Movie Love in the Fifties
May 26–June 2, 2003
On the occasion of
the paperback release of James Harvey’s illuminating book
Movie Love in the Fifties (Da Capo Press, 2002), the Department
of Film and Media presents a ten-film series devoted to the maverick
movies of the period. Harvey notes how the retrospective and book
are about Hollywood’s “post-classical” phase,
ranging from noir thrillers of the late 1940s to domestic melodramas
of the late 1950s, with their visions of living-room apocalypse—the
mannerist moviemaking that arose with the decline of the studio
and bloomed in the genre formalism of artists like Max Ophuls, Douglas
Sirk, and Orson Welles. The “movie love” of the title
refers not only to what was on movie screens in the 1950s—an
increasingly anguished account of the relations between men and
women—but to the author’s own “movie love”:
how it felt then, and how it has changed since.
As part of this program,
noted author, playwright, and essayist James Harvey will be introducing
several screenings. These screenings are noted in the film listings
below.
Organized by author James Harvey and Laurence
Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film and Media. With thanks
to Columbia Pictures Repertory, Universal Pictures, and Turner
Entertainment.
. 1958. USA. Directed by John Cromwell.
With Kim Stanley, Lloyd Bridges, Patty Duke. Years before his scathingly
prescient satires The Hospital (1971) and Network (1976),
screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky based this acerbic Hollywood
tale of a starlet’s rise, decline, and fall on the
life of Marilyn Monroe. James Harvey wrote of one of Kim
Stanley’s rare screen appearances
that she “has a Brando-like power and glamour.” 104
min.
. 1959. USA. Directed by
Delbert Mann. With Fredric March, Kim Novak, Lee Grant. Working
from his own play, Paddy Chayefsky subtly
delineates the tentative relationship between a widowed self-made
businessman and the dishy but neurotic young woman who works for
him. 118
min.
. 1952. USA. Directed by Otto Preminger.
With Robert Mitchum, Jean Simmons, Herbert Marshall. “The
movie is so smart and clever, full of charged encounters between
edgy, interesting
people. It’s the
world that noir, in its growing realism, was moving into
more and more. The 1950s were dedicated to banishing the
shadows. The result was often, as in Angel Face, a clearer
view of the emptiness” (James Harvey). 91 min.
. 1947. USA. Directed by Jacques
Tourneur. With Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas. “The
richest and most lyrical of all the postwar noir movies. The whole
movie has an
oddly elated rhythm and spirit. The visual rhythms, the
fluidity of Tourneur’s camerawork and
editing, make the film feel as if it were riding some
magical inner current. [It is] a romance less about sex
or love than about knowingness” (James Harvey).
97 min.
.
1953. USA. Directed by Douglas Sirk. With Barbara Stanwyck, Richard
Carlson. Naomi Murdoch (Stanwyck)
returns to the small Wisconsin town
she left in disgrace years earlier and to the three children she
had abandoned. “Depth of person is certainly what Stanwyck
has on the screen. And it comes not just from Stanwyck of course,
but from Sirk’s
response to her. It’s like a synchronicity of inspiration
between them” (James
Harvey). 79 min.
. 1956. USA.
Directed by Douglas Sirk. With Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray,
Joan Bennett. Cliff
(MacMurray), a family man, is in the throes of a midlife
crisis when an old girlfriend (Stanwyck) appears unexpectedly
one night at his suburban door. “What makes [the
film] moving is the rigor of its bleakness, and the way
Sirk sustains that rigor with the help of his two stars,
against the soap-opera world the movie also inhabits” (James
Harvey). 84 min.
. 1949. USA. Directed
by Max Ophuls. With James Mason, Joan Bennett, Geraldine Brooks. “One
of the most moving and powerful films ever made about the modern
American
family. Its feats of clarity and balance remind you of
[Preston] Sturges. But where Sturges gives us absurdist
farce, Ophuls offers a sustained quiet irony. He made a genre movie
that played by the rules of the game while aiming at depth and
nuance
and consistently avoiding the simplistic and obvious” (James
Harvey). 82 min.
. 1958. USA. Written and directed
by Orson Welles, based on the novel Badge of Evil by Whit
Masterson. With Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Welles, Marlene Dietrich.
“The movie’s bravura of execution—hectic, fragmented,
overheated—is relentless, even arbitrary, as if the whole
idea were to keep goosing things up. In some ways, it’s Welles’s
most reckless movie—pushing his style to the furthest extremes.
His black and white baroque style turns nightmare into high spirits
and playfulness” (James Harvey). 105 min.
. 1953. USA. Directed by
Fritz Lang. Screenplay by Sydney Boehm.
With Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin. “Fifties
noir is less about men being seduced
than about their being bullied—by
other men. The greatest of these
films—the one with the keenest
insights into the way power feels and works—is Fritz Lang’s The
Big Heat” (James Harvey). 90 min.
. 1944. USA.
Directed by Robert Siodmak. Screenplay by Herman
J. Mankiewicz, based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham.
With Deanna Durbin, Gene Kelly,
Gale Sondergaard. Durbin’s
wholesome image may have been Universal’s
most valuable asset, but for this production, described
by James Harvey as “both classy and louche,” the
studio transformed her into something
more mature and perhaps a tad sordid. Courtesy The Library of Congress. 93 min.
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