Arkansas Society for Cinema and Television Production (ASCTP)

(a Non-Profit Education Corporation)

contact: Gary William Jones gary@jonesfilmvideo.com

Glossary of Film Terms: http://www.filmsite.org/filmterms1.html

Chapter 12: Hollywood, 1952-1965

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film, Third Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.

Much that characterized Hollywood between 1952 and 1965 can be understood as a response to the anticommunist hysteria and the blacklist on the one hand and to the advent of television and economic divestiture on the other. In the name of combating communism, films directly critical of American institutions, such as the “problem pictures” and semidocumentary melodramas so popular in the immediate postwar years, could no longer be made. Instead, Westerns, musical comedies, lengthy costume epics, and other traditional genre fare—sanitized and shorn of explicit political and social referents—became the order of the day. Such films dominated the domestic market of the era both because their subject matter was uncontroversial and because their spectacular nature was suited for the new screen formats, which the studios had embraced to combat television and, simultaneously, to make their product more attractive to the former subsidiaries, the newly independent first run exhibitors.

Television threatened Hollywood with a new technology, and Hollywood fought back in kind by isolating and exploiting the technological advantages that film possess over television. The cinema had two such advantages in the early fifties, both of them associated with spectacle—the vast size of the images, and the capacity to product them in color. (p. 461)

The advent of the widescreen processes in many ways parallels the introduction of sound. Once again a financially troubled industry gambled on a novelty long implicit in the medium, and once again the novelty produced a technological and aesthetic revolution that changed the narrative form of the cinema….the deep-focus capacity Welles and Toland had labored so hard to attain in Citizen Kane (1941) had suddenly become available to any director who possessed the imagination to use it. Finally, for a variety of reasons, widescreen encouraged the use of longer-than-average takes, and it seems clear today that the widescreen processes created the functional grounds for a new film aesthetic based upon composition in width and depth, or mise-en-scene rather than upon montage. (PP. 474-6)

A final important development of the fifties in America was the breaking of the Production Code and the achievement of an unprecedented freedom of expression for the cinema…the Production Code was being challenged from within by the influx of “unapproved” foreign films and, especially, by the rise of independent production. Since the studios no longer owned America’s theaters, they could no longer force them to accept their product exclusively. Shrewdly realizing this, director Otto Preminger openly challenged the Code by producing two films for United Artists with sensational (for that era) content—The Moon is Blue (1953), which used the forbidden word virgin, and The Man with the Golden Arm (1955, in which Frank Sinatra portrayed a heroin addict. As Preminger had anticipated, both films were denied the Production Code’s Seal of Approval, and both were released independently to great commercial success. It didn’t take long for the studios to find out which way the wind was blowing: Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll, released by Warner Bros. in 1956 to a storm of protest, was the first motion picture of a major American studio ever to be publicly condemned by the Legion of Decency, the Catholic organization responsible for instituting the Production Code in the first place. The financial success of these three films sounded the death knell for the Legion’s influence in Hollywood, and the Production Code was scrapped altogether in the sixties in favor a rating system administered by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which does not proscribe the content of films but rather classifies them as appropriate for certain segments of the public, according to age.

In about 1955, human sexuality began to be overtly depicted on the American screen for the first time since the Code’s imposition some twenty years before, and more generally, a fascination with veiled (and increasingly unveiled) eroticism came to pervade American films in the late fifties and early sixties…Other taboos were broken too, as a new realism of content entered the American cinema after a long period of repression. Socials problems like juvenile delinquency (Reel Without a Cause, 1955; Blackboard Jungle, 1955), alcoholism, drug addiction, and even race were suddenly fair game for filmmakers working both inside and outside the studios. Crime began to be treated less moralistically and melodramatically…the next cultural taboo the American cinema was to overcome (simultaneously with Italy and preceded slightly by Japan) was the convention against the graphic, excessive, and/or poetic depiction of brutality and violence… (pp. 513-15)

RTV 3303-001 Spring 2010 Class #10 The Apartment (1960)

Hall, Philip, ed. 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s, 2008.

Inspired by David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), (Wilder) had to wait ten years for the necessary slackening of censorship before being able to tell the story of the “third” man, the one who lends his apartment to the adulterous couple. Surprisingly, despite its sensitive subject matter, The Apartment won no fewer than five Academy Awards (including Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay…Despite its humor, The Apartment is indeed a severe social critique, as well as an examination of contemporary American life and sexual more, It is also a strong attack on the basic corruption of the capitalist system, in which anyone with a little influence is capable of feeding off someone else

The Apartment skillfully blends various genres, but, by and large, it begins as a satiric comedy, transforms into a powerful drama, and finishes as a romantic comedy. (p. 384)

http://pro.imdb.com/title/tt0053604/trivia

Wilder directed Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot. He grew to despise her demands for star treatment and her poor work ethic, and thus included the party-girl Monroe-esque character in this film.

Billy Wilder originally thought of the idea for the film after seeing Brief Encounter and wondering about the plight of a character unseen in that film. Shirley MacLaine was only given forty pages of the script because Wilder didn't want her to know how the story would turn out. She thought it was because the script wasn't finished.

In 1968, playwright Neil Simon adapted the screenplay as the book for the Broadway musical "Promises, Promises". It spawned the hit song "What Do You Get When You Fall in Love?", composed by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. It opened at the Shubert Theater on December 1, 1968 and ran for 1281 performances.

According to Shirley MacLaine on her official web site, much of the movie was written as filming progressed. The gin rummy game was added because at the time she was learning how to play the game from her friends in the Rat Pack. Likewise, when she started philosophizing about love during a lunch break one day, this was also added to the script.

The office Christmas party scene was actually filmed on December 23, 1959, so as to catch everybody in the proper holiday mood. Billy Wilder filmed almost all of it on the first take, stating to an observer, "I wish it were always this easy. Today, I can just shout 'action' and stand back."

This is the first Best Picture Oscar winner to specifically refer to a previous winner, in this case Grand Hotel, which Baxter attempts to watch on television but is too long delayed because of commercials. Bud's boss also refers to Bud and Fran having "a lost weekend" together in Bud's apartment, a reference to Billy Wilder's earlier Oscar winner, The Lost Weekend.

This was the last B&W movie to win Best Picture at The Academy Awards until Schindler's List.

It was said that while filming the scene where C.C. Baxter sleeps in Central Park in the rain, Billy Wilder had to spray Jack Lemmon with anti-freeze to keep him from freezing.

To get Fran (Shirley MacLaine) to look genuinely startled when her brother-in-law punches Calvin (Jack Lemmon), director Billy Wilder smacked together two pieces of 2x4 during the shoot.

The nasal spray used by Jack Lemmon was actually milk. Real nasal spray would not have shown up on camera.

The film's classic last line was thought up by the writers at the last minute on-set.