Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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took the skullduggery of the screenplay as emblematic of the kind of betrayal
and backstabbing that sometimes went on in moviemaking. Promoted with
the tagline “Fasten your seatbelts,” All About Eve promised its audiences a
nasty and catty conflict between two ambitious women.
Anne Baxter plays Eve Harrington, a conniving and unscrupulous inge-
nue who wins something called the “Siddons Award” and a place at the top of
the theater world by betraying an older, insecure mentor named Margo Chan-
ning (Bette Davis) who fears that she is aging too quickly. This melodrama
is surrounded by a Broadway stage world filled with both public and private
intrigues. There are flashbacks from various points of view indicating that Eve
probably didn’t deserve the Siddons Award.
Over time, All About Eve came to be considered a Hollywood classic
of the first order. Its witty script, and especially its catty dialogue, however,
caused the movie later to become widely regarded as Hollywood “camp.” The
movie later would become a favorite of academic feminist film critics because,
like the genre of melodrama itself, All About Eve lends itself nicely to being in-
terpreted as a fictional exploration of gender roles and the nature of families.
Besides Baxter and Davis, Celeste Holm and George Sanders had major
roles. Marilyn Monroe made an early screen career appearance in a minor role,
in which she makes a stairway entrance causing the theater critic played by
Sanders to introduce her character as “a graduate of the Copacabana school
of acting.” The movie also provided good examples of the Production Code
Administration under Joseph Breen still laboring to keep Hollywood movies
as sanitized as possible, even in the changing social and cultural environment
of the post–World War II period—in this instance, demanding the deletion of
the line: “I’ll never forget the blizzard the night we played Cheyenne—first
time I ever saw a brassiere break like a piece of matzo.” Although there were
warnings that Davis would try to rewrite the dialogue on the set, she evidently
didn’t, because Mankiewicz never gave her a chance to.
That same year, Gloria Swanson starred as Norma Desmond in Sunset
Boulevard, a film meant to make even movie industry insiders believe that it
was about people actually involved in the art and business of moviemaking.
William Holden was cast as Joe Gillis, the antihero screenwriter with an acer-
bic wit, a gigolo who tells the freshly face-lifted Desmond, “There’s nothing
tragic about being fifty.”
It is sometimes said that the Hollywood establishment is drawn to mov-
ies about itself, even if they are unflattering. It is probably safer to say that
the Hollywood establishment pays attention to such movies, but that opinion
within the establishment is greatly divided about them. Compared to All About
Eve, Sunset Boulevard, directed by Billy Wilder, portrays the contradiction be-
tween stardom and aging far more bitterly. Humorous in parts, it is nonethe-
Postwar Unravelings 123
less a dark film in its mood and tone. It was praised for Hollywood examining
a relic of its own past with surprising objectivity.
Written by Charles Bracket, D. M. Marshman, and Wilder, this dark tale
of a demented silent-picture star who murders her young screenwriter lover
was considered a knockout when first released and has grown in stature since
then. Sunset Boulevard had cameo appearances for legendary directors Erich
von Stroheim and Cecil B. DeMille. This was a Paramount movie, in which
academic critics frequently detect what they call the “baroqueness” of influ-
ences from 1920s German silent movies on its style.
Due to its visual style and its look, Sunset Boulevard is often cited as an
example of film noir. Its director of photography, John Seitz, noted in an ar-
ticle in the American Cinematographer that Sunset Boulevard
depends upon photographic mood for much of its dramatic effect. Thus,
the more interesting scenes are played in low-key lighting, faithfully mo-
tivated by the time of day as well as the locale. The restrained lighting in
these sequences led the audience to focus its attention sharply on the action
in such a way that the performances could be kept effectively restrained.
New Yorker film critic Philip Hamburger called it “a pretentious piece of
Roquefort,” but nearly everyone else among the major movie critics greeted
it as a work of genius. Bosley Crowther cited “the manifest brilliance of this
sharp and corrosive film.” Box office receipts nationwide were strong. Louis
B. Mayer of MGM, however, was sour on Sunset Boulevard, commenting
that director Wilder had brought disgrace upon the motion picture industry.
Mayer thought it desecrated Hollywood’s past, as well as its present, image.
SMALL-TOWN AMERICA TO PARIS TO AFRICA
Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, and Montgomery Clift starred in the 1951
feature A Place in the Sun, a Paramount production ranked at number 92 on
the American Film Institute’s 1996 list. George Stevens, the movie’s director,
also served as the producer on the project. Adapted from a Theodore Dreiser
story, A Place in the Sun is a tale about George Eastman (Clift), the personable
but poor son of Skid Row missionaries, who wrangles a job in his wealthy
uncle’s knitting mill. He has a romantic affair with a fellow worker at the mill,
the naïve and unsophisticated Alice Tripp (Winters), but he later meets and
falls in love with a wealthy socialite named Angela Vickers (Taylor). Alice,
however, learns that she is pregnant and demands marriage. When Alice and
George visit a lonely lake, the boat they are in overturns and she drowns.
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George, who wanted to make for himself “a comfortable place in the sun,” is
accused of her murder and convicted.
A Place in the Sun is full of close-ups and poignant uses of what by now
was considered standard Hollywood film language, for example, the shot of
a sleeping neighborhood through a bedroom window after a night of illicit
romance, or the glitter of the moon upon a lake’s surface that appears strangely
malevolent. In his role as George, Clift personifies the moody, inner-directed
young man whose personal wanderlust and indecisiveness are further betrayed
by his raging libido. Clift was a proponent and early master of method acting
for the screen whose melancholy demeanor and haunted sense of selfhood put
him alongside Marlon Brando and James Dean in this era. For Hollywood
movies in the first half of the 1950s, this trio of actors became emblematic
of the outwardly rugged male lead whose inward sensitivity is hidden behind
a mask. A Place in the Sun is finally not about social class, but rather about
youthful male trauma. It is Clift’s performance as George that lifts the movie
from the stranglehold of author Dreiser’s social determinism to a much more
complex level that entails a deep psychological exploration of George’s iden-
tity and sense of self.
The 1951 Best Picture was An American in Paris, a musical in the best
traditions of MGM’s productions of the 1930s that were definitive of the
genre; it was sweeping, elegant, and riveting. The film was produced for the
studio by Arthur Freed, originally a lyricist hired by Irving Thalberg at MGM
in 1929, who, starting with Babes in Arms (1939) became synonymous with
the surface glamour and high quality of the MGM musical. Freed was largely
responsible for the development in Hollywood of what became known as the
“integrated musical”—a seamless combination of music, dance, narrative, art,
direction, and camera movement assembled according to the highest standards
of “production value,” hence creating a glossy, colorful, and engaging spec-
tacle. An American in Paris became the first musical since 1929 to win a Best
Picture Oscar and also took Oscars in seven other categories.
With rights purchased from legendary composer George Gershwin (the
younger brother of lyricist Ira Gershwin), An American in Paris is a story
about an American expatriate named Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly) living in
Paris in the years immediately following the Second World War, although
it might also be called an all-Gershwin songfest. Mulligan is pursuing his
artistic freedom diligently. In order to do so, since he has no job and is
not working, he is being “kept”—a concept dealt with none too directly
by the script in keeping with the cultural norms of early 1950s America
and Hollywood’s Production Code—by a wealthy older American woman
named Milo Roberts (Nina Foch). Oscar Levant plays a neighbor in the
same apartment building who describes himself as “the world’s oldest child
Postwar Unravelings 125
prodigy.” Soon enough, Mulligan becomes infatuated with a young French
woman named Lise, played by Leslie Caron in her screen debut, but eventu-
ally decides to give up the romance so that she can return to the arms of a
French singer (Georges Guetary).
The story, by Alan Jay Lerner, however, becomes almost peripheral
to this movie, which really consists of performance numbers imaginatively
designed and choreographed: Kelly’s jazz eruption as Toulouse-Lautrec’s
“Chocolat,” his pas-de-deux with Caron on the riverbank, Kelly’s solo dance
to “It’s Wonderful,” the “I Got Rhythm Number,” and the grand finale of
the movie, “The ‘American in Paris’ Ballet,” which is set against backgrounds
created from glimpses of famed Impressionist painters famous for capturing on
canvas scenes of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Paris: Renoir,
Dufy, Utrillo, Rousseau, Van Gogh, Manet, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
The movie also frequently challenges visual conventions of Hollywood:
for example, the elaborate costumes and sets for the “Artists’ Ball” sequence
are entirely in black-and-white, even though the rest of An American in Paris
is in color. There also is artistic abstraction in the segment after Lise leaves the
grand ball. As Mulligan is daydreaming, the seventeen-minute-long sequence
that expresses his dream interweaves his quest to find himself as an artist and his
romantic pursuit of her. For the film, the director Vincente Minnelli wanted
painterly sets throughout, merging form with content for an overall “look”
that is sustained as colorful, invigorating, and ambitious throughout. Indeed,
perhaps the only telling criticism of An American in Paris as a musical film is
that, in hindsight, it appears to have opened the way for Hollywood to churn
out a whole slew of second-rate bombastic musical spectacles in the 1950s that
were inspired by it, none of which equaled its accomplishments.
Another notable film released in 1951, The African Queen, was copro-
duced by the British company Romulus Film (run by Sir John Woolf) and
Sam Spiegel’s independent Hollywood company Horizon Pictures. Produc-
tion costs were kept between $400,000 and $500,000, and the movie was
distributed by United Artists. The screenplay for The African Queen was by the
seasoned writer and well-known movie critic James Agee, based on a novel
by C. S. Forester. The supervisory producer for the project was credited as
S. P. Eagle (a pseudonym that Sam Spiegel frequently used for himself). The
African Queen was directed by John Huston and was acclaimed by critics and
audiences alike. It starred what at the time was considered the unlikely pair-
ing of Katharine Hepburn, as the spinster sister of a missionary to Africa, and
Humphrey Bogart, as a tough, gin-swilling, and profane skipper of a rickety
riverboat. These two strong-willed characters share dangerous, and sometimes
hilarious, adventures as they conspire and struggle to blow up a German gun-
ship in East Africa during World War I.
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The upright lady of God and the hard-drinking rowdy team up to pro-
vide what amounts to a buddy film. Hepburn later published a “diary” on the
making of the movie, a process that she claimed was uneventful except in the
sense that making any film is more of an adventure than a day of laying lino-
leum or working as a teller in a bank. Although most of the movie was shot
on location in the Belgian Congo, because of the parasites in the actual waters
in Africa, underwater shots were done in London in a tank. Hepburn was
noted for her capacity to play an unassuming woman in a way that conveyed
an aggressive gentility that was irresistible.
The Bogart-Hepburn pairing for the movie’s leads was the idea of the
producer Spiegel. No matter what screen chemistry was expected from these
two, each was considered a good box office draw at the time. Bogart had
just finished In a Lonely Place, directed by Nicholas Ray, and Hepburn had
triumphed at the box office in the hit comedy Adam’s Rib opposite Spencer
Tracy. Bogart called conditions on the set in Africa “rougher than a stucco
bathtub.” Nonetheless, the fifty-two-year-old Bogart and the forty-four-year-
old Hepburn created something on-screen that had not been found that often
in Hollywood movies: a decidedly middle-aged love story. Bogart won the
movie’s sole Academy Award as Best Actor.
FROM STAGE TO SCREEN
As Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote, “Of the great American
films—and make no mistake, it belongs in that group—A Streetcar Named De-
sire remains one of the most misunderstood, underappreciated, and surprisingly
one of the most forgotten of American movies.” Turan’s judgment, however,
does not mesh with the movie’s inclusion on both lists published by the
American Film Institute (at number 45 and 47). One of the movie’s endur-
ing strengths was the fairly unusual fact that nearly every major role in it was
played by the actor who had performed the Broadway stage version, under
the same director as the movie, Elia Kazan. The sole exception was Vivien
Leigh, who replaced Jessica Tandy because the project’s supervisory producer
at Warner Bros., Charles K. Feldman, believed the cast absolutely needed at
least one established screen star.
Leigh plays a faded, neurotic schoolteacher named Blanche DuBois who
takes a New Orleans streetcar, marked with its end terminus “Desire,” to the
home of her sister Stella (Kim Hunter). The trolley journey is a metaphorical
odyssey; Blanche’s one chance to marry is ruined by Stella’s husband, Stanley
Kowalski, played by Marlon Brando, who indulges in cruel revelations about
Blanche’s past. Stanley returns home drunk and rapes Blanche, but the screen-
Postwar Unravelings 127
play, unlike the stage play, suggests that Blanche has gone mad and, perhaps,
his assault was only delusional. Moreover, Stella still desires her brutish, and
often drunken, husband even though he has assaulted her sister. It was Streetcar
that stamped Brando in the American public’s mind and launched him on his
rising trajectory to Hollywood success and celebrity.
The screenplay still posed problems with the Production Code Office,
whose head Joseph Breen originally wanted the rape, the dramatic turning
point in the stage play, to be cut entirely from the movie version. The rape
itself was handled deftly in its direction and editing, however, thus permitting
it to stay in the story and still meet the guidelines of the Production Code.
More significantly, to satisfy Hollywood’s Code, the playwright, Tennessee
Williams, wrote a new ending in which Stanley’s wife Stella, after the rape,
goes to her new baby and proclaims in a monologue: “We’re not going back
there. Not this time. We’re never going back.”
Thus, fairly typically, did the Production Code Office try to negotiate
the changing postwar American culture and the perception of the pressures
for movies to handle more mature material naturalistically. As critic Murray
Schumach wrote in his book The Face on the Cutting Room Floor, summariz-
ing the compromises and equivocations of Hollywood moviemaking in this
era: “Thus the 12-year-olds could believe Stella was leaving her husband. But
the rest of the audience would realize it was just an emotional outburst of
the moment.” The Breen office seemed content with the rape being treated
as director Kazan staged it for the camera, and the Production Code Office
further was satisfied that the ending carried the moral lesson that Stanley was
being punished by losing his wife and child.
In spite of these compromises brought to the screenplay by the stric-
tures of the Production Code, A Streetcar Named Desire was pivotal in Hol-
lywood’s slow shift toward more adult themes, which were considered bold
and controversial at the time. Time’s review labeled the movie “a grown-
up, gloves-off drama of real human beings.” In the New York Daily Mirror,
critic Frank Quinn wrote: “One of the year’s best! Raw, rough, gripping,
emotional drama for its full 122 minutes.” The review in the motion picture
industry trade journal Boxoffice, by contrast, acknowledged the power of the
movie, but also provided caution to its readers who were theater owners
and managers:
This faithful picturization of Tennessee Williams’ grim and depressing
drama of Southern decadence will shock many regular picture goers, just
as it will be widely praised and discussed by sophisticated patrons. Because
of the realism of its squalid way of life, the earthy quality and utter delu-
sion of it chic characters and its frankness in dwelling on sex, it is strictly
adult fare.
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One way or another, all of these reviews were acknowledging a preference
for an increased aesthetic of realism in a significant number of Hollywood
films by 1951.
EARNING THE OSCAR UNDER THE BIG TOP
At the twenty-fifth Academy Awards ceremony, the first to be telecast, the
movie honored as Best Picture for the preceding year of 1952 was The Greatest
Show on Earth, produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille had been
working in Hollywood since 1912, and, with Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldfish
(later Goldwyn), had founded the company that became Paramount Pictures.
A consummate showman, a great storyteller, and still an active producer/
director forty years later, DeMille read in the Hollywood Reporter that indepen-
dent producer David O. Selznick had given up his rights to develop with John
Ringling North a motion picture based on the life of the circus. Acquiring
the rights that Selznick had decided not to pursue, DeMille hired Frederic M.
Frank, Barry Lyndon, and Theodore St. John to write the screenplay, although
reliable historical accounts indicate that the film actually was based on a two-
page story summary reviewed and approved by DeMille’s grandson, Jody.
Brad (Charlton Heston, in his first starring role) is boss of the Big Top,
leading his troupe and menagerie across the country. Typical of the complexi-
ties of the nomadic life of these modern-day minstrels of the circus is the com-
petition that develops between the trapeze artists, Holly (Betty Hutton) and
Sebastian (Cornel Wilde), whom Brad repeatedly cautions not to challenge
each other. Foolishly they continue their daring challenges, and Sebastian falls
and permanently injures himself. Riddled with guilt, Holly stifles her love for
Brad in order to devote her time to consoling and caring for Sebastian. In the
meantime, the alluring elephant girl, Angel (Dorothy Lamour) pursues Brad
romantically, but her jealous former boyfriend, Klaus (Lyle Bettger), becomes
so jealous that he tries to kill Angel during her elephant act and, failing, later
causes a spectacular crash of the entire circus train.
Critic Harrison Carroll, writing in the Los Angeles Herald Express,
summed it up: “Corny, but corny in a way that audiences love.” The Greatest
Show on Earth is a potent reminder that, even when some Hollywood movies
were stretching toward a more realist aesthetic, Hollywood still remained at
its core about sentiment and spectacle. The Greatest Show on Earth consisted
of ample and enticing doses of both, with some circus sawdust sprinkled in.
At a time when television rapidly was spreading into middle-class American
households, The Greatest Show on Earth was the kind of film with family appeal,
with sentimentality, and with production values that could still reach the mass
Postwar Unravelings 129
audience even as moviegoing was in decline nationwide and movie theaters
were closing. It earned $12.8 million in North American rentals, which placed
it number two for movie earnings for the decade of the 1950s, surpassed only
by DeMille’s 1956 biblical epic, The Ten Commandments, which recorded
rental earnings in excess of $34 million.
TWO WESTERNS STRETCHING BEYOND THE GENRE
The 1952 production of High Noon was directed by Fred Zinneman, using
a screenplay by Carl Foreman based on a story entitled “The Tin Star” by
John W. Cunningham. Floyd Crosby’s cinematography on the movie is well
crafted, but hardly predictable, since there is not a single scenic landscape shot
of the kind normally found in westerns in High Noon. The western frontier
town of Hadleyville is as grimy and unattractive as its citizens, resulting in High
Noon being called the first “suspense western.”
High Noon was an independent production by Stanley Kramer, who
took advantage of the eroding studio system to work with a select group of
collaborators. Between 1948 and 1954, Kramer was responsible for seventeen
feature films made at the Motion Picture Center in Los Angeles, a hotbed of
independent production. The center was one of the institutions that had been
founded to support independent producers as challengers to the major Hol-
lywood studios soon after the Supreme Court’s 1948 decision that put an end
to vertical integration. The screenwriter for High Noon, Foreman, was one of
Kramer’s closest and most reliable collaborators in this period. He wrote a total
of five feature screenplays for Kramer, two of which, Champion (1949) and The
Men (1950), won Foreman Oscars for Screenwriting.
In the autumn of 1951, however, in the midst of production on High
Noon, Foreman was subpoenaed before a House Un-American Activities
Committee panel and asked whether he had ever been a member of the
American Communist Party. He had in fact joined the Communist Party in
1938 and remained a member until at least 1942. However, Foreman refused
to answer the question, marking him as an unfriendly witness in the eyes of
HUAC. Thus, his old friend, producer Stanley Kramer, had Foreman barred
from the set, fearing reprisals toward the project. He also kept Foreman from
being listed as a coproducer on High Noon even though Foreman previously
had been promised that credit. One leading anti-Communist voice in Hol-
lywood, John Wayne, wanted to see Foreman’s name removed as the screen-
writer as well, but it wasn’t. Wayne’s anger toward High Noon was strong and
lasting. The 1958 movie Rio Bravo, produced and directed by Howard Hawks
and starring Wayne, was considered by many within the movie industry to
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be a deliberate “anti-High Noon.” Twenty years after High Noon was released,
Wayne still was telling interviewers that he considered High Noon to be “the
most un-American thing I’ve seen in my whole life.” Shortly after his en-
counter with HUAC in 1951, Foreman left the United States and moved to
Great Britain. There, he had a successful career in movies that lasted until he
returned to the United States in the mid-1970s.
Although High Noon’s story appears to be a nearly classic tale in westerns
of a man standing alone against a gang of outlaws, the movie nonetheless may
be read several different ways because of the political context of the period
in which it was made and released. High Noon portrays a town without pity,
where the best people lack any conviction, while the worst are backstabbers
full of vengeance. The interpretation is frequently made that Foreman was
drawn to the story because of his own reactions to the first Hollywood black-
listing in the late 1940s. One theme in High Noon is about how it feels to be
deserted by friends and left alone to face enemies.
Academic critics and commentators have seen High Noon as an intended
allegory of “Red Scare” paranoia, compounded by cowardice and betrayal.
Kramer, an Austrian Jew who lost both his parents in the Holocaust, has
said, however, that he saw the movie as being less a parable of the immediate
era—the HUAC hearings and the Hollywood blacklist—than being about the
enormous question of how we collectively attempt to save our civilization. In-
deed, nearly forty years after its original release, in 1989, High Noon was being
utilized for anti-Communist campaigning by the Solidarity Party in Poland,
which summoned voters to the polls with a poster bearing the picture of Gary
Cooper in his role as Sheriff Kane, striding the main street of Hadleyville to
a showdown.
High Noon benefits from Gary Cooper’s performance. As Will Kane, he
is older and more stooped and conveys an air of resignation that he didn’t
yet have when he first started his Hollywood career in The Virginian in 1929.
Lloyd Bridges and Katy Jurado, as supporting players, also deliver exception-
ally strong performances. The musical score was by Dimitri Tiomkin. “Do
Not Forsake Me,” sung by Tex Ritter, became the movie’s signature song and
set a trend in Hollywood from the early 1950s onward for the use of original
theme songs to accompany feature films.
The editing work on High Noon by Elmo Williams is celebrated, es-
pecially for the vintage assembly of character and setting shots that hold the
tale in taut suspense just before the fatal hour of noon. Editing a film, as
cannot be too often repeated, essentially serves a function similar to staging.
In the sense of its editing, High Noon resembles a great many well-edited
movies, but still it is distinctive because of an unusual structural innovation:
the entire movie is presented as if being filmed to take place in real time. To
Postwar Unravelings 131
sustain this story in real time, Williams carved the film down to the most
simple, and pure, of forms.
When released, High Noon was a low-budget sleeper, distributed by
Columbia Pictures, even though Columbia’s executives had little faith that
the European Kramer understood the western genre and believed that Gary
Cooper was well beyond his prime and washed up as a screen talent. Industry
insiders questioned the casting of Grace Kelly, as well, as Amy Foster, the
Quaker woman who is engaged to marry Kane. Amy frequently seems to be
mouthing pacifist platitudes, but Kelly’s performance has her character do-
ing so while maintaining a cool and reserved dignity that is quite believable.
Amy’s moral rectitude and inner strength transcends the platitudes. Moreover,
Amy’s character is not entirely predictable. Helen Ramirez, played by Jurado,
is Kane’s former mistress, and while viewers expect a smoldering battle be-
tween her and Amy, to the contrary, these two women develop a friendship.
Another renowned western, Shane, was directed by George Stevens in
1953. A Paramount release, Stevens also served as the movie’s producer. It
starred Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, Jean Arthur, Jack Palance, and Brandon De
Wilde. A. B. Guthrie Jr. wrote the screenplay for Shane as an adaptation of
a novel by Jack Schaefer. Guthrie had not written a screenplay before, but
as a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist for The Way West, he was considered
by Hollywood to be a good candidate for success. It was the director’s son,
George Stevens Jr.—who went on to become a screenwriter and movie di-
rector himself, as well as being the founding director of the American Film
Institute—who had discovered Schaefer’s novel and told his father about it.
On its surface, the plot of Shane is simple. An earnest family of well-
intentioned homesteaders struggle against a band of greedy and evil ranchers.
Finally, the homesteaders are defended and saved by a lone gunfighter who
wanders into town. The gunslinger-farmhand named Shane (Alan Ladd) is
mythologized in a compelling way because of the decision of Stevens and
Guthrie to tell the story largely from the point of view of a young boy, Joey
(De Wilde). By placing Joey as an “ideal spectator” within the story and hav-
ing him tell the story from a child’s perspective strongly influence how the
viewer sees the movie. The choice means that the idealistic themes of grace,
humanity, fate, and sacrifice become more believable and compelling, because
they are filtered through the perceptions of a child.
At heart, Shane is about each of its main characters being compelled to
face facts about himself that he had not confronted before. The story of the
lone rider helping a group of homesteaders stand up to a greedy cattle baron
is standard material for a movie western, of course, and Paramount only ex-
pected Shane to do modest box office business at best, while a number of the
studio’s executives feared that it might fail entirely. Stevens had pitched the