STATE OF THE CINEMA
Glick, Nathan
State of the Cinema Truth, Art, and the Movies By NATHAN GLICK ACCORDING to its spokesmen, Hollywood has in the past year succeeded in polishing off the old taboos of subject matter. Stark...
...Looking down on the terminal from a raised observation window, the camera plays with intricate patterns of movement—criminals and detectives moving in careful chessboard counterpoint to the loose flood of innocent passers-by...
...But the minimum we do have a right to expect is to be able to pass an hour or two in the movie house without physical nausea or spiritual shame...
...Judging by the standards we apply to serious literature, I can think of only three films in the past decade which approach greatness: Carl Dreyer's Day o[ Wrath, Marcel Carne's Les Enfants du Paradis, and Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (which, criminally, after four years has not yet been generally shown...
...Here, as in King Solomon's Mines, the concentration is on the technical knowledge of terrain—a large railroad station instead of an African jungle—and on the idea of rescue in the face of unexpected dangers...
...What sets these films apart from most of Hollywood's serious work— aside from the element of genius—is the absence of the commercial consideration of "entertainment values...
...Today, for a number of complicated cultural reasons, such a situation seems to be excluded, so that we have unhappy endings which produce no catharsis of emotion and wit which is not liberating...
...Mental illness, cancer, paraplegia are no longer untouchable...
...But even if we are being borne helplessly into a culture of television, where no one reads a book, walks voluntarily in the fresh air, or visits a theater, it may be worthwhile—if only for the record—to distinguish the exaggeration of personality quirks in recent films from the true ambiguity of human character and situation, and the coarseness of tone, language and gesture from realism...
...We can hardly demand greatness as a steady diet from any art form, although we should demand the kind of serious work that aims at it...
...If we cannot have the cake of art in our movies, let us at least have a more substantial diet of this kind of bread...
...No doubt this development is not limited to the movies, but infects literature as well...
...The series of films about anti-Semitism and color prejudice culminated in No Way Out, in which the alley vocabulary of anti-Negro feeling was spectacularly used and violence was made the suffusing atmosphere of Negro-white relations...
...There have been times, for example when Dickens was writing his novels serially for popular magazines, when considerations of popularity did not violate the possibility of high art...
...Its incidental virtues include a cosmic affection for animal life, a sense of the cultural integrity of African tribes, a strikingly graceful and strange native dance performed by a seven-foot tribe, a magnificent animal stampede, and the simple excitement of a search...
...And in Partisan Review, stronghold of the avant-garde...
...Union Station has something of the same pure, unsophisticated appeal of a boy's adventure story...
...I can think of only two recent films which, without any pretense at seriousness or ideas, satisfy this condition...
...Hollywood, it would seem, has inherited the mantle of Dreiser and Zola: today the truth is caught on celluloid and canned...
...It is true that there is now a greater documentary emphasis in American films, a greater willingness to kill off heroes and heroines and explore tricky subjects...
...But are films truer or better—assuming that these are separate categories...
...Union Station has the negative distinction of being one of the very few thrillers in recent years to depend on its story line alone, without resort to half-baked psychology or gratuitous physical violence...
...Nor is it improper to suspect the surface good-will and "social consciousness" of films that show little feeling for tact, taste, and human variety...
...Though they derive from sources as far apart as Greek tragedy, 19th Century romanticism and modern satire, all of them convey a sense of the tragic and the miraculous...
...All three use face, movement, and costume as forms of revelation...
...Stark realism and unadulterated tragedy are now supposed to feel at home in the movie studios...
...In the more sophisticated area of manners and the arts, All About Eve's vitriolic reporting of Broadway backstage gossip was even surpassed in frankness and cynicism by Sunset Boulevard's intimate picture of the film colony's misfits and second-grade craftsmen...
...King Solomon's Mines has the open-air freshness and wildness which we used to get from Western films...
...Even the dreariest 'B' picture is likely to display some bizarre patch of reality," writes William Poster in the American Mercury...
...Delmore Schwartz seems almost awestruck at the willingness of Hollywood to present tragedy with an unhappy ending...
...Corroboration of this vision of Hollywood has come from unexpected quarters...
...My own impression is that a greater vulgarity has gone hand in hand with Hollywood's new sophistication, while a cruder artistry has accompanied its new techniques and subject matter...
Vol. 15 • March 1951 • No. 3
