Hollywood in TransitionModule 3 · COMM/THEA 479W: American Film History

The Industry Under Pressure

The Big Eight Studios

After World War II, the years look, in retrospect, to be the golden era for Hollywood as well as the beginning of Hollywood's undoing. Production, distribution and exhibition was dominated by the major studios, which were still grouped around the "Big Eight" vertically integrated media companies, but the power of the big boys was beginning to wane. (Lecture)

The Paramount Antitrust Case

The Supreme Court's decision in the 1948 Paramount antitrust case led to the studios' theater-chains being broken up, and along with them lay the classical Hollywood business model. Worse, urban flight and TV had shifted audiences away from downtown movie palaces into suburban living rooms. The industry was not in downward spiral, but it was in a real problem. (Lewis, pg. 212)

Film Noir and the War on Screen

From Optimism to Darkness

The industrial turmoil paralleled a genuine shift in the range of American films that were willing to say what they were saying. This was the time of Gone with the Wind (Fleming, 1939) and Casablanca(Curtiz, 1942), and the joy of the war was replaced by something much darker. (Lecture)

Film Noir

The most obvious indicator of that change was the development of film noir, which blossomed from 1945 to 1955. Movies such as Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944) introduced low-key lighting, oblique camera angles, morally tainted characters, and femmes fatales — all of it capturing the disorientation of many Americans as they returned home from the war to a country that had moved on. As the textbook puts it, noir films convey "the crisis of adjustment experienced by many American men just after the war." (Lewis, pg. 212)

The Best Years of Our Lives

From 1945 to 1955, film noir was in full bloom, at the same time reflecting and refracting the conflicted postwar American society. The tension between returning veterans and a changed home front ran through much of the era's most serious filmmaking. (Lewis, pg. 212; Lecture)

Directors Who Worked Outside the Formula

Orson Welles and Citizen Kane

A few directors managed to operate within the studio system without being completely consumed by it. In 1939, Orson Welles came to Hollywood with a contract that granted him complete creative control, almost unheard-of at the time, and produced Citizen Kane (1941). The film's deep focus shots and non-linear structure influenced the way in which people spoke about the capabilities of movies. (Lecture)

Billy Wilder

German-born Billy Wilder, who arrived in Hollywood speaking no English, was one of the most critical observers of America's social scene. Genre conventions of melodrama and comedy were explored in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Apartment (1960) as they accessed class anxiety and moral compromise. (Lecture)

Elia Kazan and HUAC

Elia Kazan transferred Method acting from New York's Actors Studio to the screen in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), where Marlon Brando gave an impressive performance. Kazan was also named by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which forever changed how his work is read. (Lecture)

Preston Sturges

Preston Sturges became one of the few writer-directors the studio system ever willingly produced, using screwball comedy conventions to satirize American myths of success, democracy, and the pursuit of happiness. His run of films between 1940 and 1944 remains one of the most concentrated bursts of comic filmmaking in Hollywood history. (Lecture)

Women Behind the Camera

Leigh Brackett

Women have also been working hard behind the scenes, although the history books have been reluctant to recognise it. Leigh Brackett co-wrote the screenplay for Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep(1946) and later co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back (1980). (Lecture)

Ida Lupino

Ida Lupino was the only woman directing important films during this period. In frustration with roles forced upon her by the studio system, she established her own production company in 1949, producing films on topics considered taboo for mainstream Hollywood: Outrage (1950) dealt with rape, and Never Fear (1950) with polio. Her aim was to produce "films that featured interesting female characters, then as now in short supply." (Lewis, pg. 237)