A few major directors ceased working or lost impetus fairly soon after the war. Ernst Lubitsch died in 1947. Josef von Sternberg, who had left Paramount in the mid-1930s and worked sporadically through the 1940s, ended his career with two films for Howard Hughes and The Saga of Anatahan (1953), a Japan-U. S. coproduction exuding the misty atmosphere of his prewar work. Frank Capra made the perennially popular It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), a mixture of homespun comedy and astonishingly cruel melodrama, but his few subsequent features had little influence.
The Great Dictator had been the last bow of Charles Chaplin’s Tramp. His experiments with other personae, coupled with controversies about his politics and personal life, made his popularity sink. Monsieur Verdoux (1947) centered on a quiet gentleman who murders his wives; Limelight (1952) was a testament to comic theater. Threatened with political persecution in the United States, Chaplin settled in Switzerland. A King in New York (1957) satirized American politics, while A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) bade farewell to the urbane comedy of A Woman of Paris.
Overall, however, a number of veteran directors continued to be central players in the postwar period. Cecile DeMille, Frank Borzage, Henry King, George Marshall, and others who had started directing during World War I remained surprisingly active into the 1950s and even the 1960s. Raoul Walsh, for example, turned out masculine action films, and Colorado Territory and White Heat (both 1949) remain models of the trim, understated efficiency of Hollywood classicism.
John Ford was still the most visible director of this generation. His Technicolor Irish comedy-drama The Quiet Man (1952) gave its backer, the B-studio Republic, new credibility. The sparkling location photography, the interplay of spirited romance and brawling comedy, and a buoyant epilogue in which the performers gravely salute the audience have made The Quiet Man one of Ford’s most enduring pictures, a utopian fulfillment of the nostalgic longing for home that permeates How Green Was My Valley.
The bulk of Ford’s postwar work was in the Western genre. My Darling Clementine (1946) is an ode to frontier life, shot in the rich depth and chiaroscuro that Ford had pioneered a decade earlier. His “Cavalry tril-
15.25 In The Searchers, the motif is established in the first shot when the mother opens the door onto the desert.
15.26 Later, Ford reminds us of the destroyed home by shooting through the opening of the smokehouse in which the mother’s body lies.
15.27 The end of a search: after bringing Debbie back to the settlement, Ethan cannot reenter civilization.
15.28, left Moderated deep focus in The Best Years of Our Lives.
15.29, right In Adam's Rib (1949), a long take records the wry interplay between an attorney (Katharine Hepburn) and her district attorney husband (Spencer Tracy).
Ogy”—Fort Apache, 1948; She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 1949; Rio Grande, 1950—pays homage to the close-knit military unit. Sergeant Rutledge (1960) and Two Rode Together (1961) raise issues of rape and miscegenation in the manner of “liberal Westerns,” and each experiments a bit: the former with flashback narrative, the latter with an unmoving long take. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), widely taken as Ford’s elegy for the frontier myth, has the simplicity of a fable: the heroic side of the West dies in the corruption brought by the railroad and Washington politics.
The Searchers (1956), arguably Ford’s most complex Western, centers on Ethan Edwards, who pursues the Comanche who have killed his brother’s family and carried off his niece Debbie. His saddle partner Martin Pawley gradually realizes that Ethan intends not to rescue Debbie but to kill her for becoming an Indian wife. Seldom had the Western shown such a complex protagonist, in which devotion and pride struggle against violent racism and sexual jealousy. At the film’s climax, as Ethan is about to kill Debbie, their shared memory of her childhood links them again in a new bond, and he is purged of his murderous impulse.
The continuity of Ford’s style is evident in The Searchers. The film’s color scheme reflects the changing seasons across Monument Valley (Color Plate 15.11).
Fordian depth of space emerges in an evocative motif of doorway framings (15.25-15.27). Even John Wayne’s final gesture of clasping his forearm is modeled on a gesture Harry Carey had used in Straight Shooting (1917). For film critics and young filmmakers of the 1970s, The Searchers typified the emotional richness of the Hollywood tradition.
Other veteran directors continued to practice their craft despite the studios’ decline. William Wyler directed notable dramas and studio pictures into the 1960s, earning large box-office revenues with The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Ben-Hur. The deep-focus, wide-angle look was already muted in Best Years (15.28); Wyler seemed content to leave it to directors working in genres more oriented to suspense or action. Howard Hawks made comedies and action-adventure films until 1970. King Vidor turned to spectacles (War and Peace) after directing overblown, delirious melodramas such as The Fountainhead (1949). George Stevens created several of the era’s biggest hits, notably Shane (1953) and Giant (1956).
Of the directors specializing in melodramas, comedies, and musicals, Vincente Minnelli and George Cukor stand out for their shrewd use of long takes. Cukor’s A Star Is Born (1954) daringly activates the edges of the ’Scope frame. And his quietly watching
15.30 The Cobweb (1955): in a sanitarium, characters confront each other before the controversial drapes.
15.31 The rogue cop finds his way blocked in Lang’s The Big Heat (1953).
15.32 Some Like It Hot: Jack Lemmon, as “Daphne," dances a passionate tango with Joe E. Brown.
Camera permits the players full sway in their performances (15.29). Minnelli’s distant framing emphasizes the characters’ interactions with the setting; his melodramas juxtapose characters with symbolic decor (15.30).
Some emigre directors, such as Jean Renoir and Max Ophiils, returned to Europe fairly soon after the Armistice, but others flourished in postwar Hollywood. The most successful was Alfred Hitchcock (see box). Fritz Lang continued to make sober, somber genre pictures that radiated paranoid unease, such as Rancho Notorious (1952) and The Big Heat (15.31). Billy Wilder became a top director noted for irony-laden dramas (Sunset Blvd., 1950; Ace in the Hole, 1951; Witness for the Prosecution, 1958) and cynical erotic comedies (The Seven-Year Itch, 1955; The Apartment, 1961; Irma La
Douce, 1963). Some Like It Hot (1959), less mordant than Wilder’s usual work, delighted audiences with its cross-dressing gags (15.32).
Another emigre, Otto Preminger, cultivated a distinctive personality both as an actor (in Wilder’s Stalag 17, 1953) and as a director. His despotic temper was sometimes compared to Erich von Stroheim’s, but Preminger was no spendthrift; as his own producer, he counted every penny. Partly to trim shooting time, he pushed the long-take technique even further than Cukor and Minnelli. The average shot in Fallen Angel (1945) lasts about half a minute, the same as in his ’Scope musical Carmen Jones (1954).
Although Preminger ingeniously composed his CinemaScope frame (15.35), most of his long takes refuse expressive effects. There are seldom elaborate camera maneuvers or virtuoso performances; the camera simply observes poker-faced people, most of whom are lying to one another (15.36). This impassivity makes
ALFRED HITCHCOCK > * « * • • * * » • » • »
Apart from the filmmakers who were also performers (Chaplin, Jerry Lewis), Hitchcock was probably the most publicly recognizable director of the postwar years. The press delightedly reported his remarks: "Actors are cattle"; " A film is not a slice of life but a slice of cake"; " Ingrid, it's only a movie" (after Bergman had sought to understand her role's motivation). His walk-on appearances, quizzically observing the crises his plots set in motion, guaranteed a moment of laughter. His image as the " Master of Suspense" was marketed through shrewd spin-offs: chatty trailers, a mystery magazine, and a television show, with Hitchcock introducing each episode in phlegmatically ghoulish tones.
Above all, the films themselves carried the stamp of his fussy, childish delight in discomfiting the audience. Like his mentors the Soviet Montage directors, he aimed at a pure, almost physical response. His goal was not mystery or horror but suspense. His plots, whether drawn from novels or his own imagination, hinged on recurring figures and situations: the innocent man plunged into a vortex of guilt and suspicion, the mentally disturbed woman, the charming and amoral killer, the humdrum locale with tensions seething underneath. The consistency of his stories and themes furnished evidence for the European critics who proposed that an American studio director could be the creator—the "author"—of his work (p. 416).
Hitchcock flaunted his stylistic ingenuity, embedding into each script a set piece that aroused suspense in the teeth of outrageous implausibility: an assassination is attempted during an orchestra concert (The Man Who Knew too Much, 1956), and a crop-dusting airplane tries to shoot down the protagonist (North by Northwest, 1959). Sometimes Hitchcock set himself a technical challenge: Rope (1948) consists of eight long takes. In Rear Window (1951), by contrast, hundreds of shots are assembled to induce the viewer to share the hero's belief that a man living across the courtyard has committed murder (Color Plates 15.12, 15.13).
Many critics found Hitchcock's postwar work to be his finest. Strangers on a Train (1951) employs taut crosscutting to divide our sympathies between hero and villain (15.33, 15.34). The semidocumentary The Wrong Man
(1956) invests a drab news story with harsh anguish. Vertigo (1958) uses location shooting and Bernard Herrmann's haunting score to pull the spectator into a hallucinatory tale of a man obsessed with a woman whom he believes he has killed (Color Plate 15,14). Hitchcock's films gave Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda dark, brooding roles suited to their maturing star images.
Hitchcock's calculations of public taste were farsighted. Psycho (1960) triggered several cycles of homicidal films, up to the "slasher" movies of the 1980s; The Birds (1963) anticipated the "vengeful nature" horror film. Like most veteran directors, he floundered in the mid-1960s, but Frenzy (1972) proved that he could still craft a plot that outfoxed the audience and that his technical virtuosity could leave viewers at once anxious and amused.
15.33 Strangers on a Train: while the hero desperately tries to finish a tennis match in time.
15.34 . . . the villain scrabbles for the lighter he needs in order
To frame the hero for a murder Hitchcock makes the audience root for both.
15.35 Advise and Consent (1962): in the U. S. Senate, Preminger’s ’Scope frame registers different reactions to a blustering speech.
15.36 A neutral long take in Anatomy of a Murder (1959): a defense attorney tries to convince his client’s wife to play the role of loyal spouse.
15.37 The final shoot-out in a mirror maze in The Lady from Shanghai.
15.38 Chimes at Midnight: a deep-space view of a chaotic battle, with the camera flanked by the warriors’ furiously scuffling legs.
15.39 In a long take, Terry toys with Edie’s glove, keeping her with him while he expresses his reluctant interest in her (On the Waterfront).
Preminger’s films noirs and adaptations of middlebrow best-sellers intriguingly opaque.
Welles’s Stmggle with Hollywood
Just the opposite aesthetic strategy was pursued by Orson Welles. Discharged from RKO after The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Welles became a vagabond director. He turned in pictures for Columbia, Republic, and Universal, but he produced most of his films on a shoestring, with funds scraped together from European backers and his film performances (e. g., in Reed’s rather Wellesian The Third Man, 1949).
Welles directed and starred in versions of Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952), and The Trial (1962), but he also made espionage films (Mr. Arkadin, 1955) and crime thrillers (The Lady from Shanghai, 1948; Touch of Evil, 1958). To all he brought the flamboyant technique he had pioneered in Kane—Gothic chiaroscuro, deep-focus imagery, sound tracks of shattering dynamic range, brooding dissolves, abrupt cuts, overlapping and interruptive dialogue, and intricate camera movement. The climax of
The Lady from Shanghai, a shoot-out in a funhouse hall of mirrors, is less a plausible resolution of the drama than a virtuoso display of disorienting imagery (15.37). Touch of Evil, beginning with one of the most baroque camera movements in Hollywood history, brought the film noir to new heights. In Chimes at Midnight (1967), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, Welles presented the most kinetic, harrowing battle sequence of the era (15.38). Welles haunted the studios in the 1970s and 1980s, hoping to complete his long-running projects, Don Quixote and The Other Side of the Wind.
Welles had come to Hollywood from New York left-wing theater, and several other directors followed him. Jules Dassin started in this vein before turning out harsh crime films (e. g., Brute Force, 1947; The Naked City, 1948). Joseph Losey worked in the Federal Theatre project and directed Brecht’s play Galileo (1947) before entering filmmaking with The Boy with Green Hair (1948). The HUAC hearings drove Dassin and Losey into exile.
15.40 Judy, Plato., and Jim are brought together un beknownst to each other in the first scene of Rebel without a Cause. The CinemaScope framing tucks them into discrete pockets of the police-station set.
15.41 Deep focus in the wide image, in Ray’s King of Kings.
During the 1930s, the Group Theatre transplanted to America the naturalistic acting “Method” taught by Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater. The most influential Group alumnus was Elia Kazan, who established himself in Hollywood while continuing to direct the Broadway premieres of Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof After specializing in liberal social-problem films, Kazan moved rapidly to distinguished adaptations of works by Tennessee Williams—A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Baby Doll (1956)—as well as to socially critical films such as A Face in the Crowd (1957), which warns of the political abuses of television.
After the war, Kazan and two New York colleagues founded the Actors Studio. They believed that Stanislavsky’s Method required the actor to ground the performance in personal experiences. Improvisation was one path to a natural, if sometimes painful and risky, portrayal. Kazan’s conception of Method acting found its most famous exponent in Marlon Brando. A prototypical Method exercise occurs in Kazan’s On the Waterfront
(1954), in which Terry picks up and toys with Edie’s casually dropped glove. Keeping her glove becomes a pretext for making her linger with him, but—as he straightens the fingers, plucks lint from it, even tries it on—it also expresses his awkward attraction to her and provides an echo of the childhood teasing he recalls (15.39). Method acting was to have an enormous influence on Hollywood through Kazan, Brando, James Dean, Karl Malden, and other Actors Studio participants.
Nicholas Ray worked with the Group Theatre before serving as assistant director to Kazan on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). He began directing with a painful tale of a runaway couple drawn into the outlaw life, They Live by Night (1948). Always a fringe figure, Ray specialized in films about men whose toughness masks a selfdestructive compulsion. In a Lonely Place (1950) implicates a Hollywood scriptwriter in a murder, revealing his narcissistic exploitation of others. In the offbeat Western Johnny Guitar (1954), the weary gunfighter is dominated by the hard-as-nails saloon lady; the film climaxes with a showdown between two gun-toting women. Rebel without a Cause (1954) showcases James Dean as another tormented hero, childishly passive and uncertain; it also demonstrates Ray’s forceful use of the CinemaScope frame (15.40). After several other “male melodramas,” Ray ended his Hollywood career with two historical epics, King of Kings (1961; 15.41) and 55 Days at Peking (1963).
Another group of postwar directors emerged from scriptwriting: Richard Brooks (The Blackboard Jungle, 1955; Elmer Gantry, 1960), Joseph Mankiewicz (All about Eve, 1950; The Barefoot Contessa, 1954), and Robert Rossen (Johnny O’Clock, 1947; The Hustler, 1961). The most idiosyncratic talent was Samuel Fuller, who had been a scenarist for a decade before he directed his first film, I Shot Jesse James (1948). A former reporter for New York tabloids, Fuller brought a B-film sensibility to every project. He relied on intense close-ups, off-center framings, and shock editing to underscore his tales of underworld treachery or men facing death in combat.
Fuller went straight for the viscera. During a fist-fight in Pickup on South Street (1953), a man is dragged down a flight of stairs, his chin thonking on each step. At the showdown of Forty Guns (1957), a cowboy punk uses his sister as a shield. The lawman coolly shoots her. As she falls, he proceeds to fire several rounds into the astonished youth. In China Gate (1957), a soldier hiding from an enemy patrol steps on a spike trap, and Fuller cuts from shots of his sweating face to extreme close-ups of spikes protruding from his boot. Fuller enjoyed staging fight scenes that assault the viewer (15.42). The opening of The Naked Kiss (1963) turns its fury on the audience, with a woman striking directly into the camera.
Other directors had a comparable, if less raw, aggressiveness. Robert Aldrich built Kiss Me Deadly
(1955) and Attack! (1956) out of the hollow dialogue and outrageous sadism of pulp fiction. Don Siegel’s police films, along with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, show a rapid pace learned during his days as an editor at Warners. Anthony Mann, like Fuller and Aldrich strongly influenced by Welles, staged fight scenes in great depth, hurling his combatants at the audience (15.43). “In the films of these hard-edged directors,” wrote critic Manny Farber, “can be found the unheralded ripple of physical experienced’2
Some new directors specialized in grotesque comedy. Frank Tashlin, former animator and children’s book illustrator, made several imaginative satires on 1950s culture (The Girl Can’t Help It, 1956; Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, 1957), as well as directing Jerry Lewis after Lewis split with his comedic partner, Dean Martin.
The oldest practitioners in the years from 1945 to 1965 learned their craft in the silent cinema or the talkies; the postwar newcomers typically started in theater or in the studio system. The youngest generation,
15.42 Using karate on a villain, and the viewer, in The Crimson Kimono.
15.43 Thrusting the violence in the audience’s face: a fight from Mann’s The Tall Target (1951).
Who began making films in the mid-1950s, often started in television. John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, Martin Ritt, and Arthur Penn directed live broadcast drama in New York before turning to feature films. They brought to cinema a “television aesthetic” of big close-ups, constricted sets, deep-focus cinematography, and dialogue-laden scripts. The Young Stranger (1956, Frankenheimer), Twelve Angry Men (1957, Lumet), Edge of the City (1957, Ritt), and The Left-Handed Gun (1958, Penn) exemplified this trend. These directors became significant Hollywood figures in the early 1960s, and they would be among the first to borrow from European art cinema and the new waves.
Despite the upheavals in the industry, directors from several generations and backgrounds made postwar Hollywood films a central force again in world cinema. The system had lost economic stability, but the genres and styles of classical filmmaking supplied a framework within which directors could create idiosyncratic, powerful films. The ambitious young filmmakers who came to prominence in Europe in the early 1960s usually turned to postwar Hollywood for inspiration.
World History
