Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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Powers was positive, faulting only what Powers found to be the occasional
extraneous sociology that impinged sometimes on the drama:
12 Angry Men is a very satisfying picture and except for the unnecessary
and unhelpful discussions of sociology that have no pertinence and no
value, it will stack up along with the year’s best as a pure suspense picture,
exceptionally well done by Fonda, Lumet, and Rose and their talented
associates.
TWO BY HITCHCOCK
Toward the end of the decade of the 1950s, two films directed by Alfred
Hitchcock stood out and warranted special attention. The first of these was
Vertigo (1958), in which Jimmy Stewart plays Scottie Ferguson, a retired
detective from the San Francisco Police Department who is hired by an old
chum to track his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak). Based on a French novel,
From Among the Dead, with a screenplay by Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor,
the movie is given a treatment by Hitchcock and his director of photography,
Robert Burks, that dwells upon the details of a growing human obsession and
can be interpreted as deeply cynical.
Scottie does his job tracking down his subject, but soon discovers that
he is falling for her romantically, only to be crushed by her suicide. Then one
day, Scottie sees a woman on the street who reminds him of Madeleine, and
his obsession ratchets up again full bore. Novak plays the two roles, as both the
sophisticated and beautiful Madeleine, a woman of wealth and social standing,
and Judy, a department store clerk whom Scottie identifies as Madeleine.
Vertigo is neither straightforward nor an easy movie to categorize. Much
of its action is enigmatic, and Hitchcock and cinematographer Burks used de-
vices such as putting their actors on a 360-degree turntable for shots intended
to disorient the movie’s viewers, as in the scene where Stewart and Novak
kiss at a stable. Scottie’s physical vertigo is further shown in shots that combine
the techniques of zooming in while tracking out to create an unusual feeling
of motion.
The movie ends without resolving all of its mysteries. Judy confesses to
her part in the murder plot, but then either falls, or intentionally jumps, to her
death. While there is a surface resolution in the form of the viewer learning
what happened to Madeleine, there is no real resolution as to Scottie’s role in
all of this nor is there any further explanation of his relationship to the two
women. The movie eerily transcends being either a suspense film, a murder
Declining Audiences and Initial Responses 153
mystery, or a horror film, precisely because it was been made to examine the
world of these events through Scottie’s twisted and obsessive subjectivity.
Writing in the New Yorker, movie critic Guillermo Cabrera Infante called
it “the first great surrealist film. . . . It draws its unsettling power from the lu-
cidity with which it portrays impossible, irrational events so that the more they
are presented in that way, the more clearly we see.” In 1958, however, Vertigo
barely broke even at the box office in the United States and was considered
by Hollywood insiders to be too confusing for most audiences. Subsequently,
it has become a favorite of film critics and historians, first in France and Great
Britain and then in the United States. Vertigo appears to display the directorial
genius and intensity of Hitchcock at its finest. It is a film that toys with Holly-
wood convention, scratches the surface of several genres—mystery, suspense,
romance—but doesn’t commit consistently to any one of them. Stewart’s
characterization of Scottie evokes a portrayal of the typical American male
of the 1950s—on the surface, a model of propriety, but underneath privately
experiencing a paranoid meltdown—so beloved by cultural critics of the era.
Hitchcock’s next picture, North by Northwest (1959), was neither financed
nor produced by one of the major studios, and its distribution was handled by
one of Hollywood’s newer companies, Metro. Nonetheless, this movie was
described by the trade journal Variety as that familiar mixture that moviego-
ers had become used to from Hitchcock: suspense, intrigue, comedy, humor.
“But seldom,” the Variety reviewer wrote, “has the concoction been served
up so delectably or in so glossy a package. It should be top box office.” Part
of the box office appeal was Hitchcock’s decision to cast Cary Grant, play-
ing a Madison Avenue man-about-town named Roger O. Thornhill who is
mistaken by foreign agents as an agent of the U.S. intelligence services. Actu-
ally, the man he is mistaken for does not even exist, instead being a fictitious
personage created by the Central Intelligence Agency so that foreign agents
won’t spot a real U.S. spy in their midst.
Hitchcock’s macabre sense of humor and his instinct for romantic dalli-
ance prevails throughout North by Northwest. He works effectively at creating
a rhythm in which repeatedly the suspense is built up, then broken for relief,
and then skillfully reestablished. Hitchcock’s use of his cast was thought to be
especially well displayed in the part he had for Eva Marie Saint, whose pre-
vious screen work had her as rather plain and convincingly sweet, but who
plunges here into the role of Eve Kendall, as conniving and treacherous as she
is glamorous. Hitchcock draws out her sexiness and seductiveness superbly.
Grant, when coming out of a romantic interlude with her in a train compart-
ment comments: “It’s much better than flying.” Still, Saint remains capable of
conveying an air of innocence, even when earlier explaining how she came to
be the mistress of the ominous foreign agent (James Mason).
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Repeatedly mistaken for a man who doesn’t exist, Grant’s character
seems trapped in a kind of hallucination. The bad guys assume he is a politi-
cal assassin. Everybody wants to kill him. The only time he’s safe happens
to be the one moment when his mother is standing next to him: “You men
don’t really want to hurt my son, do you?” The almighty men in Washing-
ton, led by Leo G. Carroll, are photographed against marble pillars like gods
on Mount Olympus. They seduce him into becoming a version of the man
the whole world thinks he is, and, in doing so, he surrenders to the weird-
ness. As such, he finds love in the beauteous form of Eve and finds himself,
literally and metaphorically, hanging from the brow of an immense stone
face in South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore. Next, he kisses the girl and the
train thrusts into the tunnel. Movie critic F. X. Feeney concluded: “North by
Northwest is a slapstick epic of self-search that eludes every label you might
try to tack onto it.”
Burks, the director of photography, shot the film in Technicolor VistaVi-
sion (a process patented by Paramount for which Hitchcock had developed
a strong affection). A. Arnold Gillespie and Lee LeBlanc provided the visual
special effects. VistaVision was known as being exhibitor friendly, meaning
that it was simpler to project than other widescreen formats and required
less expensive projection equipment. Bernard Herrmann’s score was tingling,
especially in the Mount Rushmore scenes, and Hitchcock’s working partner,
George Tomasini, was the movie’s editor. The script by Ernest Lehman is
intended to tease out the similarities between spying and acting. The New
York Times review said in summation what most reviewers did: “Suspenseful,
delightful . . . witty, and sophisticated.”
EDUCATING GIGI AND EARNING THE OSCAR
The Academy’s Best Picture Oscars for 1954 through 1957 were awarded to
movies that technically could be considered independent, rather than studio,
productions: On the Waterfront, Marty, Around the World in Eighty Days, and The
Bridge on the River Kwai. The Best Picture selection for 1958, Gigi, however,
was a standard, big-budget MGM musical with high-gloss production values,
directed by Vincente Minnelli and produced by the legendary Arthur Freed.
By 1958, however, Freed, who for decades had been a stalwart at MGM, was
also called an independent producer. By then, “independent producer” could
mean almost anything in Hollywood, covering the idea in this case that Freed
worked with his own production unit within the large tent of the studio, even
though the work he was producing constituted what, just a few years earlier,
would have been called a classic MGM musical.
Declining Audiences and Initial Responses 155
Gigi placed the Pygmalion story—an older, sophisticated man educates and
molds an unsophisticated young girl—in a Parisian setting, based loosely on a
short novel by the nineteenth-century French writer Colette. Starring Leslie
Caron, whom Gene Kelly had discovered for his leading lady in An American
in Paris in 1951, the movie’s cast included Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan,
and Hermione Gingold. Alan Jay Lerner’s collaboration with Frederick Loewe
for the title song “Gigi” captured an Oscar, and Chevalier’s version of “Thank
Heaven for Little Girls” topped the pop charts in 1958/59. André Previn su-
pervised the music for Gigi and captured an Oscar for Best Musical Score.
Gigi’s “education” is entrusted by her family to her Aunt Alicia (Isabel
Jeans). Alicia earnestly schools her young protégé in the wiles of charming and
pleasing men. Chevalier’s character, Honoré Lachaille, however, has a young
nephew, Gaston (Jourdan), who is apparently prepared to follow soon in his
uncle’s footsteps as a casanova. Gigi, however, falls in love with Gaston, and
he with she. She commits herself to him, becoming the first in a line of her
family’s women who let romantic love triumph and to marry.
The movie reviewer at the New York Times, Bosley Crowther, deemed
it “charming entertainment,” noting the movie’s similarities to the story and
characters from the stage musical My Fair Lady, which was in the third year of
a successful run on Broadway. The trade journal Film Daily wrote that: “Gigi
will be remembered by all who see it with warmth and affection.”
The original story, although its refers to Gigi as a courtesan, was veiled
to satisfy the Production Code. Director Minnelli, along with Cecil Beaton
(production design and costumes), embraced their project unabashedly. As an
article in Variety noted, when Gigi won its Best Picture Academy Award, the
film had barely earned back its production costs. It stood a chance to go into
the black financially only because the Best Picture Oscar was projected to
translate into an additional $1.5 million to $2 million in rental earnings from
new box office revenue generated entirely by the favorable publicity and pub-
lic interest created by an Oscar win.
EPIC HOLLYWOOD
The $15 million biblical epic, Ben-Hur, directed by the veteran William Wy-
ler, who was the highest-paid director in Hollywood at the time, won the Best
Picture Oscar for 1959. It was three and a half hours long and was the type of
production that Hollywood turned to periodically and which the big studios
were willing to gamble on, usually at a profit. MGM had produced a silent
version of this story in 1926 entitled Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, directed by
Fred Niblo, on which Wyler, just beginning his work in Hollywood, was a
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production assistant. The 1959 version of the movie was the “biggest of the
big” in an era in which much of mainstream American cinema was defined
by widescreen scope processes, and bringing grand epics to the screen was
perceived as one of the few ways left to bring mass audiences of all ages into
the movie theaters. Filmed in Rome, its more than three hundred sets cov-
ered more than 340 acres, and altogether over fifty thousand people worked
on the production.
The project had begun in 1953 when Nicholas Schenck, the president
of Loew’s (MGM’s parent firm), MGM production head Dore Schary, the
studio’s production manager E. J. Mannix, and producer Sam Zimbalist met
to consider doing a film version of the highly successful Broadway play A
Tale of the Christ. The play had been written by Gen. Lew Wallace and was
adapted for the screen at MGM by staff writer Karl Tunberg, whose screenplay
one critic described as being “like a four-hour Sunday school lesson.” The
accomplished veteran cinematographer Robert Surtees, A.S.C., served as the
director of photography, and Ralph Winters and John D. Dunning were the
editors. The score, orchestrated in classic Hollywood symphonic style, was by
Miklos Rozsa.
Crowther, writing in the New York Times, pointed out that at three hours
and thirty-two minutes, not counting the intermission, “it is simply too much
of a good thing.” The “good thing” that Crowther found on-screen was “the
most stirring and respectable of the bible-fiction pictures ever made.” The re-
viewer for the New York Post echoed this opinion, calling Ben-Hur “the most
realistic, literal rendering of Roman, Judean, and Christian history that can
be imagined.” Wyler didn’t want a clash of various accents, and so the voices
were simplified by casting British actors for the speaking parts of Romans, and,
for the most part, Americans as the Hebrews. In general, this proved highly ef-
fective, except for the negative appraisal offered by the critic John McCarten,
writing in the New Yorker, that Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur “speaks
English as if he had learned it from records.”
In American movie history, Ben-Hur could be appraised as hearken-
ing back to the triumphs of Gone with the Wind (1939). It received a record
eleven Oscars. The chariot race stands as an accomplished action sequence,
and the sea battle is as vast and sweeping a sequence as any previously seen on-
screen and one instance in which the widescreen format was used to its full
advantage. Ben-Hur was screened in both CinemaScope and standard 35mm
formats and did well at the box office. In 1965, Variety reported Ben-Hur’s
gross earnings at $38 million, which it compared to Gone with the Wind’s
$41.2 million take and to Paramount’s The Ten Commandments earnings of
$60 million. Moreover, Ben-Hur was the sort of movie that could continue
earning money long after its original release date. By 1968, Variety was able to
Declining Audiences and Initial Responses 157
report that Ben-Hur had grossed a total of $66 million in earnings for its North
American theater rentals.
THE IRREPRESSIBLE BILLY WILDER
Hollywood regarded Billy Wilder as a cynic, a man-hater, and a woman-
scorner. He once said of his profession: “A director must be a policeman,
a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant, and a bastard.” Time and again he
shows us movies in which human beings are behaving badly, using one another
as props or pawns, and racing into follies from which there is no escape.
Wilder wrote the script for Some Like It Hot with I. A. L. Diamond, and
their 1959 movie is number 14 on the American Film Institute’s 1996 list
of greatest films. It was produced through a packaging that put its financing
together through the efforts of the legendary Hollywood team that formed
in the late 1950s to provide production services and contacts to distributors,
the Mirisch Brothers Company, and was released by United Artists. Mirisch
provided one of the early examples of how movies could be financed and
produced, not only outside the traditional studio system but outside any estab-
lished production company as well. Their business approached moviemaking
as a one-by-one enterprise in which the production of each new film is based
on the creation of a new production company to make it.
The Mirisch business model was highly successful, and Some Like It Hot
was a box office hit and was popular with critics. “A winner with a zing!”
wrote Variety. “Hilarious. . . . Probably the funniest picture of recent memory.
Starts off like a firecracker and keeps on throwing off lively sparks to the end.”
Film Daily offered: “Could any showman ask for more? A bright comedy that
sparkles like vintage wine.” The Hollywood Reporter called it “a supersonic,
breakneck, belly-laugh comedy that should be a block-busting bonanza. Billy
Wilder was on the front burner all the way.”
The main characters, played by Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, in order
to escape Chicago mobsters, pose as musicians in an all-girl band, finding
romance with Marilyn Monroe along the way. The Time reviewer applauded
Wilder’s daring in making popular leading men Lemmon and Curtis into fe-
male impersonators, but summed up Monroe’s role dismissively: “She’s been
trimmer, slimmer, and sexier in earlier movies.” George Raft and Pat O’Brien
also had small parts in it. Moreover, the wearing of women’s clothes by Lem-
mon and Curtis is handled deftly. It isn’t the cross-dressing of men who want
to get under the skin of women, nor is it the clowning of heterosexual men
putting on ill-fitting clothing so the audience will know they don’t like it.
Instead, it’s the silly abandon of two performers having the time of their lives,
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seeming completely comfortable in their roles. Their success in pulling this off
on-screen, however, was far from guaranteed.
Since early in Hollywood history, showing a movie to preview audi-
ences had been standard industry practice, often leading to extensive cuts to a
movie before it was released to the general public or to reshooting that often
was considered necessary to save a movie. The first preview audience for Some
Like It Hot was a group of eight hundred, many of them working in the movie
and television industries, who were invited to a screening of it at a theater
in Pacific Palisades, California; a great many of them walked out. Comedian
and television personality Steve Allen was noticeable as nearly the only one
in this large audience who was constantly laughing. After that screening, the
producer David O. Selznick told Wilder, “You can’t mix blood and laughs.”
Selznick frowned on the murders in the comedy, and figured that many other
viewers did as well. Additionally, it was clear that many in the preview audi-
ence took exception to the two leads being in drag. A week later, however,
with nary an edit—even though United Artists’ executives had wanted fifteen
minutes to be cut from the movie before showing it again—the laughter was
nonstop at a showing of the movie in nearby Westwood Village to a preview
audience that likely represented a more reliable cross-section of the American
moviegoing public.
As a woman, Curtis is haughty and pseudo-refined. That’s how Lem-
mon starts out, too, but soon he throws all caution to the wind and becomes
a good-time gal. Monroe, as Sugar Kane, coos and woos, falling for several
different saxophone players, and eventually Lemmon gets engaged to an ag-
ing millionaire played by Joe E. Brown. It was a box office hit and received
six Oscar nominations. For Wilder—who had started his Hollywood career
as a screenwriter and had become a director primarily to protect his own
scripts from being purchased by a studio and then being assigned to another
director—it was a particular kind of personal triumph. In the eyes of later
generations of movie critics and historians, Wilder’s success with Some Like It
Hot was appreciated as his thumbing his nose at all the assumed Hollywood
rules, mixing slapstick and screwball comedy, gangster film and musical, into
a hybrid farce complete with two guys in drag.
SUMMARY
Throughout the 1950s, the combined impact of competition from television
and a changing American society that was characterized by massive migration
to the suburbs seriously threatened Hollywood. The only recourse for the mo-
Declining Audiences and Initial Responses 159
tion picture industry was to seek to cooperate on production for television and
to scale back its own workforce. Even as the major Hollywood studios were
publicly proclaiming that movies were better than ever, resources and invest-
ment was being shifted to production for television after 1955.
Publicly, Hollywood was seeking to bring back audiences by distinguish-
ing the experience of watching a movie in a theater more clearly from watch-
ing television. Widescreen formats were introduced, but with an overall lack
of success. The most radical attempt in this regard, 3-D, proved a disaster.
Production that was independent of the major studios increased, but the
stories and stars in movies seemed traditional. Epics and musicals gained favor
with the major studios, and both these genres favored production in color
rather than black-and-white.
In the exhibition sector, a scheme for making going to the movies
more like going to the legitimate theater, called “road-showing,” in which
reserved seat tickets were sold in advance for select film showings, led to
some profits but did not reverse the trend in audience decline. Nationwide,
movie theaters were closing, and the decidedly inferior venue for watching
movies, the drive-ins, were on the rise. Still, by 1960, weekly attendance at
movie theaters in the United States had fallen to forty million. Even so, an
overall shift toward recognition of a “new” audience for movies and toward
making movies that were greatly different from Hollywood’s past in either
look or content did not occur.
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In 1960, the Academy, which had given its Best Picture nod to the epic
extravaganza Ben-Hur in 1959, selected as Best Picture a dark, biting comedy
entitled The Apartment. The Apartment was by the same writing and directing
team that had made Some Like It Hot in 1959: Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Dia-
mond. This movie, too, had been nurtured through its stages of development
and production as a package put together by the Mirisch Brothers for release
by United Artists. The protagonist in The Apartment, C. C. “Bud” Baxter, is
played by Jack Lemmon, with Baxter being a man who can get along at the
office by loaning out his apartment for romantic liaisons to several of his su-
periors at work who are carrying on adulterous affairs. Shirley MacLaine plays
an elevator operator in Baxter’s office building, and Fred MacMurray took the
role as the most obnoxious of Baxter’s bosses.
In many ways, The Apartment plays like a vintage Hollywood comedy:
wordy, witty, fast-paced, and highly polished. On the other hand, it was per-
ceived as updated and daringly hip. As British film critic Derek Monsey wrote:
“Some people may find The Apartment sordid and immoral. It’s meant to be.
It’s also funny and pathetic and the funniest soursweet comedy Hollywood has
made in years.” That assessment summed it up well, pointing out that the 1960
Oscar winner had a certain edge of satire and criticism of the corporate estab-
lishment and middle-aged hypocrisy that could be interpreted as appealing to
younger audiences. It was rare for any comedy to take a Best Picture Oscar.
The Apartment, moreover, enjoyed the distinction of being the last feature film
produced in black-and-white to claim a Best Picture award from the Academy
until Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in 1993.
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Hollywood on the Ropes