Triumph over Containment: American Film in the 1950s

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

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Contents

Introduction

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

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

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

4 Love, Hate, Action, Violence, and Death … in One Word: Emotion: Joseph Losey and Samuel Fuller

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

6 Looking to the Skies: Science Fiction in the 1950s

7 How Can You Say You Love Me …?: Melodrama

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

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

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 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 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 particular. 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 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 so-called 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).

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 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 American life in numerous venues and sundry rubrics during the period.

ALAN NADEL, Containment Culture

American fifties culture developed in struggle 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 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 hysteria-ridden 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 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, anti-Communist 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