1950’s Film History
The Dawning of the 50s:
The 50s decade was known for many things: post-war affluence and increased
choice of leisure time activities, conformity, the Korean War, middle-class
values, the rise of modern jazz, the rise of 'fast food' restaurants and drive-ins
(Jack in the Box - founded in 1951; McDonalds - first franchised in 1955 in Des
Plaines, IL; and A&W Root Beer Company - formed in 1950, although it had
already established over 450 drive-ins throughout the country), a baby boom,
the all-electric home as the ideal, white racist terrorism in the South, the advent
of television and TV dinners, abstract art, the first credit card (Diners Club, in
1951), the rise of drive-in theaters to a peak number in the late 50s with over
4,000 outdoor screens (where young teenaged couples could find privacy in
their hot-rods), and a youth reaction to middle-aged cinema. Older viewers were
prone to stay at home and watch television (about 10.5 million US homes had a
TV set in 1950).
In the period following WWII when most of the films were idealized with conventional
portrayals of men and women, young people wanted new and exciting symbols of
rebellion. Hollywood responded to audience demands - the late 1940s and 1950s saw
the rise of the anti-hero - with stars like newcomers James Dean, Paul Newman (who
debuted in the costume epic The Silver Chalice (1954)) and Marlon Brando, replacing
more proper actors like Tyrone Power, Van Johnson, and Robert Taylor. [In later
decades, this new generation of method actors would be followed by Robert DeNiro,
Jack Nicholson, and Al Pacino.] Sexy anti-heroines included Ava Gardner, Kim Novak,
and Marilyn Monroe - an exciting, vibrant, sexy star.
One of the decade's best comedies was Harvey (1950), with James Stewart as a
lovable, eccentric drunk named Elwood P. Dowd whose best friend was an imaginary, six-foot-tall rabbit.
Another of the most popular films in the late 50s was Leo McCarey's romantic drama An Affair to
Remember (1957), the story of an ill-fated romance between Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant due to an
automobile accident, delaying a rendezvous at the top of the Empire State Building in New York City. It
was a remake of the director's own tearjerker film Love Affair (1939) with Irene Dunne and Charles
Boyer. The same story would inspire the making of Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle (1993) with leads
Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (who had first appeared together in Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)), and
Love Affair (1994) with real-life couple Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.
The New Teenage, Youth-Oriented Market:
The 50s decade also ushered in the age of Rock and Roll and a new younger market of teenagers. This
youth-oriented group was opposed to the older generation's choice of nostalgic films, such as director
Anthony Mann's and Universal's popular musical biopic The Glenn Miller Story (1954), starring James
Stewart as the big band leader, duplicated in Universal's follow-up musical biography The Benny
Goodman Story (1956) with Steve Allen (his film debut in a serious dramatic role) as the talented clarinet
player. They preferred Rock Around the Clock (1956) that featured disc jockey Alan Freed and the
group Bill Haley and His Comets (singing the title song) and many others (such as the Platters, and
Freddy Bell and The Bell Boys) - it was the first film entirely dedicated to rock 'n' roll. It was quickly
followed by two more similar films featuring Alan Freed (as Himself) -- Don't Knock the Rock (1956) and
Rock, Rock, Rock (1956). Both films argued that rock-and-roll was a new, fun, and wholesome type of
music. However, the adult generation continued to regard the new youthful generation (and the rise of
juvenile deliquency) with skepticism and fear, as illustrated in the film adaptation of Maxwell Anderson's
stage play, The Bad Seed (1956). The thriller demonstrated that evil could reside in a young, cute serial
killer (played by Patty McCormack).
Bandstand first began as a local program for teens on WFIL-TV (now WPVI),
Channel 6 in Philadelphia in early October, 1952. In mid-1956, the new host chosen
for ABC-TV's American Bandstand was 26 year-old Dick Clark. By the time the
show was first aired nationally, in mid-1957, it had become a mainstay for rock
group performances.
The rock and roll music of the 50s was on display, along with big-bosomed star
Jayne Mansfield as a talentless, dumb blonde sexpot in writer/director Frank
Tashlin's satirical comedy The Girl Can't Help It (1956). Marilyn Monroe's foil Tom
Ewell starred in the film as the protagonist. It was the first rock and roll film to be
taken seriously, with 17 songs in its short 99 minutes framework. Great rock and roll
performers included Ray Anthony, Fats Domino, The Platters, Little Richard and his Band (featured in the
title song), Gene Vincent and His Bluecaps, Eddie Cochran (with his screen debut) and others. American
youth wanted to hear their popular groups in their films that they chose to view, including Bill Haley, Jerry
Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Ritchie Valens, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, Frankie Lymon and the
Teenagers, Gene Vincent, and The Platters.
Sometimes, to appeal to the new juvenile market, actors were miscast, such as clean-cut crooner Pat
Boone in April Love (1957), playing a juvenile delinquent who was sent to his uncle's Kentucky farm for
rehabilitation. The title song, however, became a big hit for the singer/actor. By the last year of the
decade, the youth market in all its forms was worth $10 billion a year. Tragedy also struck in the last year
of the decade, when pop idols 22 year old songwriter and singer Buddy Holly, 17 year old Latino singer
Ritchie Valens, and 28 year old J.P. Richardson (aka radio DJ "The Big Bopper") were killed in a light
plane crash on February 3, 1959 in an Iowa cornfield, while on a "Winter Dance Party" tour.
Hollywood soon realized that the affluent teenage population could be exploited, now
more rebellious than happy-go-lucky - as they had been previously portrayed in films
(such as the Andy Hardy character played by Mickey Rooney). The influence of rock 'n'
roll surfaced in Richard Brooks' box-office success, Blackboard Jungle (1955). It was
the first major Hollywood film to use R&R on its soundtrack - the music in the credits
was provided by Bill Haley and His Comets - their musical hit "Rock Around the Clock."
The film also starred Glenn Ford as a war veteran and clean-cut All-American novice
teacher at inner city North Manual HS (New York), where the students, led by a
disrespectful, sneering punk (Vic Morrow), test his tolerance. [One of the other
persuasive youths was a young Sidney Poitier.]
Another film, that came later in the decade, that also exploited the new teenage market's non-conformist
attitudes, was Jack Arnold's exploitative juvenile delinquent film, High School Confidential (1958),
featuring drugs in a high school dope ring, lots of 50's slang words and hep-talk, Russ Tamblyn as an
undercover cop posing as a student, switchblade fights, drag races, Mamie Van Doren as Tamblyn's
nympho aunt, and Jerry Lee Lewis singing the title song in its opening.
Two Early 50's Youth Films and Their Influential Actors:
Two other youth-oriented actors and their films in the mid-50s would portray the potentially-scary, selfexpressive, and rebellious new teenage population.
1. Marlon Brando: A Symbol of Adolescent, Anti-Authoritarian Rebellion
A young Marlon Brando (1924-2004) was trained by Lee Strasberg's Actors'
Studio in New York in raw and realistic 'method acting,' and influenced by Stella
Adler. He starred in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway (opposite Jessica
Tandy as Blanche) in 1947, and would later repeat his work on film in A
Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and receive an Oscar nomination. He also
contributed a memorable role as a self-absorbed teen character. He played Johnny - an arrogant,
rebellious, tough yet sensitive leader of a roving motorcycle-biking gang (wearing a T-shirt and leather
jacket) that invaded and terrorized a small-town in Laslo Benedek's controversial The Wild One (1954)
(banned in Britain until a decade and a half later). The film was noted for one line of dialogue, typifying his
attitude: "What are you rebelling against?" Brando's reply: "Whadda ya got?" A nasty Lee Marvin led a
rival gang of bikers named The Beetles.
[Brando's photo as biker Johnny later appeared on the front-sleeve of the famed mid-late 60s Beatles'
album: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Brando's new style of acting would be forever emulated
by future generations of actors, including Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn, and later Russell Crowe.)]
2. James Dean: The 'First American Teenager'
The anguished, introspective teen James Dean (1932-1955) was the
epitome of adolescent pain. Dean appeared in only three films before
his untimely death in the fall of 1955. His first starring role was in Elia
Kazan's adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden (1955)
as a Cain-like son named Cal vying for his father's (Raymond
Massey) love against his brother Aron.
It was followed by Nicholas Ray's best-known melodramatic, colordrenched film about juvenile delinquency and alienation, Warner
Bros.' Rebel Without a Cause (1955). This was the film with Dean's
most-remembered role as mixed-up, sensitive, and defiant teenager Jim Stark involved in various
delinquent behaviors (drunkenness, a switchblade fight, and a deadly drag race called a Chicken Run),
and his archetypal scream to his parents: "You're tearing me apart!"
Dean also starred in his third (and final) feature, George Stevens' epic saga Giant (1956) set in Texas,
and also starring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Dennis Hopper. (The 24 year-old actor was killed in
a tragic car crash on September 30th 1955 while driving his Silver Porsche 550 Spyder -- affectionately
nicknamed 'The Little Bastard', around the time that Giant was completed and about a month before
Rebel opened. Dean was on his way to car races in Salinas on October 1st. The crash occurred at the
intersection of Routes 41 and 46 near Paso Robles at Cholame, and he died enroute to the hospital.)
[Dean's two co-stars in the film also experienced untimely deaths: Sal Mineo (as Plato) was stabbed to
death at age 37, and Natalie Wood (as Judy) drowned at age 43.] In his honor, James Dean was
awarded two post-humous Best Actor nominations: for his role as rebellious Cal Trask in East of Eden
(1955) and as oil-rich ranch-hand Jett Rink in Giant (1956).
Elvis 'The Pelvis' Presley: The King of Rock 'N Roll
Elvis' first record was That's All Right Mama, cut in July, 1954 in Memphis and
released on the Sun Records label. At the time of his first hit song Heartbreak
Hotel, singer Elvis Presley made his first national TV appearance in January
1956 on CBS' Tommy (and Jimmy) Dorsey's Stage Show, although he is best
remembered for his controversial, sexy, mid-1956 performance of Hound Dog
on the Milton Berle Show, and for three rock 'n roll performances on the Ed
Sullivan Show from September 1956 to January 1957 - his last show was
censored by being filmed from the 'waist-up'.
He was also featured as an actor in many money-making films after signing his first film deal in 1956. His
screen debut was in Paramount's Civil War drama Love Me Tender (1956) (originally titled The Reno
Brothers), with a #1 single hit song ballad. Jailhouse Rock (1957) is generally acknowledged as his most
famous and popular film, but he also appeared in Loving You (1957) (noted for his first screen kiss) and
in director Michael Curtiz' King Creole (1958) as a New Orleans teen rebel (acclaimed as one of his best
acting roles) before the decade ended. His induction into the Army in 1958 was a well-publicized event.
After his Army stint, he also starred in G.I. Blues (1960), in Don Siegel's western Flaming Star (1960)
(with only two songs) as a half-breed youth, in the southern melodrama Wild in the Country (1961), and
in other formulaic 60's films (i.e., Blue Hawaii (1961), Kid Galahad (1962), and his biggest box-office hit
Viva Las Vegas (1964)). By the 70s, his film roles had deteriorated, and although he returned to stage
performances and revived his singing career, he was physically on the decline until his death in August,
1977 of heart disease and drug abuse.
Cheap Teen Movies:
Young people attended outdoor drive-ins that showed exploitative, cheap fare created
especially for them in a newly-established teen/drive-in genre. Producer/director Roger
Corman (the 'B-movie King'), known for feeding low-budget, short, sci-fi/horror quickies
to drive-in theatres and other neighborhood venues in the late 50s, generated films such
as:
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Not of This Earth (1957); originally released as part of a double-bill with Attack
of the Crab Monsters (1957)
Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)
The Blob (1958) featuring Steve McQueen in his first starring role as a highschooler in a film about a meteorite that oozed a disgusting, gooey substance
that ate people
A Bucket of Blood (1959)
The Wasp Woman (1959)
Other examples included the first rock & roll horror film - Gene Fowler's I Was A Teenage Werewolf
(1957) (Michael Landon's first feature film), and Ed Wood's debut transvestite shock film Glen or Glenda
(1953).
The Threat of Television:
Film attendance declined precipitously as free TV viewing (and the increase in
popularity of foreign-language films) made inroads into the entertainment
business. In 1951, NBC became America's first nationwide TV network, and in
just a few years, 50% of US homes had at least one TV set. In March of 1953, the
Academy Awards were televised for the first time by NBC - and the broadcast
received the largest single audience in network TV's five-year history. By 1954,
NBC's Tonight Show was becoming one of the most popular late-night TV shows.
With a steep decline in weekly theatre attendance, studios were forced to find creative
ways to make money from television - converted Hollywood studios were beginning to
produce more hours of film for TV than for feature films. [In mid-decade, the average
film budget was less than one million dollars.] And by mid-decade, the major studios
began selling to television their film rights to their pre-1948 films for broadcast and
viewing. The first feature film to be broadcast on US television (on November 3, 1956),
during prime-time, was The Wizard of Oz (1939).
TV stars became cross-over film stars - the first was Charlton Heston. In early 1950,
Western cowboy star Gene Autry was the first film star to announce his appearance in
a sponsored TV series. The feature-length, color version of Dragnet (1954), with
popular detective TV star Jack Webb (serving as director, producer, and star) as deadpan LAPD Sgt. Joe Friday, was the first film based on a TV show - the then-popular B/W TV show of the
same name ran from 1951-1959. It was memorable for its "Dum, de Dum Dum" theme music (that first
made an appearance in the Miklos Rozsa soundtrack for the film noir The Killers (1946)), and the
disclaimer: "Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent."
In the 1955-56 season, the ABC TV show Warner Brothers Presents was the first television program
produced by Warner Brothers Pictures, and marked the introduction of the major Hollywood studios into
television production. It was a survival tactic for the studios to pioneer in television series production. In
the same year, Twentieth Century-Fox Hour played on CBS and MGM Parade on ABC. And later, in the
mid- to late 50s, Warner Bros. studios produced more TV shows, such as: their first hit series Cheyenne
(1955-1963 with Clint Walker), Maverick (1957-1962, first with James Garner) and 77 Sunset Strip (19581964).
In 1956, the studios lifted the ban against film stars making TV appearances. Fasttalking, cigar-smoking, and quick-witted Groucho Marx (of the famed Marx Brothers)
brought his popular radio show You Bet Your Life to television (NBC) as a game show in
1950, with a duck that would descend with $100 if one said the secret word. It lasted
until 1961 - its theme music "Hooray for Captain Spaulding" was taken from the Marx
Bros.' second film Animal Crackers (1930). Other TV shows became popular:
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the early sitcom I Love Lucy (on CBS, beginning in 1951); its stars Lucille Ball
and husband Desi Arnaz had founded Desilu Productions in 1950
the family show The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (on ABC, from 1952-1966)
The Donna Reed Show (on ABC, from 1958-1966)
The Honeymooners (from 1951 and after)
Lassie (on CBS, from 1954-1971)
Gunsmoke (on CBS, from 1955-1975) with James Arness as Matt Dillon
This is Your Life (on NBC, from 1952-1961)
One positive side-effect of the growing influence of American television in the 50s was that it was
becoming the proving ground for many aspiring directors. Some of the directors who began in TV in this
decade were to make some of Hollywood's best movies in the 60s:
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Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Robert Mulligan's To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Because of the emergence of television as a major entertainment medium, many studios converted their
sound stages for use in television production. Because labor was cheaper abroad, many producers were
taking their film production overseas.
Delbert Mann's direction of Paddy Chayefsky's script (initially written as a TV play and
produced for NBC Television Playhouse and aired in 1953 with Rod Steiger) for the
black and white Marty (1955) about a romantically-insecure and lonely Bronx butcher
(Best Actor-winning Ernest Borgnine) who found love with someone his friends called a
'dog'. It was a big winner on the film screen - it was the first American film chosen at the
Cannes Film Festival as Best Picture since the award was instituted, and it won four
major Academy Awards, including Best Picture from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences.
Because television (a small black and white screen) had become affordable and a
permanent fixture in most people's homes, the movies also fought back with gimmicks color films, bigger screens, and 3-D. Bigger and more colorful films and screens, and
big scale, profitable box-office epics, such as Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949), the
popular Biblical story starring long-haired and virile Victor Mature and the beautifully-bewitching Hedy
Lamarr with exposed belly-button, and MGM's expensive romantic adventure King Solomon's Mines
(1950), filmed on location in Africa, were designed to lure movie-goers back into the theatres. By the mid50s, more than half of Hollywood's productions were made in color to take Americans away from their
B/W TV sets.
Coincidentally, two of the biggest films at the start of the decade, director Henry King's
Twelve O'Clock High (1949) about the stress experienced by American bombing units
in England, and Delmer Daves' Broken Arrow (1950), an "adult-Western" of the bloodbrother relationship between an Indian agent (James Stewart) and Apache chief
Cochise (white actor Jeff Chandler), would both become episodic TV series in future
years. Along with Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow (1957), Broken Arrow was notable
for having a sympathetic depiction of the Native American culture and concerns - the
first film to be shot from the Indians' point-of-view for many years. This revisionist effort
would be followed years later by the politically-correct, award-winning Dances With
Wolves (1990).
Hollywood's War Against Television:
The width-to-height aspect ratio of most Hollywood films before the 50s was 4:3 (or 1.33:1), similar to the
boxy-size of a television screen. [However, it should be noted that there were early experiments in widescreen formats as early as the late 1920s, such as in French director Abel Gance's epic Napoleon
(1927), with its Polyvision and 3-screen projection, or in Fox's 70mm. wide-gauge "Grandeur" system first
used in Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930). Both systems were aborted attempts, and turned out to be
uneconomically viable at the time.]
So in its war against television, the film industry had three major campaigns involving technical advances
with wide-screen experiences, color, and scope:
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Cinerama
3-D and Smell-O-Vision
CinemaScope
Other Widescreen Formats and Processes
Cinerama (1952-1962)
Paramount's wrap-around, big-screen Cinerama debuted in 1952, a breakthrough technique that required three cameras, three projectors, interlocking,
semi-curved (at 146 degrees) screens, and four-track stereo sound. It made
audiences feel that they were at the center of the action.
The first film using the three-strip cinerama process was This is
Cinerama (1952), a travelogue of the world's vacation spots, with a
thrilling roller-coaster ride. Although there were a few successful boxoffice Cinerama hits in the 1950s, the process was ultimately
abandoned because its novelty wore off and the equipment and
construction of special theatres was too cost-prohibitive and
cumbersome:
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Cinerama Holiday (1955)
The Seven Wonders of the World (1957)
the Lowell Thomas production of Search for Paradise (1958)
The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962)
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the last Cinerama-released film, How the West Was Won (1962)
[In the 60s, MGM and UA also produced films including Khartoum (1966), It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad
World (1965), and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) in 70 mm. Ultra Panavision for Cinerama
screens, dubbed Super Cinerama or Cinerama 70mm. In 1963, the world's largest Cinerama screen Cinerama Dome - was 90 feet wide and unveiled in Hollywood.]
3-D Movies
In the same year as the debut of Cinerama (1952), showmanship and gimmicks like 3-D
were used to bring audiences back. Special polarized, 'stereoscopic' goggles or
cardboard glasses worn by viewers made the action jump off the screen - in reality, the
glasses were unpopular, clunky and the viewing was blurry, although it was difficult (and
expensive) for theatre owners to get cinema-goers to give them back. The 3-D effect
was unable to compensate for the inferior level of most of the films.
The first full-length 3-D feature sound film was UA's cheaply-made jungle adventure
Bwana Devil (1952)) by writer/director Arch Oboler, and starring Robert Stack - its
taglines advertised: "A Lion in Your Lap" and "A Lover In Your Arms." The film depicted
man-eating lion attacks upon the builders of the Uganda Railway. [Note: The first
feature-length 3-D film was The Power of Love (1922).]
The 3-D effect was also used in many different genres:
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in horror films (Warners' and B-film maker Andre de Toth's House of Wax
(1953) with horror master Vincent Price, a remake of Warners' The Mystery of the Wax
Museum (1933)) - the first 3-D horror film to be in the top ten box office hits in its year of release,
Vincent Price portrayed the owner of a macabre wax museum in his first horror film, House of
Wax (1953)
in musicals (George Sidney's Kiss Me Kate (1953))
in romantic musical comedies (The French Line (1953) starring busty Jane Russell) - one
provocative tagline touted: "It'll knock BOTH your eyes out"
in westerns (Douglas Sirk's Taza, Son of Cochise (1954))
in science fiction (the cheaply-made Robot Monster (1953), and It Came From Outer Space
(1953) - the first 3-D science fiction film) - and shortly thereafter, in The Creature From the
Black Lagoon (1954), a story of a Gill-Man set in the Amazon (and featuring Clint Eastwood in
his film debut as a lab assistant)
in thrillers (Hitchcock's 3-D version of Dial M For Murder (1954))
Aroma-Rama and Smell-O-Vision
Other short-lived film fads in this decade and afterwards, that were designed to tear viewers away from
their TVs, included Charles Weiss' 1959 system of pumping "Oriental" scents into the theatre through the
air-conditioning system - it was dubbed Aroma-Rama. Aroma-Rama was prominently used in Carlo
Lizzani's Behind the Great Wall (1959), an Italian documentary about Red China narrated by Chet
Huntley. In fact, this olfactory approach to expanding the movie-going experience actually had lesserknown precedents in 1906 (rose oil permeated Forest City Pennsylvania's Family Theatre during a Rose
Bowl game newsreel), in 1929 (lilac oil was spread through the ventilation system of a Boston theater
during the opening credits of the love story Lilac Time (1928)), and in the 1940s (various scents were
distributed during the double-bill The Sea Hawk (1940) and Boom Town (1940) in a Detroit theater).
Smell-O-Vision was a similar process that came slightly later in 1960, developed by the Swiss-born Hans
Laube, in which 30 different smells were injected into a movie theatre's seats when triggered by various
points in the film's soundtrack. Only one film was made with this gimmicky process - Michael Todd Jr.'s'
Scent of Mystery (1960) (aka Holiday in Spain). [Two decades later, director John Waters paid homage
to this concept with his patented system dubbed Odorama for his B-film melodrama Polyester (1981). It
used scratch-and-sniff cards and a number-system on-screen to alert an audience member when to
respond.]
CinemaScope
When Cinerama and stereoscopic 3-D died almost as soon as they were
initiated, 20th Century Fox's CinemaScope became cheaper and more
convenient because it used a simple anamorphic lens to create a widescreen
effect. The aspect ratio (width to height) of CinemaScope was 2.35:1. The
special lenses for the new process were based on a French system developed
by optical designer Henri Chretian. The first film released commercially in CinemaScope was 20th
Century Fox's and director Henry Koster's Biblical sword-and-sandal epic The Robe (1953). It debuted in
New York at the Roxy Theater in September of 1953.
The dramatic costume epic told the story of a Roman tribune Marcellus (Richard Burton) who was
converted to Christianity by Pythagoras (Victor Mature), his slave. Two other early efforts in
CinemaScope were Beneath the 12 Mile Reef (1953) and How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). The
CinemaScope wide-screen system would last for the next fourteen years.
Other Wide-Screen Formats and Processes - Milestones
Various wide-screen processes attracted audiences and monopolized the bigscreen market for most of the 1950s. There were numerous optical techniques that
widened the theatrical screen with effects that couldn't be duplicated on the TV
screen:
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- Paramount's VistaVision (used in Hitchcock's well-known thrillers To Catch a Thief (1955), his
own re-make The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958), and North by Northwest
(1959), and in DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956))
- SuperScope (RKO's answer to Fox's CinemaScope), and WarnerScope (Warners' answer to
Fox's CinemaScope)
- MGM's Camera 65 (later called Super Panavision-70 and Ultra Panavision-70)
- Panavision
- TechniScope
- Todd-AO 70 mm (producer Mike Todd's pioneering, independently-owned system); Super
Technirama 70 mm. was a Todd-AO-compatible 70mm format
The following are milestones in the wide-screen formats:
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first VistaVision film - director Michael Curtiz' and Paramount's hit film White Christmas (1954),
an Irving Berlin musical with its most-famous scene of Bing Crosby singing the title song; in the
story - a follow-up remake of the earlier hit Holiday Inn (1942), Bob Wallace (Bing Crosby) and
song-and-dance partner Phil Davis (Danny Kaye) put on a Christmas show to save a Vermont
lodge while paired up with the Haynes Sisters: Betty (Rosemary Clooney) and Judy (Vera-Ellen)
first film in SuperScope - the western Vera Cruz (1954), and later, Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (1956)
first film in WarnerScope - Santiago (1956) (aka The Gun Runner), and later Raoul Walsh's The
Naked and the Dead (1958)
first film in MGM's Camera 65 (or Ultra Panavision 70) - Raintree County (1957)
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Ben-Hur (1959) was a Camera 65 picture - the first film shot with Panavision lenses to win the
Best Cinematography Academy Award
first Todd-AO used successfully in Fred Zinnemann's Oklahoma! (1955), Around the World in
80 Days (1956), Josh Logan's South Pacific (1958), and Porgy and Bess (1959)
first film in Super Panavision-70 - The Big Fisherman (1959), followed by Exodus (1961) and
West Side Story (1961)
first films in Super Technirama - Sleeping Beauty (1959), Solomon and Sheba (1959),
Spartacus (1960), King of Kings (1961), and El Cid (1961)
first film in Ultra Panavision-70 - Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)
first film in TechniScope - A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
However, Hollywood definitely lost the struggle, because wide-screen films were enormously expensive
and risky to make. And it could not find a perfect antidote to reverse TV's capture of movie audiences.
The number of feature films released fluctuated each year and often declined - reflecting the financial
woes of the movie industry. Eventually, Hollywood gave up the idea of shooting films on 65 or 70 mm film,
and reverted back to cheaper alternatives, such as shooting on 35 mm and using special lenses for
projection.
Low-Budget Showman: William Castle (1914-1977)
50s B-horror film director and impresario schlockmeister William Castle was known as
the "King of Ballyhoo" - taking his direct inspiration for promotion from trickster P.T.
Barnum. Castle's gimmicky ad campaign for Macabre (1958) promised a $1,000 Lloyds
of London insurance policy for each patron who might die of fright during a screening of
the film. Its taglines were: "See it with someone who can carry you home!" and “If it
frightens you to death, you'll be buried free of charge!" One of the most outrageous
effects he created for movie audiences was his "Percepto" format for The Tingler
(1959), that consisted of installing small electric motors under the theatre seats and
shocking viewers with a mini-jolt of buzzing vibration when Vincent Price appeared on
screen or when blood-curdling screams were desired. The context of the film was that
there was a docile creature, living in the human spinal cord, that became activated by
fright and could only be destroyed by screaming ("Scream - scream for your lives").
The horror genre was enhanced with his House on Haunted Hill (1959) with Vincent Price as the
eccentric host of the haunted house with a pit of acid in the basement. [By the time the film was remade
about 40 years later by director William Malone as House on Haunted Hill (1999), the offer to guests to
spend a night in the house was upped from $10,000 to $1 million.] One of Castle's outrageous techniques
for this film, his "Emergo" 3-D system, pulled an inflatable plastic, glow-in-the-dark skeleton over film
audiences to scare viewers. Castle promoted "Illusion-O" for his production of 13 Ghosts (1960),
advertised as "13 Times the Thrills! 13 Times the Chills! 13 Times the Fun!" Audience members were
given red-and-blue colored 'ghost-viewers' (hand-held pieces of cardboard) in order to see (or not see)
the ghosts on-screen in the haunted house. His film Homicidal (1961) was promoted with a "Fright
Break," a 45-second timer during the film's climax. The voice-over advised the audience of the time
remaining in which they could leave the theatre and receive a full refund if they were too frightened.
However, those who wished to leave had to endure the humiliations of a "Coward's Corner" set up in the
lobby and bathed in yellow light - something even worse than remaining to watch the rest of the film.
At the start of Castle's Mr. Sardonicus (1961), he personally introduced the tale as "full of gallantry,
graciousness and ghouls," and then reappeared in the film's conclusion to ask the audience about their
preference for the evil Sardonicus' fate. The gimmick allowed audiences to vote in a “Punishment Poll" each audience member was given a card with a glow-in-the-dark thumb they could hold either up or down
to decide if Mr. Sardonicus would be cured or die at the end of the film. [Joe Dante's Matinee (1993), a
tale set in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, was about a Castle-like showman (portrayed by John
Goodman) named Lawrence Woolsey who was promoting his latest gimmicky horror film, Mant!, in Key
West, Florida.]
Extravagant, Expensive, Hollywood Epics:
Risks were taken with lavish, overstated, spectacular epic films in this decade - more
films were over three hours in the 50s, with studio support for musicals and epics. Most
of the Hollywood spectaculars were Greek, Roman, or Biblical, or otherwise, beginning
with The Robe (1953). Pioneering movie director Cecil B. DeMille, known for his largerthan-life, expensive films, lavish productions, and spectacular stunts, staged the
greatest hit of 1952 in a circus Big Top setting with multiple stars and cameo roles - the
film was Best Picture winner The Greatest Show on Earth (1952).
Other epics in mid-decade were Michael Curtiz' Biblical spectacle The Egyptian (1954)
and Desiree (1954) with Marlon Brando as an inept Napoleon. Producer/director
Howard Hawks' larger-than-life Land of the Pharaohs (1955), co-scripted by William
Faulkner and starring Joan Collins as an evil Egyptian princess, was designed to lure
television viewers away from their sets with its extravagance and cast of thousands. The exotic adventure
film King Solomon's Mines (1950), based on a novel by H.R. Haggard, starred Stewart Granger as
diamond-hunting Allan Quartermain with husband-seeking Deborah Kerr in the African jungle (filmed on
location). Two films based on Jules Verne's novels starred James Mason: Disney's sci-fi adventure
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), with Kirk Douglas as a 19th-century whaler and James Mason
as Captain Nemo in a submarine named the Nautilus, and Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
with Mason as a professor leading an expedition into an Icelandic volcano that led them to an
underground world where living dinosaurs still existed.
Three Monumental Epics in 1956:
(1) DeMille remade his own 1923 silent film for his final powerful film, re-creating the
solemn Biblical epic with special effects such as the miraculous parting of the Red Sea
(with 300,000 gallons of water), Charlton Heston as Old Testament prophet Moses, Yul
Brynner as the stubborn Pharaoh ("So let it be written, so let it be done"), and a cast of
thousands - The Ten Commandments (1956). [Former falsely-accused, blacklisted
actor Edward G. Robinson performed in a comeback role as Dathan in the film.]
(2) George Stevens' Giant (1956) was a sprawling epic about a wealthy Texas family of
cattle ranchers spanning a twenty-five year period, with big name stars James Dean (in
his final film release), Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor.
(3) And Mike Todd's epic travelogue film version of Jules Verne's Around the World in
80 Days (1956), the second Todd-AO production, was reportedly one of the largest film
projects ever made in Hollywood. It employed every means of transportation for
wagering Phileas Fogg (David Niven) to circle the globe in 80 days to win a bet,
including trains, boats, and a balloon. The film included scores of cameo roles,
thousands of extras and costumes, a cavalcade of animals (and their animal handlers), and a whirlwind
global journey - and it won five Academy Awards (including Best Picture - and in retrospect has been
widely considered one of the poorest Best Picture winners).
Other lengthy, wide-screen, full-color blockbuster epics were guaranteed to follow: War and Peace
(1956) (with Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda) and Anthony Mann's El Cid (1961) (featuring Charlton
Heston and Sophia Loren).
David Lean's epic The Bridge On the River Kwai (1957) was another big-budget
spectacular famous for its whistling Colonel Bogey March - a story of heroism and survival
in a Japanese POW forced labor camp during World War II (filmed on location in Sri Lanka). A more
traditional epic, a colorful, gritty tale of the Vikings, The Vikings (1958), starred Kirk Douglas as the fierce
and brutal Norse conqueror. [One of the alleged results of the Howard Hughes-produced The Conqueror
(1956) with John Wayne miscast as Genghis Khan, was that the filming in the Utah desert near A-bomb
test grounds in Nevada contributed to the cancer deaths of director Dick Powell and stars Wayne, Agnes
Moorehead and Susan Hayward.]
William Wyler directed the award-winning remake of Ben-Hur (1959) with its celebrated, live-action
chariot race, a much-celebrated film in 65 mm big-screen format that won 11 Oscars out of twelve
nominations (more than any other movie in Academy Award history to that time). At $15 million, it was the
most expensive film ever made up to its time, and the most expensive film of the 50s decade. It told the
story of Prince Judah (Charlton Heston) who was cruelly sent into slavery after an accident, and returned
to seek revenge on his oppressors. A similar Roman epic at the end of the decade, Kubrick's Spartacus
(1960) starred Kirk Douglas in the title role as a gladiator and the leader of a slave revolt.
Films About Hollywood Itself and the Stage:
After his successes of the 1940s with a film noir masterpiece (Double
Indemnity (1944)) and a bold drama about an alcoholic (The Lost
Weekend (1945)), director/writers Billy Wilder and Joseph L. Mankiewicz
released the scathing, acidic, subversive Gothic comedy Sunset
Boulevard (1950), with an unforgettable come-back performance by
once-great, aging silent film star Gloria Swanson, her young,
opportunistic hack screen-writer lover (portrayed by William Holden) who
narrated the flashbacked film as a dead man, her butler (former director
Erich von Stroheim), and director Cecil B. DeMille as himself. It remains the best movie ever made about
Hollywood -- years later, it was made into a Broadway musical by Andrew Lloyd-Webber.
Another 'behind-the-scenes' melodrama about Hollywood was Vincente Minnelli's The
Bad and the Beautiful (1952) with Kirk Douglas in a strong performance as a ruthless,
maverick Hollywood producer/studio head, who summoned a writer (Dick Powell), a
director (Barry Sullivan), and an actress (Lana Turner) - all with careers he launched - to
help save his studio. In the same year, the musical Singin' in the Rain (1952) reflected
the difficulties experienced by the Hollywood film industry during the transition from silents
to sound.
Nicholas Ray directed the brooding, biting film noirish story of a borderline, often-violent,
hot-tempered Hollywood screenwriter (Humphrey Bogart) suspected of murder in In a
Lonely Place (1950). And George Cukor's widescreen A Star is Born (1954), the second
version of this classic film, contrasted the rising Hollywood stardom of a singer/actress (Judy Garland in
her own comeback from depression and drug abuse) and the decline of her washed-up alcoholic
husband/mentor (James Mason). Robert Aldrich's The Big Knife (1955) presented a devastating look at
Hollywood's ruthless search for fame and power.
Although not about Hollywood, writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's literate satire about backstage
intrigue, All About Eve (1950), with Marilyn Monroe in a bit role as an aspiring starlet, starred Bette Davis
as aging theatre star Margo Channing. The film was noted for its witty, barb-infested script, and famous
for Davis saying: "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night", and Anne Baxter as the
ambitious assistant title character. It was honored with a record 14 nominations (5 of which were acting
nominations) and six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. And Tony Curtis starred in two films about
performers: magician Houdini (1953) opposite his real-life wife Janet Leigh as wife Bess Houdini, and
director Carol Reed's Techni-colored Trapeze (1956) - about two acrobatic rivals (ex-real-life acrobat Burt
Lancaster against aerialist Tony Curtis) in a competitive romantic love triangle with Gina Lollobrigida.
Ingrid Bergman gave an Oscar-winning performance (it was her second Oscar) as the lost princess in
Anastasia (1956), claiming to be the last survivor of the Russian royal family. The film represented a
comeback for Bergman, who had been exiled from Hollywood after a scandalous, overblown affair with
Italian film-maker Roberto Rossellini.
United Artists Corporation:
United Artists, originally founded in 1919 by pioneering film-makers (stars and
directors including D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas
Fairbanks, Sr.), encountered debts and financial difficulties and was forced to
sell off and reorganize in 1951. The production studio was sold to a syndicate
headed by two NY entertainment lawyers, and United Artists became solely a
financing and distributing facility. At first, the new administration released
modestly-budgeted films, but by the mid-1950s rebounded with the independent
films of Stanley Kramer and Otto Preminger. It was very successful and
competitive with all the major studios because of the release of its influential films in the decade, such as:
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The African Queen (1951)
High Noon (1952), d. Stanley Kramer
The Moon is Blue (1953), d. Otto Preminger
The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), d. Otto Preminger
Marty (1955)
Witness for the Prosecution (1957), d. Billy Wilder
The Defiant Ones (1958), d. Stanley Kramer
On the Beach (1959), d. Stanley Kramer, a story set in Australia about the virtual destruction of
the world because of lethal radiation levels
Some Like It Hot (1959), d. Billy Wilder
Inherit the Wind (1960), d. Stanley Kramer
Marilyn Monroe: Sex Symbol and Movie Star
Innovations in wide-screen technologies weren't the only weapon that
Hollywood studios used against television. Starlet Marilyn Monroe (born in 1926
and earlier known as Norma Jean Baker - Baker was the last name of her
mother's first husband), who had posed for pin-up artist/painter and
photographer Earl Moran beginning in the late 40s, had appeared in a bit-role
(with a sexy walk and the line: "Some men are following me") in UA's Love
Happy (1949) - with the Marx Brothers in their last film as a team, and in lots of
B-movies in bit roles, usually as a dumb blonde. Ultimately, she would become
the century's most enduring pop icon and sex symbol.
She had her first screen test and signed her first studio contract with Twentieth Century Fox in mid-1946
for one year and appeared in bit roles (including the musical comedy The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947),
Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay! (1948) and the juvenile delinquent melodrama Dangerous Years (1947)),
and then in 1948 for six months with Columbia Pictures - where she experienced her first co-starring role
as a showgirl in the low budget musical Ladies of the Chorus (1949). Eventually, Monroe returned to
20th Century Fox, signing a seven-year contract with the studio in 1950. She had two early memorable bit
roles as the naive "niece" (mistress) of a corrupt lawyer in John Huston's superb crime-noir drama The
Asphalt Jungle (1950) from MGM, and as an ambitious would-be Hollywood actress in Joseph
Mankiewicz's acclaimed All About Eve (1950) from Fox. Her first lead role was in the Fox thriller Don't
Bother to Knock (1952) as a mentally-unstable babysitter.
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in Henry Hathaway's Technicolor film-noir thriller Niagara (1953), Marilyn starred as a sexy,
murderous honeymooner named Rose Loomis; the film's tagline advertised: "A raging torrent of
emotion that even nature can't control!"
in Howard Hawks' musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), she appeared (with Jane
Russell) as a delightfully-scheming blonde showgirl and gold-digger named Lorelei Lee, and
performed the classic "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend"
in Jean Negulesco's comedy How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), she was one of three husbandhunting, gold-digging glamour girls (with Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable) who rented a penthouse
to attract wealthy suitors
Director/co-writer Billy Wilder cast the blossoming blonde sex symbol of the 1950s in two excellent
comedies: the slightly salacious The Seven Year Itch (1955) as a lust-fantasy object (known as The Girl)
for Tom Ewell, and enduringly known for the billowing white skirt scene above a breezy subway grating
(publicized as much more risque in press shots), and then as ditzy, busty ukelele-strumming singer Sugar
Kane in the hilarious classic, screwball, gender-bending farce Some Like It Hot (1959) - one of the
sharpest, best-casted films of all time with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as dress-wearing band
members named Daphne and Josephine (and Monroe won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a
Comedy).
[Marilyn, who had previously been married to James Dougherty in 1942 (and divorced in 1946) eloped
with baseball player Joe DiMaggio in 1954 in a short-lived union, and then married playwright Arthur
Miller in mid-1956 (a four-year marriage that ended with a Mexican divorce in 1961).]
After starting her own motion picture company, Marilyn Monroe Productions, in 1956, she appeared in
two of the company's productions as a kind, but no-talent saloon singer floozie in Bus Stop (1956) (with
another Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress) and in The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) opposite
Sir Laurence Olivier as an icy Eastern European monarch. She also starred in George Cukor's third
musical Let's Make Love (1960) (Marilyn's 27th picture) with Yves Montand (with whom she had an affair
during filming), and her last completed film was director John Huston's troubled production of The Misfits
(1961) opposite aging star Clark Gable. One film was left unfinished, Fox's and director George Cukor's
Something's Got To Give (1962), a remake of the Cary Grant film My Favorite Wife (1940) co-starring
Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse. [The film has since been reconstructed from existing film footage at 37
minutes. It includes her nighttime skinny-dipping scene in a backyard pool - it would have been the first
nude scene in an American film by a major star. It was revamped and recasted with Doris Day and James
Garner as Move Over, Darling (1963).] She died at age 36 on August 5, 1962 in her Los Angeles
bedroom, presumably from a drug overdose, but circumstances surrounding her death have proved
mysterious, with some claiming 'foul-play' due to alleged affairs with the Kennedys.
Combat-War Films and Anti-Communist Films in the 50s:
At the dawn of the decade, several dramatic World War II films made a comeback: Twelve O'Clock High
(1949), Battleground (1949) an action film about American infantryman fighting during the Battle of the
Bulge, and John Wayne as a tough, stereotypical Marine Sergeant in The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949).
The Desert Fox (1951) starred James Mason as German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel ("The Desert
Fox"), the famed tank commander in war-torn North Africa who was ultimately defeated by Montgomery.
By the time the Korean War was over by mid-decade and the peaceful Cold War period continued, more
combat and war-related films were box-office hits:
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Battle Cry (1954) - based on Leon Uris' novel about Marines on their way to
war in the Pacific
The High and the Mighty (1954), a gripping, airplane-in-flight-disaster film
starring John Wayne (who whistled the theme song) as the copilot and Robert
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Stack as the Captain; it prophetically invented the disaster film genre and foreshadowed its craze
in the 1970s
Herman Wouk's novel was adapted as The Caine Mutiny (1954), with Humphrey Bogart on trial
as an incompetent Lt. Comm. Queeg, defended by attorney Jose Ferrer
co-directors John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy and Joshua Logan made the comedy/drama Mister
Roberts (1955) about life on-board a World War II cargo ship named The Reluctant; the film was
based on the Broadway play of the same name, and starred lots of acting veterans (James
Cagney, Henry Fonda, and William Powell in his last film role) and a young up-and-coming Jack
Lemmon
To Hell and Back (1955) with decorated World War II GI and war hero Audie Murphy playing
himself as an infantryman on the battlefront
James Stewart as a US Air Force pilot in Strategic Air Command (1955)
The Sea Chase (1955), a World War II adventure with John Wayne as the captain of a German
freighter
The fear of the Communists continued to appear on-screen, mostly in blatantly anti-Communist,
propagandistic films that are mostly fascinating from a social-historical point of view: R. C. Springsteen's
The Red Menace (1949), Leo McCarey's My Son John (1952), Jerry Hopper's The Atomic City (1952) a thriller set in Los Alamos, and Lewis Allen's A Bullet for Joey (1955). At the end of the decade, the
story of a young girl in hiding before being discovered with her family and sent to a concentration camp
was filmed in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).
The Musical Genre Reached New Heights in the 50s:
This decade also witnessed the prodigious rise of colorful, escapist, lavish, classic musicals (mostly from
MGM and its production genius Arthur Freed, and from directors Stanley Donen and Vincente Minnelli)
that benefited from wide-screen exposure, including such films as:
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Irving Berlin's smash-hit musical Annie Get Your Gun (1950) with Betty Hutton as the legendary
sharp-shooting character Annie Oakley, and numerous Irving Berlin songs: "There's No Business
Like Show Business" and "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better"
An American in Paris (1951)
the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein musical Show Boat (1951), with the story of an inter-racial
marriage that causes friction on-board the riverboat, and the singing of "Ol' Man River" by William
Warfield
Singin' In The Rain (1952), the classic film noted for Gene Kelly's dance in a downpour, and
Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh"
The Band Wagon (1953)
Calamity Jane (1953), with Doris Day as the tomboyish title character opposite Howard Keel as
Wild Bill Hickok, honored with a Best Song Oscar for "Secret Love"
Kiss Me Kate (1953), a play within a play and musical version of The Taming of the Shrew, with
songs including "Too Darn Hot" and "Brush Up Your Shakespeare"
Lili (1953) with its hit song "Hi Lili, Hi Lo"
Brigadoon (1954), a Lerner and Loewe musical starring Gene Kelly, about a Scottish village that
appeared only once every 100 years
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) with its exuberant dancing
Guys and Dolls (1955), the screen adaptation of Frank Loesser's 1950 Broadway hit (based
upon Damon Runyon's stories) with Marlon Brando cast in the unlikely lead role as Sky
Masterson, and Frank Sinatra as Nathan Detroit
Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1955) - with Gordon MacRae as Curley and in love
with Shirley Jones as Laurey
The King and I (1956) - the filmic version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1951Broadway musical
hit, with Best Actor-winning Yul Brynner as the bald King of Siam ("Etcetera"), and Deborah Kerr
as the Western teacher Anna
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High Society (1956) - the musical remake of The Philadelphia Story (1940) that featured Cole
Porter songs and Grace Kelly in her final film
Carousel (1956), a delightful Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, with Gordon MacRae as a
carnival barker who must come back from Heaven to redeem himself and see his teenaged
daughter's graduation - and
South Pacific (1958) - another R & H showcase; this one included the songs "Happy Talk," "I'm
Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair," and "Some Enchanted Evening"
Damn Yankees (1958) (originally titled What Lola Wants in the UK), based on the story of Faust,
and starring male heart-throb Tab Hunter as a baseball fan who made a deal with the Devil
Porgy and Bess (1959) - directed by Otto Preminger, with George Gershwin music, and AfricanAmerican stars including Sammy Davis, Jr. as Sportin' Life, and Sidney Poitier and Dorothy
Dandridge in the title roles
Gene Kelly, in a continuing collaboration/partnership with choreographer-turned director
Stanley Donen made probably his greatest musical ever (and possibly the most popular
Hollywood musical of all time) - the exuberant Singin' in the Rain (1952). It was a
pleasurable parody of Hollywood's shaky transition from the silent era to the talkies, and
most famous for Kelly's stomping and singing through a downpour and spinning around a
lamppost, and Donald O'Connor's slapstick somesault-against-a-wall acrobatics. Other
Stanley Donen-Gene Kelly team creations were On the Town (1949) (Kelly's codirectorial debut film) and It's Always Fair Weather (1955).
Some of director Vincente Minnelli's best musicals were made in the 50s:
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the award-winning An American in Paris (1951), with a climactic "jazz ballet" finale brilliantly
choreographed by Gene Kelly
The Band Wagon (1953)
Brigadoon (1954)
Gigi (1958) - a Best Picture and Best Director victor starred Leslie Caron, Louis Jourdan, and
Maurice Chevalier ("Thank Heaven for Little Girls")
Although Fred Astaire had ended his dancing partnership with Ginger Rogers, he danced with other
partners in The Band Wagon (1953) (with Cyd Charisse), in Daddy Long Legs (1955) (with Leslie
Caron), in Funny Face (1957) (with Audrey Hepburn), and in Silk Stockings (1957) (again with Cyd
Charisse).
Adult Themes Explored:
With television aimed at family audiences, the movies were freer to explore realistic adult themes and
stronger or previously taboo subjects, such as in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) with veiled
hints at homosexuality, or voyeurism in Rear Window (1954) (with James Stewart as a wheel-chair
bound photographer). George Stevens' A Place in the Sun (1951) demonstrated the tragic struggle of
class differences, as social-climbing Montgomery Clift was convicted of the murder of his pregnant,
working-class girlfriend (Shelley Winters) while romancing rich socialite Elizabeth Taylor. Thought daring
at the time of its release, Josh Logan's Picnic (1955) starred attractive drifter William Holden who arrived
in a Kansas town and romanced Kim Novak at the start of Labor Day picnic celebrations. A Summer
Place (1959), with Percy Faith's recognizable theme song, was infamous for its scene of Sandra Dee's
mother dragging her to the doctor for a pregnancy test after a beach overnight with lover
Troy Donahue.
Columbia's multiple-Oscar winner From Here To Eternity (1953) was considered
'questionable' and ultimately sanitized due to its well-publicized, sensationalized, on-thebeach love-making scene and adulterous relationship between stars Burt Lancaster and
Deborah Kerr. The Caine Mutiny (1954) effectively adapted Herman Wouk's Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel with Humphrey Bogart in a memorable role as a crazed, paranoid naval officer
named Queeg. The melodramatic soap opera Peyton Place (1957) adapted Grace Metalious's novel
about scandalous activity in small-town New Hampshire. Joseph Mankiewicz directed Elizabeth Taylor,
Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift in Tennessee Williams' intriguingly unpleasant Suddenly, Last
Summer (1959). Another potent adaptation of a Tennessee Williams' stage hit, Richard Brooks' Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof (1958) was forced to dilute its references to homosexuality, but it still contained frank
exchanges about sex.
Marlon Brando Revolutionized the Screen with Method Acting:
Other films with adult-oriented content in the 50s included the stage-to-screen adaptation of Tennessee
Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) set in New Orleans, with Oscarnominated Marlon Brando (he had performed in the successful 1947 Broadway play) in a star-making,
emotional role as dirty, sweaty and erotic T-shirt-wearing Stanley Kowalski. (Jessica Tandy, who had
played fragile Southern belle Blanche DuBois in the stage production, was replaced by Vivien Leigh - a
perfect counterpart to Brando's animalistic, swaggering role.)
Brando's acting genius was also portrayed in the gritty organized crime drama On the
Waterfront (1954) that won eight Oscars (and 30 year-old Brando's first Best Actor
award), in which he portrayed informant, waterfront dockworker and pigeon-tender Terry
Malloy (with his famous taxi cab speech: "I could've been a contender" and the scene of
his retrieval of Eva Marie Saint's dropped glove). The political theme of Malloy's
honorable ratting against the crime boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) helped to
explain Kazan's own, self-justifying testimony before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC) in 1952. [Brando even made an impact in his first film, Fred
Zinnemann's The Men (1950), as a bitter, hospitalized paraplegic soldier showing
hostility toward his pre-war fiancee Teresa Wright.]
In his films of the early 50s, Brando brought a raw naturalistic realism to the screen - a new style termed
Method Acting that he had acquired at the Actors Studio in New York, also exemplified in the acting of
Montgomery Clift and James Dean in the era. (Although A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) was
condemned by the Legion of Decency for its bold content, it pushed back the boundaries of the
Production Code while hinting at homosexuality, nymphomania, and rape. Brando would forever be
identified with the iconic tight T-shirt he wore in the film.)
Brando's greatness as an actor in the early 50s was honored with four successive Best Actor
nominations:
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Best Actor nomination: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), famous for his bellowing of "Stella-aa-a" at the foot of the stairs, and for his brutish, masculine performance
Best Actor nomination: Viva Zapata! (1952), with Brando as the Mexican revolutionary; also
directed by Elia Kazan from John Steinbeck's screenplay
Best Actor nomination: for director Joseph L. Mankiewicz' Julius Caesar (1953) with Brando as a
mumbling Marc Antony
Best Actor nomination and win (Brando's first): On the Waterfront (1954) - director Kazan also
won an Oscar; with Brando as a failed boxer and stooge for a corrupt longshoreman's union
In the late 50s, Brando was also nominated a fifth time for his performance in Sayonara (1957), an early
film with the theme of intermarriage between an Asian and American and the resulting prejudice, with
Brando as a Korean War major romantically involved with a Japanese Kabuki dancer (Miiko Taka).
Films With a 'Social Conscience':
In the early 1950s, when McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist had taken a firm
hold, independent producer/director Stanley Kramer was producing the classic, Best
Picture-nominated western High Noon (1952), a veiled anti-McCarthy allegorical film
about a marshal (Gary Cooper) in a showdown against evil threats to the community.
Other powerful films from Kramer with a social conscience and a serious 'message'
about sensitive subjects were:
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Champion (1949), a boxing expose-drama with Kirk Douglas
Home of the Brave (1949), a ground-breaking film about racial prejudice in the
Army during WWII
The Men (1950), noted for the screen debut of Marlon Brando as a disabled veteran
Death of a Salesman (1951), a screen adaptation of Arthur Miller's Pulitzer Prize-winning play,
with Fredric March as the middle-aged title character Willy Loman; blacklisted Broadway play
actor Lee J. Cobb was denied the role, although Mildred Dunnock recreated her stage role as
Willy's wife Linda
The Wild One (1954), about youth rebellion in the guise of black-jacketed bikers led by the iconic
Johnny (Marlon Brando)
The Defiant Ones (1958), about a black and white prisoner (Sidney Poitier, the first black actor to
star in mainstream Hollywood films in non-stereotyped roles, and Tony Curtis) who escaped from
a prison chained together; the film's award-winning script was co-written by blacklisted writeractor Nedrick Young; the film brought Kramer his first Best Director nomination
the thought-provoking, grim, anti-nuclear film On the Beach (1959), a doomsday account (based
on Nevil Shute's novel) of survivors (Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins, Fred Astaire) in the
aftermath of a nuclear attack, with Gregory Peck as a stalwart submarine commander
Inherit the Wind (1960) - a dramatization of the John Scopes 'Monkey Trial' regarding evolution
and creationism, pitting courtroom figures (Fredric March and Spencer Tracy) against each other
Later, Kramer also tackled the atrocities of Nazi war crimes with Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and
race relations (and inter-racial marriage) with Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967).
Director John Sturges' Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) was a suspenseful, modern-day western/drama
about a one-armed stranger (Spencer Tracy) confronting a town's awful, racist secret. Elia Kazan's A
Face in the Crowd (1957) (with Andy Griffith and Lee Remick in their screen debuts) examined how
easily the media could manipulate and dupe the public. And Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1954)
satirized 50s morals, advertising, sex, and the growing power of television.
Hitchcock's sombre and noirish The Wrong Man (1956) examined the plight of Henry Fonda as a family
man unjustly accused of armed robbery. Another definitive film noir was Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953)
- it was an example of a sub-genre of criminal/gangster-syndicate films, along with Joseph H. Lewis' The
Big Combo (1955), Phil Karlson's The Brothers Rico (1957), and Burt Balaban and Stuart Rosenberg's
CinemaScope Murder, Inc. (1960).
Censorship Challenges: Otto Preminger
Since the mid 1930s, films exhibited a seal and number, showing that they were in compliance with the
Motion Picture Production Code Administration (better known as the Breen Office because of the
PCA's head Joseph Breen). The Hays Production Code was amended in 1951 (its first major revision
since 1934!) with content restrictions for the film subjects of drugs, abortion, prostitution, and kidnapping.
The constraints of the system were increasingly criticized by the mid-1950s, because filmmakers were
forced to make changes in their films in order to qualify for a seal of approval, but some filmmakers were
willing to take risks.
The first studio-produced film from Hollywood that was released without the seal,
deliberately, was producer/director Otto Preminger's daring The Moon is Blue (1953),
a dated sex comedy about seduction and chastity that was also condemned by the
Catholic Legion of Decency, in part because of its offensive use of prohibited words
such as "virgin," "seduce," "pregnant," and "mistress" in the dialogue. Nonetheless, the
film received three Academy Award nominations (Best Actress, Best Song, and Best
Film Editing) and great viewer curiosity and box-office publicity due to the controversy.
Director Henry Cornelius' I Am A Camera (1955), the pre-cursor to the Broadway
musical hit Cabaret, was also denied an approval seal for its subject matter of abortion.
UA's stark black and white The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), under
director/producer Otto Preminger's direction and starring Frank Sinatra, was also
denied a production seal by the Motion Picture Association of America because the film
dealt with the forbidden subject of drug (heroin) addiction. It was a test of the 'morals code' ruling on
drugs. UA Studios resigned from the MPPDA and submitted the film to state censorship boards instead.
Otto Preminger's legal drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959) (with Stewart as a crafty defense lawyer)
dealt with another taboo subject - rape. It featured real-life lawyer Joseph Welch (famous for asking in the
Army-McCarthy hearings - "Have you no decency at last, sir?") as the presiding Judge Weaver. [By the
beginning of the next decade, Preminger was able to release the controversial Advise and Consent
(1962), a drama about power politics and homosexuality (and Charles Laughton's last film).]
The release of director Elia Kazan's version of Tennessee Williams' steamy
Southern tale Baby Doll (1956) brought condemnation by the National Legion
of Decency (although released with a seal of approval) - it was especially
controversial for its gigantic Times Square billboard promoting the film with its
star Carroll Baker curled up on a cot sucking her thumb (based on one of the
earliest scenes in the film). The film was about a young teen bride nicknamed
"Baby Doll" (Carroll Baker and older husband (Karl Malden). Yet the film,
along with Preminger's challenges and other lessening of restrictions on filmmakers in 1956, was instrumental in breaking the back of the Production Code and bringing in a new era
of frank Hollywood movie-making.
Darryl Zanuck's first independent production, Island in the Sun (1957) was daring for its time, since the
Hays Code banned miscegenation. It offered two inter-racial romances between John Justin and Dorothy
Dandridge, and Harry Belafonte and Joan Fontaine. The film provided the first scene in a US film where a
white woman (Joan Fontaine) was kissed by a black man (Harry Belafonte). As the 50s progressed, there
were other indications that the production code was weakening. Best Supporting Actress nominee
Carolyn Jones played the role of a "nympho" in The Bachelor Party (1957), and four consecutive Best
Actress Oscar winners portrayed "easy women" or prostitutes:
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Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve (1957), about a patient with several distinct
personalities (one a loose party girl) suffering from a rare and controversial psychiatric condition,
and being treated with hypnosis by doctor Lee J. Cobb
Susan Hayward in I Want to Live! (1958)
Simone Signoret in Room at the Top (1959)
Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8 (1960)
Doris Day's Films and Other Romantic Musicals and Comedies:
Besides Marlon Brando, James Dean, and other rebellious characters in the
1950s, there were also squeaky-clean and wholesome stars such as Doris Day.
She appeared with Gordon MacRae in the musical Tea For Two (1950), in Roy
Del Ruth's and WB's musical romance On Moonlight Bay (1951) based upon
Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams and the Penrod stories, and its sequel By the
Light of the Silvery Moon (1953). She also had lots of roles in similar musicals in the period, such as It's
a Great Feeling (1949), The West Point Story (1950), The Lullaby of Broadway (1951), I'll See You in
My Dreams (1951), April in Paris (1952), Calamity Jane (1953), Lucky Me (1954), and The Pajama
Game (1957).
The first in a long line of fluffy, light-hearted adult sex comedies in the early 60s appeared in the final year
of the decade. The light-hearted, witty Pillow Talk (1959) starred the steadfastly-virginal Doris Day and
Rock Hudson (the first of their three films together) - portraying two perfectly matched people who battled
it out in a war between the sexes. Delbert Mann's Lover Come Back (1961) and Norman Jewison's Send
Me No Flowers (1964) were other vintage Hudson-Day comedies. Doris Day also starred with other
leading men in romantic comedies or dramas, such as Ronald Reagan in The Winning Team (1952),
James Cagney in Love Me or Leave Me (1955), Richard Widmark in The Tunnel of Love (1958), an
aging Clark Gable in Teacher's Pet (1958), David Niven in Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960), and
Cary Grant in That Touch of Mink (1962).
The romantic drama Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), with Frank Sinatra singing the film's Oscarwinning theme song, told the story of three secretaries (Maggie McNamara, Jean Peters, and Dorothy
McGuire) who traveled to Rome looking for romance with Louis Jourdan, Clifton Webb, and Rozanno
Brazzi. Rosalind Russell starred as the title character in Auntie Mame (1958), recreating her stage role in
a play that was based on Patrick Dennis' book about his eccentric relation. It was noted for her statement
of her life's philosophy: "Life is a banquet—and some poor suckers are starving to death." A witchy Kim
Novak with a cat named Pyewacket cast a love spell on publisher James Stewart in the fantasy comedy
Bell, Book and Candle (1958).
Intelligent 50s Westerns:
Low-budget Westerns turned brooding, intelligent, widescreen and
psychological in the 1950s, emphasizing well-drawn, complex and ambiguous
characters rather than blazing action. Three new directors replaced traditional
Westerns with creative, dramatic, "adult" Westerns:
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Delmer Daves
Budd Boetticher
Anthony Mann
Writer/director Delmer Daves filmed Broken Arrow (1950) - one of the first Westerns to show the Indian
perspective (although white actor Jeff Chandler played the role of Cochise), the first-rate 3:10 To Yuma
(1957) (the best of the High Noon imitations), Cowboy (1958), and The Hanging Tree (1959).
Budd Boetticher made some of the best Westerns in the late 50s starring actor Randolph
Scott, including Decision at Sundown (1957), the little known classic The Tall T (1957),
Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960).
The third new director was Anthony Mann who typically teamed up with James Stewart in
films such as the episodic, 'psychological' Winchester '73 (1950) (the film that helped
popularize Westerns for the entire decade), Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur
(1953), The Far Country (1955), and The Man From Laramie (1955). Other excellent
Mann westerns included The Tin Star (1957) and The Man of the West (1958), with
Gary Cooper as a former outlaw plagued by his past.
Two of Howard Hawks' landmark westerns book-ended the decade: Red River (1948) and Rio Bravo
(1959). The top male star of 1950, John Wayne, starred in both films.
Three other intelligent and popular Westerns were Fred Zinnemann's anti-HUAC western
High Noon (1952) for which Gary Cooper won a Best Actor Oscar by portraying an
archetypal loner/marshal taking a showdown stand for justice against the bad guys as the
clock tensely ticked towards noon. [Ironically, he was one of Hollywood's actors who
cooperated with the HUAC and targeted "Communist sympathizers" in the industry.] High
Noon was marked by Grace Kelly's first starring role as the lawman's new bride, and an
innovative real-time structure. The second Western film was George Stevens' mythic
classic Shane (1953), a new kind of Western which featured an individualistic, existential
loner/hero gunslinger. The third Western was John Ford's greatest masterpiece The
Searchers (1956), possibly the greatest Western ever made.
At the end of the decade before his classic The Magnificent Seven (1960), John Sturges directed
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) and The Last Train from Gun Hill (1958). And from Japanese
director Akira Kurosawa came The Seven Samurai (1954) - a 16th century style 'western' tale of seven
hired professionals commissioned to defend a small farming village.
The Cold War Era and Its Influence on Science Fiction Films:
Science fiction films, horror films, and fantasy films (flavored with Cold War paranoia)
flourished and dominated the box-office hits of the early to mid-50s (sometimes called
the "Monster Movie" decade), when aliens were equated with Communist fears (due to
the McCarthy Era's Soviet witch hunt). George Pal's pioneering Destination Moon
(1950) was the first in the long series of 50s sci-fi films about outer space travel and
other worlds. It won an Oscar for Best Special Effects.
Another popular hit was Robert Wise's intelligent and pacifistic The Day the Earth
Stood Still (1951) with the tagline: "From Out of Space, a Warning and an Ultimatum" a story about a spaceship that landed on a baseball diamond. Emerging from the
strange craft were an alien named Klaatu and robotic assistant Gort - with a clear
warning. [The film was remade in 2008 by director Scott Derrickson, starring Keanu Reeves as Klaatu.]
Rudolph Mate's and producer George Pal's When Worlds Collide (1951) featured more special effects in
a race-against-time and the world's extinction. Byron Haskin's The War of the Worlds (1953) (another
George Pal-produced film) was adapted from H.G. Wells' 1898 book about a Martian invasion that was
finally defeated by lowly bacterial germs. (It also was a sensational radio show in 1938 when Orson
Welles adapted it for that medium.) Director William Cameron Menzies' Invaders From Mars (1953) was
about a 12 year-old boy (Jimmy Hunt) who saw people disappear into the ground (where Martian aliens
had set up a base) and whose parents had been reprogrammed into strange-acting zombies. Earth vs.
The Flying Saucers (1956) showed the destruction of the Washington Monument and the Capitol
Building by alien spacecraft, with special effects by Ray Harryhausen.
Christian Nyby's classic sci-fi/monster film The Thing (From Another World) (1951)
featured a hostile visitor (James Arness from TV's famed Gunsmoke) from space at an
army radar base situated in the North Pole's Arctic. Its closing line broadcast America's
50s-style suspicions of the world: "Watch the skies, everywhere, keep looking - keep
watching the skies!" It Came From Outer Space (1953) was the first of director Jack
Arnold's well-regarded science-fiction adventures in the 1950s (that included Creature
from the Black Lagoon (1954) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) - about a
radioactive mist that caused Grant Williams to shrink and become dwarfed by a spider
and a cat).
The first in a long series of Britain's Hammer Studios low-budget, horror films was the
internationally-successful The Quatermass Experiment (1955) - it inspired a boom
and revival of the classic horror and sci-fi genre that was being threatened by a glut of teen-oriented
horror films. At the other end of the spectrum of 'serious' science fiction was Ed Wood's campy, hilarious
classic Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959).
The first of 1950s films about giant monsters aroused by atomic
bomb weapons tests was Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). The
science-fiction thriller Them! (1954) featured giant ants mutated
because of atomic testing and radiation and threatening Los
Angeles. Don Siegel's unforgettable, classic science-fiction
melodrama Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) told of fears
of an extra-terrestrial plot (symbolic of Communism) to replace
humans with emotionless duplicate pods. [The film was remade
and updated by Phil Kaufman in the late 70s as Invasion of the
Body Snatchers (1978), and also remade again in 1994.]
MGM's ambitious science-fiction film inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest, Fred Wilcox's Forbidden
Planet (1956), featured marvelous production values and a much-loved sci-fi icon, Robby the Robot on
the planet Altair-4, where the Krell civilization was destroyed by creatures from the Id. The original sci-fi
horror-film The Fly (1958) effectively told of matter teleportation experiments that went awry, and the
capture of the fly-sized human in a spider web crying "Help me, help me."
Godzilla (or Gojira):
Japan's contribution, following the Hiroshima bombing - and Harryhausen's inspiring Beast From 20,000
Fathoms (1953), was to create the rampant, giant green, four-hundred foot monster Godzilla, who
debuted in Toho Studios' and Ishirô Honda's Gojira - King of the Monsters (1954). [The name of the
monster was a combination of "gorilla" and "kujira," meaning whale.] It was a cautionary story about the
effects of nuclear weapons following the dropping of bombs on the Japanese homeland at the end of
WWII, and during a time of underwater nuclear testing in the South Pacific. The film led to an American
release a few years later (Godzilla - King of the Monsters (1956)) with significant alterations, after
renaming, dubbing in English and recutting (removing all political content), and starring American actor
Raymond Burr (before gaining fame for Perry Mason) as reporter Steve Martin.
Other science fiction monsters would soon follow from the team of Honda and producer Tomoyuki
Tanaka, such as Rodan (1956) - a giant pterodactyl, Ghidrah (a three-headed monster), and Mothra
(1962) - a giant caterpillar. The two did not make another Godzilla movie until King Kong vs Godzilla
(1963), in which the two gargantuan monsters fought with each other in Tokyo. Godzilla also fought
against Mothra in Godzilla vs. Mothra (1964), and against a 3-headed monster named Gidrah in
Monster Zero (1965) (aka Ghidrah, The Three-Headed Monster (1965)). The ultimate monster film was
Honda's Destroy All Monsters (1968) with all of Earth's giant monsters (Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra,
Angilas and Minya) threatening the cities of the world.
Due to its success, Honda was also called upon to direct the next year's All Monsters Attack (1969) (aka
Godzilla's Revenge) - a 'best-of' compilation. The Godzilla monster would later return in the mid-80s as
Gojira (1984) (aka Godzilla 1985: The Legend is Reborn) - a remake of the 1956 classic, in the mid90s as Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995), and at the turn of the century with Godzilla 2000 (1999) (the
first Japanese Godzilla movie since the 1985 installment to receive a US theatrical release). The ultimate
films in the US series were Roland Emmerich's big-budget Godzilla (1998), and the 50th Anniversary film
Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) - reprising the giant monster's battles with many of its old foes.
Disney's Feature-Length Animations and All-Live Feature Films:
Disney Studios returned to feature-length 'story' animations this decade with its
production of the charming, fairy-tale Cinderella (1950), one of their best examples of
the genre. The rags-to-riches story told of evil and jealous sibling step-sisters, a Fairy
Godmother, a glass slipper, a cat named Lucifer, and a pumpkin that turned into a riding
carriage. Disney's Alice in Wonderland (1951) was a nightmarish interpretation of
Lewis Carroll's storybook. Another popular animated feature, Peter Pan (1953), was
based on Sir J. M. Barrie's fantasy book, with trademark pixie fairie Tinkerbell (legendarily based on
Marilyn Monroe's figure) and villainous Captain Hook. Disney's first 3-D cartoon was Melody (1953). In
1954, Disney began to distribute its films through its own new company, Buena Vista Film Distributing.
The Lady and the Tramp (1955) was the studio's first animated feature in CinemaScope, and featured a
spaniel and mongrel who romantically shared a spaghetti strand in an alleyway. To conclude the decade,
Disney released another animated feature Sleeping Beauty (1959), with music by Tchaikovsky.
Disney Studios' first all-live action feature film was Treasure Island (1950) - an adventure tale of gold and
pirates based on Robert Louis Stevenson's novel. They also produced the exciting Jules Verne fantasy
with Captain Nemo (James Mason) and innovative, Academy Award-winning special effects in Richard
Fleischer's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). Its live-action, family film hit, Old Yeller (1957) was a
popular, sentimental boy-and-dog tale with Tommy Kirk. Their final live-action fantasy of the decade was
the hit family comedy The Shaggy Dog (1959) with Fred MacMurray.
Fairy tales, such as The Ugly Duckling, The King's New Clothes and Thumbelina, were creatively blended
into RKO Radio's Hans Christian Andersen (1952), with Danny Kaye in the title role as the village
cobbler and famed Danish writer and storyteller.
Greatest Stars of the 50s:
The biggest box-office stars of the 1950s were: John Wayne, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Betty Grable,
James Stewart, Abbott and Costello, Clifton Webb, Esther Williams, Spencer Tracy, Randolph Scott, the
team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, Gary Cooper, Doris Day, Gregory Peck, Susan
Hayward, Alan Ladd, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, June Allyson, William Holden, Clark Gable,
Glenn Ford, Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly, Burt Lancaster, Glenn Ford, Kim Novak, Frank Sinatra, Jane
Wyman, Yul Brynner, Cary Grant, Debbie Reynolds, Pat Boone, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte
Bardot, and Rock Hudson.
James Stewart: Studio control of stars significantly eroded when James Stewart signed a precedentsetting independent (or free-lance) contract to share in the box-office profits (45% of the net profits) of the
Anthony Mann western Winchester '73 (1950), and for the film version of the stage comedy Harvey
(1950). In fact, for all his Universal Studios films (including Bend of the River (1952), and The Far
Country (1954)), Stewart took no salary in exchange for a large cut of the profits -- a very lucrative deal.
As a result, he earned increasingly high salaries, became a pioneer of the percentage deal (a performer
accepted a reduced or non-existent salary in exchange for a percentage of the box office profits), and
was the industry's top box-office star by mid-decade. For Winchester '73 (1950) alone, Stewart earned
$600,000.
Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor:
24 year old Audrey Hepburn became a star and won the Best Actress Oscar in William
Wyler's captivating comedy/romance Roman Holiday (1953) when she played a
princess traveling incognito in Rome - and falling in love with reporter Gregory Peck.
She then starred in Billy Wilder's romantic comedy Sabrina (1954) with Humphrey
Bogart and William Holden, in Funny Face (1957) opposite Fred Astaire, and in the
noteworthy drama The Nun's Story (1959) as tested novitiate and missionary Sister
Luke in the Belgian Congo where she meets a handsome surgeon (Peter Finch).
The lovely, just-married (to hotelier Nicholas Conrad Hilton, Jr.), 18 year-old violet-eyed
Elizabeth Taylor appeared in Vincente Minnelli's Father of the Bride (1950). [Taylor
divorced Hilton in early 1951 and married actor Michael Wilding in early 1952.] She also
co-starred opposite Montgomery Clift and experienced illicit love in director George
Stevens' A Place in the Sun (1951) (adapted from Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy), and middecade reunited with the director for Giant (1956). Toward the end of the decade, she starred in two
Tennessee Williams' adaptations, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) as a sexually-deprived Maggie (the
"Cat") opposite Paul Newman as husband Brick, and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) as a lobotomythreatened New Orleans debutante. [In early 1957, Elizabeth Taylor divorced Michael Wilding and
married Mike Todd - who died in a New Mexico plane crash in March, 1958. She soon married the
recently-divorced Eddie Fisher (from Debbie Reynolds) in 1959 (and divorced in March, 1964).]
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis:
The powerhouse combo-comedy team of Dean Martin (the dead-pan straight man)
and Jerry Lewis (the goofy, hyper misfit) had many box-office smashes in the 1950s
from their total of sixteen films together, including such forgettable films as At War
With the Army (1950), Sailor Beware (1951), That's My Boy (1951), Jumping
Jacks (1952), Living It Up (1954), and Artists and Models (1955). After the duo split
their partnership in 1956, Lewis went solo in the 60s, directing and starring in The
Bellboy (1960) and The Nutty Professor (1963).
The Golden Age of British Comedy:
England experienced a "Golden Age of Comedy" in the 50s following the war, with a series of celebrated,
intelligent and whimsical comedies, many with superb character actors Alec Guinness or Peter Sellers in
the starring roles. They were produced by Michael Balcon's Ealing Studios and called "Ealing comedies."
[Balcon took over the studio in 1938 and ran the independent, craft-oriented studio until 1955.] Almost all
of the comedies portrayed a slightly rebellious, small-time crook interested in mocking the authoritarian
establishment. The social commentary films included the following four works, all starring Alec Guinness:
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director Robert Hamer's black-hearted comedy about inheritance, Kind Hearts
and Coronets (1949) with the versatile Guinness (in his third film) playing the
parts of all eight D'Ascoyne family victims, and Dennis Price as the
unscrupulous murderer intent on acquiring the family fortune
director Charles Crichton's light-hearted caper comedy The Lavender Hill Mob
(1951) (winner of the Academy Award for Best Screenplay) again with Alec
Guinness as the unsuspecting bank clerk Mr. Holland who masterminds a
scheme to rob the Bank of England, melt down the gold bank bars and cast
them into miniature Eiffel Towers - but his plan is thwarted by a group of French
schoolgirls; the film also featured a brief appearance by a young Audrey
Hepburn
director Alexander Mackendrick's satirical comedy The Man in the White Suit (1951) with
Guinness as an absent-minded, obsessed amateur inventor in the textile industry
Mackendrick's droll and farcical comedy The Ladykillers (1955) with Guinness as bumbling
criminal mastermind Professor Marcus planning a train robbery with a gang of thieves (Peter
Sellers in an early role, Herbert Lom, and Danny Green), all living in the boarding house of
octogenarian Katie Johnson; this was the last of the great Ealing comedies; [the film was remade
by the Coen brothers in 2004 with the same title, featuring Tom Hanks as the eccentric 'brain' of
the larcenous outfit]
In 1954, the British film companies (Ealing, Rank, and London Film Productions-Korda) began to supply
their feature films to US television networks - they were the first films to be made available. [Ealing
Studios closed in 1955. A plaque at the studio described what Ealing Studios had accomplished over
almost two decades: "Here during a quarter of a century, many films were made projecting Britain and the
British character.] Small US producers, such as Monogram and Republic, followed suit and before long
thousands of B-pictures and serials like Flash Gordon became available to American TV audiences.
The first in a long-running series of low-budget British comedies, Carry On Sergeant (1958), inspired the
institution of middle-class, low-brow, wacky humor (with double entendres and one-liners) that finally
stretched out to over 30 films in the next few decades. A few of the prominent actors who would reappear
in later installments included Charles Hawtrey and William Hartnell.
Other British Influences:
The very-quotable British theatrical work from Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being
Earnest (1952), was filmed in the early 50s with stalwart UK actors Dame Edith Evans,
Margaret Rutherford, and Michael Redgrave. English actor Charles Laughton's one and
only film as a director, the nightmarish, stark black and white The Night of the Hunter
(1955), became a cult classic with its tale of a homicidal preacher (Robert Mitchum),
with his knuckles tattooed with the words "LOVE" and "HATE," terrorizing and pursuing
two small children, and with silent star Lillian Gish in a supporting role. (Laughton also
starred as a cobbler in David Lean's Hobson's Choice (1953), a satirical comedy set in
Lancashine in the 1890s that was adapted from Harold Brighouse's famous play.)
Britisher Alexander Mackendrick, in his American debut film, evoked a noirish, brutal
view of New York City and its moral decay in Sweet Smell of Success (1957),
exemplified in the roles of a megalomaniac, syndicated newspaper columnist (Burt
Lancaster) and a seedy Broadway press agent (Tony Curtis).
UK-born Peter Sellers' popularity was enhanced in the United States after he starred in Jack Arnold's
comedy The Mouse That Roared (1959). John Osborne's groundbreaking, popular British play was
brought to the screen by director Tony Richardson as Look Back in Anger (1959), with Claire Bloom,
Edith Evans, and Richard Burton (as an "angry young man") in the cast. This UK film led to a 'new wave'
decade of realistic, "kitchen sink" British dramas in the 60s. The famed Universal monster Frankenstein
appeared for the first time in color, in Hammer Studio's version The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
directed by Terence Fisher, with Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein, and Christopher Lee as the
Monster. This film marked the advent of a long cycle of the studio's stylistic gothic horror films, with Lee
also playing the famed Dracula vampire, as in Fisher's Horror of Dracula (1958) the next year.
In the same year as Hitchcock's ground-breaking and disturbing Psycho (1960), master British cinemamaker Michael Powell made a dark, disturbing and shocking thriller Peeping Tom (1960) in vivid
Technicolor, one of the earliest "slasher" films. It was about a voyeuristic, psychopathic cameraman with
a phallic-knife in the foot of his tripod that he used to kill young women. The film's tagline was: "Terror
Meets Art in a Deadly Game of Cat and Mouse."
Notable Directors of the 50s and Their Cinematic Masterpieces:
Some of Hollywood's greatest directors made some of their masterpieces during
this decade. In continuing collaboration with John "The Duke" Wayne, director John
Ford made three exceptional films:
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Rio Grande (1950), the third cavalry film in Ford's famed trilogy
The Quiet Man (1952), Ford's own favorite film, a gloriously photographed
film in the director's native Ireland
The Searchers (1956), possibly the greatest Western ever made, and
Ford's greatest film in the Western genre. John Wayne (famous for
repeating: "That'll be the day") played the lead role as a fanatical, racist
searcher and loner seeking revenge during an obsessive quest over many
years for his Comanche-kidnapped niece (Natalie Wood)
Maverick and oft-times self-indulgent director Orson Welles filmed the expressionistic
Macbeth (1948) for Republic Pictures. Then exiled, he devoted four years of his life to
produce, direct, write, and star in another Shakespearean work filmed in various
European locales, the classic tragedy Othello (1952). He was brought back to the US
to direct and star in his first film in America in 10 years - Universal's classic B film noir Touch of Evil
(1958) with its legendary tracking shot opening the film. Unfortunately, it was a financial disaster and
spelled the end of Welles' American film-making.
In the decade, versatile producer/director Howard Hawks was uncredited as director for Christian Nyby's
sci-fi The Thing (1951), directed sex symbols Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in the musical comedy
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and Joan Collins in the grandiose historical epic Land of the
Pharaohs (1955), and then made Rio Bravo (1959) with a combination of established western stars
(John Wayne, Walter Brennan, and Ward Bond) and newcomers (Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie
Dickinson, and Claude Akins).
For most of the 50s, Austrian-born director Billy Wilder - after the dark Sunset
Boulevard (1950), turned out a variety of enduring classics and lighter comedies,
including the brilliant skewering of the press in Ace in the Hole (1951), the POW
camp comedy/drama Stalag 17 (1953) with Best Actor-winning William Holden, the
modern-day fairy tale Sabrina (1954), The Seven Year Itch (1955) with Marilyn
Monroe's famous stance astride a subway grating, the sophisticated Love in the
Afternoon (1957) (with aging Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn as the romantic
leads), the inspiring biopic The Spirit of St. Louis (1957) with James Stewart as solo
pilot Charles Lindbergh, the courtroom thriller Witness for the Prosecution (1958),
Some Like It Hot (1959), and then at the close of the decade, Wilder was awarded his
second Best Director Oscar for the Best Picture-winning The Apartment (1960).
Established director/actor/writer John Huston made a number of fine dramas of various genre types in the
50s:
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the crime caper classic The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
the successful adventure/romance The African Queen (1951), adapted from a
novel by C.S. Forester, was set mostly on a jungle river in Africa during World
War I and featured a prim missionary woman (Katharine Hepburn) and a boozesoaked river rat (Humphrey Bogart) in an odd-couple relationship
the Civil War battle tale The Red Badge of Courage (1951), a veiled anti-Korean
War treatise based on Stephen Crane's novel, with real-life hero Audie Murphy as
reluctant soldier Henry Fleming
the biopic of Toulouse-Lautrec (Jose Ferrer) in Moulin Rouge (1952) with a
celebrated can-can sequence in a French nightclub
Beat the Devil (1953), an off-beat comedy (with Humphrey Bogart's final role for
Huston)
an adaptation of Herman Melville's whale-story Moby Dick (1956) with Gregory Peck as the
crazed Captain Ahab
Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) with Robert Mitchum as a WWII sergeant and Deborah Kerr
as a Catholic nun stranded on a South Pacific island
a remake of A Farewell to Arms (1957) with Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones
George Cukor's priceless comedy Born Yesterday (1950) was an update of the best-loved stage
production featuring Oscar-winning Judy Holliday as dumb blonde Billie Dawn. [Through the decade,
Holliday also starred in Cukor's It Should Happen to You (1954) (with Jack Lemmon in his screen debut)
and Vincente Minnelli's The Bells Are Ringing (1960).] In his latter years, prolific director Michael Curtiz
was still making films in the mid-50s, such as the buddy film and black comedy We're No Angels (1955),
with Humphrey Bogart (his final film with Curtiz), Peter Ustinov, and Aldo Ray as three escaped convicts
from Devil's Island. (The film was remade with Robert De Niro and Sean Penn in 1989.) And John
Sturges directed The Old Man and the Sea (1958), an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's brief novel
starring Spencer Tracy as a fisherman off the coast of Cuba who struggled with a hooked marlin bigger
than his boat.
Chaplin's Swan Song Films:
Favorable film reviews bypassed Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) in his later years, and
his status as an actor and director was severely diminished by Red Scare accusations
during the McCarthy era by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Setbacks for the unorthodox but gifted film-maker also included his box-office failure
Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a dark comedy about a cold-blooded Bluebeard-like
murderer. The film was poorly received by the US press (although it received a Best
Original Screenplay nomination), causing Chaplin to pull it out of circulation for many
years. Chaplin attended the premiere of his own poignant film Limelight (1952) in the
UK, but the film about an aging dance hall tramp clown didn't play in the US until 20
years later due to false rumors against Chaplin and boycotts of the film. The film was
noted for its sole teaming of filmdom's two greatest silent clowns, Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
Surprisingly, when the bittersweet film was shown in the US and became 'eligible' for an Academy Award
in 1972, it won the Best Score Oscar.
In 1952, when Chaplin's passport was revoked, he was harrassed by US tax collectors,
and he was to be denied re-entry if he returned to the US, he permanently relocated in
self-imposed exile to Switzerland. Finally, he produced his final starring film, A King in
New York (1957), a biting diatribe against American life and anti-Communist hysteria,
causing him to be freshly accused of communism by some. His angry film wasn't allowed
to be released in America until 1973.
In his final film in which he served as writer and director, Universal's unfunny romantic
comedy A Countess From Hong Kong (1967), Chaplin appeared with only a short
cameo (as a nameless, seasick, white-haired elderly steward). It allowed him to direct
Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, but the romantic comedy was a large flop. It was the
first (and only) color film (and widescreen film) that Chaplin ever made, and the only one funded by a
major studio. It featured a worldwide smash song, "(Love) This Is My Song," written by Chaplin and sung
by Petula Clark. His first return visit to the US was to attend a 1972 tribute ceremony at the Academy
Awards, where he was honored with a special Honorary Oscar for his lifetime career of achievement ("for
the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century").
Hitchcock in the 50s:
Britisher Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980), the "Master of Suspense," made
some of his very best suspense/thrillers during the 1950s, and also found
success in the new medium of TV in the mid-50s. He premiered his television
series anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents in October, 1955, to bring his
macabre sense of humor to the small screen. Each show was prefaced by
his ominous, droll greeting "Good Evening" and short, introductory, onscreen comments. Hitchcock employed most of his TV crew to produce his
black and white cinematic masterpiece at the end of the decade, the lowbudget Psycho (1960).
Hitchcock became well-known and a noted film-maker for two fundamental reasons: his clever cameos
called attention to himself, and his films often did well at the box-office. Although his late 1940s films, The
Paradine Case (1947) and Under Capricorn (1949) fared poorly, his 50s films flourished:
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Strangers on a Train (1951) - adapted from Patricia Highsmith's first novel about amoral
murderers who 'traded' or 'exchanged' crimes; used as a springboard for director/star Danny
DeVito's satirical Throw Momma From the Train (1987) with Billy Crystal
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the effective, voyeuristic suspenseful classic Rear Window (1954) about a neighbor-spying
photojournalist (James Stewart) with a broken leg and his girlfriend (Grace Kelly) who believe that
one of his apartment dwellers may be a wife murderer
Dial M for Murder (1954) - a murder thriller filmed in 3-D but not required to
be shown that way, with Ray Milland as an ex-tennis pro who masterminds
to commit the "perfect" crime - the murder of his unfaithful wealthy wife
(Grace Kelly) for having an affair with a writer (Robert Cummings)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1955) - a remake of Hitchcock's own
1934 film, with Doris Day looking for her kidnapped son, and noted for the
song "Que Sera Sera" as a key element
The Trouble With Harry (1955)
To Catch a Thief (1955) - a lightweight stylish thriller filmed in the south of
France, and noted as being Grace Kelly's last film for Hitchcock, before
marrying Prince Rainier III of Monaco in mid-April 1956 and giving up her
film career forever; Kelly's last film was the Technicolor musical comedy
High Society (1956) with Cole Porter tunes, a reworking of George Cukor's
The Philadelphia Story (1940); at the age of 52, in mid-September 1982, Princess Grace
suffered a stroke while driving on the same stretch of highway in Monaco that she had driven in
To Catch a Thief, and soon died as a result of her injuries
Vertigo (1958) - a tale of masculine romantic obsession and disorientation (using a revolutionary
cinematographic technique of zooming out and tracking forward simultaneously to visualize the
'vertigo' effect) for a retired San Francisco detective (James Stewart), and with Kim Novak as a
woman who 'returned' from the dead
the classic North by Northwest (1959), exploring the director's favorite theme of an innocent
man (Manhattan businessman Cary Grant) caught in a complex series of circumstances after
being mistaken for a secret agent, and climaxing at Mount Rushmore
New Directors in the 50s:
New directors like Robert Aldrich made striking impressions with early films like the
apocalyptic Kiss Me Deadly (1955) (an adaptation of a Mickey Spillane pulp with
private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker)). Stanley Kubrick directed the track heist
thriller The Killing (1956) and the anti-war drama Paths of Glory (1957) with Kirk
Douglas. Sidney Lumet's first feature film was the brilliant jury-room drama 12 Angry
Men (1957) with Henry Fonda standing along against conviction. One of Joseph Lewis'
best-known films was the noir, cult crime film Gun Crazy (1949) - a forerunner of
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Natural Born Killers (1994). Independent-minded Sam
Fuller, director of hard-edged, tabloid-ish films, led off the decade with the nasty,
suspenseful thriller Pickup on South Street (1953) about a pickpocket (Richard
Widmark) and a roll of top-secret Communist microfilm.
Nicholas Ray:
During the post-war years, two directors who later achieved cult status emerged. The
first was one of the most original 50s directors - Nicholas Ray, most famous for his best
film Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Ray also directed other interesting films including a
Bonnie-and-Clyde variation They Live By Night (1948) - (his first film), the
aforementioned In a Lonely Place (1950), the noirish On Dangerous Ground (1952),
the quintessential rodeo film The Lusty Men (1952), the bizarre cult Western Johnny
Guitar (1954), Bigger Than Life (1956) with James Mason as a cortisone-addicted
schoolteacher, The True Story of Jesse James (1957) (a re-make of the 1939 classic),
and the crime drama Party Girl (1958).
Douglas Sirk:
The second talented and influential director of the 50s, known for visually striking, feverish, highly
polished, exaggerated, big budget, emotional soap opera - melodramas, was Douglas Sirk. His bestknown glossy films, with innovative production design and a dramatic use of garish color, often featured
Rock Hudson:
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Magnificent Obsession (1954) - a remake of the successful 1935 blockbuster
All That Heaven Allows (1956) - about a middle-aged widow's unacceptable
affair with her bohemian gardener in a small town
the soapy Written on the Wind (1956) about an alcoholic Texas oilman and his
sexy, trampish sister (Robert Stack and Oscar-winning Dorothy Malone)
Interlude (1957)
The Tarnished Angels (1957)
A Time to Love and A Time to Die (1958)
Imitation of Life (1959), Sirk's last film, from the novel by Fannie Hurst
Declining Strength of the Studio System:
In the 1950's, the after-effects of the 1948 Paramount Decrees (federal trust-busting laws that forbade
studios to be linked with theatre chains) were devastating. The courts ordered that the film industry's
vertically-integrated structure of production, distribution, and exhibition had to be separated into distinct
corporate entities, and studios were ordered to sell off their theatres.
There were many other indications of the upheavals in the film industry:
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once-powerful MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer resigned from the studio in 1951 (to be replaced by
producer Dore Schary, who was fired in 1956) and died in 1957; MGM became an independent
studio in 1959
Columbia Pictures established Screen Gems, a subsidiary for making TV programs in 1951; it
leased its pre-1948 films to television in 1955; and both founding rulers, the Cohn brothers, died
in the mid- to late-50s
Darryl F. Zanuck resigned from 20th Century Fox in 1956 to become an independent producer;
as a result, the studio started to lose money and was forced to sell its famous backlot and release
its post-1949 color films to NBC Television
Universal International (formed in 1946 from the merger of Universal Pictures and International
Pictures) was sold to Decca Records in 1952; it released its films to television in 1957
Warner Bros. sold the film rights to its pre-1950 films to an investment group in 1956
millionaire Howard Hughes, who had been in charge of RKO Studios since 1948 and sole owner
of the studio since 1954, sold off the studio's theatres (now a part of the Cineplex Odeon group).
By 1953, RKO Studios' losses totaled $20 million, and in 1954, Hughes began the sell-off of the
studio's film library to television, and fired hundreds of employees. The studio was sold to the
General Tire and Rubber Corporation in 1955, and ceased making feature films altogether in
1957
Paramount sold the rights to its films (pre-1948) to MCA in 1958
film newsreels were discontinued in the mid-50s - they were obvious victims of TV's reigning
influence; the average US film ticket price fell to $.51 in 1959 to compete with television
the effects of nitrate-based film stock, discontinued in the early 1950s because of its instability,
began to be realized with the gradual disintegration of many thousands of US films
The studios became depleted with the exit rush by both directors, artists and technicians - mostly to the
burgeoning television industry. Some of Hollywood's greatest directors, George Stevens, John Ford, and
Leo McCarey, made half-hour dramas for the Screen Directors Playhouse (1955) on television, and
others (actors, editors, and cameramen) followed suit. As a consequence, many of television's directors in
the 50s, e.g., John Frankenheimer, George Roy Hill, Sidney Lumet, Sam Peckinpah, Blake Edwards,
Michael Ritchie, Robert Altman, Robert Mulligan, Arthur Penn, and Franklin Schaffner became the new
wave of the film industry's directors into the 60s after the decline of the studio system.
The system of studio-contracted players (the star system) began to lose some of its power and grip on
movie stars in the early to mid-50s as well, and the decline would steadily reach into the next decade.
Many of the stars went independent and operated as free-lance agents, moving from studio to studio for
individual pictures and ushering in the age of the independent superstar. In the early 1950s, James
Stewart decided to free-lance, and became a precedent-setting pioneer of the percentage deal, in which
he would receive up to half the profits of his movies (he received a share of the profits for the film Bend of
the River (1952)). Other stars followed suit and demanded payment on an individual film basis (in singlefilm deals), beginning the trend toward huge star salaries and the formation of their own production
companies. Some superstars groomed themselves and guided their own careers, appearing in their own
starring vehicles.
Directors charged that the demands of high-salary stars would ruin the business. In fact, by 1959 the
production of films in the US dropped to about 250 films a year - a 50% drop from only a decade earlier,
and only 42 million Americans were attending theatrical films on a weekly basis (as compared to more
than double that amount during 1948). In contrast, more and more imported European and Asian films
(such as Rashomon (1950), The Seven Samurai (1954), Pather Panchali (1955) and The 400 Blows
(1959)) were being showcased in art houses and in burgeoning film festivals.
The "Red Scare" and Various Propaganda Films:
The aftermath of studio blacklists and Communist Party fears, following Senator Joseph McCarthy's
HUAC witch-hunt that targeted Hollywood and smeared hundreds of film people in the early 50s, had
wide-spread effects for years to come. Communist and "Cold War" paranoia and fears of Communist
infiltration were reflected in a number of films of the early and mid-50s. Allegorical science fiction films
reflected the collective unconscious and often cynically commented upon political powers, threats and
evils that surrounded us (alien forces were often a metaphor for Communism, e.g., Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (1956)), and the dangers of aliens taking over our minds and territory.
Other examples of semi-exploitative, anti-communist films helped to fuel the perceived threat of
Communist spies and sympathizers, and contributed to the propagandistic political temperament of the
time:
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I Married a Communist (1949) (aka The Woman on Pier 13), the first of several antiCommunist films made by Howard Hughes at RKO
Guilty of Treason (1950), a propagandistic docudrama from director Felix E. Feist about
courageous Hungarian Joszef Cardinal Mindzhenty (Charles Bickford) who stood up to the
Communist regime in his native land and was imprisoned; the film included graphic scenes of
torture for those who resisted and were enemies of the State
The Whip Hand (1951), from director William Cameron Menzies, about a small town harboring
Communists who planned biological germ warfare by unleashing a deadly virus
Big Jim McLain (1952), from director Edward Ludwig, a dreadful political thriller and message
film featuring John Wayne as an HUAC agent who pursued subversive pro-Reds in Hawaii; with
guest appearances from actual members of the committee
The Hoaxters (1952), the sole Hollywood film about communism presented as a documentary;
the MGM film indicted Fascists, Nazis, and Communists as damaging to the American way of life;
nominated as Best Documentary Feature (producer Dore Schary)
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Invasion, U.S.A. (1952), from director Alfred E. Green, a low-budget sci-fi
disaster film about a Russian nuclear attack on the West Coast; Hedda Hopper
exclaimed about the paranoid film, "It will scare the pants off you!"
My Son John (1952), an exaggerated anti-Communist melodrama about a
small-town couple who were shattered by the revelation that their son (Robert
Walker, who died before the film was completed) was a Communist agent;
nominated for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story (Leo McCarey)
Red Planet Mars (1952), one of the most notorious and bizarre films during the
period, from director Harry Horner, about an embittered ex-Nazi scientist
working for the Communists (intent on destroying American democracy) by
bouncing radio signals off the ionosphere and making them appear to be
coming from advanced extraterrestrials on Mars, and then interpreted as being
the voice of God
Walk East on Beacon! (1952), a dramatic espionage story (based on an article
written by FBI head J. Edgar Hoover) about a Boston-based Communist spy
ring
The 27th Day (1957), directed by William Asher, about aliens who distributed
boxes to five representatives of nations, giving them the power to destroy the
world
Rocket Attack, USA (1961), an hysteria-producing, alarmist, pseudo-documentary
propagandistic film made during the early years of the space race that contributed to fears of an
inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack by the Russians, and argued for a defense system
to protect the US from a nuclear launch; almost half the film consisted of stock footage of the
construction and test of American ICBMs
Red Nightmare (1962) (aka The Commies Are Coming! The Commies Are Coming!), from
director George Waggner, an infamous propaganda short, narrated and hosted by Jack Webb,
about a nightmarish takeover of the US by Communist forces
The legacy of HUAC's blacklisting was also felt in this decade by Best Screenplay nominee Michael
Wilson for Friendly Persuasion (1956), a Civil War tale about a Quaker pacifist family (with actor
Anthony Perkins' film debut). His nomination for writing the film's screenplay (uncredited in the film) was
declared ineligible and his name was prohibited from a listing in the final awards ballot, because of his
invoking of the 5th Amendment before the committee in 1952. Finally, by 1959, the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) determined that blacklisted film industry members could be
nominated for Oscar awards.
By the advent of the 60s, anti-Communist films took a more satirical edge, evidenced in a backlash of
black comedies and serio-comic films, such as Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three (1961), The Manchurian
Candidate (1962), Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, Or:... (1964), and The Russians Are Coming, The
Russians Are Coming (1966). And they became bolder with other such critical films as Otto Preminger's
Advise and Consent (1962), Fail-Safe (1964), and Seven Days in May (1964).