Film in the Fifties

...He delights in movies for their own sake, and he favors detailed scene-by-scene, even shot-by-shot, analysis "to follow the movie as it moves and changes and makes its points in front of us...

...The problem with it is that it seems to be directed by a solipsistic, angst-ridden teen wallowing in self-pity...

...But granting (with qualifications) that both Sirk and Ray possessed a flair for visual design, does that really confirm their artistic greatness...

...Harvey shrewdly observes that the shallow consumerism and earnest do-goodism of the Eisenhower-Stevenson decade seemed to be mirrored in movies that were either devoid of self-awareness or inflated with self-importance...

...Harvey argues that it is precisely the ability of these directors to redeem hackneyed content that confirms their greatness as artists...

...It's less than those good films—and more than the bad ones—deserve...

...These movies were no less earnest and self-satisfied than their tradition-minded alternatives...

...Entire chapters are devoted to painstaking analysis of movies by Robert Siodmak or Max Ophuls so obscure you won't find them on the shelves of the snobbiest specialty video store in the coolest part of town...

...One form of 1950s movie sanctimony was the traditional piety of flag, faith, and family that the 1960s counterculture would mock into submission...

...Harvey recounts how he himself found both Sirk's Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life "unredeemably bad" when he first saw them, before his eyes were retrained by the auteurists...

...An irony in the docile American concurrence in the French auteurists' lionization of American journeymen is that French directors acquired such prestige among Americans in the 1950s and 1960s largely because Hollywood was making such bad movies at the time...

...In any case, in the name of this formalism, Harvey has neglected many good movies...

...With the disintegration of the studio system, the patient cultivation of acting and screenwriting talent became more difficult...

...It may be wrong, by the way, to call the design sense of Ray and Sirk "formalist...

...In its grid-search thoroughness, this approach matches the one he used in Romantic Comedy...

...Inevitably, they were attracted to those directors and movies with the most exclamatory and intrusive directorial techniques and the most idiosyncratic and conspicuous directorial signatures...

...Yes, 1950s audiences could snicker at a movie that aimed too low—but with the complicity of the director...

...Harvey passes over Wilder in silence, presumably because Wilder was too literary, too opinionated about people and life, too talky to fit neatly into his thesis about the rise of postclassical cinematic formalism...

...Their pictorial arrangements and set-ups are seldom motivated by purely formal intentions...

...It actually makes you wish it had been directed by a pandering cynic...

...The crisply pressed traditionalism of the suburbs was challenged by a competing piety of reformist uplift...

...For many reasons, some touched on by Harvey, Hollywood was at an ebb in the 1950s...

...Then, too, these French critics started with the theory that the director is the true and only author of a movie— and in time-honored French intellectual style, went out in search of evidence to support their thesis...

...He told Harvey in one interview that he hadn't watched most of his films since he'd made them...

...And even that 1950s traditionalism itself was not without its ambiguities...

...An interesting study in cultural history might be written about how their reputations rose to their current heights among American movie snobs...

...That book was seldom tiresome, because Harvey was writing mostly about movies he liked—and that his readers were apt to like or to think they might like...

...Movies in general in the fifties seemed to get blander and safer—like American life in general," Harvey declares...

...In his new Movie Love in the Fifties, Harvey writes about a decade—a long decade stretching from the noir thrillers of the late 1940s to the early 1960s—in which a newly pious popular culture frowned on the qualities his previous book celebrated...

...Cinema is photography...

...he is explaining how his character is to be understood by the moviegoer...

...But cinema isn't threatened by photography...

...Even with their considerable visual imagination and technical sophistication, these directors could do no more than elevate assembly-line tear-jerking kitsch into handcrafted tear-jerking kitsch...

...But Harvey appears to feel obligated to salvage some good from the decade, something commendable, coherent, and thesis-worthy...

...But the cultural voice of the movies in the 1950s was hardly monolithic...

...The wry and intelligent sort of comedy so happily rampant in the thirties had disappeared, surviving only— in a mostly ironic form—in the noir thrillers...

...The end result was too many movies either too dumb or too sanctimonious to laugh at themselves...

...These directors produced, Harvey claims, "almost a new kind of Hollywood movie, establishing in the climate of general decline and dwindling boxoffice revenues a different relation with its audience, subverting at times just those securities in the audience—the reliance on narrative logic and linearity, on psychological realism, on the invisible camera and the self-effacing filmmaker—that the classical cinema had carefully built up...

...Or does it confirm, instead, their artistic limits...

...soliloquy while looking at her reflection in the vanity mirror in her backstage dressing room...

...In Movie Love in the Fifties, applied to a much higher proportion of bad, mediocre, or forgotten movies, Harvey's fine-grained formalism feels like over-refinement...

...Film noir and the European directors associated with that postwar style really did expand the expressive range of film technique while preserving some of the bracingly unsentimental spirit of movies from a less pious era...

...Some of the greats—Ford, Hawks, Welles—were still at work and still making the occasional late career classic...

...What the two men had most strikingly in common," writes Harvey, "was their latter-day 'rediscovery.'" Another thing they had in common was that their movies were not very good...

...But then he goes one step further, arguing that Sirk devised a style that let his contemporary audience in on the secret that he knew he was directing trash— which permitted these audiences to, in effect, indulge their guilty pleasure in these mawkish, overdetermined sobfests on their own terms, while at the same time smirking at themselves for enjoying them...

...Unfortunately, however, Ray and Sirk—and all the rest of the journeyman Hollywood directors of the 1950s—harnessed form to emotional content in such literal-minded ways that the effects are just plain corny...

...Because you get depressed...

...Both are overdue for a long interval of reneglect...

...Aren't they, rather, skilled and resourceful craftsmen indistinguishable from all the other highly trained and aesthetically sensitive Hollywood craftsmen—the film cutters, sound engineers, production designers, and so on—who collaborate in the production of a movie...

...The problem with Rebel Without a Cause is not that it glorifies solipsistic, angst-ridden teens wallowing in self-pity...

...What he comes up with is the notion, hardly new, that unsung director geniuses were slyly subverting the formulaic schlock that they were being handed to direct by philistine suits at the studios...

...Harvey writes insightfully about one, Welles's 1958 Touch of Evil...

...With a jump cut here and a camera hung from a ceiling there, these formalist "termite artists" were transmuting generic dross into stylized, aestheticized gold...

...If you had any doubt that the movies had 'lost something,' as people used to say, the late show could settle them...

...But he finally patronizes him: apologizing for the director's aesthetic judgment and violating his artistic dignity...

...In overprotecting Sirk's Hollywood output, Harvey undermines Sirk's consoling conviction that if he had enjoyed the creative control of an independent artist—instead of being a hired hand at the unapologetically anti-highbrow Universal Studios in the blah 1950s—then he would have made real masterpieces...

...Doesn't it then follow that these directors are, finally, not great artists...

...This was the era of the sensitive and scene-stealing rebel manchild—the era of Brando, Dean, and Clift...

...He argues, plausibly, that Sirk knew his stories were insipid...

...What is the best that can be said about Hollywood in the 1950s...

...Then, he tries to soften the clear—and heartbreaking—meaning of Sirk's categorical judgment: "About the films he showed some ambivalence, sounding almost dismissive...

...Jim Jarmusch couldn't identify some of these movies if Jean-Luc Godard stood in front of him with their titles written on his forehead...

...To the French mind, these manifestations of directorial aesthetic intent somehow proved the artistic unity and supremacy of the directorial vision in filmmaking...

...Nobody in America seems to have "rediscovered" Ray and Sirk until the French had first...

...Nicholas Ray is the cinema," Godard pronounced, but it's worth noting the obvious point that these French critics spoke French, after all, and had little idea just how bad the dialogue and line readings were in the American movies they revered...

...Harvey himself, recall, rendered a contemporary verdict on Sirk as "unredeemably bad," not "so bad it's actually good...

...The leading exemplars of the type are Douglas Sirk (who made Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life, and other popular melodramas) and Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause, Johnny Guitar), two Hollywood journeymen now almost universally acclaimed by American film intellectuals as expressive masters unappreciated in their own time...

...Toughness and irreverence, those onetime Hollywood specialties, seemed to be losing out to a kind of national sanctimony...

...Harvey is not the kind of critic who sees movies as a pretext for opportunistic social criticism...

...Painting began its march toward abstraction and formalism in the second half of the nineteenth century in part because its traditional representational functions had been usurped by the new craft of photography...

...And Hollywood made some ill-advised responses to the challenge of television, like the flattening, wide-screen Cinemascope format, or the production of lavish historical epics and biblical pageants...

...Harvey seems to imply as much...

...There is no dramatic irony here: He is not revealing a flawed self-conception destined to be undermined by on-screen action...

...Daniel Wattenberg is a writer in Washington, D.C...

...American critics, on the other hand, should be able to see that these American directors lacked either the personal creative juice or the authority (especially in pre-production) to save movies that were, finally, schlock meant for very broad and undiscerning audiences...

...In place of dramatization and characterization, it has characters "explain" themselves, as when the sharpie agent Allen Loomis says, "I am a man of very few principles, and all of them are open to revision...

...Even more far-fetched is the idea that Nicholas Ray was ironically distanced from his own movies...

...Instead of viewing the action dispassionately, their cameras tend to perceive it through the medium of their characters' emotions, and this projection of human emotion onto outside events is probably better understood as "romanticism...

...Obviously, Harvey liked and admired Douglas Sirk and means well...

...A startling fact revealed in Movie Love in the Fifties is that the retired Sirk himself confessed that he was embarrassed by his sumptuously decorated popular melodramas of the decade...

...I don't believe it for a minute...

...And Wilder's camera, very un-postclassically, never called attention to itself...

...Is it conceivable that such an obvious device is actually a knowing aesthetic prank...

...But because they never realized how bad the underlying material really was, they failed to understand how powerless these supreme "authors" were to preserve their "unified" artistic visions from being fatally compromised by bad scripts, bad acting, and the like...

...Asked why, the German-born director answered: "Because you don't like them...

...While movies like The Blackboard Jungle or The Wild One might overtly endorse social conformity and public order, such overt meanings were susceptible to subversion by charismatic young Method actors who, as Harvey observes, made "everyone around them (especially if they were older) seem radically less authentic...

...Stanley Kramer, Dore Schary, and others produced a cascade of liberal "message films" that sermonized against alcoholism, racial and ethnic intolerance, McCarthyism, the nuclear menace, and corrupt union bosses...

...There is finally something suspect about the whole idea of cinematic "formalism...

...In Imitation of Life, for example, Lana Turner's character, a Broadway star, delivers a sort of "Who Am I? What's It All About...

...I had Lana do the introspection monologue in front of, get this, a mirror...

...Harvey tries to write this off to Sirk's "surprising lack of egotism...

...But they weren't surviving so well either...

...Other reasons are probably to be sought in larger-scale cultural changes...

...Imitation of Life really has such lines as "Hold on to your dreams...

...And he has favored with his own refined connoisseurship too many bad movies...

...Alfred Hitchcock was still in his prime, and Harvey devotes much space to Vertigo and Psycho...

...One reason is American intellectual self-loathing...

...Oddly, given his subject, he writes just as much about Welles's breakthrough films of the early 1940s, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons...

...BY DANIEL WATTENBERG If you picked up a copy of James Harvey's last book, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, you have a notion of what he prizes in movies: wit, skepticism, independence, feistiness, joie de vivre, mystery, and sexiness...

...And Billy Wilder owned the decade, from Sunset Boulevard in 1950 to The Apartment in 1960...