Cinema's Darkest Hour
1950 makes a case as Hollywood's greatest year with a host of dark and difficult masterpieces.
1939 is often heralded as the greatest year in cinema, having given us The Wizard Of Oz, Stagecoach and Gone With The Wind. That year also gave us the brilliant Garbo comedy, Ninotchka. There were legendary performances by Bette Davis, James Stewart, Henry Fonda and more. Hollywood was churning out classics on a weekly basis.
By the end of World War Two, the flash and blown out style of those big Hollywood epics felt hollow. Americans, and the rest of the world, had endured years of horror and chaos. Filmmakers and audiences both eschewed the escapism favored at the tail end of the depression for a more honest, and accurate portrayal of the human condition onscreen.
Gone were lurid technicolor spectacles, and fantastical tales of heroism. In its place were dimly lit, black and white mood pieces that seemed to peer into the corners of our collective conscience. The cinema of the immediate post-war years was paranoid, distant, shellshocked, and stunned.
Neo-realism took hold in Italy almost immediately in the wake of Mussolini’s execution. A new Japanese cinema began to recover and recount the horrors it had endured during a long and difficult war and from the devastation of two nuclear attacks. Across the globe a new generation of directors and writers began crafting a more honest and direct cinematic language.
The postwar cinematic boom reached its first true high point in 1950. Noir by that time was winding down its final push of great films in the first wave of the genre. Italian neorealism and its French and Scandinavian cousins began to influence and inform the American cinema as well. Hollywood would even turn the camera on its own dark corners and resurrect the career, at least for a moment, of one of its earliest stars. In Japan, a forty year old director would make a masterpiece about memory that would alter movies forever.
1950 was a special year in another regard; it actually picked a great film as Best Picture. All About Eve is perhaps the defining performance of Bette Davis’ sterling career. She plays an aging actress on Broadway who is being edged out by a younger, more attractive starlet. Filled with biting repartee’, and offering a devilish peek inside the world of high stakes New York theater, All About Eve is equal parts gossipy melodrama and brilliant cinema.
Gloria Swanson also offered the defining portrayal of her career as a stylized version of herself. Norma Desmond is a faded silent star when we, and leading man William Holden find her in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. Once loved by millions, Desmond is now resigned to her dilapidated mansion and her puppy like butler, Max. Like All About Eve, Sunset Blvd. is crushingly open about the way we toss away the stars we make and love and eventually destroy. Like so much of the cinema of 1950, it pulls back the curtain on the magic to reveal a seedy underbelly.
That pair of films on the business of show are almost a refutation of 1939 and all of its trappings. As if Hollywood were saying, “We’re grown ups now. It’s time for us to make grown up films.”
Even the westerns of 1950 possessed a heft and philosophical weight to them. Samuel Fuller’s Baron Of Arizona features a sly , impish performance from Vincent Price as a swindler claiming to be an heir to the entire state of Arizona. Fuller dances around collectivism, generational wealth, and the plight of the working class while delivering a compellingly watchable tale.
Anthony Mann and James Stewart teamed up for the first of eight collaborations; a series of desolate and brooding westerns presented as fables on the western plains. Winchester ‘73 features a ridiculously strong cast, and affords us the first opportunity to see how Mann and Stewart can turn the camera on the very ideas of manhood and morality.
Noir reached its critical mass in 1950. With the wide acceptance of Sunset Blvd. as great cinema regardless of genre, American moviegoers at large were allowed to see the foundational elements of noir used by more experienced directors with larger budgets and crews. And of course, when the studios made noir, they had stars in them.
Pulpy, b-movie noir and its ilk were still out there too. Noir classics like The Asphalt Jungle, Gun Crazy, D.O.A., Night And The City, and Where The Sidewalk Ends were all released in 1950. Looking at these films now, one sees the threadbare desperation of many folks in the post-war years. As mainstream Hollywood began to paint a portrait of universal prosperity, there was also a significant thread of anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist filmmaking.
The greatest true noir of 1950 is also the greatest performance in the career of one of Hollywood’s true greats; Humphrey Bogart. Starring as a hard drinking screenwriter who is struggling to maintain a gig, Bogart’s Dixon Steele is a searingly tenacious and remarkable performance.
Directed by Nicholas Ray and co-starring a ravishing Gloria Grahame, In A Lonely Place offers a backroom look at the dingy world of Tinseltown, and delivers a first rate mystery, all while diving into the soul of a broken man who may or may not be a murderer.
Bogart’s turn as Dix is a revelation. Gone is the charm and goodness of Rick Blaine in Casablanca. The sarcastic doggedness of Sam Spade has now atrophied into bitterness and resentment. He maintains a tenuous hold upon his talent. His contempt for the world is taking over. It’s a menacing portrayal of a man ravaged by what he suffered during the war, and by what he has done to himself with alcohol and poor habits in the intervening years. Silent star, and friend of Bogart, Louise Brooks said that Dixon Steele was the closest role Bogart ever had to playing himself.
Cinema in the rest of the world was changing rapidly too. Roberto Rossellini offered a double dip of Italian neorealism with his elegiac Flowers Of St. Francis and the gorgeous Stromboli. In Mexico Luis Buñuel channeled some of that neorealism for his bracing The Young And The Damned, set in the slums of Mexico City. In France, Jean Pierre Melville delivered Les Enfants Terrible, a quasi-noir on rotten youth. The world was telling difficult tales in new and bold ways.
In Japan, Akira Kurosawa had released his newest film. The forty year old filmmaker was in the midst of a successful career, having made a dozen films before work began on Rashomon. He’d had huge success in Japan with his first few films, especially those made in the years immediately after the war. By 1950, Kurosawa was one of the nation’s finest directors, but he had yet to make a mark outside of his home country.
Everything changed with Rashomon, both for Kurosawa and for cinema. It is a film about memory and truth. It centers around three travelers who all witness the rape of a woman and the murder of her husband. Each of the three versions is played out for us to see and we, the viewer must decide who is telling the truth. The film wrestles not just with the truth, but with how we perceive ourselves, and the way we justify our own behaviors.
Kurosawa manipulates time and truth through flashbacks. There are overlapping narratives and non-linear timelines. Much of this was being invented by the director as he crafted this film. If you have loved a film that uses non-linear narratives and jumps around in time - Pulp Fiction, for example - it owes a great debt to Rashomon and Kurosawa. Even the Academy saw its greatness and awarded it the very first Best Oscar for Foreign Language Film.
The movies seemed to grow up as they hit the 1950’s. Yes, it was a decade that would give us the official invention of the teenager, The Creature From The Black Lagoon, Panovision, and 3D Glasses, but it also gave us a year filled with harsh truths, dark corners, and deeply honest and vulnerable performances from some of our greatest stars.
You can have the glitz and glamour of Dorothy and Tara. I’ll walk the slums of Mexico City or stroll the lanes of Stromboli or pull into the driveway of Norma Desmond instead. It’s real here, and I like it.
Cheers,
Matty C