The trigger releasing Kazan came in an unexpected way that changed his life. His prominence and his record as a Communist made him a target for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He was warned that he would be asked to testify. He resisted, but then he was told that movie employment could depend on it. So, in April 1952, he testified. He named names and let his wife, Molly, publish a letter to the New York Times defending his position. For the rest of his life, he never threw off the shame from that incident. But shame confirmed him as an outsider who treasured his own curse and it matured him as a filmmaker because it drew his ego out into the open.
Kazan had imposed himself on texts before. On Streetcar he instigated the transformation of a play about Blanche into a production about Blanche and Stanley, the figure who dominated audience response in 1947 and seemed the source of the play’s danger. Kazan needed to identify with his male characters. And so in On the Waterfront (written by Budd Schulberg after Arthur Miller had withdrawn), Terry Malloy testifies against the waterfront crime mob of which he has been a part.
It is a passionate, muddled film. Brando is electrifying, the supporting cast is authentic, even the extras feel from the streets. The grittiness of the Hoboken waterfront (filmed by Jean Vigo’s Boris Kaufman) is cold and abrasive, but the film is operatic, too, carried away by its emotional size. It’s unclear what the ending means. It’s far-fetched that the gangsters assassinate Terry’s brainy brother, Charlie (played by Rod Steiger), when the sensible thing to do is to eliminate Terry. Never mind. There had never been such a bold attempt at street realism before, or a performance as achingly vulnerable as Brando’s. It’s just that the passion stems from Kazan: it was his film; he was “in” it.
Kazan did a certain range of material very well, though he lacked irony or humor. He was melodramatic, self-pitying, and so pledged to some actors that his films ran the risk of losing sight of anything else—thus the character of Aaron in East of Eden (1955), James Dean’s brother, is fobbed off so Cal can be made appealing. Still, On the Waterfront and testifying start Kazan’s richest period, which carries on with East of Eden (the discovery of Dean), Baby Doll (1956), A Face in the Crowd (1957), Wild River (1960; with Clift), Splendor in the Grass (which paired Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood), and America, America (1963), the story of a family like his own coming to the new land.
Kazan’s influence lasted long after he had moved on personally from the Actors Studio. That school has been the breeding ground for exceptional actors—the first two Godfather films are stocked with Studio players, including Lee Strasberg who took over the school and became its essential if autocratic teacher.
Another name needs to be remembered in any survey of American naturalism. Paddy Chayefsky was born in the Bronx in 1923. After war service, and being wounded, he tried to write plays and scripts and he ended up in television. He did a version of Budd Schulberg’s Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run? He was coached by Molly Kazan, the director’s wife. And then, in 1953, for the Goodyear Playhouse on television, he wrote Marty, the love story of a humble butcher and a shy girl, played by Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand. It was live television, and it was meant to remind viewers of life.
Marty was directed for TV by Delbert Mann, and when the movie version was made in 1955 by the production company of Harold Hecht and Burt Lancaster, Chayefsky insisted that Mann do the film. But the cast was changed to Ernest Borgnine (the villain in From Here to Eternity, fondly recalled by Burt) and Betsy Blair. The casting of Blair took more than usual nerve. The actress was under suspicion for Communist associations. Lancaster, too, at that time was being questioned. So Gene Kelly, Blair’s husband, asked M-G-M chief Dore Schary to pull strings. “You play charades with Betsy every Saturday,” he told Schary. “She’s not going to overthrow the country.” In this case, the friendly plea worked. Blair got the part and won a nomination as Best Supporting Actress. Borgnine won for Best Actor.
That Marty won Best Picture and the Palme d’Or at Cannes is a sign of how much naturalistic acting was in vogue, and it speaks to another hope for early television, that of showing life as it seemed to be lived. Walter Winchell predicted Marty would be a sleeper hit. Variety announced, “Rarely has a single picture so influenced the film industry.” It earned $3 million on an outlay of just over $300,000 and it prompted reviewers to tell Hollywood to watch television more often—if they had sets in their houses.
Today, Marty is not easy watching. The “real” works for a moment, but then it feels studied and dull. Chayefsky would veer away from its sobriety and plainspoken characters: by the 1970s he was writing flamboyantly rhetorical scripts for The Hospital (1971), Network (1976; still a scathing and prescient attack on television), and even a sci-fi picture, Altered States (1980). Network is one of the liveliest talking pictures we have, and one of William Holden’s best world-weary roles. But Marty was a marvel in its day, full of the hope that America had discovered respect for reality.
Humphrey Bogart was another actor who reckoned he would produce his own pictures—and make a killing from them. In the late 1940s he decided not to renew his old Warner Bros. contract. Instead, he set up Santana Productions, named after the yacht he cherished. He formed a partnership with Robert Lord, a writer-producer from Warners and the man behind Black Legion, an important Bogart picture of the late 1930s in which he played a man who joins the Ku Klux Klan.
Santana made four films, none of them profitable. Tokyo Joe (1949), Knock on Any Door (1949), and Sirocco (1951) were routine. But In a Lonely Place (1950) was remarkable. Bogart had befriended the new director Nicholas Ray—in fact, Ray did Knock on Any Door.
Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1911, Ray developed slowly. He worked in radio, as a folklore researcher and as an assistant to Kazan. But in 1949, for RKO, with John Houseman as his producer, Ray released one of the most exciting of American debut films: They Live by Night, a rural noir in which Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell try to keep their love precious as fate closes in on them. The taut dramatization of endangered feeling had seldom been so striking. No one guessed it in the late 1940s, but Ray was to become an emblematic figure in the arguments over what a director was. In 1958 the French critic Jean-Luc Godard went so far as to claim, “The cinema is Nicholas Ray.” In strangers’ eyes, Ray had become a vagrant hero. But John Houseman, always an acute observer of talent, knew the man himself:
Reared…in a household dominated by women, he was a potential homosexual with a deep, passionate and constant need for female love in his life. This made him attractive to women, for whom the chance to save him from his own self-destructive habits proved an irresistible attraction of which Nick took full advantage and for which he rarely forgave them. He left a trail of damaged lives behind him—not as a seducer, but as a husband, lover and father.
There was a bond between Bogart and Ray. In the early 1940s, Bogart had become someone the public admired, a guy with integrity, but the aggressive edge of his gangsters from the 1930s lingered. In life he was a famous needler, and Ray saw a way to get back to the innate hostility that had been genre conventional in the 1930s. In addition, they were two men with younger wives—Lauren Bacall and Gloria Grahame—who might have wandering eyes, or arouse their husbands’ suspicions. Bogart had never enjoyed the Hollywood system: He had fought steadily with his boss, Jack Warner. He had been bruised and humiliated by the flight he led to Washington in 1947 to protest the early HUAC assault on possible Communists in the business. Bogey the resolute had been compelled to climb down and apologize, to protect his career. But he was an old pro, while Ray was an incipient and helpless rebel. Together they made a Hollywood picture that leaves Sunset Blvd. looking a little prim.
In a Lonely Place is the story of a screenwriter, Dixon Steele (Bogart), who has made too many compromises and who nurses his temper along with his disappointed talent. It is a portrait of idealism turned morose that nearly anyone reared in Hollywood would recognize. He meets a woman, Laurel Gray (Gloria Graha
me), and they fall in love. But their affair is put in jeopardy when Steele becomes a suspect in a murder case. He isn’t guilty, but the events of the film will show Laurel that he is angry and violent enough to be dangerous. Indeed, he comes close to killing her. The “lonely place” is paranoia, or being out of control, but it is also the plight of creative hopes gone sour in the movie capital. The story was heightened by the fact that Ray and Gloria Grahame broke up during the shoot.
The New York Times called the film one of Bogart’s best: he gave “a maniacal fury to his rages and a hard edge to his expressions of sympathy.” But the film did no business and never seems to have inspired its distributor, Columbia. Their big film that year was Born Yesterday, an enjoyable stage-based comedy about a dumb blonde (Judy Holliday, one of Ray’s lovers, who won an Oscar in it) who learns too much for the mobster who keeps her as a mistress.
Ray’s career was as volatile as Dixon Steele’s life. In the next few years he made several good films (though none of them unflawed): On Dangerous Ground (1952), produced by Houseman again, with Robert Ryan frightening as a violent cop; The Lusty Men (1952), about the rodeo world, with a world-weary Robert Mitchum; Rebel Without a Cause (1955), his great hit, James Dean’s second film, and identification of the troubled American teenager; Bigger Than Life (1956), a study of megalomania, with James Mason as a man whose life is taken over by the “miracle” drug cortisone; and Bitter Victory (1957), a North African desert war story, with Richard Burton as one of Ray’s most anguished heroes.
Nick Ray succumbed to gambling, drugs, wandering, and the general fury of self-destruction. He was at his best in the supposed confines of the 1950s, though he always believed he needed liberty. He also depended on structure and producers, despite railing against them. But in a few films and many scenes he was so exciting—with color, space, and with actors in desperate, trapped situations. You can feel Ray and his untidy desires and roaming instability in Dean’s prowling, sighing talk in Rebel, and it’s fair to say that while Ray was having an affair with the teenage Natalie Wood during that shoot, he also yearned for Dean. For all those reasons he became a test case in the 1960s for people who wanted to idolize thwarted genius. François Truffaut captured him in a comparison with Howard Hawks that speaks to the American tension over who should make films—and why: “In Hollywood, a Howard Hawks arrives on the scene and takes his time, flirts with tradition in order to flout it, and always triumphs. Ray is incapable of getting along with the devil, and when he tries to make a pact for profit, he is defeated before the fight even begins.”
Robert Aldrich was not as high-strung a talent as Ray, but he was better organized—and it’s arguable that in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) he made a more complete film than Ray ever managed. Born in Cranston, Rhode Island, in 1918, Aldrich was the child of wealth disowned by his family after he abandoned law and business for pictures. But he made his way sensibly as an assistant director, an obvious path but one seldom taken—good ADs are so prized that they are seldom allowed to escape that managerial task. He directed Burt Lancaster in Apache (1954), one of the earliest movies to treat Native American life with respect, and an opportunity for Lancaster to be a surly, athletic god.
At that point, working on his own (through his company, Aldrich and Associates) he made a deal with the pulp fiction sensation of the 1950s, Mickey Spillane, to adapt his novel Kiss Me Deadly. Aldrich and his screenwriter, A. I. Bezzerides, dropped the conventional syndicate drug dealing of the novel and replaced it with a large, seething, magical box containing fire, a growling noise, and nuclear Armageddon. The metaphor was primitive, blunt, and poetic all at the same time.
That box comes at the end. Before then, we have Ralph Meeker’s Mike Hammer. Strutting, odious, fascistic—all those descriptions have been used, but still Meeker is not just toxic; he is unrebuked. Ordinary viewers may wonder where the censor was. Hammer is set up as a private-eye hero, but he is truly an overflowing id. The villains are worse, yet less frightening. Then there are the women: from the automated, obedient sexpot Velda (Maxine Cooper) through the wounded and doomed Christina (Cloris Leachman) to the demented and depraved nemesis Lily Carver (Gaby Rodgers). There are no other American films from the 1950s where young women are so boring, desperate, or lethal. Hollywood still worshiped the female (as a way of neutralizing her, perhaps), and so you wonder how Aldrich dared present these creatures.
In addition, Kiss Me Deadly is an early example of filming Los Angeles as a built-up wasteland, instead of “home” or paradise. The final sequence, with Hammer and Velda stumbling into the Pacific as a beach house becomes an inferno, is spectacular and disturbing. And in 1955 Aldrich got away with it—anyone who suggests that the 1950s was a time of conformity and close-carpeted positivism needs to see Kiss Me Deadly and feel how law, police, and decency have given up the ghost. The film is the more intriguing in that it seems too beautiful for its own director—he had What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and The Dirty Dozen (1967) to come, complacent, moneymaking shockers. Whereas Kiss Me Deadly is an outrage, apparently without a care about its own success.
Aldrich had control over the film and shot it in three weeks for just over $400,000. United Artists released it, and it did nothing until the Kefauver Commission on crime said it was a major threat to American youth. (But who was looking after the grown-ups?)
In The Night of the Hunter (1955) our guardian was a fairy godmother looking like Lillian Gish. And if Kiss Me Deadly was an unlikely venture, Hunter, the only film ever directed by Charles Laughton, was so hard to credit or place that the public ignored it. Taken from a rural gothic novel set in the 1930s by Davis Grubb, it had a script by the former film critic James Agee. There is still dispute over how much of Agee’s script was usable and how much of it Laughton had to rework. But the picture was always a far-fetched collaboration in which the famously neurotic Laughton and his producer, Paul Gregory, were supposed to command the whole enterprise.
A criminal gives stolen money to his two young children before he is taken away to prison and execution. But another inmate, Harry Powell, a self-styled preacher, learns enough to come after the children. He marries their widowed mother (Shelley Winters), murders her, and then pursues the children through a studio-made nightscape from the Grimm Brothers, or Audubon on acid, all photographed in nightmare black and white by Stanley Cortez, the man who shot The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).
For Harry Powell, Laughton thought first of Gary Cooper, but the actor declined because he feared for his public image. It would have been a very different picture with Coop—perhaps an impossibility. So Laughton approached Robert Mitchum. The story is that he told Mitchum he had an unusual part to offer, “a diabolical shit.” “Present!” said the actor, and the two men proceeded to forge a bond. It was a part unlike anything Mitchum had done to date, yet it seemed to awaken the fiction writer and drifter he had been before he got into the acting trade he usually despised.
The babes in the wood find shelter with Lillian Gish, and her sturdy moral values will dispose of Powell. Laughton cast her as an evocation of Griffith’s tradition.
United Artists released the film without a notion of how to sell it. The New York Times admitted it was “audacious,” and some reviewers said Mitchum had never been as good. But the film had cost $800,00 and it had rentals of only $300,000. As a result, plans for Laughton to film Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead were abandoned. Not that that sounds like Laughton material, or a suitable shoot for him, in the jungle. But who would have foreseen The Night of the Hunter? Decades later, that film would be taken into the Library of Congress as an American treasure. The lesson would spread that maybe anyone could direct. As Robert Benayoun, a French writer, said, “To make only one film. But to make it a work of genius: isn’t that, in the context of a journeyman profession, the shining example that Laughton has given us?”
No small independent production company made a bigger splash than Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, with Marty as their greatest h
it. Their product usually centered on Lancaster himself, an authoritative actor, to be sure, but not the easiest partner: he had radical ideas and enough ego to interfere and be difficult. The company was about to make its best film, the one that really startled and dismayed people, Sweet Smell of Success. (Marty, in comparison, was anodyne and cozy.) As its director, Alexander Mackendrick, observed at a San Francisco preview, the effect of the film on the public “was like dripping lemon on an oyster. They cringed with the body language of folding arms, crossing legs, shrinking from the screen.” To make matters worse, the intended budget of $600,000 had climbed to $2.6 million.
Mackendrick was an odd bird. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1913, he was raised in Scotland. He was drawn to film, and had a hand in British propaganda as the Second World War began. In fact, for the Psychological Warfare Division, he went to North Africa and Italy, where he helped set up Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945). After the war, he joined Ealing Studios, where he directed several successful comedies. But he was drafted to take on a novella about the New York publicity scene written by Ernest Lehman and modeled on Walter Winchell. In time, several others came to the script, and in the end a veteran, the playwright Clifford Odets, was typing up dialogue only hours before Lancaster and Tony Curtis would deliver it.
For forty minutes or so it is a unique picture as the relationship emerges between a columnist, J. J. Hunsecker (Lancaster in a crew cut and horn-rimmed glasses) and Curtis as Sidney Falco, a publicist and “a cookie dipped in arsenic,” a user, a hustler, and a person not seen in American movies before, even if his type was thick on the ground of show business.
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