The Big Screen - The Story of the Movies

by David Thomson

  The credible domestic interiors of Best Years (shot in absorbing depth of focus by Gregg Toland) are “perfectly” dressed. But in 1946, in its mythic Midwest setting, “Boone City,” there is not a television set in sight. Television had been demonstrated before the war, and its technology had been enhanced by wartime research. But the economic sacrifices of wartime had postponed its arrival as a domestic entertainment, just as the war had delayed the eventual decision in the antitrust cases leveled at the movie conglomerates. War is not always unkind to show business.

  But in the late 1940s, as the first television sets began to appear for purchase (laughably archaic to our eyes now), movie attendance was already falling. In popular history, that fall and the rise of television are put hand in glove. It’s not the real story. Something was making audiences lose faith in moviegoing before they recognized television. From 1946 to 1947, weekly attendance fell from eighty-two million to seventy-three. In 1948 it was sixty-six million; in 1949 it was sixty-one; in 1950 it was fifty-five; and in 1951 it was forty-nine. Thirty million customers a week were gone in five years—a drop of nearly 40 percent. No wonder Selznick was gloomy that day in 1951; no wonder the studio was empty of work.

  What was happening? It is still an area for speculation: reunited lovers sat in the dark for a few years, then they were pregnant and the owners of new homes and families. Such people have never been steadfast moviegoers: their show is at home; they are tired, and a whole menu of practical realities has usurped the role of fantasy in their lives. Some of them had been educated, matured, or saddened by the experience of war and travel. One reason Harold Russell (who had lost his hands in a wartime accident) was cast in The Best Years of Our Lives was because of a new respect for painful realities. That same spirit brought several of the new Italian “realist” films to America and then urged Ingrid Bergman to Italy. It had encouraged Billy Wilder to make Double Indemnity, a study of corrupt but alluring people who betray that unimpeachable American rock: insurance. The same curdled humanism had reveled in the plight of Ray Milland’s alcoholic in The Lost Weekend. Then it gave up the ghost, and offended Mr. Mayer, by saying there was dysfunction inside those Hollywood mansions and the factories that supported them.

  Don’t jump to easy conclusions. In the postwar years, the Best Picture Oscar went to a run of films that were “real,” dark, culturally respectable, or suspicious of America: 1945, The Lost Weekend; 1946, The Best Years of Our Lives; 1947, Gentleman’s Agreement (which admitted anti-Semitism as an American issue); 1948, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet; 1949, All the King’s Men; 1950, All About Eve; 1951, An American in Paris.

  To which you can say, well, all right, An American in Paris is none of the above, and who trusts the Oscars anyway? But in the same period, the Academy’s stock was high, and other contenders included 1945’s Mildred Pierce (more James M. Cain, with Joan Crawford’s career woman getting it on the chin and her shadowed brow); Crossfire (1947); It’s a Wonderful Life (1946; where the wonder survived only narrowly against a nightmare vision of Americana); The Snake Pit (1948); A Place in the Sun (1951); A Streetcar Named Desire (1951); and High Noon (1952; which says the cowardly, selfish Western town no longer deserves Gary Cooper as its sheriff). This is the moment of film noir, few of which were as prestigious as Double Indemnity, but which seeped into the American sensibility in a way only the Western had matched before.

  On the other hand, the same years saw not just An American in Paris, but also the heyday of Danny Kaye, Bob Hope, and Bing Crosby; in nightclubs, in advance of movies, nothing matched the meeting of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. There were war films that celebrated war and the way it found character in the fellowship: Battleground, Sands of Iwo Jima, Twelve O’Clock High (where a leader, Gregory Peck, cracked, but morale and the unit held together).

  Perhaps the deepest lesson (though few people perceived it at the time) was that the old unity of the audience no longer existed. There were many who still wanted fun, fantasy, happy endings, and a couple of hours of escape. But the atom bomb’s shock waves passed through us, along with the truth about concentration camps and the witchcraft called the Red Menace. Was war really over?

  We look back now on the late 1940s and the early 1950s as a kind of Norman Rockwell mindscape in which youngish people had new families, their first cars, and new homes. They seem impacted, or content, or like “the American people.” But rifts were showing: Were you outraged by Communists or relaxed? What were your feelings about blacks and their occupying normal roles in American society? Jackie Robinson first played for the Dodgers on April 15, 1947. The incidence of divorce surged. Questions were raised about old guarantees: did everyone really admire their parents? More important, more Americans were going to college. Twelve million people went to school on the GI Bill of Rights, many from families that had never known that experience before.

  Suppose the movies were no longer quite a mass medium. There was some unease over the old models of fantasy and escapism. There was a yearning for new approaches. There were alternative escapes—the car is a movie unto itself; its windows are screens that give us a traveling show. And there were millions who wanted nothing to change. But there was not the reality or the illusion of a solid, unified mass. To be positive about it, you might say some of the previously huddled were standing up and looking around. But in a mass society, with so many fresh lessons on the ugliness of human nature, how do you allay chaos and panic, except with a mass medium? A new one was arriving.

  By 1950 there were just under four million television sets working (sometimes) in the United States—if you recall Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), in the household of Jake LaMotta (a rich man), the reception was intermittent and close to invisible. Most TV sets were still on the East Coast, and in those places there was a sudden drop in movie attendance—like 30 percent. But as yet only about 9 percent of the national population had sets. By 1962 that level had reached 90 percent. It reached saturation point, but has begun to decline in this new century—because other screens are replacing the television set.

  In Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), the widow Cary Scott’s (Jane Wyman) grown children are shocked when she contemplates a new marriage, to her gardener Ron (Rock Hudson). To calm her, or to fill her time, they make a Christmas gift to her of the one other thing she lacks besides a man—a cabinet television set. Sirk then cuts away to a piercing shot of Wyman’s sad face reflected in the gray screen: she struggles with the age gap and the respectability gap between Hudson and herself. But she never notices the gap that any modern audience is waiting for—Hudson’s fond, amused, but disinterested attitude to women. There is even a scene where Hudson’s character passes some small talk about “being a man” in difficult situations, and Wyman’s character responds, “And you want me to be a man?” Films are helpless in such winds of change, yet All That Heaven Allows contains pointed social criticism and a performance from Hudson that deserved a livelier actress.

  Was that television set a kind gift? Although it seems a comfort, and a partner to the sofa, television is critically associated with crisis: the deaths of JFK or Princess Diana; an earthquake in Haiti; the tsunami in Japan; the end of the world. We guess if that moment comes we’ll be close to our “set”—and then turn it off for final peace? That dread is wittily dealt with in Poltergeist (1982), officially directed by Tobe Hooper and coproduced by Steven Spielberg. The angered spirits in an old Indian burial ground turn nasty beneath a house in one of those infinite, bland and dead Southern Californian “developments.” The house shakes, the furniture flies, and the little girl is sucked into the television set, where the Beast lives. She is rescued of course (this is Spielberg), but when their house is ruined and the family retreat to a hotel, they quickly seize the television set in their room and put it outside, on the balcony. That is the last shot of the movie, and the stranded, dead eye of the set summoned the opening line of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer: “The sky above the port was the c
olor of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

  The penetration of our society by television would far exceed that of the movies, even at their best moment. Television became not an entertainment but a service, and when I speak of the role of a mass medium as a safeguard against disorder and fear, just contemplate a sustained interruption of electric light and Internet service in our cities today. Out of touch, we’d be plunged back into the dark. Chaos is so close, and panic is waiting. Television is nearer to electricity than it is to movie, yet we were all raised to believe it had us watching moving imagery, constant sound, and programs or shows.

  Samuel Paley was born in Brovary, a shtetl near Kiev in 1874. The family name may have been Palinski. His father, Isaac, brought him to America, to Chicago, in 1883, and Sam grew up there, tried a lot of different trades, and ended up making cigars. The business flourished, and his son William was born in Chicago in 1901—it is that first film generation again. Willie attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and he was headed for the family business.

  As part of that plan, in 1927, the Paleys bought up a struggling Philadelphia radio station, the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System. Willie was put in charge of it; his mission was to advertise the family cigars. In a year, sales doubled.

  William S. Paley proceeded to gather in more radio stations, and in 1928 he changed his business name to the Columbia Broadcasting System. CBS enjoyed early success, but Paley was ambitious to become bigger, so he was in constant need of fresh funding. That left him open to a first approach from Paramount, the movie empire, which was intrigued by radio as a public show and as a means of advertising, and which had heard about the experiments toward television, though they were being led by David Sarnoff’s RCA, which already had some investment in RKO, or Radio-Keith-Orpheum.

  When asked about television himself, in 1929, Paley said it was hard to know how it would be handled, but he predicted it would have to play in theaters, “because of the size of the theatre screen…Perfections in the projection of motion pictures will play a large part in making television applicable to theater, rather than home.” That seemed like the right hunch: audiences were so accustomed to sitting at the foot of a screen as big as a wall or a building radiant with light. But Paley was wrong, and in time he resisted television as it intruded on radio. Then he changed his mind, and rewrote the publicity. By 1948 he was on board, proclaiming, “Television offers keener insights than printed or spoken words alone can provide.” So he was wrong again. It is the one reliable trait in hucksters.

  But Paley always put his soul into negotiating, and gambling. In that respect he was ready for the movie tycoons. The Fox Studio was interested in Columbia, too. In 1929, William Fox himself invited Paley to dinner, patronized him, and promised to “make something of him.” He offered to buy Columbia for whatever sum Paley had paid to put it together. Paley took umbrage and went to meet Adolph Zukor at Paramount. He conducted himself like a powerhouse: he would grant Paramount a half share in CBS, for $5 million. Zukor agreed, though his deal was tough: Paramount paid not cash but its own stock, to be redeemed in three years. In addition, it secured six hours a week of free advertising on the radio and the obligation on CBS to be in profit before Paramount would buy back its stock.

  With the Crash of 1929, Paramount stock fell from $85 a share to $10. In advance of that, Paley had sold $1 million worth of his Paramount stock. The movie business faltered. But radio soared in the years of the Depression; CBS’s advertising revenue was up to $14.5 million in 1931. So Paramount owed CBS $4.0 million for its old stock. It couldn’t pay, so Zukor offered to trade back the CBS stock he had acquired for $5.2 million; $4.0 million of that would go back to CBS, which would once again be controlled by Paley. But to get the $5.2 million, Paley had to go to Wall Street in a fund-raising operation brokered by Prescott Bush (the father and grandfather of future presidents) and Averell Harriman. And so politics and old money entered the mass media in its early days.

  This is movie business, of course, with television some way away still, but it is also the thing Noah Cross (John Huston) swears to protect and possess in the movie Chinatown (1974): “the future.” It is also a portrait of a great operator: in the same years, Paley finessed a Crossley opinion poll that said NBC was doing far better with the listening public than CBS by mounting his own write-in response (in his favor). By the early 1950s, Paley was a more important leader for American culture than any of the movie moguls, most of whom were his friends, obliged to suffer his condescending talk.

  This history is also a guide to the driving force of advertising in these American media. Paley had been in advertising before he was a broadcaster, and so he took it for granted. How else was the public going to pay for its media? And here we should observe a contrast with what I have previously called “state cinema.”

  It was in 1922 that the British Broadcasting Company was founded. By 1927 it had become the British Broadcasting Corporation, with a royal charter defining its structure and ethos. Its chief purpose was to “Inform, educate and entertain,” to represent the different areas and voices of Britain, and to address the whole world in its own languages. It was to be funded on a license fee required of all citizens and companies possessing a radio receiver. Later that fee was changed to apply to television reception, and it stood in 2011 at £145.50 a year.

  As general manager first and then director-general, John Reith, a Scottish Presbyterian of forbidding austerity and moral principle, led the BBC until 1938. It was the Reithian insistence that the BBC, though funded by state order and policing, was to function as an independent entity, conceiving and making radio as its employees saw fit. Reith was compelled to observe government control during the General Strike of 1926: he was not allowed to air trade union or Labour Party views. He was forced out of the BBC in 1938 because of pressure from the Conservative government. But the principle of an independent broadcasting entity, funded by the public, held.

  BBC radio always had its faults and it preferred the un-American attitude that viewers were at liberty to turn off if they wished. That much discrimination could seem elitist—the BBC spoke with an Oxbridge accent for decades—but its reliability as a source of information was not questioned during the Second World War. (Charles de Gaulle was one of many people who spoke to their occupied peoples from London.) It catered to many fringe interests; it calmly refused to be overwhelmed by majority tastes; it had a whole range of services—Home, Light and the Third, which went from mainstream, to entertainment, to intellectual—and it observed those distinctions without any shame. It carried no advertising. It still doesn’t, on radio or television, though the pressures to pay its way mount all the time. Britain conceived and carried forward a kind of broadcasting that is self-sufficient and free from commercial pleas, interruption, and the demented noise of the pitch. It has regularly broadcast things that many people disapprove of, and it has usually resisted that resistance. It has been in trouble with governments. For decades, this bred a mood that cannot be underestimated: that our discourse and our scrutiny deserve to be uninterrupted. Attention deficit was not a common concept in that era, but we struggle with it now and sharp kids use it in their own defense as they snatch glances at screens Bill Paley would have deemed hopelessly small.

  This book is not interrupted every sixteen pages by a cluster of advertisements.

  I hope you are startled to think that the bound signatures of books might be intruded on by advertisements. Isn’t it just as ridiculous that on a CD of a symphony, an opera, or a jazz session there could be commercials separating the tracks, or that when you went to see a movie there would be advertising interludes every twenty minutes? We are not minds and beings ready for that sort of crass interruption—are we? And yet we are accustomed to newspapers where the text is mixed in with advertisements. On the Internet, we have to submit to ads to gain access to an item of interest, and we may realize that “interest” begins to be dependent on the necessary push
of the advertising. In its first appearance, television assumed our minds were fit to be interrupted. It made a habit.

  We have never given enough time to a consideration of the basic experience of television. By the end of the 1950s, it was clearly a force or a wan light shaping children’s minds, yet the subject rarely penetrated our educational system to sit beside reading and writing as a fit part of the curriculum. In that same period, research discovered that most children were spending more time watching moving imagery than they were working with words.

  In one way, television was less a departure than a return to something Thomas Edison foresaw and which was ignored or bypassed by theatrical movies. In the earliest days, Edison built kinetoscope parlors where single individuals looked into view-finding devices and turned a handle so they had a film show all to themselves. Edison thought it was the future—and he was correct, but not immediately. The first interaction between technology and audience preferred projection, though “preferred” suggests there was a conscious choice or a vote. Instead, the development speaks to the underground urging that will always occur in these things. So, in the first decades of the twentieth century, people elected to see projected movies in large groups. A hundred years later we are watching images nearly too small to see, in an isolation bordering on secrecy. The question hanging over these changes is whether we ever had a choice, or are we just helpless victims of the light?

  Television had a way of presenting itself as just for us. “We’ll come to you!” It seemed like a rare facility that meant we had no need to go out at night, get a babysitter, or be presentable in public. It was just one more household service to make life easier. Did that smooth assurance distract us from the way the screen was tiny, the sound dreadful, and the picture quality enfeebled? Did it also prevent us from seeing how the shape and atmosphere of the home were being revised?