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The 1950s The Cold War and Post-Classical Era The Era of Epic Films and the Threat of Television Part 5 Film History of the 1950s Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 Film History by Decade Index | Pre-1920s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s | 1960s 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s |
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The Cold War Era and Its Influence on Science Fiction Films:
Another popular hit was Robert Wise's intelligent and pacifistic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) with the tagline: "From Out of Space, a Warning and an Ultimatum" - a story about a spaceship that landed on the Ellipse in Washington, DC. Emerging from the strange craft were two aliens: a pacifist named Klaatu and robotic enforcer-assistant Gort - with a clear warning. [The film was remade in 2008 by director Scott Derrickson, starring Keanu Reeves as Klaatu.] Rudolph Mate's and producer George Pal's When Worlds Collide (1951) featured more special effects in a race-against-time and the world's extinction. Byron Haskin's The War of the Worlds (1953) (another George Pal-produced film) was adapted from H.G. Wells' 1898 book about a Martian invasion that was finally defeated by lowly bacterial germs. (It also was a sensational radio show in 1938 when Orson Welles adapted it for that medium.) Director William Cameron Menzies' Invaders From Mars (1953) was about a 12 year-old boy (Jimmy Hunt) who saw people disappear into the ground (where Martian aliens had set up a base) and whose parents had been reprogrammed into strange-acting zombies. Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (1956) showed the destruction of the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building by alien spacecraft, with special effects by Ray Harryhausen.
The first in a long series of Britain's Hammer Studios low-budget, horror films was the internationally-successful The Quatermass Experiment (1955) - it inspired a boom and revival of the classic horror and sci-fi genre that was being threatened by a glut of teen-oriented horror films. At the other end of the spectrum of 'serious' science fiction was Ed Wood's campy, hilarious classic Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959).
MGM's ambitious science-fiction film inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest, Fred Wilcox's Forbidden Planet (1956), featured marvelous production values and a much-loved sci-fi icon, Robby the Robot on the planet Altair-IV, where the Krell civilization was destroyed by creatures from the Id. The original sci-fi horror-film The Fly (1958) effectively told of matter teleportation experiments that went awry, and the capture of the fly-sized human in a spider web crying "Help me, help me." Godzilla (or Gojira): Japan's contribution, following the Hiroshima bombing - and Harryhausen's inspiring Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953), was to create the rampant, giant green, four-hundred foot monster Godzilla, who debuted in Toho Studios' and Ishirô Honda's Gojira - King of the Monsters (1954). [The name of the monster was a combination of "gorilla" and "kujira," meaning whale.] It was a cautionary story about the effects of nuclear weapons following the dropping of bombs on the Japanese homeland at the end of WWII, and during a time of underwater nuclear testing in the South Pacific. The film led to an American release a few years later (Godzilla - King of the Monsters (1956)) with significant alterations, after renaming, dubbing in English and recutting (removing all political content), and starring American actor Raymond Burr (before gaining fame for Perry Mason) as reporter Steve Martin. Other science fiction monsters would soon follow from the team of Honda and producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, such as Rodan (1956) - a giant pterodactyl, Ghidrah (a three-headed monster), and Mothra (1962) - a giant caterpillar. The two did not make another Godzilla movie until King Kong vs Godzilla (1963), in which the two gargantuan monsters fought with each other in Tokyo. Godzilla also fought against Mothra in Godzilla vs. Mothra (1964), and against a 3-headed monster named Gidrah in Monster Zero (1965) (aka Ghidrah, The Three-Headed Monster (1965)). The ultimate monster film was Honda's Destroy All Monsters (1968) with all of Earth's giant monsters (Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, Angilas and Minya) threatening the cities of the world. Due to its success, Honda was also called upon to direct the next year's All Monsters Attack (1969) (aka Godzilla's Revenge) - a 'best-of' compilation. The Godzilla monster would later return in the mid-80s as Gojira (1984) (aka Godzilla 1985: The Legend is Reborn) - a remake of the 1956 classic, in the mid-90s as Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995), and at the turn of the century with Godzilla 2000 (1999) (the first Japanese Godzilla movie since the 1985 installment to receive a US theatrical release). The ultimate films in the US series were Roland Emmerich's big-budget Godzilla (1998), and the 50th Anniversary film Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) - reprising the giant monster's battles with many of its old foes. Disney's Feature-Length Animations and All-Live Feature Films:
Disney Studios' first all-live action feature film was Treasure Island (1950) - an adventure tale of gold and pirates based on Robert Louis Stevenson's novel. They also produced the exciting Jules Verne fantasy with Captain Nemo (James Mason) and innovative, Academy Award-winning special effects in Richard Fleischer's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). Its live-action, family film hit, Old Yeller (1957) was a popular, sentimental boy-and-dog tale with Tommy Kirk. Their final live-action fantasy of the decade was the hit family comedy The Shaggy Dog (1959) with Fred MacMurray. Fairy tales, such as The Ugly Duckling, The King's New Clothes and Thumbelina, were creatively blended into RKO Radio's Hans Christian Andersen (1952), with Danny Kaye in the title role as the village cobbler and famed Danish writer and storyteller. Greatest Stars of the 50s: The biggest box-office stars of the 1950s were: John Wayne, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Betty Grable, James Stewart, Abbott and Costello, Clifton Webb, Esther Williams, Spencer Tracy, Randolph Scott, the team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, Gary Cooper, Doris Day, Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, Alan Ladd, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, June Allyson, William Holden, Clark Gable, Glenn Ford, Marlon Brando, Grace Kelly, Burt Lancaster, Glenn Ford, Kim Novak, Frank Sinatra, Jane Wyman, Yul Brynner, Cary Grant, Debbie Reynolds, Pat Boone, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot, and Rock Hudson. James Stewart: Studio control of stars significantly eroded when James Stewart signed a precedent-setting independent (or free-lance) contract to share in the box-office profits (45% of the net profits) of the Anthony Mann western Winchester '73 (1950), and for the film version of the stage comedy Harvey (1950). In fact, for all his Universal Studios films (including Bend of the River (1952), and The Far Country (1954)), Stewart took no salary in exchange for a large cut of the profits -- a very lucrative deal. As a result, he earned increasingly high salaries, became a pioneer of the percentage deal (a performer accepted a reduced or non-existent salary in exchange for a percentage of the box office profits), and was the industry's top box-office star by mid-decade. For Winchester '73 (1950) alone, Stewart earned between $500,000 and $600,000. Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor:
The lovely, just-married (to hotelier Nicholas Conrad Hilton, Jr.), 18 year-old violet-eyed Elizabeth Taylor appeared in Vincente Minnelli's Father of the Bride (1950). [Taylor divorced Hilton in early 1951 and married actor Michael Wilding in early 1952.] She also co-starred opposite Montgomery Clift and experienced illicit love in director George Stevens' A Place in the Sun (1951) (adapted from Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy), and mid-decade reunited with the director for Giant (1956). Toward the end of the decade, she starred in two Tennessee Williams' adaptations, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) as a sexually-deprived Maggie (the "Cat") opposite Paul Newman as husband Brick, and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) as a lobotomy-threatened New Orleans debutante. [In early 1957, Elizabeth Taylor divorced Michael Wilding and married Mike Todd - who died in a New Mexico plane crash in March, 1958. She soon married the recently-divorced Eddie Fisher (from Debbie Reynolds) in 1959 (and divorced in March, 1964).] Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis:
The Golden Age of British Comedy: England experienced a "Golden Age of Comedy" in the 50s following the war, with a series of celebrated, intelligent and whimsical comedies, many with superb character actors Alec Guinness or Peter Sellers in the starring roles. They were produced by Michael Balcon's Ealing Studios and called "Ealing comedies." [Balcon took over the studio in 1938 and ran the independent, craft-oriented studio until 1955.] Almost all of the comedies portrayed a slightly rebellious, small-time crook interested in mocking the authoritarian establishment. The social commentary films included the following four works, all starring Alec Guinness:
In 1954, the British film companies (Ealing, Rank, and London Film Productions-Korda) began to supply their feature films to US television networks - they were the first films to be made available. [Ealing Studios closed in 1955. A plaque at the studio described what Ealing Studios had accomplished over almost two decades: "Here during a quarter of a century, many films were made projecting Britain and the British character.] Small US producers, such as Monogram and Republic, followed suit and before long thousands of B-pictures and serials like Flash Gordon became available to American TV audiences. The first in a long-running series of low-budget British comedies, Carry On Sergeant (1958), inspired the institution of middle-class, low-brow, wacky humor (with double entendres and one-liners) that finally stretched out to over 30 films in the next few decades. A few of the prominent actors who would reappear in later installments included Charles Hawtrey and William Hartnell. Other British Influences: UK-born Peter Sellers' popularity was enhanced in the United States after he starred in Jack Arnold's comedy The Mouse That Roared (1959). John Osborne's groundbreaking, popular British play was brought to the screen by director Tony Richardson as Look Back in Anger (1959), with Claire Bloom, Edith Evans, and Richard Burton (as an "angry young man") in the cast. This UK film led to a 'new wave' decade of realistic, "kitchen sink" British dramas in the 60s. The famed Universal monster Frankenstein appeared for the first time in color, in Hammer Studio's version The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) directed by Terence Fisher, with Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein, and Christopher Lee as the Monster. This film marked the advent of a long cycle of the studio's stylistic gothic horror films, with Lee also playing the famed Dracula vampire, as in Fisher's Horror of Dracula (1958) the next year. In the same year as Hitchcock's ground-breaking and disturbing Psycho (1960), master British cinema-maker Michael Powell made a dark, disturbing and shocking thriller Peeping Tom (1960) in vivid Technicolor, one of the earliest "slasher" films. It was about a voyeuristic, psychopathic cameraman with a phallic-knife in the foot of his tripod that he used to kill young women. The film's tagline was: "Terror Meets Art in a Deadly Game of Cat and Mouse." Notable Directors of the 50s and Their Cinematic Masterpieces:
In the decade, versatile producer/director Howard Hawks was uncredited as director for Christian Nyby's sci-fi The Thing (1951), directed sex symbols Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in the musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), and Joan Collins in the grandiose historical epic Land of the Pharaohs (1955), and then made Rio Bravo (1959) with a combination of established western stars (John Wayne, Walter Brennan, and Ward Bond) and newcomers (Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, and Claude Akins).
Established director/actor/writer John Huston made a number of fine dramas of various genre types in the 50s:
George Cukor's priceless comedy Born Yesterday (1950) was an update of the best-loved stage production featuring Oscar-winning Judy Holliday as dumb blonde Billie Dawn. [Through the decade, Holliday also starred in Cukor's It Should Happen to You (1954) (with Jack Lemmon in his screen debut) and Vincente Minnelli's The Bells Are Ringing (1960).] In his latter years, prolific director Michael Curtiz was still making films in the mid-50s, such as the buddy film and black comedy We're No Angels (1955), with Humphrey Bogart (his final film with Curtiz), Peter Ustinov, and Aldo Ray as three escaped convicts from Devil's Island. (The film was remade with Robert De Niro and Sean Penn in 1989.) And John Sturges directed The Old Man and the Sea (1958), an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's brief novel starring Spencer Tracy as a fisherman off the coast of Cuba who struggled with a hooked marlin bigger than his boat. Chaplin's Swan Song Films:
In his final film in which he served as writer and director, Universal's unfunny romantic comedy A Countess From Hong Kong (1967), Chaplin appeared with only a short cameo (as a nameless, seasick, white-haired elderly steward). It allowed him to direct Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, but the romantic comedy was a large flop. It was the first (and only) color film (and widescreen film) that Chaplin ever made, and the only one funded by a major studio. It featured a worldwide smash song, "(Love) This Is My Song," written by Chaplin and sung by Petula Clark. His first return visit to the US was to attend a 1972 tribute ceremony at the Academy Awards, where he was honored with a special Honorary Oscar for his lifetime career of achievement ("for the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century").
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