by Mark Cousins
Popular culture was undergoing a flurry of changes beneath the surface of 1950s conformity. In 1952, considering the case of Roberto Rossellini’s Il Miraculo/The Miracle (Italy, 1948), the US Supreme court had ruled that films should enjoy the same freedom of speech as other art forms. The judgment had little immediate impact on films, but connected cinema to emerging ideas about self-expression. In 1954, Bill Hailey and the Comets’ song “Rock Around the Clock” injected new energy into popular music’s current style and appealed to teenagers more than their parents. The Moon is Blue (1953), produced and directed by the independent filmmaker Otto Preminger, flouted the studios’ crumbling production codes by using the words “virgin” and “mistress”. In the same year, The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953) showed a group of rebellious motorcyclists terrorizing a small town and escaping without punishment. Teenage delinquency and a lack of direction were more directly explored later in Rebel without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) (167) and East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955). The star of both films was a twenty-four-year-old James Dean, who had been an associate of New York’s innovative Actors’ Studio and who died in a car crash in the year of their release, ensuring his immediate iconic fame.
Drug addiction featured in Otto Preminger’s second controversial film in two years, The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). The director Stanley Kubrick, who was more talented than Preminger, had a similarly adverse view of life. Kubrick was a former stills photographer who, from the start of his film career, controlled most aspects of his productions with exactitude. His third feature, The Killing (1956), was a tense account of a heist and Paths of Glory (1957) concerned the indifference of First World War officers. Soon it became clear that Kubrick was a major film artist, Welles without the fluidity or liberalism, Keaton without the mirth. He was profoundly un-Eisenhowerian, brilliantly realizing physical worlds on screen, the very solidity of which pointed to the spiritual emptiness of his characters.
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Nicholas Ray’s widescreen film broke new ground by suggesting that teenage rage could not be blamed on social deprivation. James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. USA, 1955.
Television also nibbled at Eisenhower’s vision. The drama Marty (USA, 1953) about a plain, fat butcher, was a sensation and was remade for the cinema by Delbert Mann in 1955, with its themes of loneliness, low self-esteem and despair being only slightly diluted. Television not only provided new, more realistic subjects, but also introduced fresh directors into the cautious film world: Sidney Lumet, Robert Aldrich and Robert Parrish, for example, as well as Mann. The following year, twenty-one-year-old Mississippi-born Elvis Presley sexualized Bill Hailey’s kinetic new music, mixed it with blues and jazz and became the most popular singer in the world, tantalizing teenagers and scandalizing parents. In 1956, the veteran Western director, John Ford, cast his iconic leading man, John Wayne, as a racist drifter in The Searchers. As in Japan, so in the US, cheap but popular and revealing sci-fi movies started to emerge. In these, the nation and even the bodies of ordinary Americans were threatened with alien invasion.
Director Elia Kazan co-founded New York’s Actor’s Studio based on the somewhat jumbled twin pillars of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas and the acting theories of Moscow theatre director, Constantine Stanislavski; in the latter actors were taught to access their inner fears and desires and then to suppress them. A new performance technique, the Method, resulted in which actors no longer displayed their characters in the roles they played, but tried to hide them. The Wild One’s main protagonist, the Nebraskan-born Marlon Brando, had become a powerful star on the New York stage using such anti-Hollywood techniques and from The Men (Fred Zinnemann, 1950) onwards, he imported his fragmented, unravelling approach to the craft of stage acting to film, whose triviality he despised. Modern, Western, inchoate, sexualized individualism was born. Brando acted in widescreen colour films and James Dean’s two movies were filmed using this technique; the visual schemas which had been created in opposition to television’s everydayness, intended by industry bosses to increase the distance between the real world and their escapist parallel one, were used to film some of the most realistic performances in the history of cinema.
The list is long indeed and amounts to a fundamental shift in the themes, voices and targets of American popular art of the time. Some directors, like Preminger and Kazan, wanted to shift American cinema directly onto contemporary subject matter such as race, youth, sexuality and unionism. Kazan had made films about anti-Semitism (Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947) and racism (Pinky, 1949) and in the semi-documentary tradition of Louis de Rochement. He had taken on mature US cinema’s baton from Welles and the noir directors. In On the Waterfront (1954) he filmed Brando’s character – a former boxer betrayed by his bosses, who stands up to union bullies – often on the streets, without any fill light on his face (168). Kazan used his Method acting theories as a battering ram against closed romantic realism, Hollywood’s idealized and emotional view of human life since the 1920s. The students of his Actors’ Studio – Brando, Montgomery Clift, Shelley Winters, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger and many others – became the most influential performers in Western cinema.2
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Marlon Brando as a washed-up boxer who defies the powerful unions in On The Waterfront. The Method performances in the film influenced Robert De Niro and other New York actors of the next generation. Director: Elia Kazan. USA, 1954.
The Big Knife (Robert Aldrich, 1955) provides a microcosm of developments in US film and acting during this period. In it, Steiger plays a studio boss dealing with the film industry’s uncertainties, and questions about his sexuality in his own private life. Steiger decided that he could discover the layers of his character by going around a department store, asking himself what each item for sale, such as ties, shoes and kitchen hardware, would mean to his character. Having visited many of the store’s departments, he noticed a tiepin in the shape of a question mark and he realized that that is what his character was, a “question mark” man. As a literal symbol of this, he bought the pin and wore it throughout the film). This kind of experimental, psychological archaeology greatly influenced the techniques of the most-applauded actors in modern American cinema, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino.
Many film historians would now argue that the most interesting mid-1950s American directors were those who incorporated psychological and societal question marks into what were apparently conventional widescreen melodramas. Three in particular explored their characters’ rage and near hysteria under the guise of mainstream entertainments. Their astonishing films were initially dismissed by reviewers, but were to become the most influential of the period. The first of these, Vincente Minnelli, has already been encountered. His flowing shots in The Clock (1945) paved the way for Alfred Hitchcock’s ten-minute takes in Rope (1948), and he also directed An American in Paris (1951). Minnelli’s artistic interests were broader than many other American directors. He lived for long periods in New York, saw European movies there, especially those of Max Ophüls, from which he learnt how to unify scenes into long sequence shots. He also read Freud’s writings and was interested in surrealism. His film The Cobweb (1955) grew out of these intellectual concerns. The bizarre story of a wrangle between the staff and patients in a mental hospital over whether to buy a pair of curtains, it portrayed an almost comically neurotic microcosm. Robert Wiene’s imagery in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari had registered the mental distortions of its characters in 1919, but comparable shadows did not appear in The Cobweb’s apparently sane imagery. Instead, Minnelli and his cinematographer, George Folsey, exploited widescreen’s new possibilities to overload their shots with visual connections and to design them to express their main characters’ mental strain.
Director Nicholas Ray took this further. Socially conscious, troubled and bisexual, he was born in Wisconsin, studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright and made two of the most significant American films of the post-war years – They Live by Night (1948) and In
a Lonely Place (1950). In 1954, he made Johnny Guitar, a low-budget Western shot in a new film stock, Trucolor (169). He rewrote the script and introduced a fierce new political, anti-witch-hunt feel to the story of a saloon owner on the outskirts of Albuquerque, who is waiting for the railroad. Joan Crawford, the diminutive, self-styled “queen of Hollywood” in the 1930s and 1940s played the lead character, a principled individualist who stands up to the bullyboy tactics of local bankers and lawmen. This masculinization of her part gives the film some of its sense of fluid sexual identity and, as it grew, so the title character of Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) was reduced in proportion. Effectively, they swapped roles, so it is Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge, a rival cattle queen, who have the shoot-out in the end.
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Joan Crawford as a saloon owner standing up against mob rule in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar. Denounced by most American critics at the time, its passion and visual intensity make it regarded by some as among the greatest works of American cinema. USA, 1954.
Johnny Guitar was released in America to poor reviews. Crawford once said, “there’s no excuse for a picture being this bad.” And yet it is one of the greatest Westerns, if not one the greatest films, ever made. The French director and critic François Truffaut wrote that anyone who rejects Johnny Guitar “should never go to see movies again … such people will never recognize inspiration, a shot, an idea, a good film or even cinema itself.” This is because of the maturity of the love story and the denunciation of mob rule; the psychotic intensity of Crawford and the other actors; the sense that this difficult movie star caused this beautiful thing to be made; Ray’s placing of people like chessmen on a board and his architectural use of space; the film’s fantastical and unusual use of colour and the hysteria about what constitutes a man and why men fear women. Seen today in its widescreen format, it is still full of repressed feeling.
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Director Douglas Sirk portrayed the stifling world of Eisenhower’s America in All That Heaven Allows. USA, 1955.
Douglas Sirk’s methods of disguising America’s anxieties in the guise of mainstream entertainment films were just as interesting. Born in Denmark in 1900 and brought up in Germany, he became a theatre director in his twenties and then turned to film. After making nine features in Germany, he fled the Nazis and eventually went to Hollywood where, from 1943, he started building a new directing career. As an intellectual, he found the studio scripts limiting but, after the 3–D Taza, Son of Cochise, he made a string of hugely successful ultra-glossy melodramas about the sexual underside of middle-class America. The most influential of these films was All That Heaven Allows (USA, 1956) about a widow rejected by her society friends when she begins a relationship with her gardener. When he was thirteen or fourteen, Sirk had been given a copy by his father of Henry David Thoreau’s pastoral book, Walden. He loved the book and wove it into his story of prejudice (170). Around the character of the gardener he created a series of images symbolizing nature, and contrasted these with the sterile lives of the widow’s judgmental friends. Sirk lovingly portrayed the lush details of Eisenhower’s middle-class America in an otherworldly light. Gradually, the widow becomes more and more constrained by this utopia, while Sirk exposes its conformity and viciousness. The community perceives the gardener as too young and too working class for her. They are scandalized by her continuing sexual desire and her wish to express it. They expect her to sublimate her inner life and translate it into a concern for curtains and manicured lawns. In a devastating late scene in the film, she is given a television set by her children. “Most of our ladies say that television gives them something to do with their time”, says a salesperson and Sirk photographs her reflection imprisoned in its glass frame. All that Heaven Allows became one of the most quoted examples of subversive mainstream filmmaking and the German director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, updated its view of 1950s America to 1970s Germany and its own problems of denial and prejudice (see page 354). American independent director, Todd Haynes, recreated aspects of it in Far From Heaven (2003) (171) in which his lead character was married to a gay man and the gardener was African-American.
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Todd Haynes’ Oscar-winning modernization of All That Heaven Allows borrowed heavily from the Sirk’s classic. Julianne Moore in Far From Heaven. USA, 2003.
India was making about 270 films a year at this point, considerably fewer than Japan’s annual production of 500. Less than half of those 270 films were in the national language of Hindi. By the mid-1970s, production would increase to over 500 and a decade later, it had more than doubled.
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An iconic poster of one of the most famous Indian films ever made: Mother India. It features the scene where actress Nargis, playing Radha, hauls a rock out of the soil. The camera was clocked off its horizontal axis to emphasize both her effort and the strong vertical of the composition. Director: .Mehboob, 1957.
Indian films produced in the mid-1950s were still dominated by playback musical numbers but, stylistically, melodrama was even more important than in the US. Two directors in particular, Mehboob and Guru Dutt, were as central to the genre as Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli were in America.
Mehboob was a legendary figure in Indian cinema between the late 1930s and his death in 1964. Born in a peasant village in Gujarat in the country’s north west, he worked his way up the Indian studio ladder in Bombay, directing his first film in 1935 and establishing Mehboob productions in 1942. His early films were “socials” in the style of Painter, but in the 1950s he elaborated his passionate storylines and filmed them with new visual splendour, echoing the trends in American cinema of the time. The climax of this development was his Bharat Mata/Mother India (India, 1957), which has become a milestone in world film history and is appropriately called the Gone With The Wind of Indian cinema. Like All That Heaven Allows and many of the US melodramas of time, it charts a woman’s suffering in order to explore the nature of society and social change. In this case the woman is Radha, an old lady looking back on her life. As she smells a garland of flowers, there is a flashback to her youth and wedding ceremony. We see how her family was exploited by a greedy landlord – a common theme in Indian cinema – and how one son accepts the persecution and another fights. Radha works hard tilling the fields, her gold-festooned face accented with a fluttering crimson veil, like one of those moving scenes from Dovzhenko’s Arsenal (Soviet Union, 1929) (see pages 107–108), remade in fabulous colour, and with the camera angled to emphasize the effort required by her work. These images have the intensity of Johnny Guitar. It is not clear whether Mehboob, like Minnelli and Satyajit Ray, had read Freud, but his situations are bursting with primal psychoanalytic life, particularly so when Radha is forced to kill her son. The film’s title suggests that its characters are not just individuals, but representatives of the struggling nation of India itself. At one point, Radha gets covered in mud and literally becomes part of the earth, while at another, peasants form India’s geographical outline in a field (298). This film worships the land in a way similar to Dovzhenko, and as Sirk had done through Thoreau.
Mother India was produced by a more mystical and man-nered culture than America, but the themes of labour and modernity flow beneath its surface. It contains both despair and exaltation like Johnny Guitar and All That Heaven Allows. “The world is full of magic” is a line from one of the songs, and its past is not distant nor is the future unreadable. When refused corn by their landlord, Radha cries with one of her sons – one of the least forced moments in cinema. This is largely due to the lead performance of India’s most famous actress, Nargis, as Radha. She was just twenty-seven years old at the time and had been in movies since the age of five, having already scored a huge success in Raj Kapoor’s Awaara (India, 1951). Although there was no equivalent to Kazan’s Actor’s Studio in India, Nargis and others pioneered greater authenticity on screen. Image 172 shows her sweat as she and others are trying to raise a rock from the field. The film’s power
comes from how hard she works. Her make-up is like a mask that hides her suffering, just as it had done for Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows. In one scene she is framed so tightly that her hair cannot be seen. “If life is poison,” according to one of lines in the most famous song in the film, “we must drink it.” Martyrdom, stoicism and acceptance are the film’s themes and this is where it departs from Sirk. It is more conservative than All That Heaven Allows The latter film’s message is “be true to yourself”, Mehboob’s is “be true to God and virtue”.
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Mehboob echoed Prime Minister Nehru’s One India populism in images such as this one, where peasants working in fields formed the shape of their country.
Mother India was a barometer measuring the accumulated pressure within India. Significantly, it broke box-office records not only there, but in most parts of the world where American cinema did not dominate, such as the Middle East, China, the Soviet Union and even Africa. Its social engagement – it opens with the construction of a new dam – combined with family melodrama became the new schema of non-Western cinema for at least a decade. One surprising point in this predominantly Hindu country’s most famous film: both Mehboob and Nargis were Muslims.
If Mother India was India’s Gone with the Wind, Guru Dutt was its Vincente Minnelli. Like the neo-realist-inspired Ghatak, Dutt was born in 1925, educated in Calcutta and associated with the leftist intellectuals of the Indian People’s Theatre Project. However, he was less radical than Ghatak, studying dance in the early 1940s and getting into filmmaking through choreography. He started directing in 1952, but his most significant film, Kaagaz Ke Phool/Paper Flowers (1959), was also the first Indian one filmed in widescreen. It is an intense experience because Dutt himself played the lead, an autobiographical role about a film director recalling the golden age of studio filmmaking. The character dies in his directing chair at the end of the film and Dutt killed himself less than five years after its failure at the box office.