All language subtitles for Story of Film - Ep 5 - 1939-1952 - The Devastation of War

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 brilliance of Orson Welles

and explore the darkening
of American films in the 1940s.

Italy, 1939.

Mass rallies.

This salesman, Mussolini, is selling
an idea of order, superiority, purity.

He becomes friends
with this man, Hitler.

These two mates ruin
a lot of the world.

Out of the ruins of Italy,
comes a new movie language, Neo-realism.

A type of filmmaking
that will deal with the trauma of war.

This is one of its most famous moments,
filmed in real streets, urgent, and tragic.

Movies in the 1940s

had to get this raw,
because life had become this raw.

But before they did so, before
they entirely sobered up,

there was the little matter
of Stagecoach and Orson Welles.

Stagecoach made a star
of John Wayne.

The camera rushed into his face.

Yeah.

Hello, kid.

Hello Curly.

Hiya, Buck!

How's your folks?

It was the 94th film
made by John Ford,

here in his beloved monument valley,
Ford was interviewed

by another great director:
Peter Bogdanovich.

The interview shows
how much Ford hated analysis.

Take one?

There won't be more
then one take, will there?

Shoot.

�Mr. Ford, I've noticed
that your view of the West

has become increasingly sad
and melancholy over the years.

I'm comparing, for
instance, Wagon Master

to The Man who shot
Liberty Valance.

Have you been aware
of that... change in mood?�

No.

�Now that I point it out, is there
anything you'd like to say about it?�

I don't know
what you're talking about.

�Would you agree
that the point of Fort Apache

was that tradition, the
tradition of the army

was more important
than one individual?�

Cut!

Ford didn't want to say much
about his movies, but others did.

One critic wrote
that he captures

�the twitches of life and
the silhouettes of legend�.

Stagecoach is a movie legend.

It's about a bunch
of misfits on a journey.

One of them, a saloon girl and prostitute,
is cold shouldered by the others.

But she's befriended
by a cowboy called Ringo Kid.

Many of the shots in the coach
itself are filmed with back projection.

Ford contrasts the claustrophobia
of the coach

with classically composed,
pastoral shots like this one.

In this setting, the Ringo Kid
is brave enough to challenge

the snobbery against the girl.

Well, I am really a coward.
I know I am.

So that's why I did
foolish things.

And I was decorated
eight or nine times.

Tried to prove
that I was not a coward.

But after it was all over I
still knew that I still know

that I was a coward.

I have always found out
the little quiet little man

that nobody pays any attention to,
usually has more guts

and courage than those big blow-hard,
the big noisy, you know,

the big outspoken fellas.

It's the little man
that does the courageous thing.

In this scene, Ringo and the girl
start a new life together

in the mythic,
meritocratic west.

Well, kid, I told you
not to follow me.

Ford stages the scene
in deep space.

Stagecoach helped create
a new visual fashion

for deep space
and deep focus in the 1940s.

As we've seen,
in Japan a few years previously,

Mizoguchi was staging
things in depth too.

But Ford and his cameraman
combined deep staging with deep focus.

The trend in cinema had been
for the flattering effects

of a long lenses which creates
shallow focus, eyes sharp, hair soft.

Background out of focus.

Deep focus used a wide-angle lens
allowing actors and objects

to be really close
to the camera and really far away.

Both can be seen, crisply.

Deep focus emphasized
the distance between them.

It was great at rooms,
especially if you kept the camera low,

because then you'd see the ceiling,
which plunged back into the background

making a bold compositional line.

Such deep staging and deep focus

allowed the audience
to choose where to look.

As early as 1929,
Sergei Eisenstein had suggested it

as an alternative to editing.

Our eyes do the editing within
the frame.

Jumping around
from place to place.

Stagecoach's innovations
changed film history.

One person who saw
Stagecoach 30 times in 1940

was this man, Orson Welles,
who strode the movie stage.

The magician of cinema
who became its colossus.

In this scene from his first film,
Citizen Kane,

Welles and his cinematographer
Greg Tolland seemed

to be pushing deep staging
as far as it can go.

Welles plays
a hubristic newspaperman.

He is less than a meter
from the camera.

Everett Sloane is so far away
that he is as smaller than Welles's nose.

Such deep staging forces scale.

It's as expressionist
as the shadows in Caligari.

More than any film of its time,
Citizen Kane challenged

the soft and shallow look
of romantic American cinema.

But why did it do so?

Because of the talent and instincts
of the magician who made it.

RKO studio where
Welles made Citizen Kane.

He was staging Shakespeare
at the age of four.

His mother died when he was 8
and his father when he was 12.

He lived in Shanghai.

Visited the palaces of
faded emperors.

Got to know the story of power
and tramped through its ruins.

He should have been
the D.W. Griffith of the sound era.

In fact, in a career that lasted
nearly 50 years, he didn't direct

a single foot of film for any of
the four major Hollywood studios.

Norman Lloyd played the poet Cinna
in Welles' acclaimed staging

of Julius Caesar.

The story of the
staging was told, inaccurately,

in the recent
film Me and Orson Welles.

What is my name?

Whither am I going?

Where do I dwell?

Enough!

This is worse than terrible!

Cinna is Shakespeare's
indictment of the intelligentsia,

he's a lofty, byronic figure.

You know, I completely disagree!

I never had that kind
of argument with Orson.

As I watched that,
I was embarrassed,

because I never would have had
that kind of argument with Orson.

But just as an actor, like
Lloyd revered Welles,

so Welles revered
his own heroes.

Though he learnt much
from Stagecoach,

the great force in his
films, their battering ram,

comes from theatre
and elsewhere.

Here he plays Shakespeare's Falstaff,
a buffoon shot in deep space.

He was interested
in Italian renaissance painting.

His attraction to powerful people, kings,
tycoons, inventors is like Shakespeare's.

Also like Shakespeare,
he looked to the past,

to times before
democracy and liberalism.

Here, it's the world of Henry IV.

John Gielgud dwarfed
by a massive empty cathedral.

Citizen Kane thinks of himself
as a Medici or a Mughal emperor.

Kane is full of the lust
for power.

His world is massive, but empty.

Maybe the last time
he felt anything real

was as a boy playing
in the snow on his rosebud sledge,

in this incredible scene,
in deep space with tracking camera.

Citizen Kane denounced grandeur,
egomania and maybe, even,

the cinematic hubris
that made Cabiria's tracking shots.

And Intolerance's epic scale.

And The General's outlandish
production values.

Keaton's film was famously expensive.

Shakespeare and the Medicis, the
Mughals, Ottomans and Stagecoach

were not the only sources
of Welles' visual and human ideas.

There was the fact
of his own body and voice.

Both were enormous, mature,
unfeasible even.

It was like he was painted
by Holbein.

He could never play
a young person, or a teenager

or an ordinary guy
or a 20th century everyman.

The space in his films was gigantic
because his persona was gigantic.

And the sound was gigantic too,
whispers in close-up,

echoes from miles back.

49,000 acres of nothing
but scenery and statues!

I'm lonesome!

'Til just yesterday we've had no less
than 50 of your friends at any one time.

I think if you look carefully
in the west wing, Susan,

you'll find about
a dozen vacationers still in residence.

He extended the overlapping
dialogue of Howard Hawks' comedies,

to fill a whole film.

Can you prove it isn't?

Mr. Bernstein, I'd like you
to meet Mr. Thatcher.

How are you doing,
Mr. Thatcher?

Leland. Hello Mr. Thatcher,
my ex-guardian.

We have no secrets
from our readers, Mr. Bernstein.

Mr. Thatcher is one
of our most devoted readers.

The visual ideas of Toland and Welles
about deep focus and deep space

excited filmmakers
around the world.

Look at the depth of this
scene in The Maltese Falcon.

Humphrey Bogart's thumb,
no more than 20 centimeters

from the camera,
is clearly in focus.

And look at this incredible scene in a bar
in The best Years of our Lives.

The older man, Frederic March
asks the younger, Dana Andrews,

to end his romance
with the older man's daughter.

Andrews agrees to do so
and goes to call her in a phone box.

As the phone call's
the main drama in the scene,

you'd expect director Wyler
and D.P. [Director of Photography] Gregg Toland

to set up their camera near the box,

so we can see
and hear the action.

But, instead, they put it far away,
beside this piano,

where a war veteran
who's lost his hands is playing.

The father's at the piano, too,

but anxiously looks to the tiny booth
in the extreme background.

It's as if the crucial action
has been sucked away by a black hole.

We're forced to imagine
the conversation.

Just as, in real life, we
can't always see everything

that we want to see.

Years later the Austrian, Michael Haneke,
used deep space

to show a woman on a train
getting away from harassment.

And the Hungarian, B�la Tarr,
uses deep space to move our eyes

from foreground, to the background,
and then to the foreground again.

In each case the effect
was one of tension,

as if the world is a force field
in which the people are held.

Deep staging in American cinema would
become less fashionable again in the 1950s.

The new color, widescreen film
stocks were just not sensitive enough

to suck in all that information
at once.

So here, in How to marry a Millionaire,
the space is shallow

and the actors are displayed
across it like a washing line.

Very long lenses in the 60s and 70s,
excited directors about very shallow focus.

Here, filmed with a long lens,
Anouk Aim�e floated

in her own visual world,
like Garbo in the 1920s.

And in the 1990s Michael Mann's film
Heat, influenced by pop videos,

used the newest types of long lens
to create focus so shallow

that the lights behind al Pacino
in this shoot out became dreamy blobs.

But it was this place, Italy,

that was at the center
of the movie world in the 1940s.

This film school, �Centro Sperimentale,�
was opened under Mussolini in the 1930s.

This famous film studio

where great sets
have been built,

where Italian epics and
comedies had been made,

had been used as an army barracks
during World War II.

And film lights were limited.

So, filmmakers took
to the streets.

Before the war,
central Rome looked like this.

But, by 1945 it looked
like this.

People still went about their lives,
but the world had changed.

The city had changed.

The film industry had changed.

And so, in a series of films made in Italy
between 1945 and 1952,

the language
of film changed too.

What became known as �rubble movies�
[Tr�mmerfilm], were born.

The first was this one, Rome open City
[Roma citt� aperta]

directed by Roberto Rosselini.

The film started as a documentary
about a priest in Rome during World War II,

but grew into a portrait of the city,
struggling to resist fascism and Nazism.

This is how the actress in
the film was shot and lit:

old style, glamour, a negligee.

But look at how the other woman
in the film is presented...

Deglamorized, single light source.

She's pregnant but not married.

Daring for the time.

And she's anti-fascist.

Another anti-fascist in the film,
Don Pelligrini, is a priest in this church.

Rossellini wanted his images plain,
unadorned,

and so he used lenses
of about 50 mm...

rather than Wellesean
wide angle lenses...

or longer lenses.

He didn't care too much
if the shot wasn't in focus.

And whilst not hand holding
the camera much,

he seemed to have his D.P.
loosen the head of the tripod

to give loads of movement.

Light bulbs were bare
in Italian Neo-realism.

Martin Scorsese says that they influenced
the bare light bulbs in Raging Bull.

And it's said that in these neorealist films,
we saw one of these for the first time.

Rosselini said that if, by chance, he
made a beautiful shot, he'd cut it out.

If the nature of movie beauty
changed in Europe in the 1940s,

it was partly because of a
writer called Cesare Zavattini.

He said, �before this, if one was thinking
over the idea of a film on, say, a strike,

one would
immediately invent a plot.

And the strike itself became only
the background to the film.�

Today he said in a later interview,
�we would describe the strike itself.

We have an unlimited trust
in things, facts and people.�

This was revolutionary:
the reduction of plot.

De-dramatization.

And Zavattini said something
even more revealing,

�when we've thought out a scene
we feel the need to �remain� in it,

because it can contain
so many echoes and reverberations.�

This was again revelatory.

Things took place in real time.

Ordinary details mattered.

Where Alfred Hitchcock was to say

that cinema was life
with the boring bits cut out,

Zavattini and the neorealists said
that cinema is the boring bits.

The most famous film that Zavattini wrote,
Bicycle Thieves [Ladri di biciclette],

is about an unemployed man who has his bike
- his only chance of getting casual work - stolen.

He and his son
look all over Rome for it.

In the end, worn out and afraid of not
being able to get even basic work,

he himself steals a bike.

Director Vittorio De Sica,
has the scene shot starkly,

in harsh light, and keeps
the camera far back from the theft.

As if not to intrude
on the father's shame.

But then the boy
sees the father's theft.

We're close to him.

This tracking shot shows that films
like Bicycle Thieves

are not afraid of
conventional filming,

empathy, point of view,
tension and emotion.

But this scene, a few moments earlier,
is more unusual.

The boy nearly
gets hit by a car.

Twice.

In a Hollywood film the dad
would have seen this and grabbed the boy

and scolded him or comforted him, but
also realized how much he loves him.

But in Italian Neo-realism such moments
just happened, without cause or effect.

It was a loose end.

It didn't play back
into the plot.

Pre-war film stories were chains
of cause and effect.

But in Italian Neo-realism, the
chain was sometimes broken.

Neo-realism turned
the realist dissidence of 20s cinema

into a national film movement in the '40s,
that then swept around the world.

Far away from Neo-realism
and the rubble of Europe,

the mythic capital
of the American movie industry, Hollywood,

started to get less glossy
in the 1940s too.

A starlet called Peg Entwistle
killed herself

by jumping from this letter
in the Hollywood sign.

After a long day in the sunshine
in L.A., nighttime falls.

There are few streetlights,
so it's really dark.

Hardly anybody walks, so those that do
can hear their own footsteps.

The eucalyptus and orange blossom
smells almost sickly sweet.

The grills on windows cast
shadows like prisons.

Throughout World War II,
Hollywood kept making this kind of film.

Betty Grable in her feathers and d�cor,
was one of wartime's most popular stars.

But America's
most curious filmmakers

went abroad or just watched newsreels
and saw this.

And this.

The documentary tragedy
of Rome open city.

The romantic exuberance
of Hollywood ebbed.

Its paradise got a bit lost.

And it showed.

Between 1941 and 1959,
more than 350 dark films

were made in Hollywood,
films that became known as �films noirs�.

One of the earliest and most influential
was this one: Double indemnity.

Look at this scene in it.

The actress and the wall at the far end
of the corridor are both in focus.

The visual depth of Mizoguchi,
Stagecoach and Citizen Kane.

The situation is this: the insurance man
who's coming out the door

has fallen for the woman
who hides behind the door,

the wife of one of his clients.

She convinces him to help her kill her husband
and share the insurance pay-out.

They do so.

The man's boss, in the dark suit,
begins to suspect that the wife

is the murderess and goes
to the man's apartment

to tell him his hunch.

If the boss saw the wife there,
it would confirm

his hunch and implicate the man,
his employee.

So the wife hides behind
the man's outward-opening door.

Goodbye Keyes.

So long, Walter.

Double indemnity's director,
Billy Wilder,

was an Austrian Jew
who fled the Nazis in 1933.

Ironically filmed here
in the bright sun of Santa Monica,

his films were
thematically dark.

Like many �migr�s who made great
films noirs... Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak,

Otto Preminger, Michael Curtiz, Jacques Tourneur...
he loved the unpretentiousness of America,

but hated its worship of money.

The wife in this scene
lusts for it.

The man lusts for her and,
because he's weak and flawed,

for money too.

Robert Towne who wrote
the film Chinatown.

Cinema noir... The characters
are fated, in one way or another

and it is a character flaw
of some kind.

They are like moths and flames.

You look at Walter in
Double Indemnity.

And I wanted to see
her again, close,

without that silly staircase
between us.

He just can't resist
a pretty anklet.

You look at Robert Mitchum in
Out of the Past,...

he can't... he wants
to be with a decent girl,

but he can't stay out of the way,
it's usually a femme fatale...

Even when he wants
to disentangle himself, he can't avoid it...

Geddes with Chinatown.

There is some flaw in them,
that draws them to their fate,

even as they try to avoid it,
not just a dark world

where they get kind of beaten up...

They are men who at some deep,
unconscious level seek out their fate,

even as they try to avoid it.

Paul Schrader who wrote
Taxi Driver and Raging Bull:

The flawed hero which, you
know, first sort of appeared

in Freud influenced films, you know,
but it never really took hold

till after the war and you had
these guys came home from the war.

And you had all of that social dislocation
where women who had gotten jobs in the war

were now expected to give up their jobs
and men who fought in the war

came home
and didn't have any money.

There was a lot of frustration
and so that kind of Freudian hero started

feeling like a much more realistic
hero than he had felt like in,

you know, the '30s and '40s.

War, the city of L.A., flawed characters,
and social and legal collapse

created noir
but so did other things.

The lattice of shadows
of German expressionism can be seen.

In this German film,
light casts a grid of shadows,

but the handrail
is a lattice too.

Double Indemnity was co-written
by Raymond Chandler who,

along with Dashiel Hammett, created
the character types and situations of noir.

Howard Hawks filmed
Chandler's The big Sleep in 1946.

Humphrey Bogart
played Philip Marlowe.

The film crackled
with snappy dialogue.

A feature of the best noirs.

May I use your phone, Mr.
Marlowe?

Hello.

Police headquarter, please.

Hello. This is Mrs....

Hello.
What do you want, please?

I don't want a thing! What! You called me.
I called you?

Say, who is this?

This is sergeant Reilly
at headquarters.

Sergeant Reilly, well,
there isn't any sergeant Reilly here.

I know there's not...

Wait a minute.
You better talk to my mother.

I don't wanna talk to your mother. Why
should I wanna talk to your mother?

The big Sleep was the most influential
film noir since Double Indemnity.

It's complex plot set a fashion.

The film was co-written by Leigh Brackett,
another great female screenwriter,

who co-wrote this film Rio Bravo,
in which Angie Dickinson gets the best lines.

You see, that's what I'd do,

if I were the kind of girl
that you think I am.

And Bracket co-wrote this film,
Star Wars: The Empire strikes back.

In the film's climax, Luke discovers,
in the style of a Hollywood romance...

that Darth Vader is his father.

Brackett had helped bring
traditional movie storytelling into the '70s.

The women in film noir
haunt the films.

Jane Greer in Out of the Past takes her
time, moves like velvet,

knows that the man is weak,
enjoys his gaze, turns it to her advantage.

Usually in noir it's
an immoral advantage.

And yet of the 350 or so noirs,

only one, this one, was directed
by a woman, Ida Lupino.

She mastered the form,
using spot lighting and subjective camera.

A film with down-turned eyes.

Directing in American film had become,
by this stage, a boy's club.

And there's so much more
to say about film noir.

The pugnacious presence of actor
Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity

is a reminder of how noir was fascinated
by the sort of gangster films

of the 30s in which
Robinson appeared.

In those he was
disdainful, dapper.

And it's pessimism came in part

from the poetic realist films
of France in the 1930s,

such as this moody encounter
between two lost souls in Quaie des Brumes.

If proof is needed that France
influenced America in the 40s,

look at this film La Chienne,
directed by Jean Renoir.

A man falls in love
with a hard-hearted, young woman.

It was remade as Scarlet Street,
by Fritz Lang, in America, 14 years later.

The scene where the man pleads
for the woman's love is very similar.

Its star?

Edward G. Robinson.

Here in Montrose,
a suburb of Los Angeles,

a b-movie called Gun Crazy
was shot in 1950.

It was one of the most innovative,
passionate noirs ever made

and shows how documentary
and Neo-realism influenced the genre.

It was directed
by this Hemingway-esque man,

speaking on his fishing boat,
the great b-movie director Joseph H. Lewis.

A man and a woman, passionate
and reckless, are about to rob a bank.

Their hearts are beating.

In a conventional noir
we'd see their faces, sweaty brows.

Here Lewis keeps the camera
behind them.

His D.P. sat in the back seat
on a jockey saddle.

He made a special board
on which the camera could pan.

Alright?

Lewis then had new button microphones
put on the actors

and on a policeman we're about to see.

And gave the performers
free reign to improvise.

There's a car just pulled out.

We can get in there.

We'll have to... Yeah, yeah.
Okay.

Right in here.
Fast as you can.

Don't worry, I won't be a minute longer
than I have to.

Here goes nothing!
Okay!

Filming a stick up in the conventional way
was scheduled to take four days.

Lewis claims to have shot this
in three hours

and says that the unbroken shot
covers two miles of ground.

Get out.

Go on.

That's right, stand right there.

Okay.

The camera and D.P. in the jockey saddle
move forward and right.

Another sound recordist
was strapped to the top of the car.

Well, that's a nice get up.

I like it.

Good looking gun.

Thanks.

That's English, ain't it?

That's right

What show are you with?

Cheyenne rodeo in Hollywood.

The bus will be coming through
in a few minutes.

I got to stay too far out in front.

You gonna play here?

No.

Well, it's an easy town
on shows.

Three tickets and you've covered
the whole police force.

That's a pretty nice gun
you've got too.

I'm sorry, I don't let

anybody handle it.

Killed a man with it last year.

Did he have it coming to him?

Yes, but it wasn't much fun
watching him go down.

He had no idea,
he was getting...

The staging looks so real
that passers-by yelled,

�They've held up a bank!�

Take off!

The deadly passion and stylistic innovation
of Gun Crazy were a major influence

on a much later film,
Bonnie and Clyde,

about the anxiety
of a couple that robs banks.

Your mama
could take this bank.

Straight between the eyes.

She didn't fool me for a minute.
Not this time.

Paul Schrader says
that noir died out in 1958

but its influence can be seen
much later, in L.A. confidential

in which Kim Basinger pretends
to be Veronica Lake in this Gun for Hire.

In Blade Runner,
in which Sean Young

walks through shadows in a pool
of light, like a film noir, femme fatale.

In The dark Knight,
in which the city is fetid and morally dark.

And even in Mumbai noir,
such as Shiva by Ram Gopal Varma,

all shadows
and low camera angles.

The influence of film noir
has travelled the world.

So American film in the 40s
was newly serious,

but did film noir smash
the bauble of romantic cinema?

If you've seen this:

the sweeping camera moves
and sweeping emotions of Titanic,

you'll know
that the answer is no.

Romantic cinema continued.

But even to live in L.A. in the late 40s
and 50s started to feel different.

Ernst Lubitsch died in 1947.

D.W. Griffith and Greg Toland,
American cinema's civilizer

and its deep space experimenter,
both died in 1948.

Louis Lumi�re in France died too,
as did Eisenstein in the USSR.

Judy Balaban's dad, Barney,
ran Paramount studios for decades,

so she was at the center of it all,
and was engaged to Montgomery Clift.

Originally our friends were
very light-hearted

and there was a lot
of socializing and parties

and small talk
and vacations and whatever.

I mean, you know, we were close
to Janet and Tony and Dean

and Jean Martin and I was close
to Sammy Davis from New York

so we were close to Sammy and,
you know, the whole rat pack thing.

Sinatra and Gene Kelly lived
across the street from us

and Debbie and Eddie,
you know, it was just a lot of people

having a lot of parties, frankly.

But there came a moment in time
where a lot of that shifted.

I was married to Tony Franciosa
by then.

But the world began to be more conscious
of itself in the larger sphere

than just simply the insular sense
of whatever your own neighborhood was,

whether it was in the mid-west
or Hollywood,

suddenly there was
a more universal consciousness.

I look at periods were movies
seem to be ahead of everything,

and then there are periods
where they seem to be behind everything

else in the world.

So for example...
the McCarthy era,

would be a time when movies were caught
in the more backward part of that era.

Calling the house Un-American Activities
Committee to order,

chairman J. Parnell Thomas of
New Jersey opens an enquiry

into possible communist penetration
of the Hollywood film industry.

The committee you see came to determine
if red party members reached the screen

with subversive propaganda.

The question is: have you ever been
a member of the communist party?

I'm framing my answer in
the only way in which any American citizen

can frame his answer.

Then you deny...

At these hearings,
which started in 1947,

50 studio bosses and producers agreed
to sack any of their employees

who would not co-operate
with the government's

new Anti-communist House Un-American
Activities Committee (Huac).

This new poison in Hollywood life also
helped create the seriousness of film noir.

The most principled filmmakers
refused to testify against leftists.

Others named names, and great artists
were banned from working: Blacklisted.

Those affected included Abraham Polonsky,
Charlie Chaplin, Dolores Del Rio,

Paul Robeson and Dalton Trumbo.

The House Un-American Activities became
the single biggest trauma in American cinema.

The great cinematographer Haskell Wexler
shot America, America

for director Elia Kazan,
who testified against the leftists.

Kazan was a tremendously talented man
and I talked to him

a couple of times about it,
but one of the things I remember he said,

the main thing
about directing is casting.

When Kazan's name came up

for a lifetime achievement
award at the academy,

I didn't think that Gadge,
as we called him, should get that award

and Karl Rollins said,
�look, he is dying, he's a great director.

I'm going to vote for him.�

So, I did and I wrote to Gadge and
I said, �dear Gadge, I voted for you

because I think you deserved
the lifetime achievement award.

I thought... I think it might be good
if you said something

which may sound euphemistic, that
you're saying that you're sorry.

That you may have
hurt some people.�

I forget exact words I used, but...
And my nickname was Pete,

for many years, given to me
by a whore in Puerto Rico.

And she... And Kazan wrote me back:
�Pete, go fuck yourself, Gadge.�

And that's the way he was
to the moment he died.

He must have felt guilt
that he couldn't admit?

Well, I mean... It certainly
was an important thing,

that he didn't have to squeal,

he didn't have to, he was on the top,
he was on the top of the world. No.

And you're right. Rod Steiger
and a lot of other people didn't...

Would not accept
anything about him.

Kazan's Oscar award was
televised of course.

The famous reaction shots of the Oscar's
broadcast were more telling than ever.

Karl Malden, Warren Beatty stand
and clap Kazan.

Steven Spielberg sits and claps,
Ed Harris and Amy Madigan don't clap at all.

Meryl Streep and Lynne Redgrave clap,
Nick Nolte doesn't.

Back in 1949, the House Un-American
Activities Committee chairman,

J. Parnell Thomas, was sentenced
to prison for embezzlement.

The walk of fame in Hollywood Boulevard
has stars dedicated

to minor show biz personalities,
but still doesn't carry the name

of many of the blacklistees.

And there were other momentous changes
in the American film industry at the time.

In 1948, the five main studios were forced
by the US supreme court to sell their cinemas.

One of them, Paramount
sold 1,450 of them.

The government began the anti-trust
action against them because

they said you cannot, produce, distribute
and exhibit a product without being,

you know, violating anti-trust laws.

And so the government began this investigation
and sued against the industry.

It went on for some years and my father
could see, as he felt, that the handwriting

was on the wall and that no matter how long
they fought it, they were going to lose.

So he made a decision on behalf
of what he felt was the right thing

for the shareholders of the company
that they should stop fighting this,

stop spending money on it and
figure out how to, you know,

restructure the company so that there
were two separate organizations.

One of which would produce
and distribute the film

and the other one of which would
be a theatre company.

But in the early 50s,
just as the studio system,

what Stanley Donen
called �the garden�, was dying,

so it produced some
of its most splendid blooms.

At MGM, Cosmopolitan producer
Arthur Freed gave

sophisticates like Gene Kelly,
Vincent Minelli and Stanley Donen,

a chance to show that the
studios still had joy in them,

and beauty too.

This extended dance sequence in
An American in Paris

was influenced by the success
of the remarkable one

in the British film
The red Shoes.

Flashing red lights,
painted studio back drops.

Gene Kelly was a leftist, and abhorred
the anti-communist witch hunts.

But both he and Stanley Donen,
who started as a choreographer,

were Americans born and bred, not �migr�s,
and at first their outlook was optimistic.

Drawn from vaudeville
and clowning as this scene shows.

Like many of his generation,
Donen found the design, dance and sexuality

of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers
musicals of the 30s entrancing.

I was nine years old and I was
a little boy in a Southern town

in South Carolina, where I was born
and grew up, and I had never

experienced anything like that...

And I was not in... anyway... my family
wasn't related to dancing or movies

or anything and this moment of
transcended life, real life...

There they were dancing
to the music, enjoying being alive,

expressing their feelings .

The idea of Gene Kelly singing in the rain
and letting the rain hit him, is a...

That's the idea that he is so joyful,
that rain is a pleasure,

he is not worried
about getting wet,

he is thrilled with
being in love.

The camera expresses the joy
in itself without Gene,

without even Gene Kelly
just being there!

Just the uplift of the camera?!

It's not the uplift
of the camera,

it's the photograph
of the camera being uplifted.

It's what the camera sees
that does it, the camera does nothing,

it just does
what we tell it to do.

I can't talk to the camera and say,

�now lift up. I want to feel the joy
of being weightless.�

I've said this to people before
- if you say to a writer,

�does the pencil write the story?�
Of course it doesn't!

And the camera is just
the pencil that we're working with.

In Singin' in the Rain, Donen and
Kelly did a kaleidoscopic sequence

to make fun of the Busby Berkeley numbers,
which they hated.

I used to think
they were terrible.

Absolutely terrible and I thought
they were awful for a long time.

And now when I look at them,
I think they really are unique

and wonderful and they have
a point of view and I like them a lot.

What's interesting is
they didn't change at all, I've changed.

They are what they are.
A film locks it.

It's like the written word
on the page.

It doesn't change.

It's only our opinion
of what it means that changes.

Strong word,
not in the theatre.

The president isn't
in the theatre.

No, that's right.

Change in Donen's life and work
echoes the change in Hollywood itself.

In his film Indiscreet, starring
Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, for example,

he used an innovative technique
to challenge censorship.

The leading man and the leading
lady, even if they were married,

couldn't be in bed together.

It was censorship.

If they were married they had to be
in twin beds in the same room

and I wanted to show
how intimate they were.

And so I said, �I have an idea
of how I'll have them in bed together

and the censors won't be able
to do anything about it.�

In order to do it, so I could time it
and everything, I built both sets,

both bedrooms,
on the same sound stage.

I had a camera on each person,
we did it all at once

and I could watch them and say,
you know, �do this. Do that.�

And so it was done as a spilt screen
but we photographed it

as though it was
happening all at once.

How long is this going to go on?

How long is what going to go on?

The pretense that we're happy?

We've never pretended we're happy!

Who's pretending?
You are.

That we're happily married.

That you wanted to stay with me.

And, as in American cinema in general,
melancholia entered Donen's cinema.

Two for the Road was
about a married couple.

We see one of the first road trips
they took together and one of the last.

The movie intercuts
the time periods.

You have to admit it.
We've changed.

I admit it, we've changed.

It's sad but there it is.

People back then used to say to me,
�I love that movie! It's so romantic!�

And I would be stunned and say,
�it's such a hard, tough look at marriage,

why do you think of it
as romantic?�

'Cause that's what I wanted it to be,

to show you how people
could live together,

the abrasions, the buffeting
against each other...

and yet the way that you really
appreciate your partner.

By this time, Donen
had made 21 films,

some of the greatest
to come out of Hollywood.

He was just 43 years old.

Did you feel as if
you had run out of things to do?

Oh god no, no.

I mean, if you feel you've
run out of things to do

it means you think you're stupid,
you have nothing more to say,

I didn't think that.
I don't even think it now.

What else did you have to say then
and what else do you have to say now?

I think of Diaghilev
with Nijinsky, you know?

Diaghilev was supposed
to have said to Nijinsky

when he was asking him
to do a ballet,

��tonne moi!!�

astonish me... well, that's
what I am still trying to do.

I still want to astonish
you about my understanding

of what it's all about,
how it is.

How we react to it
and what can I do?

Just as Donen's films would do,

so mainstream American cinema on the whole
grew up in the '40s, and early '50s,

the years of devastation.

Under the influence of war
and Italian Neo-realism,

American movies became darker.

Life in mainstream American cinema
was no longer a bowl of cherries.

And deep focus, deep staging,
film noir lighting

and the influence
of Orson Welles

had all given American film style
new punch and portent.

In Britain in the '40s and '50s
we find films that best sum up

the movie complexities
of this time of war.

An RAF bomber pilot's plane
has been hit and is on fire.

He has no parachute,
so is about to die.

His last words are
to an American woman

on a ground control base.

English director Michael Powell
and Hungarian writer Emeric Pressburger,

plunge us into a moment of searing
drama, romantic dialogue,

shallow focus, rich color
and lighting that hides tears.

Are you in love with anybody?

No, no don't answer that!

I could love a man like you,
Peter.

I love you, June.
You're alive and I'm leaving you.

Where do you live?
On the station?

No, in a big country house
about five miles from here.

Leigh wood house.

Old house?
Yes, very old.

Good. I'll be a ghost
and come and see you.

You're not frightened
of ghosts are you?

It would be awful if you were.

They formed company together in 1942
and made films like this one

which were almost mystical
in their Englishness, their romance,

their opposition to documentary.

The airman seems not to die,

but, instead, to have
suffered brain damage.

During losses in consciousness,
he imagines going to heaven

to argue for more time on earth,
because he has fallen in love

with the American woman.

Heaven's in black and white,
an art director's fantasy.

The title of the film,
A matter of life and death,

tells us what it deals with.

The biggest things in life,
especially when the world's at war.

Powell and Pressburger showed
that moviemakers didn't have to choose

between honesty about the trauma of war
and the high style of romantic cinema.

No other filmmakers of their time
could so combine the two.

And another English filmmaker
of the 40s told us

that war and trauma
bring out the best in us.

Here he is, Humphrey Jennings.

Posh, skinny, playing a post man
who's so devoted to his duty

that even after he's tied up,
he still gets his letter delivered.

Soon he was directing,
with a poetic style all of his own.

The great British director
Terence Davies reveres Jennings.

Yes, even if he had made
only Listen to Britain,

it's one of the great poems...
that's a voice.

The most moving sequence
is around the national gallery

and when... the people are
just enjoying the song

and it may be their last summer
where they are free

and you see Marie Hersh
playing one of the Mozart piano concertos

and you just think what
he is saying is that...

something that is
quintessentially British.

That no one else has got.

We've got that
and we were prepared to fight for it.

Jennings believed that
because British people

shared the same landscapes,
history and culture,

they've got a collective unconscious.

What he called the
�legacy of feeling.�

The thing that gets people
through trauma together.

And in terms of film style,
Jennings felt that

there is a force field between shots.

Look at this moment, again from
Listen to Britain.

A half dozen tin hats.

Then cut to
five bare headed women.

Their heads where the hats were.

Then a statue of Charles I,
who was beheaded.

Three images together giving us
an eerie feeling of vulnerability of heads.

The cinematic sum,
greater than its parts.

Eisenstein's 1+1=3 again.

And in 1949, a final British film,
marvelously summed up

the changes in western cinema,
the trauma, poetics, the expressionism

and shadow play,
in these years.

The third Man is set in
Vienna after World War II,

a city split between
the victors.

The film's writer, the catholic novelist
Graham Greene,

planted, at the heart of his story,
a great moral crime.

A man, Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles
is making money by selling penicillin

that's supposed to treat children.

Director Carol Reed liked
the seriousness of this idea.

Its pessimism reminded him
of the 30s French poetic realist films

he so admired.

He and his cinematographer filmed
many shots off the horizontal axis,

to show the moral imbalance.

Director Reed had edited this Oscar
winning wartime documentary -

Miles of wire netting
for the beaches.

Seventy-two hundred tons
of petrol per day.

With an underwater pipeline
to carry it to France.

A white star
is the emblem of liberation -

and, like the Italians
and some of American filmmakers,

felt that cinema had to engage
more with reality.

This sequence in The third Man,
in which Welles' Lime is first revealed,

had the expressionist bravura
of Welles' own film, Citizen Kane.

In this famous ending, Lime's descent,
disappointed friend, Holly Martins,

stands to the left of the image,
waiting for Anna, Lime's old girlfriend,

whom Holly has come to love.

She walks towards him
from the extreme distance...

the deep staging of Welles.

Reed doesn't cut the shot,
or dissolve the walk

as Scorsese would later do
in Taxi Driver.

Reed lets Anna walk the
whole way, in real time,

the de-dramatized time
of Italian Neo-realism.

Writer Greene envisaged a happy ending,
where Anna would take Holly's arm.

As Roman Polanski would do decades later
with the ending of Chinatown,

Reed rejected such optimism.

Anna turns away from Holly
and walks out of shot.

She prefers the memory
of the rogue Harry Lime

to the weak, decent man.

One of the most daring endings
in mainstream film history.

One of the greatest
films ever made,

The third Man
is a compendium of 40s cinema.

The new moral seriousness of the movies,
their realism and deep staging,

would sweep across the world in the '50s,
to India, Africa, South America and Japan.

New continents of filmmaking
would emerge, new stories and styles,

framings and visions.

For the first time in the story of film,
cinema would be global.

Corrected and synced by
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