Original subtitles

At the end of the 1800s a new art form flickered into live.

It looked like our dreams.

Movies are multi-billion dollar global entertainment industry now.

But what drives them isn't box-office or showbiz.

It's passion, innovation!

So let's travel the world to find this innovation for ourselves.

To discover it in this man, Stanley Donen,

who made Singing in the Rain.

And in Jane Campion in Australia.

And in the films of Ky�ko Kagawa

who was in perhaps the greatest movie ever made.

And Amitabh Bachchan, the most famous actor in the world.

And in the movies of Martin Scorcese and Spike Lee,

Lars Von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.

Welcome to the story of film, an odyssey.

An epic tale of innovation across twelve decades,

six continents and a thousand films.

In this chapter we discover

the emotional Hollywood film of Douglas Sirk

and explore melodrama around the world.

The 1950s.

Widescreen.

Color.

A young American actor, James Dean.

Head hung, crippled with rage, kicks and punches a desk.

His emotions are bursting at the seams.

One of the key images of the 50s,

and the passionate theme of this part of the story of film.

To get to the heart of these emotional times

you have to start, not in America, but here: Egypt.

The youth rebellion of James Dean was taking place here too,

where there was even more to kick out against.

As usual the movies, the great mirror of their times, reflected the strain.

The 50s became the era of the melodrama.

There had been formulaic filmmaking here in Egypt since the 1920s.

Until, that is, this rebel.

The real James Dean of 50s cinema, came along.

He's the founding father of creative African cinema.

In 1958, Youssef Chahine changed film history.

Until then, Africa had played no significant part in the story of film,

but in that year he wrote, directed and starred

in the complex melodrama Cairo Station [Bab el hadid].

The first great African film, the first great Arab film.

Scenes like this had a sweaty intensity.

Chahine films himself alone, with his erotic imagination.

Chahine was a born boundary pusher and that's what Cairo Station did.

More than anything it captured the tension of its times.

The sexual repression.

The buried rage.

It was very daring.

I was talking about a sexual pervert and they spat in my face on opening night.

Nobody talked about real things.

20 percent of the young people in Egypt were frustrated because of the taboos,

because of the religion, because of idiotic parents

who were not open enough, who were not civilized enough.

Chahine plays a crippled newspaper seller, obsessed by Hind Rostom

who plays a voluptuous cold drinks seller.

He films himself staring at her, close to the camera, outside, looking in.

Look at this scene in which he listens as she has sex with another man.

Dolly cut, dolly, cut.

Then the tracks taking the strain of the weight of the train,

a symbol of Chahine's emotional strain.

No other African or Arab had thought so cinematically before.

Cairo Station was a masterpiece.

it was melodramatic, sexual and about social justice.

Like the best films of the 50s.

So where did the film and Chahine get the balls to be so innovative?

In part, from this world changing conference.

In 1955, the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries

met in Bandung in Indonesia to forge economic and cultural links.

They were allied neither to the first capitalist world,

nor the second communist world of the Soviet union.

They were a self-styled 'Third world.'

Cairo station came out of this new, non-aligned sensibility.

But this new anger and confidence

could be seen in many places around the world.

Nowhere more so than this vast country, India.

The story of Indian film is as vast as the country.

India knew as much, if not more, about devastation as Europe in the 50s.

Decolonization, partition, famine and the caste system had traumatized it.

In all this turmoil,

you'd think that the country would have no time for cinema,

but you'd be wrong.

By the 1950s, India seemed made for cinema.

Its colors seem to have the hand of a production designer about them.

Its luminosity has the feel of a studio arc light.

Look at this scene from one of the great Indian films, Paper Flowers. [Kaagaz Ke Phool]

A beam of light opens up in a film studio.

The camera tracks around it, towards a man, the film's director,

Guru Dutt, the country's Orson Welles.

He plays a director who looks at a woman he wants to cast in the film.

She's lit from below, no hair light, the opposite of Hollywood lighting.

Back on India's streets, you have the feeling

that a movie director has designed the action.

Worshipping movie stars wasn't a stretch for Indians.

The country is photogenic like Marilyn Monroe is photogenic.

The first movies made by Indians were about the lives of saints

or what were called mythologicals, like this one.

Superimpositions like early M�li�s' films show a mythic king being tested.

Then in the 30s India's film industry wired for sound.

Immediately it drew on the traditions of musical theatre in the country.

As a result, India's became the only national cinema

where musical interludes became the norm.

And the seeds of what would become known as Bollywood were sewn.

Color, display, theatricality.

This sounds familiar, like Hollywood.

Cinema as bauble.

But the less told story of Indian cinema is how it turned its face towards reality.

What became known as 'socials,' reforming films

challenging the caste system or materialism or poverty, emerged in the 1930s.

The realism of such scenes predates Italian Neo-realism.

The tidal wave of post-World War II realism that swept across the world

in the late 40s and early 50s reached its greatest heights

here in Kolkata, in the work of a man who lived in this house, Satyajit Ray.

Ray's father and grandfather were famous publishers and illustrators here.

Bollywood films, like Hollywood films, were usually set

in a fantasy everywhere land but Satyajit Ray wanted to make

his film about a very specific place.

So he and his cinematographer Subrata Mitra

and his non-professional actors went somewhere very specific.

They drove 30 minutes from Kolkata to this small Bengali village Boram,

to make their first film Pather Panchali.

Most of them had never shot a foot of film before,

yet the imagery they made here changed film history.

Its cinematography had texture, lustre, tenderness.

It's like we were opening our eyes to India for the first time.

Pather Panchali was a portrait of the life of Apu, the son of a priest,

and his relationship with his sister, mother, and old aunt

who was brilliantly played by Chunibala Devi.

Her amazingly lined face was the opposite of the smooth faces in glossy cinema.

This was new.

She was living in a brothel when ray found her

and needed a dose of morphine every day to keep her going.

What was so new was that we were seeing

a real Indian village on screen for the first time.

The movie dispelled ignorance about village life.

Real, not idealized kids, domestic details.

Cooking, drying clothes.

But what was so 50s was that Ray was also a modernist.

He believed in prime minister Nehru's plans to industrialize India

so the arrival of the train is treated, here, as an event of great wonder and hope.

The train plume of smoke is beautiful, like the plumes of pampas grass.

The camera swishes with excitement.

Apu runs with excitement.

This man Soumendu Roy, was camera assistant onPather Panchali

and went on to be Ray's D.P.

Roy still handles the original camera that they used with great pride.

It looks like a tank compared to the small cameras today.

It's amazing that they captured

so many intimate scenes with such an unwieldy thing.

Though most of the filming was on location,

key scenes were shot in this studio, Tollygunge, in the south of Kolkata,

where many of the great Bengali films were made.

This is the actual sound stage where some of the Pather Panchali sets were built.

The great actress Sharmila Tagore worked with Ray many times.

She was just 14 when he cast her in the lead in his masterpiece Devi [The Goddess].

about a girl whose father in law dreams that she's a goddess.

She was filmed as if by candle light, eyes lowering.

Like, I was an amateur when I worked in "Devi".

That was my second film with him, after "Apur Sansar"

and I was very young, I was just 14.

As you know he was a very tall person, so he sat down on a stool

and made eye contact with the child, just read out the scene once

and with sort of animatedly, like you know, with a lot of expression he would read out,

with his, as you know, he had a very expressive, well-modulated voice.

So he made it very exciting, and just hold the child's attention.

And somehow he communicated and the child was able to replicate it almost exactly.

He knew exactly what kind of a face he wanted.

But of course there was a lot of stress on eyes and also the framing

and I think he believed, like Devi as you know,

especially my role was treated in very big close up

and after the film is over, the face really haunts you

and that shot where I am sitting in the pudja place.

And the husband comes and that little exchange

between the husband and Doyamoyee,

I thought that was wonderful, because that little shake of the head that I'm...

It's not what it seems.

You know, the helplessness of her and that slowly...

You know, her getting confused.

I mean she is just a village girl and very young.

All that confusion in a little..., you know,

somebody who has not quite finished growing up yet,

I think that is just so tragic, you know,

how she becomes the victim of this regressive mindset,

orthodox mindset.

Manik-da as you know, Ray we called Manik-da,

he knew a lot about painting and...

and that control, he had tremendous control, everything.

There was not an extra note, it was so well orchestrated.

So, I think that's the kind of search for truth,

through his own work and through his own...

He wanted to evolve through the film, you know?

And he was... this eternal quest, so, you know, he had all that element.

He... had in bite all that within him and music.

And he used this beautiful medium to express himself.

Crumbling buildings, long shadows, playing kids.

The world of Pather Panchali made it a huge hit.

It played for six months in New York city alone.

Its landscapes, shaded pathways and natural soundscapes

made India central to the story of film for a moment.

It and two follow ups, the "Apu trilogy," are sometimes called

the best Asian films ever made.

But Satyajit Ray's films weren't bursting at the seams with emotion,

like 50s melodramas were.

They were too quiet for that.

But then came an Indian film that certainly was bursting at the seams.

Mother India [Bharat Mata] about this woman, Radha.

She's getting married.

Cerise red, veils.

Close ups of hands and feet, a couple gently stepping into the world.

Here's the world she discovers.

Hard work, mud, sweat.

An independent, worker's India, laboring to be modern and socialist.

Filmed in much more earthy colors.

The combination of romance and struggle made many call the film

the Indian Gone with the Wind.

In this extraordinary scene peasants stand on the map of India

in a way that echoes Hollywood musicals but also Soviet propaganda.

The main character and the whole of India are strong but fated to fail.

Mother India was a state of the nation film

and a landmark in world cinema.

This vast country to the north of India, China,

had its own unique social pressures in the 1950s.

As we've seen, the country had a movie golden age in the 1930s.

Chairman Mao took control of the country in the late 40s,

and filmmaking came under state control.

Few people would know more about this, than this remarkable man, director Xie Jin.

Xie was reputedly born in 1923 to a family so wealthy

that his mother's dowry was delivered on 20 boats.

He made his first films in the 50s and then became

the greatest Chinese filmmaker of the day, a major stylist,

a star director and a winner of scores of awards.

Xie feels that Chinese film culture is unique.

Chinese film was produced in unique circumstances,

but look at Xie's greatest film, Two Stage Sisters [Wutai jiemei].

A woman in tears.

Highlights in her eyes.

The camera moves in to get a closer look at her emotions.

We recognize this type of filmmaking.

Like the 50s films we've looked at in Egypt and India, it's a brilliant melodrama.

The woman and her sister join a Chinese opera troupe.

Look at Xie's shot here.

The camera rushes left, ravishing color, then a look behind the curtain.

Then the emergence of the actresses.

Everything beautifully placed in the moving frame.

The first sister becomes a revolutionary.

The second is seduced by fame and fortune.

A painful human drama viewed through a gorgeous lens.

What a lens!

Xie's camera tilts down into the world of the story

and then we notice that it is also craning down.

The roof of the stage seems to rise.

From a god's eye view, to the peasants.

Very Chinese.

Very melodrama.

Very 50s.

Mao's cultural revolution devastated Xie's career.

Both Xie's parents killed themselves in its aftermath

and Two Stage Sisters was accused of "cinematic confucianism."

He himself was given a job cleaning the toilets of the movie studio

where he once a leading director.

Few lives in movie history, not even Roman Polanski's,

have such amplitude.

Further east, in the early 50s Japan was recovering

from its disastrous wartime experiences.

Legendary actress Kyoko Kagawa, who worked with Ozu,

Mizoguchi and then Kurosawa.

As we've seen, the country had already, in the 1930s,

experienced a cinematic golden age.

But the 1950s heralded another.

Central to this golden age was Akira Kurosawa.

Akira Kurosawa did indeed look at individuals with a long lens.

Look at this scene from his film Ikiru.

A bureaucrat has just learnt that he's got cancer.

The weight of the world on his shoulders.

Downcast eyes.

He grew up under the feudal emperor.

This taught him to be passive.

Trudge along.

But then he was hit by the juggernaut of modern life.

Japan lost the war.

He has to start thinking for himself.

Kurosawa's shot pulls back to show the breadth of life.

Where does he fit in?

Most of the movies of Kurosawa are about this emerging of the individual.

How someone distinguishes themselves from others, without being selfish.

A very 50s tension.

Filmmaker and critic Donald Ritchie:

The hero in a Kurosawa film is notable for his staying power,

even though it won't work, he does it over and over and over again.

All of the Kurosawa heroes keep at it, until finally...

Once I was with Kurosawa and I saw an example of this...

He had a pen that didn't work, you know, ball point,

and it wouldn't work and most people would say

bring me another ball pen, but he didn't, he started working that ball pen

and finally, after about ten minutes of manipulation it worked.

And I thought this is sort of a metaphor for Kurosawa himself

and for the way that he thinks about his people.

The detective in Stray Dog doesn't have a one chance in hell

of ever getting that gun back again but he tries and he tries

and he tries and he tries and he does.

In Kurosawa's epic film Seven Samurai [Shichinin no samurai],

a group of swordsmen defend a village.

This man on the right with black hair, Katsushiro,

has become the greatest swordsman of them all.

It's the end of an epic battle, Katsushiro thinks it's still winnable.

He walks around in a circle but then throws the sword away.

He's been shot.

The era of the sword is over,

the era of the gun has begun.

The film's set in the past, but it echoes in the 50s,

because it's about the beginning of a new era.

John Ford would have filmed such a scene simply, purely.

Yet look at the rain in Kurosawa's film, and the mud and the grey.

Kurosawa was far more interested than Ford, or most directors, in atmospheric effects,

the poetic rush of imagery.

In Throne of Blood [Kumonosu-j�], one of his Shakespeare adaptations,

look how he films the lady MacBeth character,

like a ghost, gliding through a room, her kimono squeaking.

And in the same film look how he shows Birnham wood

advancing like in a nightmare, like waves.

It's like the trees have fingers.

Look how MacBeth dies, his body pierced a hundred times.

It's clear where this scene from The Godfather came from.

Another human body jerking, shaking, staccato as it dies.

Kurosawa's work became, in effect, a style-book for cinema.

He was like a one man film school.

The Seven Samurai was remade as The Magnificent Seven,

with James Coburn playing the Katsuchiro part.

Widescreen, color, bright sunlight

rather than Kurosawa's square charcoal downpour.

The symbolic knife is even seen in close up this time.

The western world in the 50s knew about Satyajit Ray,

Kurosawa and Ozu but move, say, to Latin America

and it drew a blank, which was the western world's loss,

because filmmaking in Brazil and Mexico was revving up.

As we've seen, Brazil had taken the lead in Latin American cinema.

One of its first innovative films was this one, Limite, made in 1930.

Its soaring camera expressing a woman's Liberty.

25 years later, this film: Rio 40 degrees, [Rio 100 Degrees F.]

brought Brazilian cinema back to the spotlight.

It starts with the aerial shots and big band sounds of a tourist film,

but soon it's on the ground with boys from poor backgrounds,

they sell nuts and papers.

The camera tracks back, a boy walks into the foreground,

bold use of deep staging.

The director of this film, Nelson Pereira dos Santos,

was influenced by Neo-realism and became

the most influential Brazilian filmmaker of the 1950s.

Santos filmed in slum locations but used advanced visual techniques.

Rio 40 Degrees had multiple storylines.

Here, Santos, tracks from the boys who feature throughout

to two men who talk about adult problems.

An innovative shift in story without a cut.

The realism and the energy of Rio 40 Degrees

was like Youseef Chahine's Cairo Station.

Travel northwest from Brazil in the 50s and we find that Mexico's film industry

is more advanced than Brazil's.

Movies in Mexico had been intertwined with life since the 1910s.

The revolutionary Pancho Villa held off an assault on Ojo de Agua

until an American company got its cameras in a position

to film and Villa got paid the tidy sum of $25,000 for doing so.

Come the 30s, Mexican cinema had great directors.

Fernando de Fuentes who made this film Dona Barbara, was perhaps the best.

He virtually invented Mexican national cinema

and its themes of rich and poor, feminine suffering and display.

Brilliantly controlled melodrama.

Here de Fuentes films the greatest star of Mexican cinema,

Maria Felix, on a boat as her character is about to be raped.

De Fuentes had his D.P. film from Dona Barbara's point of view: low down.

As in many Mexican films, the men are photographed against the sky.

Dona Barbara is hardened by the assault.

She becomes a landowner and rules with an iron fist.

Even more influential on Mexican cinema than de Fuentes

was this man on the left, Emilio "El Indio" Fernandez, actor and director.

This is him in Sam Peckinpah's The wild Bunch.

He was macho and cocky and Peckinpah cast him as such.

And in films that he directed like this one, The Pearl,

he was great at muscular storytelling.

Here the main character is a poor Mexican Indian fisherman.

Fernandez himself was half Indian and often portrayed mixed race characters.

The fisherman finds a pearl.

His life can at last change for the better.

But people become jealous of him and his wife,

and they can't sell the pearl.

It becomes a cancer in their lives, poisoning everything.

The film was shot by Gabriel Figueroa,

one of the greatest cinematographers of his day, who studied

with Orson Welles' favorite director of photography, Gregg Toland.

The Fern�ndez-Figeroa films were luminous, the space deep and rounded by light,

like Michelangelo sculptures.

But they also showed life to be doomed, fated to fail.

An innovative combination of gleaming light and dark human themes.

A kind of landscape, Mexican film noir.

By the late 1940s, Mexican cinema was on a roll.

But then came Luis Bu�uel, guns blazing.

The last time we met him was here,

at the premiere of his surrealist film l'�ge d'or.

By the 50s, his wanderlust had taken him to Mexico and this film, Los Olvidados.

He walked around the slums of Mexico City for a month to see the reality

of the lives of the young and poor.

He filmed street gangs, physically disabled people

in scorching daylight with high contrast film stocks.

But realism wasn't enough for Bu�uel.

He found it too earthbound and conventional.

So he added a sequence like this.

One of the hungry boy's dreams.

Slow motion.

Wind in the bedroom.

Meat as a thing to hunger for, to fear.

Mexico is rightly proud of the films Bu�uel made here between 1946 and 1965,

though his mockery of its religion, its fetishism of motherhood and suffering,

and of middle class life was very much of its time,

and created mixed feelings.

And in this journey around the movie world in the 50s,

we then come to the land of the free.

America.

An idealized America.

Eisenhower became president in 1953.

Where the political leaders of Egypt, India and Mexico aimed for socialism,

Eisenhower's vision was rather different.

Christian, middle-class, decent and suburban.

And at first glance, the best and most popular American movies

of their day seemed to reflect this.

Here in All that Heaven Allows, is Eisenhower's America at its most lush.

White picket fence.

Beautiful Autumn day.

Perfectly clean car.

The swish of an a-line skirt.

And a craning camera.

But All that Heaven Allows is far more innovative and subversive than it seems.

Martin always made the arrangements with the nursery

and after his death the service just automatically continued.

Carrie Scott, here on the right, has been widowed.

Polite society expects her to settle down

to a life of coffee mornings and charity work.

When she doesn't and starts an affair with Rock Hudson,

her gardener, much younger than she is, and of a much lower class

and filmed in darker settings and more moody lighting.

She's shunned by her friends.

Director Douglas Sirk, who fled the Nazis, exposed the conformity and viciousness

of the 50s American dream.

Society can't cope with Cary's continuing sexual desire.

And nor can her children.

In this devastating scene, they buy her that most 50s of consumer goods,

a TV set, to keep her company at night and distract her from the gardener.

Sirk's camera tracks in to one of the most potent filmic metaphors of the 50s.

Carrie not watching the TV, but imprisoned by its rectangle.

Right there on the screen:

Drama.

Comedy.

Life's parade at your fingertips.

The film used the gloss of Hollywood to attack gloss.

Surface niceties and 50s sexual sublimation.

Exactly the same approach as Youssef Chahine in Cairo Station.

Social pressure in very different societies around the world was building.

Psychoanalysis, the study of the unconscious, and its disruptive desires

had gone mainstream in the 50s.

And movies loved this.

Every genre was swelling with Freudian feeling in those days.

Director Nicholas Ray brought the sexuality of 50s America

to that most traditional genre: the western.

He was a passionate drunk.

Here he is filmed later in life, handheld, on a student production.

Enraged and arguing with an actress.

In his western Johnny Guitar, Ray argued with 30s movie star Joan Crawford.

She strides into a world of outlaws, builds this highly decorated saloon

with its back wall like a cave...

You wanted the dancing kid, Marshall?

And is waiting for the railroad to bring customers.

The straight laced locals hate this.

They form a Lynch mob.

Here's someone from that Lynch mob.

Emma, who's dressed in black, the color of villainy,

spits almost fascist fury.

Bringing thousands of new people from the east.

Farmers, dirt farmers, squatters.

They'll push us out!

Emma's line about people from the east is code for modern people, communists.

Director Ray saw Emma and the mob as the House Un-American Activities

Committee bullies, thus adding to the film's subversion, its political anger.

Crawford's body language makes her the strongest man in the film.

She looks down on the other men, and is hated for her sexual deviance.

Never seen a woman who was more a man, she thinks like one, acts like one,

and sometimes makes me feel like I'm not.

Eddie, that's last month's paper.

How many times do you have to read it?

Johnny Guitar was released in America to pretty terrible reviews.

But this French director and critic Fran�ois Truffaut

wrote that 'anyone who rejects it should never go to see movies again,

such people will never recognize inspiration, a shot, an idea,

a good film or even cinema itself.'

The camp of Johnny Guitar, its Freudian sexuality

showed that the lid could not be kept on the pressure cooker of sex

in movies of the 1950s.

In the films of underground maestro, Kenneth Anger, the lid blew off.

In this scene in his 1947 film, Fireworks, Anger himself

is stripped and beaten by sailors.

It was shot silent, lit from below.

A dream about pain and sex.

The French director Jean Cocteau, who's film, The Blood of the Poet,

helped found poetic underground cinema,

saw fireworks and wrote a fan letter to Anger about it.

Seventeen years later, his Scorpio Rising, once again

combined masculine costumes with bodily close ups, low level lighting

and fetishism but this time added rock and roll songs to the sound track.

This was the first time this had been done in this way,

highly innovative.

A technique that would be copied by Martin Scorsese in Mean Streets

and David Lynch in Blue Velvet.

The magic techniques of Georges M�li�s begat Cocteau begat Anger

begat Scorsese and Lynch.

Quite a chain of command.

Kenneth Anger, Douglas Sirk and Nick Ray were all working in California,

but perhaps an even bigger challenge to the Eisenhowerian idea

that 50s America was heaven, came from this city: New York.

Suspicious of all that sun and sky and all those palm trees,

New York had its own ideas about imagery and reality, acting and landscape and sex.

TV was made here.

Its low resolution black and white imagery was plain, compared to Hollywood spectacle.

But a TV drama like this, Marty, about this lonely butcher was a sensation.

He phones a girl, asks her out.

But his confidence is low. He's had many knock-backs from women.

Yeah. Yeah, I understand. Sure.

This was live TV.

The camera is right next to actor Rod Steiger who played the butcher.

Character rather than gloss.

Marty led to more character based films like On the Waterfront

and, even, Taxi Driver.

Steiger trained here: The Actors Studio.

Some of the teaching here said

that actors should access their inner fears and desires, then suppress them.

Access then suppress, acting as a pressure cooker,

identity as a melodrama.

A new performance technique called The Method resulted.

One of the great method films, On the Waterfront,

was shot here, across the water from Manhattan.

It was directed by Elia Kazan.

Marlon Brando, who'd also studied in the actors studio,

confronts a union boss who'd been responsible for a murder.

Hey, Friendly! John Friendly, come out of there.

Friendly! Come out of there.

Brando's character doesn't think much of himself.

He's inarticulate and slow to anger, but his fury,

long suppressed, finally explodes.

Wait a minute you.

You take them heaters away from you and you're nothing!

You know that?

You'll talk yourself in the river.

You take the good goods away and the kickbacks and a shakedown cabbage

and them pistoleros are you're nothing!

You're guts is all in your wallet and your trigger finger, do you know that?

As he was taught, to prepare for the scene,

Brando will have remembered some fury in his personal life

then tried to hide it, then let it all come out.

You give it to Jerry, you give it to Dugan, you give it to Charley,

it was one of your own.

In this famous scene, Rod Steiger plays Brando's brother,

he works for the Union boss.

Has the cashmere coat to show it.

Listen to me, Terry!

Take the job, just take it.

No questions, take it.

Steiger pulls a gun on his brother.

You'd think that Brando would get enraged by this

but the opposite happens.

He pushes the gun away, tenderly.

Oh, Charley.

The emotion that has been suppressed, hidden, is not rage,

but disappointment and, even, brotherly love.

Okay, Derrik.

There'd been many types of realism in acting before it,

but now actors no longer displayed their characters but tried to hide them.

As Freud had taught, the surface is a lie, a mask.

Modern western, inchoate masculinity came out of moments

like the back of the taxi scene.

In this scene in Howard Hawk's western Red River,

old and new cinema fought it out.

You're soft. Won't anything make a man out of you?

You once told me never to take your gun away from you.

John Wayne, an old style action man, squared up to the actor who,

at the Actors' Studio, was even more troubled than Brando, Montgomery Clift.

Alright.

For 14 years I've been scared, but it's going to be alright.

But Clift fights back.

Come on, get up.

The 1950s standing up to the 30s and 40s.

Judy Balaban was engaged to Montgomery Clift.

Monty was sort of the forerunner...

of the sensitive man, if you will. You know?

He was the sort of beginning of accepting the notion

that guys were just not these cut out masculine figures

of masculine traits, or whatever.

And I think he was the precursor of Marlon and Jimmy Dean.

He was just at the edge of that, coming into that.

James Dean, in Rebel without a Cause, was the icon of these modern men.

He's the son of a rich family.

Dad, stand up for me.

Director Nicholas Ray's wide screen shows the posh family home.

But then Dean, like cinema itself in the 50s, explodes.

Stand up!

Tilted camera, he attacks his father.

Do you want to kill your own father?

He puts the boot into all that good taste.

There was no social reason for his rebellion, it was personal, existential.

Dean died aged 24 in 1955,

just as teenagers and rage had really got going.

Suddenly, American cinema was all about young, angry, East Coast, inarticulate men.

They knew that 50s America wasn't all Doris day and Disney.

It was rife with tensions between parents and kids,

management and workers, white and black.

And back here in California the tension in 50s cinema gets even more intriguing.

As if to prove that it wasn't only the trendy young American directors

who were making swollen movies in the 50s,

let's look at what four of the American master directors,

Orson Welles, John Ford,

Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks were up to.

Each of them made masterpieces in those years.

Welles filmed his movie Touch of Evil in Venice, California.

He plays Hank Quinlan, a corrupt lawman bulging at the waist.

Welles filmed with wide-angle lenses to make the imagery bulge.

Even the building here seems to curve around the man.

Hank's desperately lonely and obsessed by a woman.

I don't know what Willard thinks she's got to do with it?

Maybe she'll cook chili for him, or bring out the crystal ball.

John Ford's greatest film of the 50s, The Searchers,

is also about a lonely man, obsessed by a woman,

his niece, who's been abducted.

When he finds her he holds her up to the sky,

not sure whether to hug or harm her.

The abductors were native Americans, Edwards' rage is racist.

In 50s America, the biggest drama of them all.

Scotty in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo is as obsessed as Ethan and Hank,

but with an apparently dead woman.

He follows her look alike, his eyes burning blue.

Hitchcock films his point of view, putting us in his driving seat.

Scottie slips into an erotic dream state.

In an era when families were the social norm,

none of these men is in one.

And, neither is this man, John Wayne in Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo.

He plays a sheriff who's assembled this motley posse

to defend a town against bandits.

The men sit around, joke, talk and sing.

In the era of Chahine's sexual frustration,

of Sirk's conformity, of Mehboob's symbolic women,

of James Dean and Marlon Brando's unraveling men,

this posse, filmed in warm colors, smoking, strumming and drinking coffee,

were the closest mature American cinema got to showing an ordinary family at all.

In Britain in the 50s, tensions about sex and society

were more hidden beneath the surface.

The films of this man, David Lean, didn't scream like the melodramas

of Egypt, India, Mexico and America.

But still waters run deep.

Lean's films contain the emotions of Britain in the 50s,

its empire in decline.

Like Akira Kurosawa in Japan, Lean's black and white films of the '40s

were taut stories of his nation, England, on a human scale.

In this scene in his adaptation of Charles Dicken's Great Expectations,

the young Pip, who comes from a humble background,

encounters another class, which is haughty and stopped in time.

Your clock's stopped, miss. It should say a quarter past three.

Don't loiter, boy!

Gothic and erotic.

And then, like Kurosawa's,

Lean's films seemed to become as much about landscape.

How it dwarfs people.

In this scene from Lawrence of Arabia, Lawrence imagines going to the desert.

In the burning match he sees the heat of the Arab sun.

Then the famous cut that seems to picture T.E. Lawrence's colonial dream of elsewhere.

What makes the film very 50s is that it hints

that Lawrence's attraction to Arabia was sexual too.

The director who made this film held David Lean in total contempt.

Working class people at an amusement park, having fun, believing in life, optimism.

The film is interested in these people but its director Lindsay Anderson,

who was bookish and caustic, didn't believe.

He thought that human beings were selfish, especially posh ones.

So O Dreamland is a hot subject, filmed coolly.

Anderson was a leftist, but O Dreamland's irony

is far from this, the most famous leftist film in movie history,

Battleship Potemkin.

In Potemkin the working classes were pictured as noble types.

A caring mother, children of the revolution.

O Dreamland's people or, rather, its stare at them, was not simple at all.

It was full of pity and admiration but,

also, disappointment and maybe even contempt.

How conflicted and class ridden.

Just like Britain itself in the 50s.

And, finally, in our travel around the world in the 1950s,

if we move to France not long after O Dreamland,

we find this 22-year-old ballet dancer and model, Brigitte Bardot.

She had the kind of beauty that made the box office go "ka-ching."

There was nothing ambiguous about this stare.

Bardot's hair was unkempt, she refused to dress

like posh Parisian woman.

Eventually she brought more money to the French economy

than the motorcar manufacturer Renault.

Sex was coming out in the open in the movies.

The 1950s were the pressure cooker years in the movies.

The non-western world decolonized, got confidence

and you could see this in its movies.

The western world had sex and power on its mind,

and you could see this in its movies.

Audiences got hot under the collar.

They were swollen with the desires of their times.

The language of the movies was straining at the seams,

something had to give.

Synced and corrected by job0@whatkeepsmebusy.today