Triumph Over Containment: American Film in the 1950s PDF
Preview 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 rec ord for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2022 by Robert P. Kolker All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www . rutgersuniversitypress . org Manufactured in the United States of Amer i ca Contents Introduction 1 1 On Containment, Screen Size, and the Lightness and the Dark 7 2 “It Was Like Going Down to the Bottom of the World”: John Garfield and Enterprise 22 3 “I’m a Stranger H ere Myself”: Nicholas Ray and Ida Lupino 37 4 “Love, Hate, Action, Vio lence, and Death . . . i n One Word: Emotion”: Joseph Losey and Samuel Fuller 66 5 “Put an Amen to It”: The Old Masters— Welles, Hitchcock, Ford 86 6 Looking to the Skies: Science Fiction in the 1950s 108 7 “How Can You Say You Love Me . . . ?”: Melodrama 131 Conclusion: “Complete Total Final Annihilating Artistic Control”— Stanley Kubrick Explodes Containment 162 Acknowl edgments 179 Notes 181 Selected Bibliography 187 Index 189 v Triumph over Containment Introduction I came of age during the 1950s. By late in the de cade 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 mov- ies. But I was po liti cally naive, despite the fact that I came from a po liti cal family. My parents worked very hard and kept their heads down; overt poli- tics 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 grand mother’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 found ers of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. She quit the union when David Dubin- sky signed the Taft- Hartley antiunion act. A distant cousin, Hannah Wein- stein, 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 E ngland in the early 1960s but never met her. That was part of the story of my early life during that tumul- tuous de cade: 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 b ecause the ’50s have stayed with me and 1 2 • Triumph over Containment I keep wanting to know more and more about the de cade. It was, in retro- spect, too po liti cally horrible and too full of imaginative vitality, too crazy and self- contradictory to ignore. It was a de cade of fear and cele bration, 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 d on’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 de cades 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 de cade. 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 under- standing of the de cade in which I came of age. Of course I’m not alone in this fascination. Many p eople have written about the postwar years, its politics and its movies. The HUAC investiga- tions, the Hollywood Ten, and the blacklist have been studied with increas- ing attention to the details of new information. Many of the filmmakers of the de cade have received attention and analy sis. But I want to examine the de cade in a somewhat diff er ent way: to look at the films and filmmakers as part of a movement of imaginative re sis tance. Re sis tance? 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 de cade 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 w ere years of contradictions. Pos- sessing an oppressive po liti cal climate with a startlingly limited po liti cal discourse (any dissent was labeled Communist), it was also the de cade of aesthetic invention: the Beat writers, the ascendance of abstract expression- ist 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 p eople, despite the inescapable fact that t hose very studios w ere in
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