I'm often asked by younger filmmakers, why do I need to look at old movies?
I've made a number of pictures in the past 20 years.
And the response I find that I have to give them is that I'm...
I still consider myself a student.
Um, the more pictures I made in the past 20 years, the more I realized I really don't know.
And I'm always looking for something to...
something or someone that I could, that I could learn from.
I tell the younger, the younger filmmakers and the young students...
that I do it like painters used to do, what painters do...
study the old masters, enrich your palette, expand the canvas.
There's always so much more to learn.
Now, take this forgotten "B" film, Silver Lode.
Now, this was directed by Allan Dwan,
one of the unheralded film pioneers who made the first of his 400 films...
back in 1911.
At the end of his long career, he was sort of relegated to low-budget genre films.
But low budget or not, watch the beautiful simplicity...
of the sweeping tracking shots that are literally guiding the desperateJohn Payne...
toward his final sanctuary, the town church.
Dwan's finest movies featured simple people,
pastoral landscapes and the rural America of a bygone era.
But behind the lyrical images of the Old West,
Silver Lode suggests the fragility of our democratic institutions.
On Independence Day, the day of his wedding,
John Payne should be the happiest man in Silver Lode.
There he is! Look! There! There he is!
Instead, he has to fight for his life when he's unjustly accused of a murder...
and suddenly ostracized by the community.
Daringly, the fugitive's bride-to-be convinces the town that he's not guilty...
by forging a telegram from a U.S. Marshal.
"McCarty not what he represents himself to be.
Wanted for murder and cattle rustling. "
So, persecuted for the wrong reasons, Payne is pardoned for the wrong reasons.
- Ya fixed it! - You have to remember that this was the era of the blacklists.
Shoot 'em all! How many bullets ya got left? Two? Three?
Political messages had to be smuggled in, cloaked in metaphors.
Actually, the name of the villain, played by Dan Duryea,
was "McCarty."
And so a church bell and a fantastic lie saved the day.
McCarty's dead.
Dan, there isn't much that I can say.
But I think I can speak for all of us... we're sorry.
You're "sorry"?
A moment ago you wanted to kill me.
You forced me to kill, to defend myself, to save my own life.
But you wouldn't believe what I said.
A man's life can hang in the balance...
on a piece of paper!
And you're sorry.
The '50s... The '50s for me is a fascinating era...
when the subtext became as important as the apparent subject matter...
or even more important.
I mean, look at Douglas Sirk's film All That Heaven Allows, which he made in 1955,
or Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, made in 1956.
Now, you have to understand these were not "B" movies.
These were big-scale pictures with major studio stars.
Furthermore, they were Americanas,
the most wholesome genre of the period.
Jane Wyman, the widow in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows,
is not rejected by her community, she is immersed in it.
Her world becomes unhinged when she falls in love with Rock Hudson,
a much younger man who happens to be her gardener.
A spiritual descendant of Thoreau, he represents a solid and serene individualism...
that seems sadly out of place in the New England of the 1950s.
What a beautiful view of the pond. Why, you can see for miles.
Mm-hmm. The sun comes up right over that hill.
- Oh! - Do you like it?
Why, it's unbelievable.
Let's take your boots off, huh?
- Hello, Dan. - Hello, Cary.
- Cary, you know Miss Frisbee, Mr. Allenby. Mr. Kirby. - Yes.
- How do you do? - Oh, what's this I hear about your... Oh.
Haven't I seen you somewhere before?
Well, Mrs. Humphrey, probably in your garden.
I've been pruning your trees for the last three years!
Oh, yes, of course.
- Uh, Sara, I really must be going. - Excuse me. I'll be right back.
- Are you saying you don't want to marry me? - Oh, no, I'm not saying that.
I'm... I'm just asking you to be patient.
- It's only a question of time. - Only of time.
Well, right now everybody's talking about us.
We're a local sensation.
And like Sara said, if... if the people get used to seeing us together,
then maybe they'll accept us.
You mean, uh, we'll be invited to all the cocktail parties.
And, of course, Sara will see to it that I get into the country club.
I can see that you don't want to listen to anybody's ideas but your own.
And I can see that you're trying to make me choose between you and the children!
No, Cary, you're the one that made it a question of choosing.
So you're the one that'll have to choose.
All right.
It's all over.
Once she surrenders to the community's pressure, Jane Wyman is trapped.
Cary.
She's left suffocating in their world of pretense and illusions...
far from Hudson's Walden Pond.
Home, family, social roles...
can't fulfill the pursuit of happiness anymore.
Somehow, they've become the instruments of repression.
Beneath the surface of the seemingly ideal setting...
lay a sharp indictment of American small-town life.
? And heaven and nature sing
Both Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray stayed within the rules.
Their films had the required happy ending.
But they hinted at the dangers inherent in conforming to society's conventions.
You see, anything indirect...
is, uh, stronger,
in many cases, at least,
because you leave it or you hand it over to the imagination...
of your audience, you know.
And I've always been trusting...
my audience to have imagination.
Otherwise, they should stay out of the cinema.
- You know, you have to leave something open. - Mm-hmm.
The moment you start preach in the film... preaching in the film...
the moment you want to teach your audience,
you're making a bad film.
If you can't have a life, settle for its imitation.
There's your present now.
This is whatJane Wyman receives from her children...
- Oh, please, Kay... - as a substitute for her lost love.
Mother! Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas, Mrs. Scott.
Television, the movie's rival medium in the 1950s,
was cast as the ultimate symbol of alienation.
All you have to do is turn that dial, and you have all the company you want...
right there on the screen.
Drama, comedy, life's parade at your fingertips.
Like Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray offers...
both the American family in suburbia and the psychotic elements:
The convention and the contradictions; the sugar and the poison.
Look at Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life.
James Mason portrays a frustrated schoolteacher...
who undergoes personality changes when he becomes...
hooked on cortisone, then an experimental drug.
Just use your reason calmly.
We'll have dinner the moment you've mastered this problem.
Here he feels ten feet tall.
- Ed, dinner's been waiting two hours. - I'm sorry.
- Richie ought to eat. - I'm hungry too.
Ed, Richie didn't even have lunch.
The cortisone acts as a catalyst.
It reveals a mental and spiritual dissatisfaction...
and fuels Mason's growing desire to escape...
from the dull existence that stifles his soul.
Lou, it'll be better for all of us if you clearly understand one thing.
I will not tolerate your attempts to undermine my program for Richard.
Yes, darling.
Be good enough not to speak to me in that hypocritical tone of voice.
I see through you as clearly as I see through this glass pitcher!
If you imagine I'm going to be fooled by all this sweetness and meekness...
"Yes, darling, no, darling..."
you're even a bigger idiot than I took you for.
Let's clear this up once and for all!
I'm staying in this house solely for the boy's sake!
As for you personally, I'm completely finished with you.
There's nothing left. Our marriage is over.
In my mind I've divorced you.
You're not my wife any longer, I'm not your husband any longer.
Mason's family goes through hell as he starts questioning every tenet...
of family life in the 1950s.
"Momism," Sunday school, Little League sports...
and even the egalitarian principles of American education.
Lou! Lou!
You'll be happy to know you've won.
All of my efforts have been too late.
In this house, our son has become a thief.
My heroes are no more neurotic than the audience.
Unless you can feel that...
a hero is just as fucked up as you are...
that you would make the same mistakes that he would make...
uh, you can have no satisfaction...
when he does commit a heroic act.
Because then you can say, "Hell, I could have done that too."
And that's the obligation of the filmmaker, of the theater worker...
to give a heightened sense of experience to the...
people who pay to come to see his work.
"And they came to the place of which God had told him,
and Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac, his son,
and laid him on the altar upon the wood.
And Abraham stretched forth his hand...
and took the knife to slay his son."
But, Ed, you didn't read it all. God stopped Abraham.
God was wrong.
Ed! No! Ed! No! Ed! No!
Richie! Run out the window! Richie! Richie!
No! Richie!
Samuel Fuller's characters were no intellectuals.
His was a visceral cinema,
excessive, explosive.
He once defined film as a battlefield.
Love, hate, action, death. In one word, emotion.
Impact was his main concern.
Whether he was dealing with the Old West or Cold War America,
his images were bursting with violence and sexual energy.
In Pickup on South Street,
Richard Widmark is a pickpocket...
andJean Peters a prostitute.
Here he inadvertently takes a microfilm...
which Communist agents are trying to smuggle out of the country.
How much is it worth to ya?
What are you pushin' me for?
You came here to buy, didn't you?
America's fate is in the hands of two outcasts.
She's just a runner who doesn't even know what side she's on,
while he's a cynic, willing to do business with all sides.
How much did ya bring?
I don't wanna talk about it.
- A former crime reporter, - How much?
- Fuller cultivated the shocks and hyperbole... - Five hundred.
That tabloids used in their headlines.
You tell that Commie I want a big score for that film, and I want it in cash.
- Tonight! - What are you talkin' about?
You tell me. You people are supposed to have all the answers.
- Tell ya what? - Come on! Drop the act. So you're a Red.
Who cares? Your money's as good as anybody else's.
Now get your stern up those stairs and tell your old lady what I want.
I'll do business with a Red, but I don't have to believe one.
Playing both ends against the middle, Widmark defied all "isms,"
- even patriotism. - Get outta here!
Writer-director-producer Samuel Fuller's work...
was a potent antidote to America's complacency during the Cold War.
He was the most outspoken of the '50s smugglers.
No ideology escaped his scathing irony.
American hypocrisy was his constant target.
Fuller's heroes were hard to distinguish from his villains.
If you refuse to cooperate,
you'll be as guilty as the traitors that gave Stalin the A-bomb.
Are you wavin' the flag at me?
I know something in our side you should get...
Get this. I didn't grift that film, and you can't prove I did.
- Do you know what treason means? - Who cares?
- Answer the man! - Is there a law now I gotta listen to lectures?
When he says, "Don't wave the goddamn flag at me,"
Hoover objected to that and verbally objected it...
in my presence at Romanoff's table with Zanuck.
He objects that an American would say during the heat,
the hottest point of the Cold War with Russia,
"Don't wave the goddamn flag at me."
And Zanuck said, "He's right," to me. "He's right. We'll leave out 'goddamn.'"
And Hoover got very angry.
"You know damn well that's not what I mean."
And Zanuck explained very simply, and he was a friend of his... I mean, he knew him...
"This is his character talking, and that character doesn't give a goddamn about the flag.
It means nothing to him.
Any flag... You must be that character.
Otherwise, we are making a propaganda film.
And we don't make those kind of propaganda films."
Fuller had found a niche in "B" films and genre pictures,
but when the studio system collapsed,
he was relegated to low-budget, independent productions.
He had no money, no stars and only minimal sets.
But out of these limitations emerged an outstanding film,
Shock Corridor.
Ajournalist pretends to be a madman in order to investigate a crime...
that took place in a mental hospital.
But instead of winning the Pulitzer Prize, he goes mad.
Aaaah!
Shock Corridor was full of front page material.
The inmates were the product of Cold War paranoia and Southern racism.
Every form of American insanity was represented. - Trent!
This baptizes a new organization, the Ku Klux.
- Sounds good. - No.
Ku Klux Klan.
Sounds more mysterious, more menacing, more alliterative.
- Ku Klux Klan. Say it. - Ku Klux Klan.
- KKK. - KKK.
It'll catch on quick. It'll drive those carpetbaggers back north.
Scare the hell out of'em. Tar and feather them.
Hang' em. Burn 'em.
Listen to me, Americans. America for Americans!
Keep our schools white!
- Keep 'em white! - That's right! Keep 'em white!
- I'm against Catholics! - Hallelujah, man! Hallelujah!
- AgainstJews! Jews! - Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
- Against niggers! - Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
- Against niggers! - Hallelujah!
There's one!
Let's get that black boy before he marries my daughter!
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
The metaphor was crystal clear.
In Fuller's vision, America had become an insane asylum.
Sadly, Fuller's later career was typical of the times.
To finance his unorthodox projects, he had to move to Europe.
And for a whole generation of smugglers, this was the end of the line.
The pioneers and showmen were gone.
The moguls were replaced by agents and executives.
Actors and directors were starting their own companies.
Start the wind machine.
Runaway production was the name of the game.
Turn on the paddle wheel.
Roll 'em!
- To make films you had to go to London, - Action!
Paris, Madrid and Rome.
A film like Two Weeks In Another Town captured the desperation of the times.
I have an offer... leave.
There's only one name for you.
On the streets of my village they call them...
- Welcome to Hollywood on the Tiber. - How dare you!
- You are behind schedule. - I need two weeks to finish shooting this picture.
You give me two extra weeks, and I'll give you a Maurice Kruger picture.
- Don't you want the best movie you can get? - No.
- Don't you have pride in what pictures you put your name on? - No.
Turn that off and get out. I want to get some sleep.
Tucino, you international peddler!
Take a good look at a movie that was made just because we couldn't sleep until we made it.
Ironically, Two Weeks In Another Town...
- was the sequel to The Bad And The Beautiful. - Laugh the way he would have!
That's not a god talking, Georgia. That's only a man.
Both films were directed by Vincente Minnelli, produced byJohn Houseman...
and starred Kirk Douglas.
But in ten years, from 1952 to 1962,
the industry had undergone tremendous changes,
and Two Weeks In Another Town...
was a startling mirror of Hollywood's decline.
Did it with style.
L-It's all right, Mrs. Curry.
Kruger, you're great.
I was great.
The golden age was over.
And for many a veteran director, this was a painful period of anguish and self-doubt.
Who in his right mind would expect me to settle for you?
A worn-out, dried-up, whining, meddling old hag!
My lawful wedded nightmare. Frustrated and stupid.
Sticking your fat nose into everything day and night!
Clara?
Clara.
Don't swallow all those sleeping pills.
The doctor will just have to come up and pump out your stomach again.
You know how sick that makes me.
Oh, Clara. Clara.
L- I look at this film I'm shooting. I like it.
What if I'm wrong...
and it's another calamity?
Where do I go from here?
Took me two years to get this job, and that was a fluke.
How can a man go wrong and not know why?
What's happened to me?
Is it ego?
Self-indulgence?
Or...
am I just plain afraid?
Oh, my poor...
I've seen the film you're shooting, and it's beautiful.
Whereas the smuggler works undercover and his subversion is not detected immediately,
the iconoclast attacks conventions head-on...
and his defiance sends shock waves through the industry.
In Hollywood, the iconoclasts comprise the visionaries, the groundbreakers,
the renegades who openly defied the system and expanded the art form.
Often they were defeated. Sometimes they actually made the system work for them.
Hollywood has always had a love/hate relationship with those who break its rules,
extolling them one moment and burning them the next.
The Hollywood establishment often confused entertainment with escapism,
so borrowing from real life was deemed either boring or sometimes subversive,
particularly if it meant plumbing the lower depths.
But back in the silent era, a few filmmakers challenged...
the ideals of glamour and wholesomeness by injecting...
a dose of reality into their films,
generally within the framework of the melodrama.
D. W. Griffith, for instance, is often identified...
with quaint romanticism and Victorian sensibility.
But more than once, he went beyond the accepted melodrama of his time.
In Broken Blossoms, he showed how a sordid reality...
can destroy the purest dreams.
This was the most delicate interracial romance.
Physical and spiritual suffering is what unites Lillian Gish,
the waif battered by her boxing father,
and Richard Barthelmess, the young Buddhist who lost his religious fervor...
in the slums of London.
Their bodies, like their souls, are bent or stunted.
Both are broken blossoms.
Only when they find each other do they come alive.
So, for a brief moment,
they're allowed to dream before our eyes.
But when the racist father discovers the situation,
bigotry is exposed in its rawest form.
Sweetness and compassion turn to fury and savagery.
The young Chinese who didn't believe in violence...
picks up a gun to save his beloved.
He'll come too late.
Her punishment is death.
Erich von Stroheim was the most outrageous of the iconoclasts, and he fell the hardest.
The Wedding March is a fairy tale, but a tragic one,
with Fay Wray, a poor musician's daughter, as Cinderella,
and Stroheim, the scion of an aristocratic family, as her Prince Charming.
The setting was Vienna in the last days of the Hapsburg dynasty,
a decadent world that both fascinated and repelled Stroheim.
The city of waltzes and operettas was a pigsty.
Behind the romantic exterior, Stroheim revealed an ugly, cruel society...
ruled by greed.
The apple blossoms offered a brief refuge,
but they were an illusion.
Innocence was doomed from the start.
Stroheim's heroines were no madonnas.
Like their male counterparts, they were always endowed with strong sexual desires.
What Stroheim was after was a more honest depiction...
of human relationships.
Both lovers were victims.
The young girl who surrendered her soul...
and the prince who had not yet been corrupted by the hypocrisy of his milieu.
Stroheim's images could certainly be brutal,
and they inevitably got him into trouble with the censors.
But at heart, he was a romantic...
who was haunted by the loss and the corruption of love.
Rather than indulge in the splendors of imperial Vienna,
he exposed its moral squalor.
The young prince's father, a ruined aristocrat,
strikes a deal with a rich merchant, who's desperate to marry off his crippled daughter.
Stroheim paid a high price for his transgressions...
and his perceived intransigence.
The very qualities that made him a great artist undid him.
He was dubbed a megalomaniac and ended up losing control over most of his projects.
They would all be eventually truncated or disfigured.
All fragments of a broken vision.
In the '30s a few topical films...
allowed the grim reality of the Depression to seep into the movies,
particularly at Warner Brothers.
Young Darryl Zanuck, then head of production,
ordered his writers to draw their subjects from newspaper headlines.
I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang was probably the most famous...
of these hard-hitting exposes.
It even led to the reformation of the penal system in the South.
However, David Selznick at RKO...
jumped the gun on Zanuck by releasing his own indictment of the chain gang system...
several months earlier.
The film was called Hell's Highway.
Well, young fella, ya won't catch cold in that sweatbox.
It was one of the three films directed by Rowland Brown,
a forgotten figure whose meteoric career reputedly ended...
when he punched one of Hollywood's top executives.
Carter's dead. Strangled to death in the sweatbox.
The contractor says the boy committed suicide.
- Carter's dead. - Carter's dead.
Somehow, Rowland Brown's audacity epitomized the pre-Code era.
Those are the tumultuous years before rigid censorship rules,
known as the Production Code, came into effect.
- Where's Carter? - Yeah! Where is Carter?
Where's Carter?
Quiet there!
A convicted bank robber, Richard Dix is one of the forgotten men of the Depression.
His rebellious behavior is justified by the appalling conditions at the prison camp.
His desperation reflects that of the country.
Well, why don't you start?
The World War One veteran was once an all-American hero.
Social consciousness sparked Warner Brothers'stark dramas.
Films like William Wellman's Wild Boys OfThe Road and Heroes For Sale.
I have to get to my aunt's in Chicago someway.
- This is the only way I can do it. - Well, don't your folks mind?
My mother's dead.
And we got a big family.
With me gone, it means just one less mouth to feed.
That's why they were kind of glad to see me go.
Wild Boys OfThe Road was about teenagers who had been forced to leave home...
to find work because their parents lost theirjobs in the Depression.
Railroad dicks constantly harassed and abused them.
Cheese it! Railroad dicks!
The social and political context was painted in rather broad strokes,
but the dramas were contemporary, urgent, gripping.
Wild Bill Wellman had a natural feeling for the vagabond life,
for the homeless youngsters and their battles with authority.
His sympathy lay with the outcasts and with the rebels.
Tommy!
Now, at the opposite end of the spectrum...
you find a different breed of iconoclast,
Baroque stylists such as Josef von Sternberg.
Like Stroheim, Sternberg demanded total control...
over all aspects of his productions.
But his was a voluptuous, dreamlike, supremely artificial world,
lovingly composed on the Paramount soundstages.
Sternberg's radical stylization proved as provocative...
as Stroheim's extreme realism.
Each film became a ceremonial with the director orchestrating...
the most elaborate, erotic rituals around his star,
Marlene Dietrich.
Of the seven films Sternberg made with Dietrich,
The Scarlet Empress was the most baroque and the boldest...
in its depiction of erotic manipulation...
as it traced the transformation of an innocent Prussian princess...
into Catherine the Great, the empress of Russia.
The woman you adore is quite close to you, isn't she?
Catherine, I love you, worship you.
As the heroine quickly discovered, political power and sexual power were inseparable.
Her battles were waged in the bedroom...
as she learned the art of choosing and changing lovers at the right time.
Catherine showed such considerable skills...
that she even challenged traditional sexual roles.
Behind the mirror, as you know, there's a flight of stairs.
Down below someone is waiting to come up.
Will His Excellency be kind enough to open the door for him carefully...
so that he can sneak in?
Nothing escaped Sternberg's artistic control.
He wrote the script, conceived the lighting,
composed some of the music,
directed the Los Angeles Symphonic Orchestra,
helped design the sets and sculptures,
Why did you send my mother away? What wrong had she done?
And probably selected every icon himself.
He even claimed that Marlene was just another tool.
He said, "Remember that Marlene is not Marlene... I'm Marlene.
She knows that better than anyone. "
That must be Peter.
Go and see if it is and tell him to come here at once.
Your Imperial Highness, Her Majesty wishes to see you at once.
"To the artist," insisted Sternberg,
"the subject is incidental, and only his vision matters. "
He said, " The camera is a diabolical instrument...
that conveys ideas with lightning speed.
Each picture transliterates a thousand words. "
Perhaps the greatest iconoclast of them all was also the youngest...
Orson Welles.
The downright villainy of Boss Jim W. Gettys' political machine,
now in complete control...
He was 25 when he landed in Hollywood.
I made no campaign promises...
because, until a few weeks ago,
I had no hope of being elected.
Now, however, I have something more than a hope.
And Jim Gettys...
Jim Gettys has something less than a chance.
In the wake of his radio show War of the Worlds,
the young prodigy was given unprecedented latitude by RKO,
including what's known today as...
the right to final cut.
At the time only screen legend Charlie Chaplin...
enjoyed such creative control over his productions.
For his first film Welles set out to explore the many facets...
of media baron William Randolph Hearst,
whose abuse of wealth and power defied America's democratic traditions.
Some in Hollywood were so incensed...
that they put pressure on RKO to destroy the negative.
Fortunately, they didn't succeed.
Welles was like a young magician enchanted by his own magic.
In fact, the most revolutionary aspect of Citizen Kane...
was its self-consciousness.
The style drew attention to itself.
Rosebud.
Now, this contradicted the classical ideal...
of the invisible camera and seamless cuts.
Welles used every narrative technique and filmic device...
deep focus, high and low angles, wide-angle lenses.
"I want to use the motion picture camera...
as an instrument of poetry, " he said.
And somehow Welles'passion for the medium...
became the great excitement of the piece itself.
Now, you see, I had the best contract that anybody's ever had for Kane.
Nobody comes on the set; nobody gets to look at the rushes; nothing.
You just make the picture and that's it.
If I hadn't had that contract, they've would've stopped me at the beginning,
just by the nature of the script.
But it was such conditions... I've never had anything remotely equal...
to that contract since.
So it isn't just the success.
What spoiled me is having had the joy of that kind of liberty...
once in my life...
and never having been able to enjoy it again.
George Amberson Minafer walked homeward slowly...
through what seemed to be the strange streets of a strange city.
For the town was growing and changing.
It was heaving up in the middle incredibly.
It was spreading incredibly.
And as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself...
and darkened its sky.
Orson Welles inspired more would-be directors...
than any other filmmaker since D. W. Griffith.
Yet Welles didn't change the status of the Hollywood director.
He actually lost all his privileges a year later...
on The Magnificent Ambersons,
which was chopped down and partially reshot in his absence.
Do you know that I always liked Hollywood very much.
It just wasn't reciprocated.
Throughout his career, Welles pushed the creative envelope in so many ways.
To trace Kane's political ambitions, for instance,
he created fake newsreel footage.
To give it the appropriate look,
he had editor Robert Wise drag the film across a concrete floor.
Here was an opportunity for Welles to recall...
William Randolph Hearst's fondness for dictators.
You saw Kane posing with Hitler for the photographers.
Now, at the same time, in his first talking picture,
Chaplin dared to aim at the Fascist powers directly.
At the risk of infuriating America's isolationist forces,
Chaplin took on the dictator singlehandedly.
Und now, derJuden.
DerJuden!
DerJuden.
Ohhhh, derJuden.
His Excellency has just referred to theJewish people.
A comedy drawing on such topical horrors...
as racial persecutions and concentration camps,
The Great Dictator presented Chaplin with another major challenge:
He gave himself a double role,
that of the monster dictator Hynkel...
and the victim, theJewish barber.
Of course, even the renegades like Chaplin and Welles had to work around the censors.
Attention!
The content of American films was still strictly controlled.
Adult themes and images were too often curtailed or suppressed.
But after World War Two,
audiences wanted pictures to be truer to life.
A few of our filmmakers started challenging the rules.
Hey, Stella!
You quit that howlin' down there and go to bed!
- Joyce, I want my girl down here! - You shut up!
Elia Kazan led the assault.
Hey, Stella!
His Streetcar Named Desire caused the first major breach in Hollywood's Production Code.
I wouldn't mix in this.
Kazan fought tooth and nail, frame by frame,
to preserve the integrity of Tennessee Williams'drama when he adapted it to the screen.
This meant exposing the overtly carnal desires...
of Stanley and his battered, pregnant wife Stella.
Now, these close shots of Kim Hunter were not in the film...
as it was originally released...
because the Legion of Decency objected to their sensuality.
The studio decided to cut them...
and replace the jazz score with more conventional music.
Don't ever leave me, baby.
The camera is more than a recorder...it's a microscope.
It penetrates. It goes into people.
You see their most private and concealed thoughts.
I'm able... I have been able to do that with actors.
I mean, I've revealed things that actors didn't know they were revealing about themselves.
You know, I seen you a lot of times before.
Remember parochial school out on Paluski Street?
Seven, eight years ago. Your hair... Had your hair, uh...
Braids. That's right.
Looked like a hunk of rope.
You had wires on your teeth and glasses, everything.
You was really a mess.
I was 12 years old when I saw On The Waterfront.
It was a breakthrough for me.
Don't get sore. I'm just kidding you.
I just mean to tell you that you... grew up very nice.
Kazan was forging a new acting style.
Edie?
It had the appearance of realism,
but actually it revealed the natural behavior of people...
and the truth in that behavior that I'd never seen before on the screen.
Stay away from me!
"Brando, " Kazan said, "was the only actor I could describe as a genius.
He had that ambivalence that I believe is essential in depicting humanity..."
Come on! Open the door, please!
- "both strength... - Stop it!
And sensibility. "
I want you to stay away from me.
I know what you want me to do, but I ain't gonna do it, so forget it!
I don't want you to do anything. You let your conscience tell you what to do.
Shut up about that conscience. That's all I been hearin'.
I never mentioned the word before. You just stay away from me!
Edie, you love me. I want you to...
I didn't say I didn't love you. I said stay away from me!
- I want you to say it to me. - Stay away from me!
Elia Kazan paved the way for the iconoclasts of the '50s and '60s.
They were writer-directors and writer-producers,
men like Robert Aldrich, Richard Brooks,
Robert Rossen, Billy Wilder,
and among the younger generation...
Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah.
They all defied the guardians of public morality...
by daring to tackle controversial issues like racism,
inner-city violence, juvenile delinquency,
homosexuality, war atrocities,
the death penalty.
A new reality was hitting the screens.
I think producer-director Otto Preminger did more than anyone else...
to bring about the demise of the Production Code.
His crusade against censorship led him from The Moon Is Blue,
a comedy about professional virgins,
to Advise & Consent,
which exposed political corruption in Washington...
and even showed gay bars.
He was among the first to challenge the blacklists by hiring Dalton Trumbo,
one of the "Hollywood Ten,"
to write Exodus.
One of Preminger's most important victories was scored...
when he made the film The Man With the Golden Arm,
probably the first honest depiction of drug addiction...
on American screens.
Here's Frank Sinatra, in one of his most memorable performances,
as a heroin addict going through withdrawal.
Let me out!
Ohh!
Out!
Come on! Let me out!
Ohh!
And don't try to come back, or I'll throw you out again!
Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success...
exposed a different kind of addiction...
the addiction to power.
I love this dirty town.
The arena was Broadway, with Burt Lancaster portrayingJ.J. Hunsecker,
the master manipulator.
In Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman's screenplay,
the formidable newspaper and radio columnist was to show business...
what Senator McCarthy was to Cold War politics.
His fear and intimidation tactics...
made him a national institution,
but his ruthless world flickered in a moral twilight.
Manny, tell me, what exactly are the...
unseen gifts of this lovely young thing that you manage?
Well, she sings a little.
You know, she sings...
Manny's faith in me is simply awe-inspiring, Mr. Hunsecker.
- Actually, I'm still studying. - What subject?
Singing, of course.
Straight concert and...
Why, of course. You might, for instance, be studying politics.
Uh... me?
- Well, you see,J. J... - I mean, I?
Y-You must be kidding, Mr. Hunsecker.
Me, with myJersey City brains?
I know. That wonder boy of yours opens at the Latin Quarter next week.
- J.J., uh... - Say good-bye, Lester.
J.J. 's power is based on a network of informers and sycophants.
That's the only reason the poor slobs pay you... to see their names in my column.
- Now I make it out you're doing me a favor? - I didn't say tha...
The day I can't get along without a press agent's handouts,
I'll close up and move to Alaska.
Sweep out my igloo. Here I come.
Manny, you rode in here on the senator's shirttails, so shut your mouth.
Now, come,J.J. That's a little too harsh.
Anyone seems fair game for you tonight.
This man is not for you, Harvey, and you shouldn't be seen in public with him.
Because that's another part of a press agent's life.
They dig up scandal about prominent people and shovel it thin...
among columnists who give them space.
There seems to be some allusion here that escapes me.
We're friends, Harvey.
We go as far back as when you were a fresh kid congressman, don't we?
Why is it that everything you say sounds like a threat?
Maybe it's a mannerism, because I don't threaten friends.
But why furnish your enemies with ammunition?
You're a family man, Harvey, and someday, God willing, you may want to be president.
And here you are, out in the open,
where any hep person knows that this one is toting that one around for you.
Are we kids, or what?
Next time you come up you might join me on my TV show.
Thanks,J.J., for what I consider sound advice.
Go now, and sin no more.
? It was an itsy-bitsy teenie-weenie ?
- ? Yellow polka dot bikini ? - Nein! Nein!
? That she wore for the first time ?
Let's not forget that comedies can be just as iconoclastic as dramas.
Billy Wilder's work, first as a writer in the 1930s,
then as a writer-director from the '40s on, is a perfect example.
Over the years Wilder's wit only grew more abrasive.
Instead of sweetening his brews, he kept adding more acid.
- Sind Sie ein Amerikanischer Spion? - Nein!
You won't find a more iconoclastic film in the Kennedy years...
than his film One, Two, Three,
? It was an itsy-bitsy teenie-weenie ??
a savage political farce that dared ridicule all ideologies at the height of the Cold War.
- Hey! - MacNamara!
If it isn't my old friends Hart, Schaffner and Karl Marx.
- I see you bring blonde lady with you. - Ring-a-ding-ding!
James Cagney plays a Coca-Cola executive who has enrolled his secretary...
to hoodwink the Soviet commissars in East Berlin.
To what do we owe this unexpected pleasure?
- You're a trade commission. I thought we might trade. - Coca-Cola?
No. But I hear you boys would like Fraulein Ingeborg to go to work for you.
- You wanna trade your secretary? - Right.
- For Russian secretary? - Wrong.
I do not blame you. Ours is built like bowlegged samovar.
We find proposition very interesting. Now, what can we offer you?
All I want from you is a small favor.
Small favor, big favor. Anything.
There's a guy named Otto Ludwig Piffl being held by the East German police.
- For what reason? - Son of a gun stole my cuckoo clock.
- You want cuckoo clock back? - Wrong.
- You want Piffl back. - Right.
Impossible, my friend. We cannot interfere with internal affairs...
of sovereign republic of East Germany.
- No Piffl, no deal. Let's go, Ingeborg. - Wait! What is the hurry?
You're not giving us a chance.
Is old Russian proverb: You cannot milk cow with hands in pockets.
Herr Ober! Vodka! Caviar!
Herr Kapellmeister, more rock and roll!
Wilder's transgressions of political correctness...
matched his transgressions of good taste.
To Wilder, good taste was another name for censorship.
"I'm accused of being vulgar," he would say.
"So much the better, that proves I'm closer to life. "
The picture was hit by a change in attitude.
The wall was built, nobody could get through East Berlin to West Berlin and vice versa.
The desire of the audience to laugh was strong.
About 25 years later,
it became a smash hit in Germany.
Everybody went to see it because...
the wall was gone and, uh...
it was not gone yet, but it had eased, you know, that whole thing.
And it became... it became, uh...
it became a kind of a historic vignette...
of the silliness of the Russians...
and the stupidity of the Americans.
Come on, everything. Get it up here.
By the late 1960s the Production Code was almost defunct.
- Bonnie and Clyde put the nail in the coffin. - Clyde, where's the car?
What did he do? Where's the car?
Where did he go?
Here!
The old studio system...
was so hypocritical.
They were constantly fearful of being accused of instilling in youth...
the glory of the outlaw.
So they had these rules, for instance,
that you couldn't even fire a gun in the same frame with somebody getting hit.
You had to have, literally, a film cut in between.
So I thought, if we're gonna show this, we should show it.
We should show what it looks like when somebody gets shot,
that shooting somebody is not a sanitized event.
It's not immaculate.
There's an enormous amount of blood.
There's an enormous amount of... of horror of change...
that takes place when that occurs.
We were in the middle of the Vietnamese war.
What you saw on television was every bit...perhaps even more bloody...
than what we were showing on film.
Hey...
The Production Code didn't survive the late '60s.
Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch disposed of it.
Today the violence in films is certainly more graphic.
The last frontier may be sexuality,
and beyond sexuality the complexity of the human psyche.
This is the territory that Stanley Kubrick has been mining in his films.
Like Kazan, Kubrick was a New York maverick who grew into an iconoclast.
He emerged from independent production and film noir...
to create his own unique, visionary worlds.
His association with Kirk Douglas...
on Paths of Glory and Spartacus...
established him as a major player,
but he couldn't stand being an employee on studio projects...
and moved to London to make Lolita.
He stayed there and hasn't worked in Hollywood since.
He's one of the rare iconoclasts...
who's enjoyed the luxury of operating completely on his own terms.
Back here we have the kitchen.
- That's where we have our informal meals. - Perhaps if you'd...
My pastries win prizes around here.
If you'd let me have your phone number, that would give me a chance to think it over.
Here's James Mason as a European intellectual discovering the trappings...
of small-town America.
Oh, you must see the garden before you go.
My flowers win prizes around here.
They're the talk of the neighborhood.
Voilˆj!
My yellow roses.
My... Uh... Oh. My daughter.
Uh, darling, turn that down, please.
I could offer you a comfortable home...
With a sunny garden, a congenial atmosphere, my cherry pie.
When Kubrick made Lolita,
the subject of a middle-aged man infatuated with a sexually precocious minor...
was still completely taboo.
We haven't discussed, uh, how much.
Oh, uh, something nominal. Let's say...
This was not the contraband of a smuggler, - 200 a month?
But open defiance.
Including meals and late snacks, et cetera.
- You're a very persuasive salesman, Mrs. Haze. - Thank you. Uh...
What was the decisive factor? Uh, my garden?
I think it was your... cherry pies.
Ohh!
Why were you so late coming home from school yesterday afternoon?
Yesterday. Yesterday. What was yesterday?
Yesterday was Thursday.
That's right. That's right.
Michelle and I, um, stayed to watch football practice.
- In the Frigid Queen? - What do you mean, "In the Frigid Queen"?
I was driving around and I thought I saw you through the window.
Oh. Yeah. Well, we stopped there for a malt afterwards.
What difference does it make?
You were sitting at a table with two boys.
I told you, no dates.
- It wasn't a date. - It was a date.
- It wasn't a date. - It was a date, Lolita.
- It was not a date. - It was a date!
It wasn't a date.
Whatever it was that you had yesterday afternoon, I don't want you to have it again.
And while we're on the subject, how did you come to be so late on Saturday afternoon?
Professor Humbert's fall befits his transgression.
- Where have you put her? - Get your hands off her!
- Where is she? - Obsessed with Lolita,
who's now run away from him,
he undergoes a mental breakdown.
- Hold it now! - Don't let go!
The satirical comedy turns into a bizarre tragedy.
Let's get this business straight.
This girl was officially discharged earlier tonight in the care of her uncle.
If you say so.
Well, has she or hasn't she an uncle?
- All right, let's say she has an uncle. - What do you mean, "let's say"?
Uh, all right. She has an uncle.
Uncle Gus. Uh, yes, I remember now.
He was going t-to pick her up here at the hospital.
- L-I forgot that. - Forgot?
- Yes, I forgot. - All right, let him up.
Uh, she didn't, by any chance,
leave any... message for me?
No, I suppose not.
Five years in the army...
and some considerable experience of the world...
had by now dispelled any of those romantic notions regarding love...
with which Barry commenced life,
and he began to have it in mind,
as so many gentlemen had done before him,
to marry a woman of fortune and condition.
And, as such things so often happen,
these thoughts closely coincided...
with his setting first sight upon a lady who will henceforth play a considerable part...
in the drama of his life...
the Countess of Lyndon,
Viscountess Bullingdon of England,
Baroness Castle Lyndon of the kingdom of Ireland.
A woman of vast wealth and great beauty.
Kubrick's boldest project...
was a period piece set in 18th-century Europe...
Barry Lyndon.
He broke new technical ground,
having special lenses manufactured...
to capture the glow of the candlelit mansions of the aristocracy.
Instead of a picaresque tale,
Kubrick offered another grim journey of self-destruction...
the rise and fall of an opportunist.
On the surface...
the approach was cool and distant, deceptive.
But I found this to be one of the most profoundly emotional films I've ever seen.
Samuel, I'm going outside for a breath of air.
Yes, milady. Of course.
Kubrick's style was strangely unsettling.
His audacity was to insist on slowness...
in order to recreate the pace of life...
and the ritualized behavior of the time.
A good example is this seduction scene,
which he stretches...
until it settles into a sort of trance.
What has always struck me is the ballet of the emotions in the film.
Watch the tension between the camera's movements...
and the character's body language,
orchestrated by the music in this scene.
WithJohn Cassavetes'characters,
the emotion was always up front.
That's great.
It was at once their cross and their salvation.
John's approach was warm, embracing, focused on people.
- Aah! No. No. No, no, no, no. - Yes. Yes.
Relationships were all he was interested in.
The laughter and the games, the tears and the guilt,
the whole roller coaster of love.
A middle-class housewife, in despair over the failure of her marriage,
has been picked up by a young man.
She takes him home for the night.
The next morning he finds her comatose.
Operator?
I want the emergency rescue squad.
My number?
My number is...
Come on, now. Drink this, damn it!
Goddamn bitch. Drink this!
Come on, now. Don't go back out.
Cassavetes embodied the emergence of a new school...
of guerilla filmmaking in New York.
His films were literally made on the credit plan.
John was fearless, a true renegade setting up one psychodrama after another...
with the complicity of a whole close group of actor friends.
He insisted on having fun when making films...
while looking for some kind of truth.
Maybe even a revelation.
No. You gotta stay awake. Please.
I don't want you to die.
No.
Please, lady.
You gotta stay awake.
To have a philosophy is to know how to love...
- You gotta stay awake. - and to know where to put it.
But you can't put it everywhere.
You've gotta be a priest saying, " Yes, my son, yes, my daughter, bless you. "
But people don't live that way.
They live with anger and hostility and problems...
and lack of money, lack of...
You know, tremendous disappointments in their life. They're...
So, what they need is a philosophy.
I think what everybody needs is a way to say...
"Where and how can I love, can I be in love...
so that I can live with some degree of peace?"
And so that's why I have a need for the characters...
to really analyze love, discuss it, kill it,
destroy it, hurt each other, do all that stuff...
in that war,
in that word polemic and picture polemic of what life is.
The rest of the stuff really doesn't interest me.
It may interest other people, but I have a one-track mind.
All I'm interested in is love.
That's it! Hoo-hoo!
You're gonna cry! Ohh, geez! Come on!
Come on. I didn't want to hit you, but don't go to sleep on me.
Ohh! Come on, now! Cry! That's it! That's life, honey!
Tears of happiness, man. Just do it!
Come on, now. Ohh.
All of Cassavetes'films,
they were all epics of the human soul.
Watching them brings to mind a comment made byJohn Ford to a collaborator...
who was complaining about the miserable weather conditions in the desert...
when they were trying to shoot a picture.
The guy said, " Look, Mr. Ford, what can we shoot out here?"
And Ford replied, "What can we shoot?
The most interesting and exciting thing in the whole world... a human face."
You want some coffee?
- Can I trust you? Huh? Huh? - Yeah.
Okay. I don't trust you anyway.
I don't...
Uh-huh. You little sneaky, you.
I'm gonna get you some coffee!
So, we're gonna have to stop...
because I can't go on any further.
Number one, we just don't have the time.
Number two, we've reached a different era.
It's the era of the late '60s, the years that I started making movies myself,
and, uh, it puts me in a different perspective.
We've reached a whole new chapter altogether and I really...
I could not really do justice to my friends who are making films...
and companions and, uh, my generation of filmmakers from the inside.
I can't... I can't do it.
Um, so the story really has no end,
and we haven't even started discussing...
such incredibly major figures as...
Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges,
Joseph Mankiewicz, John Huston,
George Stevens, Sam Peckinpah,
William Wyler or, of course, Alfred Hitchcock.
But fortunately they've been celebrated in so many ways,
in so many books and articles and in some, actually, wonderful shows.
Documentaries about film are becoming a genre unto themselves...
thanks to Kevin Brownlow and David Gill's invaluable 13-hour series...
about Hollywood in its silent era...
just the silent film alone, 13 hours;
Peter Bogdanovich's film Directed byJohn Ford,
Richard Schickel's series The Men Who Made The Movies,
and so many British and French portraits of filmmakers.
So many directors have inspired me over the years,
I wouldn't know how to stop mentioning their names, we're indebted to them.
As we are to any original filmmaker who managed to survive...
and impose his or her vision in a very competitive profession.
When we talk about personal expression,
I'm often reminded of Kazan's film America, America,
the story of his uncle's journey from Anatolia to America...
the story of so many immigrants who came to this country from a very, very foreign land.
You're blockin'traffic! Come on! Move it along!
I kind of identified with it and was very moved by it.
Actually, I later saw myself making this same journey, but not from Anatolia.
Rather, from my own neighborhood in New York,
which was, in a sense, a very foreign land.
I made that journey from that land to moviemaking,
which was something unimaginable.
Actually, when I was a little younger there was another journey I wanted to make.
It was a religious one... I wanted to be a priest.
However I soon realized that my real vocation, my real calling,
was the movies.
I don't really see a conflict between the Church and movies... the sacred and the profane.
Obviously there are major differences,
but I could also see great similarities...
between a church and a movie house.
Both are places for people to come together and share a common experience,
and I believe there's a spirituality in films,
even if it's not one which can supplant faith.
I find that over the years many films address themselves to the spiritual side of man's nature...
from Griffith's film Intolerance toJohn Ford's The Grapes of Wrath,
to Hitchcock's Vertigo,
to Kubrick's 2001 and so many more.
It's as if movies answer an ancient quest for the common unconscious.
They fulfill a spiritual need that people have...
to share a common memory.