The films of the ‘fifties’ still have resonance today. Many of the subjects were anchored firmly in world moving events. A more cavalier look at what happened in the recent world war and what the outcome meant for the future. There was also a new wave of escapism with extravagant Hollywood Musicals and costly costume dramas filched from the Bible. Hollywood was having its own internecine war. The expensive Studio system of making films against the guerrilla tactics of the swift moving freedom of the Independents. A war that the Studios were bound to lose. It was in the fifties that the movies went head to head with its greatest threat – television. Before then the Studios moguls had dismissed the threat as rubbish and buried their collective heads in the sand. At last they were waking up to the very real possibility that they were about to join the dinosaur. They thrashed about for a belated answer and, in 1952, came up with Cinerama. The trick here was to shoot the scene with three cameras simultaneously and then patch them side by side onto an enormous screen. You could hardly see the joins they claimed. The first was a sort of trailer for what was to come, This is Cinerama (1952). The best was How the West Was Won but this didn’t arrive until the beginning of the sixties. By this time Cinerama had been ambushed by all sorts of hustlers, PanaVision being one of the busiest. Still looking for some way of ungluing the audience from the fetish of the small screen, 3D was brought out and dusted down. It had been used as a minor curiosity since demonstrated by William Friese-Greene as far back as 1890 but now it was back big-time. There were a lot of films made but the drag of having to wear the one fits all cardboard spectacles proved to be too much for the ordinary cinemagoer. There were some notable films along the way. Mainly in 1953 it seems. It was fun dodging the ping-pong ball and various other pieces of equipment looming out of the screen in The House of Wax. The third dimension heightened the sense of involvement in It came from Outer Space and you were fully involved in the close-up osculations of Kiss Me Kate. 20th Century Fox was the first company to shoot a major feature film in Cinemascope. The wrap was called on How To Marry A Millionaire (1953), a full six months before The Robe (1953) was finished but lost out in the rush to be the first released onto the appreciative public. Soon CinemaScope was where it was all happening and the big production houses waded in with films like 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1954), A Star Is Born (1954), Lady And The Tramp (1955) and even had a tilt at cartoons with Mr Magoo (1954). There were plenty of others shooting for the wide screen and for a while the cinema held its own against the 14 inch, black and white TVs. The New Medium also encourage the splendour of high-class musical production like An American In Paris and Singing In The Rain among others of equal quality. Fred Astaire, after announcing his retirement in 1946, couldn’t resist the call of dancing feet and stuck on his top hat and white tie to return to the screen. The debate at the time was whether new boy, Gene Kelly was better than Astaire. The consensus of opinion was that Kelly was ‘more muscular’. While the American cinema was rampaging around the world screens the British film industry was surviving on comedy and taut, well-written but under funded dramas. Increasingly the Brits were looking to America for finance and from necessity came a number of highly rated successes. For the American producers, working with British companies served two purposes. One, they were getting the authentic backgrounds demanded by the cinemagoers and secondly the Europeans worked cheap. Among some of the best co-productions from this time were the Bogart – Hepburn water-bound drama of The African Queen (1951) and Moulin Rouge with the irrepressible Zsa Zsa Gabor (1952). The same year saw Alec Guinness having a mental breakdown on The Bridge On The River Kwai. Italy stood in for Greece on Helen of Troy (1956) and Spain was Russia for War And Peace. It is axiomatic that great films need great Directors. And there was plenty of those around in the Fifties. John Houston left his Texan roots to take on more cosmopolitan subjects, The Asphalt Jungle (1950). The African Queen, Moulin Rouge, Moby Dick (1956). David Lean did some of his best work in the fifties and early sixties. The Sound Barrier (1952) had Ralph Richardson and Nigel Patrick wrestling with the controls as they broke the sound barrier, turned to Hobson’s Choice to give John Mills a chance to try a strange accent and finished the decade with The Bridge On The River Kwai. Tony Richardson’s Look Back In Anger (1958) was proclaimed as a revolution in filmmaking. Carol Reed proved that comedy wasn’t dead with Our Man in Havana (1959) and Orson Welles proved he had a Touch Of Evil in 1958. Robert Wise had a bash at Sci-Fi with The Day The Earth Stood Still in 1951 and switched to a gritty Desert Rats in ’53. Willy Wilder was proving worth his Green Card with Sunset Boulevard, The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, while William Wyler countered with Roman Holiday (1953), Friendly Persuasion (1956) and the fantastic Ben Hur in 1959. The list of giant directors of the fifties goes on and on. Most of them sailed on through the sixties and many of them were still film making in the seventies and eighties. In Britain a little known film company in England made the first steps towards world renown. On the banks of the Thames, in a converted house, Terence Fisher made The Curse Of Frankenstein in 1957 and followed it with Dracula in ’58 and made Hammer Films an international icon. By the end of the decade the panache was draining from the film industry and the dross of the ghastly sixties was beginning to take hold. Read Ingrid’s column every Tuesday at Den Of Geek. Last week’s is here.
