1950s

The 1950s were overwhelmed by a cycle of science-fiction B-movies, some good, some bad, and some so bad they're good: The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951; produced by Howard Hawks), War Of The Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953), the Japanese Gojira (an exercise in cryptozoology by Inoshiro Honda, 1954, spawning the Kaiju Eiga genre of Japanese monster films), The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1956), and Invasion Of The Body-Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956).

There are many more examples of these films, featuring deadly alien invasions (with anti-Communist subtexts) and monsters awakened and/or mutated (exploiting anxiety about atomic radiation), though their lurid posters are often more interesting than the films themselves. The most lamentable science-fiction films of the period were directed by Ed Wood, often cited as the world's worst director. Wood's films, including the notorious camp classic Plan Nine From Outer Space (1956), were certainly incompetent, though they were never dull.

MGM made a long series of Technicolor musicals produced by Arthur Freed in the 1940s and 1950s, including Meet Me In St Louis, An American In Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), On The Town (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1949), and, most famously, Singin' In The Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952). Often acclaimed as the greatest musical film ever made, Singin' In The Rain was a comedy based on Hollywood's transition to sound in the 1920s. The other key Hollywood-on-Hollywood film of the era was the Gothic melodrama Sunset Blvd (Billy Wilder, 1950), which starred two figures from the silent era: actress Gloria Swanson and director Erich VonStroheim.

Alfred Hitchcock relocated from London to Hollywood in the 1940s (his greatest British film was The 39 Steps from 1935), and directed several films (including Notorious in 1946) under contract to David O Selznick. Hitchcock directed his most acclaimed films during the 1950s, after extricating himself from the Selznick contract: Rear Window (1956), and Vertigo (1958). Hitchcock's greatest film, the shocking Psycho, was released in 1960, and influenced 'slasher' films such as Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1974), John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), and Wes Craven's Scream (1996).

Isidore Isou, founder of the Lettriste avant-garde art movement, directed Traite De Bave Et D'Eternite in 1950. The film was deliberately asynchronous, a technique Isou called Cinema Discrepant. Other Lettriste films featured spoken soundtracks though no images (known as Cinechronic films), the first being Gil J Wolman's Atochrone (1950). Isou and Wolman both contributed to Guy Dubord's Cinechronic Hurlements En Faveur DeSade (1952).

In protest at the lack of social realism in British films, a Free Cinema group was established, with a short manifesto published in 1956. The group initially produced three short documentaries which focused on working-class culture and recreation: O Dreamland (Lyndsay Anderson, 1953), Momma Don't Allow (Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, 1955), and Together (Lorenza Mazzetti, 1956). The Free Cinema directors then progressed from documentaries to feature-films: 'kitchen sink' dramas about Northern 'angry young men', such as Room At The Top (Jack Clayton, 1959) and Look Back In Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959), true to the social realist origins of the movement. Britain's other great contribution to 1950s cinema was the series of comedies produced by Ealing, the best of which being The Ladykillers (1955) directed by Alexander Mackendrick and starring Alec Guiness.

The greatest star of the decade was undoubtedly Marilyn Monroe, perhaps the ultimate Hollywood sex symbol. Her renditions of Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953) and I Wanna Be Loved By You in Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959) are her career highlights. Monroe died in 1962, after an (either accidental or suicidal) overdose of sleeping pills.

The Threat From Television

The increasing popularity of television forced Hollywood to introduce numerous technological innovations in order to compete for audiences. The most successful of these innovations were widescreen and 3-D formats based, ironically, on experiments conducted since the 1890s.

The first widescreen process of the 1950s, the triptych Cinerama format used for This Is Cinerama (Merian C Cooper, 1952), was directly inspired by the Polyvision system used in the 1920s, though it added a curved screen to provide a feeling of immersive depth. 20th Century Fox's CinemaScope anamorphic widescreen system soon replaced the more cumbersome Cinerama. CinemaScope was based directly on Henri Chretien's Hypergoner system, which he had first demonstrated in Construire Un Feu (1929). Hypergonar enabled not only horizontal panoramic projection but also unique vertical widescreen images. The first film in the CinemaScope format was the rather dull epic The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953). In order to fully demonstrate the panoramic potential of the new widescreen formats, a number of biblical epics of the 1920s were remade in widescreen Technicolor splendour, including Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ (William Wyler, 1959; a remake of Fred Niblo's 1925 original) and Cecil B DeMille's remake of his own 1923 The Ten Commandments in 1956. (They were dismissed as 'tits and sand' films by the industry, for their over-reliance on exoticism.) Since the 1950s, ultra-wide formats have only rarely been utilised for narrative films, relegated instead to novelty attractions such as Imax (Tiger Child by Donald Brittain, 1970), Omnimax (Garden Isle by Roger Tilton, 1973), and Showscan (New Magic by Douglas Trumbull, 1983). These audience-engulfing, large-screen and multi-screen formats were initially proposed by Stan VanDerBeek in his 1966 manifesto "Culture:Intercom" And Expanded Cinema: A Proposal And Manifesto.

Another gimmick used by Hollywood to lure audiences away from TV was 3-D, which had been used previously in isolated experimental films and the silent film The Power Of Love (Nat G Deverich and Harry K Fairall, 1922) though was first promoted as a mainstream attraction in Bwana Devil (Arch Oboler, 1952). 3-D lent itself most naturally to science-fiction films such as It Came From Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953). Director William Castle (The Tingler, 1959) was the undisputed king of gimmicks in the 1950s, though his inventive marketing schemes were far more memorable than the films they promoted.

To provide a unique alternative to television, American drive-in cinemas began screening sensationalist, melodramatic exploitation films, from disposable WIP (Women-In-Prison) films such as Caged (John Cromwell, 1949) to more substantial JD ('juvenile delinquent') films such as The Wild One and Rebel Without A Cause.

The Method

Though most 1950s exploitation films were low-budget, absurdly moralistic, and instantly out-of-date, there are two clear exceptions: The Wild One starring Marlon Brando and Rebel Without A Cause starring James Dean. Brando was one of a number of young male actors who starred in juvenile delinquent films about youth rebellion, the prototypical example being Brando's own performance in The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953). James Dean starred in the yet more iconic Rebel Without A Cause (Nicholas Ray) in 1955 (released after Dean had been killed in a car accident). A parallel trend existed in Japanese cinema, with a genre known as Taiyozoku inaugurated by Takumi Furukawa's Taiyo No Kisetsu (1956).

In A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951), Marlon Brando introduced a new acting style to the cinema: the Method. Trained at the Actors' Studio, he brought an unprecedented intensity to screen acting, notably in On The Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954). Director Kazan named names to senator Joe McCarthy during the Communist witch-hunts, and On The Waterfront, in which Brando's character testifies against organised criminals, can be seen as self-justification for Kazan's actions.

The new realism of Brando and Dean's acting style was complemented by a new generation of directors who produced their own films and thus bypassed the studio system. Shadows (1959), by John Cassavetes, was made completely independently in 16mm. Stanley Kubrick also produced his own films, directing independently since the early 1950s (his breakthrough being Paths Of Glory, 1957). Arguably, no other director has matched Kubrick's perfectionism or his consistent genius. In the 1960s, he relocated to England, where he directed the satirical masterpiece Dr Strangelove Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964), the stunning science-fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and the stylised A Clockwork Orange (1971). Kubrick's films belong to no specific style or movement, though he was clearly influenced by the fluid camerawork of Max Ophuls (for example, Lola Montes, 1955).

The most determined of the independent producer-directors was Otto Preminger, who released The Moon Is Blue (1953) without Production Code approval. He also directed one of the best documentary-style Noir thrillers, Where The Sidewalk Ends, in 1950.

World Cinema

In India, Satyajit Ray directed the 'Apu trilogy' (Pather Panchali in 1955, Aparajito in 1956, and Apur Sansar in 1959), in stark contrast to the musical decadence of Bollywood films such as Alam Ara (Ardeshir Irani, 1931). The Apu trilogy marked a temporary shift away from populist Bollywood fantasies, helping to foster an Indian culture of non-populist films known broadly as Parallel Cinema, including art films (Kalamatka) and experimental cinema (Prayogika). In the 1960s, New Indian Cinema was fully established as an alternative to formulaic mainstream populism, led by Bhuvan Shome (Mrinal Sen, 1969). With Arun Kaul, Mrinal Sen wrote a Manifesto Of The New Cinema Movement, criticising traditional Indian musical films, in 1968. Shyam Benegal's debut film Ankur (1974) has been described as an example of Middle Cinema, as it represented a balance between the artistic integrity of Parallel Cinema and the populism of the mainstream Indian film industry.

In Italy, Federico Fellini directed La Strada (1954), which was compared to French Realisme Poetique, in contrast to Italy's prevalent Neo-Realismo style. Italian cinema was gradually moving away from the social worthiness of Neo-Realismo, and populist genres such as the Spaghetti western, the Giallo, and the Peplum would all flourish in the 1960s. Peplum films began with Le Fatiche Di Ercole (Pietro Francisci, 1958).

During the 1950s, directors such as Satyajit Ray, Federico Fellini, and Ingmar Bergman all established international reputations for the cinema industries of their respective countries. In Sweden, Smultronstallet (1957) and the masterful religious allegory Det Sjunde Inseglet (1957), and, later, Persona (1966) and Viskningar Och Rop (1972), marked director Ingmar Bergman as one of world cinema's greatest artists. The most significant example of this internationalisation was Japan's master director Akira Kurosawa. His Rashomon (1950) and his epic Ken-Geki film Schinin No Samurai (1954), both starring Toshiro Mifune, brought the Japanese film industry to the forefront of international attention. His other siginificant films of the period include Ikiru (1952), Kumonosu Jo (1957), and Kakushi Toride No San Akunin (1958).

Japan's other greatest film-makers, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu, had, unlike Kurosawa, been directing ever since the silent era, though their greatest films were also made in the 1950s. Mizoguchi's work - Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) and Sansho Dayu (1954) - has been compared to the work of French director Jean Renoir, as he shares Renoir's use of deep-focus photography, constantly moving camera, and tragi-comic narrative. By contrast, Ozu's Noriko trilogy (Banshun from 1949, Bakushu from 1951, and Tokyo Monogatari from 1953) contains virtually no camera movement at all. (A nostalgic trend for Meiji-Mono films, set in the historical Meiji period, was revived in the 1950s, the greatest example being Toyoda Shirou's Gan from 1953.)

Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari is an example of Japan's Kaidan Eiga, films featuring ghost stories (an early example of which is Mizoguchi's own Kyoren No Onna Shisho, 1926). The dramatic realism of Ugetsu Monogatari is atypical of the genre, however, as most examples are supernatural horror stories. Nobuo Nakagawa, the greatest of all Japanese horror directors, made an Obaneneko-Mono film about a ghostly cat (Borei Kaibyo Yashiki, 1958). In 1964, Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan was the first Kaidan film to gain international recognition (it was probably made with an international audience in mind, offering a convenient compilation of classic Kaidan scenarios). The genre's real breakthrough came decades later, in 1998, when Hideo Nakata's J-Horror Ringu - following in the wake of Korea's K-Horror ghost film Yeogo Goedam (Park Ki-Hyung, 1998) - became the first worldwide Kaidan blockbuster.

Genre Revisionism

Hollywood genre cycles from the 1930s were revisited in the 1950s, notably the gangster film and the western. James Cagney starred in White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949), equalling and perhaps even exceeding the achievements of his original 1930s classic The Public Enemy. The western underwent considerable revision, influenced by the surprisingly radical High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952). John Wayne, who starred in Howard Hawks's Red River (1948) and John Ford's 'cavalry trilogy' (Fort Apache, 1948; She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, 1949; Rio Grande, 1950), gave arguably his greatest performance in Ford's The Searchers (1956), introducing a new psychological complexity to the genre and presenting the traditional western hero as an anachronistic outcast.

The dark and amoral world of Film Noir reached its logical conclusion with the apocalyptic Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955). Orson Welles, director of Citizen Kane, began his Noir masterpiece Touch Of Evil (1958) with a sequence that rivals Bronenosets Potyomkin's 'Odessa Steps' as the greatest sequence ever filmed. Its opening shot is a stunning and seemingly never-ending tracking sequence.

Like the 1920s, the '50s represent a golden age for Japanese cinema. In the 1930s, a series of literary adaptions (Bungei Eiga) were produced, including Izu No Odoriko (Heinosuke Gosho, 1933) and Wakai Hito (Shiro Toyoda, 1937); in the 1940s, there were jingoistic war dramas (Kokusaku Eiga) such as Hawaii-Mare Oki Kaisen (Kajiro Yamamoto, 1942); however, in terms of variety and quantity, the 1920s and, especially, the '50s, remain unmatched in Japan.

The short-lived Keiko Eiga films of the 1920s inspired a new genre of social-realist Japanese cinema, known as Shakai-Mono. The director who dominated this genre was Tadashi Imai, who was well-known for the unsentimental nature of his films (called 'nakanai') such as Himeyuri No To (1953). By contrast, most Japanese films were highly melodramatic ('namida chodai'), typified by Kinoyu Tanaka's Chibusa Yo Ein Nare (1955).

Another 1920s Japanese genre, Shomin-Geki, was also revived in the 1950s, branching into several new sub-genres. Mikio Naruse's Meshi (1951), for instance, was an example of the Tsuma-Mono sub-genre (films about wives). Keisuke Kinoshita's Nihon No Higeki (1953) represents the Haha-Mono sub-genre (films about mothers). The most popular of these Neo-Shomin-Geki films was Heinosuke Gosho's Entotsu No Mieru Basho (1953).

The New Wave

In a break away from the prevalent French Realisme Poetique, film critics writing for Cahiers Du Cinema magazine (edited by Andre Bazin) began making their own films, in a movement that became known as the Nouvelle Vague. Cahiers writers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut recognised the individualism of directors such as Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, and this realisation led to the 'politique des auteurs' - the notion, popularised by Alexandre Astruc, that a director has artistic control over a film in the same way as an author has over a novel. They key text in the formation of the Nouvelle Vague was Francois Truffaut's Une Certaine Tendance Du Cinema Francais, published in Cahiers in 1954 and decrying what he saw as the retrogressive state of French cinema (he dismissively renamed the popular 'cinema de qualite' as 'cinema du papa').

Godard's A Bout De Souffle (1959), with its hand-held camerawork, location-shooting, and jump-cut editing, signalled a reinvigoration of French cinema. The movement's other early masterpieces are the enigmatic collage-film Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) and Truffaut's Les 400 Coups. Truffaut's film caused a sensation when it opened in 1959, though Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob Le Flambeur (1955), Agnes Varda's La Pointe Courte (1956), and Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958) are regarded as key progenitors of the movement.

Aside from the Nouvelle Vague, French cinema of the period is remembered for its suspenseful and atmospheric horror films. Specifically, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1954) was a significant influence on Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.