Triumph over Containment: American Film in the 1950s 9781978820968

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Triumph over Containment

Triumph over Containment American Film in the 1950s

ROBERT P. KOLKER

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kolker, Robert Phillip, author. Title: Triumph over containment : American film in the 1950s / Robert P. Kolker. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021008379 | ISBN 9781978820920 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978820944 (epub) | ISBN 9781978820951 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978820968 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—United States—History—20th century. | Cold War in motion pictures. | United States—In motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.U6 K585 2022 | DDC 791.430973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008379 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2022 by Robert P. Kolker All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.rutgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

1

Introduction

1

On Containment, Screen Size, and the Lightness and the Dark

7

“It Was Like Going Down to the Bottom of the World”: John Garfield and Enterprise

22

3

“I’m a Stranger Here Myself”: Nicholas Ray and Ida Lupino

37

4

“Love, Hate, Action, Violence, and Death . . . in One Word: Emotion”: Joseph Losey and Samuel Fuller

66

“Put an Amen to It”: The Old Masters—Welles, Hitchcock, Ford

86

2

5

6

Looking to the Skies: Science Fiction in the 1950s

108

7

“How Can You Say You Love Me . . . ?”: Melodrama

131

Conclusion: “Complete Total Final Annihilating Artistic Control”—Stanley Kubrick Explodes Containment

162

Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography Index

179 181 187 189 v

Triumph over Containment

Introduction

I came of age during the 1950s. By late in the decade I was a wanderer in New York, walking my Astoria neighborhood, portable radio at my ear, and then Manhattan, learning its streets, becoming part of its flow. I spent time in the Village. I went to Alan Freed’s rock and roll shows. I went to the movies. But I was politically naive, despite the fact that I came from a political family. My parents worked very hard and kept their heads down; overt politics were the province of relatives. But even so, they ran scared. Early in life, my mother was upset when I took a copy of my grandmother’s Daily Worker to school to use for arts and crafts. Later in life, I learned that my Aunt Sarah, a lifelong Communist, was one of the founders of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. She quit the union when David Dubinsky signed the Taft-Hartley antiunion act. A distant cousin, Hannah Weinstein, a TV producer who settled in London—her best-known show in the 1950s was The Adventures of Robin Hood—was a conduit for scripts from blacklisted American writers. She may have been Joseph Losey’s lover. I stayed in her house during my first trip to England in the early 1960s but never met her. That was part of the story of my early life during that tumultuous decade: I kept missing the people and missing the point. I was more interested in rock and roll than left-wing politics. Nevertheless, I must have absorbed something subconsciously because the ’50s have stayed with me and 1

2 • Triumph over Containment

I keep wanting to know more and more about the decade. It was, in retrospect, too politically horrible and too full of imaginative vitality, too crazy and self-contradictory to ignore. It was a decade of fear and celebration, of imaginative rebirth, despite the weight of anti-Communism’s dead hand. I saw many movies during the ’50s. The Thing from Another World scared me so much that I ran out of the theater. Nick Ray’s Knock on Any Door gave me nightmares. I don’t know why. All the films I saw then made a deep impression, because when I see them now, they strike a chord that films from other decades don’t. Nostalgia is most certainly at work, even though I know that nostalgia is usually based on false or exaggerated memories. At age eighty, looking back at one’s teens provokes a tenderness of recall. Perhaps “evocative” is closer to the point. Fifties films evoke for me not merely images but a tenor of the time, with the accrual of understanding of what those times were about. Perhaps “control” is another way to describe my feelings toward the period. After this expanse of time, I feel barely emotionally and intellectually in control of the decade. I know it, or at least my adult response to it. I feel its films as part of my childhood memory and adult delight. I want to write about them, rediscover them in order to gain more understanding of the decade in which I came of age. Of course I’m not alone in this fascination. Many people have written about the postwar years, its politics and its movies. The HUAC investigations, the Hollywood Ten, and the blacklist have been studied with increasing attention to the details of new information. Many of the filmmakers of the decade have received attention and analysis. But I want to examine the decade in a somewhat different way: to look at the films and filmmakers as part of a movement of imaginative resistance. Resistance? In commercial Hollywood filmmaking? While the blacklist was in full terrorizing mode? The answers are complex: there was no revolution, there were few overtly experimental films, but there were films that not only spoke to the decade but spoke against it, tried to understand it, tried to burrow through its miasma. Manny Farber called this “termite art,” gnawing around the edges. There were other termites. The 1950s were years of contradictions. Possessing an oppressive political climate with a startlingly limited political discourse (any dissent was labeled Communist), it was also the decade of aesthetic invention: the Beat writers, the ascendance of abstract expressionist painting, rock and roll, modern jazz—as well as the movies. Despite the outrage of HUAC and the blacklist, which denuded the studios of some of their best people, despite the inescapable fact that those very studios were in

Introduction • 3

decline, hobbled by the Supreme Court ruling that divested them of the theaters which guaranteed distribution of their films, despite the aging studio heads slowly losing their grip, and despite the decline of audience attendance from its 1946 peak (television was taking its toll as was the demographic shift to the suburbs where there were, as yet, few movie houses), the movies thrived and imagination reigned. Some of the decade’s films— Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952), On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954), Rebel without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), Giant (George Stevens, 1956), and Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960—it began shooting at the end of the decade), to name just five—remain in the cultural memory. Many others have been forgotten or have become part of the stream of movies available on Turner Classic Movies, Amazon, and YouTube. But let’s consider a list of works by just a few directors (an unashamedly auteurist list), starting with the late 1940s through the early 1960s—the end of World War II through the Cuban Missile Crisis—the long 1950s. The old masters reached their maturity during the period: John Ford made The Searchers (1956); Orson Welles briefly came home from Europe and made Touch of Evil (1958); Alfred Hitchcock hit a triple with Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960). New filmmakers emerged with extraordinary works: Nicholas Ray made (among some lesser films) They Live by Night (1948), Knock on Any Door (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), On Dangerous Ground (1951), The Lusty Men (1952), Johnny Guitar (1954), Rebel without a Cause (1955), Bigger Than Life (1956), and, in France, Bitter Victory (1957). Joseph Losey, before fleeing the blacklist, made The Boy with Green Hair (1948), The Lawless (1950), a remake of Fritz Lang’s M (1951), The Prowler (1951), and The Big Night (1951). Before he left because of the blacklist, Jules Dassin filmed Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948), and, in England, Night and the City (1950). He spearheaded the movement of location shooting. Elia Kazan escaped the blacklist by informing on his friends and therefore managed a successful career as an important director of actors, Marlon Brando in particu lar. His films of the period include Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), Pinky (1949), Panic in the Streets (1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Viva Zapata! (1952), Man on a Tightrope (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), East of Eden (1955), Baby Doll (1956), and A Face in the Crowd (1957). Samuel Fuller evaded HUAC (but not an FBI file), punching his way through the decade with rough-hewn films like I Shot Jesse James (1949), The

4 • Triumph over Containment

Baron of Arizona (1950), The Steel Helmet (1951), Fixed Bayonets! (1951), Park Row (1952), Pickup on South Street (1953), Hell and High Water (1954), House of Bamboo (1955), China Gate (1957), Forty Guns (1957), Run of the Arrow (1957), and The Crimson Kimono (1959). Douglas Sirk made remarkable melodramas, so wise in the ways of the genre that some became commentaries on it: Magnificent Obsession (1954), There’s Always Tomorrow (1955), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), and Imitation of Life (1959). Billy Wilder started the decade with Sunset Boulevard (1950) and ended it with Some Like It Hot (1959). In the decade in which science fiction thrived, Jack Arnold shone with It Came from Outer Space (1953), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954—remade as The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro in 2017), and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). Other ’50s science fiction films saw remakes, some more than one: The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby, Howard Hawks, 1951), The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956). John Ford was not the only master of Westerns—though The Searchers was the best of the genre. Anthony Mann moved from stark noirs in the late forties to often violent Westerns in the ’50s, like The Naked Spur (1953), The Man from Laramie (1955), The Tin Star (1957), and Man of the West (1958). Stanley Kubrick began his feature film career as an independent with his first war film, Fear and Desire (1953), and a pair of noirish gangster films, Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956). He went to Germany to film Paths of Glory (1957) under the auspices of Kirk Douglas’s production company and had his first and last entanglement with the big budget studio system when Douglas hired him to replace Anthony Mann on Spartacus (1960). He fled to England for the rest of his career not because of the politics of the blacklist but because of the autonomy-crushing politics of a crumbling production system. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) put the final touch on the decade of containment by blowing up the world. There were directors who started their careers in television, during the socalled “golden age” of TV drama: John Frankenheimer, who made the penultimate Cold War melodrama, The Manchurian Candidate in 1962 (the ultimate is Dr. Strangelove, a satire). Arthur Penn started his feature film career with a Western, The LeftHanded Gun (1958) and went on to make a key film of the “new” Hollywood, Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

Introduction • 5

This is not to give the impression that the films of the ’50s were just a prelude to the Hollywood Renaissance of the late 1960s, even if some of its filmmakers went on to make extraordinary films during the subsequent decade. The films under consideration are sui generis, they belong to their decade. At the same time, they speak to ours, sometimes as museum pieces, sometimes as elements in a time machine, often as indicators of the cultural and political climate of the moment, and many as important cinematic events on their own. Those are the ones I am most interested in, especially those that are dark or over-the-top melodramatic or reflective of their time directly or obliquely. I’m interested in genres, especially science fiction and melodrama (less so musicals or Westerns), but most of all in directors. This surely dates me, since auteurism—the idea that the director, no matter how many other people might be involved in the making of a film, is the primary creative force, because he or she is responsible for putting the images on film and, sometimes, for editing those images together—is somewhat out of fashion. Auteurism has always been a useful fiction when applied to American film, any one of which is a collaborative effort. But I rest easy in the fiction, and I can tell the difference between and the details of films made by Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, John Ford, Jack Arnold, or, of course, Hitchcock, Welles, and Kubrick. They and others put their mark on their films and are easily recognized as the guiding creative force. My hope is that this ease will be communicated to you. Many of the filmmakers discussed here have often been analyzed by others, including myself in my introductory texts, The Cultures of American Film and Film, Form, and Culture as well as in The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema. Here, I have tried to come to them with a fresh perspective and a gentle invitation for the reader to look at the films again or, as may be the case for many, for the first time. Furthermore, because there has been so much written about Welles, Hitchcock, and Kubrick, I’m going to try and keep my discussion within the bounds of this book’s themes. In a sense, I suppose, contained. What follows, then, is not an encyclopedia of ’50s films or a history of the decade but rather a close look at the imaginative work of filmmakers who broke through the oppressive climate of Hollywood in the 1950s. I have chosen filmmakers and genres that not only represent the best of the period’s work but which, frankly, I like the most. What follows is less scholarly than it is personal; it is analytic and, indeed, impressionistic, not to mention opinionated. This means that many films and filmmakers will be left

6 • Triumph over Containment

out and some genres, like the musical, barely touched upon. I have divided this book into sections, first considering the period in general, then focusing on a particular, short-lived, independent production company, Enterprise, then on some directors I think most important to the decade, Nicholas Ray, Ida Lupino, Joseph Losey, Samuel Fuller, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and John Ford. I then consider two genres, science fiction and melodrama, that seem to best capture the spirit of the times. I end the book with Stanley Kubrick, who began his extraordinary career in the 1950s and, just after its end, made the film that exploded Cold War absurdity. In my discussions of the films, I have wrestled with the problem of plot summary. Many of the films may be unfamiliar, so for these I have given some plot as an anchor for discussion of form and content. For others, I have skipped large portions of plot with the hopes that you know them or will be tempted to see them again or for the first time. There are wonderful films here and almost all are available in one form or another, whether through disc or streaming. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I do. These are, after all, the films of my life.

1 On Containment, Screen Size, and the Lightness and the Dark

The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. GEORGE KENNAN, the “Long Telegram,”

1946

Containment was the name of a privileged American narrative during the cold war. Although technically referring to U.S. foreign policy from 1948 until at least the mid-1960s, it also describes

7

8 • Triumph over Containment

American life in numerous venues and sundry rubrics during the period. AL AN NADEL , Containment Culture

American fifties culture developed in strug gle against the McCarthyite xenophobia, against the increasing institutionalization of life outside traditional family structures, and against the postwar anxieties and ambitions that clamped down on its energies. W. T. LHAMON, Deliberate Speed

George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram,” with an assist by the Truman Doctrine in 1947, kick-started the Cold War by insisting that the Soviet Union, former U.S. allies in the fight against the Nazis, were bent on conquering large swaths of the countries they liberated. Kennan and Truman were, no doubt, correct. What they could not foresee was that the urge to “contain” the Soviet Union would spread virally through Cold War culture. What started as a suggested strategy became, almost unconsciously, a warning against liberal discourse, against women, sexual difference, and people of color, against cultural productions that asked the wrong questions or offered the wrong answers, “wrong” meaning left or even just right of center. “Wrong” meant being gay or having joined a left-wing organization. Culture, politics, desire itself was contained by the dominant anti-Communist discourse. The Hollywood blacklist, created by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, who came to Hollywood for a second visit in 1947, is an example of containment at its most virulent. An earlier incursion went nowhere, but after the war, after unrest and strikes within the studios shook up the studio bosses, they were welcome, and they took advantage of that welcome to wreak havoc. Their job, as they saw it, was to rein in what they perceived as subversive activity, which they understood as Communist influence on or in the movies. There were pro-Soviet films made during the war

On Containment, Screen Size, and the Lightness and the Dark • 9

that particularly garnered HUAC’s attention: the Warner Bros. film Mission to Moscow (Michael Curtiz, 1943), which celebrated Stalin and excused the show trials; Samuel Goldwyn’s The North Star (Lewis Milestone, 1943), a grim film about the Nazis in the Ukraine; and MGM’s Song of Russia (Gregory Ratoff, 1944), which depicted the Russian people as happy, which made Ayn Rand angry. But it wasn’t really pro-Soviet films HUAC was after, but rather the Jewish studio heads and their employees—producers, writers, directors—who, in the late 1940s, were the source of mass entertainment, celebrity, and influence. HUAC wanted them to inform on each other in a seemingly endless round of humiliation. If they refused vociferously on the basis of their rights, as did the Hollywood Ten (screenwriters Alvah Bessie, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, directors Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, and producer Adrian Scott), they were sent to jail. Otherwise, they were blacklisted and lost their jobs, their livelihood, and their station in life. If they informed, as did Dmytryk after jail or Elia Kazan, going on to make a movie about informing, all they lost was their conscience and moral compass. The blacklist was an act of containment in the form of fear. Many blacklisted writers continued to work, albeit under pseudonyms or with nonblacklisted writers acting as fronts. blacklisted directors Joseph Losey and Jules Dassin left for Europe. A few came back after the blacklist was over, like Abraham Polonsky. Others were simply lost. Yet, despite the pall, movies were made, and an extraordinary variety of movies at that. Some, like the infamous The Woman on Pier 13 (Robert Stevenson, 1949) or the hysteriaridden My Son John (Leo McCarey, 1952), were blatantly anti-Communist. Others, particularly before HUAC got up to full speed, were overtly liberal and antiracist, most notably Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1950 No Way Out, or tepidly against anti-Semitism, such as Gentleman’s Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947) and Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947). But the “social problem” films were short-lived. HUAC saw to that. But what HUAC and the timid, aging heads of the studios could not do was prevent extraordinary films being made across genres. And this imaginative eruption reflected the very conflicts at large in the culture. Postwar America was a conflicted place: victorious in the war; confronted by a new war in Korea; cowed by fears of the atomic bomb; depressed by the full exposure of Nazi atrocities; faced with the realities of changing race relations; and confused over the role of women and, given the impact of the

10 • Triumph over Containment

Kinsey Reports, about sexuality in general. These conflicts were expressed in films about male anxiety, in films of great violence, in films of silly comedy, in biblical “epics,” and in fanciful musicals. Some films showcased a new acting technique, dubbed “the Method,” emanating from the Actors Studio in New York. Method actors—most prominently Marlon Brando and James Dean—created the artifice of raw emotion and an immediacy of exaggerated gesture. Their style emerged from the fog of male angst, demonstrating a sensitivity that went with the power of their physical presence and acted as an antidote to the poisonous, hypermasculine, homophobic, antiCommunist political discourse. The Method was just one manifestation of resistance to the troubled complacency of the political pall. So were the films that questioned the givens of the culture, films like Joseph Losey’s The Lawless (1950) and George Stevens’s Giant (1956) that, in very different ways, confronted racist attitudes toward Hispanics. Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause (1955) and Bigger Than Life (1956), along with Martin Ritt’s No Down Payment (1957) and the musical It’s Always Fair Weather (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1955), were among the films that questioned the consensus about suburban life, corporate hegemony, and the diminishment of the individual. Westerns (of all genres) like Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), and Allan Dwan’s Silver Lode (1954) took on McCarthyism. But as we will see, films did not have to go after specific political and cultural targets to demonstrate imaginative vitality. There are films noir, gangster films, war films, westerns, musicals, melodramas, and (especially in this particular decade) science fiction films that, conservative or progressive, demonstrate that containment was no match for the cinematic imagination. We find another form of resistance by means of a seemingly minor, technical matter: a change in the size of the movie screen. Given the Supreme Court’s divestment decree, which ruled that the movie studios could no longer own theaters—their guaranteed means of distribution—and the need to get people back into what theaters they could, the studios experimented with the very format of viewing, working on the assumption that a larger movie screen would tempt viewers away from the (at the time) tiny TV screen. From the coming of sound in the late 1920s until the early 1950s, the size of the film screen was almost square, with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. Cinerama was introduced early in the decade as a travelogue novelty, photographed and projected on a curved, wide screen with three projectors in an aspect ratio of 2.59:1. It evolved into a single camera–projector process using

On Containment, Screen Size, and the Lightness and the Dark • 11

70mm film and was used for a few narrative features like How the West Was Won (John Ford, et al., 1962) and, much later, 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). IMAX, although using a different process, is the contemporary incarnation of Cinerama. In 1953, 20th Century-Fox adopted an old process and introduced CinemaScope, an anamorphic process that squeezed the image onto 35mm film, which, unsqueezed by the projector lens, yielded a viewing ratio of 2.35:1. The first CinemaScope film was a biblical “epic,” The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953). Other studios followed suit, in particu lar Paramount with VistaVision, “Motion Picture High Fidelity,” achieved by running the film horizontally through the projector and then printing release prints on standard vertical 35mm, creating a very detailed image. By mid-decade, the size of the movie screen was permanently changed, if not as wide as Cinerama or Cinemascope. A new, nonanamorphic aspect ratio of 1.66:1 or 1.88:1, achieved by matting the 35mm image in the camera or the projector, created the illusion of greater width and became the new standard. It took many years and new technologies for the television screen to catch up. The standard for television aspect ratio is now 16:9. Why spend time talking about screen size? There is a small irony in the fact that in the age of containment, when Hollywood itself was being squeezed by the blacklist, movie screens expanded. It was, as are most decisions made by the film business, an economic one—the hope that a big screen would tempt people away from their small, square, black-andwhite TV sets. But the result was an aesthetic one as well, a reorientation of screen space, a rethinking of how a scene might be composed and how that composition would be perceived. The viewer would now need to scan the horizontal width of the frame, at least in those films where the director took advantage of the newly gained space (many directors, especially when they were framing for eventual viewing on television, grouped actors toward the center of the composition). Depth was sacrificed for width. But while in the culture at large the world was narrowed into a Manichean vision of Communism versus the “ free world,” filmmakers were expanding their horizon through the technologies of the camera lens and the perceptions of the viewing audience. There was an attempt to regain depth in cinematic space by means of the awkward technologies of 3D. But this led to greater containment as viewers needed to wear glasses with red-and-green lenses to pick up the red-andgreen images photographed in tandem during filming in order to create the illusions of depth. (Other 3D technologies used polaroid lenses to filter

12 • Triumph over Containment

the double vision.) The results were headache-inducing compositions with objects seeming to leap from the screen and protrude into the viewers’ space. 3D was the very definition of a novelty, though one that produced a number of interesting films—science fiction It Came from Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953), Western Hondo (John Farrow, 1953), and musical Kiss Me Kate (George Sidney, 1953), among others. Even Alfred Hitchcock tried his hand at 3D with Dial M for Murder (1954). But by that time, audiences had had enough, and it was released mostly in its “flat” version. 3D had something of a comeback in the 2000s, but as in the early 1950s, its novelty wore off after a few years. Rather than presenting depth-of-field compositions, exploring the possibilities of cinematic space, 3D placed constraints on viewers and filmmakers alike. The screen remained wide but two-dimensional. Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision, and other widescreen processes presented challenges. As I noted, many filmmakers simply ignored the width or filled it with action. A few made the horizontal line eloquent with meaning. John Sturges’s Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) was among the first MGM CinemaScope titles to take on serious content. Previously, the format was used by the studio for adventures like Knights of the Round Table (Richard Thorpe, 1953) or musicals like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Stanley Donen, 1954, originally filmed in 70 mm). But Bad Day at Black Rock was something different, particularly for MGM: a film with social, even political, resonance, a revenge melodrama that has its roots in WWII and the treatment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. It is hardly unusual for a ’50s film to have a WWII veteran in a central or peripheral role. The returning vet, as we will see, was part of the lingering memory of the war and could embody any number of concerns as passive victims or active heroes. In Bad Day at Black Rock, John J. Macreedy, played by MGM stalwart Spencer Tracy, is a damaged vet with one arm. He comes to an isolated desert town wearing a black suit, blue tie, and black hat, a costume, save for one scene in a bathrobe, he doesn’t shed for the brief length (under ninety minutes) of the film. The town is so barren, it is all but a vacant space. Macreedy is so mysterious, that he too is all but vacant, even as we learn that he has come to deliver a medal to the Japanese father of the man who saved his life. He learns that the glowering, slack-jawed inhabitants of the town murdered the father in a fit of racist rage. Even with the mystery solved, even after Macreedy disables a leering and violent Trimble (Ernest Borgnine) with his one arm, we are left with an empty feeling of horrendous acts by vicious bigots that have not sufficiently been accounted for or avenged. Visually,

On Containment, Screen Size, and the Lightness and the Dark • 13

FIGURE 1.1 Director John Sturges composes figures to make the most of the CinemaScope

frame in Bad Day at Black Rock.

Sturges doesn’t have the luxury of vacant spaces on the physical screen; he has the broad horizontal of the CinemaScope frame to fill. He shows his awareness of the framing problem from the very beginning in the film’s title sequence, in which the train bringing Macreedy to town snakes across the CinemaScope frame. The self-conscious framing is prelude to the serious work ahead, and Sturges does his work subtly, by arranging characters and objects that don’t crowd his compositions and that sometimes upset their balance—he may tilt his camera up from a low angle or create a modified Dutch tilt (canting the frame off center). He seems at all times conscious of what the frame has to hold and how to fill it so that we will have to be perceptually aware in order to take in every thing across the expanse of the screen. As viewers, we are asked to be conscious of what we see and therefore conscious of why we are seeing it. The formal structure of the film, its emphasis on the gulf between moral and immoral action, is echoed in the expanse of space before us and the ways in which the director fills it. The violence of bigotry is key to the film’s message, and it is just one of many films across the decade to deal with racism, sometimes radically so. There were antilynching films, like veteran director Clarence Brown’s adaptation of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1949, scripted by blacklisted Ben Maddow), and films that directly confronted racism and its violent outcomes. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out offers two linked narratives. The first is a confrontation between a vile racist, Ray Biddle (Richard Widmark), and a doctor played by Sidney Poitier in his first film role (he would go on to play many parts as a “nonthreatening” Black man,

14 • Triumph over Containment

an important if controversial presence that sidelined other Black actors such as Juano Hernández, James Edwards, and, in many uncredited roles, Juanita Moore). Biddle, a thief, believes Poitier’s Dr. Brooks has murdered his brother. Biddle’s racism is unrelenting and unredeemable, and despite the film’s inevitable turn to melodrama, the bad taste of Biddle’s vileness lingers. The second narrative is even more explosive, a full-scale race riot between Black and white communities, which the film sees as inevitable. No Way Out is among the most outspoken films about race during the decade, but there were others. The problematic issue of passing was taken on in Pinky (Elia Kazan and [uncredited] John Ford, 1949) and Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959, in which Juanita Moore had an important credited role). George Stevens’s Giant, as mentioned, touched upon prejudice against Hispanics, a subject that was more forcefully handled by the independent film Salt of the Earth (1954), whose creative personnel were all blacklistees: director Herbert Biberman, writer Michael Wilson, producer Paul Jarrico, and actor Will Geer. Salt of the Earth, which dealt with the problems of Mexican American miners in the Southwest and the necessity of their unionizing, was the subject of incredible resistance. Right-wing groups tried to shut it down and even managed to get its Mexican star, Rosaura Revueltas, deported. The film never received a proper theatrical exhibition. The extraordinary thing about all these films has less to do with their quality as films—though that is high in most cases—but the fact that they were made at all. The studios were not brave, their breakdown in the face of HUAC is proof of that, and their concerns about losing their audience in the South was ongoing. The fact that they permitted racial themes to enter even a few films is a testament to the tenacity of some filmmakers in the face of great odds. Salt of the Earth demonstrated a wholesale revolt against the studios and their blacklist, a production made in the face of overt intolerance and physical threats. The most concentrated period of “socially conscious” films was the late 1940s, ironically just before or during the HUAC hearings in Hollywood. Some filmmakers found themselves in front of the committee and blacklisted while their films were in circulation. Such was the case with Edward Dmytryk, whose Crossfire (1947) was one of two films to deal with antiSemitism. Dmytryk became one of the Hollywood Ten the very year of the film’s release and was imprisoned by HUAC. Unlike his colleagues, he turned informer. The other film was Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), directed by Elia Kazan, who later saved his career by naming names in front of the committee. Neither of these films confront the issue of anti-Semitism with

On Containment, Screen Size, and the Lightness and the Dark • 15

extraordinary force. Crossfire cloaks its message in film noir and gangster trappings, with its anti-Semitic character portrayed as a psychopath. Gentleman’s Agreement deflects the issue even more. Gregory Peck plays a magazine reporter sent out in the field, pretending to be a Jew in order to document anti-Jewish sentiment. Whenever he becomes depressed over the awful treatment he receives, he is reminded that he is not Jewish, thus blunting the emotional damage that he might other wise suffer. It is a commonplace that the studio heads, most of whom were Jewish, did not want to foreground their religion or ethnicity, or, for that matter, take any great social or political risks in their productions. Yet, risks were taken. Not only were there progressive films about race but very dark, violent films in which corruption and murder were common coin, especially early in the decade. The variety of content speaks to a desire to reach as wide an audience as possible and, consciously or not, to probe a variety of social and cultural issues. The sheer volume of output demanded variety, and that variety included films of social relevance as well as films that hinted at a profound pessimism. There is a key scene midway through William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), down on his luck, unable to find substantial work since coming home from the air force, is reduced to working as a soda jerk in a drugstore, where the friendly place of his youth has become a mass-market operation run by a supercilious manager and a floor clerk who used to be the subject of Fred’s teasing and is now Fred’s superior. A man (Ray Teal) sits down at the counter, the camera looking over his shoulder and down the counter to the very rear of the store. The deep field composition is typical of the film, which was shot by Gregg Toland, Orson Welles’s cinematographer for Citizen Kane (1941). Fred is making sundaes while the customer opens his newspaper with the headline “Senator Warns of New War.” The shot changes to show us Fred mechanically fixing his ice cream treats when Homer (Harold Russell), a navy man who lost both hands in combat and now uses mechanical hooks, comes in. Another cut shows Fred and Homer shaking hands over the counter. We move closer to Homer and the man at the counter, who is wearing a telltale American flag pin. Homer jokes with him about his hooks when Wyler cuts to a close shot of the man, who launches into a diatribe about Homer having sacrificed for nothing. Wyler frames a close shot of Homer and the man, who is an oldtime, right-wing isolationist, going on about how the Nazis and the “Japs” had nothing against us, only against the “Limeys and the Reds.”

16 • Triumph over Containment

FIGURE 1.2 Homer (Harold Russell) pulls the American flag pin off the right-winger

(Ray Teal) as Fred (Dana Andrews) looks on in The Best Years of Our Lives.

Censorship no doubt did not allow him to add “Jews.” He insists they could have beaten the Germans without our help, but we were deceived into the war by “a bunch of radicals in Washington.” Fred asks the man to leave, and, as he goes to the cashier, insulting Fred, he is followed by Homer, whose patriotism has been insulted. “I’m not selling anything but plain, old-fashioned Americanism,” the man says. The altercation leads Homer to pull off the man’s pin and try to fight him. Fred leaps over the counter and a melee ensues, which sends the man crashing into a showcase. Fred quits his job and leaves with Homer, who picks up the American flag pin and puts it in his pocket. Aside from establishing how far Fred has fallen since leaving the ser vice, this sequence could easily have been left out without serious damage to the narrative. But it is important to the greater narrative of prewar isolationism and postwar anti-Communism and marks the film itself with a certain innocence. Coming between the end of WWII and just before the antiCommunist onslaught that would begin in Hollywood just a year after the film’s production, Best Years attempts to predict a world where WWII

On Containment, Screen Size, and the Lightness and the Dark • 17

soldiers will assimilate and all social classes—all white social classes, that is—will function happily and old-school right wingers have no place. Fred is literally from the other side of the tracks, married to a woman (Virginia Mayo) who loves him only for his uniform and who has been hanging around with a gangster (Steve Cochran) while Fred was off to war. Homer is from a lower-middle-class family living in a simple house, engaged to be married to an innocent woman (Cathy O’Donnell) completely accepting of his disability. Al (Fredric March), a sergeant in the army, is an upper-middle-class alcoholic banker with a loving family, but a too curious son (Michael Hall), who questions and baffles his father about the atomic bomb and nuclear energy. He conveniently disappears from the film. There is no room for doubt in The Best Years of Our Lives. Its deep spaces are welcoming to the respective families and to the viewer, who is invited to see the depth of tender reconciliation that the film leads to. Unlike the dark spaces that Toland creates for Citizen Kane, we see clearly and with sympathy. All the obstacles—Homer’s hooks, Fred’s anger, Al’s alcoholism— are resolved. Fred needs to go through a metaphorical rebirth as he sits in the front of a derelict bomber, one of hundreds being scrapped at war’s end. The plane’s ghostly aura starts up—a startling effect created by Wyler, Toland, and composer Hugo Friedhofer—and Fred relives the trauma of his wartime past until a voice, the deus ex machina, breaks the spell. It’s the construction manager of the decommissioned fleet, and he offers Fred a job. Al overcomes his alcoholic haze to deliver a populist speech about loaning money to worthwhile working people, and Homer’s fiancée helps undress and put him to bed. As Robert Warshow observed, the women in Best Years are always putting their men to bed—domesticating them, reining in their postwar chaos, all the participants aligning in their proper order. The film ends in the harmony of marriage of Homer and Wilma while Fred and Peggy, Al’s daughter (Teresa Wright), exchange glances in the background, and when we see them close-up, it is clear that they too will marry. The film assures us that the postwar years will be harmonious, with wartime trauma resolved, and good-looking white people thriving. It was a Hollywood dream. And on the other side was a nightmare. Film noir, surely the most analyzed genre of American film, thrived from 1945 through the early part of the 1950s. Unlike The Best Years of Our Lives, its spaces are shadowy and frightening, its inhabitants brutal and murderous. Dread and betrayal seeps from it. The Blue Dahlia (George Marshall), released the same

18 • Triumph over Containment

year as Best Years, also concerns three ser vicemen returning home. Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd), Buzz Wanchek (William Bendix), and George Copeland (Hugh Beaumont) enter a world of nightclubs, hotels, blackmailers, and murderers. In Best Years, Fred’s wife took up with a gangster. We don’t see much of him or his world, but the mise-en-scène of The Blue Dahlia could well have been made of that off-screen milieu. It is a grim and grimy world where guns and violence reign. The trio are a sad lot. Only George seems relatively stable. Buzz has a steel plate in his head and a brutal case of PTSD. He goes slightly mad when he hears jazz blaring, calling it “monkey music.” The racial undertones of his outbursts may or may not have been conscious to the filmmakers. Johnny is at odds. His wife, Helen (Doris Dowling), lives in a hotel bungalow and comes on like a wartime liberated woman: “I take all the drinks I like, any time, any place. I go where I want to with anybody I want. I just happen to be that kind of a girl.” “That kind of a girl” killed their three-year-old child in a drunken car wreck. She is now hanging out with a criminal lounge lizard, Eddie Harwood (the soon-to-be-blacklisted Howard Da Silva), and shortly into the film, she is murdered. To say that the bulk of The Blue Dahlia is a murder mystery, a whodunit, would be to miss its dominant tone of mutual suspicion and violence—especially against Johnny—and the twisted relationships that emerge as the film progresses. A cankered romantic interest emerges when Harwood’s wife, Joyce (Veronica Lake), turns up and seems to fall for Johnny. But this was largely a romance of box office convenience because Ladd and Lake were popular costars. The whodunit turns out not to be Johnny or—the most likely suspect— Buzz but the randy, wizened, blackmailing house detective (Will Wright) of the hotel where Helen lived. It doesn’t matter, even less than Johnny and Joyce going off together at the film’s finale matters. Buzz is left with his PTSD. The world of the film is left with its dark corruption. Not quite dark enough. The Blue Dahlia is not a great film noir. It doesn’t hold up to the truly brutal films of Anthony Mann of the late ’40s, such as T-Men, Raw Deal, Border Incident, and Side Street. Often working with cinematographer John Alton, Mann created a shadowy world full of pain and anguish, of men and women crying out, being hurt in the shadows where they can barely see who is assaulting them. George Marshall is not up to this level of bleakness and Raymond Chandler’s dialogue is lacking his usual wit. But in comparing it with The Best Years of Our Lives we get a good idea of the seemingly unbreachable gap in the ways the culture was viewing itself through its films.

On Containment, Screen Size, and the Lightness and the Dark • 19

FIGURE 1.3 Buzz (William Bendix) proves his steadiness by lighting a match held by Johnny (Alan Ladd) with a bullet in The Blue Dahlia.

Full-bore optimism or abysmal pessimism may be too severe a polarity, even for a culture so at odds with itself as that of the ’50s. The relentlessness of anti-Communism on all levels of the political and the personal reveals a dark, sadomasochistic streak that even Best Years wasn’t quite immune from. There was, of course, light, often provided by comedies and musicals. Singin’ in the Rain stands as an energetic bright spot amidst the darkness (although It’s Always Fair Weather, made by the same pair of Kelly and Donen a few years later was considerable darker in tone). Comedies abounded, even service comedies like No Time for Sergeants (Mervyn LeRoy, 1958) or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’s At War with the Army (Hal Walker, 1950). I don’t talk much about comedies and musicals in this book. I find more complexity in melodrama, in noir or gangster films, in science fiction and some Westerns. But I don’t want to tar an entire decade with gloom and despair because I like its gloomy and despairing films. In what follows, I can’t promise a balance, but I will keep an eye on the contradictions inherent in Hollywood’s output during the decade. There were few films as openheartedly optimistic as The Best Years of Our Lives but many as despairing as

20 • Triumph over Containment

The Blue Dahlia. As the postwar years wore on, generic containers held political and cultural attitudes firmly in place: comedies and musicals entertained brightly, for the most part; gangster films gradually absorbed noir and both went into decline; science fiction ascended by allegorizing political paranoia; the Western displaced contemporary pessimism with visions of frontier civilization building, although they occasionally commented on contemporary issues and portrayed their heroes as troubled frontiersmen; and melodrama heightened emotions beyond rawness and into a sublime realm of impossible desire. Or probable failure. As much as melodrama or any other genre attempts to resolve itself by means of redemption, punishment of evil, destruction of space aliens or native Americans or outlaws, or subduing of a character’s own destructive impulses, a sense of incompleteness remains. Fifties cinema is uneasy, like the culture itself. Its despair is almost palpable, even in some of its musicals and comedies. But out of despair comes ongoing attempts to address it, to attempt to overcome it, though the sadness remains. It is as if, through its films, the 1950s kept bumping up against its own political and social depredations and, in the various attempts to confront or avoid them, the films, in all their variety, could not quite break out of those very depredations. I’m aware that this seems to contradict my central point about the triumph over containment; but that triumph lies in the very attempt to overcome, to find a cinematic vision that opens a path to another way of thinking that goes beyond the banalities of Cold War containment. True, Dixon Steele and Laurel Gray have no chance to forge a relationship at the end of In a Lonely Place (1950). Scottie Ferguson stares into the void of his own obsession at the end of Vertigo (1958). Ethan Edwards is left alone in the desert at the end of The Searchers (1956). The men of The Bachelor Party (Delbert Mann,1957) remain desperately unhappy with their lot. The Martians die of the failure of their immune system, but the Earth is left in ruins at the end of The War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953). Annie Johnson dies of shame and grief at the end of Imitation of Life (1959). Not all films, by any means, end in such sadness, and even those that do often conquer their despair through the power of their imaginative means. This is their triumph: form drives content, and when that drive is successful even the darkest view is brightened by the unbridled—yes, uncontained— exercise of visual and narrative imagination. The films and filmmakers I  discuss in this book practiced their trade under the constraints that the studios applied under normal circumstances, though as the decade advanced,

On Containment, Screen Size, and the Lightness and the Dark • 21

censorship began to show signs of shattering. But they strug gled as well under unusual circumstances set up by the blacklist, a pall of fear and mistrust that might have stymied all creativity. The story is often told about a script called I Married a Communist that Howard Hughes, the owner of RKO from 1948 to the early ’50s, used as a loyalty test. Any director who turned it down (including Joseph Losey and Nicholas Ray) was marked as disloyal or worse. It was eventually made as The Woman on Pier 13 by Robert Stevenson in 1949. There were less blatant attempts at ideological testing, and some directors did not need a threat to make an anti-Communist film; we only need think of Leo McCarey’s hysteria-ridden My Son John (1952). In that film, a mother (Helen Hayes) all but loses her mind when she discovers her son (Robert Walker) is a Communist. But creative minds were not lost. Some were driven into exile or prison; others pushed through. In the end, the blacklist really didn’t work. Liberal, sometimes progressive, ideas infiltrated film and, by the end of the decade, the blacklist began to be dismantled. Containment did not hold.

2 “It Was Like Going Down to the Bottom of the World”

John Garfield and Enterprise He defended his streetboy’s honor and they killed him for it. ABR AHAM POLONSK Y on John Garfield

When his contract was up with Warner Bros. in the late 1940s, actor John Garfield joined with producer Bob Roberts to form the independent company Enterprise. It was a gamble taken by a high-profile actor, and it resulted in two of the most powerful films of the postwar period and one interesting gangster-on-the-run piece. Roberts and Garfield gathered around them some of the best screenwriters and directors, almost all of them in trouble 22

“It Was Like Going Down to the Bottom of the World” • 23

with HUAC. Abraham Polonsky was blacklisted. Robert Rossen was blacklisted until he named names. John Berry was blacklisted and went into exile in Europe. Dalton Trumbo was one of the Hollywood Ten, and, after his release from prison, he lived in Mexico and wrote award-winning scripts fronted by other writers. Garfield was pursued by HUAC until he died of a heart attack in 1952, at age 39. The three films Garfield made with Roberts—Body and Soul (Robert Rossen, 1947, written by Abraham Polonsky), Force of Evil (written and directed by Abraham Polonsky, 1948), and his last film, He Ran All the Way (John Berry, 1951, written by Dalton Trumbo, fronted by Guy Endore)— do not fit neatly into conventional genres. Body and Soul is a boxing film, of the kind popular at the time. Peter Stanfield counts some twenty-nine boxing films produced between the late ’40s and the late ’50s, and these do not include the many films that have a passing reference to boxing. Not only was the sport itself popular, but some boxing films had a marked left-leaning perspective in their “nostalgic vision” of the rise of a “proletarian protagonist” from the ghetto and “his struggles with organized crime, and an unforgiving social and economic order.” It is interesting to compare boxing films made at about the same time as Body and Soul: Champion (Mark Robson) and The Set-Up (Robert Wise), both released in 1949. Each of these see the sport and the central character differently, and those differences mark conflicting views of the individual and his world in the postwar period. Champion was written by Carl Foreman and Ring Lardner, both of whom would soon be blacklisted. Their protagonist, Kirk Douglas’s Midge Kelly, is a preening narcissist, whose rise from a life as a railcar-riding hobo to world champion is marked by the men and women he leaves in his wake. He refuses to throw a fight, but is fully able to make his manager and crippled brother, as well as his long-abandoned wife, suffer for his heedless rise to fame. If the fight business—as it is portrayed in all three films—is dirty and corrupt, then Midge is fully capable of being dirty himself, especially where money is concerned. He regards those around him as tools to get him more cash. But at the heart of the film is a statement of the loneliness of Midge’s life and of those around him. His brother Connie (Arthur Kennedy) leaves Midge in disgust and has an interesting meeting with Midge’s long-forgotten wife Emma (Ruth Roman), who has been reduced to waiting tables. She is the working-class hero of the film, expressing a life of isolation and loneliness. In a simple over-theshoulder two-shot with Connie in a dark bar, she tells her story:

24 • Triumph over Containment

Yeah, I’ve had a lot of jobs. Stores, ran an elevator once. I was even a model for a while. I’ve got a good figure in a bathing suit. But, anyway, I wanted to get away from dirty dishes and glasses.

Connie asks why she hasn’t divorced Midge. She answers, “I don’t know. You know, there’s more loneliness than anything else in the world.” You can be lonely in an awful lot of places: the movies, dance halls, in your own room. [She plays with her wedding ring.] People are funny. A little piece of cheap gold can almost make you believe things are different than they really are.

This moving bit of existential angst is out of keeping with the rest of the film, but quietly plays up what is a commonality among the three boxing films, the isolation of their characters from the rest of the world. Everyone in contact with the sport and the boxer is lonely. The ring and its boxers, managers, and hangers-on is an enclosed island where the boxer proves his worth or falls from the weight of corruption bearing down on him. “You stink from corruption,” Connie yells at Midge. And at a crucial point, there is the suggestion that Midge rapes his wife. Before his last fight, Connie confronts Midge with his anger over what he’s done. He takes a swing at Midge with his cane and the boxer knocks out his brother. The corruption eats at Midge from the inside and, with a snarl that only Kirk Douglas can manage, he gives his life to his last fight. Midge must die, given Hollywood morality and his overreaching and trampling on other people. But he doesn’t so much sully the sport as become sullied by it, seduced by wealth and the seeming ease of acquiring it. Being sullied by the sport is the reigning principle of most boxing films, certainly of the three we are entertaining here. In its isolated state, the boxing world seems to render in small the larger anxieties of postwar culture, anxieties over the potency of the individual, and the enormity of the evil unleashed by the Nazis and the terrors of atomic energy. These may seem too large for these films to carry, but they are of a piece with the films noir that appeared in the late ’40s and early ’50s that portrayed small men being crushed in the dark by powers they can’t control. It is as if the only way to counter the uncontrollable forces of the larger world is to portray two men beating the shit out of each other in order to attain some presence amid the darkness and corruption. Midge wants to be a big man, but is undone by

“It Was Like Going Down to the Bottom of the World” • 25

the pressures of his ego and the fight racket he willingly becomes part of. Robert Ryan’s Stoker in The Set-Up is a small-time loser from the very start. A journeyman boxer who always loses, he stays with his unhappy wife (Audrey Totter) in studio-made mise-en-scène, a small set in which the Hotel Cozy where he lives is across the street from the Paradise City arena where he boxes. The arena is filled with grotesque onlookers (one of them blind, one who listens to the ball game while watching the fight, others in various states of excitement over the violence). There is neither coziness nor paradise for Stoker, whose very name on the poster outside the arena has a slash mark through it. Slated by gamblers— the sweaty, grinning “Little Boy” (Alan Baxter) and his hangers-on—to lose his match, a decision he knows nothing about until the middle of the fight, he goes on to win it nevertheless. His seconds, in on the fix, desert him. In a dark alley after the fight, Little Boy breaks Stoker’s hand. In a nice bit of diversion from this awful violence, Wise cuts away to the shadows of a jazz band, drums banging, on the alley wall. But violence in fight films cannot be avoided, since it is their subject. Despite the unsavory onlookers who Wise keeps cutting to in the course of the fight, we, as viewers, are asked to watch unflinchingly and root for the underdog. The popularity of fight films depends on the willingness of viewers to indulge themselves in watching the mock brutality. Perhaps because it is mock, we can more easily take it as a representation rather than the thing itself. After all, the films are aimed at a much wider audience than the sport of boxing itself. In any case, boxing films manipulate us in interesting ways. We shudder at the corruption and the violence; we wish the protagonist to conquer his opponent and the mobsters; we are in constant concern that he won’t. Stoker wins his match and loses everything in the most horrible way. He has no future, despite regaining the affection of his wife. At the end, the camera pulls back on the studio street, a crowd gathered around the injured fighter, a sign reading “Dreamland” glowing over a chop suey joint, a clock reading 10:16. When the film started, it read 9:05. The film is one hour and twelve minutes long. We witness the pathetic, violent fall of a little man in real time. Body and Soul was the most prominent of the three boxing films of the late 1940s. Unlike Champion and The Set-Up, it is set in the near past, in the Depression, where stories of the rise from poverty were shared by many genres in addition to boxing films. (The boxing film Golden Boy [Rouben Mamoulian, 1939] was made during the Depression itself.) Setting the film in the Depression makes its origin story more powerful and the boxer’s

26 • Triumph over Containment

downfall more painful, putting him back in the state of poverty from which he came. There is a difference in Body and Soul, however. Charley Davis’s (John Garfield) family was not poor but lower-middle-class, a typical economic situation in the three Bob Roberts–John Garfield films we are considering. People of very moderate, even marginal means provided a locus of minimal happiness. Charley’s parents used to run a candy store before it was bombed by gangsters. Their now reduced state pushes Charley to pursue his boxing career, however reluctant the family is to accept the wealth his career brings to him. The story is told in flashback. At the film’s start, there are moody nighttime images of a deserted training camp, ending with a shot of Charley, fully clothed in bed, having a nightmare, calling out “Ben, Ben,” his sparring partner. He leaves camp for his parents’ home, so upset over the death of his sparring partner that he tries to find solace. We don’t know yet exactly what has happened, only that his mother (Anne Revere) and his girlfriend Peg (Lilli Palmer) don’t want him. His mother stands stiffly in the foreground of their modest apartment as Peg refuses Charley’s advances in another room, seen through a window. She tells him to leave. This is not the way a successful boxer is treated, and in a rapid series of sequences, we find out why. Charley will be fighting a fixed match. “Everything is addition or subtraction, the rest is conversation,” Roberts (Lloyd Gough), the fixer, tells Charley as he prepares for the fight. Everything is reduced to money. The film continues in flashback as Charley lies down before the fight. “I’m going down the drain. . . . Everything down the drain,” he repeats, as the film moves to an earlier time. Charley is feted by the local Democratic club and meets Peg. The moment is lighthearted through the meet-cute, but takes a downward turn when Charley comes home. His mother is strongly against his new profession, and though his father supports him, the family tension runs high. The bomb, aimed at the nearby speakeasy, destroys the candy store and kills Charley’s father. His mother in her newfound poverty seeks a loan from a charity, a humiliation Charley can’t abide, and this is what turns him to boxing. His mother is adamantly against it, and in a rapid dialogue, typical of Polonsky’s writing, Anna and her son come to a break. He throws out the social worker asking questions about their status. His mother calls Charley a fool, and he explodes, yelling at his friend to set up a boxing match. “I want money, do you understand? Money, money!” “I forbid it. You’d better buy a gun and shoot yourself!” Charley retorts with the one exclamation that puts a stop to the argument: “You need money to buy a

“It Was Like Going Down to the Bottom of the World” • 27

gun!” This need for money is different from Midge’s in Champion. There, the quest for cash came with the need for conquest and self-aggrandizement. Charley wants money for the power it brings to lift him out of the near poverty of his parents. What he doesn’t count on is that he will be a killer. Roberts forces a match between Charley and Ben (Canada Lee), a black boxer who has received a severe head injury and been told not to fight again. The results are foretold. Ben is almost killed during the fight and dies later in a spasm of anger over Charley’s having sold out his career. Charley’s lifelong pal, Shorty (Joseph Pevney), who runs afoul of Roberts, is beaten by his goon and run over by a car. Charley, who, in his perfect wildness, was compared by Peg to William Blake’s Tiger, is now Roberts’s puppet and carries the burden of guilt with him. Worst of all, he has become a vessel for money. A complex montage represents the emptying out of Charley through the abuse taken by his body and his drowning in money and drowning in an affair, losing what little soul he once possessed. There isn’t much moralizing here. Polonsky and Rossen are content to show Charley simultaneously rising and falling. They work by contrast: Charley has agreed to throw a fight and he promises his mother and Peg it will be his last. In a curious scene, Charley, his mother, and Peg are visited by Shimen (Shimen Ruskin), the local grocer. He is markedly Jewish, and his presence serves to remind us— if not Charley—of who Charley is and where he came from. The visit, the pride Shimen evidences for Charley on behalf of the neighborhood, shakes the family, who take Charley’s admission that he will throw his last fight as a grievous betrayal not only of Charley himself but of all of them who have supported him throughout his rise. Shimen acts as the soul of the film, its grasp of the reality of one’s origins and righteousness, all of which Charley has lost. Charley, of course, comes around and refuses to throw the fight, which is photographed with dramatic intensity by the great cinematographer James Wong Howe. According to Polonsky, screenwriter Rossen at one point wanted things to end badly, with Charley killed by Roberts’s goons and his head thrown in a garbage can—something considerably more violent than the end of The Set-Up. Instead, there is some redemption, the regaining of soul with the loss of the body. Charley confronts Roberts, who is burning with anger and incipient violence, with a newfound strength of character: “Everybody dies,” Charley tells him, words Roberts himself has thrown at Charley twice before. This leaves the end of Body and Soul in a somewhat ambiguous state. Has Charley learned humility? Will he willingly return to

28 • Triumph over Containment

FIGURE 2.1 John Garfield takes a beating in the ring in Body and Soul.

Peg and the bosom of his family? What, after all, has the film taught us about the boxing racket? Charley, in the end, gets off too easily—or was the fact of his not getting killed itself a triumph over corruption? The triumph of his lower-middle-class morality makes only a small political dent in the world at large. Charley may survive. Garfield himself had his head handed to him by HUAC and didn’t. He Ran All the Way was the last of the Garfield-Roberts productions (under the auspices of Roberts Pictures) and the last film Garfield would make. It breaks through the surface of the typical early ’50s gangster film by means of a terse, concentrated narrative (it runs just seventy-seven minutes) and a limited set complemented by location shooting. Most of the action takes place in a working-class apartment, its spaces exaggerated by James Wong Howe’s deep-focus photography countered by amazing close-ups. It is also a slyly political film, carefully managing sympathy for Garfield’s Nick Robey, a petty thief and cop killer, and the family whose daughter he seduces and dominates. The film presents class struggle in miniature. Nick is a lumpen proletariat, living with his mother (Gladys George)

“It Was Like Going Down to the Bottom of the World” • 29

FIGURE 2.2 Cinematographer James Wong Howe creates an amazing close-up of John Garfield in He Ran All the Way.

and working as a small-time criminal. The family he takes hostage consists of simple working people: the father (Wallace Ford) works in a newspaper’s printing plant, his daughter, Peggy (Shelley Winters), in a bakery. The mother (Selena Royle) stays at home and looks after their son. There is no simple allegory here, only a narrative of persistent struggle in which all parties carry some burden of complicity and fear. Nick shifts back and forth from gentleness to threat; the family moves from fearful compliance to forceful action, especially when Peg decides to run off with Nick, suffering a touch of Stockholm syndrome. But while her father tries to shoot Nick, it’s Peg who fires the fatal shot, leaving Nick to die in the gutter. Contact with Nick has permanently changed the family dynamics. Domestic and psychological space—so well communicated by Howe’s cinematography—is shifted with the intrusion of a member of the violent underclass into an ordered lower-middle-class home. Innocence is lost and there is no indication that greater knowledge is found. On its surface, He Ran All the Way is a bit of cinematic pulp fiction. But it rises from its generic roots through the subtle force of its quiet and complex politics, provided by Dalton Trumbo, and, of course, the force of Garfield’s presence.

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There is no innocence in Force of Evil, the greatest film of the GarfieldRoberts collaboration. Well reviewed on its release, it has since grown in appreciation. Martin Scorsese has called it a major influence on his early films, and it is generally considered a high-water mark of late ’40s noir. Except that it isn’t quite a film noir but something sui generis. It has noirish elements and certainly partakes of gangster film tropes. But it is more than this. As many have pointed out, it is a retelling of Cain and Abel under the guise of a story about the numbers racket and the destructive forces of small-time capitalism versus capitalisme sauvage. Force of Evil is a film in which everyone is corrupt, in minor and major ways, from the big-time head of the numbers operation and his lawyer, to the small-time operator out of his apartment, to an old-time Depression gangster who wants to take the action back. “This is Wall Street.” The first words of the film are spoken in voice-over by Joe Morse (Garfield), the lawyer for the big-time numbers operator, Tucker (Roy Roberts). We look down at the downtown canyons of New York. It is July 3rd, and on the following day most numbers players will bet on some combination of 776, which will make the big-time operators rich and impoverish the small “banks,” the mostly family-owned operations, one of which is run by Joe’s brother, Leo (Thomas Gomez). Tucker wants to turn the racket into a legal lottery, which means pushing small banks out of business; the law wants to put them all out of business; Joe is stuck in the middle, playing both sides and losing. In an early scene, Joe and Tucker confront each other. Tucker starts out calmly, pouring himself a cup of coffee while Joe stands, worrying about his brother and what will happen to him when the winning number wipes him out. “He’ll turn white and die. Ashamed to be old and broke.” He moves closer to Tucker, threatening to tell Leo about the fix, at which point Polonsky cuts to a mid-shot of Tucker, eyes narrowed and mouth thin: “You’ll tell him nothing of the kind.” Cut to close mid-shot of Joe: “It’s the only way, Ben.” Cut to Tucker rising quickly from his chair, dominating the frame: “It’s the only way to ruin us. No.” Joe insists that it is safe. “No!” shouts Tucker, and Polonsky cuts to a two-shot of the men facing each other, Tucker warning Joe not to see his brother. Tucker goes on to explain how they have fixed 776 to win and thereby wipe out the small competitors. He explains that he could have called in his old beer-running partner Ficco (Paul Fix) to strong-arm the bankers but Joe talked him out of it (at this point they are descending an elegant stairway that prepares for an important rhyming shot at the end of the film). It’s a kind of blackmail, common coin amongst these people.

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Joe does visit his brother, and the ensuing confrontation is the most powerful in the film. The dialogue escalates in staccato rhythms until the repetitions transcend dialogue and become verse. Polonsky cuts the scene to emphasize the agonizing irreversibility of the brothers’ positions and passions. The scene is worth quoting and describing in full: [sitting on Leo’s desk in a far shot of the two of them]: How are you, Leo? L EO What do you want, Joe? JOE I came to see you, Leo. Do I need a particu lar reason? L EO You wouldn’t come around here if you didn’t have a particu lar reason. JOE What’s the difference? We’re brothers. [Cut to a mid-shot of Leo at his desk, looking pained.] L EO Is it a social visit or a business visit? I haven’t seen you in an age. What is it? I’m busy. [Cut to mid-shot of Joe sitting on the desk. He then gets up and leans on the desk with his hands.] JOE Leo, I’ve come to take you out of this air shaft and put you in a real office in a real business. To pay you back for every thing. Because you’re my older brother. That’s why I’m here. [Cut back to Leo sitting at his desk, mopping his face.] L EO Come around after I’m dead. [Back to Joe leaning on the desk. He gesticulates toward Leo.] JOE I had to fight to get this proposition for you, Leo. I had to stick my neck way out. Now, you listen to me! [Cut briefly back to Leo.] Something very serious is about to happen to your business. You’re one of twenty or thirty numbers banks in the city—one of the smaller ones. Suppose a combine moves in. [Joe moves to the rear of the frame. Leo is in close-up, frame right.] Suppose it organizes and merges these banks, eliminating the little ones, like yours. You’re listening now, aren’t you? Suppose it reduces the overhead—legal fees, bail bonds. Supposing it reduces the cost and guarantees the profits. [Joe moves back to the desk and leans toward Leo.] A man like you would be out of business, wouldn’t you? You couldn’t compete, could you? But suppose you had a brother, and this brother made your bank the number one bank in the combination, in the merger, in the corporation. JOE

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What corporation? Tucker? [At this point, Leo’s assistant, Doris, comes in and walks toward the desk until the three are composed in the shot. Leo tells her to come in.] DORIS I’ve got the tickets for the winners, Mr. Morse. L EO And what does this corporation expect from me, Brother Joe? [Doris moves toward the rear of the frame and opens the safe. Joe moves around to the front of the desk.] JOE In return for the organization . . . [Joe looks at Doris with suspicion. Polonsky cuts back to the medium close-up of Leo.] L EO I have no secrets from Doris. If you want to talk, talk. If not, go. [Cut back to the three-shot.] JOE In return for the organization and ser vice, in return for taking you into the combination, the corporation gets two-thirds of the profits and you get one-third . . . but I warn you . . . L EO Two-thirds for Tucker, Brother Joe, and one-third for me, for my own business? [Cut back to Leo.] Do you know what that is, Joe? [Leo shouts as Joe and Doris look back at him.] Blackmail! That’s what it is! Blackmail! [Cut back to Leo, who is livid with rage.] My own brother blackmailing me! JOE You’re crazy! You’re absolutely crazy mad! [Joe is now approaching Leo, shouting back at him.] You’re not listening to me! [Cut to Leo at his desk.] I don’t want it! You know why you don’t want it? I’ll tell you why, because you’re a small man. Because if it’s a small thing, you’re a tiger. A tiger. [Cut to Leo, drinking milk and clutching his heart.] But if it’s a big thing, you shout and yell and call me names. [Cut back to Joe.] “Oh, no, a million dollars for Leo? Oh, no, must be the wrong address. It must be somebody next door.” [Cut back to the three of them as Leo gets up from his desk and walks to the door.] L EO The answer is no! JOE You understand your “no” won’t stop the merging of these banks, yours included! [Joe runs to Leo and clutches him.] Leo, Leo, this is your chance, the one I got for you. L EO You take your chance, Joe, and get out of here. I’m an honest man here, not a gangster with that gangster Tucker! [The door opens, revealing Leo’s employees listening outside.] JOE Are you telling me, a corporation lawyer, that you’re running a legitimate business here? [Joe closes the door.] What do you call this? Payoffs for L EO

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gambling. An illegal lottery. Policy. Violation 974 of the penal code. Policy—the numbers racket. [Cut to a two-shot of Doris clutching money and Leo resting his hands on his desk.] L EO I do my business honest and respectable! [Joe walks to the desk.] JOE Honest? Respectable? Don’t you take the nickels and dimes and pennies from people who bet, just like every other crook, big or little, in this racket? [Cut to medium close-up of Joe.] They call this racket “policy” because people bet their nickels on numbers instead of paying their weekly insurance premium. That’s why—policy. That’s what it is, and that’s what it’s called. [Cut back to two-shot of Doris and Leo.] And Tucker wants to make millions, you want to make thousands, and you, you do it for thirty-five dollars a week. [Cut back to the three of them around Leo’s desk.] But it’s all the same, all policy! L EO This is my secretary, my stenographer, my friend, Doris Lowry. She’s been with me a long time. She’s like a daughter to me. [Doris moves to the rear and Polonsky cuts back to Leo.] And you . . . I wanted to be the lawyer, and I could have been the lawyer if I threw you out of the house when our parents died. But no, I worked for you like a fool. For you! And I gave you everything! [Cut to medium close-up of Joe.] JOE Why do you talk this way to me in front of strangers? [Cut back to the three-shot, in the course of which Leo crosses to the door and stuffs money in his jacket pocket. It is at this point that the dialogue achieves the rhythm of verse.] L EO She’s no stranger to me! You’re the stranger! And I’ll tell the whole world Because you’re my brother. And I owe it to the whole world, Because you’re my brother, what you are A crook and a cheat and a gangster. [Joe walks over to a distraught Leo. He helps his brother on with his jacket.] JOE Leo, be calm. Tucker will make you honest Tucker will make you respectable. He’s giving me a quarter of a million dollars

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To create public sentiment to make policy legal, Like bingo, bango, and the Irish sweepstakes. I’m paying you back, Leo. I’ll make you rich, With an office on Wall Street up in the clouds Be calm, Leo. Be sensible. [Leo turns to his brother.] L EO All right. I am sensible. I am calm I’ll give you my answer Calmly and sensibly My final answer My final answer is finally no The answer is no, Absolutely and finally no Finally and Positively no! No! No! No! N-O!

Big thieves and small. Arrogance and self-defeating stubbornness and pride. Eventually a situation is created in which betrayal leads to everyone losing. Joe helps his brother by eventually getting him killed. He arranges raids on Leo’s bank to try and force him into Tucker’s circle. Leo’s own employee, the hapless Bauer (Howland Chamberlain), turns in his own boss to the police and to Ficco, the gangster, and gets killed in the process. Eventually Ficco destroys the entire operation. In a lovely location shot, Joe walks down a deserted Wall Street, while the gang moves in, kills Bauer, and drags out the dying Joe. “Money has no moral opinions,” Joe says at one point. But he learns, once every thing has fallen to pieces and his brother dead, that he has. He has even found love with Doris (Beatrice Pearson) and the courage to expose the racket. But an expected happy ending is hard to find in this film in which money, without moral opinions, has brought down everything, in which a tone on the telephone indicates that it is being tapped, where mutual suspicion and heartbreak determine the fall. All Joe can do is descend with some glimmer of recognition of what has happened. Echoing the descent on the elegant staircase in Tucker’s apartment, Joe and Doris descend the ugly

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FIGURE 2.3 “Absolutely and finally no, finally and positively no!” Leo Morse (Thomas Gomez)

confronts his brother Joe (John Garfield) in Force of Evil.

staircase under the George Washington Bridge that leads to the rocks where Leo’s body has been tossed. Joe’s voice-over once again becomes verse: Doris was waiting for me downstairs And we left before the police came I wanted to find Leo to see him once more It was morning by then, dawn, and naturally I was feeling very bad there As I went down there I just kept going down and down there It was like going down to the bottom of the world To find my brother . . . I found my brother’s body at the bottom there Where they had thrown it away

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on the rocks by the river Like an old, dirty rag nobody wants He was dead and I felt I had killed him I turned back to give myself up to Hall Because if a man’s life can be lived so long And come out this way like rubbish something was horrible and had to be ended one way or another and I decided to help.

The three films that John Garfield made for Bob Roberts and his Enterprise productions mark the end of the brief progressive period of postwar Hollywood. This is not to say that they were the only progressive films made, far from it; but they are among the best and, given the talent behind them, the most of a piece. Class-conscious, tough, aware of the power and corruption of money, and always filmed with a precision of spatial awareness that helped to define the characters, they spoke to the anxieties more than the optimism of postwar United States. What they lacked in numbers of films made, they made up for in the energy supplied by Garfield and his collaborators. What they gained in their view of the world proved negatively prophetic. Awareness of the corruption of capital—indeed, progressive awareness of any aspect of American life—would come under censure, proven by the fact that so many of Enterprise personnel were clawed down by HUAC soon after they made their films. Despite that, the three films made by Garfield with producer Bob Roberts are examples of early independent filmmaking at its best—strong, complex, and politically engaged.

3 “I’m a Stranger Here Myself”

Nicholas Ray and Ida Lupino Nicholas Ray, born Raymond Kienzle in Galesville, Wisconsin, in 1911, managed a prolific, if uneven, filmmaking career, beginning in the late 1940s and lasting until the early ’60s. One of his later works was made in collaboration with his students at SUNY Binghamton, an amorphous, experimental film called We Can’t Go Home Again. He started early in life as a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, an experience that lingered in the expressive interior architecture of some of his films. He was, for a time in his youth, a committed Communist (long enough to earn him an FBI file), and he went on to work with various left-wing theater groups in the 1930s before turning to film and the patronage of both John Houseman, who was Orson Welles’s producer on Citizen Kane, and Howard Hughes. His friendship with Hughes, who briefly ran RKO in the late ’40s and early ’50s—inexplicable to most, though biographer Patrick McGilligan thinks there was something of a special relationship between the two—saved Ray from the blacklist. He may even have cooperated with HUAC. Relationships were Ray’s problem 37

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throughout his life—with studio heads and producers, with women and men (he was bisexual), with alcohol and drugs, and with cinema itself. He peppered his output with extraordinary films of emotional and formal sensitivity and with films of small interest, like the John Wayne vehicle Flying Leathernecks (1951). He had one major hit, Rebel without a Cause (1955), one biblical epic, King of Kings (1961), and three Westerns, Run for Cover (1955), The True Story of Jesse James (1957), and the extraordinary Johnny Guitar (1954). His best films dealt with men and adolescents, the confused and the violent, the passive and aggressive. Aggressive defines Ray’s cinematic style at its best. Less assaultive than Samuel Fuller or consistently dynamic like Orson Welles, his films are often eloquent and sometimes startling. They appeal to me on a deeply emotional level, which analysis is hard to communicate but certainly worth a try. The first part of On Dangerous Ground (1951) follows detective Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) on his rounds through the Los Angeles night. Wilson is a lonely, violent cop, tied up in knots, his anger uncontained and eating at him. Ray’s camera work and editing communicate Wilson’s ner vous energy, cutting from point-of-view shots from the cop car driving the whirling dark streets to Wilson, along with his partners, moving from one tawdry joint and street corner to another, questioning suspects, informers, and an abused woman who wants him to abuse her in turn. He brutalizes a suspect, a sadomasochist, who wants to be beaten up. Jim lunges at the man and in a looming, grimacing mid-shot asks, “Why do you make me do it? You know you’re gonna talk. I’m gonna make you talk. I always make you punks talk . . .” The man bolts and Jim dives after him, beats him, all the while crying, “Why do you make me do it? Why? Why?” Ray mercifully dissolves out of the scene to the cop car pulling into the police station. After receiving a warning from his captain (who sits in a fancy restaurant, stuffing in more and more food), Jim is back patrolling the streets with his partners. A scream from the abused woman, who is being beaten on the streets, causes them to pull over. As Jim rushes through the alley to catch her attackers, Ray briefly follows him with a nervous, jittery handheld camera. This is surely not the first use of handheld shot in American film history— Welles used one in the newsreel sequence of Citizen Kane—but it is a startling effect nonetheless, a climactic moment in which Jim’s violence is refracted through the way we see him. And the entire sequence as it unfolds, in which Jim’s deeply concerned partner tells him, in so many words, to get a life, to find his heart outside of the police work that is eating him up, marks a break

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FIGURE 3.1 “Why do you make me do it? You know you’re gonna talk. I’m gonna make you

talk. I always make you punks talk . . .” Violent cop Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) threatens a suspect in On Dangerous Ground.

in the film. The city can no longer contain him, and Jim is banished to the country, to the snow fields up north where a murder has taken place. A number of things happen with this location shift. One is in the music, written by Bernard Herrmann, the greatest film composer (among many other films, he scored Citizen Kane and worked with Alfred Hitchcock for many years, and we will hear his work again in the science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still). He creates a hunting motif for French horns that accompanies the men as they pursue the murderer. In this pursuit, Jim, who would seem to be out of place in this barren, frozen landscape, meets his double, an angry, trigger-happy father of the slain girl, Walter Brent, played by Ward Bond, not only one of John Ford’s favorite actors but a rabid antiCommunist who assisted HUAC in its investigations. The snowbound landscape is different from the dark city streets Jim is used to, but the anger and obsessiveness are the same—up to a point. The film drops into this landscape a blind woman, Mary Malden, played by Ida Lupino, an actress who, at this point in her career, had also become only the second woman to direct post-sound Hollywood films (Dorothy Arzner was the first). Her presence

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immediately sentimentalizes the mise-en-scène, softening the image, the tone, and ultimately Jim himself. The object of the hunt, the murderer, is Mary’s disturbed younger brother, one of Ray’s wayward adolescents. Jim prevents the enraged Walter Brent from shooting the boy, who falls to his death in the pursuit. Against all odds, against the very grain of the film, Jim falls in love with Mary. He finds his heart, just as his partner had pleaded with him to do. He heads back to the city, Ray using the same point-of-view shot from the car window as Jim drives through the dark streets that opened the film; but this is not the expected end. The voice of his partner echoes in his ears as Ray’s camera looks closely at his face, which dissolves to the snowy cabin and ends with a rapturous close-up of Jim and Mary embracing and a final pan of the landscape. The change of mood is so sudden that it was thought that Lupino herself directed the final scenes. Given that, at least in his later years, Ray sometimes left films before they were done, this is not an unreasonable conjecture. But McGilligan argues that, even against the advice of screenplay author A. I. Bezzerides and others, it was Ray himself who insisted on the ending. Lupino (and Herrmann) may have helped to add the swooning rapture of the ending, but Ray manages a swift change of mood and tone that is purposely frustrating. I want to see Jim return to the dark streets and a life of violence; it satisfies the trajectory of the film and no doubt some perversity of my own mood. On Dangerous Ground is more interesting when lunging with Jim in his ferocious confrontations with thieves and pimps. But Ray wants to change the trajectory and allow Jim to break out of the cycle of violence that has entrapped him. The film’s conclusion reverses the less conventional ending of In a Lonely Place (1950), where Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) walks away from his lover Laurel Grey (Gloria Grahame) because of her fear of his violent temper. That ending is painfully ironic; its sadness lingering long past the viewing of the film. Dix leaves just as he learns of his exoneration of a murder charge, an exoneration that might have made their relationship possible. Or not. Dix is a man carrying such a load of incipient anger, an unhealable wound—from the war, from his mistreatment as a screenwriter, as an inextricable part of his character—that Laurel would always be vulnerable to being wounded emotionally or physically by him. She is warned about this in an extraordinary little scene in which a mannish masseuse tells her that she is in danger of abuse at Dix’s hands. With Laurel lying on the table, the masseuse looming above her, the sequence serves almost as an eruption of

“I’m a Stranger Here Myself” • 41

Laurel’s own unconscious, urging in gruff tones the realities of her dangerous situation. But the warning comes in the middle of the calm where the couple is most at ease with one another. Laurel is acting as Dix’s lover, guardian, and servant while he is writing a script after a long dry period. She throws the masseuse out. Ray dissolves to a beach scene where the couple, along with his old army buddy and current police detective, Brub (Frank Lovejoy), and his wife, Sylvia (Jeff Donnell), are having an evening picnic. Dix indulges in borderline abusive teasing of Laurel until Sylvia inadvertently mentions the detective who is investigating Dix for murder. Dix leaves in a rage, Laurel just managing to get into the car with him, and speeds through the nighttime roads, sideswiping another car. He beats that car’s occupant bloody and nearly kills him with a rock until Laurel stops him. These eruptions of violence, including against his own agent, Mel (Art Smith), a mild, older man who dotes on him, are uncontainable. His rage is communicable. At dinner with Brub and Sylvia, he has them reenact a murder. He describes what happens in “a lonely place on the road.” As he spins his tale, Ray narrows the key light on Dix’s eyes, and he bends forward, absorbed by his story. Brub’s arm is around Sylvia’s throat, and it tightens as Dix’s story becomes more heated; Brub nearly strangles his wife. This unleashing of the unconscious hints at a universality of rage that is easily, too easily, persuaded to appear and wreak havoc. Unlike Jim in On Dangerous Ground, Dix cannot be redeemed, something all but unimaginable in American film of any decade. And it is just this that makes In a Lonely Place the extraordinary film that it is. The collaboration between Ray and Bogart, whose company, Santana, produced the film, takes the latter’s tough guy persona and turns it pathological (Bogart would play a pathological character again in Edward Dmytryk’s 1954 film, The Caine Mutiny). By so doing, the character is stripped of any possible domestic relationship of the kind so often promised in our movies. In their last intimate scene, after Laurel has been warned by the detective investigating Dix for murder, after she has had nightmares about his violent temper, they face each other across the kitchen. Dix, in an offhanded gesture that defines his remoteness from ordinary domesticity, tries to straighten out a grapefruit knife. Much of the scene is played out with the characters framed apart from each other, Laurel huddled next to the refrigerator, Dix at the kitchen counter. He pressures her to marry him, but her fears have overcome her. She decides to leave, though without the courage to tell him so. The couple hold a party in a restaurant with old friends, and it is here

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FIGURE 3.2 Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) leans into his story of committing murder in In a Lonely Place.

that Dix hits Mel for peremptorily delivering his script to the studio. There is the possibility of a turn: the studio likes the script; Dix makes up to Mel; the police find the murderer and absolve Dix. But Dix and Laurel have a last violent confrontation in which he almost strangles her. He takes the call from the police, but it is too late. In an unexpected act of self-awareness and the preservation of Laurel, he walks out, alone. Perhaps this is some kind of redemption after all. Both Laurel and Dix understand they will never be able to contain his violence and they save themselves by parting, consigning themselves to an impossible love lost and a perpetual aloneness. This is the sentimentality that the film buries in its finale. “I lived a few weeks while you loved me,” quotes Laurel from the script Dix wrote, tears streaming, as he walks away. As a screenwriter, Dix is a sentimentalist by profession; as a violent man, his sentimentality is strangled by his actions. He is stuck in a lonely place. As a narrative about Hollywood (and we will look at others from the 1950s further on), In a Lonely Place portrays an unhappy place, where losers and has-beens, where talent that has used itself up, are in a curdled

“I’m a Stranger Here Myself” • 43

FIGURE 3.3 The collapse of domesticity. Dixon tries to make breakfast as Laurel (Gloria Grahame) sits sadly in her isolation in In Lonely Place.

knot of unhelpful interdependence. Because of Dix’s violence, that interdependence, weak as it is, falls apart. We don’t directly see the cruelty of studio bosses, as we do in Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife (1955), but an atmosphere of oppression hangs over the film nonetheless, mostly as a result of Dix’s temper and self-hatred. Perhaps this reflects Bogart’s own unhappy experience when, in 1947, he marched on Washington with a group of like-minded liberal stars to defend their colleagues against HUAC’s predations. He was made to eat crow in the aftermath, disavowing his participation in the march. Like Dixon Steele, his anger was palpable. Dix’s anger, however, seems apolitical, although it results in the destruction of domestic politics, that complex weave of power that holds or destroys intimacy. It is just that intimacy that Dix’s violence rips apart. Violence is also the subject of Bitter Victory, the film Ray made in France and North Africa in 1957 in black-and-white CinemaScope, though the violence here is in counterpoint to the barely repressed violence of In a Lonely Place. In this complex film, violence is much like a shadow, following the characters and defining them by its presence or absence. Given that the film

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is about a raid by British soldiers on German headquarters in Libya during WWII, violence is omnipresent, but in the tension between the two male leads of the film, Leith (Richard Burton) and Brand (Curd Jürgens), it plays a repressed role, defining strength and weakness by the way it is controlled, the way it becomes a passive-aggressive tool. Brand is a cuckold and a coward; Leith has been his wife’s lover and the tension between the two spills over into their mission. The two are reflections of one another, something Leith recognizes: “I despise you for the professional coward that you are,” he tells Brand. “I’m a kind of mirror of your own weakness,” and, he feels, his own. Leith admits to a kind of existential weariness that would be relieved by his own death, which Brand is unable to actively perform for him. But perform it he does, passively. As the men rest in the desert, a scorpion crosses their path. Brand sees and ignores it, even as it crawls up Leith’s leg and stings him. Brand gets three chances to kill Leith and in each case does so indirectly, allowing the scorpion to sting him and then, in self-defense, shooting Mekrane (Raymond Pellegrin), Leith’s Arab companion. “Is it that easy to kill?” Brand asks himself. Finally, he leaves Leith to die in the desert. “We’re all murderers now, aren’t we? Welcome to the club,” Leith tells him. His confusion about his own capabilities, indeed the distance between himself and his understanding of his role as commander and as a man, hollows Brand out, as it does Leith himself. The image is made literal by Ray in startling fashion. In his dying moments, just before he saves Brand from a sandstorm, Leith refers to him as “the stuffed dummy with the medal on his chest.” We have already seen, back at the base, a room full of large, faceless, straw-filled dummies with hearts painted on them that the men use to practice close combat. These creatures appear under the opening and closing credits of the film and become visual surrogates for Brand, who, at the very end, as if realizing he is a hollow, broken man, pushes onto one of the dummies the medal given him for distinguished ser vice. The reference to T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” is not subtle; that it exists at all in mid-1950s film is extraordinary. But Ray was capable of extraordinary films. He had an uncanny ability to understand the weakness at the heart of his male characters, of their anxiety turned into violence or passivity. Across the expanse of the CinemaScope screen, he was able to communicate the claustrophobic environment of male anguish and its destructive force. Toward the end of Bigger Than Life (1956), Ed Avery (James Mason), crazed and megalomaniacal, stands with his wife at the foot of the stairs of

“I’m a Stranger Here Myself” • 45

FIGURE 3.4 Bitter enemies. Leith (Richard Burton) and Brand (Curd Jürgens) in Bitter Victory.

their suburban home, reading from the Bible. He has a pair of scissors in his hand and ruminates about Abraham and Isaac. He is about to kill his son, who he has tormented and abused all but physically—up to now. His wife, Lou (Barbara Rush), tries to reason with him, pointing out that God, in the end, did not allow the sacrifice to take place. “God was wrong!” Ed exclaims. Ed Avery is not a hollow man. He is a quiet, unprepossessing suburban schoolteacher who is given cortisone by his doctor for a deadly inflammation. It makes him insane, turning him into a monstrous teacher, husband, and father. But, of course, cortisone is not the villain, only a McGuffin. Trapped in his claustrophobic suburban home—Ray’s use of color and CinemaScope only emphasizes the smallness of his characters’ lives—the cause of Ed’s megalomania is the 1950s themselves. Like Martin Ritt’s No Down Payment (which I’ll discuss in a later chapter), released the following year, Bigger Than Life announces the suffocating limits of containment and the dangers of going beyond them. Along with popular books of the period— The Lonely Crowd, The Organization Man, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (made into a film by Nunnally Johnson the same year as Bigger Than Life)—these films speak to the nagging contradictions of relatively well-off lives which suffer from self and culturally imposed repression and depression. The demographic and personal upheaval caused by the postwar move to the suburbs was extreme. Cities lost much of their middle class. Women were virtual prisoners in homes at some distance from cities and bound to housekeeping and child-rearing. Men could circulate out of the home into

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FIGURE 3.5 Cracking up. Ed Avery (James Mason) sees his fractured self as his wife, Lou (Barbara Rush), looks on helplessly in Bigger Than Life.

their place of employment, often perceived as a different kind of prison of competition and conformity. And yet, I have to ask if this narrative is valid? Does it compare with the lived experiences of most men and women of the decade? Were men and women living such a constrained, painful life of emotional and social deprivation? Was there an acute self-consciousness of who they were and the life they lived that was reflected back to them in the films they saw? This clutch of films, of which Bigger Than Life is the most persuasive, suggest that ’50s’ audiences either had to be shown who they really were or that they knew this and allowed the films to affirm it. Did they respond with a shock of awareness or a nod of recognition? Bigger Than Life was not a commercial success. Perhaps audiences saw too much or perhaps found the exaggerations of constrained lives depicted in the film too extreme. The Averys’ life is visibly frustrating. Their home is covered with travel posters, aspirational images of a life they cannot attain on a teacher’s salary. Ed has a second job at a cab company—at one point the CinemaScope screen is filled with yellow cabs—but he doesn’t drive, only works as a dispatcher known to his colleagues as “voice.” The family’s physical movement is mostly up and down the staircase that dominates their house. Internal freedom is permitted Ed by means of the cortisone that expands his mind and diminishes his soul. But that freedom is too much. Uncontained, Ed becomes an abusive megalomaniac, intent on destroying his family—his son especially. He plays God, a vengeful God, whose frustrations explode into a murderous rage.

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Dixon Steele didn’t need pills to trigger his violence; it was in his nature. Ed is more a creature of his moment: repressed and unhappy. His violence needs to be released by external circumstances—into external circumstances. His is the rage of the return of the repressed. He is an everyman demanding obeisance, every suburban husband wanting to kill his oppressive family. There is no cure for this. The film ends with Ed being subdued by his friend and crashing down the staircase that was the central feature of his house. It is now in ruins. He awakens in the hospital, remembering what has happened and drawing his wife and son to him in his bed. The nuclear family is reignited. The family, always the family. Nicholas Ray was as close to radical in his visual ideas as any commercial filmmaker could be, yet oddly conservative in the thematics of his films. His characters so often create family units, even when they are outcasts or outlaws. Occasionally they fail, as we’ve seen in In a Lonely Place or Bitter Victory. There is failure as well in an earlier Bogart collaboration, Knock on Any Door (1949). Here Bogart is a lawyer defending a young criminal, Nick Romano (John Derek), known to the press as “pretty boy.” Bogart’s Andrew Morton attempts to befriend and save Romano, whose nihilism is summed up in his motto, “live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.” When the judge passes sentence, Ray executes a Hitchcock-like crane shot, leaving the two isolated and small. They are left stunningly alone, Nick failed by society, Morton by the law. In the end, we see Bogart from behind as he looks down the long, dark corridor through which Nick is taken to his death. This utter failure is not as devastating as the end of In a Lonely Place for the simple reason that the characters do not expose the painful vulnerabilities of Dix and Laurel. Those are shared by a younger couple, the runaways Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell) in They Live by Night (filmed in 1948, released 1949). The outlaw couple on the run is an old movie trope, going as far back as Fritz Lang’s 1937 You Only Live Once, up through Joseph H Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1950, co-scripted by Dalton Trumbo), and climaxing with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Gun Crazy, contemporaneous with They Live by Night, offers an interesting comparison. The two films demonstrate very different sensibilities active in the early part of the decade: one a roughhewn, sentimental-free gangster film in which no one is redeemed and the couple killed, the other a tender display of late adolescent affection under the most dire and ultimately deadly circumstance in which one member of

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the couple is killed. Both films are tours de force. Lewis made Gun Crazy in hard-edged black and white and indulged in rapid dollies into huge closeups of his characters. The famous bank robbery sequence, filmed entirely from the back seat of the couple’s car, runs almost three and a half minutes. There is a kind of frenzy to the film, as if Lewis can’t get enough of his characters’ energy, no matter how misdirected and doomed. There is also a bank robbery in They Live by Night, also filmed partially from the back of a car. There is violence, but muted like much of the film, made in carefully modulated gray tones. The precredit sequence, a prelude of sorts, shows Bowie and Keechie embracing against a black background. Titles over the image of the couple read: “This boy and this girl were never properly introduced to the world we live in. To tell their story . . .” They quickly turn toward the camera, and Ray cuts to the film’s title over a helicopter shot—perhaps the first of its kind—and the film’s title and credits. Bowie and Keechie want to withdraw from their rural criminal life, to withdraw from the world. They marry in a grim ceremony that is more dirge than celebration. They attempt to hide out in a motel and live as a normal, invisible couple. Annie and Bart (Peggy Cummins and John Dall) in Gun Crazy want to blast their way into the world. They, too, marry in a roadside joint, but without giving it a thought. Bart is a firearms obsessive, Annie a sharpshooter. They fall in love at a carnival where she performs. From then on, they pursue their criminal life until they are inevitably shot down, in a mist-enshrouded swamp where they have taken cover. Bowie is shot down by the police, having been betrayed by an aggrieved relative, who trades the boy’s location for her husband’s release from jail. Bowie’s criminality bears down on the couple, driving them into isolation and darkness, while Annie and Bart’s violent life defies the dark—their bank robbery takes place in broad daylight—and gives them an adrenaline shot of perverse pleasure measured against the depressive withdrawal of Ray’s young couple. Annie and Bart are a self-contained family; they need to hide out briefly with Bart’s sister, but that is a matter of convenience and necessity. Bowie and Keechie cannot long remain content and insular with their lives, which are interrupted by their past—Bowie is recognized by a city thug in the restroom of a nightclub the couple have dared to visit for a moment of pleasure. Annie and Bart also visit a nightclub and must flee the police, who recognize the serial numbers on the bills Bart used for admission. His ignorance leads to their downfall. And while the gangster in the men’s room in They Live by Night drives Bowie and Keechie back into hiding, it is the broken wife of

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FIGURE 3.6 The precredit sequence of They Live by Night.

an imprisoned gang member who gets Bowie killed. Making a family as a couple taking refuge from the world proves, as it must, impossible. They Live by Night is a film of despair, of rural angst and the inescapable pall of petty criminal behavior. Gun Crazy is about the pleasures of perversity, about living fast, dying young, and leaving a corpse without much regret. The films reflect, to an extent at least, the anxieties and the nihilism of postwar America, where, for a moment, everything seemed possible, just before so much became choked by Cold War terrors. That, for Ray at least, was reason to search more deeply for family-making and to realize more painfully that the search was fruitless. Bigger Than Life was a statement about family as pain and constraint, resulting in an explosion of uncontrolled ego. They Live by Night was one of pain and withdrawal. Mid-decade, Ray’s best-known film, Rebel without a Cause (1955), tried to find a path from domestic pain to redemption with a suggestion of explosion of the universe. Rebel is part of the cycle of juvenile delinquent films that circulated throughout the decade. Adolescents, sometimes malevolent as in Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955), more often misunderstood, or even comic, as in The Delicate Delinquent (Jerry Lewis, Don McGuire, 1957), were

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something of an obsession that seemed to emerge from fears of loss of control over a generation born just before war’s end, directing their energies in uncontainable ways. (In Samuel Fuller’s 1959 film about postwar Germany, Verboten!, a character remarks on the remnants of the Hitler Youth: “In my country they’re called juvenile delinquents. The same disease all over the world.”) Rebel belongs to the misunderstood youth variation of the delinquent cycle. The cause the rebels seek in Ray’s film is love and security, qualities that would save them from their wayward and often violent activities. This introduces a vein of sentimentality that runs through the film and separates it from In a Lonely Place and Bigger Than Life, bringing it closer to On Dangerous Ground where love overcomes brutality. There are differences in the look of the films. Both Bigger Than Life and Rebel without a Cause are filmed in color and CinemaScope. Bigger Than Life uses the breadth of the screen to emphasize the claustrophobic spaces of the Avery family. In Rebel, Ray uses the widescreen to crowd the action across his palette and to emphasize James Dean’s body and face, making it a focal point of the film. In one sequence I’ll discuss in a moment, the widescreen becomes a method to inscribe Dean’s character’s point of view, skewed by the anguish he suffers. Rebel’s credit sequence bears an interesting comparison to the precredit sequence of They Live by Night. There, the two main characters were placed before a black background with titles announcing their innocent state. Under the credits of Rebel, Dean’s Jim Stark is sprawled on the ground, drunk. Soiled, crumpled newspapers surround him. A sign, barely visible in the background, reads “Danger . . . Keep Out.” Jim plays with a toy monkey, wraps it in a bit of newspaper, and goes to sleep. From the outset, Jim Stark is marked as a child in a young man’s body. Even drunk, he expresses loneliness and longing for companionship, even if it’s a toy monkey. The matter of Dean’s “expression” is something we need to discuss at this point because it represents a change in film acting in the decade. “The Method” was presented as a new technique, drawing on the emotions and experiences of the actor. Developed from the writings of Konstantin Stanislavski and put into practice by Lee Strasberg in his Actors Studio, the Method helped create a highly mannered style that drew attention to the actor’s work as much as it did to the character the actor was performing. Despite the fact that actresses, like Julie Harris, came out of the Actors Studio, the focus was on its male alumni, most especially Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean. Brando and Dean became more than

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actors and something approaching cultural phenomena; they outstripped their roles, becoming characters in their own right and public figures of admiration and, often in the case of Brando, mockery—self-mockery in Brando’s case, sometimes, in interviews, downplaying the seriousness of his art and talent. Dean’s celebrity was more complex because he died after making only three films, killed in a car accident just before the premiere of Rebel without a Cause. Intensity of performance produces intensity of response, and Dean created an intensity equal to another ’50s icon and student of the Method, Marilyn Monroe. The cult lives on; there is a website for each where licensed merchandise can be purchased. There is no doubt that, early in his career, especially in A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951), Brando brought a rough, sexualized presence to the screen that was novel at the time. Montgomery Clift was more understated, more internal in his acting style. In A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951), he creates a vulnerable presence adequate to a role that emphasizes his character’s passivity. Dean, on the other hand, works hard at getting the effects of character he and the film need. He was twenty-four years old, playing a teenager, suffering the requisite problems of adolescence. He attempts to join a gang of delinquents, only to have a fellow gang member die in an auto race called the “chickie run.” In the face of all this, he expresses an agonized vulnerability. “You’re tearing me apart,” he wails at his indecisive parents. Screen acting styles changed for a variety of reasons during the 1950s. There was, in general, a greater sense of intimacy and urgency in most performances. Some of this was due to the influence of the Method, some to the influence of live television drama, whose small scale required quieter, more intense acting. Dean came to film from television, where he had practiced his brooding. It may not be entirely fair to criticize his anguished, selfconscious performance in Rebel because Ray wanted to foreground the tensions inherent in an inherently good character pushed to extremes where he was reluctant to go. He also needed (perhaps unconsciously) a strong presence to push a narrative that, without Dean, without the virtuosic miseen-scène, would come across as somewhat banal. The film laments the loss of strong parenting that leaves children adrift. Were that all there was, there would not be much of a film. But Ray, with Dean’s intensity, universalizes the problem. The children of Rebel without a Cause are all but adrift in the cosmos, suggested when Jim and his new schoolmates visit the planetarium at the Griffith Observatory for a scary presentation about the end of the world. After the show, there is a knife fight between Jim and Buzz (Corey

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FIGURE 3.7 “You’re tearing me apart.” James Dean practices the Method in Rebel without

a Cause. Marlon Brando screams his famous “Stella” in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Allen) in which Jim, always reluctant to get into trouble, bests his tormentor, which leads to the deadly chickie run. Ray needs to establish the crucial problem of fathers and children, in particular by feminizing his father (played by Jim Backus). Jim discovers him in a suit and frilly apron, on his hands and knees, anxiously picking up his wife’s dinner which he has just dropped on the floor. Jim first mistakes his father for his mother, and, when he discovers what has happened, both laugh at first. But Jim is appalled, and he lifts his father up, inarticulately gesturing to him not to do this, to stand up to his wife. He tries, without success, to get advice from his father about whether he should take part in the chickie run. His father, still in his apron, fumbles, unable to give a straight answer. Sandwiched between these scenes is another bit of family unpleasantness

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concerning Judy (Natalie Wood), who will become the redeeming figure in Jim’s life, and her father (William Hopper), who is suspiciously repelled by her displays of physical attention—suspiciously because there is a hint that he is attracted to her and can only respond by pushing her away. The outcasts, joined by Plato (Sal Mineo), a wayward, implicitly gay child with absent parents, form a surrogate family; but first there is a spectacular death. The chickie run is a brutal game that requires its players to jump out of a speeding car before it careens over a cliff. Starting as a dare to prove Jim’s mettle to the group, it ends with Buzz dying. Death seems to be the redeeming act for everyone concerned—but not before Ray creates a most startling sequence. After the car race, Jim drops off Plato and Judy, goes into his house, and drinks from a milk bottle, rubbing the cold bottle over his face. He sees his father asleep in front of a blank TV screen, walks over to the couch, and lies down. He hangs his head over the side of the couch and sees his mother coming up the stairs. Assuming Jim’s point of view, Ray’s camera looks at the scene upside down and executes a counterclockwise rotation to right it. The effect on the large CinemaScope screen is disorienting, which of course it is meant to be. It also calls attention to the cinematic apparatus, a sharp departure from the accepted norm of Hollywood filmmaking which ordinarily hides its methods behind a shield of seamless storytelling. We’ve seen Ray use unusual effects: the helicopter shots in They Live by Night and the handheld camera in On Dangerous Ground. There is a brief moment in Bigger Than Life when Ed Avery goes to his medicine cabinet and Ray and the entire crew can be seen, for an instant, in the mirror as it swings open. The upside-down point-of-view is not the end of the visual pyrotechnics. There is first a long take in which Jim, hoisting himself up from the couch, confronts his parents at the foot of the stairs, trying to make them understand his moral quandary, his desire to go to the police to explain what happened. His parents are outraged, unable to give their child the moral guidance he needs. The rest of the sequence is played out against the staircase, beautifully shot and edited. Ray tilts the camera, again disorienting our sense of space. Jim demands his father stand up for him, finally grabbing him and pulling him down the stairs and over a chair. His mother pulls him off and Jim just catches himself from hitting her before running out the door. The domestic violence played out on the staircase signals a seemingly unfixable break in the family structure. Parental weakness places the burden of moral judgment on the children. Every adult, even the police—figured in the sympathetic figure of an officer named Ray

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FIGURE 3.8 Domestic chaos on the staircase. Jim (James Dean), his mother (Ann Doran),

and his father (Jim Backus) in Rebel without a Cause.

(Edward Platt)—is unavailable. Out of a need for self-protection, Jim, Judy, and Plato form a new family, trying to hide from the unwelcoming world around them. But that world intrudes in the form of Buzz’s gang, looking for trouble and scaring Plato, who has been left alone as Jim and Judy go off to make love. Violence is inevitable. Early in the film there is a premonition. As students gather at Jim’s new high school, Plato rides his scooter past a small cannon that is set off as the flag is raised. Everyone, Jim especially, is startled by the noise. At the abandoned house where the new family has taken refuge, Plato shoots one of the gang members who has been stalking them. In his frenzy, he almost shoots Jim. Pursued by the police to the Griffith Observatory, his gun empty, frightened by their lights, he is shot dead—Ray twists his camera sideways as the shots bring Plato down. The end of the film is a realignment of the stars. Before his death, hiding from the police in the planetarium, where the stars rotate overhead, Plato— recalling the show they saw early in the film—asks Jim if the end of the world will happen at dawn. The end comes for Plato, but there is a sudden shift in Jim’s parents, who become strong and protective. Jim claims Judy as his friend and goes off with her. There is gain and loss, something of a catharsis as the crowd leaves Plato’s African American maid (Marietta Canty) alone to grieve. The camera pulls away and dawn comes up; Nick Ray, briefcase in hand, looking around at his handiwork, walks to the observatory. It is a gesture of pride and a signature of work well done.

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A year before Rebel without a Cause, Ray made one of the strangest Westerns to appear in the decade, when the genre flourished as never before or since. It’s worth taking a brief detour to look at the genre and its moment. The allegories of good (white men) fighting bad (Indians or outlaws dressed in black) suited Cold War culture and its Manichean view of the world. So did the myth of the frontier, of wide-open spaces that needed to be civilized—that is, “Americanized”—by stalwart upholders of liberal white culture. Subtlety was only occasionally exercised in the making of Westerns, though politics did sometimes come through, most famously in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), widely considered an attack on McCarthyism. Politics were more explicit in Alan Dwan’s Silver Lode (1954), in which actor Dan Duryea plays a corrupt marshal named McCarty. Anthony Mann transitioned from harsh, violent noirs in the late 1940s to often harsh, violent Westerns of the ’50s, five of them with James Stewart (who throughout the 1950s was redefining his acting persona, culminating in his role as Scottie Ferguson in Hitchcock’s Vertigo). Stewart played a variety of types for Mann, often wronged, sometimes seeking revenge, and rarely at peace. The Man from Laramie (1955), the last Western Stewart made with Mann (besides Westerns, they made Thunder Bay, 1953, The Glenn Miller Story, 1954, and Strategic Air Command, 1955), is a complex tale of revenge, family infighting, an old patriarch’s dreams as he goes blind, and gunrunning to Native Americans, all with typical outbursts of violence. For taking salt from family-owned property, Stewart’s Will Lockhart gets dragged by a rope tied to a horse and has his mules killed by the vicious son of the Waggoman family. In perhaps the most egregious violence in a Mann Western, that same son (Alex Nichol), angered at his father’s disapproval of him and Will’s wounding of him, shoots, at close range, Will’s hand. The oedipal overtones of The Man from Laramie add a complexity that was typical not only of Mann’s work but of some other 1950s Westerns as well. The genre, in some instances, was given a heavy load to bear—as we’ll see again when we look at John Ford’s Westerns—perhaps too heavy. But before it went into decline, many variations were played on its basic themes, none more fascinating than Ray’s Johnny Guitar. Johnny Guitar was not the only Western Ray created. Run for Cover (1955), with an aging James Cagney, is a conventional Western when compared to Johnny Guitar. He made a Jesse James film, The True Story of Jesse James (1957), that I’ll discuss along with Samuel Fuller’s Jesse James film in

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the next chapter. Here it is worth taking brief note of his “modern” Western, the rodeo film, The Lusty Men (1952), a rather straightforward story about tough guys riding tormented animals for an adrenaline rush and money. “Maybe it’s something you can’t explain to a woman,” Jeff (Robert Mitchum) tells Louise (Susan Hayward), whose rancher husband, Wes (Arthur Kennedy), decides to take the challenge and join the rodeo circuit. Much of the film is made up of Louise troubled by her husband’s dangerous undertaking, her interaction with the riders’ wives, Jeff’s unstated love for Louise, and, finally, his decision to return to the arena. It costs him his life. The rodeo sequences are made up mostly of second-unit work intercut with wildly jarring point-of-view shots from Wes or Jeff on their bucking horses or bulls. The dialogue is straightforward, but sometimes a bit silly: “A horse is a lot like a woman,” or “rodeoin’ will make an old woman of you before your time.” The Lusty Men is Ray at his most direct, simplified of flourish (save for those point-of-view shots of men riding cinched animals) and clear in its macho posing. There is none of the male angst that seeds In a Lonely Place or Bitter Victory, none of the longing or emotional pain. That is saved for one of Ray’s great achievements. Johnny Guitar—cowritten, like The Man from Laramie, by Philip Yordan—is tender, surreal, campy, bizarre, political, and colorful (it was shot in Trucolor, a two-color process that tended to emphasize greens and reds and was anything but “true”). It was made to showcase actress Joan Crawford, who was the film’s “de facto producer,” and Ray succeeds in making Crawford’s Vienna a unique Western heroine, tough and needy, in charge of her gambling house, strong in the face of her rival, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge), begging for a declaration of affection from Johnny (Sterling Hayden). Vienna first appears, dressed in black, at the balcony of her casino as Johnny, who just rode in on horseback, waits for her below. She establishes her dominance, leaning on the rail, ordering one of her employees, Sam (Robert Osterloh), to put a light on outside. In a typical Ray sleight of eye, Sam walks toward us and addresses the camera: “Never saw a woman who was more a man. She thinks like one, acts like one. It sometimes makes me feel like I’m not.” On the last line, Ray cuts to the interior of the kitchen, where it turns out the man was actually addressing the cook (John Carradine) and Johnny. The wind outside blows. The cook says he likes working for a woman. Vienna orders her men to spin the roulette wheel because she likes the sound. She retires to her dining room, replete with a bust of Beethoven, where she consummates a deal to expand her property

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next to the railroad that’s about to come through. The very first sequences of the film establish character and place and confirm that gender will play an unusual role, with a woman dominant. Vienna uses her sexuality (and her gun) when necessary. She learned about the railroad coming through by “exchanging confidences” with the surveyor. Her nemesis, Emma, is in a constant state of sexual frustration because the Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady) won’t return her desire for him. Vienna desires the diffident Johnny, a man even more calm and self-possessed than she, his past hazier than hers, his passion held tightly. Early on, in an amazing sequence, Johnny faces down the angry mob that barges into Vienna’s place under Emma’s seething leadership. He deftly catches a spinning whiskey glass, which is about to fall on the floor, confronts the mob, directly facing McIvers (Ward Bond), and asks for a light for his cigarette, calmly stating, “But you boil it all down, what does a man really need? Just a smoke and a cup of coffee.” Sterling Hayden, who had recently folded and named names in the face of HUAC’s questioning, asking for a light from Ward Bond, notorious for supplying names to the committee. Johnny’s diffidence is a mask to hide his love for Vienna. In a lovely scene, he and Vienna confront one another about their past and present. Vienna is firm about her understanding that men can lie and steal and hang on to their pride while a woman just has to “slip once, and she’s a tramp.” The hardness between them is difficult to soften. In a later scene, Vienna, dressed in purple, speaks again with Johnny, now tenderly, now gruffly. “Tell me something nice,” Johnny asks. “Lie to me. Tell me all these years you’ve waited.” She repeats his words back to him and grabs and throws his whiskey glass across the room. They parry over the ways she built her business, their anger over her use of her sexuality, and their bottled-up love for each other. The scene is played out in the lowlight of dusk over Victor Young’s melancholy score. It ends in a tearful embrace. Frustration and repression create the tensions that are played out throughout the film. Emma’s jealousy of Vienna and unfulfilled desire for the Dancin’ Kid, the Kid’s own past with Vienna, a bank robbery, all propel the narrative to a confrontation between Vienna and Emma, McIvers, and their mob, all of them dressed in black. A “posse,” Johnny calls them. “A posse isn’t people . . . a posse is an animal.” It’s here that the film takes on some political weight. In her frustrated rage, Emma becomes a McCarthylike figure, laying blame for the bank robbery on Vienna and pursuing her with the mob. She riles them up with threats that the railroad will bring in

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undesirable elements to squeeze out the townspeople. Vienna, dressed in white (a dress that catches fire in the ensuing inferno), prepares for the onslaught, dismissing her men and sitting at the piano as Emma and the mob come. Emma and her men browbeat the adolescent Turkey (Ben Cooper), a member of the Kid’s gang and wounded during their attempted escape, forcing him to lie about Vienna in order to save his life. Emma, with unrestrained glee, sets the casino ablaze and the mob take Vienna and Turkey off to be hanged. Johnny saves Vienna from the gallows and, now dressed in scarlet and blue after the blaze, Vienna engages in a final shoot-out with Emma. Emma kills the Dancin’ Kid, and Vienna, after being wounded, kills Emma. Johnny and Vienna reach a moment of reconciliation. Plot is ultimately beside the point in describing and analyzing Johnny Guitar. While it contains some of the basic Western tropes—the gambling house, rival gangs, a stagecoach robbery, a lone hero (a reluctant hero in this case)—these elements are overwhelmed by something approaching grand opera as much as a traditional Western. Its feminist bona fides are clear and clearly announced by Vienna whenever she talks about her sexuality and how she used it to get ahead in what is clearly a masculine domain. The heterosexual romance between Johnny and Vienna is fraught with pain, jealousy, diffidence, and disdain and countered by the confrontations between Vienna and the always smoldering Emma Small. By foregrounding a heroine, Ray changes the genre by reordering its gender givens and expectations. Through costume and exaggerated gesture, he removes any pretense of realism and creates an almost Brechtian drama in which all the figures—the outlaw Dancin’ Kid, his trigger-happy sidekick Bart (Ernest Borgnine) who is “mean to horses,” the teenage Turkey, the sickly Corey (Royal Dano), McIvers, Emma, and Vienna and Johnny themselves—are more than types and less than realistic characters. They play as gaudy pieces in this odd and touching Western, whose all but surreal gestures hide deeply felt emotions. As I noted earlier, the end of On Dangerous Ground takes an unexpected turn. Robert Ryan’s violent cop, Jim Wilson, returns from the dark city streets to the snowy small town and the embrace of Ida Lupino’s blind Mary Malden. Their embrace is in soft focus, a touch of sweet visual romanticism rarely indulged in by Nicholas Ray. So rare that, as I noted, it was rumored that Lupino herself shot those final scenes. Perhaps she did advise Ray, because by that time, 1951, Lupino had become only the second woman director, after Dorothy Arzner, in the history of post-sound Hollywood.

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FIGURE 3.9 The many wardrobes of Joan Crawford as Vienna with Sterling Hayden as Johnny in Johnny Guitar.

(There were many women silent film directors, such as Alice Guy-Blaché and Lois Weber.) The story is that Lupino, already an established if not first-rank actor, came into directing almost by accident. In the late 1940s, she formed a film company called the Filmakers [sic] with her husband at the time, Collier Young. Their first film was about a single mother, Not Wanted (1949), and was assigned to director Elmer Clifton, who had a heart attack as the film was starting to shoot. Lupino took over. The films that followed were: Never Fear (1950), about the polio epidemic; Outrage (1950), a film about rape, a subject so taboo in Hollywood cinema that it is amazing that it was made at all; Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951), a melodrama about tennis and the tensions between mother and daughter (the title was provided by Howard Hughes, whose RKO was now distributing Lupino’s films); The HitchHiker (1953), certainly her best-known film that, like some of Nicholas Ray’s work, is a study of weak men under intense pressure; The Bigamist (1953), a woman’s take on, again, a fragile man who, in his loneliness, marries a second wife. After this film, the Filmakers was dissolved, and Lupino turned

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FIGURE 3.10 Sterling Hayden named names before HUAC. Ward Bond supplied the

committee with names. Here Johnny accepts a light from McIvers in Johnny Guitar.

to directing television, which she did prolifically, directing only one more theatrical film in 1966, The Trouble with Angels. As Marsha Gordon points out in her excellent study of Lupino’s films, Lupino had to play a recessive role in order to thrive, always insisting that she was not infringing on male territory, that she was, after all, just a woman; however, the films she made are hardly recessive. She was a strong director, working with some of Hollywood’s best cinematographers: Archie Stout, George Diskant, and Nicholas Musuraca. Her films, unsurprisingly, focus on women or, in the case of The Hitch-Hiker, on men without women and the trouble that ensues. In The Bigamist, it is a strong woman who drives her husband to take a second wife. Because hers was the only female voice in a cacophony of male directors, her films are, if not feminist (which she disavowed), then certainly from a woman’s perspective. It could not be other wise. We get a sense of this in the very last shot of Hard, Fast and Beautiful, a film about a rising young tennis player and her overachieving mother. The grasping, overbearing stage mother is something of a cliché in Hollywood film. We see it, for example,

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FIGURE 3.11 Ida Lupino takes the caveat against showing married couples in the same bed

to its absurd conclusion in Hard, Fast and Beautiful. The actors are Claire Trevor and Kenneth Patterson.

in Daniel Mann’s 1955 biopic of Lillian Roth, I’ll Cry Tomorrow, but in Lupino’s hands it becomes something more. In Hard, Fast and Beautiful, the domestic scene is inverted. Florence Farley (Sally Forrest) is an up-andcoming tennis player, seemingly content to remain in her small town and fall in love with Gordon (Robert Clarke), who works at the local tennis club. Florence’s mother, Millie (Claire Trevor), is in a fast-fading marriage with the fading Will (Kenneth Patterson). Their bedroom is an astonishing parody of the double bed syndrome that the Hays Office spread like a silly joke over all films since the 1930s: married couples were not allowed to sleep in the same bed, which might imply that sex was happening. The beds in the Farleys’ room are not, as was typical, separated by a nightstand; they are rather placed horizontally, head to head, so that the headboards, touching each other, disallow for intercourse of any kind. Mother and daughter become equal partners in the ascent to tennis success, taking pleasure in the game and, especially, its perks of travel and money under the guidance of tennis promoter Fletcher Locke (Carleton G. Young). Florence is a natural. Her brightness and energy enliven the many sequences

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of tennis playing that stretch out across the film. But attitudes change when Florence decides she wants to marry Gordon. Here, Lupino’s film takes a melodramatic, even populist turn. The down-to-earth Gordon wants no part of the globe-trotting tennis world of Florence and her mother. He loathes the reptilian Fletcher and provides the needed wedge to pull Florence back down to earth, no matter how hard the struggle. And struggle she does, winning her last match at Forest Hills in a state of physical and mental exhaustion. She goes off with Gordon; Fletcher abandons Millie for a new player; and Millie is left alone. That last shot is not of the happy couple but of a darkened Forest Hills stadium, Millie sitting alone and abandoned in the stands. The camera pulls back and away as newspaper scraps blow in the wind. Is this a sign of the ultimate punishment for Millie’s Faustian reach, or is Lupino insisting that a woman who asks too much will be ultimately destroyed for the asking? It is rare to see a male character put in this position of abject aloneness or get such comeuppance unless he’s committed a crime. For Lupino, the sting of personal defeat is borne solely by the character least likely to receive our sympathy, a woman who attempted to gain as much as she could. In The Bigamist, the man does commit a crime. He marries a second woman. Lupino’s film is a small, one-and-a-quarter-hour chamber piece in which nothing very much happens. Harry (or sometimes Harrison) Graham (Edmond O’Brien), a travelling salesman living in San Francisco, feels marginalized by his businesswoman wife, Eve (Joan Fontaine). Unable to assert himself in his marriage, alone and unmanned, he falls in love, impregnates, and marries Phyllis (Lupino) in Los Angeles. The story is told partly in flashback as Graham relates his problem to the adoption official who, investigating Eve and Graham’s application for a child, discovers the dual marriage. The weaving in and out of narrative time adds a small amount of complexity to what is essentially a simple, sad tale in which everyone is ultimately left alone, especially Eve. At film’s end, when Graham’s trial is over—the judge granting much sympathy to all the parties—Eve stands by herself in the courtroom. Like Millie at the end of Hard, Fast and Beautiful, the woman is left without solace. Phyllis has Graham’s child; Eve has only her work. The Bigamist presents a man without resources, without qualities other than simple need. He is caught between two women, each representing a type: the independent businesswoman, who loves Graham and her work in equal measure, and the needy Phyllis, more Graham’s equal, closer to a cipher, a waitress in a Chinese restaurant. The only consolation is that they at least share a bed.

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At the end of Outrage, it is a man who is left alone. This may seem unusual for a film about rape in which a woman is all but destroyed by her traumatic experience, but Lupino has equal concern for many of the characters here, though she seems somewhat harsh on the victim. Ann Walton (Mala Powers) is rendered close to catatonic by her experience, refusing to talk about it, cooperate with the police, even remain in her hometown where she had been engaged to be married. She flees, as if she can outrun the shame she feels. The visual means Lupino uses to express her character’s agony are intriguing. Ann is a shy person. Early in the film, as she sits in the open, having lunch with her fiancé, kissing him, an elderly woman looks on kindly. Her gaze makes the couple uncomfortable, and they leave. This shy sweetness is ruptured by the rape, which Lupino represents in stark, almost expressionist visuals as Ann flees through the dark alleyways of the warehouse district where she works, which are lit obliquely and littered with lumber, cranes, and trucks. Ann tries to hide in the cab of a truck and sets its horn blaring. She continues to flee her pursuer, then trips and falls. From her panicked point of view, things turn blurry, and as the rapist strikes, the camera cranes up to a window where an old man peers out, unable to see what is happening. Ann becomes immune to the gaze of others. They cannot see the trauma she has suffered, and she cannot confront it. She flees her home for California and there she comes under the care of a sympathetic family and a priest who is himself searching for faith. There is another attempted assault, during which Ann sees, in her attacker, the face of her original rapist, and hits him with a wrench. Again, she flees, and is caught and jailed. But the flashbacks clear her mind about the original attack. After a plea by the priest about treating the criminally insane, Ann is released and becomes strong enough to return home to face her trauma. But the priest, who has fallen in love with her, remains behind, and the last shot of the film is of him looking at the bus carrying Ann back home. Ann discovers some inner courage while Reverend Bruce Ferguson (Tod Andrews) is left with another reason to question his faith. In the end, Outrage is as much about testing emotional limits as it is about rape itself. The rapist has an ugly scar on his neck and, in a sense, the principal characters in the film are all scarred in one way or another. The priest doesn’t find his faith or his love, though Ann has shown him the path, and he gives a knowing look toward the sky when Ann leaves. Ann returns home and must remain in psychiatric care. Perhaps the most interesting thing

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about this film, besides its (at the time) taboo subject matter, is the way Lupino tamps down the nascent melodrama waiting to break out. It is there in the script, but in the film, the director brings it just to the surface but disallows it full presence. Not so the violence, which is presented in as frightening a way as possible without making it overly graphic. Finally, Outrage stands as a minor film about a major subject. The fact that it turns to religiosity in order to calm the emotional turbulence that it sets up shouldn’t deflect from its strong presentation of female vulnerability and fear, as well as the possibilities that gentle masculinity can counter male brutality. This idea is treated somewhat similarly in The Hitch-Hiker, in some ways her most conventional work. There are no women. The focus is on three men: one, Emmett Myers, is a psychopath, played by William Talman; the other two are ordinary men, moyen sensuel, Roy and Gil, played by Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy, two cinematic avatars of 1950s common manhood (Lovejoy plays Dixon Steele’s friend Brub in In a Lonely Place). The lack of women is precisely the problem. The two men held captive by Myers for the length of the movie are unmoored, one might even say unmanned, by their passivity. They have no fight, hardly any anger. They suffer an ordeal of humiliation, sitting in front of their car while Myers, an insane backseat driver, sleeps with one eye open and, when awake, barks orders while holding them at the point of a gun. Even when Myers makes Gil shoot a can out of Roy’s hand, they waver but do his bidding. Without women, the film implies, men are helpless, in a foreign country—quite literally, since their ordeal takes place as they are driving through Mexico looking for a place to fish. Without women, they look for trouble. Gil mentions that this is the first time he’s been away from his wife since the war. Roy, recalling a woman they once met there, thinks maybe it would be a good idea to stop at Mexicali for some drinks and to ogle women. Roy smiles and drives through the town, and Lupino supplies a conventional montage of nightclubs and street life passing by. Pitchmen come to the car tempting them with nightspots and women. Gil feigns sleep. Perhaps if they hadn’t made this detour, they would not have been stopped and held hostage by Myers, humiliating the two hapless men over and over. Only at the end, when the police close in and handcuff Myers, do the men take out their anger, Roy punching Myers over and over. When the police take him away, Gil comes to Roy like a soothing wife: “It’s alright, it’s alright.” He puts his arm around Roy as they walk off into the dark. Nicholas Ray and Ida Lupino created some of the most adventuresome filmmaking of the decade. Ray may have been uneven in his output, but in

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FIGURE 3.12 Held in thrall by a madman. Roy (Edmond O’Brien), Gil (Frank Lovejoy), and their captor, Myers (William Talman), in The Hitch-Hiker.

his best work he created startling films that went against the grain of stolid Hollywood productions. His films about violent men, his disoriented adolescents, his stunningly eccentric Western, are made with an intelligent eye and a certain puckishness that allows for an unexpected camera movement or an unusual use of color. Whether peering out the window of a car hurtling through the nighttime streets or at Vienna in Johnny Guitar, dressed in white, sitting on the balcony of her gambling casino, playing the piano, there is pleasure and often excitement in the making of unusual images and affecting narratives. It is an excitement shared by us as viewers. Lupino’s films are unusual not only because they were made by a woman but because that woman was so invested in stories about women or, in the case of The Hitch-Hiker, of men without women. Her films, like Ray’s, probed the enigmas of gender and the pathos of mutual misunderstandings. Her images are strong and eloquent, speaking not so much to the characters’ states of mind as to the atmosphere of troubling emotions and desperate actions, often understated. Together, Ray and Lupino represent not opposites but an integral part of the imaginative web of ’50s cinema.

4 “Love, Hate, Action, Violence, and Death . . . in One Word: Emotion”

Joseph Losey and Samuel Fuller Gathering the films of Joseph Losey and Samuel Fuller together in one chapter is an act of perversity. They could not be more different. But from perverse opposites comes insight, and the comparison of the two is fascinating. Losey, even in his American films, was an elegant, politically charged filmmaker, searching for just the right image, driving his characters to an edge of despair and refusing to bring them back. Losey was a thoughtful director. Sam Fuller was something of a friendly brute—not in his life, certainly, but in the rugged, trashy, crude, and sometimes vulgar and silly propulsion of his films. His Westerns, war films, and one great film noir are all marked by a desire to push images and narratives onto the viewer, whether she wants them or not. Losey was, if not reticent, careful. Fuller threw images together, 66

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sometimes in startling, often laughable ways, in rough-and-ready narratives, but with the sincerity of a filmmaker who believed in the power of cinema to startle his audience. If that meant that a woman had to be slugged, then so be it. Losey and Nicholas Ray shared a common background. Born close together in age and geography, they went, a few years apart, to the same high school. They were both active in the radical New York theater during the 1930s. Losey hired Ray as an assistant on the Living Newspaper production Injunction Granted in 1936. In 1945, Losey produced the Academy Awards ceremony and Ray was his stage manager. FBI files on Ray and Losey were also started in the 1940s. According to Patrick McGilligan, Ray’s name had been turned over to HUAC in the late 1930s. When HUAC started their Hollywood investigations in earnest in 1947, the two Wisconsin natives had very different responses. On the surface, Ray seems to have escaped HUAC’s clutches; as noted previously, Ray was friendly with Howard Hughes during the period that the anti-Communist, obsessive-compulsive millionaire owned RKO, and this may have protected Ray from being blacklisted. Losey, on the other hand, had no protection, only plenty of evidence against him, including his work with Bertolt Brecht (he directed Brecht’s Life of Galileo). In 1946, J. Edgar Hoover cited him—according to David Caute—as “a contact for various Soviet espionage agents.” Losey was indeed active in Communist causes and the threat from HUAC was so real that, when subpoenaed to appear on July 19, 1951, he left the country and spent the rest of his career filming first in Italy, then for an extended period in England, and later in France. Ironically, Fuller, a full-chested American and a proud WWII veteran, also had an FBI file, and even spoke to J. Edgar Hoover about his stoutly anti-Communist Pickup on South Street (1953), which Hoover thought was un-American. He was subpoenaed but not blacklisted. Joseph Losey’s American films, a mere five out of a total output of thirtyfour features, are marked by a complex political intensity. Each of them— The Boy with Green Hair (1948), The Lawless (1950), and M, The Prowler, and The Big Night (each released in 1951)—are marked to one degree or another with Losey’s politics and his justifiable feelings of persecution. Early in M, his understated remake of the 1931 Fritz Lang film about a serial child killer, Inspector Carney (blacklisted actor Howard Da Silva) walks past a group of detectives questioning potential witnesses. One woman says something about seeing a child in a red dress. “What are you, a Communist?” the detective asks. It’s a throwaway line, but for a filmmaker about to flee

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the country in anticipation of the punishment he would receive as a Communist, it is throwaway with an ironic, indeed sarcastic, bite. In 1951, “Are you a Communist?” was both a threat and a ner vous joke. “I hear McCarthy’s after you,” a friend joked to my parents in the early ’50s. They were not amused. There is a moment in The Big Night when the feckless George Le Main (John Barrymore Jr.) comes upon an African America singer (Terri Angelus) he just heard in a nightclub. George is a poor wreck of a human being, in worse shape than the adolescents that populate many of Nicholas Ray’s films. On a dark quest to avenge the beating of his father, he meets with one humiliation after another. Drunk and distressed, he falls to the curb outside the nightclub. He pets a dog and discovers it belongs to the singer. He gets up, says he’s pleased to meet her, and compliments her on her looks and her voice. There are close-ups of each, the singer especially pleased to receive his praise. “You’re so beautiful,” he says, “even if you are a . . .” Her face saddens. “I didn’t mean to say it,” George repeats over and over as he is led away by a drunken acquaintance, leaving the singer humiliated and distraught, leaning against a lamppost. There are instances of gender humiliation (George’s father is brutally beaten by a cane-wielding madman whose wife his father took away) and racial humiliation. Perhaps the humiliation experienced by Losey himself, whose politics, talent, and income were threatened by HUAC. It infiltrates his American films. There is a difference between humiliation and revolution. A film can take a defiant stand and proclaim victory over oppression, even call for uprising. We see this in films as different as Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) or Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), or even Salt of the Earth, the pro-union, feminist film made in 1954 by blacklistees. We see hints of it in Joseph Mankiewicz’s No Way Out, where the Black community must take violent action in response to their racist neighbors. But communal action, violent or peaceful, is not the stuff of American film, especially in the ’50s. And Losey, no matter how left his leanings, rarely went beyond expressing sympathy and calling for understanding. Peter, the boy with green hair (played by Dean Stockwell), facing bullying and ostracization, deeply humiliated, has his head shaved. The only optimistic note is his decision at film’s end to let his green hair grow back. Those who at first turned against him have a change of heart and embrace the difference that the green hair represents. The film is as sentimental as Losey ever allowed himself to be. He even has Robert Ryan, more often seen as a gangster or

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FIGURE 4.1 A celebration of difference. Dean Stockwell in The Boy with Green Hair.

rogue cop, play a sympathetic role as a doctor who listens to young Peter’s sad story. (Recall that Nicholas Ray permitted Ryan to go sentimental at the end of On Dangerous Ground.) The Boy with Green Hair is a cry for the tolerance of difference, which is taken to its absolute extreme in Losey’s remake of M. Peter Lorre, playing Fritz Lang’s serial child killer, is an unalloyed monster, pathetic but undeserving of sympathy. Losey’s killer is played by David Wayne, an actor usually cast in light comedies and who therefore carries an extra burden to convince us of his inherent evil. Others of the film’s actors carry different burdens, as they are currently or soon to be blacklisted: Howard Da Silva plays a police detective; Martin Gabel a mob boss; and Luther Adler plays his role as an alcoholic mob lawyer mainly with his expressive eyes. The film is therefore replete with outcasts both within and outside of the fiction. In 1931, under the post-Expressionist, late-Weimar aesthetic of the “new objectivity” (Neue Sachlichkeit), Fritz Lang fashioned a dark, stolid, studiobound film where the gangsters and beggars of Berlin join forces to find the child killer who is drawing too much attention from the police. Losey by and large avoids the dark (although there is a chiaroscuro sequence of the

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murderer in his apartment) and instead chooses to do a great deal of location shooting in the Los Angeles sunlight. Shooting on location was becoming popular at the time—Jules Dassin’s 1948 The Naked City was promoted for its location shooting—and in Losey’s hands, Los Angeles becomes a backdrop to the characters’ activities. One of the film’s locations, the Bradbury Building, would become the setting for the finale of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner thirty years later. Otherwise, M stays fairly close to Lang’s original, with a major difference dictated by the moment. For Lang, the takeover of the city by criminals reflected the growing threat of Nazi mob rule. For Losey, the mob is nothing less than a stand-in for HUAC. Thugs taking over the law from the police mirror HUAC’s thuggish behavior against anyone with even slightly left-of-center politics. There is no allegory or one-to-one relationship built into the film, but it is hard not to see the distraught child killer brought to bay by the lowest of the low, who are sent into action by the head of the mob, as a parallel to hapless victims humiliated by the committee. The irony, if there is one, is that one of the victims here is not only the psychotic child murderer but also the wretched, alcoholic mob lawyer. His plea for his “client” to be institutionalized rather than destroyed by the angry mob becomes as well a plea for himself. The final sequence of the film is a terrifying play of confusion in which the killer, hysterical, screams about his helplessness and the lawyer, hysterical, yells about his own selfvictimization. He is shot by the mob boss, and the film ends with the boss and child killer taken off by the police and the lawyer’s body left sprawled in the foreground. Here, humiliation ends in death. This final sequence takes place in a parking garage with the drama between the lawyer and the child killer staged on a ramp. Behind them is a sign: “Keep to Right.” It is almost a warning: to stay out of trouble with power in the early 1950s, one had to stay to the right. To do otherwise would lead to humiliation and, if not physical death, financial ruin and damage to one’s political beliefs and well-being. Angry mobs also figure in The Lawless. It begins with images of Mexican American crop pickers at work and an epigraph: This is the story of a town and of some of its people, who, in the grip of blind anger, forget their American heritage of tolerance and decency, and become the lawless.

The film roughly parallels the notorious Sleepy Lagoon murder case in which a young Mexican American was found murdered in the Sleepy Lagoon reservoir

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FIGURE 4.2 “Keep to Right!” The police take the child murderer (David Wayne) in custody

as Inspector Carney (Howard Da Silva) kneels over the body of mob lawyer Langley (Luther Adler) in M.

near Los Angeles in 1942. This act led to a wholesale roundup and imprisonment of Mexican Americans and ultimately to the Zoot Suit Riots in which U.S. ser vicemen beat up Mexican American youths. After the riots were quelled, zoot suits were banned and the original defendants were acquitted and released, due not to the yellow press that sensationalized and race-baited the story but the liberal and Communist left, who fought for the imprisoned. Losey updates the story, placing it in the town of Santa Marta, “the friendly city,” and initially focusing on two characters, Chavez (Maurice Jara) and Rodriguez (Lalo Rios), fruit pickers who get into a fight with two white boys after a minor traffic accident. Losey contrasts the life of Rodriguez, living poorly in the Sleepy Hollow district and having to shower outdoors, with that of one of the white boys in the accident, Joe (John Sands), showering in his luxurious house. But then, it seems to me, Losey and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (under the pseudonym Geoffrey Homes) make a mistake. They shift focus from the Mexican Americans and their Anglo opponents to a disillusioned newspaper man, Larry Wilder

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(played by Macdonald Carey, who is too much of a smooth Hollywood type for the role), and continue the film from his perspective and his romance with Sunny Garcia (played by Gail Russell in dark makeup). In other words, the film becomes bogged down in the crusading newspaperman genre. The romance is interrupted by a fight at a dance in Sleepy Hollow between the locals and rich white kids and things get completely out of hand. Rodriguez accidentally punches a cop, a chase ensues, and the police car carrying the captured Rodriguez overturns in a fiery wreck. The luckless Rodriguez escapes again and hides in a barn, where a young girl, who hits her head when she sees him, accuses him of assault. There is no denying that Losey handles all of this deftly, as he does the exaggerations of the press that, as in the Sleepy Lagoon case, play the race card in exaggerating the evils of the Mexican Americans and Rodriguez in particular. The mobs are ugly and they destroy Wilder’s newspaper office, but then there is a deus ex machina in the person of Joe’s rich father (John Hoyt), who bails out Rodriguez and offers to rebuild Wilder’s paper. In the meantime, Wilder continues to publish using the town’s Spanish-language newspaper office. There is no denying the political push to The Lawless, even in the irony of its title, for the real lawless are not the Mexican Americans but the mobs who are ready to destroy the “fruit tramps.” Nor would the parallel with the Sleepy Lagoon case be anything but obvious to a contemporary audience. What is missing is the group action that helped clear the original victims of racism in that event. There is no doubt that the producers of the film, which was distributed by Paramount, applied the usual political pressures against progressive group action, but there is also no doubt that for once in his American output, Losey blinked. He was attuned to the terrible power of the mob, but this was not an unusual perspective. There are many American films that condemn mindless mob action. The problem with The Lawless is that, while the film’s politics are sound, its execution is faulty. It took a group of blacklisted filmmakers to make a film, Salt of the Earth, that treated the pain of Mexican American workers with compassion and a clear eye. I’m tempted to say that The Prowler, certainly the best known of the five films Losey made in the United States, is the least overtly political but perhaps the most socially exposed of the group. The film was written by Hugo Butler, who had fled to Mexico before being called in front of HUAC, and (though he received no screen credit) Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten. Losey used Trumbo as the radio voice of Susan Gilvray’s (Evelyn Keyes)

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husband. These two voices stand behind the film, one, the blacklisted screenwriter, informing it with a politics that may be silent but no less potent, the other a creepy reminder that Susan is controlled first by her husband and then by the prowler himself. The Prowler is about control and potency: the power of looking, insinuating, and subduing. The film starts and ends with policemen. The precredit sequence has the camera peering through a bathroom window at a woman coming out of a shower. She spots the prowler, screams, and pulls down the window shade. The immediate postcredit sequence shows two cops getting out of their squad car, flashlights cutting the dark, looking for a prowler. One of the cops, Webb (Van Heflin), peers through the window from the outside. He has become the prowler and will quickly insinuate himself into Susan’s only briefly reluctant embrace. The Prowler is concerned with the ways Webb manipulates Susan. Unlike the tormented men of so many other ’50s films, he is self-possessed to the point of self-obsessed and psychotically determined to get his prey. From a cop at the window, he becomes the ardent suitor in Susan’s home. When she resists, he waits out her desire, lying on the bed of his dingy room, reading a muscle-building magazine. Like Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) in The Servant (Losey’s first collaboration with Harold Pinter in 1963), Webb is of ambiguous sexuality, more interested in his power over Susan than in consummating it. His patience is his victory, short-lived as it is. She comes to him in a state of abjection, creating in Webb a spasm of self-satisfaction over her loss of self-respect. When, after attempting to ignore him, she finally calls, Webb falls back on his bed and tosses a crumpled piece of paper into the overhead light fixture in grim delight. Susan has become the humiliated figure. In uniform, but posing himself as a prowler, he flushes Susan’s husband out of his house and shoots him, removing, he thinks, the controlling voice and freeing them to be together. The tormented couple marry, and Webb buys a motel. Susan becomes pregnant, and, out of fear of discovery that they were together before the killing, they flee to a ghost town in the desert. The film takes a somewhat predictable turn, ending with Webb being shot down by the cops on a desert dune. The Prowler is a film about the power of the gaze. From the first shot, we act as voyeurs, peering through a woman’s bathroom window. Webb is a prowling psychopath, and Susan’s husband, a disk jockey, whom we see directly only once when he is murdered by Webb, always ends his radio show by saying, somewhat threateningly, “I’ll be seeing you, Susan.” Her husband

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FIGURE 4.3 “I’ll be seeing you, Susan.” Hiding out in the desert, Susan (Evelyn Keyes) and Webb (Van Heflin) hear the recorded voice of Susan’s husband (supplied by Dalton Trumbo) in The Prowler.

always makes recorded transcriptions of his program on disc, one of which happens to go with the fleeing couple to the desert shack where they hide out. When they suddenly hear his voice, hysteria reigns—the gaze, even modulated through the voice, is inescapable. There is a simple morality here, that one can’t get away with murder, but Losey is rarely that simplistic. He wants, like so many other ’50s filmmakers, to examine the male psyche, and in this case a particularly predatory one who looks and is looked at, who prowls and is prowled in turn. There may not be greater societal import in this film than in the others he made in the early part of the decade, but it could be that this look at the underbelly of masculine perversity and female vulnerability is a determined examination of a culture curdling in the middle under the ruthless gaze of HUAC and Joseph McCarthy and their destructive power. Losey avoided HUAC by leaving the United States and eventually settled in the United Kingdom and restarted his career, at one point teaming up with playwright Harold Pinter for three films in the late ’60s and early

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’70s—The Servant, Accident, and The Go-Between—that cemented his international reputation. He never lost his political edge but gained a subtler, more elegant style. His 1976 film, Mr. Klein, made in France, is among the best films about the Holocaust. He was the most successful of the blacklisted Hollywood figures. (Dalton Trumbo was able to return to screenwriting under his own name, but not in the volume he produced before or even during his blacklisting.) Losey kept making almost a film a year until his death in 1984. Between 1949 and 1959, Samuel Fuller made thirteen films (and wrote many others). He went on directing theatrical features until 1964, turned to television, and then back to features, with three films in the 1980s. Of the thirteen in the ’50s, there are four Westerns, I Shot Jesse James (1949), The Baron of Arizona (1950), Forty Guns and Run of the Arrow (1957); five war films, The Steel Helmet (1951), Fixed Bayonets! (1951), Hell and High Water (1954), China Gate (1957), Verboten (1959); a newspaper story, Park Row (1952); an orientalist crime film, House of Bamboo (1955); a melodramatic cop film with orientalist overtones, The Crimson Kimono (1959); and a film noir, Pickup on South Street (1953). Each of these films is marked by the peculiarity of style, the roughness and directness that are the hallmarks of the Fuller method: rugged, in your face, unsubtle, sometimes unintentionally funny, and almost always eye-catching. I’ve chosen to start with Westerns and a comparison of Nicholas Ray’s Jesse James film, The True Story of Jesse James (1957), with Fuller’s earlier I Shot Jesse James. Ray’s “true story” claims itself to be “as close to what actually happened as any man can testify.” Perhaps. Gone is the nearly operatic style of Johnny Guitar, and in its place is the usual gunplay and horse riding typical of the genre. It was, according to McGilligan, a studio job that Ray took little interest in. Ray wanted Elvis Presley to play Jesse James, and settled for Robert Wagner, with Jeffery Hunter as Frank James, both of them too smooth and urbane for a pair of nineteenth-century outlaws—domesticated outlaws at that, worried about their sickly ma (Agnes Moorehead), who recalls how kindly they were. She recalls as well, via flashbacks, how the war turned the boys into outlaws. There are spectacular scenes of Jesse and Frank James diving with their horses over a cliff into a river, a scene that exemplifies the incredible cruelty visited to horses during the filming of many Westerns, and a bravura scene in which Frank and Jesse ride through a shop window in their escape from the disastrous Northfield bank robbery. According to McGilligan, Ray states that, to save more injury to the horses in this scene (cruelty to animals in movies had become a matter of some controversy), the

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studio used footage from an earlier film, Henry King’s Jesse James (1939). Throughout The True Story of Jesse James, Ray tries his best to capture the legend, the slow buildup of the mythic quality of the James brothers. They are post–Civil War outlaws on the side of the South who, like many of their movie brethren, earn a combination of admiration and fear, but in their case, notoriety is cloaked in anonymity, since no one has seen the brothers’ faces. A case could be made that Jesse is another of Ray’s emotionally wounded adolescents, here set in the Old West (an idea picked up by Arthur Penn in his 1958 film debut, The Left Handed Gun, which idolizes another mythical adolescent cowboy outlaw, Billy the Kid, played by Paul Newman). Emotionally wounded or not, Jesse tries to be a domesticated husband, his family life layered over his real business of robbing banks and shooting people. Despite Frank’s attempt to control his violent impulses, and his belief in his own legend, Jesse continues until his anonymity and his luck run out. Ray’s Jesse James is conflicted, almost schizophrenic in the divide between his domestic yearnings and his murderous tendencies. But there is no real emotional or even visual force to this. The film is Ray at his disinterested best; it is a capable film with no resonance. The most interesting moment comes at the very end, when a blind Black man sings the ballad of “the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard,” a moment in which Ray recalls his days working with Alan Lomax, collecting and performing folk songs. I Shot Jesse James was Samuel Fuller’s first feature. As the title indicates, the focus is less on the legendary outlaw than on “the dirty little coward” who killed him. Bob Ford (John Ireland) is the one whose conscience is torn in this version: if he could rid himself of Jesse, he would be pardoned of his crimes and free to marry his love, the actress Cynthy (Barbara Britton), and settle down to farming. Fuller’s Jesse (Reed Hadley) is not an adolescent but a rather stiff middle-aged man with slicked-down hair and a beard. Ford is the youngster, torn between friendship and desire for fame. Desire wins out, and Ford shoots Jesse with a gun Jesse gave him as a gift. A montage of newspapers shows that public opinion turns against the “coward” and his pardon is scorned, even by his love. The film is somewhat stagey, shot mostly from a frontal angle in long takes without the occasionally extravagant visual flourishes that mark Fuller’s later works, but the style suits the matter of the film, which is about performance. Even a raucous bar fight is filmed as if it were onstage (an exception: during one fight, a fist comes directly at the camera). The style

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FIGURE 4.4 Two versions of Jesse James. Samuel Fuller’s Jesse, in I Shot Jesse James, is played

by Reed Hadley, here with his murderer, Bob Ford (John Ireland). In Nicholas Ray’s The True Story of Jesse James, Jesse is played by Robert Wagner, here with his brother Frank, played by Jeffrey Hunter.

suits the core event of the film, because not only does Ford want to marry an actress, he wants to go onstage to reenact his killing of Jesse, a curious act of celebrity and expiation. But once in front of an audience, he loses his nerve. Poor Ford is haunted, even when he goes into a bar; he can’t escape his guilt as a travelling singer serenades him with the Jesse James ballad. The legend maker is undone by his own legend, which breeds hate rather than the admiration that has now shifted to Jesse James himself. Fuller, though, loves his outcasts, men who have acted against normative behavior and sometimes perform outrageously. Ford is momentarily rewarded by striking silver, shooting a mountain lion, and being reunited with the reluctant Cynthy, who is in love with another man. Haunted by his past deeds, the ballad, and Jesse’s brother in pursuit, he is finally shot by Kelly (Preston Foster), Cynthy’s would-be lover. This inevitable retribution, carried out in classic Western fashion as the two antagonists meet in the town street— Kelly refusing to face Ford until the last minute, when Kelly shoots him point-blank with a rifle—feels needed as opposed to wanted. Perhaps there could be other options to the cliché; however, the image of Ford curled in a fetal position on the ground and then cradled in Cynthy’s arms leaves a poignant trace. In his later films, Fuller is more at home with rough sentimentality than with poignancy. Fuller’s 1957 Western, Forty Guns, written, produced, and directed by Fuller for 20th Century-Fox, is a more accomplished piece. Brilliantly filmed by Joseph Biroc in black-and-white CinemaScope, the camera is mobile, the spaces deep and rich. There is a screen-filling close-up of Griff Bonell’s (Barry Sullivan) eyes as he walks down the dusty street to disarm the drunken

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Brockie (John Ericson), who has been shooting up the town. Eleven years later, Sergio Leone would create the same kind of shot in Once upon a Time in the West (1968). There is a virtuosic three-minute-long shot in which Griff and his brothers, Wes (Gene Barry) and Chico (Robert Dix), walk from their hotel room down the street, joined by the incompetent sheriff, Ned Logan (Dean Jagger). They stop to send a telegram when suddenly, with a shout, Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck) and her forty retainers come riding around the corner in a cloud of dust. The timing is impeccable and the introduction of Jessica Drummond is appropriately impressive (we have seen her and her retainers during the credit sequence, but with less drama than her appearance here). Unfortunately, the body of the film is a disparate collection of ideas about corruption and the end of the Old West, the love of Wes and an Annie Oakley–type gunmaker, Rio (Ziva Rodann), and the romance of Griff and Jessica. There are some fine set pieces, such as a violent tornado which knocks Jessica off her horse, violently dragging her until Griff comes to the rescue. Taking shelter from the storm, they make love. There is a nicely staged scene in which Sheriff Logan, after trying to kill Griff, declares his love for Jessica. In a long take in the shadows of her palatial home, Jessica averts her eyes and Griff looks away as Logan makes a pathetic plea for her love. Still averting her eyes, and despite his pleading, she writes him a check in lieu of her affection. Logan hangs himself. The old ways and the old power relationships of the Old West are coming apart. All the men take a bath in the tubs of the town bathhouse. Things end badly. Brockie shoots down Wes on his wedding day. The government takes away everything from Jessica, and when Brockie—Jessica’s brother, for whom she bankrupted herself to buy his freedom—breaks out of jail, holding Jessica hostage, Griff wounds her, sacrificing her so that she will fall and he can kill Brockie. The promise of a film about a strong woman, perhaps in the mold of Vienna in Johnny Guitar, is, in this instance, beyond Fuller’s grasp. “The high ridin’ woman with a whip,” as the bathhouse balladeer sings, yields to love; she runs after Griff while the singer assures us that, if a big and strong man came along, “the woman with a whip is just a woman after all.” This is the sentimentality of the loss of power, of men and especially women giving in to the clichés of the Western and the clichés of movie romance. It would take another twelve years for a very different filmmaker, Sam Peckinpah, to drop the sentimentality and, in The Wild Bunch, film the end of the West in all its violence.

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FIGURE 4.5 Almost a classic Western shoot-out but for the fact that Griff (Barry Sullivan) has to wound Jessica Drummond (Barbara Stanwyck) to shoot her brother Brockie (John Ericson).

Fuller’s first war film, The Steel Helmet, which was the first film about the Korean War, is also unable to escape his inherent sentimentality. There was nothing sentimental or engaging about the Korean War. It was a horrible slog that the United States very nearly lost. It was a war that never should have been fought, except that the deadly logic of the Cold War made it, or something like it, inevitable. Fuller’s telling of it veers from the brutal to the cute, especially with the presence of a young Korean boy, Short Round (William Chun), who saves Sergeant Zack (Gene Evans) and sets off with him and a lost platoon in search of a Buddhist temple, all while being constantly under fire from the North Koreans. Zack is the perfect Fuller antihero: grizzled, gruff, stupid, and competent. He speaks with a cigar butt in his mouth, calls his comrades “ballerinas,” and yells at them to “eat rice” when he wants them to hit the dirt. And while the platoon is not quite the clichéd conglomeration of ethnic stereotypes that was common in WWII films, they are a collection of misfits and oddballs, including a bald soldier who suffered scarlet fever as a child, a Japanese (Richard Loo) whom everyone calls “Buddhahead,” a tough lieutenant, Driscoll (Steve Brodie), a soldier who plays mute, and an African American medic, Corporal Thompson (James Edwards—a Black actor prominent in a number of early ’50s films), who Fuller and the platoon can’t quite figure out what to do with. He dresses the wound of an enemy sniper, who taunts him about discrimination in the

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FIGURE 4.6 Sgt. Zack (Gene Evans) with the bullet hole in his helmet in The Steel Helmet.

United States. Thompson responds with a short speech about how racism is gradually being confronted, at which point the North Korean spits in his face. Thompson proves himself when, during the final battle, he throws off his medic’s armband and mans a machine gun. Much of the action in The Steel Helmet takes place in the Buddhist temple where the platoon rests, but which, unbeknownst to them, houses a North Korean soldier who is in hiding. There is a smart, high overhead shot from the sniper’s point of view, looking down at the men, a shot foreshadowing the inevitable—the killing of Short Round. That bit of sentimentality is irresistible, and Fuller builds on it. The North Korean captive discovers the note Short Round has been carrying to place as a prayer to the Buddha that would make Sergeant Zack like him. The discovery causes sarcastic laughter on the part of the prisoner, and this triggers the unveiling of Zack’s love for Short Round and anger at the prisoner. Zack shoots him, breaking military law and destroying a valuable carrier of intelligence. He’s grabbed by Lieutenant Driscoll, who tells him, “no matter how sentimental or personal you get, you’re supposed to be in the United States Infantry.” He calls him “a big, dumb, stupid, selfish, fat-headed sergeant,” which is not far from the

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truth. But in Fuller’s eyes, Zack has heart, and his stupidity is a virtue for an instinct-driven fighting man. Zack grabs the prisoner, who is barely alive, and utters Fuller’s immortal words: “If you die, I’ll kill you,” a line so beloved by Fuller that he repeats it in his last major film, The Big Red One (1980). Zack is wounded in the last battle, which is made up of a good deal of stock footage that Fuller needed to bargain for from the army. Wounded and traumatized, along with the survivors—Buddhahead, Thompson, and the bald soldier—Zack makes a final gesture of affection by putting his steel helmet with the bullet hole in it on Short Round’s grave. The survivors proceed to march off to their next battle. The end title reads: “There is no end to this story.” There was no end to Fuller’s story either. As Marsha Gordon points out, the film raised the ire of critics on the left and the right for the ways Fuller treated soldiers and addressed race, and for depicting the killing of a POW. HUAC opened a file on Fuller and Hoover followed suit, but Fuller was able to bluster through. He was never called before HUAC and continued exercising his eccentricities. Fuller followed The Steel Helmet with another Korean war film, Fixed Bayonets! It was produced by 20th  Century-Fox, which became his home studio for a number of films. With a producer assigned to the project, it is a more conventional war film than its predecessor, which means it is less Fullerian. It also means he could tack onto the beginning of the film his thanks for the cooperation of the Department of the Army, which was offered only begrudgingly for The Steel Helmet. Confined to a small studio set, taking place mostly in a frigid cave where the lost platoon is holed up, the film is a coming-to-maturity story of Corporal Denno (Richard Basehart), who moves from cowardice to bravery in battle. Gene Evans is in the film as Sergeant Rock, but his is a relatively minor role, certainly less grizzled and battle-worn than his character Zack in the previous film. Fixed Bayonets!, while less ragged and torn than its predecessor, is at the same time more affecting, perhaps because it is more conventional. Fuller loves fighting men—he himself came to maturity as a soldier in WWII, at the end of which he photographed the liberation of the concentration camp in Falkenau—and his war films glorify the bravery of soldiers, if not war itself. “Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, and death . . . in one word: emotion.” He said that in answer to the question “What is cinema?” posed to him by Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965), a moment when Fuller (as well as Nicholas Ray) was becoming lionized in Europe and rediscovered in the United States. The emotions

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of the battlefield appealed to Samuel Fuller, a patriot, a lover of the military, and a rough-and-tumble filmmaker held in suspicion by J. Edgar Hoover. The particular film that got under Hoover’s skin, Pickup on South Street, is one of the finest films noir of the decade and one of its more successful anti-Communist films, one which the New York Times’s Bosley Crowther said, “the climate is so brutish and the business so sadistic in this tale of pickpockets, demireps, informers, detectives and Communist spies that the whole thing becomes a trifle silly as it slashes and slambangs along, and the first thing you know its grave pretenses are standing there, artless and absurd.” Crowther, critic for the Times for decades, was only sometimes right about the films he reviewed. He missed much and eventually, by the late 1960s, was so out of touch with what was happening to American cinema that he was out of his job. But in this case, in the ascending verbiage of disdain and disgust, he actually understands Fuller. “Artless and absurd” could be the epigraph for the discussion of the director’s work but for one thing: “artless” was Fuller’s trompe l’oeil, because the seeming absurdity and artlessness of his work is the result of a basic artfulness, so brusquely carried out as to be invisible. In short, Fuller knew exactly what he was doing as his film “slashes and slambangs along.” Film noir had reached its apogee by the early 1950s. It peaked with Anthony Mann’s great films of the late ’40s—T-Men, Raw Deal, and Border Incident among them—all photographed by John Alton in a style of such dark obliqueness that many sequences are abstractions of light and dark. They are brutal films, as I mentioned earlier, in which characters are hurt and feel the hurt. Mann’s films speak, like so much of noir, to the cultural upheaval following the war. Contemporary battle films glorified America’s wars. Noir, as we saw in my earlier discussion of The Blue Dahlia, addressed the anxieties of the home front, a different battlefield of sex, greed, and betrayal. Noir’s misogyny, indeed its misanthropy, was unrelenting, but the anger and bitterness of noir dissipated somewhat as the ’50s wore on. There were two great codas to the genre, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), which a student of mine once called the strangest film he had ever seen, and Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958). I’ll talk about the Welles film later. Aldrich’s is an adaptation of a Mickey Spillane novel. It is tempting to say that Spillane was the literary version of Sam Fuller, but the writer’s crudeness, brutality, and misogyny far outdid anything in Fuller, who had a basic intelligence driving his films. Aldrich took Spillane’s detective protagonist, Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), and turned him into a patsy in an upside-down

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world where the object of everyone’s quest is nothing less than a nuclear device. Spillane searches for the “great what’s it,” which turns out to be a blinding light of nuclear fission in a box, opened by the film’s Pandora and ending the world. The darkness of this ultimate noir turns into the blinding light of nuclear annihilation. The quest object, the McGuffin, in Pickup on South Street is less apocalyptic: a strip of microfilm with a chemical formula that the Communists— sorry, the Commies—want. Around this object coalesce a variety of Fullerian characters—Skip McCoy, Candy, Moe, Tiger, Zara, and Joey. They come after one another, hurt each other, beat each other up, shoot one another, make love, and die. Skip (Richard Widmark, one of the great actors of the period, who could mutate into a variety of roles) is a pickpocket, who lives in a shack out on a pier in the East River. He appears to thrive on beer that he keeps cold in box he lowers into the water. His dexterity is extraordinary, and in the film’s most impressive sequence, he weaves through a packed subway car, easily removing wallets and valuables from unwary passengers. (Six years later, the French master Robert Bresson would make a film called Pickpocket that draws on Fuller’s virtuosity.) But in this Cold War drama, many are wary and there are eyes everywhere; there are eyes on Skip in the person of FBI agent Zara (Willis Bouchey), who spots him lifting the wallet containing the microfilm from the Commie’s “muffin,” the prostitute Candy (Jean Peters). As more characters enter the scene, trying to convince Skip not to “play footsie with the Commies,” Fuller and his camera dance around them, taking great pleasure in observing their ridiculous, brutal interactions and reactions. Skip, the intricate master of the pocket, immaculately dressed, plays everyone against each other. He discovers what’s on the microfilm, though he doesn’t understand its significance. He slugs and knocks out Candy when she comes looking for it and then rolls her over with his foot—it’s a scene worthy of Spillane. Afterward, they embrace, but he doesn’t consummate their lovemaking when he finds out what she wants from him. Poor Candy is everyone’s punching bag. Her handler, Joey (Richard Kiley), the Commie stooge who runs scared throughout the film, beats and shoots her in an elaborately sadistic sequence. He murders Moe (Thelma Ritter), the snitch and itinerant necktie saleswoman, whose sole wish is to make enough money for a decent burial and who acts as Skip’s conscience. “Even in our crummy kind of business you gotta draw the line somewheres,” she tells him. She convinces him of Candy’s love for him: “The muffin you grifted, she’s

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FIGURE 4.7 Pickpocket on the subway Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) sizes up his prey, Candy (Jean Peters), and winds up with microfilm stolen by the Commies.

okay.” She’s the one who tells him not to play footsie with the Commies. Unfortunately, the Commies play more than footsie with her; Joey kills her. Her warning to Skip is mild compared to Zara’s. “If you refuse to cooperate, you’ll be as guilty as the traitors that gave Stalin the A-bomb.” Suddenly, and not so surreptitiously, with the reference to the Rosenbergs, the dead weight of the Cold War falls on the film, and none of its sentimentality can lift it. Fortunately, Skip is having none of it. In a close-up emphasizing his defiance, he replies self-righteously, “Are you waving the flag at me?” This was almost like another bomb falling. J. Edgar Hoover did not like that line; he thought it un-American. Studio head Darryl Zanuck and Fuller had to pay him a visit, two in fact, and explain. Not that the film needed any of that kind of explanation. Fuller’s anti-Communism is like tissue binding the film. It could be torn out—the French did it when they dubbed the dialogue to make it appear as a movie about drug dealing. But for an American audience, the anti-Communism might have seemed offhand, like Skip’s remarks. This is not the hysteria of a crazed film like My Son John (Leo McCarey, 1952), in which Helen Hayes loses her mind when she discovers her son is a Red. Fuller’s Commies are not smooth operators like John in McCarey’s film. They are toughs, unlike Joey, pipe- and cigar-smoking heavies, shown only briefly when Candy, brought by Joey to their meeting, tries to state her confusion about her roll. Close-ups communicate their evil. “Security isn’t interested in all this confusion,” says the scariest Commie. Fuller is imagining the dark undertow of Communist power, briefly but pointedly. Joey is the weak tool; Candy, treated like a ragdoll, the redeemer. Despite the beating she took from Skip (maybe, given Fullerian logic, because of it), the innocent Commie go-between becomes the pickpocket’s lover. Skip delivers a terrific beating to Joey on the tracks of the subway and, thus redeemed, walks off with the girl.

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The critic Michael Rogin accused the film of anarchofascism and, playing on the famous aphorism of Walter Benjamin, said of Pickup on South Street that Fuller turned politics into aesthetics. Fuller was something of an anarchist, but nothing of a fascist, and he is too politically confused to solidly aestheticize politics. Like all his films, Pickup rolls along, full of visual ideas and strange characters (there’s an odd scene in a Chinese restaurant in which a large man gives Moe’s whereabouts to Candy, picking up her bribe money with his chopsticks and stuffing it in his pocket). Fuller makes an aesthetic statement of confused politics which were rooted in Cold War silliness but more solidly in the rough-and-tumble of the gangster-noir genre, resulting in a kind of crazy postmodern pastiche before its time. Unlike Joseph Losey, his view of the world was not rooted in the ethics of diversity and the morality of social justice but in a crazy quilt of patriotism expressed in a visceral, sometimes punch-drunk style, expressive and sometimes risible. In retrospect, Joseph Losey can only barely be called an American director given that the body of his work was made abroad. His status as a permanent expat, however, was caused by the very American experience of the blacklist and his courage to flee its grasp. The films he did make before he left demonstrate a commitment to social issues as well as a cinematic style of thoughtful compositions and tight editing. This is in contrast with Fuller, who blustered through the blacklist and whose films have something of an anarchic view of the world and its cinematic representation. Losey’s films point toward high seriousness, Fuller’s toward a rugged, eccentric style, inimitable and, in a curious way, endearing. Each of them confronted the constraints of the 1950s by using their cinematic imaginations to render the decade as either oppressive or explosive. Losey left no mark on American film, precisely because the body of his work was done abroad. Fuller became a darling of the New Wave and the New German Cinema of the 1970s, appearing in a number of films, including those of Jean-Luc Godard and Wim Wenders. Traces of his style can just be glimpsed in early Tarantino. But Fuller’s mark is stronger than that. The rough violence of contemporary cinema is an outgrowth of—among many other things—the inelegant roughhouse of Fuller’s cinema.

5 “Put an Amen to It”

The Old Masters—Welles, Hitchcock, Ford I am often asked what my favorite film is. It can be an awkward question because my answer, Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 exquisite, lyrical exploration of fascism, The Conformist, is often met with incomprehension. I’m not trying to be pretentious; it’s just not a well-known film. My other choice, Orson Welles’s 1962 adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, is a film that is all but invisible (and was so from its very release). I’m on safer ground when I name Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo. All of these films made up my cinematic education and to which I return with pleasure time and time again. Welles, Hitchcock, and Kubrick were active in the 1950s and made some of their best films during the decade. I’ll discuss Kubrick in the last chapter; here I want to address, however briefly, some of the films made by Hitchcock and one by Welles, and add another old master, John Ford—not my favorite filmmaker—into the mix. Filmmakers I may not like are still important for understanding the decade. John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles started their film careers well before the 1950s: the 1910s for Ford; the 1920s for Hitchcock; and 1941 86

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for Welles. Welles’s career was the most difficult and contentious. Citizen Kane failed as a commercial film because of the enmity of William Randolph Hearst and his newspapers. Racism and a change of ownership at his studio, RKO, got him fired from the documentary he was making in Brazil. He was having too good a time photographing a celebration by people of color, and the studio was having none of it. Meanwhile, while he was away, the editing of The Magnificent Ambersons, his follow-up to Kane, was taken away from him and chopped to pieces. Welles knocked around Hollywood for the rest of the decade, making a few films: The Stranger (1946)—a film about a Nazi attempting to take on an American identity in a small Connecticut town—his only commercial success, The Lady from Shanghai (1947), and Macbeth (1948), a commercial failure. He acted in a few films, was busy with liberal political causes, and then left for Europe, where he made Othello (1951) and Mr. Arkadin (1955), the latter a crazy, powerful film about postwar Europe and the complications of authoritarianism. He continued making films until his death in 1985. The Lady from Shanghai was something of a lark: a noir, replete with a femme fatale in the person of Rita Hayworth, who was in the throes of a separation from Welles, and a plot so complex that it needs Welles’s character, Mike O’Hara, to explain it. Unfortunately, the explanation is offered in voiceover, while the screen is filled with the distracting images of the carnival crazy house that provides the film’s climax. In addition to its mazelike plot, The Lady from Shanghai is full of bizarre characters and more bizarre set pieces, culminating in a shootout in the hall of mirrors in that crazy house. Multiple figures, reflected and refracted, are shot, each shattering multiple times. The complexities of corruption fall apart in agonizing shards. The Stranger was Welles’s film about postwar America, one that he admitted was made to prove he could make a film like anyone else—although it contains enough exploration of cinematic space to give it away as a Welles film. Despite its warning about Nazi infiltration into small-town America, it is something of an innocent film, unaware of the political storm to come because it was made, like The Best Years of Our Lives, on the cusp of political and cultural change from antifascism to anti-Communism. Welles’s Connecticut town proves at first porous to the influence of the Nazi Franz Kindler, who poses as Professor Charles Rankin. He murders the fanatic who follows him from Germany (and the dog who discovers the body), and manages to marry the wife (Loretta Young) of a Supreme Court justice. It’s

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an unlikely scenario, yet Welles manages to create a suspension of disbelief that works because of the very readiness of the characters within the film to accept its patently absurd premise—a moment of postwar innocence perhaps shared by everyone. When Rankin reveals himself at a dinner party attended by the Nazi hunter Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) who is in pursuit of him, his grip, literally, begins to fail. Giving a speech at the dinner about the intractable character of the Germans, someone asks about Karl Marx. “Marx wasn’t a German. Marx was a Jew.” The fantasy is broken, the once innocent family is shown images of the Nazi concentration camps (the first such to be exhibited in a theatrical film), and Rankin, née Kindler, is exposed and falls to his death from a clock tower, skewered by the statue of a Teutonic figure. The innocence of The Stranger would not last long, not in the films Welles made in Europe or the film he made when he returned to the United States in the late ’50s. Touch of Evil (1958) is among his most important, most inventive films, and one he almost had great freedom in making until it was taken from him by Universal, recut and with scenes not directed by Welles added to it. He wrote a forty-page memo trying to save his original cut (some of which was restored in a reissue of the film in the 1990s), but the experience was a crushing defeat that sent Welles back to Europe. The re-editing, even the additional scenes filmed by someone else, could not take away from the visual power of a film about corruption and racism in a U.S. border town. Welles was politically active in the 1940s and took particular interest in the Sleepy Lagoon incident that was the basis of Joseph Losey’s The Lawless. Touch of Evil doesn’t directly address Sleepy Lagoon but instead focuses on a Mexican gang, a Mexican anticorruption official (played by Charlton Heston), and his racist wife (Janet Leigh), all of whose machinations take place in a nightmare space in which the border is represented as a metaphor of moral ambiguity in the age of Joseph McCarthy. Welles’s police captain, Hank Quinlan, bullies his way to pin evidence on innocent people, including, in this instance, when they are in fact guilty. His means are crude and vicious as he lumbers through the twilight of a skewed, unstable landscape. Everyone is tainted in some way, everyone tormented. Touch of Evil is a vision of the underbelly of America as seen by someone who has been away for some time. The vision is dark, but so full of Wellesian energy, so rich in cinematic invention, that it transcends the bleakness of the world it sees. This is the paradox of a film in which form transcends content, but whose content stings with its vision of a darkly corrupted world.

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FIGURE 5.1 The corrupt cop Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) with his partner Menzies

(Joseph Calleia) in Touch of Evil.

Hank Quinlan, something a Joseph McCarthy surrogate, is an ambiguous figure. Like McCarthy, he manufactures evidence against those he wants to be guilty; but he is also at the mercy of those even more corrupt than he is, like the Mexican gang leader, Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff), who gets the ex-alcoholic Quinlan back on booze. At the film’s climax, pursued and pursuing through the dark, fetid canals of the border town, Hank is shot by his loving partner Menzies (Joseph Calleia) and falls into the muck. In the end, he is mourned by the town madam, Tanya (Marlene Dietrich). “He was some kind of a man,” she says. “What does it matter what you say about people?” Welles returned to Europe after the cruelty of the studio that attempted to wreck his film. There he made two of his greatest works, The Trial (1962) and Chimes at Midnight (1965), as well as an unusual and affecting “essay film,” F for Fake (1973). Back in the United States, he worked on and off on a film called The Other Side of the Wind, fragments of which were edited together and shown on Netflix in 2018. Touch of Evil remains, with Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, another film badly mutilated by the studio, RKO in this instance), The Stranger, and, to a lesser extent, that crazed noir, The Lady from Shanghai, the films in which he was most in touch with his native country. All deal with the corruption of power; Touch of Evil understands the instability of the power that corrupted the political culture of the 1950s and ultimately the culture as a whole. But the film understands

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as well the power of imaginative vision that permits us to transcend the swamp that (quite literally) he sees his country sinking into. Welles’s sympathy for the devil—“What does it matter what you say about people?”—may sound a bit jejune, but he is, in fact, seeing clearly through the suffocating air of the decade. “There were only victims,” Dalton Trumbo said, looking back on the decade. Perhaps both Welles and Trumbo were too ready to forgive. Perhaps they wanted, rather, to comprehend, and with comprehension comes understanding. Welles never gave up the fight, filming until the very end. Welles’s cinematic intelligence is the most intriguing, the most boisterous and adventuresome of any of the directors discussed in this book. That he was unable to make more films, that his orneriness and unconventional visual and narrative techniques made him a pariah rather than a welcomed artist, diminished the potentials of American film. He was the enemy of containment, an uncontained filmmaker held back by studio timidity. John Ford never saw the country as a swamp nor did he suffer very much from studio timidity. He was a prolific filmmaker, who began making movies in 1917 and made his last, 7 Women, in 1966, independent yet dependent on the studios to distribute his films. In his Westerns, he celebrated a free and nationalistic United States, built by heroes of the Old West who often sacrificed themselves for the good of the community they helped create. His politics were curious to say the least, and perhaps would be best described in an oxymoron, “liberal-conservative.” In his films he was by turns racist and compassionate, especially toward Native Americans, whom he sometimes saw as noble and suffering and at other times savage and needing to be wiped out. (I will occasionally use “Indians” when appropriate to the films I’m discussing.) African Americans were seen as noble and worthy of respect, as in Sergeant Rutledge (1960), or as banjo-strumming, shuffling stereotypes playing “Dixie,” as in The Sun Shines Bright (1953). The Searchers, his greatest film, is shockingly misogynistic. He played an admirable role during the blacklist. In 1950, Cecil B. DeMille attempted a coup in the Directors’ Guild of America, accusing its president, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, of being a Communist. During a meeting, Ford stood to support Mankiewicz and introduced himself with what has become a famous greeting: “My name’s John Ford. I make Westerns.” Mankiewicz stayed as president, although the fight for doing away with loyalty oaths, which was rankling the guild, was lost. John Ford made Westerns. He worked in other genres as well. Among his ’50s films, The Quiet Man (1952), about an American boxer in Ireland, has been celebrated, despite its inference of rape and the abuse the John

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Wayne character, Sean Thornton, visits on his bride to be, Mary Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara). But my interest here is in Ford’s Westerns, the socalled cavalry trilogy made between 1948 and 1950—Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950)—and his masterpiece, The Searchers (1956). All of these films star John Wayne, who (despite his appearance in other directors’ films) was Ford’s creation, his avatar of American masculinity, his figure of moral rectitude and physical authority— except in The Searchers, where he was not. Of the trilogy, the first, Fort Apache, is the best and most eloquent of the Fordian vision of the West in the late forties. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is the most beautifully and movingly rendered. Rio Grande is the most barren and retrograde, demonstrating a retreat to a more conservative view of the world in concert with the growing repression in Hollywood. Rio Grande was made at the beginning of the Korean War, and it is probably no coincidence that Ford’s very next work was a navy-sponsored propaganda documentary, This Is Korea! Speculation is that the central event in Rio Grande, the cavalry forcing the Indians to the opposite side of the river, is an unsubtle parallel of the army attempting to drive Communist forces back into China. The screenwriter for Rio Grande was James Kevin McGuinness, a conservative, one of the founders of the Motion Picture Association for the Preservation of American Ideals, and a friendly witness for HUAC. Joseph McBride thinks that Ford hired McGuiness, a friend, because he was fired from MGM, perhaps for “anti-Communist zealotry.” Ford could and did bend with the ideological winds, which makes him hard to pin down, unless we take each film as a reflection of a conflicted creator. This makes his Westerns a fantasy of America’s past refracted through the political currents of the present. They create a mythology in which heroism, cowardice, racism, and misogyny change as in a shifting light. The cavalry trilogy winds its way around the exploits of the post–Civil War military, following the career—though in different incarnations—of John Wayne’s character: Capt. Kirby York in Fort Apache, Capt. Nathan Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Lt. Col. Kirby Yorke in Rio Grande. Capt. York plays something of a minor role in Fort Apache. The central character in that film is Henry Fonda’s Lt. Col. Owen Thursday, a martinet, bitter at his banishment to the forsaken outpost of Fort Apache and unyielding in his hatred of Native Americans. The result of his narcissistic stubbornness is a defeat of the military and the death of Thursday in a battle that echoes Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn.

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FIGURE 5.2 The martinet Thursday (Henry Fonda) has his first confrontation with Capt. Kirby York (John Wayne) in Fort Apache.

Thursday’s flaw is not so much that he is an unyielding commander but that he is unable to come into harmony with the community of soldiers and wives that constitute the fort and make it livable. Indeed, his first entrance into that community interrupts a dance in honor of George Washington’s birthday, the dance being a Fordian trope of pleasant order in a chaotic environment as well as, in this instance, a patriotic celebration. Thursday introduces chaos by walking stiffly into the celebration as the dancers stop and stand at attention. He refuses to shake the hand offered him by Capt. Collingwood (George O’Brian), whom he later removes from his command and who is killed in the battle. The reasons for their mutual dislike are never stated. A very different entrance and welcome is offered to 2nd Lt. Michael Shannon O’Rourke (John Agar), the young soldier who will become romantically involved with Thursday’s daughter, Philadelphia (Shirley Temple). That scene is played with perfect Fordian sentimentality: O’Rourke’s father, played by Ward Bond, sits in his humble room reading (I presume) the Bible when O’Rourke comes in. His father looks up and quietly registers his delight. But instead of instantly greeting his son, he turns for a moment back to his book, closes it, looks up and over to his son at the door, and finally

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gets up and welcomes him, only to turn away to blow his nose and hide his tears. Irish sentimentality (not to mention horseplay, fistfighting, and drinking) is a mainstay of Ford’s films: “This place seems to be full of O’Rourkes,” Thursday says in a barely repressed, anti-Irish aside during a muster in which he orders his men to dress correctly and behave according to regulations. (A bit later, in what amounts to a racial slur, he addresses Michael O’Rourke as Murphy.) Thursday is so knotted up in his bitterness and resentment that he antagonizes everyone, most dangerously the Apache themselves, and his misunderstanding of them will destroy him. Wayne’s Capt. York tries to reason with him, to make him understand what the Native Americans need and want to ensure that he can make peace with them. There is a nice composition in which York and Cochise (Miguel Inclán) touch hands in a gesture of peace, while, in the foreground, one of Cochise’s men holds a rifle as if in premonition of the battle to come. Thursday will have none of it. He defies York and the word he gave to a “breech-cladded savage.” He will not yield to getting rid of Meacham (Grant Withers), the local white trader who is killing the natives with cheap whiskey. Once again, Thursday interrupts a dance, ordering the soldiers to attack the Apache against all evidence that this is a mistaken and deadly decision. In an act of humiliation, after York threatens Thursday to a duel, Thursday sends him to the rear, inadvertently saving him from certain slaughter with the rest of the troops. In a dramatic finale to the battle, York has circled the wagons against an expected Apache assault, following their slaughter of Thursday and the remnants of his platoon. The Apache ride up en masse, and York drops his sword. The Apache do not attack and disappear in a cloud of dust. The fade to black that follows might well end the film, but Ford suffers what can only be described as a failure of will. He creates a coda, in which York, now the commander of the fort, stands by a portrait of Thursday. The newspapermen he’s talking to describe another painting they have seen, this one in Washington: “There were massed columns of Apaches in their war paint and feather bonnets . . . and here was Thursday, leading his men in that heroic charge.” “Correct in every detail,” York lies. He stands by the window on which Ford superimposes the troops riding by. As he leaves for the battle, he greets O’Rourke and Philadelphia, now with a child. York dons a cap with a white cloth behind it, the same as Thursday wore. There’s an insert of Philadelphia and the child looking brave, and the troops march off to kill the Apache, singing “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

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“Those who see irony and ambiguity here must concede, I think,” wrote Robin Wood, “that they are arguing against the tone of the scene and trusting the tale, not the artist. Certainly, the ending does violence to the previous development of the Wayne character and to the whole drift of the preceding narrative.” There is no irony or ambiguity here. Ford created a pro–Native American Western that told of an unyielding martinet who brought death to his troops and then felt it necessary to pivot and take it all back. “I take it all back,” he seems to say. “What is made up, is really the truth.” Of course, coming at the end of WWII, Ford could not possibly make an antimilitary film. He believed, most certainly, that things could go wrong under the wrong leadership; but, even in such a case, legends of history if not the facts must prevail. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) did not kill the outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), as everyone believes. The killing was done by Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who has exiled himself and his black servant, Pompey (Woody Strode), to the desert. Despite Stoddard’s attempt to tell a newspaperman the truth, he is rebuffed: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” In Fort Apache, the statement might be, “This is the military, sir, and it must be honored even if the honor is a lie.” For Ford, the fantasist of the West, legends must exist in order to uphold the fragility of the fantasy. Just as the gorgeous compositions of riders against the rocks and sky of Monument Valley—Ford’s location for all his Westerns—belie the primitive conditions of the settlers of the West, so the power of those compositions belies the truths that occur in their shadows. Ford’s Westerns, with the possible exception of The Searchers, are lies, but we need the lies because they are so beautiful. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is considerably less fraught than Fort Apache and revels in two things. The first is its formal beauty, in which Ford uses color sometimes expressionistically, as when John Wayne’s Capt. Nathan Brittles visits his wife’s grave and talks to her about his pending retirement. The scene is bathed in a red glow, signifying sunset, but the glow is exaggerated to create a mood, to simply revel in the color. The second is Brittles himself. John Wayne’s character is made to age considerably since the character of Kirby York that he played in Fort Apache—mustached and gray—and with only a few days left in the military, he is busy watching out for Native American tribes, who are briefly feeling their power after Little Bighorn. The body of the film is made up of the troops marching across Monument Valley, at one point through a raging thunderstorm, tracking and fighting

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FIGURE 5.3 Capt. Nathan Brittles (John Wayne) sits by the gravesite of his wife in She Wore

a Yellow Ribbon.

the Indians. A love triangle develops between two of the soldiers and a woman inexplicably included in the scouting party. Everything in the film leads up to the sentimental departure of Brittles. “Old soldiers . . .” he says at one point, as he begins a speech. The phrase draws on the ballad about old soldiers never dying but just fading away. A few years after the film appeared, General Douglas MacArthur would use the phrase in his farewell to Congress after having been fired by President Truman. In the course of the film, there is the usual horseplay and a fight (there is almost always a brawl in a Ford Western) with the drunken Quincannon, played by Victor McLaglen (McLaglen acted the drunk in all three films, under the name of Mulcahy in Fort Apache and Quincannon again in Rio Grande). The drunken Irishman and his brawling don’t so much stop the action of the film as round it out. Drunken brawling seems to Ford to be an icon of fun-loving masculinity—not so much a rite of passage as simply a right of natural expression. Its excess and repetitiveness, however, come across ultimately as a foolish obsession of a silly old man.

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As one of his last actions, Capt. Brittles meets with Pony That Walks (played by a Native American, Chief John Big Tree) in an attempt to stop another Indian war. Both are old soldiers, both unyielding. The scene looks forward to the confrontation between Ethan Edwards and Chief Scar in The Searchers, but in this case, it is a friendly confrontation between two aged warriors whose quest for peace is fruitless. The Indian tribes join together. They savagely destroy the gunrunners trying to exploit them for rifles. “All chant of war,” a voice-over tells us as we see the Indians gathering, “war to drive the white man forever from the red man’s hunting ground.” Brittles, in one of his last acts, has his men humiliate the Indians by driving away their horses, becoming in the end closer to Thursday than York. His actions result in no casualties, but the Native Americans are chased back to their reservation. Brittles rides off into the glowing red sunset, ready to assume his retirement, but he is stopped by a rider holding Brittles’s promotion to lieutenant colonel. Brittles remains in the military with endorsements from all levels, including Ulysses S. Grant. And then a typical Fordian moment happens. Brittles is pleased with the high-ranking endorsements, but Sgt. Tyree (Ben Johnson) adds that it would be complete if Robert E. Lee had also signed the promotion letter. “Wouldn’t have been bad,” Brittles says. Ford cannot allow the Civil War to be forgotten, or forgo a nod to the South. It occurs over and over again in his films. It is part of the complex of Fordian sentimentality and conservatism. He seems to hold tight to the “lost cause.” She Wore a Yellow Ribbon ends with a dance, a final visit of Brittles to his wife’s grave, and a voice-over that accompanies images of the troops offering a patriotic salute to the “dog-faced soldiers,” whose fighting formed the United States. The voice-over does not say that the formation of the United States was done by destroying Native Americans. Fighting Indians is of course the most common trope in Westerns, along with outlaws who disrupt the peaceful Europeanization of the frontier (that’s the theme of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). John Ford’s attitude toward Native Americans was, if not complex, at least ambivalent. He obviously knows they were beaten, that they lost, but he is obsessed with why and how. He continually searches for answers as to whether they were good or bad, savages or victims. His ambivalence is at its most interesting in Fort Apache and curious in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. It is unambivalent in Rio Grande. For reasons stated earlier, Rio Grande bears the barren stamp of a conservative imagination. In this last film of the trilogy, Little Bighorn has been

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all but avenged as the tired troops return to the fort, their anxious wives searching for familiar faces. Native Americans are bound with ropes. But the Apache attack and cross the river, while the troops, led by John Wayne’s Lt. Col. Kirby Yorke (wearing a mustache and beard reminiscent of Owen Thursday in Fort Apache), have been forbidden to pursue them. The military melodrama is mixed with the domestic, as Yorke’s son Jeff (Claude Jarman Jr.) and wife Kathleen (Maureen O’Hara) come to stay with him at the fort. Jeff Yorke must prove himself in a fistfight, but Kathleen only needs to show her loyalty to her husband. That she harbors a long-lasting love for him is figured in a nicely done scene in which she pulls out a music box that plays “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” while she looks off wistfully and goes out of focus. Kathleen is a woman of the South, and, during the Civil War, Union troops burned down her plantation. Yorke carries around a Confederate ten dollar bill as a memento of their past. Once again, Ford’s sentimentality about the South overcomes him, as if he regrets its loss or simply wishes to keep its memory alive. The myths of the Confederacy are hard to shake off. For Ford, they were part of the warp and warping of American history, rarely to be questioned, always to be sentimentalized. Perhaps it isn’t too much of a stretch to suppose that sentimentality over the South goes hand in hand with Ford’s sentimental view of women. Kathleen and Yorke are serenaded by the troops, and Kathleen proves her worth by doing the troops’ laundry. Sentimentality aside, it is the fight against the Indian tribes that counts. The general frees Yorke to attack the Apache, who have captured the children of the fort and taken them across the river where, drunk, they carry on dancing and drumming until they are routed by the troops on their barely legal mission. Yorke is wounded by an arrow during the fight and his son, proving his worth, pulls it out of his father’s chest. The military prevails; the nation, figured in the children and in Yorke’s son, are safe. The band plays “Dixie.” Horseplay is over for the time being. In the real world, the Korean War was heating up. As I said, there is simply no political stability in Ford’s work, that he can pivot his ideology—imaged through his treatment of Native Americans— on a whim. The Searchers once more figures Native Americans as brutal savages; the Comanche kill, take scalps, and abduct women and make them their “wives.” But there is a major difference in this film that lifts it above the rest of Ford’s work. John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is as savage in his hatred of Native Americans as they are of the white settlers of Texas after

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the Civil War. The Searchers (written by Frank Nugent) is a complex film, the only one in Ford’s canon in which moral ambiguity is fully examined, and where the beauty of Monument Valley contains a canker in the form of an obsessed, driven racist on a five-year quest to kill his niece, Debbie (Natalie Wood), who has been taken by Chief Scar (Henry Brandon). The Searchers is also Ford’s most circumspect work where glances, gestures, and even raw emotion take the place of the broad strokes and horseplay of many of his other films. There is only one fistfight, and alcohol consumption is at a minimum. A seriousness pervades the film, with only a few bad choices. Some scenes are played out with glances merely, as in the early sequence where Ethan’s sister-in-law, Martha (Dorothy Jordan), caresses Ethan’s coat in a room to screen right. Rev. Capt. Samuel Johnston Clayton (Ward Bond) sips coffee in the main room, looking purposefully ahead, aware of what is happening—an act of repressed desire—but tactfully withholding his glance. Deep into their quest, as Ethan tries to slaughter a herd of buffalo so the Comanche will have nothing to eat, they come upon the cavalry, who have attacked the tribe and rounded up Comanche women. In a room with frightened, hysterical young white girls, they hope to find Debbie. “It’s hard to believe they’re white,” one of the soldiers says. “They ain’t white anymore,” says Ethan, “they’re Comanche.” As he turns to leave, Ford cuts and dollies into a close-up of his face gazing at the women. The brim of his hat darkens his eyes. His expression is a remarkable mix of anger, fear, disgust, and hatred. This is a rare moment of quiet from Ethan, who other wise has no tact, no control over his emotions. An unrepentant Confederate, possibly a bank robber, he rides from the bright desert into the dark warmth of his brother’s house. He makes a racist comment about his family’s adopted, partCherokee son, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), and reluctantly takes him along on his hunt for Debbie after the Comanche destroy his family. Driven by hatred, he and Martin move through a hostile landscape on a quest driven by Ethan’s desire to kill his polluted niece. His obsession and racism are unyielding and he tends to pass it on. The ugliest sequence of the film occurs as a would-be humorous interlude in the search for Debbie. Ethan and Marty offer stupid trinkets and hats to a group of friendly Native Americans as a jaunty tune plays on the soundtrack. Marty discovers he has purchased a wife with his gifts. Her name is Look, and when she tries to bed down with him, he kicks her and she rolls down a hill. Ethan laughs uproariously. Look later turns up among the dead Native Americans that the cavalry have massacred.

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FIGURE 5.4 “They ain’t white.” Ethan Edwards’s (John Wayne) confused, angry gaze at the women taken from the Comanche.

As many times as I have seen this episode, I am revolted by it. True, it can be explained as part of Ethan’s view of Native Americans as subhuman, a view he passes on to his part-Cherokee nephew. Perhaps Ford himself found the sequence repellent but necessary to his narrative—perhaps as necessary as the prolonged scene in The Quiet Man where the American Sean Thornton drags his Irish wife, Mary Kate Danaher, across the fields. There are strong women in Ford’s films—the women who keep the community together in Fort Apache are proof of that. But there is an undercurrent of misogyny that, like the fistfights and alcohol consumption, Ford finds amusing. Perhaps to a fifties audience, they were. I find this side of Ford puerile. The marvel is that when a film as a whole works as well as The Searchers, episodes like spousal abuse tend to be swallowed up in the perfection of the whole. (This is not the case in The Quiet Man, where drunkenness, brawling, and abuse of women are an abiding premise.) The consistency of the character of Ethan Edwards is what keeps The Searchers whole. His uncorruptible obsession manages to corrupt the landscape as well as the people he encounters. When he finally confronts Chief Scar, he discovers his double in anger and hostility. Scar is killed by Marty, not Ethan, and when the cavalry attack, Ethan finally takes Scar’s scalp, his penultimate revenge. There is a moment of redemption. In the end, Ethan doesn’t kill Debbie but scoops her into his arms as he did his

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FIGURE 5.5 The beautiful, uninhabitable landscape of Ford’s Monument Valley in

The Searchers.

niece when he first arrived at the Edwardses’ home. The film ends with the famous doubling of its opening: the family gathers on the porch as Marty and Ethan, Debbie in his arms, come home. But there is no home for Ethan. At the beginning of the film, the door is open to let Ethan in from the desert. At the end, it is closed to keep him out; the prisoner of the desert (which is the French title of the film) is cursed “to wander forever between the winds.” At his very best, John Ford is the poet of lost souls who turn the desert into a community which they then must leave. His mythical Western landscape embraces and repels at the same time; it is too rugged, too perfectly formed by nature, and then captured by Ford’s remarkable compositions which cannot possibly contain human habitation. At his worst, Ford is the drunken Irishman in love with barfights and male horseplay (and, in his workaday world, a serial abuser of actors), so that the viewer is forced to pick and choose, to take the good bits and try to ignore the unpleasant ones. With the exception of a few extraordinary films, it might be too much to ask. Hitchcock asks a great deal of us: he wants complete attention and response, sometimes fear, even, occasionally, awe. In his best work, he allows little room to pick and choose because his films create a kind of hypnotic attention; you cannot take your eyes off them. There are no embarrassing moments or foolish horseplay that make you wish you could fast-forward.

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With some important exceptions, like the crop-dusting and Mount Rushmore sequences in North by Northwest (1959), there are relatively few grand vistas. Hitchcock’s landscapes, true to his origins in German Expressionist cinema, are internal, or rather the internal is externalized. Hitchcock started his career in the early 1920s, and in his best work concentrated on films about disturbed, often murderous psychological states. The power plays of sexual manipulation fascinated him, as did the ability to portray these manipulations in tightly composed and edited films in which each frame and each camera movement contains important information: the details about the lives and torments of his characters. I want to concentrate on the three towering works that Hitchcock made in a burst of creative energy that would have a lasting influence on the history of cinema. Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960) are Cold War films, even though only North by Northwest has an overt political theme. Strangers on a Train (1951) bruised slightly against the political climate. Set in part in Washington, D.C., where the murderous Bruno (Robert Walker) infiltrates the staid world of a senator (Leo G. Carroll), his daughter (Ruth Roman), and her tennis-playing fiancé, Guy (Farley Granger), the film merely hints at the canker in the body politic. Bruno is the dark id that destroys complacency, corrupt and corrupting (his implied homosexuality is of a piece with the belief that homosexuality was more potentially traitorous than Communism). But Strangers on a Train is not completely satisfying because, it seems to me, its many ideas are not sufficiently thought out. This is not true of The Wrong Man. Made in 1956, it is an allegory of the blacklist. A quiet, passive man, a bass player at the glamorous (in the ’50s) Stork Club, Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda) is picked up by the police and accused of robbery. He is paraded before his various accusers, humiliated, and jailed. Although proven innocent when the real robber miraculously appears, Manny is scarred by his experience. Unlike the actual blacklistees, Manny has no way of escaping his humiliation ritual; he cannot name names, only be named by his accusers. Like Psycho a few years later, The Wrong Man is shot in claustrophobic black and white. Its pace is slow and deliberate. Along with Bernard Herrmann’s score, it thrums like Manny’s bass playing or, more likely, the relentless beat of Manny’s humiliation and isolation, like the trial that drones on until a juror jumps up asking if he has to listen to all this. A mistrial is declared. His jail cell spins around him as he fails to keep a grip on his panic. His wife goes mad, her mind like “the dark side of the moon,” the

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psychiatrist tells Manny. Only prayer seems to save him, though this seems like an ironic coincidence, a devotion that could not save him until the last moment. Even the “happy ending,” with Manny and Rose (Vera Miles) freed from their burdens, seems forced and uncomfortable. Like the accused in the HUAC investigations, Manny is crushed by his impotence in the face of everyone who has already made up their minds. It is not an experience easily forgotten, easily repressed. Like The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho are about containment, but they go much further in their examination of the constriction of the male psyche, the attempt to erase the feminine, and the folding inward of sexual desire resulting in the return of the repressed in violent form. North by Northwest is a comedy thriller, but its apparent lack of seriousness doesn’t hide the fact that the central female character, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), is both an operative and a captive of U.S. Intelligence. She is pimped out to spy on Phillip Vandamm (James Mason), who has stolen microfilm, and plays Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) for a fool until he is almost killed by a crop duster trying to shoot him down in a cornfield. A comedy, yes. Vandamm is ultimately captured, and his partner, Leonard (Martin Landau), falls to his death. The film ends with the lovers embracing in the upper berth of a train as it plunges into a tunnel; but to get there, they had to endure the Cold War intrigue of false identities, attempted murder, and a near-fatal chase over a national monument (not Monument Valley as in Ford’s films but Mount Rushmore). In this film, the central characters manage to outrun Cold War entanglements. The microfilm, even more than in Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, is a McGuffin, a device to set the narrative in motion but not really its central concern. In North by Northwest, Hitchcock is interested in the chase, in the mistaken identities, in the manipulation of the woman. Manipulation is a form of containment; it gives power to the manipulator and enfolds the victim in his embrace. Eve Kendall is held both by the CIA (or whatever “alphabet soup” agency has her as an agent) and the spies. As a sexual tool, she is contained even more. Roger is in sexual thrall to Eve and, because Vandamm believes Roger is a man named George Kaplan, his very identity is held by the spy as well as the government. His “real’ identity is contained within himself, since no one will believe who he really is, and he himself becomes lost amid the prairie fields of intrigue and spycraft. Near the end, after all has been revealed by Eve’s handler, after she fakes shooting Roger in the middle of a crowd in the Mount Rushmore cafeteria, Roger

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FIGURE 5.6 A painful confrontation in North by Northwest. Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) believes Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) is the consort of spy Vandamm (James Mason). She is, but she is also a government spy.

goes to Vandamm’s house near the monument. The house is an odd Frank Lloyd Wright affair, and once Roger gets in, he views Eve from a high perch, making eye contact as Vandamm and his lover, Leonard (Martin Landau), plot to get rid of her by throwing her from their plane “over water.” Hitchcock does a lovely camera move, craning and rolling over the group as if it were the plane itself, while Roger looks on, helpless for the moment. Because it is a comedy, everything works out in the end. Roger manages to pull Eve up from off the monument and, in a clever manipulation of closeups and arm pulling, into an upper berth, where, we hope, sex is finally had. The train plunging into the tunnel indicates as much. Comedy or not, in North by Northwest, Hitchcock has succeeded in making the American landscape a place of fear (not terror, that comes later in the claustrophobic world of Psycho) where deviousness and physical danger lurk. It is a place corrupted by power and the manipulation that power allows to take place. Power. The three films in question are concerned in dif ferent ways with how power is used, abused, and turned against those who have it. For Hitchcock, power is containment, and those who have it or employ it suffer for it. Eve and Roger are subject to it and survive. Judy/Madeleine (Kim Novak) in Vertigo and Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) in Psycho are destroyed by it. In these two films, those who have power are also destroyed. Vertigo focuses on a man so sexually repressed, so obsessive and contained, that he

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FIGURE 5.7 Looking into the abyss. Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) in Vertigo.

must build a woman from scratch, or at least from his memory of a woman who never existed but who he thought she was when he first saw her. Scottie (James Stewart) is an all-around reduced personality, weak and without resources. He is set up by a wealthy businessman to follow his wife, Madeleine, who the businessman then kills, but not before he makes Scottie believe she is possessed by the ghost of a long-dead woman. Scottie becomes obsessed with the woman, and it is he who is held in thrall by a ghost. When he discovers the girl Judy, who played Madeleine, he forces Judy to become her, even though that “her” never existed. Madeleine plunges to her death from the top of a mission tower (this is not a comedy and there is no hand to help her from falling), and Scottie is left gazing into the abyss of his own emptiness. A bare-bones plot summary does not convey the profound resonance of Vertigo. Hitchcock, with the help of Bernard Herrmann’s extraordinary score, created a hypnotic film, a threnody to male angst and its impossibly destructive dreams, dreams of objectification and delusion, nightmares of falling into the grave of one’s own despair. The film is not only the crown of Hitchcock’s work but the crown of fifties American film. Of all the decade’s films that dealt with the ambiguities and anxieties of masculinity, Vertigo, in its dreamlike way, shows masculinity to be a sham that exists only as it objectifies and manipulates women, creating its own self-destruction in the process.

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When Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) tells Scottie his tall tale about his wife being haunted by the spirit of the long dead Carlotta, he is positioned in front of a window, outside of which the cranes of heavy industry—images of power—provide a background. As he talks, he moves above his victim, rendering him small and vulnerable before us. By such manipulations of his mise-en-scène, Hitchcock tries to let us know in advance the downfall of his subject. Caught up in a dream, he drives the streets of San Francisco and follows Madeleine’s every move, not knowing that her moves are being choreographed by Elster, who has hired her to lead Scottie on a morbid hunt. Scottie is a willing victim, so easily enthralled. In a series of set pieces, Hitchcock allows us to see everything Scottie is blind to. He manipulates light and shadow, color and darkness, even the movement of the camera and editing following Scottie’s gaze back and forth from Madeleine’s head where, in a museum, she gazes at the portrait of Carlotta, the ghost who is supposed to possess her. The twist of her hair becomes an obsessive image. Madeleine allows Scottie to fall in love with her. After all, he saves her from drowning when she throws herself into San Francisco bay, takes her unconscious body home, undresses her, and, it is ever-so-subtly suggested, makes love to her. But necrophilia has become just one expression of Scottie’s obsession. He is, after all, haunted by a woman, taking the place of a dead woman who, he is told, is haunted by the specter of another dead woman. Scottie is unattracted to the one “real,” living woman in the film, his friend Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes). She ultimately disappears from the grayness of Scottie’s mind, unavailable to his psychosis. The darkness is embedded within the film’s elegiac aura, grimmer still when (he believes) Madeleine falls to her death and Scottie, after a night of dreadful nightmares of falling, falling, falling, becomes catatonic. The film neatly divides itself into two parts. The first is Scottie’s pursuit and romantic attachment to the woman he believes is Madeleine. The second, when he awakes from his catatonia, is his psychotic pursuit of Judy, who was Madeleine and who, when Scottie finds her, he forces to become Madeleine again. And she dies again. Vertigo is an elegiac poem of power misused for the end of destruction. It is a yearning dream of the collapse of male desire, which is turned into a nightmare of obsession when that desire attempts to create an image of a woman that negates the woman entirely. In that negation is the ruin of the self, of the male ego, which, seeking the end of its containment, finds itself contained in its own nightmare. Destruction is also the province of Psycho, but this film is not a threnody. Filmed in stark black and white, tightly composed, with unnerving

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camera movements, it confuses all the false comforts of gender security. Psycho is the nightmare at the end of the 1950s, the creepy return of the repressed in an outburst of violence never seen before on the screen and a merging of male and female that erases gender difference in one psychotic coup. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) and his mother become one, and they leave us in the complex last shot of the film with the grin of absolute madness, unknowable, indecipherable, and forever threatening. Viewers (and Hitchcock, who never made as good a film again) have never quite recovered from Psycho. It haunts the screen and our consciousness, and blistered the shell of containment that was already becoming frayed by the time it appeared. Psycho is constructed as an elaborate practical joke, a game between filmmaker and viewer that trusts the latter will not get it until the end. Hitchcock asks us to look and look while denying us what’s right before our eyes and ears. We are led astray by a series of feints, the first being our scopophilic gaze at a pair of lovers having a tawdry afternoon assignation in a cheap hotel. It is the most depressing scene in the film and a foreshadowing, as we eavesdrop on the two talking about a domestic life with mother’s picture on the mantel, which Sam (John Gavin) suggests they will have to turn to the wall when they make love. References to mother abound in the film, the first climax occurring during the scene between Marion Crane ( Janet Leigh) and Norman Bates in the parlor behind the motel office after “Mother” has yelled at her son for being attracted to his new guest. There, with Hitchcock’s camera looking with wonder and fear at Norman’s face, surrounded by his stuffed birds, the story is told. Mother goes a little mad sometimes, but is harmless as one of those stuffed birds. Why not put her someplace? Marion asks. Norman loses it, peering menacingly at Marion and at us. People always mean well, Norman says, “they cluck their thick tongues and shake their heads and suggest so very delicately . . .” He asks if she knows what goes on in an institution, “laughing and tears and cruel eyes staring at you . . .” They part amicably enough; Marion goes to her room and takes a shower and Mother slashes her to pieces. We might know at this point that Mother and Norman are one and the same if Hitchcock were not so clever at dodging it. When we see the film again (and again), the joke is clear. But at first look, we need to follow Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) into the cellar to confront the hollow eyes of Mother’s preserved corpse. Finally, after the psychiatrist offers his rational explanation of Norman’s state of mind—gender-fluid to say the least—we

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FIGURE 5.8 Madness and violence. The triple dissolve that ends Psycho.

get to peer into his face, his maniacal grin, the look of inviolate and irrational madness. Is this the way Hitchcock summed up the decade? The film, after all, was made during the last months of 1959, and despite the joke at its heart, it is a grim, dark recognition of the inevitable and inexplicable visitation of violence. Not the violence against the mind and spirit—this he had already addressed in The Wrong Man—but violence against the body. The film reaches beyond the postwar period and shades into a rough allegory of Nazism and the camps. I don’t think this is a stretch. The deadly shower and the triple dissolve that ends the film—Norman’s manic grin, Mother’s skull, and a chain pulling a car out of the swamp—are an assault of ugly, brutal violence. What was a joke becomes a visual attack on the ner vous system and a reminder of the darkness abroad in the world. Such were the terrors of WWII and the postwar period—physical, political, cultural, psychological. At the end of Vertigo, Scottie is left staring into the abyss. At the end of Psycho, it is we who do the staring.

6 Looking to the Skies

Science Fiction in the 1950s Psycho ends with a terrifying look into the abyss of madness, a sum of the fears of the postwar world. But it was hardly the only film to trade in cultural fear, just the best. Postwar traumas were many. WWII ended with the blast of two atomic bombs over Japan. Before that, Germany was using guided missiles to bomb England. Werner Von Braun, who helped develop the V-2 rocket, was brought over to the United States after the war to help with the American rocket program. The death camps were demonic technologies of murder. When the transition was made from antifascism to anti-Communism, threats about the infiltration of “alien” ideologies and “Communist subversion” that were waiting to take over our democracy became part of the national discourse. Technologies of destruction and alien ideologies were planted in the minds of postwar Americans, and they were frightened. Then there were things from the sky. In 1947, a military weather balloon came down at an air force base near Roswell, New Mexico. The rumor and conspiracy mill ground out a story that what fell from the sky 108

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was a spaceship, a flying saucer containing an alien life-form. Many were ready believe, and the culture was primed for what became one of its favorite postwar pastimes, spotting flying saucers, as well as one of the most popular film genres of the decade. Science fiction films were a displacement of fears—a sublimation, even— into a wondrous display of creatures and monsters, from above or below. As figured in individual films, science fiction was often a low-budget priority for the studios, and it too often showed. But there were also some highbudget, carefully thought out, and intelligently filmed examples of the genre, creating a variety of films that incarnated what Susan Sontag called “the imagination of disaster.” “These films,” she states quite simply, “reflect worldwide anxiety, and they serve to allay them. . . . In the figure of the monster from outer space [or beneath the sea], the freakish, the ugly, and the predatory all converge—and provide a fantasy target for righteous bellicosity to discharge itself, and for the aesthetic enjoyment of suffering and disaster.” Her only error in judging these films is to deny that they have any political relevance. They do, and it is profound. One of the first science fiction films of the decade was less about disaster and more about science. Destination Moon, directed by Irving Pichel and produced by George Pal in 1950, set an initial standard for high production values and quasi-scientific accuracy. The roots of the film go as far back as the French magician Georges Méliès’s fantasy A Voyage to the Moon in 1902, but without the rocket landing in the eye of the man in the moon or the whimsical creatures that cavort around the scientists. Destination Moon imagines the plans and trials of astronauts achieving the first moon landing some nineteen years before NASA succeeded in doing so, including space walks and extravehicular activity. Destination Moon influenced later nonalien science fiction productions such as Robert Altman’s Countdown (1967), Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995), and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2010), each of which focused both on the characters involved in the mission to the stars and the mysteries of interplanetary flight itself. Even Destination Moon’s opening credits, rolling in an angle from bottom to top, had an influence, echoed in the opening crawl of the Star Wars films. The extravehicular space walk to fix a broken radar unit, resulting in one of the astronauts slipping off into space, is seen again in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the film that summarized and transcended all of ’50s science fiction. Destination Moon touches briefly on postwar politics and rivalries with the Soviet Union, and it praises private enterprise over government

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intervention. But mostly it concerns itself with the mechanics of space flight, at least as they were imagined at the time. Despite its influence on a number of later science fiction films, its sober, workmanlike view of spaceflight quickly fell into the minority of science fiction output during the rest of the decade. Creatures predominated; monsters came out of the sea; saucers landed, disgorging aliens. The Roswell affair surely influenced The Thing from Another World released in 1951, directed by Christian Nyby and produced by Howard Hawks, whose hand is clearly present in the direction. “We finally got one. We found a flying saucer,” the men exclaim as they join hands in a circle and, with a crash of music on the soundtrack, measure the immense ship frozen under the ice. The location is an Arctic military base, and this sets the stage not only for the action of this film but the role of the military in almost all the science fiction films to come. The military will be our saviors or, rarely, as in The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951) or War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953), completely powerless. The military men in The Thing are engaged in pleasurable, teasing camaraderie. The playfulness of men in groups is a mark of a Howard Hawks film, going all the way back to Only Angels Have Wings (1939), where Cary Grant runs an airfreight company in the wilds of South America. As in that and so many other Hawks films, there is a smart woman who proves her worth and value to the group of men. In The Thing it is Nikki (Margaret Sheridan), who the men, in a bit of sexual horseplay, tie back-to-back to her reluctant lover, their captain, Patrick Hendry (Kenneth Tobey). But things grow very serious when the men discover the flying saucer, which they manage, by accident, to blow up. Left in the frozen ruins is a creature, who they chop out and bring to the base, covering it with an electric blanket. This bad mistake allows the Thing, a blood-drinking, giant, humanoid vegetable (played by James Arness, who would go on to play Marshal Dillon on TV’s Gunsmoke for twenty years) to emerge. It rages through the base, kills the dogs and drinks their blood, and survives being set ablaze. Its arm, detached by a door, ejects seeds which the scientist grow in their lab using blood to nourish the seedlings. The Thing’s arm grows back. (This was the sequence that sent me fleeing in fright from the movie theater at age eleven.) “What do you do with a vegetable?” Nikki is asked as the crew despairs, threatened with destruction. “Boil it. Stew it. Bake it. Fry it,” she tells them. They decide on the latter and, in a truly hair-raising sequence, electrocute the Thing in the dark spaces of the base, shrinking it to a small pile of dust. In The Thing, the military men act with instinctual intelligence. They

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FIGURE 6.1 Capt. Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) and his men try to keep the Thing (James Arness) from entering the base, resulting in the severing of the monster’s arm.

have time for horseplay, but know how to confront a threat, even if their salvation is suggested by a woman. But The Thing is a Cold War film, and despite the competent military there is the threat not only from the space alien but from within the group as well. The chief scientist at the base, Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) is a cold, hyperrational intellectual who wears a Russian-style hat. His wish to learn from the creature puts the whole group in danger. He is so taken by the monster, he cannot see its threat, only its vegetable superiority. “No pain or pleasure as we know it. No emotions, no heart. Our superior in every way.” No heart, no emotions— the Thing might as well be a Communist and Dr. Carrington a Communist sympathizer. He attempts to confront the monster just before the men are about to pull the switch to fry it. He pulls the plug on the electrical generator and begs the Thing to understand that he’s a friend who wants to understand him. For his pains, the Thing swats him away. Present among the men is a journalist, who continually tries to get a photograph of the monster and fails every time. What we see as viewers is invisible to the world of the fiction that constitutes The Thing from Another

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World. This allows the film a full measure of paranoia, and the plea from the journalist at film’s end assures us of the immanence of danger that, in the film, is known only to the men on the base: “Watch the skies everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies.” This is the great fear ginned up by most ’50s science fiction: that we cannot see the threats against us, however much they are adumbrated in the films. John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of The Thing is more explicit, more seen. This thing is an alien-borne disease of the blood—HIV and AIDS were on people’s minds—which turns victims into destructive monsters. Where Nyby and Hawks saw the isolated military community come together to destroy the alien, Carpenter saw a paranoid world, in which no one could be sure of who was infected. The paranoia that lurked in much ’50s science fiction was about an unknown force about to overtake us. It was given the name of Communism and allowed the generation of another paranoia created by the Communist hunters of HUAC and Joe McCarthy. The same year as The Thing from Another World, its opposite appeared, a thoughtful, somewhat liberal science fiction film, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Robert Wise’s film is a Cold War Christian allegory in which a space visitor arrives in Washington, D.C., to warn the Earth to live in peace. Klaatu is a dapper, human-looking alien (played by the British actor Michael Rennie), who pretends to be a man named Carpenter and whose initials are J. C. (To emphasize the Christian allegory, Wise has his space visitor resurrected from a fatal wound.) His goal is to warn the world to cease its “petty squabbles” or face annihilation. How? From a galaxy-wide squad of robots, one of whom, Gort, is with Klaatu on his Earth voyage. Gort is a huge, streamlined, metallic creature with a lethal laser beam (this film was made before the laser was invented) in its helmet that destroys anything it’s aimed at, including the military and their armaments. Gort is the golem to Klaatu’s Christ, a creature made to save the universe from rogue planets. It attacks the military early in the film when Klaatu, just out of his saucer and still looking mysterious in his space gear, pulls out a mechanism that could have taught the world the mysteries of the universe. The mechanism, mistaken for a weapon, is destroyed and Gort strikes, vaporizing everything. In his human guise, Klaatu manages to befriend a woman and her son (Patricia Neal and Billy Gray) and teaches an Einstein-like mathematician (Sam Jaffe) to solve an impossible equation. But Klaatu knows that Earth needs more than math; it needs a lesson in the strength he can call forth. He demonstrates his power by turning off the electricity worldwide (except for

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FIGURE 6.2 Klaatu (Michael Rennie) and Gort the robot (Lock Martin) in The Day the

Earth Stood Still.

hospitals), and Wise creates a montage of nations and capitals—including a dark and brooding Moscow—cowering under their deprivation of power. He calls on world leaders to take to heart his plea for peace under the threat of annihilation. The Day the Earth Stood Still is, as I said, one of the lone representatives of a politically liberal science fiction film. With its relatively high budget, music made by a theremin (an electronic sound generator, invented by a Soviet scientist, that supplied the eerie music track of many a science fiction film) scored by Bernard Herrmann, an attractive alien, an attractive woman who comes to his aid, an unattractive man who wants to profit from him, a friendly mathematician (a surrogate for Albert Einstein), an innocently curious child, and omnipresent media, the film treats the Cold War as something that can be peacefully solved, the Earth protected by joining a confederation of planets— or else! Klaatu’s ultimate statement is that “the test of any such higher authority is, of course, the police force that supports it.” The film’s monster does not threaten to take over bodies or suck their blood but simply incinerate them and their planet if they don’t comply. Liberalism has its limits.

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The majority of ’50s science fiction is genre- rather than auteur-driven. Howard Hawks, whose hand is present throughout The Thing from Another World, allowed himself to be listed only as producer. If one director does stand out from the rest in the world of science fiction films, it is Jack Arnold, and rather than treat his films together, I’m going to bookend my discussion with his work, looking at The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) at the end of the chapter. Arnold made an important and influential monster film, The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), which, when adapted as The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro in 2017, won many Academy Awards. But it is Arnold’s alien invasion film, It Came from Outer Space (1953), that is among the most interesting versions of its type. A close examination can serve as a template for a further understanding of the genre as it developed throughout the decade. As we’ve seen, America in the 1950s was a culture of contradictions. Terrified by the “other,” by difference in anything from skin color to gender to political ideology, people were at the same time worried about “conformism.” The fear of being too like one another—exacerbated by the growth of monotonous suburbs where newly married couples fled to escape the city— stood in tension with the fears of Communist infiltration and subversion, events that, were they real, would have created a real difference. Many science fiction films of the decade begin by depicting a conformist, often banal life, which is radically disrupted by the appearance of creatures from above. It Came from Outer Space (1953) begins twice. To the sound of a theremin, a blazing ball of light streaks over the desert and then heads straight for the audience. Why this effect? It Came from Outer Space was filmed in 3D, which explains many of its visual strategies, beginning with that flaming spaceship coming directly at the viewer. The film begins again, the camera gliding over a rock pile (perhaps made by the crash of the flying sphere) and then taking in the town of Sand Rock, Arizona. A voice-over by Dr. John Putnam, the central character of the film played by Richard Carlson, a regular in fifties science fiction, tells us about this nice town, “knowing its past and sure of its future.” He soon repeats that last phrase, but with a sure touch of irony. Putnam, an astronomer and writer, lives with his fiancée, Ellen (Barbara Rush), in a small house in the desert. They look through their telescope and, once again, we see the sphere burning its way across the sky and crashing nearby. The dreary town’s future is about to change. It Came from Outer Space is an economical film, not merely in its budget: only an hour and twenty minutes long, with an intermission necessary

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FIGURE 6.3 “I saw them as they really are . . . horrible!” The alien in It Came from Outer Space.

for changing the 3D reels in the projectors. It quickly dispenses with John and Ellen’s cute repartee and introduces us to the sphere from outer space and its inhabitants—one-eyed walking blobs that leave a trail of glitter in their path. Arnold does something unusual, allowing us a view through the alien’s eye, which sees a watery bulbous world, complete with an eerie theremin soundtrack. That same year, Byron Haskin allowed the scientists to briefly see through the tricolor lens of a Martian scope in The War of the Worlds. The use of a point-of-view shot creates an unexpected shift in perception, complicated by the fact that the aliens in It Came from Outer Space can assume human form. They take over the bodies of the townspeople, who disbelieve John’s story of the sphere’s arrival. As a result, they become the creatures’ creatures. The film’s narrative is built on many layers. John Putnam believes the aliens, who reveal themselves and their plans to fix their ship and leave Earth. The town’s sheriff, who vies for Ellen’s affections, continues an antagonistic relationship with John throughout the film, both believing and disbelieving him. Director Arnold, working within his limited means, creates an interesting complexity of how the shock of the unknown turns people inside out with a combination of fear and anger, ending in violence. He also plays

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with the trope of the friendly alien, though in this case so hideous that they must take over human bodies in order to get their work done. At one point, John faces his own alien double in a confrontation in which his alien self must convince him of both their power to destroy and their wish to coexist. On their escape from Earth, John, returned to his own self, does not give the usual warning to “watch the skies” but instead promises that the aliens will be back. It Came from Outer Space is unusual in its relatively calm approach to the invaders. Hysteria is at a minimum; a scientist rather than the military confronts the aliens. Comprehension replaces panic. The aliens of This Island Earth (Joseph Newman, 1955) come, like those of It Came from Outer Space, seeking help. Their planet, Metaluna, is under vicious attack from its enemies and is about to be destroyed. Its remaining inhabitants come to Earth to seek scientists to help them with their shield against bombardment. The aliens are quite human looking, though with high foreheads and stark-white hair (the film is in color). There are monsters, “mutants” that protect the rulers of the dying planet, but they seem an afterthought in a film that almost offers a notion of coexistence with the alien “other.” Almost, but not quite. The scientists, Dr. Meacham (Rex Reason) and Dr. Adams (Faith Domergue), are partly seduced, partly kidnapped by the alien Exeter (Jeff Morrow) to come live in an elegant house while they help build defensive nuclear weapons in its futuristic laboratory. On Metaluna, the “Monitor,” the head of the dying planet, wants the planet’s survivors to live on Earth, where they will be “superior.” Thus, the usual threat of alien takeover is repeated. Mollified somewhat by Exeter, who takes the scientists to his planet and brings them back to Earth at the cost of his life, the film grounds itself in many of the tropes of science fiction. The Metalunans saucer and the underground refuge they’ve built to protect them from the enemy planet’s bombs are nicely imagined; the mutants are giant bugs and menacing enough; and the sentimental Exeter puts a nice turn on the usually destructive aliens of ’50s science fiction. It Came from Outer Space contrasts the hideousness of the aliens with their desire for a peaceful resting place on Earth. The Day the Earth Stood Still is alone in its unabashed celebration of alien invasion in the cause of peace. This Island Earth wants to both frighten and reassure us about alien invasion, not quite succeeding in doing either, despite the fact that the humans survive and at least one alien sacrifices himself for their welfare.

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Most alien invasion movies of the fifties followed the path of It Came from Outer Space, though with various degrees of subtlety and minus the peaceful intent of the aliens. Invaders from Mars, directed in 1953 by William Cameron Menzies (the director of the 1936 Things to Come and an important production designer), starts on a domestic note as little David (Jimmy Hunt) observes a saucer crashing in the fields by his house. Then his parents, followed by others, including military men, fall into sinkholes created by the Martians, have electrodes planted in the back of their heads, and become slaves to the “ human race in its higher form”—a head with tentacles inside a glass globe, giving orders to giant mutants. So often in science fiction, the goal of aliens is to turn humans into pure intelligence, to get rid of bodily and emotional obstacles to an untroubled life of the mind. The invaders from Mars are destroyed in the end, but the questions of a malignant alien force aimed at taking us over remains. Invaders from Mars is especially potent in its attack on the domestic, the turning of parents and the police into monsters. Dr. Blake (Helena Carter) is threatened with machine rape as, unconscious, she is placed before the thing in the globe while a spinning probe descends to implant an electrode in her head. Fortunately, the army succeeds in detonating the ship before anything more drastic occurs. But then, a sudden turn: Invaders from Mars turns out to be a dream film, little David’s nightmare. His parents are fine and loving after all. He returns to his bed only to see out the window . . . a saucer landing. It is canny of the film to start at the domestic level, keeping its focus on little David throughout so that the danger of alien invasion starts with the most vulnerable, the most innocent. What could have been a cheap trick in turning the film into a dream actually has some resonance. The national nightmare was alien takeover, Communism by invisible infiltration. As we’ll see in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, sleeping is a dangerous activity, opening the sleeper to mind and body infiltration and transmutation. A child’s nightmare is a warning for all. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, Bobby befriends the alien Klaatu under his guise as Mr. Carpenter. In this case, the innocence of the child helps the alien, who has come to save, or at least warn and frighten, the planet. David, on the other hand, represents the most vulnerable potential victim of the aliens, and his dream the vulnerability of everyone. Innocence sparks the complex Cold War film The Red Planet Mars (Harry Horner, 1952). The scientist couple, Chris and Linda Cronyn (Peter

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Graves, Andrea King), work to make radio contact with Mars with little success until their son, eating a piece of pie, suggests that they send the number pi—3.14159—to Mars in order to get a response. At the same time, an ex-Nazi scientist in the Andes is working for the Russians to make the first contact. Mars responds, sending the Cronyns visual code, telling them about their advanced civilization and causing massive upheaval on Earth. The latter is, of course, a constant in science fiction movies. The discovery of alien life causes chaos, even madness; the slightest hint of extraterrestrial life is a trigger for mass hysteria. The warning seems to be that if humans will not be pacified by being taken over by aliens and turned into emotionless automatons, they will collapse in an agony of disorientation and panic. When the transmissions from Mars take on a religious cast, things get even worse. “Love goodness and hate evil” is the ultimate message, and the earthlings think God has spoken, at least through his Martian prophet. The Russians remove Stalin’s picture from the wall and resurrect long-buried religious icons. Red army soldiers mow them down. In the end, ambiguity reigns. The ex-Nazi claims that he was the source of the transmissions from Mars; it was all a hoax. But just as Chris and Linda blow up their lab, a last message comes in. The Red Planet Mars is both the perfect Cold War science fiction film and the most eccentric. Its look is plain and unadorned by any directorial flourish. Its dialogue is nonstop (it was adapted from a stage play). And while there are no aliens to be seen, Mars acts as a mediator between the two 1950s antagonists, the Soviet Union and the United States, with a Nazi thrown in for good measure. It uses science fiction tropes to accentuate the ideological and theological strug gles of the decade. The cinematic polish of The Day the Earth Stood Still tends to keep focus on the character of Klaatu, his robot, and his strug gle against the lack of comprehension of the world he is trying to save. The ambiguous signals received in The Red Planet Mars create situations that are too broad, too inexplicable. The brutal Russians and the sentimental Americans represent realpolitik tensions but are portrayed as something just short of cartoons. And while the representation of public chaos resulting from the Martian messages is disturbing, the film does not examine it or go beyond the religiosity that concludes it in a sentimental, if ambiguous, cloud. The War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, produced by George Pal, 1953) also has an element of religiosity about it, but this alien invasion film, a bigbudget color production, represses explicit Cold War references, focusing instead on nonstop images of destruction that seem destined to destroy

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Earth. The War of the Worlds has an auspicious inheritance: it is based on a novel by H. G. Wells, who had earlier supplied the screenplay for Things to Come. More importantly, it was the basis for the 1938 radio program by Orson Welles—the most infamous radio program ever produced. Broadcast on Halloween in the form of a documentary in which musical interludes were interrupted by increasingly horrifying reports of Martians landing in New Jersey, it created a nationwide panic. People ran from their homes and took to the roads to escape the Martians. Why? Theories abound. It was a time of heightened war tensions as the Nazis marched on Europe. People were flipping the radio dial and kept landing on Welles’s program during the most terrifying moments. People were simply in a ready state of gullibility. The social disruption prophesied by science fiction films came true on that October evening. Welles, who went on to become one of the greatest American film directors, was not invited to direct the film version of The War of the Worlds. Byron Haskin and George Pal were hardly as distinguished as Welles, but they managed to create sufficient mayhem with convincing special effects. The film stresses the utter helplessness of humans in the face of the marauding spaceships whose rays level everything. The military is of no use. A priest who stands before one of the ships to pray for understanding is vaporized. The atomic bomb fails to penetrate the shields that surround the aliens’ machines. This is truly, to borrow the title of Susan Sontag’s essay, “the imagination of disaster.” This War of the Worlds manifests an utter helplessness; worse than cultural and political paralysis, the film speaks to the implicit despair of the Cold War and an utter distrust of human behavior. The scenes of rampaging mobs who steal the truckload of vital scientific information driven by the film’s nominal hero, Dr.  Forrester (Gene Barry), are almost as brutal as the attacks by the Martians. We see little of the aliens themselves. One is glimpsed by Forrester’s love interest, Sylvia (Ann Robertson), skittering by a wrecked farmhouse, appearing as a squat blob with thin, three-fingered arms and one red-greenand-blue eye. The film plays with the number three, which is the mark of the aliens, their machines, and their battle plans. The numerology seems to have no direct meaning beyond adding to the mystery of the creatures and their destructive plans. The repetitive threes constitute only a multiplication of destruction. “No direct meaning” is key here. The introductory voiceover tells us that the Martians inhabit a dying planet and are therefore looking for a new world to conquer. That suffices for exposition; the rest is

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FIGURE 6.4 The imagination of disaster. In The War of the Worlds, Martian ships destroy

Los Angeles before the Martians themselves are destroyed by pathogens alien to them.

invasion and destruction until—with the main characters huddled in a church—the machines begin to crash. A three-fingered arm emerges from one of the ships and withers before our eyes. The voice-over tells us the Martians were brought down “by the littlest things which God in His wisdom had put upon this earth”: pathogens, against which the Martians have no immunity. Steven Spielberg remade War of the Worlds in 2005 and makes gigantic the aliens’ machines and their quite literal bloodthirstiness. They are ratfaced vampires, modern-day terrorists that suck the blood of their human victims and spread the Earth with blood-filled vines. But unlike the earlier film, Spielberg is more interested in the human struggle, namely of his star, Tom Cruise, who attempts to save his family in the face of alien disaster. In so doing, he creates an odd sequence in which Cruise’s character, Ray, and his daughter take shelter in the basement of a farmhouse. The sequence parallels the one in which Dr. Forrester and Sylvia do the same. It is here that the aliens are seen, scurrying around, engaging in a small in-joke where they are frightened by a bicycle—a reference to Spielberg’s own E.T., where the friendly alien is spirited away on a bike. But Spielberg presses the sequence

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further than its predecessor, introducing the crazed resistance fighter Harlan Ogilvy (Tim Robbins), whose manic desire to fight the aliens threatens Ray and his daughter and their quest to get to Boston. Ray kills Harlan in a curious act of displacement. He can’t destroy the vampire invaders and instead kills someone who wants to try to destroy them. The 1953 version of The War of the Worlds has no room for such ideological peculiarities or domestic niceties. While there is a romantic couple, the film plays less than usual on disrupted domesticity and focuses instead on global disruption and destruction. All ’50s science fiction has some element of spectacle: flying saucers arrive, creatures emerge, complacency is disrupted. In this film, disruption by the Martian machines excites disruption within the culture itself, as figured in the marauding gangs that emerge as the very infrastructure of the world is destroyed. A different domesticity threatened by unusual forces is figured in MGM’s big-budget, color, CinemaScope science fiction film, Forbidden Planet (Fred Wilcox, 1956). Here the invaders are not aliens but earthlings visiting an Edenic planet in a galaxy far away. Forbidden Planet has the most interesting pedigree of any film in the genre: it is based on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where the magician, Prospero, and his daughter, Miranda, live in isolation on an island with the magician’s two slaves, the air spirit Ariel and the earth spirit Caliban. In the film, the scientist, Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), lives on the planet Altair with his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis). They are alone, save for their robot, Robby, and a strange chthonic force that has wiped out all the other colonists on Altair as well as its original inhabitants. As in The Tempest, Morbius and Altaira are visited by strangers, the crew from Earth. Altair is an Eden in which the innocent Altaira plays with wild beasts while her father experiments with the equipment of the lost inhabitants of the planet, the Krell. Robby has a fine pedigree, going back to the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who set forth rules that robots must obey, and that Robby follows to the letter: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

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There is a degree of calculated innocence in these “laws,” since, like all such, they are constructed to be broken when a narrative so demands, which happens frequently in contemporary science fiction. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the HAL 9000 computer, a robot who proclaims itself a conscious entity, turns murderer. Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and its prequels, along with his Blade Runner (1982), contain robots turning against their creators. In the latter, the replicants fight to retain their memories and their very lives. One of them goes so far as to destroy his maker by putting out his eyes. By the time Scott reached his most recent Alien prequel, Alien Covenant (2017), a robot creates life-destroying monsters, the robots themselves having become monsters. But all this is in the future. Robby the robot does all the tasks necessary for a luxurious life and obeys the three laws. However, as in all film and literature, Edenic worlds are never secure, never innocent for long. The “Caliban” of Forbidden Planet, the alien force that wiped out everyone but Morbius and his daughter—and will soon kill him—is in fact not alien at all; it is a “creature of the Id.” The more intellectual power the Krell and Morbius used on their titanic machines to gain greater knowledge, the more they aroused their own unconscious impulses. Freud would have called it “the return of the repressed,” which, in the film, is made visible in the gunfire aimed at it as a huge lion-like creature (in fact drawn by a Disney animator). Forbidden Planet is the rare fifties science fiction film without a political allegory lying in its interstices. But it does pick up some old cultural myths: that too much knowledge is a dangerous thing—in the case of this film, a disastrous thing. Morbius is not only Prospero from The Tempest but Dr. Faustus as well (with some shades of Dr. Carrington from The Thing from Another World). He wants total intellectual power and dies for his pains. The creatures of the id are a manifestation not only of the unconscious proclaiming its territory but of overweening pride at the cost of a fragile innocence. It is also a tale of isolation creating an unsupportable environment easily disrupted by visitors from the home planet. The aliens in this film are Morbius and Altaira themselves, alienated from the Earth and their own inner life. Altaira is innocent of her sexuality; Morbius of the limits of his own endeavors. Altaira’s sexuality is awakened by the commander of the visiting earthlings, named Adams (he enters the Garden), played by a young Leslie Nielsen. Monsters take over Morbius and he dies. The monsters from the id are his own. The engaging spectacle of Forbidden Planet was highly influential on science fiction films to come. There is a hologram of Altaira that foreshadows

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FIGURE 6.5 Robby the Robot (Frankie Darro) short-circuits when ordered to fire a gun.

His master, Dr. Morbius (Walter Pigeon), stands by him in Forbidden Planet.

the one of Princess Leia in the first Star Wars (1977). Images of the Krell’s underground power plant foreshadow similar images in Lucas’s film as well as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Forbidden Planet proves that 1950s American film was able to create science fiction with more than a modicum of imagination and enough resources to provide spectacle with some subtlety and humor. Lacking subtlety and humor, the most potent of ’50s alien invasion films is undoubtedly Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which has spawned many remakes and almost as many interpretations. Is it a film about conformity and the loss of individuality? Is it a subtle comment on racial otherness, of immigrant labor? Is it a pro-McCarthy film, warning us that our minds (and bodies) are in danger of being taken over by an alien force? I think that is what it is doing, and to understand why, I will call on one of the great Communist hunters of the decade. Communism—if we are to believe the anti-Communist rhetoric of the ’50s—would creep up and take us over were we not vigilant. “Communist thought control,” wrote FBI head J. Edgar Hoover in1958, “in all its various capacities, has spread the infection, in varying degrees, to most phases of American life. . . . The communist is in the marketplaces of America: in organizations, on street corners, even at your front door. He is trying to influence and control your thoughts.” Hoover might as well have written a scenario for a science fiction film! Thought control is a key feature of Invaders from Mars and It Came from Outer Space, where the aliens take over the minds and bodies of humans. The aliens of Invasion of the Body Snatchers are never seen. Seeds fall from

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the sky. They grow into pods that release formless human bodies. When a person sleeps, his or her features are transferred to the pod person, who becomes that person’s simulacrum, minus emotion, minus free thought, not quite a zombie but not quite human. Dr. Kauffman (Larry Gates), the psychiatrist of the town of Santa Mira where the film takes place, explains to Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) and his girlfriend Becky (Dana Wynter) what is happening: Less than a month ago, Santa Mira was like any other town. People with nothing but problems. Then, out of the sky, came a solution. Seeds drifting through space for years took root in a farmer’s field. From the seeds came pods, which had the power to reproduce themselves in the exact likeness of any form of life. . . . Suddenly, while you’re asleep, they’ll absorb your minds, your memories, and you’re reborn into an untroubled world. . . . MIL ES Where everyone’s the same. [Miles worries about the loss of love]. K AUF F MAN Exactly. . . . There’s no need for love. MIL ES No emotions? Then you have no feelings? Only the instinct to survive . . . K AUF F MAN Love, desire, ambition, faith. Without them, life’s so simple, believe me. K AUF F MAN

Dr. Carrington, in The Thing from Another World, marvels about the alien: “No pain or pleasure as we know them, no emotions, no heart. Far superior . . . in every way.” As we have seen, the fear of losing emotions runs like a thread throughout fifties science fiction film: the fear of an alien infection that will render us less than human and more like—what? Godless Communists? Automatons who unquestioningly obey a higher power, the “overlords,” to use the term invented by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke? In the world of realpolitik and cultural churn, there are in fact various threads: a yearning for individual freedom and independence played against a yearning for strong leadership that might take the burden of decision-making off the shoulders of individuals. There was ingrained racism and homophobia that too often equated homosexuality with subversive activity, but nowhere, except in science fiction and dystopian film and literature, was there such a tension between the desire for and fear of the loss of emotion. This is the great fear, that we will become automatons without will or affect, at the

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mercy of a power that doesn’t much care for us and is using us for its selfish needs. If that power emerges from beyond the Earth, our resources to counteract it are indeed strained. No other genre was as capable of dealing with these conflicting emotions and needs than science fiction. There is no gainsaying the energy and paranoia of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. With its low-contrast, black-and-white cinematography and California setting, the film looks like many low-budget science fiction films of the decade. But there are differences. The intensity of Miles Bennell’s hysteria against the takeover of humans by their cloned bodies emerging from pods is more powerful than all of the scared humans let loose in the genre. The process he witnesses is so inexorable it seems unstoppable, and so it was meant to be. As more and more people are taken over, Miles and Becky are reduced to scared, running individuals—the last individuals. There are startling scenes: Miles and Becky visit their friends Jack (King Donovan) and Teddy (Carolyn Jones). Jack has discovered his simulacrum being formed on the billiard table in his darkened rec room. A poster reading “Mirroir Noir”—Black mirror—hangs on the wall, echoing what is happening to the people on Earth as they become emotionless reflections of themselves. As Jack dozes off, the creature on the table begins taking on his features. They find bubbling pods in the greenhouse, foaming and bursting with yet unformed pod people. The more Miles and Becky learn about what is happening, the more frantic they become as everyone around them changes into pod people. Their hysteria grows. Eventually, the police and the townspeople come after them, the only two left uncloned. With the town’s warning siren blaring gratingly on the soundtrack, they flee into the hills. They hear music—a sign of civilization—but no, it is coming from a farm preparing alien pods for further takeovers. Here we get a sense of the fear of the immigrant other, as the pods are farmed out for distribution throughout the country. The pod people are the “other.” So is the suggestion that immigrant labor is gathering up the pods. Miles and Becky run and run until, exhausted, Becky falls asleep and becomes a pod person. The film would have ended with an hysterical Miles standing in the middle of the highway yelling at the passing cars, trying to warn them of the coming danger by screaming “you’re next” at the passing traffic, including trucks carrying pods to San Francisco. At this point, the studio stepped in and asked Siegel to create a wraparound narrative, with Miles’s ravings being taken seriously by doctors in a hospital and the FBI called in on the case. The body of the film is presented in flashback.

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FIGURE 6.6 Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) reacts in horror when he discovers his

girlfriend Becky (Dana Wynter) has fallen asleep and become a pod person in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Fortunately, this does not diminish its impact or its allegory of the political climate of the 1950s, with its hysteria over Communist takeover. This, more than anything else, allowed the film to make an indelible impression. Political and cultural paranoia are critical effects and indelible. So indelible that Invasion has been remade three times, but none of the remakes— Philip Kaufman’s in 1978, Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers in 1993, Oliver Hirschbiegel and James McTeigue’s Nicole Kidman vehicle, The Invasion, in 2007—have the rawness and political punch of Siegel’s original. One film of the 1950s considers the effects of cosmic powerlessness at a very local level: in the basement of a middle-class family. To understand how this happens, we need some context. There was no shortage of nuclear-fueled monsters emerging from the sea in the fifties. The most famous was from Japan, Ishirô Honda’s Godzilla (1954), a strange, clunky film with a man

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(Haruo Nakajima) in a reptile suit stomping over a model Tokyo. Obviously, Japan had good reason to fear nuclear energy, and their Gojira is a chthonic beast that emerged from the depths of the sea, an extension of human legend and fear, a mythic creature reborn of the atomic age. His raging destruction is, in some peculiar way, the rage of the Japanese people themselves, against their leaders and against their own destructive impulses. The American film, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié, 1953), released just a year before Godzilla, does not resonate with the same historical and cultural vibrations as its Japanese relative. This monster is also atomic born, released from the Arctic shoals by nuclear blasts, and it does a good job of destroying lower Manhattan and a Brooklyn roller coaster. The creature, animated by Ray Harryhausen, a master of stop-action animation, is somewhat more convincing than Godzilla, as is the mixture of location shooting and model work that makes up the prehistoric dinosaur’s rampage. The beast can only be destroyed by radioactivity because shooting it will cause its disease-ridden blood to kill more people (a foreshadowing of Alien, whose acid saliva burns through whatever it touches). The atom remains the cause and cure for monstrous abnormality visited on the world. These two films, Godzilla and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, spawned many spin-offs and sequels—in Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954), for example, irradiated giant ants are the threat. Jack Arnold poses an alternative to atomic monsters. He and screenwriter Richard Matheson imagine a human exposed to a strange form of radiation who turns into something less than a monster. The result, The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), raises an interesting question: How does a low-budget film in what was at the time a poorly regarded genre become a statement of existential angst, of where we stand in the vastness of the universe? In much of science fiction film, this question rumbles beneath the surface, never quite coming to the fore. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with its promise that being taken over by an alien force will simplify life by removing our emotions, suggests a profound question about our responses to our essential humanity. Forbidden Planet supposes the promise and threat of cosmic knowledge, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The War of the Worlds of cosmic destruction. But even the best science fiction occults such profundity within the fantastic, the speculative, an imagined future, a dystopian world, and, unfortunately, in the 1950s, an often tacky mise-en-scène. The Incredible Shrinking Man presents its questions within the banal ordinariness of the domestic, where everyday things and events, from a pet cat to a spider

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to a leaking hot water heater, become threats to an ordinary man who is gradually losing his place in the home and the cosmos. He becomes his own alien. The film is an increment of despair and self-sufficiency as Scott Carey (Grant Williams) dwindles in size because of his contact with a nuclear cloud while on a boat, during a holiday with his wife. This is important because, as we have seen in other science fiction films, disrupted domesticity is a key to the great fear these films try to evoke. Pleasure and intimacy are destroyed in the course of the film, especially as Scott tries to maintain his masculinity and control over a domestic environment that overwhelms him as he shrinks. His anger and resentment grow; he shrinks not only in size but in his ability to relate to his wife and others. At one point, curious as to why the furniture around him suddenly seems normal size, we discover that he is living in a dollhouse—until their pet cat chases him out and he lives the remainder of his days in the basement eating stale crumbs and battling a spider with the household tools at hand. Arnold is canny in the way he presents these events and captures the poignancy of Scott’s incredible situation. He introduces Scott’s shrinkage gradually. At first his clothes begin to be too big. Later, we see only the back of a large chair, and not until the reverse shot do we understand how tiny Scott appears, seated within the chair’s embrace. The look of a man at a bar telegraphs to us the curiosity of strangers regarding this small man, who is now seated with a small woman, trying to make contact with a person his size, trying to maintain his dignity and manhood—not an inconsiderable problem in the 1950s. This was a siege decade where, as we have seen, containment—containment of Russian expansion, containment of political freedom, containment of personal expression—made up the politicalcultural atmosphere. The ever-diminishing, completely isolated Scott Carey is a victim of this containment, winding up in rags in the flooded cellar of his home, defending himself against an insect. He becomes something of an everyman figure, a reflection of a decade of paranoia and anxieties real and imagined, grown small and diminished in size and potency. Arnold does not leave Scott to disappear in total despair. In the voiceover that accompanies much of the action in the film, Scott communicates his feelings and fears; he grows philosophical in the end. In his all but poetic last words, a combination of metaphysics and theology, he proclaims a cosmic victory as the camera pulls back on him eventually disappearing down into the earth and up into the cosmos:

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It was as if my body had ceased to exist. There was no hunger. No longer the terrible fear of shrinking. Again I had the sensation of instinct. Of each movement, each thought tuned to some great directing force. I was continuing to shrink, to become . . . what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world? So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens, the universe, worlds beyond number. God’s silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of Man’s own limited dimension. I had presumed upon Nature. That existence begins and ends is Man’s conception, not Nature’s. And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist.

Coming late in the life span of the genre, The Incredible Shrinking Man is something of a final word, a response to the monsters from outer space or from beneath the sea. The monsters, it seems to say, are us, at the mercy of forces out of our control, harming us in our own home. Forbidden Planet had a similar message, except that “home” was an exotic, far-off planet. But in no other science fiction film does the human figure play such a crucial role, passive at the mercy of out-of-control science, active in self-defense, disappearing into the cosmos. There are so many ’50s films that address the crisis of masculinity. Jack Arnold’s and Richard Matheson’s response is that masculinity might simply disappear. Science fiction cinema went into decline in the late ’50s and early ’60s as McCarthyism faded and anti-Communism became a tiresome, inescapable part of the cultural discourse. The genre was revived by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars ten years after that. But the ’50s genre was never far from filmmakers’ or audiences’ thoughts. Susan Sontag wrote in “The Imagination of Disaster”: There is a vast amount of wishful thinking in science fiction films, some of it touching, some of it depressing. Again and again, one detects the hunger for a

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FIGURE 6.7 Scott Carey (Grant Williams) stares at the cosmos as he shrinks into infinity in The Incredible Shrinking Man.

“good war,” which poses no moral problems, admits of no moral qualifications. . . . Yet at the same time the bellicosity of science fiction films is neatly channeled into the yearning for peace, or for at least peaceful coexistence.

There was much yearning in the Cold War decade: for peace; for destruction of the Soviet Union; for a relief from conformity; for a desire for consumer goods; for listening to Mantovani and Sinatra, rock and roll and Elvis. All the contradictions are contained in the gray landscapes of science fiction film, where ordinary lives are infiltrated by alien life-forms, sometimes meaning well but mostly not, and where the military promises salvation and sometimes fails. In none of the ’50s science fiction films is peaceful coexistence offered as a permanent possibility. Then as now, otherness and difference were too frightening in almost any form. There are, in the end, no moral qualifications in science fiction, only the disqualifications of foreign invasion. For moral qualifications, we need to look at melodrama in which emotions are barely contained and the return of the repressed always threatens to break through its containment.

7 “How Can You Say You Love Me . . . ?”

Melodrama Like pornography, we know melodrama when we see it. It is notoriously hard to define, if for no other reason than that it takes so many forms. “Excess” is the word that comes most frequently to mind when we think about melodrama: overblown emotions, situations of conflict and suffering, outlandish coincidences, broad gestures, repression and oppression, desire unsatisfied, and, of course, redemption. This last is what separates melodrama from tragedy. The tragic figure dies through an excess of unknowing, his moral blindness leading to his and others’ destruction and the enlightenment of the audience. In melodrama, there may be multiple sufferers, and, in place of moral blindness, there may be a moral quandary, or no quandary at all but a struggle with competing desires—sexual, domestic, even existential. Much is brought to bear on the melodramatic protagonist, who seems to buckle under the weight of trial and despair until a compromise through moral settlement is achieved, the struggle is resolved, and the sufferer comes to a different emotional point than where he or she began. In other words, the graph of melodramatic emotion starts at a place of repression or extreme emotional pain, rises to a point of aching desire, and falls just short of that 131

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desire’s fulfillment. Redemption in melodrama is often a process of squelching, of normalization by deprivation, rejoining the community or the domestic scene sadder and possibly wiser. A melodramatic character may die—Death of a Salesman is the classic example—but he or she (while most melodramas feature a suffering woman, males suffered greatly in the ’50s) is more likely to survive knowing their passion will never be quite realized. The audience is left sadder but not wiser—unless the message, as it often is in melodrama, is to not reach too high. The end of the tragic protagonist is death; the end of the melodramatic protagonist, if left alive, may be if not stasis then a certain clear-eyed acceptance of a new emotional or existential state. Knowledge is important in tragedy. The audience must understand the circumstances and meaning of the tragic hero’s end. Emotion is primary in melodrama. The audience must feel the protagonist’s pain, must empathize, even weep in sympathy. Melodrama is a participatory genre; emotion is shared and redemption—if it occurs—celebrated by character and viewer alike. 1950s melodrama was marked by some interesting variations, not the least of which were male-centered films, which, as already noted, are filled with angst and solicit the sympathies for misunderstood youth or even middleaged men, as we have seen in such films as Vertigo, Rebel without a Cause, and Bigger Than Life. The plight of the ’50s male was chronicled not only in films but in print as well. “Momism,” coined by Philip Wylie back in 1943, pointed the way to the idea that men were losing their patriarchal rights. In a series of articles in Look magazine, collected in a 1958 book called The Decline of the American Male, the authors argued that women had taken over, demanding satisfaction, domineering, and, indeed, threatening potency. “In the free and democratic United States of America, he had been subtly robbed of a heritage that the Communist countries deny by force.” Men contained by women—worse than Communism. Such nonsense was not so outrageous within the general cultural discourse, and it indicates crudely what so many male melodramas were saying with passion. Scottie Ferguson in Vertigo is rendered a hollow shell by the loss of the female phantasmagoria that was created for him; when he recreated her and she died again, it emotionally destroyed him. Jim Stark’s father in Rebel is unmanned by wearing an apron and carrying a tray of food for his wife. No one is more dominated by a woman than Norman Bates. In the great days of film noir, rapacious women regularly undid their men—“rotten to the core” is the selfjudgment rendered by Phyllis Dietrichson, the serial husband killer in Billy

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Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944). By the 1950s, there were fewer femmes fatales. Men may have been oppressed by women, but in many films, they needed no help in feeling oppressed. The culture in general seemed to place a burden on man as the family breadwinner, as the corporation man, the organization man, the man in the gray flannel suit, or just a schoolteacher like Ed Avery in Bigger Than Life or butcher like Marty in the film that bears his name—a dull fellow, carrying a weight of aloneness, anxiety ridden, doomed to be misunderstood. Some of the burdened male films began as television plays during the socalled golden age of live drama, roughly 1953–1955. These productions were seedbeds for young acting talent, particularly from the Actors Studio— James Dean, Paul Newman, Rod Steiger, and Kim Stanley, to name a few— and directors who would go on to film careers, such as Delbert Mann, Sidney Lumet, and Arthur Penn. For these dramas, their dependency on tight close-ups of anxiety-ridden men and haggard women made them extraordinarily intense—too intense for many audiences, and so they disappeared when television went nationwide. Some, miserabilist though they were, were adapted for the big screen with some of the misery alleviated. The best-known television writer and screenwriter of the period was Paddy Chayefsky. He wrote no less than twelve episodes of the Philco Television Playhouse between 1953 and 1954, including the aforementioned Marty, which was made into a film in 1955. This work about a homely butcher looking for romance struck a note of realist misery and pity for a character with no apparent hope, stuck until a last-minute decision to pursue a woman he is attracted to. But, rather than Marty, I would like to begin my discussion of ’50s melodrama with Chayefsky and Delbert Mann’s film, The Bachelor Party (1957, remade from the television production of 1953). The film is largely forgotten today and hard to find, though it was successful enough in its day and garnered an Academy Award nomination for Carolyn Jones, who played a beatnik character known in the credits only as “the Existentialist.” The film is an epitome of male angst, a theme I’ve been following throughout our discussion, and it features no less than five men drunkenly prowling nighttime New York in various stages of distress. Each of the men suffer anguished disappointment with their lives. Walter (E. G. Marshall) has asthma and has been told by his doctor he must leave New York and move to Arizona. He sees no way to uproot his family and himself and can only repeat in his unhappiness, “I’m going to die.” Eddie (Jack Warden) is a hapless womanizer. We last see him sitting alone at a bar

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FIGURE 7.1 Men on the prowl. Charlie (Don Murray), “the Bachelor” (Jack Warden),

and Walter (E. G. Marshall) surround “the Existentialist” (Carolyn Jones) in The Bachelor Party.

at 3 a.m., trying to chat up an older woman at the far end, another of the desperate figures who populate the film. Arnold (Philip Abbott) is about to be married to a woman for whom he has no sexual attraction. He is doubtless a closeted gay man who suffers from his family’s pressure to marry. He is left at the door of his parents’ apartment where they and his fiancée, unseen behind the door, lie in wait for him. Kenneth (Larry Blyden) is the one voice of reason who, despite his confession of having had an affair, tries to soothe the distraught Charlie (Don Murray), finally leaving the group and going home early. Charlie, a bookkeeper, is particularly tormented. He lives in the housing projects with his pregnant wife and goes to night school in order to advance himself. He hates his life, doesn’t want to be a father, and is looking momentarily for a place of rest and unburdening at the side of the Existentialist at a Greenwich Village party. Dressed in black with black hair and lipstick—the perfect beatnik stereotype—she delivers a long monologue involving her landlord and her boyfriends, a parody of what a middle-class audience imagined beatniks to be.

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The film is unrelenting in driving home its bookkeeper characters’ distress. In long, leisurely, claustrophobic takes, filmed in somber black and white on the streets, in the subway, in a restaurant, a bar, a restroom, a party, an apartment watching porn films, the men, in a state of high anxiety, worry aloud about their lot. Even the women aren’t immune. In addition to the Existentialist, there is Charlie’s wife (Patricia Smith), whose sister-in-law (Nancy Marchand) proceeds to tell her a wrenching tale of her husband’s affairs and gives Charlie’s wife pause about whether she should continue their pregnancy. The miserabilist atmosphere is relieved only by the characters, who, despite their desolation, are lively and kinetic. It’s an interesting paradox of the script, with the usual fine rhythms of Chayefsky’s writing and Mann’s direction that we (or at least I) stay fascinated by the characters’ ongoing despair. Less interesting is the abrupt ending of the film, when Charlie has a sudden burst of well-being and returns to his wife’s arms. Melodrama does not ordinarily sustain such a rapid change of heart, but here it does not negate the energetic unhappiness that has gone before. The Bachelor Party is an urban melodrama, almost neorealist in its use of locations on the streets of the city. Jules Dassin’s crime film The Naked City (1948) is credited with absorbing some of the methods of Italian neorealism by being shot in large part on the streets, and this led to a number of low-budget films leaving the bounds of the studio for actual urban settings. But even as this was occurring, geopolitical changes in the culture at large involved the great migration of the middle-class urban population to the suburbs. The creation of Levittown on Long Island—inexpensive, onefamily houses built rapidly on farmland—and others like it around the country shortly after the war accelerated the movement of returning vets and their families out of cities and into what was once the country. Kenneth in The Bachelor Party wants to move his family to Long Island, but worries about the mortgage. In the real world, mortgages were available to many white families and, as a result, new minicities grew in the suburbs, creating their own culture with their own melodramas. No Down Payment (Martin Ritt, 1957, with a script by the prolific Philip Yordan, who also wrote Johnny Guitar) takes its cue from the new suburbs and creates a tangled knot of emotional pain and sexual angst. Even though No Down Payment is filmed in black-and-white CinemaScope, its suburban development of Sunrise Hills seems as claustrophobic as the apartments and bars of The Bachelor Party. Every house seems to have access to every other, with less privacy than an apartment building. On their

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first day, David and Jean Martin (Jeffrey Hunter and Patricia Owens) see through their window Troy and Leona Boone (Cameron Mitchell and Joanne Woodward) making love. At their welcome barbecue, David and Jean meet their neighbors, all of whom talk about how relatively well-off they are financially, and how most saw ser vice during the war. Some twelve years after WWII, the men are still basing their lives on their ser vice, Troy most of all, with his garage festooned with war memorabilia and his desire not to be an “organization man” and become chief of police. He is brutal to his wife and an emotional threat to the neighborhood. He won’t let his wife get pregnant—which she badly wants after she was forced to put their first child up for adoption—until he gets his appointment, which, because he doesn’t have a college degree, he of course fails to achieve. In his drunken rage over this soul-destroying disappointment, he rapes Jean. Jerry Flagg—played by Tony Randall, usually known for comic roles— is a cringing alcoholic, used car salesman, and failed womanizer. He is about to bottom out until Herm Kreitzer (Pat Hingle) offers him a proper job in his garden supply store. David, an electrical engineer, is angry because his boss wants him to go into sales. It is while he is out of town on a sales trip that his wife is raped. As in any good melodrama, intensely painful incidents unfold like the leaves of a dying flower. Frustration and anger embroil most of the characters, fueled with sex and alcohol. And there is an added complication: race. Herm’s Japanese assistant, Iko (Aki Aleong), wants to move into the neighborhood. (The filmmakers themselves were not quite brave enough to make the person desiring entry a black man.) Herm is so conflicted by this request, so afraid of what the neighborhood council will say, that it becomes an irritant to his marriage. Herm knows the law against discrimination (even though the Fair Housing Act was still some years in the future), but he is terrified by the effect the request would have in the community. The resulting uproar gives him pause about the suburban life: “I guess owning a house and a deep freeze is not the whole answer.” He gives voice to the fear inhabiting himself, his wife, and the neighbors, the fears of not enough money or prestige or, though it isn’t stated, common sense. After the rape, events move rapidly. Out of intense shame, Jean refuses to go to the police. Her husband turns out to be happy in sales. The rupture in their marriage caused by the rape is not addressed. But there is retribution: Troy is killed when a car he is working on falls from the lift and crushes him. The Iko family are quietly accepted into the community—we

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FIGURE 7.2 Suburban nightmares. A drunken Troy (Cameron Mitchell) is set to attack

Jean (Patricia Owens) in No Down Payment.

see them exiting church, along with Herm and his wife (Herm’s refusal to go to church was a sore spot in their marriage). Troy’s wife, a lower-class Southerner who never really belonged, leaves Sunrise Hills Estates. Despite the amelioration and removal of the one couple who infected the group, we are left with the status quo at Sunrise Hills and its socially incestuous group of troubled people. Despite Troy’s claim that he did not want to become an “organization man,” with its reference to William Whyte’s famous book published in 1956, he wants to lead the organization of the town’s police force. His failure, Jerry’s drunkenness, and the sexual tension among all the community indicate an insular, contained world that is ultimately suffocating. No Down Payment has the requisite amount of unhappiness and choked desire that marks any good melodrama. It both adds a timeliness and suggests a certain smugness that was common among intellectuals in regard to suburban life while at the same time indicating that, with the removal of the bad elements and the introduction of racial tolerance, this tormented community may survive. It is common for film melodrama to achieve some sort of balance. In a commercial medium, it would not work to leave the audience so distraught that they might not want to return to the theater. Nor do the filmmakers want to insult their audience by exposing their way of life without demonstrating how it might work to their benefit. In other words, it isn’t unusual for melodrama to have it all ways at once. Just before No Down Payment, in 1957, Martin Ritt, fresh from directing television dramas, made a very different melodrama for MGM (No Down Payment was made for Fox), this one about race. Not the offhand nod

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to racial tensions present in No Down Payment but a direct confrontation with violent racial hatred. Edge of the City (script by Robert Alan Aurthur) takes place in the railroad yards and is peopled by tough workers who use their hooks to move heavy freight and, in one horrific instance, to kill. The narrative of the film is cleverly constructed around three main characters, one with a secret, the second with the charm of self-assurance, the third with brutal hatred. The secret, that he is an army deserter, pushes Axel Nordmann (John Cassavetes in his second nontelevision role—in his first, Don Siegel’s Crime in the Streets, he plays a juvenile delinquent) to take a job as a dockworker under Charlie Malick (Jack Warden). Malick demands a cut from his workers’ salaries and carries out a simmering hatred for Tommy Tyler (Sidney Poitier, already the major African American player in American film). Axel’s friendship with Tommy and his family is warm and unquestioning. Race is never an issue, but Axel’s agonizing silence about his past strains all relationships and bursts into violent anger. He takes on Charlie in a fight with grappling hooks, but Tommy, knowing that Charlie’s violence is really aimed at him and egged on by Charlie’s racial slurs, takes on the fight himself. He is killed by a grappling hook in his back. In the face of the silence by the rest of the workers, and released from the secret that kept him bottled up, Axel returns and takes on Charlie, fighting and choking him into submission. The film ends with Axel, half dead himself, dragging Charlie’s all but lifeless body down the railyard tracks as the workers look on. Edge of the City does not attempt the kind of melodramatic balance we see in No Down Payment, and its rawness about race is not unusual for the decade. I’ve noted a number of films that take on the issue, and we will examine another in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life. There’s no doubt that Sidney Poitier was a calming presence that allowed viewers to be comfortable with the relationship between Axel and Tommy, and the domesticity of Tommy and his wife (Ruby Dee) and child is set up as a model, no matter how idealistic, of black working-class life. That life and the couple’s friendship with Tommy make his death all the more wrenching. The beating that Axel delivers to Charlie provides some satisfactory closure, but not enough to convince us that there aren’t more Charlies terrorizing the railyards. The image of a bloodied Axel, staggering with Charlie’s body to deliver him to the police, might ring a bell, because Edge of the City is MGM’s answer to Columbia’s On the Waterfront (1954). The story behind Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg’s film, whose popularity has well outlived its decade, is well known but bears repeating. In 1952, under orders from

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FIGURE 7.3 Confrontation between Tommy (Sidney Poitier) and Charlie (Jack Warden). After beating up Charlie, Axel (John Cassavetes) drags him through the railyard in Edge of the City.

20th Century-Fox threatening to withhold his Viva Zapata! from distribution if he refused, Elia Kazan named names to HUAC, eight people who were members of the Communist Party when Kazan was also a member. Schulberg also named names. Shortly after his craven performance, Kazan took out an ad in Life magazine, defending his actions and urging others to follow suit. All of this saved his filmmaking career but ruined his career as someone with a moral center. On the Waterfront is a testament to informing dressed up as a melodrama of bravery in the face of gangster violence. It is the redemption of a washedup boxer who must be crucified by a vicious beating to enable him to free the longshoremen from the gangsters running the waterfront. Perhaps Kazan felt “crucified” by the opprobrium heaped on him for informing; perhaps he wanted to atone. I think not. On the Waterfront is too earnest in its approval of Terry’s (Marlon Brando) act of bravery and defiance. I wonder, though, if Kazan and Schulberg had enough sensitivity to notice an unintended irony in the fact that the last shot of the film is of the men being caged by the door of a descending elevator taking them to the docks. In other words, the film suggests that despite Terry’s ratting out the union bosses, the men are still under the thumb of the real boss, of “Mr. Big,” who makes a brief, anonymous appearance in the film, watching the crime commission’s hearings on TV. Do the filmmakers believe that Mr. Big will be brought down with the rest of the mob because of Terry’s informing? Do they see the dockworkers as poor slobs who will be oppressed no matter what? The ambiguity is almost as troubling as the defense of informing. Kazan and Schulberg were canny enough to create a sleight-of-hand deflection. No one can righteously complain about cleaning out gangsterism

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from the workplace, nor might anyone associate it with betraying colleagues in a completely different political arena, had they not known the facts. Kazan’s gangsters are viciously threatening. Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) destroys anyone who dares to call out his mob. He has Edie Coyle’s (Eva Marie Saint) brother killed. Father Barry (Karl Malden) is nearly killed when the teamsters dump a load of freight on him. And, of course, they beat Terry to a pulp. The love affair between Edie and Terry, the sweet and gentle woman versus the rough-hewn ex-boxer, further diverts attention from what is actually going on. The result is a complex structure of violence and resistance in which the excuse for betrayal becomes a kind of hermeneutic buried within another story of redemption, as far from the workings of HUAC in Hollywood as possible. On the Waterfront therefore becomes a test case about the separation of politics from art. This is complicated by the fact that, even if we subtract Kazan’s personal act of betrayal, the film alone is political, concerning as it does the manipulation of power and powerlessness among workers who have no choice but to follow their corrupt bosses or die. And so Kazan succeeds in deeply occulting the truth of the film beneath its superficial political-romantic melodrama. All this, along with Brando’s tightly mannered, self-pitying performance, make On the Waterfront a contained film, hermetically sealed against interpretation unless the viewer has the key, allowing her to see how politically and morally corrupt the film is. To be fair, melodrama tends to stack the narrative and visual decks. We are given, in any representative film, much to absorb, to look at, to react to. Despite what the characters suffer on-screen, much of the emotional weight falls on the viewers, who are asked to respond not only to the characters but to the entire mise-en-scène, the melodramatic space created by gesture, décor, even camera movement. We also want to read the film deeply because, as we have seen, there may be an underlying narrative that needs to be surfaced. Some melodramas do not request historical contextualization or need hermeneutic investigation; they are aimed directly at the heart. But no film (indeed, no work of the imagination) exists in a cultural or even political vacuum; the people who make them are products of their time, and the time influences the work. We need to be alert to subtext and ambiguity, lest the films permit our emotions to outstrip understanding. Before On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan filmed Tennessee Williams’s play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Tennessee Williams was a phenomenon of the decade; the adaptations of his plays and his original screenplays were

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FIGURE 7.4 Bloody but unbowed, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) staggers toward informing

on the mob in On the Waterfront.

wildly popular because their rampant sexuality—steamy if not explicit— titillated audiences already obsessed with sexuality, not only for the usual reasons but because the Kinsey reports made clear (if not directly, at least through media coverage) the polymorphous perversity of much of the population. Sex was on people’s minds, and Williams’s melodramas made it safely accessible. Probably no film based on a Tennessee Williams play is as famous as Kazan’s. As yet untainted by his abjection to HUAC, the film is the opposite of the delicate, self-aware, even reflexive films of other melodramatists, especially Douglas Sirk, whose work I’ll discuss further on. The dynamics that Kazan creates between Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois (Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh) are explosive. Brando often plays vulnerable, even feminized, male characters (in the 1953 motorcycle film, László Benedek’s The Wild One, he breaks down and weeps, and he does so again in Streetcar), but here he mostly taunts, rages, and rapes. True, he is needy, as his famous bellowing for Stella (Kim Hunter) indicates, and throughout the film he represents unrestrained id, smashing against the frail madness of his sister-in-law. Unlike more conventional melodramas, there is no dramatic arc in Streetcar. It moves from one outburst to another, with some cringe-inducing interludes between Blanche and her would-be suitor Mitch (Karl Malden), so that the climactic rape is barely a climax but an inevitability—as is her being taken away to an asylum.

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Theatrical melodrama is different than cinematic, though they come from the same roots in the Victorian stage. The filming of theatrical melodrama, especially Tennessee Williams adaptations, is simply broader, more bombastic, and more sexually infused than other melodramas. It is as if filming a Williams play permitted an amount of sexuality forbidden in other films, and the Production Code wilted under Williams’s Southern heat. Serafina (Anna Magnani) in The Rose Tattoo (Daniel Mann, 1955) caresses her naked husband in bed. Later, she takes off her top, dressed only in a black slip, when she learns of her husband’s death (many women are seen in their slips throughout the film). Here, Magnani’s sensuality is matched against a surprisingly goofy Burt Lancaster, who, in his undershirt, opens a bottle of spumante at crotch level, allowing it to spout as the cork pops. There is no subtlety here but rather a frantic, almost comic atmosphere to the film (in fact, there is a comic interlude involving an escaped goat). In the end, it is a film that can’t quite find its tone: melodrama or sex farce, or a bizarre combination of both. Perhaps producer Hal Wallis wanted to counter the over-ripeness of Streetcar with something less intense while keeping up audience expectations for Tennessee Williams’s sexual heat. But comedy and Southern gothic do not mix well, and melodrama in particular tends to wither under the stress of the comic. Magnani, who came to the attention of Hollywood because of her extraordinary performance in Rossellini’s neorealist film Rome, Open City (1945), would bring her fussy, mannered sexuality to another Williams adaptation, Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (1960), playing against a recessive, restless Marlon Brando. The Williams films she plays in are some distance from neorealism. There is none of the raw, on-the-fly immediacy that marks the best of the neorealist period, although The Fugitive Kind maintains an intensity and a certain rawness without the staginess of Kazan’s Streetcar. Brando is in a more recessive mode here, a mysterious drifter in a snakeskin jacket named Valentine who becomes the lover of Magnani’s Lady Torrance, a shop owner, who wishes to reconstruct her father’s sugar shop in the back of her store. It is burned to a cinder by her sick, jealous, impotent husband, and Valentine vanishes in the flames. Here, Lumet’s tight direction and editing—already seen in his extraordinary film, 12 Angry Men (1957)—prevent the overheating that threatens Streetcar without diluting the sexual intensity of the characters and their interaction. Williams wasn’t the only Southern writer whose work was adapted for the screen during the decade. William Faulkner’s Pylon was filmed by

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FIGURE 7.5 A tense, sexually charged moment between Valentine (Marlon Brando) and Lady Torrance (Anna Magnani) in The Fugitive Kind.

Douglas Sirk as Tarnished Angels in 1957, and, taking advantage of Orson Welles’s brief return to the United States, Martin Ritt filmed The Long Hot Summer (1958), based on Faulkner material, with Welles playing the paterfamilias, Will Varner. Paul Newman plays the drifter people believe is a barn burner. I noted facetiously that Southern gothic films seemed to get by the censorious Production Code. But in fact, the code was slowly fading away over the course of the decade, and perhaps the prestige aura of a Tennessee Williams or William Faulkner adaptation, and the success of Streetcar, was part of hastening its demise. Other films also weakened the code. Otto Preminger’s The Moon Is Blue (1953) allowed the taboo word “virgin” to be spoken. His melodrama about drug addiction, The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), was released without code approval. (Preminger was not only instrumental in loosening code restrictions; he signed Dalton Trumbo to write Exodus in 1960 and allowed the writer’s name to appear in the credits, thereby helping to break the blacklist.) Other films followed suit— Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s adaptation of Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), with its barely suppressed themes of homosexuality, lobotomy, and cannibalism, Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot in 1960, and Hitchcock’s Psycho in the same year—breaking with all code restrictions. The code eventually died, morphing into the MPAA rating system. Playing games with the Production Code was an ongoing occupation of writers and directors during its thirty-year reign, part of the intricate studio politics of getting a film made. Writers, it is said, would purposely put in ribald material to throw the censors off on a false trail while they wrote in more subtle material that evaded the censors’ not very bright attention. Battling the censors was, of course, not the only strug gle in getting a film made. Studio politics (and, in the ’50s, national politics) were often brutal,

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pitting the dominant personalities of the studio heads against the contract players, the writers for hire, and the unionized crews—with the addition of the weight of the HUAC hearings. Sometimes fear, sometimes the brute force of personality got films made. Egos clashed. Sex was (and continues to be) used as a bargaining chip. Such conditions were often themselves melodramatic and occasionally were used as material for melodramatic films. Three of the best films about moviemaking include The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and one just after the end of the decade, Two Weeks in Another Town (1962). Both were directed by Vincente Minnelli. The third came mid-decade, Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife (1955, adapted by James Poe from a Clifford Odets play). We can note in passing one of the most popular ’50s films, the musical about the coming of sound to the movies, Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952). Minnelli was an expert melodramatist as well as a director of musicals for MGM. He liked working with Kirk Douglas, not only in the two films mentioned but in the biopic of Vincent Van Gogh, Lust for Life (1956). He was able to extract good performances from other actors as well, in melodramas that did not have filmmaking as their subject. Some Came Running (1958), for example, contains a modulated performance by Frank Sinatra as a returning vet and burned-out writer and Dean Martin as a woman-hating gambler. Shirley MacLaine plays Ginnie, variously referred to by Martin’s character, Bama, as a “tramp” or a “pig.” Some Came Running is a mostly restrained film, exploring Sinatra’s Dave and his inability to find a comfortable emotional place for himself and his talent. His love for his former professor’s daughter is not reciprocated, and he marries Ginnie out of a mixture of pity, self-pity, and self-laceration. Once again, a male character is confused and hurt, and if not quite tormented, then certainly in perpetual unease. Dave is saved from his hasty marriage by a drunken gangster friend of Ginnie, who guns down both, killing her. The shooting takes place in a grand and delirious set piece in a carnival fairgrounds, with colored lights and carnival rides, massive crowds, and the camera tracking the killer through it all. It is an explosive representation of repressed anger and frustration, a tactic sometimes used by Minnelli to shake up his characters and viewers by figuratively blowing things up and shattering complacency. This is one melodramatic strategy that counters the more conventional collapse into a satisfying acceptance of modified desire. Minnelli tries to soothe the eruption at the carnival by ending the film on a quiet note. The film ends with Ginnie’s funeral. Little is resolved. The camera moves from the gathering at the

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grave to the vacant landscape surrounding the cemetery. In this film, the sadness of emptiness leaves us with little recourse, little understanding of what might happen to the characters and how they might survive. Before looking at Minnelli’s films about filmmaking, I want to briefly mention Aldrich’s The Big Knife, which comes between the two films. Robert Aldrich is at the opposite end of the melodramatic scale, filling his films to overflowing with sound and fury. I’ve mentioned his great, crazed late noir, Kiss Me Deadly, an almost surreal film about nuclear holocaust and an impotent detective. He brings that sensibility, slightly modified, into his Hollywood melodrama about a tormented actor, Charlie Castle (Jack Palance), and a crude, bullying studio boss (fashioned after Columbia’s Harry Cohn), Stanley Hoff, played by Rod Steiger. Confined mostly to a single set, Castle’s house and grounds, Aldrich depends on the agonizing dynamics between the players, especially Castle’s unbearable anxiety—which leads to his suicide—to generate the considerable emotional tension of the film. The Big Knife is a melodrama of personal destruction, of a large personality beaten down by a single-minded corporate mentality that will stoop to murder in order to maintain its power and save its star player. Charlie is torn between his estranged marriage to a woman (Ida Lupino) who wants him to get out of Hoff’s clutches and his own agonizing weakness. Surrounded by his cast-off women and Hoff’s toady (played by Wendell Corey, who calls everyone “Kitty”), nagged by the memory of his having killed a child in a car accident and set someone else up for it, confronted by the possible murder of another woman who has been threatening him—secrets and terrible incidents keep piling up—Charlie slowly disintegrates. Aldrich’s camera keeps him constantly in view, constantly on the verge of a ner vous breakdown, which inevitably occurs. Aldrich and playwright Odets imagine a Hollywood that is rapidly disappearing. The Hoff-like studio bosses were aging out, and stars were increasingly free agents rather than contracted to a studio and driven to suicide by its executives. Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town focuses on an aging director, Maurice Kruger (Edward G. Robinson), at the end of his career and Jack Andrus (Kirk Douglas), another wreck of an actor, whose career is over and who was in rehab because of a car accident and a psychotic break. The important difference between this film and its antecedent, The Bad and the Beautiful (excerpts of which the characters watch in a screening room), is that the action takes place not in Hollywood but in another town, Rome, specifically in Cinecittà, the studio built by Mussolini, at the moment when, as the

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FIGURE 7.6 Desperation and despair in The Big Knife. Charlie Castle (Jack Palance) and his

wife, Marion (Ida Lupino).

studios were disintegrating, overseas productions or, more likely, as portrayed in Two Weeks in Another Town, coproductions were becoming frequent. Nicholas Ray and Anthony Mann, for example, worked with producer Samuel Bronston in Spain late in their careers as more and more filmmakers were taking advantage of lower budgets and tax breaks available abroad. Two Weeks in Another Town is about rehabilitation, a melodrama of redemption in which Jack Andrus learns from a stricken Kruger that he had an affair with Jack’s ex-wife. Jack confronts her and beats her up following a scene at a party that is reminiscent of Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (made just two years before Two Weeks in Another Town in Cinecittà). But after a harrowing, cathartic, drunken car ride—another of Minnelli’s explosive episodes—Jack finds that he can expel his demons. (The sequence is an even more harrowing car ride than the one Minnelli stages in The Bad and the Beautiful when Georgia, in hysterics, flees her unfaithful lover.) Jack has already proven himself by taking over direction of Kruger’s unfinished film, and now can reclaim himself as an actor and functioning human being. Minnelli is too much in love with filmmaking to allow his characters to collapse completely under the weight of their storming emotions in the way that Aldrich does in The Big Knife. The death of Kruger liberates Jack and the other characters to be their filmmaking best. In another town, American filmmakers overcome the burdens of their past and become great moviemakers.

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The Bad and the Beautiful is also a melodrama of redemption, but not necessarily of the main character, Kirk Douglas’s Jonathan Shields, a producer and director who uses his friends to climb to the top. The melodramatic dynamics in this film differ from those we have been looking at so far. The main character neither seeks nor gains redemption. He in fact remains unmoved throughout. It is rather the three people, a director, writer, and actress, whose lives he deeply affects who need to come to a state not merely of emotional equilibrium but of acceptance and forgiveness, a place that recognizes all the good Jonathan has done for them despite the hurt he has caused. Each tells their story in flashback when executive producer Harry Pebbel (Walter Pidgeon) summons them to his office to hear Jonathan’s latest pitch. Jonathan needs a hit and wants them to write, direct, and star in it. Pebbel is not in the mold of Stanley Hoff, or even the real-life Harry Cohn. Unlike Hoff, he has everyone’s best interests at heart. The story each character tells—director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), actress Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), and writer James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell)—starts on a low note, raises to a major key, and then falls to despair and hatred. Fred Amiel meets Jonathan as a paid mourner at the funeral of Jonathan’s hated father. They become friends and start their careers on lowbudget Westerns and horror films, the latter in the manner of 1940s producer Val Lewton, who had his own little horror unit at RKO. Lewton discovered, in films like Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942), that mere suggestion through the use of shadows and sound could create as much fright—even more—than representing people in animal costumes. Jonathan and Fred come up with the same solution to the horror film Pebbel has asked them to make. Their discussion takes place in a projection room, with its lights and shadows reminiscent of a scene ten years earlier in Citizen Kane (Minnelli references Kane again later in the film, when the camera cranes up into the scaffolding as the crew watch the final shot of the film Jonathan is making). In the projection room, Jonathan turns off the lights so that, lit only by a desk lamp, he shows how shadows in the dark create fear. The film they make, Son of the Cat Man, is a success, and Pebbel offers Jonathan an “A” picture that Fred has prepared to direct. This precipitates the first turn. Jonathan denies Fred’s expected role as director and abandons him. Minnelli does a masterful job of communicating Fred’s shock and disappointment. Jonathan comes out of Pebbel’s office excited that he has gotten everything he’s asked for, including another director. As he mentions the director’s name, Minnelli cuts to Fred’s face, registering hurt surprise.

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After a shot of both of them, he cuts to a close-up of Jonathan, telling Fred he’s not ready to direct a million-dollar picture. Recriminations ensue, and Pebbel walks out of his office with the new director, all of them leaving Fred to stand alone, mortified and distraught. Minnelli does scenes of great hysteria, like the climax of Some Came Running or the wild car ride in Two Weeks in Another Town. When he slows down, he can be effective in silently conveying strong emotion. Georgia Lorrison’s story is more conventionally melodramatic: a brokendown actress, suffering under the memory of an abusive father (Jonathan Shields also has a troublesome father in the background), she is brought to stardom by Jonathan, who dresses her, trains her, dumps her in the pool when she goes back to booze, and becomes her lover, until she inevitably discovers him with another woman. Melodrama, as we’ve seen, is hard on its characters, male or female. Terry Malloy is beaten to a pulp; Charlie Castle drowns himself in the bathtub. Women in melodrama sometimes get beaten—raped in Lupino’s Outrage—but the Production Code would not permit their suicide, though Minnelli comes close. Suffering from depression after his film has wrapped, Jonathan takes comfort in the arms of a trampish starlet whose shadow falls over Georgia, who surprises both as she unexpectedly comes to Jonathan’s home. Jonathan urges her gently and then violently to leave. She blindly drives her car through a driving rain, almost killing herself before coming safely to a stop, on the brink of self-destruction. The third story is in many ways the trickiest of the lot because Minnelli and writers Charles Schnee and George Bradshaw create two impossible characters. A pipe-smoking Southern writer of great fame, James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell), “graduate of Harvard and the Sorbonne,” is a not very intellectual presence. His unlikely wife, Rosemary (Gloria Grahame), is all Southern flittery and comes to a very bad end. Jonathan brings them to Hollywood, seducing Bartlow to write the screenplay of his novel. In a nicely filmed long take in their Hollywood bungalow, played partly through their reflection in a mirror, Bartlow and his wife, returning from Shields’s party, move about each other as she upbraids him about his rudeness to his patron. He worries about her dancing with Jonathan’s Hispanic star, Gaucho (Gilbert Roland). As they begin to make up, they move in for an embrace, but Rosemary pauses and walks away, as if a thought has suddenly given her pause. She turns and returns, and they embrace passionately. The pause is significant because it presages a deadly turn. Jonathan takes Bartlow to the country to write his script without interruption and has

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FIGURE 7.7 Two scenes of self-destruction behind the wheel. Georgia (Lana Turner) in The

Bad and the Beautiful and Jack Andrus (Kirk Douglas) in Two Weeks in Another Town.

Gaucho entertain Rosemary by flying her to Mexico. The plane crashes, killing them both. The nadir comes without great emotion. Minnelli can be a cool melodramatist, who wants comprehension rather than tears, diverting our attention immediately, just like Jonathan diverts Bartlow from his grief. At the peak of their friendship and Bartlow’s grief, Jonathan lets fall that he set up the plane ride that killed Bartlow’s wife. Jonathan is in the bathroom, preparing to go with Bartlow to the country to work on their script; Bartlow is in the foreground, struck dumb by Jonathan’s gaffe, Jonathan by Bartlow’s fist to his jaw. But even in this moment of tension, Jonathan gains the upper hand by telling the truth, that Bartlow is better off without his wife. Everyone learns a lesson, including Jonathan Shields. He takes over directing the picture that Bartlow has written and ruins it through his incompetence. The director he has fired warns him that he needs “humility,” the one quality Jonathan doesn’t have. And so the film comes full circle. Pebbel convinces Fred, Bartlow, and Georgia how much they thrived when they left Shields, explaining that his thoughtless behavior allowed them to find their own success. The film ends as they cluster around the phone to hear Jonathan’s call for their help in his next film. Like Two Weeks in Another Town, The Bad and The Beautiful ends with a kind of reformation rather than redemption. The melodramatic arc is smoothed as things return to the status quo ante, though with the characters wiser and better than they were. Filmmaking, in both movies, is depicted as a rough but ultimately rewarding undertaking, unlike The Big Knife, where it only results in death. Many of Minnelli’s melodramas tend to leave us with a barely convinced feeling of satisfaction. There is an inescapable pleasure in their invention that

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is infectious. The stillness at the end of Some Came Running, the rehabilitation of Jack Andrus in Two Weeks in Another Town, the recognition of Jonathan Shield’s innate qualities at the end of The Bad and the Beautiful attempt to wash away the shocks that precede them. We are, in effect, set free. There is little irony in their closure, little left for us to ponder. Which brings me inevitably to Douglas Sirk, one of the most studied filmmakers of the decade, a director whose work not only influenced the thinking of film scholars but of filmmakers as diverse as Todd Haynes and the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose filmmaking style changed after he discovered Sirk. Sirk’s great melodramas—Magnificent Obsession (1954), There’s Always Tomorrow, All That Heaven Allows (both 1955), Written on the Wind (1956), Tarnished Angels (1957), and Imitation of Life (1959)—are only a part of his output, which began in Germany in the 1930s. When he came to Hollywood in the early ’40s, he worked in a number of genres, including comedies and a Western, Taza, Son of Cochise (1954), starring Rock Hudson, who first appeared in Sirk’s Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952) and went on to be in many of the melodramas that followed. Sirk was not the first or only expat filmmaker to make a Western. Fritz Lang made three. The Austrian Fred Zinnemann made what is probably the most famous Western of the decade, High Noon (1952). But Taza, Son of Cochise is, despite its well-meaning focus on Native Americans, a wooden film, and Rock Hudson, bare-chested and heavily made up in brown skin, is, in retrospect, slightly ridiculous. But Rock Hudson, in retrospect, is less ridiculous than fascinating and heartbreaking. A gay man who didn’t come out until he contracted AIDS in the mid-1980s, making it a public cause, he stands as a startling representative of the Hollywood publicity machine. Throughout the 1950s and into the early ’60s, he was among the most recognizable and filmable “heterosexual” males. The quotes are important because Hudson was made into heterosexuality by his studio and through the films he starred in, especially Sirk’s. His Rock Hudson is most often a recessive, sensitive character. In Magnificent Obsession, Hudson’s Bob Merrick starts out as a rich, careless lout, responsible for the death of a good woman’s husband, but redeems himself by becoming a sensitive surgeon, saving the sight of that same woman, whose blindness he caused. With its main character’s progression from a boorish playboy to a serious, religious savior and eye surgeon, Magnificent Obsession stands as an essay on melodrama, with all its coincidences, all its acts of redemption and swelling music, with an added fillip of religion and

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pre–Star Wars talk about a life force. There is even a Yoda figure in Randolph (Otto Kruger), who makes key appearances throughout the film as Merrick’s spiritual guide. One reason Sirk’s films attract so much interest is that they seem to be self-conscious, playing with generic rules, exaggerating the already exaggerated melodramatic elements while taking themselves seriously. It’s something of a double take: first you see the surface narrative, the lush mise-en-scène and dynamic acting, and then, if you care to pay attention, the melodramatic structure becomes evident, exposed; you become conscious of the melodrama of the melodrama. This might endanger the primary narrative by exposing it, making it seem ridiculous, even silly. Exposure is the very substance of Magnificent Obsession, which is about blindness and sight. Bob Merrick is blind to his reckless disregard for others until he is enlightened by the force of a higher power. His carelessness causes Helen Phillips (Jayne Wyman) to get hit by a car which causes her to go blind. Merrick goes to medical school in order to cure Helen, who has fallen in love with him. He uses an assumed name, and she doesn’t recognize him as Merrick. Mutual blindness, more illness, and eventually love and a cure under Merrick’s care. Merrick is exposed, but Helen has already fallen in love with him; even more, he is exposed to moral righteousness. Everyone sees the light. Irony almost perishes. This sounds ridiculous, too much to be taken seriously, a piling of absurdities, as if the sheer weight of coincidence—Merrick causes Helen’s husband’s death because he uses the town’s only resuscitator to save his life after a speedboat accident; she has met him, but on second meeting doesn’t recognize him after the blindness caused by her attempting to escape from him in a taxi; he finds religion, goes to medical school, and operates to restore her sight—will explode the melodrama’s already emotional excess. Sirk is able to take these absurd events and apply a narrative brake so that they are slowed down and occur as if they could actually happen in some alternate melodrama universe. “Realism” is not what is at play here. In fact, part of the attraction of Sirk’s films is that they are not realistic in the conventional Hollywood sense. Magnificent Obsession is restrained in comparison to the works that come after it and makes its coincidences plausible rather than risible. That plausibility is tested in some of the films to come where the structures of melodrama become even more evident. Following the sword-and-sandal Sign of the Pagan (1954) and the costume drama Captain Lightfoot (1955), There’s Always Tomorrow (1956) focuses on

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its male character, Clifford Groves (Fred MacMurray). A toy manufacturer leading the usual suburban life with its usual ennui, he perks up upon meeting Norma Vale (Barbara Stanwyck). This pairing of the two, who appeared together in Double Indemnity (1944), presents an intriguing contrast. Here they are a briefly happy if illicit couple, whose end is not a murderous liaison but a wrenchingly sad and inevitable parting. Filmed in black and white, it eschews the lavish mise-en-scène that would become more and more evident in later films. In this film, Sirk places his camera behind screens that block characters from our direct contact, and there are a few reflections of faces in surfaces and mirrors that became part of his stylistic trademark. But the emphasis is less on mise-en-scène than Clifford’s quiet despair and loneliness, figured in a moving shot where he is composed with one of his toy robots. Norma’s sadness is represented by her face reflecting the rain outside like tears. The romance is thwarted by Clifford’s adult son, and the emptiness of suburban family life is made permanent. There is none of the excessive redemption present in, for example, No Down Payment. This is a quiet, somber work, more restrained than the films to come. I want to leap chronology and leave All That Heaven Allows (1955) until last. Instead, I want to look at Sirk’s grand opera of a melodrama, a film of sexual frustration and intergenerational conflict in oil country, the film whose title morphed into a Bob Dylan song, Written on the Wind (1956), and whose content became the basis of the television series Dallas. Sirk creates a number of distinct character types to populate his Texas landscape. Rock Hudson’s Mitch Wayne is on the bottom of the class rung, born poor, reaching success as a geologist in the Hadley Oil Company and a confidante of its owner, Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith). His boyhood friend, Jasper’s son Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack), is a drunk, uncomfortable in his skin, driven to suicide when he learns he has a sexual “weakness.” Marylee Hadley (Dorothy Malone) is what might be called in the 1950s a “nymphomaniac,” more reasonably, a frustrated sex addict, in love with Mitch, who of course has only a brotherly interest in her. In the middle is Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall), executive secretary of Hadley’s New York ad agency, whose legs, early in the film, become the object of Mitch’s gaze. This instant of erotic charge sparks the action. The film has a cyclical narrative and begins with what will be its climax: a drunken, distraught Kyle madly driving his sports car through the blowing leaves of the Texas town named after the oil company. The leaves blow through the doors of the Hadley mansion, and it is here where the film picks

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up its narrative threads and tells its complete story, that in the end will get him shot and killed. Kyle metaphorically circles the narrative since all of its members are in one way or another in thrall to him and his irrational behavior. His seductive behavior as well, since Lucy marries Kyle rather than her true lover, Mitch. She claims to have all his neuroses and addictions under control. She doesn’t; she can’t control his limitless self-pity, the anxiety over what he believes is his sterility, and his self-destructive impulses, signaled by the gun he keeps under his pillow. The sexual politics of the film are played out not only between Kyle and Mitch, the latter assuming a passive role except when he needs to beat up one of Marylee’s pickups in a bar. Mitch needs to manage his love for Lucy while fending off seductive entreaties from Marylee. There is a nice set of sequences that demonstrates the triangle. Marylee attempts to seduce Mitch, no doubt one of many times. The two are driving away from the bar, where Mitch had to save not only Marylee but Kyle from a beating (Kyle went to bring Marylee home from a road house where she went with her latest pickup). Marylee asks Mitch if he loves her. “Like a brother,” he unhelpfully responds. Marylee, seductive as always, insists she won’t give up. Sirk dissolves on Marylee’s face to Lucy in her room, talking to Marylee, who is taunting her about her marriage and Mitch. At one point in this particularly nasty conversation, Marylee, sprawled in a chair, drinking, is reflected in the mirror on Lucy’s vanity, creating, in effect, her double as an insistent irritant and troublesome presence. Sirk does try to soften Marylee. In a little scene in which Marylee goes to the pond she and Mitch visited as children, voice-overs of their childish banter remind her of the impossibility of a relationship with her true love. This pastoral interlude (which is preceded by a scene between Mitch and his father hunting, in which Mitch tells of his love for Lucy) only points up everyone’s loneliness. They are isolated, no matter how close. And no matter what their station, sexuality is either repressed or expressed inappropriately, climaxed by Marylee’s mad masturbatory dance—clutching Mitch’s photograph—while her father falls to his death down the stairs. The film comes full circle to where it began, Kyle driving drunk back to the house, smashing his liquor bottle to the ground. Marylee has planted the seeds of unease with Lucy, and Lucy discovers she’s pregnant. The result of her telling this to Kyle, who is consumed by anxiety because he believes he’s sterile, explodes the emotions that have been pent up in all the characters. Sirk goes on a binge of emotional and physical excess, which ends with

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FIGURE 7.8 In reflection, Marylee (Dorothy Malone) taunts Lucy (Lauren Bacall) in

Written on the Wind.

Kyle threatening to shoot Mitch and Marylee wrestling the gun away from him, shooting him in the process. That is the film’s climax. Its coda allows Marylee to redeem herself by telling the inquest the truth about the killing while Mitch and Lucy drive off together. In one of the more outrageous shots ever to close a film, Marylee is alone, sitting beneath her father’s portrait, fondling Mitch’s penis in the guise of a model oil well. Nothing so becomes melodrama than metaphors for sexual desire, and nothing so becomes Written on the Wind than Dorothy Malone’s over-the-top performance in which she practices seductive poses in every shot. Marylee is melodrama personified while Mitch is the antidote to melodrama. Malone overplays and Hudson underplays. Kyle is an hysterical wreck and Lucy is at the mercy of all of them. The sexual politics of the film play out between them and play themselves out, destroying one man, leaving one woman completely alone, and resolving the desire of the couple who should have been together from the moment Mitch ogled Lucy’s legs. Sirk’s last film, Imitation of Life, is, like Magnificent Obsession, something of a remake of a 1930s film by John Stahl, a subdued black-and-white melodrama about two women, one black, who make a fortune making pancakes. There is romance and a quietly played subplot about passing. Sirk’s film is anything but quiet. Its colors are brilliant and its emotions broad. John Gavin plays the Rock Hudson role, but he doesn’t quite have the Sirkian

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FIGURE 7.9 Marylee fondles a substitute phallus at the end of Written on the Wind.

gravitas for the part, and Lana Turner trades glamor for subtlety. As a film about race, its politics are politely liberal. Aspiring actress Lora Meredith (Turner) accepts destitute Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore) as a servant without pay. Annie’s light-skinned daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) loathes her race. Much of the film is built on a series of loathings and humiliations. Lora is humiliated by her first manager, who wants to whore her out to make her a star. Sarah Jane humiliates her mother by refusing to recognize her when she comes to see her in school. When she grows up and runs away, Sarah Jane gets involved with rough trade and is brutally beaten by a man who discovers she’s black. The paths of the women move in opposite directions; as Lora moves up in career and social status, Sarah Jane slides into degradation. Her mother moves quietly into despair, wishing only for her daughter and for a glorious funeral—which Sirk supplies, replete with a performance by Mahalia Jackson. Performance is the key to the structure of Imitation of Life—as indicated by the very title of the film. Lora is an actress, who gives up a life of love and poverty for success on the stage and an affair with playwright David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy). The passage of years yields success and wealth, but little in the way of satisfaction. The rekindling of her romance with Steve (John Gavin) does not bring her closer to the melodramatic desire of home and sexual satisfaction. Meanwhile, Sarah Jane’s performance as a white woman becomes more intense, culminating in the savage beating at the hands of the boy she wanted to marry. Sirk plays this for all its horror. The music blares;

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the beating is shown reflected in a store window, twice removed from our gaze but no less horrific. The trauma forces her to assume the role of a bar performer and live in degradation. Another role reversal occurs between Steve and Lora’s daughter Susie (Sandra Dee), who become romantically involved (though it’s not clear they are lovers). At one point, Sirk creates a virtual mirror image, reflecting Susie’s excitement as she prepares to meet Steve and Annie’s shock as she reads her daughter’s letter telling her what has happened to her. Annie seeks out her daughter and, hiding behind a screen, witnesses Sarah Jane’s vulgar performance in a cheap dive. Performance and denial. Every character moves up, for a time, except for Annie. Sarah Jane dances in more fancy venues, insisting she is white and cruelly denying her mother, who insists on holding her close in a moment of peak emotion that marks the beginning of Annie’s decline. To her pain, Susie is told that Lora and Steve will marry. In their showdown, Susie’s anger at her mother is an interesting inversion of the relationship between Sarah Jane and Annie. Sarah Jane wants to deny her mother’s very existence; Susie complains that her mother’s existence is one of distance and lack of caring. Annie’s is the final performance, and the best. She is the only character who has not lived an imitation of life, and her death scene is among the most moving things Sirk has done, bringing out what might be the first “real” emotion from Laura. Her funeral brings the return of Sarah Jane into the family fold and a moving display of African American faces silently bearing witness to Annie in an elaborate funeral parade. Imitation of Life was not the first film about passing. Elia Kazan and John Ford directed Pinky in 1949, a rural drama in which Patricia Johnson (Jeanne Crain) passed for white while going through nursing school in the North. She returns to her poor Southern town, where she is treated horribly and nearly raped, but stays to nurse the town’s dying white matriarch, Miss Em (Ethel Barrymore). The fulcrum on which this film turns, what makes it other than a conventional melodrama, is the matter of property: the house and grounds that Miss Em leaves to Pinky, giving her status and stature. For Sirk, it is always a matter of emotion and the ways in which his characters glide along the path of their intensity. Pinky has its emotional pull, when Pinky decides to stop pretending who she is, to stay in the town, give up her fiancé, and turn the property into a clinic and nursery school, but it is, on the whole, cooler than Sirk’s film. The emotional dynamic of the final sequences in Imitation of Life is instead a matter of moral certainty. The final tight close-up on Pinky’s face erases racial difference and replaces

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FIGURE 7.10 Reconciliation after the death of her mother. Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) is embraced by Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) in Imitation of Life.

it with hope and righteousness. The attitude toward race in both films indicates the space of time in which they were produced. Some films of the late ’40s, just before HUAC’s dead hand fell, were particularly liberal about race and bigotry. The ugly behavior of white people in Pinky is unmitigated, as is the racism depicted in Mankiewicz’s No Way Out. By the late ’50s, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, racial attitudes in film shifted somewhat. In Edge of the City, we can already see a more personalized treatment of race. Bigotry is narrowed to one person and the emphasis is on the unquestioning friendship of Axel and Tommy. Race is completely personalized and then celebrated by Sirk. The return of Sarah Jane and the procession of faces following Annie’s funeral cortege end the film in an embrace of people of color. Sirk’s farewell to filmmaking turns out to be a celebration of melodrama across racial lines. “Celebration” may be an odd word to describe melodrama, given its penchant for emotional pain; but even pain, especially pain caused by the death of others, can take the perverse form of a celebration of life. In melodrama, death befits its victim almost as much as a diminished life. There are two directions melodrama can take: an upward slope of redemption or the downward slope of diminishment, disease, or death and the sadness they incur. Sirk’s masterpiece, All That Heaven Allows, is a combination of diminishment and sadness. The film is sculpted by light and darkness, by movements both subtle and broad, by attitudes cruel and loving, all managed into perfect melodramatic form. And within all this is a political consciousness,

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a critique of ’50s country club life, of stultifying middle-class pleasures, the life we saw melodramatized in No Down Payment, the life many people in the ’50s wanted and were simultaneously afraid of. All That Heaven Allows seeks a place of romantic and sexual simplicity, unadorned and uncomplicated. The problem posed by the film is that the two people looking for this simplicity are years apart in age and economically far apart in class. The melodramatic trigger therefore is incongruity and resistance: the incongruity of the ages and class standing of the couple in love and the resistance created by those around them. Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), a gardener and nurseryman, is just glimpsed in passing at the beginning of the film, barely noticed as widow Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) chats about lunch, tree trimming, and the country club with her friend Sara (Agnes Moorehead). This distance is rapidly closed when she offers Ron coffee and the inevitable spark is struck. The heat it creates threatens to burn down the rafters of family and country club friends. The colors of the flames are spectral. Sirk plays with rainbow hues, most famously when Cary’s daughter Kay (Gloria Talbott) comes to her mother to tell how she was mocked by her college classmates over her mother’s love for a younger man. They all but called Cary a whore. The window of her room breaks the lights into rainbow colors that reflect on the two as Cary tries to convince Kay of her love for Ron. But the children win out, for a bitter moment. In the previous scene, Cary’s son Ned (William Reynolds) angrily voiced his disapproval of the impending marriage. “Ned,” Cary pleads, “we mustn’t let this come between us.” At this point, Ned is behind a screen, blocked off from his mother. The family fire has gone out. Fire and ice. Cary drives through the wintry landscape to tell Ron they must put off the marriage until they are better accepted. Ron, usually cool and temperate, angrily states his unhappiness and his wish not to become part of the country club set. Fire, ice, and containment. Ron will not be put in a box. At the country club, he and Cary are subject to the pitiless stares of others. As a contrast to the country club, Ron and Cary attend a clambake at the home of a former adman. As we’ve learned from the television series Madmen, as well as various ’50s and ’60s films, including the slightly depressing Donen-Kelly musical It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), advertising was a cultural placeholder of ’50s and ’60s angst, an occupation marked by cutthroat competition and overwhelming insecurities. Breaking from the “rat race” was seen—in the movies at least—as a major leap to liberation, which is what the bohemian party in All That

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FIGURE 7.11 The spectral colors bathing Cary (Jane Wyman) and her daughter Kay (Gloria

Talbott) in All That Heaven Allows.

Heaven Allows represents. The partygoers are from all classes, raucous and friendly, the opposite of the country club crowd. Thoreau is their bible, and though Ron has never read about lives of quiet desperation and listening to the beat of a different drummer, he lives the Thoreau ideal. Despite her happy attendance at the party, Cary’s family stand in the way and make her miserable—until they don’t. After breaking her engagement to Ron, the children change their tune, not because she has given Ron up but because they have lost interest. Kay and Ned, home for Christmas, have suddenly grown up. Kay, dressed in scarlet, is engaged to be married. Putting her head in her mother’s lap, composed against a bowl of red roses, she apologizes for her past behavior, too late to keep Cary from unfathomable sadness. Ned is about to leave the country on scholarship and then work for a company in Iran (like Mitch in Written on the Wind). The children have bought their mother a Christmas present, a television set, to bring “life’s parade at your fingertips.” In one of the great images of containment, Sirk dollies into the television set, its screen reflecting Cary, gazing with a look of vacant sadness. Of all of Sirk’s reflective surfaces, this is the most eloquent. Only Cary’s doctor can talk sense to her now. Her headaches are the result of loneliness and repression. “Marry him,” he tells her. But as she goes

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to the farmhouse that Ron has made especially for them, as he sees her and calls after her, and as she leaves, he suffers a terrible fall. All Cary can do now is sit by him, nurse him, wait for his recovery. She is told it will take a long time. Sitting by his side—he is comatose—a deer looks into the window, an image of the innocence of their love, however compromised by illness. Heaven allows only so much. “Don’t ask for the moon. We have the stars,” says Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) at the end of Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942). Melodrama, pursuing uncontained emotions, turns out, very often, to be the genre of containment. Its characters, particularly its women, only sometimes gain everything they desire. In fact, it is the denial of desire that generates the emotions melodrama depends on. Sirk is particularly eloquent about this. While Mitch and Lucy do finally go off together at the end of Written on the Wind, Kyle is dead, and Marylee can only sit alone, fondling a phallic model oil well. Cary can only be a motherly caretaker of her stricken lover. She has waited too long, allowed too many others to sway her decision, and she must be punished to some degree—punished, perhaps, for falling in love below her class and age. Melodrama leaves small leeway for transgression. In melodrama, no emotional trauma is great enough that the sufferer cannot come out in the end knowing something they didn’t know before, even before they die. Sometimes they learn enough to break out of the containment of their fears, repressions, or anger. Sometimes, like Cary in All That Heaven Allows, Charlie in The Bachelor Party, or the couples in No Down Payment, they move into a state of acceptance, an unsatisfied state that is neither contained or freed. Melodrama, in the end, is a genre that expresses dissatisfaction if not downright depression, relieved only by redemption that is often unconvincing if not jejune. The melodramas of the 1950s often reflected the constrained lives that its viewers imagined they themselves were living. They offered a variety of ways out of these constraints, most of which depended on outcomes unavailable or unconvincing. Yet, in their exaggerations, in the inventiveness of their settings and the eloquence of the visual spaces their characters inhabit, they are irresistible. We cannot take our eyes off suffering when it is so powerfully and attractively expressed. Suffering was no greater in the ’50s than it is now, though the inventiveness of the melodramatic imagination has diminished since that decade. Suffering superheroes too often take the place of suffering wives and husbands, depressed women, and angst-ridden men. The anxieties of the ’50s were different than the anxieties of the early twenty-first century—or were they?

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Issues of race and gender, an oppressive political atmosphere, are still with us. We don’t worry about the bomb, but we do have overwhelming worries about disease. Internecine culture wars rage on. And whenever necessary, right-wingers raise the anti-Communist flag as if the absurdity of that gambit has never gone away. The melodramas we do have are different; they are centered on adolescents more than during the ’50s, and fatal diseases are often the source from which emotions surge. The image of Cary sitting by Ron’s bedside, with the deer at the window, seems imprinted on the culture’s melodramatic unconscious. It’s all that heaven allows.

Conclusion

“Complete Total Final Annihilating Artistic Control”—Stanley Kubrick Explodes Containment Many directors discussed in this book were either near the end of their careers or did not survive creatively much past the decade. There were exceptions. Joseph Losey went on to do his best work as an expat in England. So did another filmmaker who started his work in the early 1950s and went on to be a singular cinematic intelligence. Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), his Cold War film, the film that figuratively blew up containment, were made in England, as were all his subsequent films. Unlike Losey, Stanley Kubrick was not subject to the blacklist—he was a complete unknown during its most virulent period—but he encountered it through his work on Spartacus (1960) and indirectly by means of his hiring of HUAC informer Sterling Hayden to act in The Killing (1956) and Dr. Strangelove and Adolphe Menjou, a HUACfriendly witness, to act in Paths of Glory (1957).

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Stanley Kubrick’s first feature-length film, Fear and Desire (1953), followed his career as a photographer for Look magazine and two short films. His photography for Look was extraordinary for a youngster. Kubrick photographed subway riders and celebrities; he caught subjects on the fly or posed. The framing and lighting of his pictures expressed a visual imagination that he would fully develop in his films. His early documentary, Day of the Fight (1951), following a boxer and his twin brother through their preparations for a bout and the fight itself, is based on a series of photographs Kubrick did for Look. Fear and Desire, however, comes from another source: from Kubrick’s fascination, I might say obsession, with war. Six of his thirteen feature films are about war or contain battle scenes. He was perpetually attempting to come to terms with the defeat of battle, its absurdity and terrors, its dehumanization and mutilation of the body and spirit. As his first try at a feature film and a film about battle, Fear and Desire comes across as somewhat amateurish, an intellectual exercise, set, as the opening narration states, in a “country of the mind.” It was disowned by its creator. Yet, in its rugged earnestness, it is comparable to Fuller’s The Steel Helmet, which, given the young Kubrick’s thirst for films, he no doubt had seen. Both films treat war as an internal conflict among members of a lost patrol; both are unpolished and unsubtle. But there the comparison ends. There is no sentimentality in Fear and Desire, no little boy’s death to provoke our emotions. Instead, there is a group of soldiers unable to determine who or where they are. One, confronting a woman presumably from the enemy’s side, ties her to a tree, then goes mad. The others, confronting the enemy, discover that they are their doubles. The enemy is them. This level of abstraction, the film’s desire to see war as something more than physical battle, is something that Fuller could not be bothered with. But for the young Kubrick, his imagination not yet fully formed, Fear and Desire contains an idea of the depth and sophistication of his later films. In Fear and Desire, he tried many visual and thematic strategies, especially editing, imitating the style of the Russian pioneers, Pudovkin and Eisenstein. He wanted to look closely at the distortions of the deprivations of battle. Whether it is the soldier Sidney (Paul Mazursky) going mad as he taunts an enemy woman tied to a tree or the image of hands clutching a spilled bowl of stew after an attack, Kubrick, the autodidact, kept trying things out, honing his style, looking for the precise image and the perfect edit. Fear and Desire is a one-person

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FIGURE C.1 The soldier Sidney (Paul Mazursky) goes slowly mad while tending to the captured girl (Virginia Leith) in Fear and Desire.

film school, the making of which allowed Kubrick not only to discover film technique but to understand what would not work and could be discarded as he moved on. The mid-1950s were a time of experimentation and professionalization for Kubrick. Killer’s Kiss (1955) continued the experimental mode of Fear and Desire. Where in his first film he experimented with montage techniques—rapid cutting of violent images—in his second he worked on framing by looking at ways to compose his subjects, drawing on his past experience as a photographer to best see the characters as they appear through window frames and doorways. Davey (Jamie Smith) first sees Irene (Gloria Price) through a complex of window frames, distant and contained. Kubrick also tried out the symmetrical framing that would become something of a visual obsession in his later work, and he again demonstrates how seriously he had been going to the movies. Fear and Desire was shot in the Malibu hills. Killer’s Kiss, a film about a boxer with a glass jaw who saves a lovely dance hall girl from the clutches of an abusive older man, was shot almost surreptitiously on the streets of New York. It is part of the subgenre

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FIGURE C.2 A celebration of influence. Davey (Jamie Smith) hides in a mannequin factory in Killer’s Kiss, just as the child killer (David Wayne) did in Joseph Losey’s M.

of boxing films I noted in chapter 2 and fits with the contemporary movement of filmmakers who left the studio and went onto the streets, a movement pioneered by Jules Dassin in his 1948 film The Naked City. When he was a Look staffer, Kubrick photographed the shooting of Dassin’s film. But more than other films shot on location, Killer’s Kiss has a visual texture, an almost haptic immediacy of the city in the ’50s, with shots of shopwindows and odd people on the streets. Here is the Manhattan that I knew as an adolescent: strange, familiar, inviting, forbidding, with alleys and warehouses ready for exploration. Like me, young Kubrick went to the movies, a lot, and Killer’s Kiss contains a surprising acknowledgment to a filmmaker I’ve discussed previously In Joseph Losey’s M there is a sequence where the child murderer hides out in a storeroom filled with mannequins. Heaped up and hanging from the ceiling, they surround him. The climax of Killer’s Kiss is an all-out battle in a mannequin factory between the boxer Davey and the slimy Rapallo (Frank Silvera), who is keeping Irene captive. For Losey, the mannequins were a setting; for Kubrick, they are props for mad creativity. Plaster body parts are chopped to pieces, flying apart in a manic display of imaginative violence that would surface again many years later in A Clockwork Orange (1971). Killer’s Kiss is an early example of independent guerilla filmmaking: Manhattan caught on the fly, a sense of ’50s city life moving by. In some of its compositions and lighting, it partakes of elements of film noir; in others, the boxing genre. In one sequence, a flashback, Kubrick takes the time to photograph a long ballet sequence, danced by his wife at the time, Ruth

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Sobotka. Even though it was picked up for distribution by United Artists, Killer’s Kiss never reached a broad audience and is still something of an amateurish effort, still a film of visual experimentation, a trying out of various techniques. But an important career event intervened at this point. The independent filmmaker, who did all the work himself (other than scripting his Fear and Desire, which was written by Howard Sackler), teamed up with a producer, James B. Harris. The partnership permitted a greater freedom for Kubrick, allowing him not only to concentrate on his filmmaking but have a trusted colleague help sift through projects (and there were many that never got made) and make the necessary connections that would result in funding. Kubrick’s next film, The Killing (1956), is a more polished work and was an important turn on the gangster and heist genres that were popular throughout the decade. I noted earlier that film noir was on the wane by the early 1950s, overtaken by gangster films less burdened by the dark postwar angst that marked late ’40s films such as those by Anthony Mann. The shear brutality of Mann’s films, the beatings, the menacing figures emerging from the shadows, marked the climax of a kind of filmmaking that not only darkened the cinematic landscape but reflected the darkening unease of the culture as a whole. Fear and Desire has noir elements; The Killing is more firmly situated in the mid-’50s cinematic milieu of desperate gangsters, suffering existential angst. It’s often said that The Killing bears a close resemblance to John Huston’s 1950 heist drama, The Asphalt Jungle, even down to its star, Sterling Hayden, a troubled individual who had named names in front of HUAC and tried to make amends ever since. He was not Harris and Kubrick’s first choice, but proved so right for their disillusioned, existentially burdened Johnny Clay that Kubrick called upon him again for the part of Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove. In fact, the film closest to The Killing is André De Toth’s 1953 gangster film Crime Wave, in which Sterling Hayden also stars, this time as a policeman. Two other actors in Crime Wave would appear again in The Killing: Ted de Corsia, a regular thug in gangster films—playing a crooked cop in Kubrick’s film—and the loony Timothy Carey, who plays Nikki, a man hired to shoot a horse to divert attention from the racetrack heist in The Killing (he would turn up again a few years later as one of the condemned soldiers in 1958’s Paths of Glory). Kubrick played it safe with many of the other actors he chose: Marie Windsor, Jay C. Flippen, Elisha Cook Jr., all of whom would have been familiar to ’50s audiences. He asked veteran cinematographer Lucien Ballard to photograph the film, a choice

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that led to much on-set tension. Kubrick the photographer was not about to yield his viewfinder, and Ballard had little regard for the young newcomer with novel ideas. In The Killing, Kubrick took a standard heist narrative—the robbing of a racetrack—and fractured it, breaking linearity, repeating events from different characters’ perspectives, all the while leading everything to inevitable failure. The effect is somewhat blunted by a voice-of-god narration that tells us just where we are at any particular moment (were it made today— and it has influenced contemporary films, especially Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction—titles or time stamps superimposed on the images would take the place of the voice-over). Despite the voice-over, the experiment is effective enough to communicate how the hapless gangsters’ well-planned racetrack robbery comes apart despite, indeed because of, its meticulous planning. The Killing is therefore a step forward in Kubrick’s developing style and cinematic vision. His camera is nimbler, tracking nervously across the room early in the film as the would-be thieves plan their job. He indulges in long takes, especially when George (Elisha Cook Jr.) tells his wife (Marie Windsor) about the job as the camera stares at them, a clock ticking in the background. The fractured time scheme allows him to portray the same incident from different points of view. Johnny hires Maurice (Kola Kwariani), a chess-playing wrestler, to divert attention as Johnny, donning a clown mask, robs the racetrack counting room. In the first instance, Kubrick tracks Maurice across the length of the betting hall until he gets to the bar and then cuts away to the horses at the gate. When he cuts back, we see Johnny standing by the door to the counting room. Maurice starts the fight that distracts the cops. The action switches to Nikki, who has an unpleasant, racist exchange with the Black parking lot attendant (James Edwards) before shooting the horse, Red Lightning. Nikki is shot trying to escape. Later, Kubrick cuts to an earlier moment in the time scheme where Johnny leaves for the track. When he gets there, it is at the same time that we first saw Maurice arrive, but now we see more than we did before. Marvin (Jay C. Flippen), the fatherly figure who loves Johnny, is leaning against the wall, drunk. He is not supposed to be there, and his presence signifies a glitch in the plan. The complex scheme is beginning to totter. Johnny walks to the bar next to Maurice—something we did not see the first time we saw this sequence. He walks back to the door of the counting room, and, after we once more see the horses at the gate, Maurice begins his disturbance.

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FIGURE C.3 Existential resignation: Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) and Fay (Coleen Gray)

in The Killing.

Disturbance is the key. The delicately timed structure that Johnny creates for the heist falls apart. George tells his wife, Sherry, about the gang’s plans. She tells her lover. In the gunplay that ensues, the gang is shot to pieces in a startling bit of fractured continuity. Johnny and his fiancée attempt an escape with a suitcase bulging with money, only to see a yapping dog distract the driver of the luggage cart, spilling it to the ground, its contents disappearing in a swirl of bills on an airport runway. The whole of The Killing is built like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces slowly fall out or are put in the wrong place. The film adumbrates what will become a Kubrickian constant: men engaged in small or epic strug gles leading to inevitably small or epic failures. Failure is always the option, the only option. Only Killer’s Kiss ends in an unambiguous “happy ending” when Davey and Irene meet to go off together. The Killing ends with a whimper as Johnny and his wife are surrounded by a pair of cops, coming to take them away. Paths of Glory (1957), the film that follows The Killing, is the first Kubrick film made with a decent budget and a big star. Kubrick and Harris joined with Kirk Douglas’s production company to make a WWI film at a time

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when war films were somewhat out of fashion. Paths of Glory is unflinching in its view of misery and wrongdoing on the miserable front lines where the troops are sent to slaughter and in an elegant chateau that houses the high command. In this film, Kubrick comes completely into his own, assured and astonishing in the visual and thematic choices he makes. His camera makes full use of WWI’s trench warfare, tracking its central character, Kirk Douglas’s Col. Dax, as he grimly tries to bolster his troops against the crazed ambitions of the generals. The tracking shots are a tour de force, capturing the rhythms of Dax’s determination to be strong for his men while at the same time registering the despair inherent in the whole of the war’s enterprise. He moves purposefully and hopelessly. The high command is represented by two figures whose machinations and ambitions cost many lives. One of these, the supercilious Gen. Broulard, is played by Adolf Menjou, which is a joke played on both the actor and the audience. Menjou was a favorite HUAC witness who happily gave up names, solicited or not. In Paths of Glory, in a scene that is blocked and shot like a danse macabre, he goads the martinet Gen. Mireau (George Macready) to force his troops to take an impossible position. When they fall back, Mireau orders fire on his own men. What follows is a most grueling trial, a courts-martial ordered by the generals to punish at random three men who did not take the enemy position—regardless of the fact that the position could not be taken. Kubrick, the former chess hustler, treats the trial like a fixed game of chess, with the accused soldiers as pawns. His camera glides behind the legs of the soldiers as Col. Dax impotently attempts a defense. He creates deep-focus close-ups of the accused, distorting the courtroom that is part of the chateau that houses the generals, seen in contrast to the wretched trenches of the troops. The three soldiers chosen to stand trial, found guilty before the fact, are executed by firing squad—including one who has been knocked unconscious—in a public ceremony. Before the execution, the men languish in prison, offered a sumptuous last meal, alternately brooding and anguished. They are sent a priest, played against type by Emile Meyer, who specialized in brutal New York cops. Pvt. Arnaud (Joseph Turkel) mocks the priest’s homilies and attacks him. In a violent sequence, taken with a handheld camera, Cpl. Paris (Ralph Meeker) fends off the attack and hits Arnaud, who falls and hits his head. He is unconscious throughout the execution, despite attempts to revive him before he is shot. The ruthlessness of these sequences, indeed the film as a whole, is rare even in the most violent of ’50s cinema. The grimness of Paths of Glory

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FIGURE C.4 Cpl. Paris (Ralph Meeker) is offered a blindfold by Lt. Roget (Wayne Morris)

before he is executed in Paths of Glory.

is unrelenting. Even the sentimental sequence that ends the film, where the surviving troops weep over the song sung to them by a beautiful captive German (Susanne Christiane Harlan, who became Kubrick’s third wife), only adds to the hopelessness. After the weeping, the troops are ordered back to the front. All this is not to suggest that Paths of Glory is a depressing film. The sheer cinematic energy that propels the narrative lifts us above but not beyond the suffering of the troops. Imagination transcends suffering, allowing us to keep our distance and use our reason as well as our emotions. This is the formula of all Kubrick’s films and the reason so many of them take a long time to catch on. Their surface often seems hard to penetrate, and that penetration happens gradually. What is slowly revealed is a rich subtext of struggle and defeat figured in images of intense complexity. Paths of Glory was produced by Bryna, Kirk Douglas’s company. Pleased with Kubrick’s direction and, after firing director Anthony Mann in 1959, believing he could keep the thirty-year-old filmmaker under his control, Douglas hired Kubrick to take over the direction of Spartacus. Douglas was wrong. Kubrick discovered to his discomfort what big studio production was about. He brushed with the politics of the era and the politics of

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Hollywood in ways he couldn’t have imagined when he took the job in the hopes it would advance his career. What it did advance was his conviction that he needed to leave Hollywood as soon as Spartacus was finished, because making this film was Kubrick contained. Spartacus is a multilevel phenomenon. First, it was one of a number of sword-and-sandal “epics” that were popular during the 1950s and the early 1960s, many with religious subjects. Best known are Cecil B. DeMille’s wooden bombasts, especially The Ten Commandments (1956). Nicholas Ray all but ended his career making King of Kings (1961) with Jeffrey Hunter as an adolescent Jesus. In the same year, Anthony Mann made El Cid. William Wyler, director of The Best Years of Our Lives, remade Ben-Hur, with its famous chariot race, in 1959. It was probably because he was turned down for the lead in Wyler’s film that Douglas decided to make Spartacus, drawn to the novel by Communist and once-jailed writer Howard Fast. He asked Fast to write a screenplay and Anthony Mann to direct. Neither lasted long. After only three weeks of shooting, Douglas fired Mann. The reasons change depending on who is telling the story: perhaps because he favored the visuals or dialogue over a straightforward narrative; perhaps because he emphasized the love story between Spartacus and Varinia over the battle scenes; or simply because of a disagreement with Douglas and the film’s other producers over a general approach as to how the film should be made. Whatever the reason, Mann was gone and Kubrick, who had never directed a film of this size and with this budget, was invited to take his place. Howard Fast’s script was tossed and the film rewritten by Dalton Trumbo. With this, the Cold War came into the film. Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, had made a living—after being released from prison—writing scripts in Mexico under assumed names. The Brave One (Irving Rapper, 1956), written under the name Robert Rich, won him an Academy Award. Douglas assumed the mantle of the brave one and decided to put Trumbo’s name on the credits, announcing that he had broken the blacklist. However, at about the same time, Otto Preminger also signed Trumbo to write Exodus under his own name. Both films appeared in 1960. No matter the exact chronology, Trumbo was the éminence grise behind Spartacus, and his clash with Kubrick hardly created a peaceful shoot. Each had his own ideas about what the film should be, whether to feature Spartacus as a bigger-than-life leader of a revolution or a life-sized hero of a failed uprising. The actors, big names themselves—Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov, Charles Laughton, and Kirk Douglas himself, here at the peak of his popularity—had their own ideas

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about the script and their lines. Throughout, Stanley Kubrick, struggling even with his director of cinematography, Russell Metty (who photographed Welles’s Touch of Evil and many of Sirk’s melodramas), held fast to the notion that it was the director who must have the final word. Frustration boiled over, leading Trumbo to make an extraordinary statement: I have gone through a process of inquisition on this script that rivals any torment devised by a committee of Congress. The difference is that one can tell the committee to go fuck itself and stop the ordeal, whereas considerations of friendship, mutual respect, professional obligation, and . . . artistic commitment and devotion, prevent such an escape from present circumstances.

He would ultimately write the eighty-page “Report on Spartacus,” detailing his complaints. In the end, of course, the film belonged to its producers and Universal, its studio. They had the right to final cut. It bears small relation to a Kubrick film, because the director’s touches—the symmetrical compositions, the imposing battles (some designed by Saul Bass), the attempted seduction of Antoninus (Tony Curtis) by Crassus (Olivier) in the oysters and snails scene cut from the original release and later restored—are lost in the film’s overall gigantism. It could be argued that the dying fall that marks the end of the film—Spartacus’s defeat and crucifixion—is an unmistakable Kubrick touch, though its seriousness and the sentimentality of Spartacus’s wife and child visiting Spartacus on the cross lack his usual irony. If a coherent theme emerges, it is the blacklist itself, because the film is a dirge to lost causes and betrayals. Crassus announces the crucifixion of the captive slaves. He pledges that more will die “if they falter one instant in loyalty to the new order. The enemies of the state are known . . . , lists of the disloyal have been compiled.” This is the language of HUAC. Spartacus left a lasting mark on Kubrick. While it taught him how to manage a large-scale production, which he put to use in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon, it also taught him that he had to be as independent and as secluded from Hollywood as possible. All his succeeding films would be made in England, and Kubrick and his family lived there permanently beginning in the late 1960s. He followed Spartacus with a relatively small film with large implications. Lolita (1962) is a circular narrative, beginning at the end, when the benighted

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FIGURE C.5 “I’m Spartacus.”

and chastened pederast Humbert Humbert (James Mason) comes to the bizarre house of his double, the corrupt and corrupting Quilty (Peter Sellers). He is there to take revenge for Quilty’s stealing away his beloved Lolita. “Are you Quilty?” he asks when he enters the house. “No, I’m Spartacus. You come to free the slaves or somethin’?” This bit of ironic self-reflection indicates that Kubrick understood the limitations that Spartacus put on him and, perhaps, knew he had the last laugh. It announces his return to the relative freedom of independent production, relative because getting Lolita made involved a delicate dance with the censors in the United States and the United Kingdom. By moving production to England, Kubrick and Harris were able to play the censors of both countries against each other, compromise by making Lolita older than she is in Nabokov’s novel, remove some of the more pornographic bits, take advantage of the funds available to overseas productions, and get the film made despite all odds. The result is a rather chaste comic melodrama, though quite unlike any melodrama that preceded it. Filmed in an almost unexpressive black and white, in leisurely takes, Lolita pursues its wretched, sympathetic protagonist with the same dogged determinism as Humbert pursues his Lolita (Sue Lyon). This determinism is key to the movement of the narrative, for we are firmly in the space of Kubrick’s imagination, where the peak of desire always foretells the fall of the desiring subject. Humbert pursues his object of desire by marrying her mother (Shelley Winters), who conveniently dies when struck by a car, and

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FIGURE C.6 “Are you guilty?” “No, I’m Spartacus. You come to free the slaves or somethin’?” Humbert Humbert (James Mason) confronts Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers) in Lolita.

carrying her daughter off on a cross-country trip. Settling down in a perverse domestic situation in which Humbert is both husband and father, Humbert’s overweening jealousy results in losing his Lolita to Quilty, who has been following and hounding them throughout their voyage in a number of guises. In the end, Lolita gets the last sob, becoming a pregnant hausfrau with Humbert her weeping rejected lover, whose only recourse is to kill the mad pervert Quilty. The film comes full circle. As in Spartacus, no slaves—in this case, slaves of desire—are freed. Deep within Lolita is a sequence in which Humbert returns home in the town where he and Lolita are playing house. It is dark except for a pool of light revealing Dr. Zempf, the school psychiatrist, who has come to convince Humbert to allow Lolita to appear in the school play. Dr. Zempf is, of course, Quilty in disguise, and he wants to spirit Lolita away to appear in porn films. None of this is clear to Humbert, who takes Zempf, with his thick glasses and thicker German accent, at face value. Poor Humbert, but lucky Kubrick and Sellers. From Dr. Zempf emerges Dr. Strangelove, the wheelchair-bound Nazi scientist who will take part in the end of the world in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Although Dr. Strangelove appeared in 1964, well after the period which is the focus of my book, it is nevertheless a direct response to the madness of the 1950s, with its anti-Communist obsession and the military buildup

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of the crazed postwar period. Dr. Strangelove is also a satire, a rare genre in any discipline, offering comic exaggeration of recognizable people and their character tics along with an ironic worldview that observes from a distance the madness of its characters and their ultimate destruction. Dr. Strangelove is also an example of narrative economy. Just over an hour and a half, it creates a visual and narrative space in which the mad and the cunning move toward their mutual destruction. The insane General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), setting the course for nuclear annihilation, gives a rant that contains in condensed form the lunacy of anti-Communist discourse that ruled the ’50s. It ends in a statement of madness so extreme and hilarious that it highlights the madness that precedes it. “Mandrake,” he asks his barely comprehending aide, Group Capt. Mandrake (Peter Sellers), “do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war?” He said war was too important to be left to the generals . . . but today war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the International Communist Conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Mandrake is struck helpless in the face of this insanity. Ripper’s fearful obsession leads him to send B-52 bombers to destroy the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the United States and the Soviet Union have set up a Doomsday Machine, so that any detonation of an atomic bomb will result in the utter destruction of the world. A bumbling President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) talks on the phone to a drunken Soviet Premier Kissoff within the cavernous, darkened space of the War Room, illumined by a circular fluorescent light and a giant screen showing the approach of the planes to Soviet airspace. General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) tries to assure those in attendance that a nuclear strike would not, after all, be that bad. Clutching a binder called “World Targets in Megadeaths,” he is confident: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed. Tops. Depending on the breaks.” His language is insanely familiar because it is based on real-life madman Herman Kahn, whose 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War, argued the possibilities of how we might prevail should such a war take place. Kubrick conferred with Kahn on the making of the film.

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In the shadows of the War Room, the angel of death, Dr. Strangelove (Sellers again), waits for his moment to be freed of his wheelchair, to rise up and salute his Führer as the world explodes. All the loony characters that populate the film are—as in any good satire— based on real people: Ripper and Buck Turgidson are fictionalized versions of the bomb-crazed General Curtis LeMay. President Merkin Muffley is loosely based on presidential hopeful Adlai Stevenson. Nazi scientist turned American missile expert Werner Von Braun and the young Henry Kissinger are models for Dr. Strangelove. All Kubrick had to do was exaggerate the characteristics of these people, place them in a setting—General Ripper’s office; the cockpit of a B-52 bomber; the dark, cavernous War Room—and make a not too crazy link between warfare and sexual potency. The men who populate this film are all sexually off-kilter in one way or another, especially Ripper, who refrains from sexual intimacy for fear of losing his precious bodily fluids. The apocalypse, when it inevitably occurs, is presented in orgiastic terms, as Major King Kong (Slim Pickens) rides his H-bomb as if it were a giant phallus penetrating the Earth and the inhabitants of the War Room argue about the need for sexually attractive women to accompany them into the mine shafts where they hope to survive nuclear winter. Meanwhile, Strangelove, heretofore confined to a wheelchair, rises up as the end is near, delivering a Nazi salute: “Mein Führer! I can walk!” In the end, it is not Communism that is the ultimate threat but the return of fascism. Kubrick, as so often, was prophetic. The film ends with H-bombs destroying the world. And so also ends, a bit belatedly, the cinema of the ’50s, with a film that explodes the decade with an uncontained blast of cinematic imagination. Kubrick emerged from the decade like few other directors. He addressed its anx ieties perhaps not as lyrically as Nicholas Ray but with a sense of exploration and experimentation that none of the other filmmakers, with the possible exceptions of Welles and Hitchcock, could muster. He partook in that most outlandish, soul-destroying of ’50s cinematic excesses, the sword-and-sandal “epic,” and emerged stronger for it. He made a film of a book, Lolita, that, when it appeared mid-century, was banned. In Dr. Strangelove, he took the very political and cultural language of the ’50s and twisted it into its own self-devouring absurdity. The world ends at the end of Dr. Strangelove, but Kubrick was only beginning. The ’50s stayed with him. His next film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, enveloped the science fiction films that preceded it, processed them, absorbed them, and then transcended them in one of the most brilliant and haunting films ever made.

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FIGURE C.7 Nazism rises as Dr. Strangelove salutes his Führer in Dr. Strangelove or: How

I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Dr. Strangelove did not end the Cold War. Not even the fall of Communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union could accomplish that. In 2021, when I’m writing this, we are again hearing a demonization of the “radical left,” of “Communists.” A useful bogeyman is hard to kill. Creating fear throughout the body politic is always a good ploy for right-wing authoritarians. They need to contain; too many of us seem to want to be contained. Artists, for the most part, fight containment through the power of imagination. Filmmakers have a particularly hard time doing this because they work in a profit-driven environment overseen by men with money. Even Kubrick wasn’t immune from such pressures. But imagination seems to win over the tightest containment, and the films we have looked at demonstrate something that has often been recognized in the discussion of film history: good filmmakers burrow through all the obstacles in their way to make films that reflect their moment and, perhaps, transcend it. They triumph over containment.

Acknowledgments

For their assistance on various parts of this project, I want to thank Nathan Abrams, Marsha Gordon, Mike Mashon, and, most especially, my editor at Rutgers, Nicole Solano.

179

Notes

Introduction 1 She may have been Joseph Losey’s lover: David Caute, Joseph Losey: A Revenge on

Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 115.

2 termite art: Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” Negative Space:

Manny Farber on the Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 134–144.

5 This surely dates me: A recent defense of auteurism and the 1950s is James Morrison,

Auteur Theory and My Son John (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).

Chapter 1

On Containment, Screen Size, and the Lightness and the Dark

8 the House Committee on Un-American Activities: Among the many studies of

HUAC in Hollywood, one of the best is an essay by Jon Lewis, “ ‘We Do Not Ask You to Condone This’: How the Blacklist Saved Hollywood,” Cinema Journal 39, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 3–30. 10 a larger movie screen: The standard work on screen size is John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). A quick history of changes in screen sizes can be found at widescreen.org. See also http://www .3dfilmarchive.com/home/top-10-3-d-myths, accessed April 10, 2021. 17 As Robert Warshow observed: “The Anatomy of Falsehood,” The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 125–132. Originally published in 1947.

Chapter 2

“It Was Like Going Down to the Bottom of the World”

22 John Garfield and Enterprise: The Polonsky quote is from Andrew Sarris,

Interviews with Film Directors (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 395. Background for this chapter is from Brian Neve, Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (London: Routledge, 1992), 126–144.

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182 • Notes to Pages 22–67

22 When his contract was up with Warner Bros.: Thomas F. Brady, “Garfield Deal

Off at Warner Studio,” New York Times, July 16, 1949, 7.

23 Peter Stanfield: Peter Stanfield, “A Monarch for the Millions: Jewish Filmmakers,

Social Commentary, and the Postwar Cycle of Boxing Films,” in “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, ed. Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 79–96. The quotation is on page 80. 27 his head thrown in a garbage can: Polonsky interview in Sarris, Interviews with Film Directors, 390. Polonsky recalls a somewhat less violent ending in Neve, Film and Politics in America, 133.

Chapter 3

“I’m a Stranger Here Myself”

37 Patrick McGilligan thinks: Patrick McGilligan, Nicholas Ray: The Glorious

Failure of an American Director (New York: ITBooks, 2011), 210, Kindle.

40 But McGilligan argues: McGilligan, Nicholas Ray, 193–194. 43 Perhaps this reflects Bogart’s own unhappy experience: A good summary of the

49

56 56 58

59

61

incident is by Karina Longworth, “You Must Remember This: Bogie and the Blacklist, Humphrey Bogart’s Very Bad Trip to Washington, D.C. in 1947,” Slate, March 4, 2016, https://slate.com/culture/2016/03/you-must-remember-this-on -the-blacklist-humphrey-bogart-and-the-african-queen.html. the cycle of juvenile delinquent films: The standard study of delinquency in the ’50s is by James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: Amer ica’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Trucolor: See James L. Limbacher, Four Aspects of the Film (self-pub., 1968), 46–47. Joan Crawford, who was the film’s “de facto producer”: McGilligan, Nicholas Ray, 244. this odd and touching Western: Two excellent articles on Johnny Guitar are Raymond Durgnat, “Theme and Variation,” Films and Feelings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 187–192, and Leo Charney “Historical Excess: Johnny Guitar’s Containment,” Cinema Journal 29, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 23–34. Lupino took over: See Marsha Gordon, “Redirecting Reputation: Ida Lupino’s Hollywood Fictions,” Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 170–203, and Matthew Thrift, “How Ida Lupino Lit a Path for Women Directors and Indie Filmmakers Alike,” July 17, 2018, accessed February 21, 2020, https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi /lists/ida-lupino-director. See also https://wfpp.columbia .edu/essay/how-women -worked-in-the-us-silent-film-industry/#Director_ andor_ Producer, accessed October 7, 2020. disallow for intercourse of any kind: See Gordon, “Redirecting Reputation,” 191.

Chapter 4 “Love, Hate, Action, Violence, and Death . . . in One Word: Emotion” 67 67

Ray’s name: McGilligan, Nicholas Ray, 96.  J. Edgar Hoover cited him: Caute, Joseph Losey, 100.

Notes to Pages 67–91 • 183 67

70

72

75 75 75 81 82 84 85

Fuller, a full-chested American and a proud WWII veteran, also had an FBI file: see Marsha Gordon, Film Is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 84–87. Sleepy Lagoon: For information on the Sleepy Lagoon Riots, see Doug Dibbern, “The Violent Poetry of Our Time: The Politics of History in Daniel Mainwaring’s and Joseph Losey’s The Lawless,” in “Un-American” Hollywood, 97–112; “Sleepy Lagoon Murder and the Zoot Suit Riots,” http://www.lalawlibrary.org /pdfs /grants/Sleepy _ Lagoon_ Murder.pdf, accessed August 18, 2020; Richard Griswold del Castillo, “The Los Angeles ‘Zoot Suit Riots’ Revisited: Mexican and Latin American Perspectives,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 16, no. 2 (2000): 367–391, accessed August 18, 2020, www.jstor.org /stable/1052202. one of the Hollywood Ten: the Ten were Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo. a studio job: McGilligan, Nicholas Ray, 340–341. Elvis Presley: McGilligan, Nicholas Ray, 342. According to McGilligan: McGilligan, Nicholas Ray. the film raised the ire of critics: Gordon, Film Is Like a Battleground, 84–87. “the climate is so brutish”: Bosley Crowther, “Roxy’s ‘Pickup on South Street’ Mixes Underworld Goons with Communist Spies,” New York Times, June 18, 1953, 38.  J. Edgar Hoover did not like that line: Gordon, Film Is Like a Battleground. The critic Michael Rogin accused the film: Rogin, “Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies,” in Ronald Reagan: The Movie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 268. The original aphorism by Benjamin is, “This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.” In Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 242. See also Jonathan Auerbach and Lisa Gitelman, “Microfilm, Containment, and the Cold War,” American Literary History19, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 745–768.

Chapter 5 87 90

90

91

91

“Put an Amen to It”

one that he admitted was made to prove: Mark W. Estrin, ed., Orson Welles: Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 189. “There were only victims”: Trumbo in a 1971 speech to the Writers Guild of America. See Andrew O’Hehir, “Dalton Trumbo and American Evil,” Salon, June 26, 2008, https://www.salon.com/2008/06/26/trumbo/. “My name’s John Ford”: Gaylyn Studlar and Matthew Bernstein, John Ford Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 103. Speculation is: See J. Hoberman, Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War (New York: New Press, 2012), 140–144. See also Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, John Wayne: American (Nebraska: Bison Books, 1995.) Joseph McBride thinks: McBride, Searching for John Ford (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 503. See also John H. Lenihan, Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film, (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 30.

184 • Notes to Pages 94–162

94 “ Those who see irony”: Robin Wood, “ ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’: The Late

Films of John Ford,” in Studlar and Bernstein, John Ford Made Westerns, 28.

Chapter 6

Looking to the Skies

109 Susan Sontag: “The Imagination of Disaster,” Commentary, October 1965,

121 123

123 124 124

129

accessed August 27, 2020, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/susan -sontag /the-imagination-of-disaster/. rules that robots must obey: Isaac Asimov, “Runaround,” in I, Robot (New York: Doubleday, 1950), 40. comment on racial otherness: See Katrina Mann, “ ‘You’re Next!’: Postwar Hegemony Besieged in Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (2004): 49–68, and Barry Keith Grant, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (London: British Film Institute, 2010), 77–92. “Communist thought control”: J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1958), 319, 191. “overlords”: Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (New York: RosettaBooks, 2012), Kindle. Originally published in 1953. homophobia: See, for example, Robert J. Corber, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). “It was as if my body had ceased to exist”: The dialogue comes from the film and from the online script, accessed April 12, 2021, https://www.the-incredible -shrinking-man.net/?p =1721.

Chapter 7

“How Can You Say You Love Me . . . ?”

132 “Momism”: Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive

Press, 2007).

132 a series of articles in Look magazine: J. Robert Moskin, “Why Do Women

Dominate Him?,” and George B. Leonard Jr., “Why Is He Afraid to Be Different?,” in The Decline of the American Male, by the editors of Look (New York: Random House, 1958). 138 The story behind Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg’s film: For a good summary of the facts, see Wendy Smith, “The Director Who Named Names: Reconsidering the Legacy of Elia Kazan,” The American Scholar, December 10, 2014, https://the americanscholar.org /the-director-who-named-names/. 142 Production Code: A standard work on the Production Code is Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 144 Minnelli: An important scholarly analysis is by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” Screen 18, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 113–118.

Conclusion 162 “Complete . . . Annihilating . . .”: Peter Krämer, “ ‘Complete Total Final Annihi-

lating Artistic Control’: Stanley Kubrick and Post-war Hollywood,” in Stanley

Notes to Pages 165–176 • 185

165 166 171

172

176

Kubrick: New Perspectives, ed. Tatjana Ljujić, Peter Krämer, and Richard Daniels (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2015), 48–61. the shooting of Dassin’s film: David Mikics, Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 16. not Harris and Kubrick’s first choice: letter by James Harris, June 1, 1956, Kubrick Archives, University of the Arts, London. Spartacus is a multilevel phenomenon: Production details and other information on the making of the film can be found in Martin M. Winkler, ed., Spartacus: Film and History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007). an extraordinary statement: quoted by Duncan L. Cooper in “Who Killed the Legend of Spartacus? Production, Censorship, and Reconstruction of Stanley Kubrick’s Epic Film,” in Winkler, Spartacus, 25. orgiastic terms: James Naremore uses the word “wargasm” to describe what goes on in Dr. Strangelove. James Naremore, On Kubrick (London: British Film Institute, 2007), 119–137.

Selected Bibliography

Caute, David. Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Eisenschitz, Bernard. Nicholas Ray: An American Journey. Translated by Tom Milne. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Gordon, Marsha. Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. ———. Film Is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Hoberman, J. An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War. New York: New Press, 2013. Klinger, Barbara. Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Krutnik, Frank, Steve Neale, Peter Stanfield, and Brian Neve, eds. “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Ljujić, Tatjana, Peter Krämer, and Richard Daniels, eds. Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2015. McGilligan, Patrick. Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director. New York: ITBooks, 2011. Kindle. Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Naremore, James. On Kubrick. London: British Film Institute, 2007. Ryan, Tom. The Films of Douglas Sirk: Exquisite Ironies and Magnificent Obsessions. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. Rybin, Steven, and Will Scheibel, eds. Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground: Nicholas Ray in American Cinema. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Scheibel, Will. American Stranger: Modernisms, Hollywood, and the Cinema of Nicholas Ray. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017.

187

188 • Selected Bibliography

Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. Second enlarged edition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Studlar, Gaylyn, and Matthew Bernstein. John Ford Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Telotte, J. P. Science Fiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Index

acting technique, the Method, 10, 50–51 Actors Studio, The, 50, 133 Adler, Luther, 69 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (TV series), 1 Al (fictional character, The Best Years of Our Lives), 17 Aldrich, Robert, 82, 145 aliens, belief in, 108–109 aliens (It Came from Outer Space), 115–116 alien takeover, as metaphor for Communism, 117 All That Heaven Allows (film), 157–160 Altaira (fictional character), 121, 122–123 Alton, John, 18, 82 Andrew Morton (fictional character, Knock on Any Door), 47 Andrews, Dana, 15–16 angst, male, 132–133 Annie (fictional character, Gun Crazy), 48–49 Annie Johnson (fictional character, Imitation of Life), 20, 155–156 Ann Walton (fictional character, Outrage), 63 anti-Communism, 2, 11, 15–16, 19, 20; current, 177; films on, 9, 67–68 anti-Semitism, films against, 9, 14–15 anxieties of 1950s, contrasted with today, 160–161

Apache Native Indians, 93 Arnold, Jack: Creature from the Black Lagoon, The by, 114; Incredible Shrinking Man, The by, 114, 127–129; It Came from Outer Space by, 12, 114–115, 116 At War with the Army (film), 19 audience attendance, movie house declining, 3 auteurism, 5 Axel Nordmann (fictional character, Edge of the City), 138, 139 Bachelor Party, The (film), 20, 133–134 Bad and the Beautiful, The (film), 147–149 Bad Day at Black Rock (film), 12, 13 Bart (fictional character, Gun Crazy), 48–49 Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The (film), 127 Beaumont, Hugh, 18 Becky (fictional character, Invasion of the Body Snatchers), 125 belief, in aliens, 108–109 Ben (fictional character, Body and Soul), 26, 27, 28 Bendix, William, 18 Berry, John, 23 Bessie, Alvah, 9 Best Years of Our Lives, The (film), 15–17, 18, 19 189

190 • Index

Biberman, Herbert, 9, 14 Bigamist, The (film), 59, 62 Bigger Than Life (film), 44–47, 49, 50, 53 Big Knife, The (film), 145–146 Big Night, The (film), 67, 68 Big Red One, The (film), 81 Big Tree, John, 96 Biroc, Joseph, 77 Bitter Victory (film), 43–44 blacklist, Hollywood, 1; filmmakers impacted by, 3, 21, 37, 85; HUAC and, 2, 8–9; resistance against, 14 Blanche DuBois (fictional character, Streetcar Named Desire, A), 141 Blue Dahlia, The (film), 17–18, 19, 20 Bob Ford (fictional character, I Shot Jesse James), 47, 77 Bob Merrick (fictional character, Magnificent Obsession), 150–151 Body and Soul (film), 23, 25–28 Bogart, Humphrey, 40, 41, 43, 47 Bond, Ward, 39 Borgnine, Ernest, 12 Bouchey, Willis, 83 Bowie (fictional character, They Live by Night), 48–49 boxing films, 22–26, 165 Boy with Green Hair, The (film), 67, 68, 69 Bradshaw, George, 148 Brand (fictional character, Bitter Victory), 44, 45 Brando, Marlon, 3, 50–51, 52, 140, 141 Braun, Werner Von, 108 Brecht, Bertolt, 67 Bresson, Robert, 83 Brockie (fictional character, Forty Guns), 78 Brown, Clarence, 13 Brub (fictional character, In a Lonely Place), 41 Bruno (fictional character, Strangers on a Train), 101 Burton, Richard, 44, 45 Butler, Hugo, 72 Buzz (fictional character, Rebel without a Cause), 51–52, 53, 54 Buzz Wanchek (fictional character, Blue Dahlia, The), 18

Candy (fictional character, Pickup on South Street), 83, 84 Capt. Collingwood (fictional character, Fort Apache), 92 Capt. Nathan Brittles (fictional character, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon), 94–96 Capt. York (fictional character, Fort Apache), 92, 93 Carey, Macdonald, 72 Carpenter, John, 112 Cary Scott (fictional character, All That Heaven Allows), 158–160, 161 celebration, in melodrama, 157 Champion, The (film), 23–25 Charley Davis (fictional character, Body and Soul), 26–28 Charlie (fictional character, Bachelor Party, The), 134 Charlie Castle (fictional character, Kiss Me Deadly), 145, 146 Charlie Malick (fictional character, Edge of the City), 138, 139 Charlotte Vale (fictional character, Now, Voyager), 160 Chavez (fictional character, Lawless, The), 71 Chayefsky, Paddy, 133, 135 Chico (fictional character, Forty Guns), 78 Chief Scar (fictional character, Searchers, The), 98, 99 Chimes at Midnight (film), 89 China Gate (film), 75 Chris and Linda Cronyn (fictional characters, Red Planet Mars, The), 117–118 CinemaScope: in Bad Day at Black Rock, 12, 13; in Bigger than Life, 45, 46, 50; in Bitter Victory, 43, 44; in Forty Guns, 77; introduction of, 11; in Rebel without a Cause, 53 Cinerama, 11, 12 Citizen Kane (film), 15, 17, 37, 87 Civil Rights Act (1957), 157 Civil War, 76, 91, 96; confederacy in, 97, 98 Clarke, Arthur C., 124 Clarke, Robert, 61 Clifford Groves (fictional character, There’s Always Tomorrow), 152 Clift, Montgomery, 51

Index • 191

Cochise (fictional character, Fort Apache), 93 Cochran, Steve, 17 Cold War: containment and, 7, 8, 20; films on, 83–85, 101–102; science fiction and, 109, 111, 117, 118, 119, 130; Westerns as allegory for, 55, 79 Cole, Lester, 9 Comanche Native Americans, 98 comedies, 19 Communism: alien takeover as metaphor for, 117; films influenced by, 8–9 See also anti-Communism Confederacy, in Civil War, 98 Connie Kelly (fictional character, Champion), 23–24 containment: Cold War and, 7; culture of, 7, 20, 21, 128; in melodrama, 160; U.S. policy of, 7 See also specific types Containment Culture (Nadel), 8 Corporal Denno (fictional character, Fixed Bayonnets!), 81 Corporal Thompson (fictional character, Steel Helmet, The), 79–80 “country club set,” 158–159 Cpl. Paris (fictional character, Paths of Glory), 170 Crawford, Joan, 56–57, 59 Creature from the Black Lagoon, The (film), 114 creature of the Id (fictional character, Forbidden Planet), 122 Crime Wave (film), 166 Crimson Kimono, The (film), 75 Crossfire (film), 9, 14–15 Crowther, Bosley, 82 Cruise, Tom, 120 culture, of containment, 7, 20, 21, 128 current anti-Communist sentiment, 177 Cynthy (fictional character, I Shot Jesse James), 76, 77 Dancin’ Kid, the (fictional character, Johnny Guitar), 57–58 dangers, of fascism, 176 Da Silva, Howard, 18, 67, 69 Dassin, Jules, 9, 135, 165 Dave (fictional character, Some Came Running), 144

Davey (fictional character, Killer’s Kiss), 165, 166 David (fictional character, Invaders from Mars), 117 David Martin (fictional character, No Down Payment), 136 Day of the Fight (film), 163 Day the Earth Stood Still, The (film), 112–113, 116, 118 Dean, James, 50–51, 52 Debbie (fictional character, Searchers, The), 98, 99, 100 decline, of movie attendance, 3 Decline of the American Male, The (Look), 132 Deliberate Speed (Lhamon), 8 Delicate Delinquent, The (film), 49 Destination Moon (film), 109–110 Dial M for Murder (film), 12 Dixon Steele (fictional character, In a Lonely Place), 40–43, 47 Dmytryk, Edward, 9, 14, 15 domesticity, portrayal of, 128 Donnell, Jeff, 41 Doris (fictional character, Force of Evil), 32–35 Douglas, Kirk, 4, 23, 24, 147–149, 170–171 Dowling, Doris, 18 Dr. Adams (fictional character, This Island Earth), 116 Dr. Brooks (fictional character, No Way Out), 14 Dr. Carrington (fictional character, Thing From Another World, The), 111, 124 Dr. John Putnam (fictional character, War of the Worlds, The, 1953), 114 Dr. Kauffman (fictional character, Invasion of the Body Snatchers), 124 Dr. Meacham (fictional character, This Island Earth), 116 Dr. Miles Bennell (fictional character, Invasion of the Body Snatchers), 124, 125 Dr. Morbius (fictional character, Forbidden Planet), 121, 122, 123 Dr. Strangelove (fictional character, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), 176, 177

192 • Index

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (film), 174–177 Dwan, Alan, 55 Ed Avery (fictional character, Bigger Than Life), 44–47, 53 Eddie Harwood (fictional character, Blue Dahlia, The), 18 Edge of the City (film), 138, 139 Edie (fictional character, On the Waterfront), 140 Edwards, James, 14, 79 Eisenstein, Sergei, 68 Ellen (fictional character, It Came from Outer Space), 114 Elliot, T.S., 44 Emma Kelly (fictional character, Champion), 23–24 Emma Small (fictional character, Johnny Guitar), 56, 57–58 Emmett Myers (fictional character, Hitch-Hiker, The), 64 emotion, in melodrama, 132 Enterprise (production company), 6, 22 E.T. (film), 120 Ethan Edwards (fictional character, Searchers, The), 97–100 Evans, Gene, 79–80, 81 Eve (fictional character, Bigamist, The), 62 Eve Kendall (fictional character, North by Northwest), 102 excess, in melodrama, 131 Exeter (fictional character, This Island Earth), 116 “the Existentialist” (fictional character, Bachelor Party, The), 134 fascism, dangers of, 176 Faulkner, William, 13, 142–143 Fay (fictional character, Killing, The), 169 fear: of loss of emotions, 124–125; of “other,” 125, 130 Fear and Desire (film), 163–164 feelings, about 1950s, 2, 128 F for Fake (film), 89 Filmakers (production company), 59

filmmaking: “termite” resistance in, 2; widescreen processes of, 11, 12, 50, 53 film noir, 17, 24, 66, 82 films: anti-communist, 9, 67–68; against anti-Semitism, 9, 14–15; boxing, 22–26, 165; Communist influence on, 8–9; film noir, 17, 24, 66, 82; gangster, 17, 18, 19, 20, 30; pro-Soviet, 9; on racism, 13–14, 68, 80, 138, 157; science fiction, 4, 5, 6, 10, 20; socially conscious, 14; 3D, 11, 12; war, 75; Westerns, 55, 57–61, 66, 75–79, 90. See also specific topics Fixed Bayonets! (film), 75, 81 Fletcher Locke (fictional character, Hard, Fast and Beautiful), 61–62 Florence Farley (fictional character, Hard, Fast and Beautiful), 61–62 Flying Leathernecks (film), 38 Forbidden Planet (film), 121, 122, 129 Force of Evil (film), 23–36 Ford, John, 4, 40, 86–87, 100; attitude toward Native Americans of, 93, 94, 96, 97; Fort Apache by, 91–94, 95, 99; politics of, 90; Río Grande by, 91, 96–97; Searchers, The by, 93, 94, 96, 97; She Wore a Yellow Ribbon by, 91, 94–96 Foreman, Carl, 23 Forrest, Sally, 61 Fort Apache (film), 91–94, 95, 99 Forty Guns (film), 75, 77 Franz Kindler (fictional character, Stranger, The), 87–88 Fred Amiel (fictional character, Bad and the Beautiful, The), 147–148 Fred Derry (fictional character, Best Years of Our Lives, The), 15–16, 17 Fugitive Kind, The (film), 142–143 Fuller, Samuel, 3, 55, 66; Big Red One, The by, 81; Fixed Bayonets! by, 75, 81; Forty Guns by, 75, 77; I Shot Jesse James by, 75, 76–79; Pickup on South Street by, 82, 83–85; Steel Helmet, The by, 75, 79–81, 163 Gabel, Martin, 69 gangster films, 17, 18, 19, 20, 30 Garfield, John, 22; Body and Soul by, 23,

Index • 193

25–28; Force of Evil by, 23–36; He Ran All the Way by, 23, 28–29 Gaucho (fictional character, Bad and the Beautiful, The), 148–149 Gavin Elster (fictional character, Vertigo), 105 Geer, Will, 14 gender, in films of Lupino, 65 General Jack D. Ripper (fictional character, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), 175–176 Gentleman’s Agreement (film), 9, 14–15 George Copeland (fictional character, Blue Dahlia, The), 18 George Le Main (fictional character, Big Night, The), 68 Georgia Lorrison (fictional character, Bad and the Beautiful, The), 147, 148, 149 Giant (film), 14 Gil (fictional character, Hitch-Hiker, The), 64 Ginnie (fictional character, Some Came Running), 144 Godzilla (film), 126–127 golden age, of TV, 4 Gordon (fictional character, Hard, Fast and Beautiful), 61–62 Gordon, Marsha, 60, 81 Gort (fictional character, Day the Earth Stood Still, The), 112–113 Grant, Carey, 103 Griff Bonell (fictional character, Forty Guns), 77–79 Group Capt. Mandrake (fictional character, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), 175 Gun Crazy (film), 47–49 Hadley, Reed, 76 Hank Quinlan (fictional character, Touch of Evil), 88, 89 Hard, Fast and Beautiful (film), 59, 60–62 Harlan Ogilvy (fictional character, War of the Worlds, 2005), 121 Harris, James B., 165

Harry Graham (fictional character, Bigamist, The), 62 Harryhausen, Ray, 127 Harry Pebbel (fictional character, Bad and the Beautiful, The), 147, 149 Haskin, Byron, 115, 119 Hawks, Howard, 110 Hayden, Sterling, 56, 57, 59, 60 Hearst, William Randolph, 87 Helen Phillips (fictional character, Magnificent Obsession), 151 Hell and High Water (film), 75 He Ran All the Way (film), 23, 28–29 Hernández, Juano, 14 Herrmann, Bernard, 39, 101, 113 High Noon (film), 55, 150 Hispanics, prejudice against, 14 Hitchcock, Alfred, 86–87; North by Northwest by, 102; Psycho by, 101, 103, 105–107, 108; role of power in, 103–104, 105; Strangers on a Train by, 101; Vertigo by, 20, 103–105; Wrong Man, The by, 101–102 Hitch-Hiker, The (film), 59, 60, 64 “Hollow Men, The” (Elliot), 44 Hollywood, blacklist of: filmmakers impacted by, 3, 21, 37, 85; HUAC and, 2, 8–9 Hollywood Ten, 9 Homer (fictional character, Best Years of Our Lives, The), 15 Honda, Ishirô, 126–127 Hondo (film), 12 Hoover, J. Edgar, 67, 81, 82, 123 House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC): Enterprise production company and, 36; Fuller and, 3; Garfield and, 23, 28; Hitchcock and, 102; Jewish studio heads and, 9; Kazan and, 138–139; Kubrick and, 162; Losey and, 67–70, 74; socially conscious films and, 14 Houseman, John, 37 House of Bamboo (film), 75 Howe, James Wong, 27, 28, 29 How the West Was Won (film), 11 Hudson, Rock, 150, 152, 154 Hughes, Howard, 37

194 • Index

Humbert (fictional character, Lolita), 173–174 Huston, John, 166 Iko (fictional character, No Down Payment), 136–137 “Imagination of Disaster, The” (Sontag), 129–130 I Married a Communist (script), 20 IMAX, 11 Imitation of Life (film), 14, 20, 154–156 importance, of subtext to melodrama, 140 In a Lonely Place (film), 20, 40–42 Incredible Shrinking Man, The, 114, 127–129 Injunction Granted (play), 67 Inspector Carney (fictional character, M, 1951), 67 Intruder in the Dust (film), 13 Invaders from Mars (film), 117 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), 117, 123–125; remakes of, 126 Ireland, John, 76 I Shot Jesse James (film), 75, 76–79 It Came from Outer Space (film), 12, 114–115, 116 It’s Always Fair Weather (film), 19 Jack (fictional character, Invasion of the Body Snatchers), 125 Jack Andrus (fictional character, Two Weeks in Another Town), 146, 149 James, Frank, 75, 77 James, Jesse, 55–56, 75, 77 James Lee Bartlow (fictional character, Bad and the Beautiful, The), 147, 148, 149 Jarrico, Paul, 14 Jean Martin (fictional character, No Down Payment), 136, 137 Jeff (fictional character, Lusty Men, The), 56 Jeff (fictional character, Rio Grande), 97 Jesse James (film), 76 Jessica Drummond (fictional character, Forty Guns), 78–79 Jewish studio heads, 9, 15 Jim Stark (fictional character, Rebel Without a Cause), 50, 51–54

Jim Wilson (fictional character, On Dangerous Ground), 38–40 Joe (fictional character, Lawless, The), 71–72 Joe Morse (fictional character, Force of Evil), 30–35 Joey (fictional character, Pickup on South Street), 83, 84 John J. Macreedy (fictional character, Bad Day at Black Rock), 12 Johnny (fictional character, Johnny Guitar), 56–58 Johnny Clay (fictional character, Killing, The), 167, 168 Johnny Guitar (film), 38, 55–58, 65 Johnny Morrison (fictional character, Blue Dahlia, The), 18 Jonathan Shields (fictional character, Bad and the Beautiful, The), 147–149 Judy (fictional character, Rebel without a Cause), 53, 54 Judy (fictional character, Vertigo), 104–105 Jürgens, Curd, 44, 45 Kafka, Franz, 86 Kathleen (fictional character, Río Grande), 97 Kay Scott (fictional character, All That Heaven Allows), 158–159 Kazan, Elia, 3, 9, 14, 15, 138–140, 141 Keechie (fictional character, They Live by Night), 48–49 Kelly (fictional character, True Story of Jesse James, The), 77 Kennan, George, 7, 8 Keyes, Evelyn, 72–73 Killer’s Kiss (film), 165, 166 Killing, The (film), 166–168 King of Kings (film), 38 Kissinger, Henry, 176 Kiss Me Deadly (film), 82–83 Kiss Me Kate (film), 12 Klaatu (fictional character, Day the Earth Stood Still, The), 112–113 Knights of the Round Table (film), 12 Knock on Any Door (film), 2, 47 Korean War, 79–80, 81

Index • 195

Kubrick, Stanley, 4, 6, 86, 163–164, 164–165, 165–167, 165–170, 172–174, 173, 174–177; Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by, 174–177; Fear and Desire by, 163–164; HUAC and, 162; Killer’s Kiss by, 165, 166; Killing, The by, 166–168; Paths of Glory by, 168–170; war and, 163 Kyle Hadley (fictional character, Written on the Wind), 152–154 Ladd, Alan, 18 Lady from Shanghai, The (film), 87 Lady Torrance (fictional character, Fugitive Kind, The), 143 Lake, Veronica, 18 Lancaster, Burt, 142 Lang, Fritz, 3, 69; M by (1931), 67, 70 Lardner, Ring, Jr., 9, 23 Larry Wilder (fictional character, Lawless, The), 71 Laurel Grey (fictional character, In a Lonely Place), 40–43 Lawless, The (film), 67, 70–72, 88 laws of robotics, 121–122 Lawson, John Howard, 9 Lee, Robert E., 96 Left-Handed Gun, The (film), 76 left-wing politics, 1, 8, 37 Leith (fictional character, Bitter Victory), 44, 45 LeMay, Curtis, 176 Leo Morse (fictional character, Force of Evil), 30–35 Leona Boone (fictional character, No Down Payment), 136, 137 Lewis, Jerry, 19, 48 Lhamon, W. T., 8 Lieutenant Driscoll (fictional character, Steel Helmet, The), 79, 80–81 life: country club, 158–159; suburban, 137 Lila (fictional character, Psycho), 106 Little Boy (fictional character, Set-Up, The), 25 Lolita (film), 172–174 “Long Telegram,” (Kennan), 7, 8 Look (fictional character, Searchers, The), 98

Look (magazine), 132, 163 Lora Meredith (fictional character, Imitation of Life), 155–156, 157 Lorre, Peter, 69 Losey, Joseph, 66, 165; Big Night, The by, 67, 68; Boy with Green Hair, The by, 67, 68, 69; HUAC and, 67–70, 74–75, 162; Lawless, The by, 67, 70–72, 88; M by (1951), 3, 67, 69–70, 71, 165; Pickup on South Street by, 67, 75, 82, 83–85; Prowler, The by, 67, 72–74; Ray and, 67 Louise (fictional character, Lusty Men, The), 56 Lovejoy, Frank, 41, 64 Lt. Col. Kirby Yorke (fictional character, Río Grande), 97 Lt. Col. Owen Thursday (fictional character, Fort Apache), 91–92 Lt. Michael Shannon O’Rourke (fictional character, Fort Apache), 92 Lt. Roger (fictional character, Paths of Glory), 170 Lucy (fictional character, Written on the Wind), 153–154 Lumet, Sidney, 142 Lupino, Ida, 39, 58–60, 62, 64, 65; Hard, Fast and Beautiful by, 59, 60–62; Hitch-Hiker, The by, 59, 60, 64; Never Fear by, 59; Outrage by, 59, 63–64 Lusty Men, The (film), 56 M (film, 1931), 67, 70 M (film, 1951), 3, 67, 69–70, 71, 165 MacArthur, Douglas, 95 Madeleine (fictional character, Vertigo), 104–105 Magnani, Anna, 142, 143 Magnificent Ambersons, The (film), 87 Magnificent Obsession (film), 150–151 Mainwaring, Daniel, 71 male angst, 132–133 Malone, Dorothy, 154 Maltz, Albert, 9 Man from Laramie, The (film), 55 Mankiewicz, Joseph, 9, 13–14, 68, 90 Mann, Anthony, 18, 55, 82, 166, 170–171 Mann, Daniel, 142 Mann, Delbert, 133

196 • Index

Manny Balestrero (fictional character, Wrong Man, The), 101 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (film), 94 March, Fredric, 17 Marion (fictional character, Big Knife, The), 146 Marion Crane (fictional character, Psycho), 106 Marshall, George, 17, 18 Martin, Dean, 19, 144 Martin Pawley (fictional character, Searchers, The), 98, 99, 100 Marty (film), 133 Marx, Karl, 88 Marylee Hadley (fictional character, Written on the Wind), 152, 153–154 Mary Malden (fictional character, On Dangerous Ground), 39–40 Mason, James, 44 Maurice (fictional character, Killing, The), 167 Maurice Kruger (fictional character, Two Weeks in Another Town), 146 Mayo, Virginia, 17 McCarey, Leo, 21 McCarthy, Joseph, 74, 88, 89 McCarthyism, 55 McGilligan, Patrick, 67, 75–76 McGuinness, James Kevin, 91 McIvers (fictional character, Johnny Guitar), 57–58 McLaglen, Victor, 95 Méliès, Georges, 109 melodrama, 5, 6; Bad Day at Black Rock, 12; celebration in, 157; complexity of, 19; containment in, 160; excess in, 131; importance of subtext to, 140; modern, 161; No Way Out, 14; realism in, 151; redemption in, 131–132, 160; tragedy contrasted with, 131–132 Menjou, Adolf, 168 Menzies (fictional character, Touch of Evil), 89 Menzies, William Cameron, 117 metaphor for Kazan and HUAC, On the Waterfront as, 138–139 Method, the, 10, 50–51

Mexican-American issues, 70–72 MGM (studio), 12, 137 Midge (fictional character, Vertigo), 105 Midge Kelly (fictional character, Champion), 23–25 Millie (fictional character, Hard, Fast and Beautiful), 61–62 Minnelli, Vincente, 144, 147–149, 150; Bad and the Beautiful, The by, 147–149; Some Come Running by, 144–145; Two Weeks in Another Town by, 145–146, 149 Mitch Wayne (fictional character, Written on the Wind), 152, 153–154, 159 modern melodramas, 161 Moe (fictional character, Pickup on South Street), 83 “momism,” 132 monsters: nuclear-fueled, 126–127; portrayal of, 129 Moore, Juanita, 14 moral qualifications, in science fiction films, 130 movie house, attendance declining for, 3 movies. See films movie screen: size of, 10–11; TV screen versus, 10–11 movie studio divestment ruling, Supreme Court, 3, 10 Mr. Arkadin (film), 87 Mr. Klein (film), 75 My Son John (film), 9, 21 Nadel, Alan, 8 Naked City, The (film), 135, 165 Native Americans, attitude toward in Ford, 93, 94, 96, 97–99 Ned Logan (fictional character, Forty Guns), 78 Ned Scott (fictional character, All That Heaven Allows), 158 Neue Sachlichkeit (“new objectivity”), 69 Never Fear (film), 59 New York Times (newspaper), 82 Nick Robey (fictional character, He Ran All the Way), 28 Nick Romano (fictional character, Knock on Any Door), 47 nightclub singer (Big Night), 68

Index • 197

Nikki (fictional character, Killing, The), 167 Nikki (fictional character, Thing from Another World, The), 110–111 1950s: anxieties of today contrasted with, 160–161; feelings about, 2, 128 No Down Payment (film), 135–136 Norman Bates (fictional character, Psycho), 106–107 Norma Vale (fictional character, There’s Always Tomorrow), 152 North by Northwest (film), 102 No Time for Sergeants (film), 19 Not Wanted (film), 59 Now, Voyager (film), 160 No Way Out (film), 9, 13–14, 68 nuclear-fueled monsters, 126–127 Nyby, Christian, 110 O’Brien, Edmond, 64 O’Donnell, Cathy, 17 Once Upon a Time in the West (film), 78 On Dangerous Ground (film), 38–40, 50 Only Angels Have Wings (film), 110 On the Waterfront (film), 137, 141; as metaphor for Kazan and HUAC, 138–139 Ornitz, Samuel, 9 Othello (film), 87 Other Side of the Wind, The (film), 89 Outrage (film), 59, 63–64 Pal, George, 119 Paramount (studio), 11 passing, as white, 156–157 Paths of Glory (film), 168–170 Patrick Hendry (fictional character, Thing from Another World, The), 111 Patterson, Kenneth, 61 Peck, Gregory, 15 Peckinpah, Sam, 78 Peg (fictional character, Body and Soul), 26, 27, 28 Peggy (fictional character, He Ran All the Way), 28, 29 Perkins, Anthony, 106 Peters, Jean, 83, 84 Philadelphia (fictional character, Fort Apache), 92, 93

Philco Television Playhouse, The (series), 133 Phillip Vandamm (fictional character, North by Northwest), 102, 103 Phyllis (fictional character, Bigamist, The), 62 Pichel, Irving, 109 Pickup on South Street (film), 67, 75, 82, 83–85 Pinky (film), 14, 156–157 Pinter, Harold, 73, 74–75 Place in the Sun, A (film), 51 Plato (fictional character, Rebel Without a Cause), 53, 54 Poitier, Sidney, 13, 14, 138 political relevance, of science fiction, 109 politics, of Ford, J., 90 Polonsky, Abraham, 9, 22, 26, 30, 31 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 68 Pony That Walks (fictional character, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon), 96 postwar United States, 9–10, 24, 45–46, 49, 108 Powers, Mala, 63 prejudice, against Hispanics, 14 President Merkin Muffley (fictional character, Dr. Stranglelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), 175 Production Code, of studios, 143 Professor Charles Rankin (fictional character, Stranger, The), 87 pro-Soviet films, 9 Prowler, The (film), 67, 72–74 Psycho (film), 101, 103, 105–107, 108 qualifications, moral, in science fiction films, 130 Quiet Man, The (film), 90–91, 99 Quilty (fictional character, Lolita), 174 Quincannon (fictional character, Fort Apache, Río Grande), 95 racism, films on, 13–14, 68, 80, 138, 157 Ransom Stoddard (fictional character, Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The), 94 Ray (fictional character, War of the Worlds, 2005), 120–121

198 • Index

Ray, Nicholas, 3, 38, 40, 43, 48, 64–65; Bigger Than Life by, 44–47, 49, 50, 53; blacklist and, 37; Johnny Guitar by, 38, 55, 56–58; Knock on Any Door by, 47; In a Lonely Place by, 41; Losey and, 67; Lusty Men, The by, 56; Man from Laramie, The by, 55; Rebel without a Cause by, 38, 49–50, 51–54; role of family and, 47, 49, 51–52; They Live by Night by, 47–49; True Story of Jesse James, The by, 38, 55, 75–76 Ray Biddle (fictional character, No Way Out), 13, 14 realism, in melodrama, 151 Rebel without a Cause (film) by, 38, 49–50, 51–54 redemption, in melodrama, 131–132, 160 Red Planet Mars, The (film), 117–118 religious messages, in science fiction, 118 remakes: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 126; M (1951), 3, 67, 69–70, 71, 165; Thing from Another World, The (1982), 112; War of the Worlds (2005), 120–121 resistance: in filmmaking, 2; against Salt of the Earth, 14 Reverend Bruce Ferguson (fictional character, Outrage), 63 Rio Grande (film), 91, 96–97 riots, Zoot Suit, 71 Ritt, Martin, 135 RKO (production company), 21, 37, 67, 87, 89 Robby the Robot (fictional character, Forbidden Planet), 121–122, 123 Robe, The (film), 11 Roberts, Bob, 22, 36 robotics, laws of, 121–122 Robson, Mark, 23 rock and roll, 1 Rodriguez (fictional character, Lawless, The), 71 Roger Thornhill (fictional character, North by Northwest), 102 Rogin, Michael, 85 role: of family in films of Ray, 47, 49, 51–52; of military in science fiction, 110–111; of power in films of Hitchcock, 103–104 Ron Kirby (fictional character, All That Heaven Allows), 158–160

Rosemary Bartlow (fictional character, Bad and the Beautiful, The), 148–149 Rose Tattoo, The (film), 142 Rossen, Robert, 23, 27 Roswell, New Mexico, 108 Roy (fictional character, Hitch-Hiker, The), 64 Run for Cover (film), 38 Run of the Arrow (film), 75 Russell, Harold, 15 Ryan, Robert, 25, 68–69 Salt of the Earth (film), 68, 72; resistance against, 14 Sam (fictional character, Psycho), 106 Sarah (Aunt), 1 Sarah Jane (fictional character, Imitation of Life), 155–156, 157 Schnee, Charles, 148 Schulberg, Budd, 138–139 science fiction films, 4, 5, 6; Cold War and, 109, 111, 117, 118, 119, 130; fear of loss of emotions in, 124–125; fear of “other” in, 125, 130; political relevance of, 109; religious messages in, 112, 118; role of military in, 110–111; thought control in, 123; 3D in, 20, 110, 115; the unknown and, 115 Scorsese, Martin, 30 Scott, Adrian, 9 Scott Carey (fictional character), 128, 129 Scottie Ferguson (fictional character), 20, 104–105 Searchers, The (film), 20, 90, 91, 97–100, 101 Sergeant Zack (fictional character), 79–81 Set-Up, The (film), 23, 25, 26 Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (film), 12 7 Women (film), 90 sexuality, in work of Williams, 142 Sgt. Tyree (fictional character, Río Grande), 96 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (film), 91, 94–96 Shimen (fictional character, Body and Soul), 27 Short Round (fictional character, Steel Helmet, The), 79, 80 Side Street (film), 18 Sidney (fictional character, Fear and Desire), 163 Siegel, Don, 123

Index • 199

Silver Lode (film), 55 Sinatra, Frank, 144 Singin’ in the Rain (film), 19 Sirk, Douglas, 4; All That Heaven Allows by, 157–160; Imitation of Life by, 14, 20, 154–156; Magnificent Obsession by, 150–151; Tarnished Angels by, 143; There’s Always Tomorrow by, 151–152; Written on the Wind by, 152 size, of movie screen, 10–11 Skip McCoy (fictional character, Pickup on South Street), 83, 84 socially conscious films, 14 Some Came Running (film), 144–145 Some Like It Hot (film), 4, 143 Sontag, Susan, 109, 129–130 Soviet Union: films positive toward, 9; in Red Planet Mars, The, 118 Spartacus (film), 170–172, 173 Spielberg, Steven, 120–121 Spillane, Mickey, 82 Stahl, John, 154 Stanfield, Peter, 23 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 50 Stanley Hoff (fictional character, Big Knife, The), 145 Stanley Kowalski (fictional character, Streetcar Named Desire, A), 141 Steel Helmet, The (film), 75, 79–81, 163 Steve (fictional character, Imitation of Life), 155–156 Stevens, George, 14 Stevenson, Adlai, 176 Stewart, James, 55, 104 Stockwell, Dean, 68, 69 Stoker (fictional character, Set-Up, The), 25 Stranger, The, 87–88 Strangers on a Train (film), 101 Strasberg, Lee, 50 Streetcar Named Desire, A (film), 51, 52, 140–141 studio heads, Jewish, 9 studio politics, 143–144 studios, Production Code of, 143 Sturges, John, 12, 13 suburban life, 137 Sunny Garcia (fictional character, Lawless, The), 72

Sunset Boulevard (film), 4 Supreme Court Ruling, on theaters, 3 Susan Gilvray (fictional character, Prowler, The), 72–74 Susie (fictional character, Imitation of Life), 156 Sylvia (fictional character, In a Lonely Place), 41 Sylvia (fictional character, War of the Worlds, 1953), 119 Talman, William, 64 Tanya (fictional character), 89, 90 Tarnished Angels (film), 143 Taza, Son of Cochise (film), 150 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 121 “termite art,” 2 Terry (fictional character, On the Waterfront), 139, 140, 141 theaters, Supreme Court Ruling on, 3 Them! (film), 127 There’s Always Tomorrow (film), 151–152 They Live by Night (film), 47–49 Thing from Another World, The (film, 1951), 2, 110–111, 112 Thing from Another World, The (film, 1982), 112 This is Korea! (film), 91 This Island Earth (film), 116 Thoreau, Henry David, 159 thought control, in science fiction, 123 3D films, 11–12; in science fiction, 109, 115 T-Men (film), 18 Toland, Gregg, 15, 17 Tommy Tyler (fictional character, Edge of the City), 138, 139 Touch of Evil (film), 88–90 Tracy, Spencer, 12 tragedy, melodrama contrasted with, 131 treatment, of Mexican-Americans, 70–72 Trevor, Claire, 61 Trial, The (film), 86, 89 Trimble (fictional character, Bad Day at Black Rock), 12 Troy Boone (fictional character, No Down Payment), 136 Trucolor, 56

200 • Index

True Story of Jesse James, The (film), 38, 55, 75–76 Truman Doctrine, 8 Trumbo, Dalton, 9, 23, 29, 47, 72, 75, 90, 171–172 Tucker (fictional character), 30–35 TV: films competing with, 3, 10; golden age of, 4; movie screen versus screen of, 10–11 20th Century Fox (studio), 11 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 11, 86, 176 Two Weeks in Another Town (film), 145–146, 149 Uncle Joe Grandi (fictional character, Touch of Evil), 89 United States: HUAC of, 2, 3, 8, 9, 14, 23, 28, 36; postwar, 9–10, 24, 45–46, 49, 108; Soviet Union containment policy of, 7; Supreme Court of, 3 Universal (production company), 88 unknown the, in science fiction, 115 Valentine (fictional character, Fugitive Kind, The), 143 Verboten (film), 75 Vertigo (film), 20, 103–105 veterans, of World War II, 12, 15–18, 136 Vienna (fictional character, Johnny Guitar), 56–59, 65 viewer perception, of large screen, 11 VistaVision, 11 Voyage to the Moon, A (film), 109 Wagner, Robert, 75 Walter (fictional character, Bachelor Party, The), 134 Walter Bren (fictional character, On Dangerous Ground), 39 War: Civil, 76, 91, 96, 97; Cold, 7, 8, 21, 85, 102; Korean, 79–81; Kubrick and, 163; World War I, 168–171; World War II, 44, 79, 81, 107, 108 war films, 75, 79–81 War of the Worlds, The (film, 1953), 20, 110, 115, 118–120, 121 War of the Worlds (film, 2005), 120–121 War of the Worlds, The (radio program), 119 Warshow, Robert, 17

Wayne, David, 69 Wayne, John, 91, 92, 93, 97 Webb (fictional character, Prowler, The), 73–74 We Can’t Go Home Again (film), 37 Weinstein, Hannah, 1 Welles, Orson, 37, 38, 86–87, 89–90, 119; Citizen Kane by, 15, 17, 37, 87; Lady from Shanghai, The by, 87; Magnificent Ambersons, The by, 87; Stranger, The by, 87–88; Touch of Evil by, 88–90 Wells, H. G., 119 Wes (fictional character, Forty Guns), 78 Wes (fictional character, Lusty Men, The), 56 Western films, 57–61, 66, 75, 90; as allegory for Cold War, 55, 79 white, passing as, 156–157 Whyte, William, 137 widescreen filmmaking processes, 11, 12, 50, 53 Widmark, Richard, 14, 83 Wilder, Billy: Some Like It Hot by, 4, 143; Sunset Boulevard by, 4 Williams, Grant, 128 Williams, Tennessee, 140–141, 142 Will Lockhart (fictional character), 55 Wilson (fictional character, Stranger, The), 88 Wilson, Michael, 14 Wise, Robert, 23, 25, 112 Woman on Pier 13, The (film), 9, 21 Wood, Robin, 94 World War I, 168–171 World War II, 44, 79, 81, 107, 108; veterans of, 12, 15–18, 136 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 37 Written on the Wind (film), 152 Wrong Man, The (film), 101–102 Wyler, William, 15, 16, 17 Wylie, Philip, 132 Young, Collier, 64 Young, Victor, 57 You Only Live Once (film), 47 Zara (fictional character, Pickup on South Street), 83 Zinnemann, Fred, 55, 150 Zoot Suit Riots, 71

About the Author

is professor emeritus at the University of Maryland. He is the author of numerous books, including A Cinema of Loneliness; Film, Form, and Culture; The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema; and Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film with Nathan Abrams. He is currently at work on a biography of Stanley Kubrick with Nathan Abrams. ROBERT P. KOLKER