Too often there’s an impulse to paint the past as a simpler time, but there’s nothing simple about the films that came out in the 50’s (or what was happening in the industry at the time). It’s this decade that author and film professor, Foster Hirsch, has chosen as the subject of his latest book, Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties, and in the following interview you can start compiling your watch list early before the book comes out this October.
Rachel Bellwoar: I really appreciated the enthusiasm in which you wrote about the various widescreen formats that the studios employed in the ’50s. As much I’ve noticed movies from that era always stress whether they were filmed in CinemaScope or VistaVision, until your book I never bothered to learn the difference. It was easy to treat them as interchangeable. Do you think the full magic of those formats is lost today, due to the inability to watch those films the way they were meant to be screened?
Foster Hirsch: The full magic of the early wide-screen processes like Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision, Todd-AO, cannot be recaptured today for a number of reasons. First, wide-screen filmmaking in the early 1950s was entirely new – and those of us who were there were witnesses to a revolution in filmmaking. I remember the impact of seeing The Robe at Grauman’s Chinese, and the thrill of watching the screen ‘grow’ from the standard Academy ratio to the full width of the new screen size. That kind of excitement is possible only at the beginning of a technological revolution. Second, we saw wide-screen movies in magnificent movie palaces – very different from the anonymous architecture of the multiplex. And too, as streaming becomes more and more the way of watching movies, wide-screen filmmaking is endangered. IMAX is alive and well, fortunately, and that is the closest approximation of the screen size of the early ’50s movies.
Bellwoar: Instead of diving right into the movies that came out during the fifties, Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties begins by systematically going over how each studio tried to appeal to audiences and adjust to major changes in leadership. How important is it that readers have that context of what going on behind the scenes to understand the movies that came out during that time (especially in light of the blacklist)?
Hirsch: I think it is important for readers to have the history of the studios as a prologue to the discussion of films. At each studio there were major shifts that reflected the larger economic and cultural and political changes that affected the industry in the tumultuous postwar period. As the subtitle indicates, a major theme of the book is the collapse of the studio system – the process began in the postwar period, but was not completed until the following decade.
Bellwoar: You’ve previously written a book about the Actor’s Studio. For those who associate “method acting” today with actors like Jared Leto and Jeremy Strong, what could they learn from studying Marlon Brando and Joanne Woodward?
Hirsch: The ‘first wave’ of Method actors in film – Brando, [James] Dean, [Montgomery] Clift, Woodward, Kim Stanley – established a new level of psychological realism that all good film actors have continued to draw from. It is one of the themes of my book that there was more great acting in ’50s movies than in any earlier period – and I would contend the level has not been reached since. All aspiring movie actors should study the scene between James Dean and Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden in the office of the character played by Van Fleet – this is Method acting in its purest, most power form.
Bellwoar: One of my favorite genres that had a major moment in the ’50s is the melodrama. If Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life is the film you would hold up as the greatest melodrama of the fifties, is there a melodrama you wish more people talked about today?
Hirsch: Other ’50s melodramas that should be seen and talked about celebrated: The Cobweb, Miracle in the Rain, Written on the Wind, I’ll Cry Tomorrow, No Down Payment, There’s Always Tomorrow.
Bellwoar: Another genre which I haven’t always gravitated towards but which flourished during the fifties is the Hollywood epic. Do you feel that epics deserve a critical reevaluation in the say way that melodramas got?
Hirsch: I am a huge fan of the Hollywood epic, but I realize I am in a distinct minority. I pushed for Land of the Pharoahs and The Egyptian to be shown in the ’50s for the ’50s series at the Film Forum that will launch my book, but I do not expect a large turnout. The ancient-world epic of the postwar period is a bygone genre, out of phase with current tastes and interests. Still, I would make a case for films like Quo Vadis, Ben-Hur, The Robe, and the two titles above.
Bellwoar: In the book you talk about how it could be argued that sci-fi movies took the place of war movies in the ’50s, when it comes to addressing topics and anxieties that were off limits otherwise during the postwar decade. Could you speak more to that idea?
Hirsch: For sensitive topics in the ’50s, allegory was often the most useful approach, and science fiction became a favored format. Great sci-fi films of the time, steeped in political allegories about the Cold War and the blacklist, include Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Them!, and The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Bellwoar: Were there any films you discovered over the course of writing this book that really impressed you, or films that you felt differently about after watching them again?
Hirsch: I was surprised – and pleased – to discover that films I had liked when I saw them in the ’50s I still liked when I saw them again for the book. Two noir thrillers come to mind: The Steel Trap and Sudden Fear. I remember loving them in 1951 – if anything, my admiration has only increased in the intervening decades. Discoveries for the book (films I had not seen when they were first released) include Bhowani Junction, Band of Angels (widely despised, but really worth another look), My Son John (also despised, I think unfairly).
Bellwoar: What are some of your favorite interviews that you conducted for this book?
Hirsch: All of the celebrities cited in my acknowledgments were helpful and agreeable. My two favorites: Carroll Baker, who has become a person friend and who, at 92, is sharp, funny, down-to-earth, proud of her career but unimpressed by her fame; she will appear for an interview after a screening of Baby Doll during the Film Forum series on Nov. 2. When I interviewed him when he was 84, Tab Hunter was still the best-looking man in the world – and he was also the most charming.
Bellwoar: In the epilogue you mention that you’re working on a companion volume to this one on the sixties. About how far along are you, and would you say that you prefer one decade’s movies to the other’s?
Hirsch: I am in the early stages of my companion volume, on Hollywood in the sixties, and I am struck by the similarities between filmmaking in the ’50s and ’60s – in Hollywood, the 60s did not become what we now think of as the era of cultural and sexual and political revolution until after the decade’s midpoint. I will always have a special bond with the ’50s, which is now further away from us in time and needs more ‘protection’ than the 60s. But both decades, in terms of quality, are very high – compared to where we are now.
Bellwoar: This is something you broach in the epilogue as well, but would you say that our current decade has now superseded the fifties as Hollywood’s most turbulent decade?
Hirsch: Until the pandemic, the ’50s was Hollywood’s most turbulent decade. Post-2020, the chaos and uncertainty of the industry are greater than they have ever been. In the future, a historian covering the pandemic decade will be faced with sorting out a series of crises, some of which may prove to be fatal.
RB: Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Foster!
Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher — Television goes on sale October 10th from Knopf.
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