1945 - 1960 The Suburban Dream Jump to:
1945 - 1960 The Suburban Dream Jump to:
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4 Cinema's Heroes and Families
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Western Import and its representative, M. Jacques Haik, launched the Keystone comedies with Mabel, Fatty, and Charlie in Europe in 1915; other comedies of theirs not distributed by this house were suppressed. In a very few months Chaplin had replaced Linder as king of comedy, and cinemas had to book A Night at the Show weeks ahead. Western Import was even compelled to place photographs of Mabel and Charlie on sale so as to make their appearance widely familiar and to discourage imitators. For there were imitators galore. The firm of Bonaz had brought over the films of Billie Ritchie, who wore the same mustache, the same pants, the same hat as Chaplin's, and carefully copied his movements. He shared Chaplin's success for several months. There were other doubles, not to mention Lloyd, who also sported the little mustache. There was a Jack and, after the war, even a Charley; then this Charley and Billie Ritchie went to law, accusing each other of plagiarism. Both of them lost. All of this merely added to the fabulous prestige of Chaplin.
Naturally enough, so great a success as his was bound to annoy some of the producers. In 1916 there was quite a lot of feeling against American importations in the film world. Le Cinéma published an article signed by Jean Yvel which violently attacked Chaplin. His Tillie's Punctured Romance had just appeared, an insane comedy with Marie Dressler and Mabel Normand. "His art, if we may call it so without profaning the word, is more simian than human. . . . Charlot is not a comedian, he is a twopennyha'penny jumping jack." After calling on the sacred names of la belle France and of education, this writer concluded: "What a far cry is this from the artistry displayed by Prince in the Rigadin films!"
The cinema's heroes and families were much less secure than television's. Westems and epics alike defined the hero as someone to whom violence is done; loser, martyr or victim, the liberal hero was passive, defensive, unwilling or unable to take the initiative himself.
There was an inescapable taint of masochism in the inevitability with which James Stewart, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, even Gary Cooper, were deliberately maimed and humiliated. Heston seldom survived an epic without being stripped and mutilated at least once.
Younger male stars, trained in the neurotic mannerisms of the Method school of acting, took the performance of physical and emotional vulnerability even further. What often seemed to be being celebrated was their capacity to soak up punishment, and no-one responded better to this treatment than the sulky and indecipherable Marlon Brando, whose mumbling was always most justified after a beating. Even John Wayne, the great icon of conservative male stability, did not escape without having repression and neurosis attached to his character in John Ford's The Searchers.
The movie going public first saw James Dean on the screen in East of Eden with Julie Harris. In this film, Jimmy was an overnight sensation. For his performance in East of Eden, he was nominated for an Academy Award. he received the first Audience Poll Award for Best Actor in 1955. Fame and fortune seemed his. In his second film, Rebel Without a Cause, he was supported by co-stars, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo.
Jimmy had looks, appeal, talent, a serious attitude toward his profession and a keen desire to become a director. His friends and co-workers felt his sensitivity and talent. Rugged sports were a necessity in his life. Often at Warner Brothers Studio, he would spar with an athletic coach. His first purchase in Hollywood was a beautiful Palomino horse, next a motorcycle and finally his $7000 German made sports car, a Porsche Spyder 550. During the filming of Giant with Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, the studio forbade him to engage in any kind of racing. The day after the film was completed, Jimmy was happily preparing for one of the year's most important and exciting sports car events. He left Los Angeles headed for the race in his Porsche-suddenly at the intersection of Routes 46 and 41 near Cholame, a car appeared-a collision and death came instantly to Dean, age 24, on September 30, 1955. Jimmy was brought back to Fairmount and laid to rest in the Winslow family plot in Park Cemetery, Fairmount, a short distance from the farm on which he grew up. Funeral services were held at the Fairmount Friends Church on October 8, 1955.
The gratification of the mammary fixations of American males, which was represented by Jane Russell, Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe, rarely passed without some barb directed at the childish fatuity of the version of male desire they embodied.
The success of Alfred Hitchcock's films, premised on the inexpIicable, intolerable disruption of bourgeois normality which plunged its leading characters into an absurd chasm of madness, guilt and adventure, impIied an audience excessively interested in exploring its anxieties. The hero of North By Northwest (1959), played by Cary Grant, is an advertising executive called Roger O. Thomhill.
The O., he explained, "stands for nothing", suggesting a hollowness at the centre of American materialist culture which permitted the abyss to open. Hitchcock's next film, Psycho, toyed obscenely with even more intimate terrors, of murder in Mother' s bedroom and compulsive behavior in the toilet.
The export market was becoming increasingly important for Hollywood, and its operations were aided by the State Department, which had long recognized the usefulness of movies as advertisements for the American way of life.
But the harder motive, as ever, was economic. With the decline in American revenues after 1946 and the sharp rise in production costs, foreign sales became increasingly important. By 1955 the stability of the international market was as vital to the major distributors as the stability of the home market had been in the 1930s.
Expanding foreign interests was less difficult than finding ways of maintaining home audiences. The industry's failure to resist the encroachments of television in part provoked, and was in part permitted by, the exploitation of an undeveloped market elsewhere. However much the masses stayed at home, film was now definitely mass entertainment, and was increasingly designed for an internationally undifferentiated audience.
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