The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  I Love Lucy was the third most popular show in its first season, and then first in the next three, 1952–55, and then again in 1956–57—in the missing year, The $64,000 Question pushed it into second spot. Lucy won the Emmy for Best Situation Comedy for 1952 and ’53 and Lucille Ball won as Best Comedienne in 1952.

  Desi had exceeded his budgets, and CBS was afraid the show was going to be a disaster. But by 1952 the American Research Bureau reported that (with 2.9 viewers for every set), I Love Lucy was being watched by one fifth of the nation, or thirty million people. The total weekly attendance at movie theaters that year was forty-three million. Twenty-nine million watched the 1953 inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower, but when the episode of Lucy came along in which Lucy had a baby, forty-four million tuned in. And television penetration across the nation was still below 50 percent. We liked Ike but we loved Lucy.

  Ball even survived the noisy 1953 revelation that, in the 1930s, to please her father, she had been registered as a Communist. Desi responded, “The only red thing about you is your hair, and even that is not legitimate!”

  The show is astonishing, still. Time brings out deeper messages maybe, and it’s easier now to feel the dysfunction or the frenzy in the Ricardo household. It comes as no surprise to learn that the Arnaz-Ball marriage ended (in 1960), though this early example of “reality TV” was thriving on impossible distinctions: Lucy was pregnant because Lucille Ball was. Sometimes Karl Freund’s high-key lighting is as alarming as anything in Metropolis. Lucy is a child going out of her mind in the lead-up to feminism in America, and the conservatism of the household is cast iron enough to feel like a prison. But the comedy is ecstatic, and I refer not just to Ball’s extended silent-screen routines but also to Arnaz’s mounting skill as a straight man. In the tradition of American comedy, I Love Lucy bows to no one, and it has the honor of introducing a woman in the lead role and family as the disaster area. The show must have sold a lot of cigarettes, which is another kind of dysfunction, and a sidebar in what happens to the huddled mass if it looks at the light too long.

  Desi and Lucille made so much money that in 1957 Desilu bought out the foundering RKO, the studio that had once doubted Ball’s star appeal. Desilu was grossing $25 million a year in the early 1960s. There is no more compelling anecdote in Hollywood business history. Just as Desilu had defined the place of film, a regular crew, and a studio audience, so it became a factory with twenty-six sound stages that made hit TV shows: I Spy, Our Miss Brooks, My Three Sons, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mission: Impossible, The Andy Griffith Show, Star Trek, and so many others.

  If this sounds like a stretch, play with the links between Desi Arnaz and Ben Siegel: they gambled and believed their life could be determined and transformed by the courting of luck. One ended up fabulously rich and the other was shot to death in Los Angeles on June 20, 1947, several years before I Love Lucy.

  Nevertheless, the cut from Hollywood to Vegas is promising. Part of the potential of Las Vegas was its being just “up the road” from Los Angeles. Several years before Vegas became the site of large hotel-casinos, the small Nevada settlement had been an escape for a few movie people, especially the gay community: Liberace first performed in Las Vegas in 1943, when the population of the town was not much more than ten thousand.

  The notorious Flamingo was not actually envisioned and created by Siegel and the Mob. Its first owner and visionary was Billy Wilkerson, the owner of The Hollywood Reporter and of several nightclubs frequented by the movie crowd in Los Angeles. In fact, Wilkerson was bought out by Siegel and his syndicate, but the famous scene (from Bugsy), of Warren Beatty walking out into the desert and having his epiphany in imagining the Flamingo never happened. What did occur was Siegel’s extravagant spoliage of Wilkerson’s bright idea. (It is a further part of Bugsy’s movie romanticism that the film is in love with Siegel’s creative idea, at the expense of the way he and his mistress, Virginia Hill, were skimming several million out of the venture. That’s why he was shot.)

  But the Hollywood connection never wavered. On that rainy night when Siegel’s Flamingo opened just outside Las Vegas (December 26, 1946, six days after Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life premiered in New York), Clark Gable and Lana Turner were among the movie stars brought in to give the occasion glamour. One of Siegel’s close friends was another actor, George Raft, in a symbiotic alliance—Siegel was anxious to be seen with actors, while Raft was drawn to the thrill and money of real gangsterdom.

  The flop of the Flamingo didn’t last long. Once the careless Siegel had been removed and organized crime took over management of the business, gambling reverted to its normal ways: it made a profit for the house. In turn, the house and then the houses became attractions for visitors, for star performers, and for the considerable range of craftspeople losing work in the movie business from about 1947 onward. Dancers, musicians, set designers, costumers, and hairdressers, to say nothing of lighting artists, were needed in Las Vegas, where a very large set was about to be built (the Strip), and then remade with startling regularity.

  Vegas was a screen thrown up in the desert, as if to prove that America had the technical know-how, the money, and the reckless imagination to do it. It was an assault on nature. There was another light show. By the mid 1950s, guests at the hotels would go up to the roof to watch this sensational projection: the testing of nuclear weapons in the desert no more than a hundred miles to the north. They gasped and sighed, as if at a fireworks show, which doesn’t mean they weren’t afraid, too, in their hearts. Las Vegas was a new city where there was a violent cut, from the real to the insane, every time you blinked.

  In 1900 the entire population of Las Vegas (or the white population) was said to be twenty! By 1931, when gambling was legalized, the state had 91,000 citizens. In 1940 it was up to 110,000, with about 8,500 in Las Vegas. By 1960 the numbers were 285,000 for the state and 64,000 for the city. By 1980, 800,000 and 164,000. Today, the population of Las Vegas is close to 600,000 in a state with over 2.6 million. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the state and the city were unrivalled in their rate of growth in the United States. But with the new Depression (i.e., now), Las Vegas got ready for a magic trick only philosophers and hermits had predicted: going back to being a ghost town, or nothing. The cuts keep coming.

  The state revenues from gambling were $21 million in 1946 and $550 million in 1970—that figure does not include the turnover from hotels, restaurants, shopping, and tourism in general. The revenue from the movie industry in 1970 was $1.1 billion. But since then, the revenue from gambling has surpassed box office income. By 1991 the gambling revenue for Clark County (which includes Las Vegas) was over $4 billion.

  There are other factors involved: the absence of a state income tax in Nevada encouraging retirees who may never gamble; the early availability of cheap and spacious housing in Nevada; what is called a benign climate; the development of other industries in the state; and then the integration of gambling into so many other parts of the nation so that the unique allure of Las Vegas was diluted. But those factors cannot detract from one kind of fantasy competing with another in the field of American entertainment. Anyone visiting Las Vegas quickly (and few stay long) becomes aware that the city is a light show in which the sun is secondary or superfluous. The Forum shopping area, attached to Caesars Palace, is a beguiling theatrical environment where several times an hour the lighting scheme goes from day to night and back again. It is a vast sky-screen, a listless movie loop that makes us want to purchase.

  The structures and the styles of the city were never meant to conform with the rest of America. Instead, they are founded on change, instability—the way in which film sets were built, struck, and then remade—and the larger aim to make their physical world a pliant enactment of desire and dream. Reyner Banham is one architectural historian who saw the crossover from movies to Las Vegas (this is from his 1971 classic, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies):

  Los Angeles had seen in this cent
ury [he meant the twentieth] the greatest concentration of fantasy-production, as an industry and as an institution, in the history of Western man. In the guise of Hollywood, Los Angeles gave us the movies as we know them and stamped its image on the infant television industry. And stemming from the impetus given by Hollywood as well as other causes, Los Angeles is also the home of the most extravagant myths of private gratification and self-realization, institutionalized now in the doctrine of “doing your own thing.”

  Banham added that the studio lots, with their anthology of different sets, were a prelude to the boisterous fantasy enactments of the Vegas casinos. So there have been Parises at every major studio; there is a Paris in Las Vegas; and there is the Paris of films such as Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Inception (2010), where we are encouraged to believe that real places serve more usefully as backdrops for our imagination.

  Las Vegas was noir in neon color before film noir had dared reach that far. It was, in its first decades, a site of brief but deliberate escape for the common, huddled America, a destination where working-class and lower-middle-class tourists could come for a long weekend, inhabit an unimaginably large hotel room at a low rate, gamble, get a hooker (or gaze at women who might be hookers), and believe they were brushing shoulders with gangsters and their dames. It was not so far from being in a movie. The leftover affection from that idyll can be felt at the end of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, where the movie just dwells on the lights, the fountains, and the mirage of the place. There were floor shows that aspired to the standards of the Folies Bergère and where star performers could be seen: Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Martin and Lewis, and then the Rat Pack, whose ongoing reality show in the hotel-casinos was more daring and less censored than their archaic movies.

  So as Hollywood’s own glamour began to decline, and feel the beginnings of shame, Las Vegas offered a remake, a parody, and then a pastiche of it. But the look of the place, even its amber glow in the sky seen from afar, like a vast drive-in, is all circumstantial compared with gambling’s extension of the narrative fantasy of movies.

  When we went to the movies, our pursuit of happiness was being courted at arm’s length. For a very modest outlay financially, we could imagine ourselves in the arms of Donna Reed or Jimmy Stewart (it’s a wonderful kiss) and think ourselves into the secure, stable happiness of Bedford Falls, even if we knew we lived somewhere closer to Pottersville (these are the opposed townscapes of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life). In theory, we knew we were dreaming, or pretending, and the whole process was given the polite gloss in Americana of offering delight and consolation in hard times. Very few wondered if the play upon fantasy might be addictive or dangerous. It was enough that the cohesion of the growing society was assisted, and its morale helped, by the entertainment.

  In Las Vegas (and all the subsequent sites for gaming) the deal was a lot blunter, but equally reckless. The fantasy was interactive: you could win, and lose, on the spot. You put down as much as you wanted, as much as you had, or as much as you could borrow, for the chance at a mythic happiness—the big win, the golden moment, breaking the bank. There were many ways of describing this reward, but none of them made it more likely. In an allegedly conservative, hardworking, practical, and realistic nation, founded in God, honesty, and a fair deal, some of us persuaded ourselves that we could get the big Happiness of the right numbers coming up in a row. Everyone knew what a long shot they were following. But they took the chance, which was an early sign that soon the American habits of saving your money and being prudent with the economy were doomed. The adrenaline of fantasy was surging through our veins. Increasingly, the stock market was perceived as a casino, and in the great financial crash of 2007 and onward the practices of fraud, criminality, and deceit were institutionalized. The masses were as huddled as ever, and the light of entertainment was a blinding and imprisoning force.

  Not the least result of this was both an astonishing adulation of the lucky winner as an American ideal, and the actual increase in the statistics for suicide in Clark County (the highest in the nation, with people 54 to 62 percent more likely to kill themselves than average citizens in the United States).

  But even that new and deranged economic model is not the end of the transaction. Gaming, or picking directions at random and by whim, had altered the bases of narrative. When the movies began, the moral codes in narrative were strenuously underlined, especially in popular fiction, but in the great novels and dramas, too. Novelists from George Eliot to Henry James weighed the moral being of their characters, and even if the authors might have lost their own guiding religious faith, their humanism and their interest in social well-being were hinged upon the moral impact of how things turned out. In The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer is left up in the air at the end of the novel—and we are there with her—but the outlines are clear on the choices she has made, the traps she has found, and the large things she still needs to do.

  That pressure is very strong in silent film; indeed, it may now be a moralizing impediment to our pleasure with such movies. There was also an emerging contradiction between the helpless observation of appearance and the assertion of inner values. More and more in films, we watch people and refrain from judgment. The clearer and closer the scrutiny, the less easy it is to reach a moral conclusion.

  Then add to that natural predicament the sheer overload of story, a slide that becomes an avalanche with television. Our stories, the narrative shapes we invent to explain the world to ourselves, resemble one another. And as you watch movies, where the formulaic begins to congeal, that pattern becomes inescapable. Hollywood repeated stories that worked. With its great stars, it searched for “vehicles” for Joan Crawford or Bette Davis or whomever, so their films became copying devices, reiterations of familiar typologies and principles—they became Joan Crawford pictures and not particular, fresh stories. That potential was drastically increased by television, where Lucy and Desi replayed the same “situation” week after week: Lucy has a crazy scheme or need—can she get it past Desi? It will all end in a great sigh and a forgiving embrace.

  It wasn’t just that the audience was getting a shot of I Love Lucy every week. In the same week, they were getting Amos ’n’ Andy, Strike It Rich, The Jackie Gleason Show, the various Arthur Godfrey shows, The Red Buttons Show, Our Miss Brooks, The Jack Benny Program, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, I’ve Got a Secret, Two for the Money, The Millionaire, Topper, The $64,000 Question, The Ed Sullivan Show—and these are just the CBS offerings. There was another large network, NBC, that had its own shows, and ABC was struggling to rival them. Some of the shows I’ve named were not strictly fiction; they were game shows, talk shows, or reality TV, but they were many of them thoroughly written and often rigged. So little could be trusted.

  Comedy shows and game shows were looser, and we felt we were watching real people. (Remember Susan Sontag’s words.) But coming along was a host of real fiction shows. They had the same characters episode after episode, but they posed as crucial dramas; they solved problems so relentlessly you wondered how problems kept arising; they were earnest and ponderously repetitive: Gunsmoke (the most popular show in America from 1957 to 1961, the moment of John Kennedy!), Wagon Train, Have Gun—Will Travel, The Rifleman, Perry Mason, Rawhide, Bonanza, Dr. Kildare, The Defenders, The Fugitive—hour upon hour of it, day upon day. I daresay some of you loved those shows for an hour and a season. We “all” watched them. And as we lived with them, how could we avoid seeing that story was like a game, with the same cards seeking a different arrangement every week, and the moral conclusion seeming increasingly unbelievable?

  Few things are more decisive in the history of the mass media than this undermining of story as a thing of educational value. But the proposal in gambling is to subvert ordinary value or worth and to impose the arbitrariness of chance on all other codes.

  Once you’ve noticed the gambling instinct, you see it everywhere; soon you can’t cross the street o
r get married without weighing the risk or the win. So, would you rather make Harvey or Winchester ’73 (both from 1950)? To make that decision, you must pretend you’re Jimmy Stewart—hasn’t everyone tried that impersonation? Didn’t Jimmy and nearly every other actor ask that we try? (There’s only one actor you’ve never heard an impression of, Spencer Tracy, and that thought comes from James Curtis, who gave years of his life doing a biography of the actor, so calm on-screen, so turbulent in life.)

  James Stewart was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, in 1908, the son of a hardware merchant. He got a degree in architecture at Princeton and joined the University Players in Massachusetts, a group that included Joshua Logan, Henry Fonda, and the actress Margaret Sullavan. He went onstage as an appealing but very thin romantic lead. There was a sweetness to him, a boyishness that attracted women and the liberal aspirations of directors such as Frank Capra, even if Stewart’s own politics were to the right. As part of that charm, he leaned on his natural urge to hesitation and country drawl. Soon that act was a part of him.

  He was put under contract by M-G-M, and he became a popular favorite. He formed an intriguing on-screen bond with Margaret Sullavan—he loomed over her, but she was the commanding figure, and their two voices (his shy, hers throaty) worked together. He felt like her lover and her child. So they did Next Time We Love (1936), The Shopworn Angel (1938), and The Mortal Storm (1940), and found their masterpiece as Alfred and Klara in Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940), set in a studio-made Budapest, in a novelty gift store at Christmas, with two people cool to each other in person, unaware they are pen pals falling in love.

  Beyond that, Stewart had several big hits: he was in Capra’s You Can’t Take It with You (1938), and then the soulful rural senator in Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), filibustering for justice; he was the laconic cowpoke who tames and enchants Marlene Dietrich in Destry Rides Again (1939); and he won the Oscar playing the reporter in George Cukor’s movie version of The Philadelphia Story (1940). That award seems a touch perverse: Cary Grant does have the lead role, but in his heyday no one really got Grant any better than the Academy understood that The Shop Around the Corner was destined to be a treasure.