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 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 job0@whatkeepsmebusy.today