The Story of Film

by Mark Cousins

  159

  Bob Hope as the cowardly and inept dentist, ‘Painless” Potter, and Jane Russell as Calamity Jane in the comedy The Paleface. Director: Norman Z. McLeod, USA, 1948.

  These musicals and comedies are the most entertaining films in the years following the devastation of war, and both genres would continue to change and adjust to new ideas and technology. However, the bigger movie trend of this period was the maturing of mainstream cinema. Film noir, neo-realism and Rashomon were three advances in the seriousness of film and the story behind each is one of international influence. From now on, more than ever before, film style’s complex evolution was the result of the cross-fertilization of aesthetic ideas from many continents. Yet filmmaking in Mexico, Brazil, Hong Kong and India certainly became distinctive and the prospects for world cinema seemed good. Sixty percent of America’s population still went to the cinema regularly, whereas only nine per cent do today. Early in the 1950s television had started to scare the world of film, but it responded by visually reinventing itself.

  1. Zavattini, Cesare. Reprinted in Sight and Sound, Vol 23, No 2, Oct–Dec 1953.

  2. Thompson and Bordwell, Film History, An Introduction, op. cit.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Quoted in The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini by Tag Gallagher, Da Capo Press, 1988.

  6. Quoted in Kinder, Marsha, Blood Cinema, op. cit., p. 32.

  7. Salt, Barry, op. cit.

  8. Truffaut–Hitchcock, op. cit.

  9. The longer takes and more mobile camerawork in Ivan the Terrible Part 1 (1945) show that Eisenstein eventually rejected some of his pioneering montage techniques.

  10. There is no clear agreement over which was the first film noir, though many cite The Maltese Falcon (1941). Its director, John Huston, is an example of a non-émigré whose war experience may have convinced him that Hollywood needed to make more serious, darker, films. Others in this category are William Wyler, George Stevens and James Stewart.

  11. Elsaesser, Thomas, Weimer Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imagery, Routledge, 2000. p. 374.

  12. British wartime fiction films such as Went the Day Well? (Albert Cavalcanti, 1942) and The Way Ahead (Carol Reed, 1944) also had documentary qualities and would have been seen by Hollywood producers and directors at this time.

  13. Quote in Roy Armes’ Third World Filmmaking and the West, University of California Press.

  14. Sankar, Kobita, Indian Cinema Today, Sterling Publishers Private, 1975.

  15. Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, op.cit.

  16. Quoted in Luis Buñuel: El Doble Arco de la Belleza y la Rebelda, 2001, Downtown Book Center.

  17. Although Kelly had been producing “dream ballets” since Cover Girl (1944) and Anchors Aweigh (1945).

  160

  In the 1950s, Western filmgoers finally got a chance to see Asian films. One of the first to break through was Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali. India, 1955.

  THE SWOLLEN STORY (1953–59)

  Rage and symbolism in 1950s filmmaking

  6

  Prime Minister Yoshida, a pro-West modernizer who had opposed the Second World War, was the key political figure in Japan in the early 1950s. US President Eisenhower was a Republican who had masterminded the Allies’ European efforts in the Second World War and came to power in 1953. Nehru, a British-educated socialist, was Indian Prime Minister between independence in 1947 and his death in 1964. Yoshida saw Japan as economically precocious, repentant about its disastrous years as an agressor and able to stand on its own two feet. Eisenhower envisaged America as Christian, white, suburban and built around decent middle-class families. Many had spare money to spend on inessential things. Advertisers made objects desirable and people expressed their personalities according to what they acquired. Women could afford to dress a little like Janet Leigh and men could drive cars not unlike their movie idols’. Life in affluent countries was beginning to resemble the utopian world of escapist movies, at least on the surface. Nehru’s India, on the other hand, was deeply religious and socially unequal and yet he had an atheistic and anti-caste political programme.

  JAPAN’S SECOND GOLDEN AGE

  Humiliated and ruined by the Second World War, Japan’s national wealth rocketed throughout the 1950s. Advertising spend increased tenfold and the national ambition was for the “Bright Life”, an America-influenced consumerist society. Politicians were to declare in 1955 that the “post-war period is over.”

  Kurosawa’s internationally successful Rashomon (1950) boosted the country’s international confidence. Soon, more than 500 indigenous films were being made every year. In 1959 classical master Yasujiro Ozu directed Ohaya/Good Morning, which commented on the new consumerism through its story of two boys who attempt to force their parents to buy them a television by going on strike.

  161

  Twenty years after his great Osaka Elegy, Kenzo Mizoguchi finally achieved recognition in the West for his seventy-seventh film, the haunting Ugetsu Monogatari. Japan, 1953.

  The period of Japanese filmmaking covered in this chapter began with a year, 1953, as outstanding as 1939 had been in the history of American cinema. Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari/ Ugetsu, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Jigokumon/Gate of Hell and Ozu’s Tokyo Monogatari/Tokyo Story showed three directors, who have already figured in this story, in their very best form. When previously discussed (see pages 132–33), Mizoguchi was evolving a highly mobile camera style in Osaka Elegy (1936) and Sisters of Gion (1936) to tell emotionally underplayed period stories of women redeeming men with their love and stoicism. Ugetsu was his most acclaimed film and repeated Rashomon’s success at the Venice Film Festival. It is an understated tale of a sixteenth-century potter who dreams of being rich, but who is given spiritual guidance by his wife. The film was exquisitely shot by the great cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa in long flowing takes coolly detached from the action. Miyagawa had also shot Rashomon and the two films shared producers and two actors. Ugetsu’s ending is one of the most serene in movie history, the disaffected potter returning home to find that his house has been destroyed and his wife has died. The lady he had met on his journeys had been her spirit. Her voice says, “Now at last you have become the man I wanted you to be.”

  The sadness of time passing, or “mano no aware” in Japanese, had also been central to Ozu’s films, as discussed in earlier chapters. He made his most famous film, Tokyo Story, in 1953 by further refining his 1930s classical style. It was his most moving film on his trademark theme – the relationship between parent and child. The story is about an old couple who decide to visit their children. Distracted by their own lives, their offspring are too busy to spend much time with their parents. On the train home, the mother becomes ill and later dies. The film closes with the father sitting alone in his home, missing his wife, but resigned to the fact that this is how life is. All the techniques illustrated in I Was Born, But… remain: the camera is almost always below eye level (162), camera moves are sparse, intermediate spaces or “pillow shots” create narratively neutral, poised images between sequences. However, there is less humour than in I Was born, But…. Ozu’s classicism had become more sombre.

  162

  Another Japanese master came belatedly to attention in 1953. Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, about an older couple visiting their busy offspring, was his forty-sixth film. Notice how, two decades after I was Born But…, Ozu was still placing the camera below eye level.

  Kinugasa’s return to form was an echo from an even more distant past. His A Page of Madness (1926) was part of the 1920s insanity film cycle derived from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (see pages 96–98). In the 1930s and 1940s, his work became more conventional, but Jogokumon/Gate of Hell (1953) was a twelfth-century tale made in exquisite colour. In the pattern of Rashomon and Ugetsu, it was the toast of the Venice Film Festival and distinguished itself by occupying a screen that was wider than usual. Until 1953, the images of most international films were one-third wider t
han they were high, which was approximately the same shape as the canvases used by many Western landscape painters. Apart from the odd rare exception like Gance’s Napoleon (see pages 92–94) and Henri Chrétien’s experiment described below, every other film image conformed to this shape, the “Academy” ratio. In the 1950s Academy would be abandoned by filmmakers in the same way that silent cinema had been sidelined twenty-five years earlier and as a result film camera lenses, stock and even movie screens had to adapt. Industry bosses had been searching for ways to make cinema differ from television. Their solution was to make the screen bigger, more horizontal and “more epic”.

  163

  Japan’s first widescreen film. Veteran director Teinosuke Kinugasa didn’t direct all of Gate of Hell, but he and cinematographer Kohei Sugiyama created beautiful imagery.

  WIDESCREEN IN JAPAN AND THE US

  Widescreen was pioneered by the Frenchman, Henri Chrétien, in 1927. He wanted to achieve the ultra-widescreen effect of sections of Gance’s Napoleon, without having to use three cameras. He added a lens onto a single camera, which would squeeze a very wide scene sideways onto a standard film strip. When the film was projected in the cinema, a polar opposite lens would de-squeeze it, to reveal the original widescreen scene. This effect was enthusiastically embraced by 1950s Japanese directors and cinematographers and, perhaps because their country had a long tradition of horizontal scroll painting and of triptych prints forming a single rectangular image, unlike the West, they dynamized the full width of the new wide screens.

  A director new to this story, Kon Ichikawa, took Kinugasa’s compositional schema further. Ichikawa had started his film career in comedy in the late 1940s and his first great film was Mr Pu (1953), a satire about Japan’s modernization. When his Yukinojo Henge/An Actor’s Revenge (1963) was re-screened successfully in the West decades after its release, his use of widescreen staging was a revelation. A character appears as a tiny point of light in the top left-hand corner of the image in one sequence, perhaps ninety-five per cent of which remains completely black. This cannot be illustrated in a book, but a comparable effect would be if this double page spread was entirely blank, except for the first letter on the left-hand page.

  The first film in the B-movie cycle, Gojira/Godzilla (Hondo Ishiro), about a Tyrannosaurus-like creature awakened by an atom bomb, was released in Japan in 1954. The country’s most famous inter-national director, Akira Kurosawa, had not yet taken to widescreen, but other innovations in The Seven Samurai (1954) made it his most successful film to date. Although this was not the first Japanese Samurai film, it was influenced by the Westerns which flooded Japan after its Second World War defeat. Particularly affected by Stagecoach (USA, 1939) and the other films of John Ford, Kurosawa mixed the Samurai and Westerns schema with his own interest in ennobling self-sacrifice and experiment. The story tells of a group of sixteenth-century villagers plagued by bandits. Ordinary Samurais will not help them, except for a good-hearted one, Shimada. He gathers together six others including Kikuchiyo, who does not qualify as a Samurai, but who is a great swordsman. In a series of battles, they defend the villagers and three of them, including Kikuchiyo, are killed. Eventually, the local people plant their rice for the new season and the remaining samurai pass their dead colleagues’ graves as they leave.

  The Seven Samurai was not only innovative in its mixture of Western and Eastern film narrative; for the first time in his career Kurosawa used several cameras to film a battle scene. Doing so allowed it to be staged in longer sequences, which could then develop and evolve. It also afforded the director unparalleled freedom and continuity when cutting between the different camera angles in post-production. His use of lenses longer than 150mm flattened the space in key scenes, such as the one above (164).

  164

  The most significant conduit between Eastern and Western cinema in the 1950s were the films of Akira Kurosawa. His The Seven Samurai worked the Westerns of John Ford but added more horizontal compositions and telephoto cinematography. Japan, 1954.

  Keen to emphasize the epic quality of their films, 20th Century-Fox produced America’s first 1950s widescreen film, The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953) (165) using CinemaScope, a variation of Chrétien’s pioneering process. In 1897, Enoch J. Rector had devised a widescreen method of shooting The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (see pages 28–29), which helped popularize cinema. 20th Century-Fox marketed The Robe heavily, hoping to achieve a similar effect fifty-five years later. Other film studios followed suit.

  Many American filmmakers were daunted by widescreen’s creative implications. The screen no longer approximated human physiognomy. Western painting provided few models for such composition and audience members sitting close to the screen had to turn their heads to see its entire width. Afraid of disorienting the audiences with close-ups nearly twice their previous width, US directors at first positioned their cameras further from the actors, arranging their performers in frieze-like rows across the screen (166). This was repeated in the second CinemaScope film, How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 1953) and is sometimes called “washing line” composition. These filmmakers were also afraid that cutting on such a big screen would be visually disruptive, so they staged more theatrical shots; as a result, average shot lengths increased from eleven to thirteen seconds. Recalling what happened in the 1940s when average shot lengths increased, the staging of these early widescreen films might be expected to be deeper. Yet everyone in images 165 and 166 is roughly the same distance from the camera. Part of the reason for this is that colour was now being used. (Television was black and white at this stage.) Colour film stocks were less sensitive to light, so the cameras’ apertures therefore had to be more open than in the previous decade’s glistening films noirs. Wide apertures resulted in shallow focus, leading to shallow staging, which became the norm in the majority of widescreen films of the time.

  The stereoscopic or “3-D” movie, which also emerged in the US during this period was a famous exception to this. It used a technique in which two adjacent cameras filmed a deep-staged scene from almost the same angle, approximately replicating how humans look at something with both eyes. The combination of these slightly different images, together with the use of special glasses, produced a startling sense of an advancing foreground and receding background. Bwana Devil (Arch Oboler, USA, 1952) was the first of these 3–D movies. The equipment was awkward and so camera movement was difficult. In order to close down the aperture somewhat, a very bright set was needed and, therefore, a large number of lights. This resulted in extremely hot filming conditions. Directors felt frustrated by these constraints in the way that the earliest silent ones did, but no equivalent of René Clair or Rouben Mamoulian emerged to explore the intellectual and dramatic possibilities of this cumbersome new form. A few interesting films were made, such as Taza, Son of Cochise (Douglas Sirk, USA, 1954), André De Toth’s House of Wax (1953, all the more remarkable because its one-eyed director could not see the three-dimensional effect) and Alfred Hitchcock’s restrained, theatri-cal Dial M for Murder (1954), but the approach did not catch on. Audiences rejected it (because of the awkwardness of the glasses) and 3–D films stopped being produced in 1955, although they were revived sporadically in later years. Some vast Sony Imax 3–D cinemas were built in the 1990s and although few films were shot in this format, examples such as Into The Deep (Howard Hall, USA, 1994) and Space Station (Toni Myers, USA, 2002) proved very popular.

  165

  Not since silent times had film staging been so theatrical. Widescreen cinema became mainstream in the first CinemaScope film, The Robe. Director: Henry Koster. USA, 1953.

  166

  Betty Hutton, Rory Calhoun, Lauren Bacall, Cameron Mitchell and Marilyn Monroe in one of the typical “washing line” compositions of How to Marry a Millionaire. Director: Jean Negulesco. USA, 1953.

  TENSION AND MELODRAMA IN AMERICA AND SOUTH ASIA

  The most important difference between Japanese and American cinema during th
is period cannot be found in mere analysis of their respective film styles. Rather, the way those styles responded, in each country, to social change, must be examined. It is central to this chapter’s argument that 1950s cinema reflected the tension of its times. Whereas Ozu and Mizoguchi registered the tremendous impact of war and Prime Minister Yoshida’s modernization campaigns with caution and resignation,1 American filmmaking was much marked by the strains of the Eisenhower era. Many US filmmakers were happy with the conventional, consumerist, optimistic picture of American life in the Eisenhower years and they created comparable filmic worlds. A nostalgic winter musical, White Christmas (Michael Curtiz, USA), was the top US box-office film of 1954, as was the feel-good island one, South Pacific (Joshua Logan, USA), four years later.

  However, America’s key filmmakers could not ignore that the emergence of the “teenager” and the paranoia of the new “cold” war with the USSR made their country much less cohesive than it appeared. Secondly and more intriguingly, they could not fail to grasp that US cinema’s tentative maturity of the late 1940s and early 1950s was opening up new schema and novel ways of writing and shooting scenes, which would not go away. Situations could be staged in depth with more dramatic complexity, acting could be rawer and edgier, lighting could be more natural and happy endings were not the only route to box-office success, filmmakers tried to accommodate both philosophies. They attempted to embrace the Eisenhower vision and stem the flow of dwindling audiences, by ensuring that their films were more entertaining and colourful than ever before. But at the same time, they wanted them to be psychologically and socially honest. As a result, their work was bursting at the seams during the seven years between 1953 and 1959.