, who had shot The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in 1921) was luminous and state of the art, but we the people were preparing to look at a tiny, warped image in which the grain (the wavering lines) was hideous and tiring. You see, we have been this unbelievable way before and demonstrated that technology impresses us more than pleasure or beauty. We are not huddled for nothing—we are stupid, too, as we insist we are making progress.

  In the first few years after the war, the picture business was carried away on a quick wave of optimism, no matter that anyone watching the audience carefully knew that attitudes had altered. But in the heady moment of victory, reunion, and reaffirmation, movie attendance reached a peak: from 1943 to 1946 the weekly attendance in the United States was steadily over eighty million.

  It was a moment epitomized in the title The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), the Sam Goldwyn–William Wyler picture about veterans returning from war and trying to resume their lives. It is one of those occasions in popular entertainment that identified a widespread mood without strain. The film won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and the acting award for Fredric March, as well as an Honorary Oscar for Harold Russell (a real-life amputee playing Homer, the sailor who comes home to his girlfriend, Cathy O’Donnell, with hooks for hands). This was an impressive mixture of “real life” and novelette, and in 1946 few noticed any misfit. It was a great film when it opened, which is when the business says you need to be great. It got rentals of over $11.0 million on a total budget of $2.5 million (including a late boost for advertising). Moreover, the film was honest: it said vets faced tough problems, not least the greed and indifference of the mass of people who had stayed home. But it was a movie, too, so it assumed those problems would be overcome. Life would be okay—that confidence was there in the advertising, too, the air of reassurance after crisis had supposedly ended. Even the critic James Agee, who detected some coziness in the film, admitted, “This is one of the very few American studio-made movies in years that seem to me profoundly pleasing, moving, and encouraging.” He set his reservations aside because he felt the picture was good for us, just as the title was passed on by word of mouth without a trace of irony.