1950: A Bad Movie Year When Filmmaking Changed Forever

by John Aquino on 03/23/12

The film director and film journalist and author Peter Bogdanovich once wrote an article dubbing the 1939 as the greatest year for movies, and this has been taken up by others and is now common thinking.

I would like to propose that the year 1950 is the year that filmmaking reached a new low and changed forever.

It’s funny that I stumbled on someone else’s website that called 1950 the greatest year of moviemaking.  The website’s point is that 1950 was the year of All About Eve, written and directed by Joseph Mankewicz, Sunset Boulevard, directed by Billy Wilder and written by Wilder and Charles Brackett, and The Asphalt Jungle, directed by John Huston and written by Houston and Ben Maddow. Great films all, to be sure. But All About Eve is surely the talkiest and most uncinematic Oscar winner for best picture, and the cinematic darkness and black mood of Sunset Boulevard, which was about a gigolo and an aging movie star, and Asphalt Jungle, which about a bank robbery gone wrong, illustrate the post-war despair of the filmic output. Either the films of 1950 were mostly listless affairs or in the case of these three films and some others deliberately moody, dark, and despairing.

There were a number of reasons why this was. One has to do with the aging of the big stars of the 1930s and 1940s as well as the studio and production heads and the failure to replace them adequately. A 1944 court ruling involving actors’ contracts hit the studios’ bottomlines and forced them to jettison many of their contract players. Aging actors and actresses, in turn, became freelancers and, starting in 1950, negotiated as part of their pay a percentage of the gross. Directors followed suit, and this ultimately meant that even the most successful films  never made a profit. 

Another court decision that affected moviemaking starting in 1950 was a 1948 Supreme Court ruling that Hollywood studios could not own theatres and therefore could not guarantee that a movie they made would be shown. This decreased output, which decreased creativity. The continued growth of television was also keeping people home for entertainment, which caused a drop in movie attendance and ticket sales. And some of those aging stars—Abbott and Costello, Ray Milland, Bob Cummings—found employment on television.

Finally, a film released in 1950 led to the beginning of the decline of Hollywood censorship, morals, and standards.

Aging Stars, Studios Heads, Lackluster Output

While it true that some fine films were made in 1950, mostly the output was run-of-the mill. For every Asphalt Jungle, M-G-M, the Cadillac of Hollywood studios, was churning out movies like A Skipper Surprised His Wife, Watch the Birdie, The Reformer and the redhead, The Yellow Cab Man, Lady Without Passport, and Right Cross. For musicals, M-G-M, which had been responsible for such greats as The Wizard of Oz and Meet me in St. Louis, was producing such gems as Nancy Goes to Rio, Two Weeks of Love, and the Duchess of Idaho.

Yes, M-G-M released Annie Get Your Gun in 1950, but its troubled production was illustrative of the breakdown in system and quality: Judy Garland, after years of drug and alcohol addiction that was supported by the studio in order to get her to sleep, get her up, and keep her calm, had a breakdown during Annie and was replaced by Betty Hutton from Paramount Studios; Frank Morgan, who had been with the studio since 1932 and had played the Wizard of Oz opposite Garland in 1939, died during production of Annie and was replaced; and Busby Berkeley, gifted but troublesome director of such musical landmarks as Forty-Second Street and Footlight Parade, was fired and replaced. The released film is big and noisy and gaudy but somehow unaffecting, almost as if the filmmakers just wanted to get it out.

Warner Bros., which had produced the great Berkeley musicals of the 1930s, was doing such derivative song-and-dance efforts was West Point Story, The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady, and Tea for Two, all evocative of other eras. Universal Studios was tied to its new or continuing series: Francis the Talking Mule, Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town, and Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion.

The stars of the 1930s and 40s were aging, and it was showing. Errol Flynn, age 41 and looking 60, played in two 1950 routine westerns for Warners, Montana and Rocky Mountain, weak follow-ups to such Flynn westerns as Dodge City and They Died with their Boots On.  Gary Cooper, the star of 1940’s The Westerner, 49 and looking 60, also starred in two forgettable westerns: Dallas and Bright Leaf. Clark Gable, Rhett Butler in 1939’s Gone with the Wind, 49 and looking heavy, played a race car driver crammed into his vehicle in To Please a Lady and was reunited with his co-star (former lover and mother of his daughter) of 1935’s Call of the Wild, Loretta Young, in Key to the City. At Warners, James Cagney rehashed the plots of Warners’ West Point musicals of the 1930s and his own Footlight Parade in the West Point Story, reportedly sliding his 51-year-old knees across the floor over and over until they bled.

Watching stars of the 1930s and 1940s playing the same old roles in 1950 films is often sad. They’re going through the motions, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are older and the plots are tired.

Actresses were aging too and mostly doing what they had done before. Betty Grable, age 34, played a show business mother in My Blue Heaven and starred in Wabash Avenue, a remake of her 1943 film Coney Island. Joan Crawford starred in The Damned Don’t Cry, a retread of her 1945 Oscar-winning performance in Mildred Pierce. Greer Garson revived her Oscar-winning role of Mrs. Miniver from the 1943 film of the same name in The Miniver Story. Bettie Davis did star in All About Eve, which won the Oscar for best picture and for which she received the New York Film Critics’ Award as best actress. But she was 42, and her mannered performance as a mannered theatre star in Eve set the tone for subsequent performances, which dwindled in number after Eve.

Spencer Tracy showed his age to comic delight as the father in Father of the Bride at M-G-M but also ignored his age in Malaya, in which at 51 he listlessly played the type of adventurer and con man he had played in the 1930s starting with his first film, Up the River. Co-starring with him in Malaya was Jimmy Stewart, who, in a forgettable part for his old studio, M-G-M, was killed off half-way through the film. Stewart was by then freelancing for various studios, and it was he who signed to take a lower salary and a percentage of the gross for Winchester ’73.

Hollywood studios had already lost their special ability to keep actors under really long-term contracts, which sometimes stifled their careers but often, surprisingly, led them to do very good work. The law up into the 1940s allowed studios to suspend contract players for rejecting a role with the period of suspension to be added to the contract period. In theory, this allowed a studio to maintain indefinite control over an uncooperative contractee. Actress Olivia De Havilland had been under contract to Warners since 1935 and had appeared with Errol Flynn in such popular films as Captain Blood, the Adventures of Robin Hood, and Dodge City. She was also loaned out to play Melanie in Gone with the Wind. When Warners informed her that she was under suspension for having refused a role and that her contract was being extended yet again, De Haviland, whose father was a patent attorney, initiated a lawsuit that was supported by the Screen Actors Guild, in De Havilland v. Warner Bros. Pictures, 67 Cal. App. 2d 225 (1944).

De Haviland won the case in 1944, thereby reducing the power of the studios and extending greater creative freedom to the performers. The California Court of Appeal's ruling came to be informally known, and is still known to this day, as the De Haviland Law. The ruling interpreted the already existing California Labor Code Section 2855. That code section imposes a seven-year limit on contracts for service unless the employee agrees to an extension beyond that term. De Haviland ended her contract with Warners, which vowed never to hire her again, signed a three-film deal with Paramount, chose her roles carefully and won the Oscar for best actress in 1946 for To Each His Own and in 1949 for The Heiress.

David Niven and De Haviland’s estranged sister, actress Joan Fontaine, who had won an Oscar earlier than her sister, both acknowledged that De Haviland had done a great service to other actors. Actors took greater charge of their careers, the studios couldn’t force them into roles they didn’t want to take, with the result that some films were not made and some that were made were indifferently cast, affecting their quality.

The Black List, the De Haviland Law, and Film Noir

While so many of the films were retreads, what was new was dark.

In addition to causing his knees to bleed in West Point Story, Cagney had gone back to playing gangsters, beginning in 1949’s White Heat for Warners. But in contrast to his strutting, cocky, earnest if misguided Rocky in 1938’s Angels with Dirty Faces, the new Cagney gangster was sick and violent. His 1950 film Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye was banned in Ohio as “a sordid, sadistic presentation of brutality and an extreme presentation of crime with explicit steps in commission.”

Also in 1950 Cagney’s former gangster cohort at Warners Humphrey Bogart, age 51 and looking it, played an aging test pilot in Chain Lightning for Warners, and starred in In a Lonely Place for Columbia. This film noir was indicative of the mood change that had hit Hollywood, with Bogart, the romantic anti-hero Rick from 1942’s Casablanca, playing a screenwriter who may or may not be a killer of women and who takes delight in people’s suspicion that he might be.

Films had progressed from the great year of 1939 when the world appeared to be coming out of the Great Depression and was clearly headed into a second world war through the war years with their flag-waving and optimism and then to the late 1940s and into the 1950s when soldiers were coming home wounded (The Best Years of Their Lives, Till the End of Time, The Blue Daliah, all 1946) or violent and twisted (Crossfire, 1947), war widows struggled (Holiday Affair, 1949), and people were dealing with their guilt or secrets (All My Sons, 1948).

And many in Hollywood had secrets and reason to worry that people were after them. The “Hollywood Ten,” screenwriters and directors who refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was investigating whether or not Hollywood was disseminating communist propaganda, started serving their prison sentences in 1950, and that same year a pamphlet titled Red Channels named 151 entertainment industry professionals in the context of “Red Fascists and their sympathizers.” Soon most of those named, along with a host of other artists, were barred from employment in much of the entertainment field. Having no other way to make a living, blacklisted screenwriters began using “fronts” who took credit for the work of the blacklisted writer and shared the money. In 1950, one of the Hollywood Ten, Dalton Trumbo, used Millard Kaufman as his first front for the film Gun Crazy.

Not only were people taking credit for work that they did not write, some informed on others to Red Channels and the HUAC to advance their own careers.

Creativity fares badly in such an atmosphere.

It wasn’t only actors and actresses who were aging and struggling. Louis B. Mayer had been head of M-G-M studio operations since 1924 and had seen the studio through its glory days. By 1948, due to the growth of television and changing public tastes, the studio had suffered a considerable drop-off in its success. Mayer was ordered by his New York boss to hire writer and producer Dore Schary as production chief with instructions that Schary control cost. While Mayer preferred wholesome family films like Meet Me in St. Louis, Schary wanted to make message films such as 1950’s The Next Voice You Hear, in which a voice claiming to be that of God preempts all radio programs for days all over the world. It starred James Whitmore and Nancy Davis, the future Mrs. Ronald Reagan, first lady of the United States.

By 1950, Mayer and Schary were in a battle for control of the studio. It affected the output. Within 18 months, Mayer was gone.

Schary began the process of not renewing the contracts of and even firing M-G-M stars. Clark Gable lasted until 1954, but a story David Niven told in his memoir Bring on the Empty Horses typifies the mood. Gable’s agent called him to say that M-G-M would not be renewing his contract. A week later, the agent called to say that Gable’s 1953 film Mogambo was a monster hit, that M-G-M wanted to renew his contract after all, and would pay him the $200,000 a film he had been making. Gable said, “Ya know, I think after all this time, I should be making more. See if you get me $300,000 a picture.” The agent called back a week later and said, “You know, they agreed. They’ll give you the $300,000 a picture.” Gable said, “I’ve been thinking, they kinda hurt my feelings by not renewing me after 23 years at M-G-M. Tell you what, see if you can get me $400,000 a picture.” The agent called back a month later and said, “Hey, I did it! I really did it! And it was hard, it was really hard. But they finally agreed to give you $400,000 a picture.” Gable said, “Fine. Now get them up to $500,000 a picture, and then tell them to go F*** themselves.”

Gable started freelancing like Stewart and getting a percentage and was happily employed until his death in 1960. For what it was worth, none of the films Gable made away from M-G-M, with the possible exception of his last, The Misfits, were any better than To Please a Lady.

Back in 1950, Mayer and then Schary, who replaced him a year later, had done nothing to control or combat the blacklist and had even been co-conspirators. The year 1950 was a venomous year. Ingrid Bergman, Bogart’s co-star in Casablanca and one of the most famous and successful stars in Hollywood in the 1940s, was blacklisted in 1950 not for her politics but because she had had an adulterous affair with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini and married him that year.

At M-G-M, Schary had been letting actors go in order to control costs. Even though De Haviland won the Oscar for Best Actress in 1949 by 1950 she was virtually unemployable. She did not make another movie until 1952’s My Cousin Rachel and made only six movies in the entire decade of the 1950s. If studios were letting their contract players go, it goes to reason that they would not want to employ the actress who had virtually destroyed the Hollywood actor contract system. Besides, De Haviland had been accused of having communist sympathies and was later called before the HUAC.

The Paramount Ruling and Il Miracolo Case

The reason Schary and other studio heads had to control costs because of declining ticket sales. The decline was affected by the growth of television but was accelerated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. 334 U.S. 131, (1948). The verdict went against the movie studios, forcing all of them to divest themselves of their movie theater chains on anti-trust grounds. In addition to Paramount, RKO Radio Pictures, 20^th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, and Universal International were named as defendants.

The inability to block-book an entire year's worth of movies caused studios to be more selective in the movies they made, resulting in higher production costs and dramatically fewer movies made. This also caused studios to raise the rates they charged theaters, since the volume of movies fell.

The effects of the Paramount ruling began to be felt in full in 1950.

At the end of 1950 there was another court ruling that forever changed filmmaking on both sides of the ocean.

Il Miracolo was an Italian film directed by Rossellini, whose affair with Ingrid Bergman and subsequent marriage created a scandal in 1950. Its plot centered around a man who calls himself “Saint Joseph,” who was played by director Federico Fellini, co-writer of the script with Fellini. The man impregnantes a disturbed peasant girl named Nanni, who was played by Anna Magnani. The pregnant Nanni comes to believe that she is the Virgin Mary carrying the baby Jesus. The film was obviously intended to be satiric.

It premiered in Europe in 1948 as one of three parts in and the anthology film  titled L’Amore. Il Miracolo sparked widespread moral outrage, and was criticized as harmful and blasphemous. Protesters in Paris picketed the film with signs saying “This Picture Is an Insult to Every Decent Woman and Her Mother” and "Don't Enter the Cesspool."

The anthology film was first shown in New York in November 1950, presented under the title Ways of Love, with English subtitles. In December, Ways of Love was voted the best foreign language film of 1950 by the New York Film Critics Circle.

After its American release, the New York State Board of Review concluded that Il Miracolo or The Miracle was "sacrilegious." After a hearing, on Feb. 16, 1951, the Commissioner of Education was ordered to rescind film’s license. The board's decision was upheld by the New York court, as well as the Court of Appeal.

In Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, 434 U.S. 495 (1952), the Supreme Court  determined that provisions of the New York Education Law that allowed a censor to forbid the commercial showing of a motion picture film it deemed to be “sacrilegious” was a "restraint on freedom of speech and thereby a violation of the First Amendment.

The court stated that “It is not the business of government in our nation to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine, whether they appear in publications, speeches or motion pictures.”

The Burstyn decision weakened the ability of state censorship boards and the Catholic Church to influence the types of films Americans were allowed to see. Consequently, the case signaled the rise of a new era in which films would be more mature and more controversial than ever before. In 1953, Otto Preminger and United Artists decided to release a movie version of the sex comedy The Moon is Blue, even though had been denied a Motion Picture Production Code seal of approval because it used the words “pregnant” and “virgin.” The film was later condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency. But it was still widely distributed and became a hit.

FIlms started being targeted to a narrower audience than in the 1930s and 1940s, and not the wide demographic, family audiences the studios had targeted in the 1930s and 1940s. Foreign films were more widely available, and seeing them indicated that you were sophisticated and not one of the crowd. Even U.S. films, the restraints of censorship relaxed, risked losing some in favor of the fewer.

 And so films in 1950 were either routine or dark, guided by struggling studios with aging stars anxious to break out on their own, which was leading to a star-oriented, narrower audience mode of entertainment.

Aftermath

After such a bleak—in so many meanings of the word--year as 1950, Hollywood reacted. Attempting to give audiences something they could not get from television, M-G-M in 1951 shot one of the most opulent movies ever made, the Roman spectacle Quo Vadis starring Robert Taylor. M-G-M went on to make a series of splashy spectacles—Scaramouche, Beau Brummell, The Adventures of Quentin Durward, and the Knights of the Round Table—and went on to make four of the greatest screen musicals ever made: Singing in the Rain (1952), The Bandwagon (1953), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and Gigi (1958). Other studios followed the spectacle route, and widescreen movies became the norm.

But the films were often empty, the stars were still aging, the studios were in turmoil, films were often written by blacklisted writers using “fronts,” and the ticket sales continued to decline. In 1953, 1956, 1957, and 1958, the Academy Award for screenwriting was won by a blacklisted writer who either used a front or a pseudonym.

Schary was forced out of his position in 1957, and the studio was taken over by “suits.” By 1960, all of M-G-M contract stars had been released, the last being Robert Taylor, who had lasted so long because he was able to fit into films of different genres, including spectacles, and was generally likeable and not troublesome.

RKO Studios was sold to General Tire, which shut it down in 1957 and sold the facilities to Desilu Studios, owned by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, two former film stars who had found success in television with the show I Love Lucy.

In 1950, the films produced were generally unremarkable, and the seeds of decline had been planted.

Copyright 2012 by John T. Aquino