© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
Two modes of prestige film
In gauging the changes that Hollywood underwent during the postwar years, two scenes from ‘quality’ films released two decades apart are exemplary. In the first, Dodsworth (William Wyler, Goldwyn/United Artists, 1936), a series of six shots immediately signals classical film narration and elevated production values. Sam Dodsworth's (Walter Huston) entrance into the dining room of an ocean liner consists of an elaborate tracking shot interwoven with the crossing of extras behind his forward motion, then a low-angle, deep-space composition that morphs into a subtle crane shot of Dodsworth, before he is joined by Major Lockert (David Niven). The effect is to assert a narrational presence in excess of the characters, a point of view outside the action that, even if it does not tell the story in the way a third-person omniscient narrator does in literature, connotes a literary voice. Afterwards, a low-angle, deep-space shot of his wife Fran's (Ruth Chatterton) entrance highlights much of what distinguished the 1930s prestige picture: the modernist set design, giving a greater sense of solidity and grandeur than the sound stage sets actually possessed; the populated and fully furnished mise-en-scene; the somewhat experimental yet refined costume design; the elaborate lighting arrangement, keeping the star in full and flattering illumination, despite camera and actor movement. Finally, the last shot visually doubles the love triangle theme by framing Fran between the two men, a framing that is repeated throughout the film. In summary, both cinematically and thematically, William Wyler and Samuel Goldwyn have given what to them – and to audiences in general – was an appropriate treatment of work from a novelist like Sinclair Lewis, with his high-culture credentials. ‘In the years that followed the Second World War’, David Thomson offers, ‘Wyler was Hollywood's idea of a great director – respectable, diligent, tasteful, a servant of stars and box-office potential, and a reliable master of big projects’.1 As Dodsworth reveals, the same applied before the war. William Wyler was one of the classical Hollywood directors most associated with the prestige film. His projects generally had literary sources, ‘serious’ themes and lavish production values.
In contrast, Marty (Dilbert Mann, UA/Hecht-Lancaster, 1955) resists much of classical Hollywood's ‘quality’ style. In one famous scene, Marty (Ernest Borgnine) and his mother have a dinner conversation about Marty's marriageability. The dining-room set is striking in the severity of its low-key lighting and recalls the use B filmmakers historically have made of minimal lighting to disguise inexpensive sets.2 Throughout the scene, fast film stock and heavy single-source overhead lighting leave very little of the room visible, just the table, the characters and part of a sideboard. Twelve mostly static shots last for two-and-a-half minutes; the scene consists of a few long takes containing much of the dialogue (shots 1, 7 and 12 last at least thirty seconds each) and a few shorter shot/counter-shot alternations done with a multiple-camera setup. Thus the action is blocked and shot much like a television show – no surprise, given that the source was neither a canonical play nor a grand historical subject but the anthology television theatre programme, Goodyear Television Playhouse. The telecast's director, Delbert Mann, directed the independently produced film, and its writer, Paddy Chayefsky, was known primarily for his writing for anthology programmes and for Marty specifically. The result was the maintenance of a television aesthetic. As Eric Barnouw argues about the anthology drama:
To this close-up drama, live television brought an element that had almost vanished from film. ... Film had long been dominated by its own kinds of time, made by splices in the editing room. ... The manipulation of ‘film time’ offered creative pleasures so beguiling to film makers that they had virtually abolished ‘real time’ from the screen. Its appearance in long stretches of television drama gave a sense of the rediscovery of reality – especially for people whose only drama had been film.3The film version trafficked in this ‘real time’ too: the previous scene, in which Marty, calling a woman to ask for a date, is shot in a continuous three-and-a-half-minute take, with the camera simply panning to follow Marty's movement, or tracking in for emotional punctuation. At an earlier point in Hollywood's history, this live-theatre aesthetic would have been read as ‘cheap’ and undesirable. Marty had a negative cost of only $400,000, and it is impossible to imagine a feature film so low in budget qualifying as a prestige film in the 1930s. In 1956, however, the film garnered four Academy Awards out of eight nominations and established a precedent for smaller-scale dramas from directors with theatrical and anthology television credentials. Rather than looking for cultural legitimacy in a Broadway play adapting a Nobel Prize-winning novel, as Dodsworth did, Marty inverted the cultural touchstone by looking to a television show itself looking to off-Broadway theatre.
The aesthetic difference between these two films registers, in large part, in their divergent concepts of what ‘serious’ entertainment means and should be. In this area, Hollywood underwent a far-reaching transformation in the postwar years: newer genres emerged, such as the topical political drama, the pseudodocumentary, and eventually ‘mature’ Broadway adaptations aimed towards thematic, stylistic and topical importance; location shooting, contemporary settings and social critique gained a prominent place in US commercial cinema. Beyond this trend in quantity, the postwar years saw a qualitative shift in what counted as serious cinema, as the nature and role of the prestige film changed in Hollywood. When film historians speak of the prestige film in the studio years, they designate a production category surpassing the typical A film in its budget, treatment and subject matter. During the postwar years, however, another type of serious film came to prominence, one that can also claim the term ‘prestige’ picture since it speaks to, or elicits acclaim from, observers inside and outside the film industry. Where the film industry defined the prestige picture of the 1930s, film consumers defined the new type of prestige film. Dodsworth and Marty thus represent two modes of prestige film. The industrial mode looked outward, conspicuously, towards higher cultural forms to lend Hollywood narratives the aura of respectability. The socially-defined mode looked inward, internalizing an aesthetic and form of perception that itself was meant to be culturally more elevated. This analytic distinction is also a historical one: over time, the Hollywood prestige film transformed its overwhelming reliance on the Dodsworth mode of prestige cinema to the increasingly internalized middlebrow sensibility of the Marty mode. By the emergence of the ‘New Hollywood’ in the 1970s and 1980s, the literary adaptations and historical films deemed prestigious in the classical years had all but disappeared.
Key to this shift was a cycle of social problem films released between 1945 and 1949. A glance at the Academy Award's Best Picture nominations from this period shows examples from this cycle: The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945), a ‘gritty’ expose of the problems of alcoholism; Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946), a triptych of the problems facing returning veterans; Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), an indictment of anti-Semitism; The Snake Pit (Anatole Litvak, 1948), a plea for more humane mental healthcare; Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949), a melodrama about racial passing in the South.4 Their box-office and critical success led competing studios to produce more message films and, in the process, establish a new model for the socially-defined prestige film. This transformation was twofold. An industrial transformation of the prestige film emerged from the changing conditions of the film industry in the 1940s, particularly after World War II. Meanwhile, a larger cultural legitimization of the cinema created a receptive context that would champion the newer mode of prestige cinema. The social problem films were the site of a mutually influential process in place by the late 1940s: Hollywood's prestige dramas began to incorporate more finely internalized modes of aesthetic judgment just as the popular press critics responsible for the legitimization of Hollywood's product took the prestige drama as their main focus. This interplay between internal trends in the film industry and its context as social practice helps to explain Hollywood's makeover between the conspicuous cultural touchstone of Dodsworth and the quiet respectability of Marty – indeed, between its classical form and what film scholars identify as postclassical style and content.
One significant factor internal to the film industry was responsible for the emergence of the newer type of prestige film. Starting in 1940 but more particularly after 1947, the oligopolistic and vertically integrated arrangement of the industry started to undergo reorganization because of antitrust prosecutions and rulings. This process stretched for two decades, but various stages of its implementation had an immediate impact. Embedded in the industry's metamorphosis was a transformation of the prestige film itself. The stability of the cultural marketplace for movies in the 1920s and 1930s was matched by the stability of oligopoly and vertical integration. After World War II, however, the Paramount antitrust case upended studio economic arrangements. When combined with new marketplace conditions and more localized economic trends, divorcement created the ideal conditions for some studios and independent producers to shift modes of prestige film production.
The classical prestige picture had its roots in a stable studio system of content and genre differentiation. As Tino Balio has argued, the prestige picture of the 1930s was not a genre but rather a production category. ‘A prestige picture is typically a big-budget special based on a pre-sold property’, he writes, ‘often as not a "classic", and tailored for top stars.’ He lists four cycles that dominated the decade's big-budget productions: nineteenth-century European literature; Shakespearean plays; bestselling novels and hit Broadway plays written by Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors; biographical and historical subjects.5 These were usually two hours or more in their running time and were exhibited on a roadshow basis, similar to the legitimate theatre, with single features, increased prices, intermissions and reserved seating. The exhibition treatment, production values, star draw and overall quality usually made these films the bigger box-office performers of the decade. Just as importantly, Balio notes, they were the defining public face of the studio, both within the industry and among the larger public.
The prestige film of the 1950s shared many characteristics with its 1930s counterpart. If anything, film specials with high-profile premieres and roadshow exhibition were now the mainstay of a greatly reduced and entrenched film industry, not just occasional productions. Biblical epics replicated the spectacle of 1930s historical dramas such as In Old Chicago (Henry King, 1938) on a grander scale. The literary and historical melodrama Raintree County (Edward Dmytryk, 1957) mimicked Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) in its running time, theme and intermission. Broadway hits by William Inge (Picnic [Joshua Logan, 1955]) and Tennessee Williams (Streetcar Named Desire [Elia Kazan, 1951]) were adapted for the screen.
Nevertheless, on closer examination the postwar prestige film was different. For one thing, legitimate theatre had itself changed after the war and now veered away from popular taste and towards a literary realism and ‘mature’ content that suited the highbrow and, more especially, middlebrow tastes of those still attending dramatic theatre. More importantly, the postwar spectacle film was not necessarily the same as a prestige production. Stanley Kramer's problem films, such as The Defiant Ones (1958), still served as exemplars of ‘serious cinema’. Along with Marty, other modestly budgeted, black-and-white dramas such as On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954), Twelve Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957) and Inherit the Wind (Stanley Kramer, 1960) defined Hollywood at its most literary and intellectual. From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinneman, 1953) surpassed in prestige the box-office juggernaut The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953). In the postwar years, the prestige film had split between the popular prestige picture, often an epic spectacle, and the critical prestige picture, including the problem film and the literary melodrama. Two modes of prestige, in essence, sat side by side.
Ultimately, the breakup of the studio's vertical monopoly and horizontal oligopoly put into play secondary changes that fostered studios' reliance on the critical prestige picture. Most notably, the Paramount decision made the distribution market competitive once more: distributors (the studios) still formed an oligopoly, but now exhibitors could begin to purchase films regardless of studio affiliation, without the restrictions of block or blind booking. Michael Conant points out that the process of divorcement was a decade long. After the Supreme Court ruling in the United States vs Paramount Studios case of 1948, it would take until the end of the 1950s before MGM divested its ownership of Loews cinemas, but already in 1951 Paramount's first-run theatres were booking on a strictly competitive basis.6 Still other effects were felt earlier: block booking was limited to five-feature blocks after the first consent decree in 1940, and the practice ended after the first Paramount decree in 1946. In all, divorcement proceeded unevenly, and the lag between the consent decree and final divestment – and the staggering of different studios' divestment – provided fertile ground for the postwar social problem films and new prestige films.
The double-feature system of the 1930s and war years was, to begin with, suddenly subject to instability. For a decade the system had functioned for all three branches of the industry. Brian Taves points to several advantages that the B films held for the studios: they met demand for product, guaranteed cash flow and ‘balance[d] a large overhead by using sets, stages, ranches, and contract talent on a nearly continual basis’.7 The fixed rentals of the lower halves of the double bills were a hedge against the riskier yet potentially more profitable A films. One can overstate the functional nature of the double features, since audiences and producers alike frequently chafed at the practice in the 1930s, yet the double feature matched the exhibition market of the Depression years, with its premium on variety and quantity over quality; generally, only first-run downtown theatres could resist the demand for double bills.8
The end of block booking mandated by the consent decree did not stop the practice of double features, but it did put more competitive pressure on both the A and B features. The war years were the start of a decade-long shift in budget allotment of the major studios. ‘Because of the overheated first-run market, the success of reissues, and decree-related selling policies’, Thomas Schatz notes, ‘the majors all but eliminated low-budget productions during the war.’9 Essentially, A-film budgets became less risky and more profitable, so production budgets rose accordingly, fuelled additionally by inflation and rising input costs. The limitations of block booking meant that the majors needed A-film quality more and B-film market hedge less. This situation would become acute in the postwar years, as the ban on block booking would lead to the majors' outright abandonment of their B units. Now that the end of block booking increased demand for higher-quality pictures and decreased demand for the Bs, studios found production costs rising even higher. The postwar market, in fact, was pushing in two directions at once. Studios could not find a market of exhibitors willing to pay what they considered an adequate price for the B product, while parts of the exhibition market, especially the neighbourhood and small-town ‘circuit theatres’, were still showing double bills and found it difficult to rent affordable films for the lower half of the bill. By 1949, Variety reported that double-bill theatres had difficulty finding non-percentage-rental pictures when even B-film stalwarts Columbia and Republic announced the plan to cut B production.10 By the early 1950s, rising production costs and falling profits would effectively cause the double-feature system to implode.
Paradoxically, the dual feature's demise had a particular impact on the production category by definition never shown in double features: the prestige film. Aided at first by the strong wartime A-film market, prestige films of the traditional mould performed quite well for the studios. Spurred on by demand, their production costs would rise steadily throughout the decade; additionally, inflation and the expense of Technicolor pushed the cost of prestige films higher in the postwar years. Industry-wide, the average feature budget in 1942 was $336,000; that figure rose to $554,386 in 1945 and $665,000 in 1946.11 The trend was sustainable as attendance was steady or rising, but already in 1947 the exhibition market faced its first domestic decline and loss of overseas markets to protectionism. Suddenly the worries of industry observers were well founded.12 Without a steady income stream from integrated theatres or block-booked B films, the studios' balance sheets were squeezed and the top end of their output was in crisis. 20th Century-Fox, for instance, produced a few extravagantly budgeted prestige films in the late 1940s. At a time when the studio's A films ranged from $1 million to $2.5 million, Fox counted on 1946's The Razor's Edge (Edmund Goulding, 1946), costing $3.35 million, 1947's Forever Amber (Otto Preminger, 1947), costing $6.38 million, and 1948's Captain from Castile (Henry King, 1947), costing $4.5 million. Each meant a loss on the balance sheet, with high rental returns ($8 million worldwide for Amber, $6 million for Captain) that nonetheless failed to recuperate below-the-line costs. As Aubrey Solomon observes on the expensive prestige film: ‘On the average $1.5 million picture, such returns would be wildly successful, but new extravagance would take its toll on profits’.13 Studios in fact did rein in extravagance, and quickly. Over the next two years, Fox would reduce its typical high-A budget from $2.35 million to $1.785 million, a drop repeated across the industry.14
One strategy for cutting costs came from the mid-A and near-A market. The social problem film was one obvious success story. Problem films were not entirely new in the late 1940s, but as a prestige genre their appearance was intermittent, more of a hypothetical promise of what serious Hollywood could be than a trend in its achievement. Nonetheless, films like Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940) established the direction in which producer Darryl Zanuck, Fox and the industry in general would go after 1945. Wyler's independent Best Years of Our Lives shared some stylistic traits with the director's earlier prestige productions, but pursued prestige through topical reference rather than presold source material and through a stark, realist aesthetic rather than spectacle. The year before, Lost Weekend had won Best Picture from the Academy despite production values that were plain, mid-budget and far removed from the Grapes of Wrath's literary tone and pace. Fox's ‘race problem’ cycle of Gentleman's Agreement, The Snake Pit and Pinky continued the trend with contemporary milieu, decent but modest production values and moderate star draw. In fact, Fox found the mid-budgeted, A-film, social problem picture to be its most profitable type of film. Gentleman's Agreement earned $3.9 million domestically, The Snake Pit $4.1 million and Pinky $4.2 million. Even without world rentals, these returns were essentially double the negative costs. Unable to fund profitably lush production values or lavish sets, Fox opted for prestige based on realism in style or content. Poor box-office performance of the spectacle prestige film signalled to the studio that audiences and critics were just as likely to reward the ‘quality’ mid-budget drama. Fox's formula was soon copied: Susan Hayward tried to imitate Ray Milland's career success by playing an alcoholic in Smash-Up (Stuart Heisler, 1947), normally staid and prestige-focused MGM felt emboldened to adapt Intruder in the Dust (Clarence Brown, 1949) and Columbia entered the prestige race with the socially relevant All the King's Men (Robert Rossen, 1949).
The postwar problem films were not prestige pictures in the strictest sense of film industry economics: big-budget offerings exhibited on a roadshow basis. Except for Best Years of Our Lives, the initial problem films like Lost Weekend or Gentleman's Agreement played as normal A films, albeit ones with unexpectedly long runs and strong box office. By other measures, though, they had the marks of the prestige picture: their advertisements served as the public face of their studios, in both the general and the trade press; they received disproportionate recognition from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the popular press championed them; and they tapped into a broad cultural admiration, especially from community groups, clergy and members of an urban cultural elite.15 In the new conditions of a postwar USA, the move to relevant content had guided studios to the new model of the prestige film.
Nowhere was this model clearer than in ambitious Bs that crossed over. RKO's Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947), for instance, was shot at a negative cost of between $500,000 and $650,000 (a near-A budget in 1947), and grossed four times its cost by becoming a hit in major metropolitan areas, where its run broke local theatre records.16 The film's box-office success prompted Variety to write of studios pursuing an aggressive B policy:
Announcements of the ‘high end of Bs’ have been customarily greeted with a yawn in the trade, but present efforts appear to have a bit more substance than the usual exercise at label-juggling. Such important grossers as 20th-Fox's ‘Boomerang’ and RKO's ‘Crossfire’ made it perfectly apparent last year that a B-size budget didn't have to mean a B-sized picture.The strategy of upgrading B-budgeted films into A films through problem-film material was repeated at RKO, before Schary was ousted,18 and across the industry. In turn, even A-film, problem-film producer Fox adopted the upgrading strategy for its low-A No Way Out (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1950), which would, as Zanuck's comments on the script indicated:...
Warner Brothers' plan is to make the lower-budgeters as exercises for their embryo talent, but Metro and RKO both aim to use generously the upper-bracket personnel among producers, writers, directors and players. Dore Schary, RKO production chief, who was responsible for the $650,000 ‘Crossfire,’ is particularly hot on the idea of making pix at from $400,000 to $600,00 that, by the unusual nature of their story, will compensate for other values that must be shaved to stay within this ceiling.
...
The type of story is particularly important in the change. The former concept was that minimum cost films must generally be adventure and action yarns. Compare that with Schary's ‘Boy with the Green Hair’, now in preparation, which is aimed at fighting prejudice, bearing similarity to this extent to ‘Crossfire’.
Rather than being produced down to audiences who might be expected to see a B in a subsequent-run house, Schary's using the low-budget unit to experiment with mature stories and yarns with social content that can attract the type of audience which just doesn't ‘go to the movies’ but picks its pictures.17
strive for realism and not extravagance. I visualize this picture in the same category as Boomerang, Street With No Name [13 Rue Madeleine], and Call Northside 777, and while it is in the same milieu as Gentleman's Agreement and The Snake Pit, it does not, of course, demand such an expensive overall production.19Zanuck's comparison points to the distinction the studio made between the problem film and the pseudodocumentary – the A and B genres of postwar realism – and its use of realism as marker of aesthetic distinction. The trend would continue until the final divorcement of Loews Theatres – throughout the 1950s, Schary slated a number of low-budget productions as social problem films, including Go For Broke! (Robert Pirosh, 1951) and Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955).
These major studio examples do not include the many independent productions that shared the major studios' gambits for prestige. Independent production had been around for some time, usually appended to United Artists' distribution arm. However, the war years encouraged independent production. The emphasis on quality A films and the first-run market boom led studios to adopt greater use of unit production and of independent production, while tax laws encouraged talented individuals to form their own production companies.20 ‘Independent’ companies proliferated at varying degrees of distance from the studios. One key arrangement was the in-house independent, whose freedom brought creative licence to use lower-budgeted pictures as a sort of research and development arm for the studio. Meanwhile, by the postwar years, competitive distribution gave truly independent producers entry into the exhibition market.
Whatever their distance from the major and minor studios, independents were able to use social relevance or pseudodocumentary realism to parlay a low-budget film into mid-budget prestige and box-office returns. Mark Hellinger, in-house at Universal, turned to pseudodocumentary for The Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1948), while Schary's Vanguard Pictures provided the social comedy The Farmer's Daughter (H.C. Potter, 1947) for Selznick and RKO. The cycle of what Thom Anderson calls films gris, noir films with a realist milieu and left-leaning message or allegory, displays the range of the new independent relationships: The Lawless (Joseph Losey, 1950, Pine-Thomas in house at Paramount), Body and Soul (Robert Rossen, 1947, Enterprise Productions through United Artists), Give Us This Day/Christ In Concrete (Edward Dmytryk, 1949, ‘independent’ for poverty-row Eagle-Lion) and Right Cross (John Sturges, 1950, B film at MGM). 21 Equally important were the higher-key social problem dramas emerging with the late-1940s' ‘race problem’ cycle. Louis de Rochemont's Lost Boundaries (Alfred Werker, 1949) managed to combine problem film and pseudodocumentary, and the film's distribution company, Film Classics, was duly rewarded. The company, in fact, had staked its distribution fee on the film's success; the box-office success and increased prestige of Lost Boundaries allowed Film Classics, a small independent distributor specializing in rereleases, to seek better independent productions to increase the money it fronted for independent production projects.22 Kramer got a boost from Home of the Brave, which like Lost Boundaries was produced for under $600,000. The number of social problem independents continued and multiplied in the 1950s: the Kramer films, I Want to Live! (Robert Wise, 1958), Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955) and the Samuel Fuller films dealing with racial prejudice are prominent examples. The example of Walter Wanger's production of I Want to Live! shows how, well into the late 1950s, independents continued to upgrade low-budget films to A films for the first-run market by adopting social problem content.23 Afterwards, the new mode of prestige film would no longer be concentrated in the moribund social problem genre but in New American Cinema and other prestige dramas.
Divorcement alone did not bring about change in the class disposition of prestige cinema. Rather, metaphorically speaking, the industrial changes were a fulcrum or lever that translated broader cultural shifts into the particular decisions about what Hollywood studios produced. That is, filmmakers and producers made the decisions they did partly for idiosyncratic reasons, but always in the context of what audiences responded to and what public discourse circulated about their studios' films. Divorcement helps to explain Hollywood's timing in turning towards the socially serious as well as the underlying causes of its new relation to middlebrow taste formations. The prestige film of the 1930s relied on a relatively stagnant hierarchy between cinema and art. The destabilization of that hierarchy had every bit as much to do with the destabilization of the industry as it did with what filmgoers wanted and expected to see.
By its nature, prestige is a social phenomenon. It requires, in C. Wright Mills's pithy summary, ‘at least two persons: one to claim it, and another to honor the claim’.24 It is one thing for the industry to claim an aesthetically superior and socially edifying product, it is another for viewers and observers to agree with that claim. Understanding the prestige film means not merely tracking its industrial history, but more broadly assessing the place of cinema in what Pierre Bourdieu terms a hierarchy of legitimate culture: ‘Not all cultural meanings, theatrical presentations, sporting events, recitals of songs, poetry or chamber-music, operettas or operas, are equivalent in dignity and value, and they do not all call for the same approach with the same urgency’, he writes, adding:
In other words, the various systems of expression, from theatre to television, are objectively organized according to a hierarchy independent of individual opinions, which defines cultural legitimacy and its gradations. Faced with meanings situated outside the sphere of legitimate culture, consumers feel they have the right to remain pure consumers, and judge freely; on the other hand, within the field of consecrated culture, they feel measured according to objective norms, and forced to adopt a dedicated, ceremonial and ritualized attitude. Thus jazz, cinema and photography do not give rise – because they do not claim it with the same urgency – to the attitude of dedication, which is common coin when one is dealing with works of scholarly culture. Some virtuosos, in a bid for legitimation, transfer to these arts models of behaviour that are current in the realm of traditional culture. But in the absence of an institution to teach them methodically and systematically as constituent parts of legitimate culture, most people experience them in quite a different way, as simple consumers.25For Bourdieu, the ‘middle arts’ like jazz, cinema and photography fall into a ‘sphere of the legitimizable’ in which formalized aesthetic attitudes begin to take hold, but only variably across the population and without the institutional legitimacy of the high arts. The history of the prestige film, therefore, is partly a history of the relative importance of ‘pure consumers’ and ‘virtuosos’ in the reception of ‘quality’ films. Over the twentieth century, and during the postwar years especially, the cinema underwent an elevation in cultural status from Bourdieu's sphere of the arbitrary (that of pure consumer) to the sphere of the legitimizable. First, highbrow artists and intellectuals began to view cinema as an art form in its own right, and their cineclubs, criticism and institutions formed an incipient film culture challenging Hollywood. Subsequently, middlebrow appreciation came to mean not simply Hollywood's citation of high culture but also the filmgoer's distinction between serious, artistic feature cinema and Hollywood's usual product. The altered relation of cinema to the other arts brought about a shift in a genre, the prestige film, built on a fixed relationship between film and the legitimate arts.
Perhaps the most significant development for the emerging film culture was the development of high-minded film criticism in response to avant-garde filmmaking. David Bordwell has argued that ‘seventh art’ cinephilia emerged from this network of film periodicals, cineclubs and institutions and that it marked a considerable redefinition of highbrow taste:
The faults of this research program should not lead us to forget how radical it was. For many years after the invention, most well-educated people thought that film could acquire prestige only by aping great works of drama or literature. ... Nevertheless, the Standard Version fell prey to elite assumptions by expecting film to develop in accord with high-art models.26The shift in highbrow sensibility can be measured in difference between The Nation's 1913 lampoon of a ‘Democratic Art’ – ‘To watch one of these exhibitions is like seeing an animated popular magazine without the labor of turning the pages, and like the picture magazine it requires no thought or attention’ 27 – and a 1929 New York Herald Tribune review of The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor-Dreyer, 1928) as ‘among the really significant achievements of modern art’.28 Seventh-art film criticism in upscale, ‘serious’ publications like The New Republic and The Nation and leftist political publications like The New Masses championed the avant garde and disdained most commercial cinema, but nonetheless took seriously the idea that the cinema, including popular cinema, could be art.
Increasingly, highbrow film culture also gained an institutional footing. The Museum of Modern Art was instrumental in applying art-historical discourse to a popular medium hitherto without history or preservation. The library spoke of periods, of movements and schools of filmmaking, and of aesthetic breakthroughs. It exhibited and distributed programmes of films to educational and cultural institutions: ‘The Development of Narrative’, ‘The Rise of the American Film’, and so on.29 Meanwhile, the nonfiction film was following another avenue towards cultural legitimacy; whereas MoMA's Film Library had been a milestone in the acceptance of film within the artistic and literary fields, government and foundation sponsorship of the documentary movement of the 1930s marked some level of acceptance in the fields of social science and public policy.
Taken together, these developments – the emergence of an aesthetically oriented film criticism and the institutionalization of art-historical and social-scientific discourses of cinema – outline a shift in the intellectual field of the interwar years. Previously, highbrow taste factions had dismissed film as frivolous entertainment at best, culturally undignified at worst, while legitimate social-scientific and policy voices saw movies as having an unhealthy influence on society. But whether in response to the importation of foreign avant-garde films, the transition from silent to sound in Hollywood or the emergence of nonfiction films, certain intellectuals pushed cinema into the sphere of the legitimizable. The effect was to split highbrow response to cinema into two factions: a traditionalist disdain for popular culture and a reclamation of the aesthetic (or sociologically serious) within popular art. Bourdieu has described attempts to épater la bourgeoisie as ‘proving the extent of one's power to confer aesthetic status’;30 in many ways the division in US highbrow taste over cinema sprang from a similar gambit by a dominated faction of the bourgeoisie.
The highbrow impulse would flourish in the non-commercial film culture and vibrant avant garde of the postwar years. In 1947, the largest and most influential of the postwar film societies, Cinema 16, began its successful two-decade run in New York, taking an even more scholastic approach to film exhibition than MoMA and expanding its focus to include documentary and non-narrative films with no chance for commercial exhibition. The US avant garde, too, was blossoming on both coasts. Even if many of the avant-garde films of the 1940s and 1950s were quasi-narrative in comparison to the structural-materialist films that would come in the 1960s and 1970s, they nonetheless confounded or subverted narrative expectations inherited from the commercial film industry and as such were experienced as assaults on conventional notions of what films should be. The obtuse ‘narratives’ of Gregory Markopoulos, Willard Maas or Maya Deren defied easy comprehension and forced viewers to use other arts – poetry, mythology, dance – as an aesthetic key to their understanding. As Lauren Rabinowitz argues:
cinema was increasingly identified as an object divided on the basis of the intellectual discourse associated with different groups of media objects. By the end of the decade, ‘highbrow’, ‘lowbrow’, and ‘middlebrow’ had become the popular designations of hierarchical categories of aesthetic taste.31As before the war, highbrow reception developed in tandem with avant-garde filmmaking, but the postwar counterparts pitted their film culture against not only a culturally reviled Hollywood but also an emerging middlebrow culture.
That middlebrow film culture borrowed from the highbrow cineastes the notion that cinema was an art, and combined it with an almost exclusive preference for commercial fiction features. In one sense, it continued a middlebrow impulse of Hollywood itself. Joan Shelley Rubin diagnoses a split tendency in middlebrow culture – on the one hand democratic and on the other hand reverential to cultural authority – across early twentieth-century US culture, from the ‘great books’ movement to book-of-the-month clubs and Alexander Woolcott's book-review radio broadcasts.32 Similarly, the literary adaptations, biopics and historical films of the 1930s promised for the masses the possibility of high-culture experience. To studios they were valuable not simply for preselling content, but also for the association of cultural elevation they conferred – the sense that watching a film version of a canonical novel or play was a substitute for the aesthetic experience of the adapted work itself. Dodsworth is an ideal type in this use of literary source material; the film was based primarily on the work of a novelist with high-culture credentials and secondarily on an acclaimed Broadway theatrical adaptation. Thematically, the film centres on ‘adult’ material, the dissolution of a marriage because of a wife's infidelity; if anything, the film version emphasizes the bittersweet romance more than the source material does. Characteristically, the novel's keen class analysis in the myriad cultural references that European travel provides for its protagonist Sam Dodsworth are conspicuously missing in the adaptation; prestige filmmakers were primarily interested in literary source material for romantic melodramas with a more complicated emotional tenor.
The postwar years continued this outwardly middlebrow citation of highbrow culture. Marianne Conroy has pointed to references rife in postwar Hollywood's narratives, from theatrical adaptations marketed as vehicles for method actors to the social problem films. In Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959), she notes:
The possibility that Lora might audition for a [Tennessee] Williams play is no sooner proffered than it is dropped. The play is ‘all cast’ before she even appears in Loomis's office. ... In fact, the specific playis largely beside the point of the reference; indeed, Williams himself matters only insofar as he is arguably the one American playwright a mass audience in 1959 would have recognized as a serious writer of ‘blockbuster plays’.33The postwar middlebrow film still tried to be a substitute for high culture but also thematized legitimate culture as distinct from the Hollywood formula. Frank Sinatra unpacking his stack of Modern Library books in Some Came Running (Vincente Minelli, 1959) or the montage of ‘classic’ book covers in I Remember Mama (George Stevens, 1948) take on, conspicuously, a high-culture/cinema differentiation that the 1930s prestige film was all too eager to elide.
Postwar middlebrow film culture involved far more than explicit citation, however. Art films from Britain's Rank Studios or social problem films from Stanley Kramer and 20th Century-Fox did not so much offer anxious cultural references within their narratives as they positioned themselves as the sort of cinema middlebrow consumers championed as ‘artistic’. The distinction between ‘Hollywood’ and ‘art’ assumed a centrality in the classed reception of the postwar years. Aesthetic judgment came without any semi-formalized basis of formal contemplation that marked highbrow discussions; in making claims of artistry for social problem and other prestige pictures, these consumers were pursuing a parallel process of legitimization that the highbrows had effected in another context. Hollow citations and literary uplift continued, but increasingly, too, middlebrow taste valued in cinema a literary and theatrical ‘quality’ and recognizable characteristics of ‘maturity’: socially relevant content (the ‘race problem’ cycle), theatrical scope in acting style (Henry V [Laurence Olivier, 1945]), pessimistic subject matter (The Men [Fred Zinneman, 1950] and The Snake Pit) epic narrative scale applied to everyday subject matter (Best Years of Our Lives) and eventually non-traditional sexual thematics (Bonjour Tristesse [Otto Preminger, 1958]). This version of the middlebrow had less to do with the class references that could corroborate the audience member's self-image than in positing one's preference for the ‘right’ kind of film artistry as a conspicuous marker of one's social position. For quite a few people, cinema had become a realm of potential cultural legitimacy.
The rise and subsequent changes in middlebrow culture corresponded to the changing class structure of a rapidly expanding economy. Janice Radway traces the rise of the middlebrow in the first half of the twentieth century to the rise of the professional–managerial class; Conroy similarly cites C. Wright Mills's notion of status panic and white-collar growth.34 Both explanations are useful, but insufficient: the ‘new middle classes’ appeared a half-century before the period Conroy considers, and the mere existence of a professional–managerial class does not account for any change in middlebrow culture between the 1920s and the 1950s. Here, Bourdieu's sociology of taste can help. While older strains of middlebrow culture arose from the class milieu of the old petite bourgeoisie (shop owners and small-scale proprietors), three new bourgeois class fractions favoured newer strains of middlebrow culture, ones more inclined towards the ‘virtuoso’ gambits of cultural legitimization. The ascendant or ‘new bourgeoisie’ represents the new business and management class created by the managerial revolution.35 The new petite bourgeoisie includes ‘all the occupations involving presentation and representation (sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration, and so forth) and in all the institutions providing symbolic goods and services’.36 The class fraction is marked by the ‘well-armed pretension’,37 a pretension to high culture based on a rejection of tastes typically associated with the petite bourgeoisie. Finally, the ‘executant’ petite bourgeoisie includes junior executives and clerical workers, who fall between the newer and more classically middlebrow forms.38 One likely engine for the change in middlebrow reception and the cultural legitimization of cinema is a changing balance between these ‘newer middle classes’. While the managerial revolution of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries began to undermine the old petite bourgeoisie, the sustained economic prosperity of the 1940s swelled the ranks of the new and executant petite bourgeoisie while solidifying the stature and social hegemony of the new bourgeoisie. Class coalition is a useful notion in describing the social problem genre, which included the top box-office earners for their studios and straddled ‘mass’ and ‘class’ appeal.
The journalistic film critic was both an emblem and a key catalyst of middlebrow reception. Already employed to make judgments on commercial narrative cinema, film reviewers extended their charge to an aesthetic judgment that referenced cinema's existence as art. Scholars such as Robert Ray have pointed to a gap between popular and critical tastes in the 1950s but have underestimated how much this dynamic was already emerging by the mid 1940s.39 For instance, Bosley Crowther's favourite films of 1946 were not the year's box-office winners (see Table, overleaf). A few, like Best Years of Our Lives and Notorious (Alfred Hitchock, 1946), appear on both lists, but it is instructive to note that films with a strong box-office draw – Road to Utopia (Hal Walker, 1945) or Saratoga Trunk (Sam Wood, 1943/45) – were even more generic and less like the kind of prestige film that Crowther preferred. In contrast to highbrow writers such as Parker Tyler and Manny Farber, mainstream critics did not see potential cultural worth in any film, high or low, but instead took the prestige drama, the art film and the social problem film as the raison d'être for their criticism. A mutually influential process was thus in place by the late 1940s: Hollywood's prestige dramas had begun to incorporate more finely internalized modes of aesthetic judgment just as the popular press critics responsible for legitimizing Hollywood's product took the prestige drama as their main focus. Against a backdrop of the film industry's changing conception of prestige drama, postwar journalistic critics assessed cinema's relation to other media and urged the production of films that could compete with higher arts.
Critical favourites and box-office winners, 194640
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Nowhere, at least in the latter part of the 1940s, was the film critic's self-consciousness in discussing film as an artistic medium more noticeable than in reviews of problem films. The popular press's middlebrow tendency continually contrasted the prestige film with Hollywood's non-prestige product. Bourdieu, famously, has pinned this sort of differentiation as the basis of class judgment: ‘A difference ... only becomes a visible ... socially pertinent difference if it is perceived by someone who is capable of making the distinction [who] is endowed with the categories of perception’.41 Critical distinction was not new to the postwar years (The Nation in 1913 had classificatory schemata of its own), but postwar journalistic critics approached the social-problem film through a series of distinctions that signalled the cinema's position in the sphere of the legitimizable: European or Hollywood, mature or immature, art or commerce, courage or cravenness, realism or artifice. Bourdieu's model not only draws attention to these binary contrasts, but also reminds us that binary distinction need not serve a binary understanding of class. Even close historical studies like Lea Jacobs's reading of A–B film distinction in the 1930s often take the historical agents' class antinomies to imply class bifurcation.42 Instead, aesthetic distinction just as often asserts a middlebrow taste. While highbrow taste differentiated Hollywood and the avant garde, Hollywood and documentary or Hollywood and the European art film, the middlebrow critics contrasted different commercial narrative features to suggest that some were closer than others to more legitimate theatrical, literary or visual arts.
The distinction between imported and domestic product was the most glaring. Films imported from Europe were instrumental in shifting the middle terrain in cinematic legitimization. Highbrow critics championed the Italian neorealist films and in so doing helped to solder cultural legitimacy with a self-consciously realist aesthetic. In Hollywood, neorealism inspired specific productions like The Search (Fred Zinneman, 1948) and, arguably, a general narrative activation of location shooting. As Barbara Wilinsky has emphasized, the cosmopolitan values associated with watching foreign films were central to the discourses of reception during the emergence of the ‘art film’ in the postwar years.43 The films of Britain's Rank Studios – Henry V, The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger, 1948) and Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) – implicitly challenged Hollywood's product by citing some higher art, such as theatre, dance or the psychological novel.
Whether Italian or British, foreign films contrasted with Hollywood and guided middlebrow reception of the social problem film. One reviewer of Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947), for example, called the film ‘an example of what Hollywood can do ... if it wants, or if it has the courage more than once in a blue moon. This RKO-Radio production is the sort of film that critics and a critical public have come to expect only from abroad’44. A review of The Snake Pit contrasted European films (‘purposeful, adventurous, courageous or merely grown up’) with a Hollywood that ‘lacks the brains, artistry or daring to undertake such work locally’.45 Even a negative review of Boy with the Green Hair (Joseph Losey, 1949) criticized the film on the grounds that it was not enough like the neorealist films.46 The industry reacted defensively: Warner Brothers' Jerry Wald countered, ‘Hollywood may be stumbling, but it's certainly more realistic than Broadway or the British’.47 Wald's statement reveals just how much had changed in the cultural terrain, so that one might expect Hollywood films to ape legitimate theatre and foreign films more closely.
Meanwhile, critics contrasted maturity and immaturity as stand-ins for cinema's relation to other media. Sometimes ‘mature’ applied to the implied audience of the film, since reviewers lamented a commercial cinema geared towards teenagers' tastes and sensibilities. One critic praised All the King's Men as ‘pleasantly free of the superfluous preachments that so often mar a Hollywood movie concerned with any topic more difficult than the mating customs of soda-fountain habitués’.48 Elsewhere maturity meant the sophistication of the medium relative to other, more institutionalized arts. One reviewer of the films on anti-semitism writes:
As great mass media, intimidated by the size of their audiences, [the cinema and radio] have lacked the courage familiar in fiction and on the stage. ... But of recent months the movies have apparently decided to grow up.49Similarly, a review of The Snake Pit calls for an ‘adult medium’ on an equal footing with literature and capable of dealing ‘truthfully and unflinchingly with adult subjects’.50 The New York Times viewed the same film as an opposition to ‘Hollywood as usual’:
This latter fact, incidentally, is the only ‘Hollywood’ touch that Millen Brand and Frank Partos have permitted to show in their superior script. ... The Snake Pit, while frankly quite disturbing, and not recommended for the weak, is a mature, emotional drama on a rare and pregnant theme.51In later contexts, ‘mature’ and ‘adult’ would connote material that pushed audience expectation of what was sexually permissible on screen. Here, though, ‘adult’ subjects are the high-minded ones – the superego to Hollywood's usual id.
Underlying the contrast between an adult and a juvenile medium was a parallel contrast between art and commerce, in which the middlebrow tendency castigated escapist cinema in favour of seriousness. In Pinky, Time was relieved to see the public ‘interested in movies that give serious treatment to a serious theme’, and in Best Years of Out Lives, it was considered as the problem genre's forthrightness a sign of its quality.52 Newsweek praised the ‘intelligent and courageous handling’ in Best Years and the ‘restrained and courageous treatment of a delicate theme’ in Lost Boundaries; the magazine also wrote of Kramer's Home of the Brave that ‘indisputably, it took courage for an independent producer to tackle this highly controversial theme’.53 The genre-wide equation of social relevance with courage and honesty was ultimately a restatement of a distinction between art and commerce. Studio films with ‘courage’, after all, were putting their profits at risk and were hence received as serious rather than commercial in nature.
Finally, the popular press critics contrasted the realism of the social problem film with the artifice of Hollywood's usual product. Many of these reviews cited aspects of the filmmaking itself, including set design and cinematography, as lending an air of realism. ‘In spite of the fact that this cast has several top-ranking stars’, wrote one review of Best Years of Our Lives, ‘Wyler has succeeded in making these people as real as your neighbors. This natural tone is further heightened by the realistic sets.’54 Similarly, Lost Weekend received praise for its location shooting and its set design:
Paramount should be credited for making one of the best movies of this or any other year. ... Not the least of the film's assets are its realistic sets. The Birnam apartment actually looks like a New York apartment; and the street scenes, which were photographed in New York, are the real thing.55
The Lawless (Joseph Losey, 1950) impressed a Time reviewer in part through its cinematography:
Using unvarnished photography on the streets, interiors and people of real California towns, director Joseph Losey has given the picture a startling look of reality. For the setting of his manhunt climax, he takes imaginative advantage of the stony, rolling waste of a gold-dredging field. His mob scenes crackle with a spontaneous movement and raw vitality usually found only in bang-up newsreel footage.56
Bosley Crowther at The New York Times cited The Lost Weekend's ‘case-history documentation in its narrative and photographic style’, and ‘a sharp tone of actuality in all [Wilder's] studio work’.57
Not all critics praised the social problem films. Some felt that individual films failed to live up to a quality genre; others objected to the genre's didactic tone, whether from a highbrow disdain of middlebrow ‘uplift’ or lowbrow defence of mass entertainment. In general, the periodicals more aligned with highbrow taste were the most critical of the problem film. This category included reviewers such as John McCarten from The New Yorker or Robert Hatch in The New Republic, both quoted above, who took the mission of social relevance to heart yet often faulted problem films for their aesthetic failings, insufficient realism or lack of sociological analysis. James Agee's review of Crossfire demonstrates just this strategy:
Few things pay off better in prestige and hard cash ... than safe fearlessness. This film is not entirely fearless, even within its own terms. ... [I]t may as well be remembered that, at best, Hollywood's heroism is calculated to land buttered side up. Movies about Anti-Semitism aren't so desperately chancy after all. ... All that aside, however, Crossfire is an unusually good and honest movie and may – I hope, will – prove a very useful one.58
The New York Times's Crowther was another supporter and critic. In his tenure from 1940 to 1967, his support for the genre and the new ‘realistic’ prestige films were tempered by criticisms of films that he felt did not do justice to social reality.59 As Frank Eugene Beaver points out, Crowther argued that cinema uplift had a dual nature, aesthetic and social: ‘Crowther's demand for realism in pictures’, he notes, ‘became synonymous with his demand for entertaining and significant stories’.60 As such, Crowther occupied the middle-ground between the highbrow sensibility of Agee and The New Yorker and the middlebrow cultural reverence shown by the anonymous reviewers at Time or Newsweek. Significantly, the wider-circulating visual-digest magazines such as Life and Look registered very little generic difference between the problem film and others. In passing along the publicity materials given by the studios, they sidestepped the issue of the films' prestige in favour of the sort of star coverage the middlebrows frowned upon.61
To a surprising extent, producers and makers of the problem films shared many of the critics' distinctions. Writer Phillip Dunne considered Pinky's script ‘the most challenging and important subject for a picture that I have come across in years. ... [I]t can be an even more significant picture than Gentleman's Agreement’.62 Zanuck warned the makers of No Way Out against ‘any element which even remotely has a feeling of "movie" or "Hollywood". I do not say this disparagingly of the movies or Hollywood, but only as the term is applied by the critics’.63 He explicitly considered Academy Awards and critical reception in his deliberations on mid- and low-budget prestige films; as he noted on The Snake Pit: ‘It is neither courageous nor clever for us to try to present in this picture the intimate details of life in an insane asylum. We won't get either critical acclaim nor public praise for it if we do’.64 Hence, producers did not simply share the critics' perspective (Zanuck was too keen to foster ‘showmanship’, that is, popular generic appeal), but instead sought the critics' approval, shifting their perspective to vicariously understand the critical mindset.
To gain critical and wider prestige, the studios appealed to the middlebrow taste formation in the marketing of the social problem dramas. To begin with, the emphasis on ‘courage’ in the receptive context got taken up in the studios' advertising strategy. ‘Gentleman's Agreement calls a spade a spade’, read the tagline in one newspaper advertisement. The Northern trailer for Intruder in the Dust shows a racist attack from the narrative with a superimposed title reading ‘No beating around the bush! No sidestepping! No double-talk!’65 Implicit was a condemnation of those other kinds of films that did sidestep Jim Crow. Eventually, too, ‘courage’ became a recurring element in the self-congratulatory industrial discourse on the social problem film.
The rhetoric may have been inflated, but studios such as 20th Century-Fox really sought recognition from a broader slice of established opinion brokers than were traditionally engaged in discussion of cinema. This desire for recognition influenced their marketing strategy, and Gentleman's Agreement provides a useful example of the reorientation of prestige film exploitation to cultural elite institutions that held disproportionate sway in the public sphere. Fox advertising executive Charles Schlaifer wrote up the film's exploitation campaign as a report to model the promotion of other mid-A budget prestige films, especially those in the problem film cycle. The new type of prestige film brought with it new means of marketing and promotion to signal its event status, including special screenings for community groups and tie-ins with social scientific research on public opinion.66 Accordingly, Schlaifer and Zanuck devised a series of advance screenings for opinion-makers, industry competitors and political leaders that would take the place of a traditional premiere.67 ‘The primary purpose of these screenings is to influence New York newspaper reviewers’, Schlaifer wrote, but added, ‘The secondary purpose of these screenings is to influence nationally syndicated opinion-makers who write either columns, features, or editorials.’68 The success of marketing Gentleman's Agreement bore out their ideas. Fox began to prioritize its problem films in the advertising budget. While Gentleman's Agreement had cost a respectable $265,000 in publicity – below the big-budget prestige pictures Forever Amber and Captain from Castile – by 1949 the problem film The Snake Pit received $417,000 for advertising, over three times the amount of any other Fox feature and half of the studio's yearly trade press advertising budget.69 The example of Kramer's The Defiant Ones shows that the split between an ‘exploitation ballyhoo campaign’ and a ‘"prestige" campaign’ was conscious and entrenched by the 1950s.70 The late 1950s career of Kramer embodied the contradiction of being a producer–director about whom it was impossible to tease out the earnest cinematic statement from the commercial calculation. By that point, the prestige film's industrial transformation and the broader cultural elevation of the cinema had successfully converged.
Scholars working in the twin Marxist and Weberian traditions are fond of speaking of ‘steering mechanisms’, the underlying structural forces driving a historical phenomenon.71 Two primary steering mechanisms – industrial reorganization and the middle class's reorientation in relation to the cinema – go a long way to explaining the relatively sudden historical changes to Hollywood's prestige film. Both modes of prestige cinema – the Dodsworth and the Marty – persist in the commercial US cinema marketplace today. Merchant–Ivory productions, after all, serve a similar role in today's industry to those of Samuel Goldwyn or David Selznick. Nevertheless, we have crossed another divide. The shift in balance between the two modes of prestige cinema was predicated on the particular history of individual films, as well as the particular circumstances of their audiences. A microhistory of these circumstances will flesh out film scholars' understanding of why Hollywood made the types of films it did and how they were received. Undoubtedly, such a history will document the exceptions and particulars that do not fit the main trajectory of the prestige picture in the mid twentieth century. The oversimplification imposed by the broader historical model, however, allows us to take an initial look at the fundamental steering mechanisms. Given how little film historians have found the prestige picture a worthy object of study, any distortion entailed in distilling the wealth of Hollywood's high-A film output is a necessary price to pay for the explanatory power that a structural history provides.
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Acknowledgements |
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I would like to thank the anonymous readers at Screen for their constructive and valuable comments; Ned Comstock at USC's Doheny Library, Barbara Hall at the Margaret Herrick Library and the staff at UCLA's Charles E. Young Library special collections for their help; also Phil Rosen and Chuck Maland for their suggestions and advice.
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Notes |
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 TOP Notes |
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1 David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: Knopf, 1994), p. 832.
2 Brian Taves, ‘The B film: Hollywood's other half’, in Tino Balio (ed.), Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), p. 332.
3 Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: the Evolution of American Television, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 161.
4 Academy Awards: Lost Weekend – Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and Actor, 1946; Best Years of Our Lives – Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor, Editing and Music, 1947; Gentleman's Agreement – Best Picture, Director and Supporting Actress, 1948. Other Academy nominations: Snake Pit – Best Director, Picture, Screenplay, Actress and Music, 1949; Pinky – Best Actress and Supporting Actress, 1950.
5 Balio, Grand Design, pp. 179–80.
6 Michael Conant, Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry: Economic and Legal Analysis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 107–12.
7 Taves, ‘The B film’, p. 313.
8 Robert W. Chambers, ‘The double feature as a sales problem’, Harvard Business Review, vol. 16, no. 4 (1938), pp. 226-36. Variety complained of a ‘vicious circle’ keeping double features entrenched as industry practice. Mike Wear, ‘Growth of double bills’, Variety, 3 January 1937, p. 12.
9 Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: the American Cinema in the 1940. History of the American Cinema, Volume VI (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. 152.
10 ‘Dualers’ dearth of B's in 1950', Variety, 16 November 1949, p. 7; ‘Certain secondary houses in a spot because of dearth of A's’, Variety, 29 June 1949, p. 6.
11 Schatz, Boom and Bust, p. 172, 331.
12 Ibid., pp. 330–31; ‘Top-drawer industry leaders accept staggering production costs but fear no B.O. dip’, Variety, 8 January 1947, p. 5. Schatz points to the 1947 loss of the British exhibition market as a major factor in studio planning for 1948.
13 Aubrey Solomon, Twentieth Century-Fox: A Corporate and Financial History (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988), p. 66. All Fox production costs and domestic receipts cited are from ibid., pp. 242-4.
14 Schatz, Boom and Bust, p. 332.
15 The correspondence held in the Stanley Kramer Collection is a good sample of the admiration, organized and spontaneous, that these members of the cultural elite afforded Kramer for his problem films. Stanley Kramer collection, Charles E. Young Library Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.
16 Betty Lasky, RKO: The Biggest Little Major of Them All (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984), pp. 196–7.
17 ‘When's a B film not a B', Variety, 4 February 1948, p. 7.
18 ‘Hughes wants no "messages" in pix; viz. Green Hair’, Variety, 4 August 1948, p. 1.
19 Darryl Zanuck, memo, 1 February 1949, Box 2420.2, 20th Century Fox script archive, Special Collections for Cinema and Television, Doheny Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
20 Schatz, ‘Boom and bust’, pp. 178–88.
21 Thom Anderson, ‘Red Hollywood’, in Suzanne Ferguson and Barbara Groseclose (eds), Literature and the Visual Arts in Contemporary Society (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1985), pp. 141–96. See also Charles J. Maland, ‘Film gris: crime, critique and Cold War culture in 1951’, Film Criticism, vol. 23, pp. 1–26.
22 ‘FC's fee gamble on Boundaries pays off solidly’, Variety, 23 November 1949, p. 3; ‘Boundaries, Wanted cause film classics to revise budget ideas’, Variety, 27 July 1949, p. 9.
23 Dennis Bingham, ‘"I do want to live!": female voices, male discourse and Hollywood biopics’, Cinema Journal, vol. 38, no. 3 (1999), p. 8.
24 C. Wright Mills, White Collar: the American Middle Classes (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 239.
25 Pierre Bourdieu, with Luc Boltanski et al., Photography: a Middle-brow Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 95–6.
26 David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 44.
27 ‘A democratic art’, The Nation, 28 August 1913, p. 193. I am indebted for this pointer to Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: the Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 231.
28 Richard Watts, Jr, ‘A dying art offers a masterpiece’, New York Herald Tribune, 31 March 1929.
29 Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: the Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); Raymond J. Haberski, Jr, It's Only a Movie!: Films and Critics in American Culture (Lexington, KT: University of Kentucky Press, 2001).
30 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 47.
31 Lauren Rabinowitz, ‘The American avant-garde’, in Schatz, Boom and Bust, p. 459.
32 Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), p. 295.
33 Marianne Conroy, ‘"No sin in lookin’ prosperous": gender, race, and the class formations of middlebrow taste in Imitation of Life', in Rick Berg and David James (eds), The Hidden Formation: Cinema and the Question of Class (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 119.
34 Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle-class Desire (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Conroy, ‘"No sin in lookin’ prosperous"‘; Mills, White Collar.
35 Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 311.
39 Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 141.
40 Source: Bosley Crowther, ‘The "ten best"‘, The New York Times, sec. II, 29 December 1946; ‘60 top grossers of 1946’, Variety, 8 January 1947, p. 8; Schatz, Boom and Bust, p. 467.
41 Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: on the Theory of Action (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 9.
42 Lea Jacobs, ‘The B film and problem of cultural distinction’, Screen, vol. 33, no.1 (1992), pp. 1–13.
43 Barbara Wilinksy, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 38.
44 Review of Crossfire, Newsweek, 28 July 1947, p. 84.
45 Robert Hatch, Review of The Snake Pit, The New Republic, 8 November 1948, p. 28 and 29.
46 Review of Boy with the Green Hair, Time, 10 January 1949, p. 84.
47 Jerry Wald, ‘1946 in review’, Variety, 8 January 1947, p. 5.
48 John McCarten, Review of All The King's Men, The New Yorker, 12 November 1949, p. 101.
49 Review of Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement, Saturday Review of Literature, 6 December 1947, pp. 69–70.
50 Review of The Snake Pit, Saturday Review of Literature, 27 November 1948, pp. 28–30.
51 Bosley Crowther, Review of The Snake Pit, The New York Times, 5 November 1948.
52 Review of Pinky, Time, 9 October 1945, p. 96; review of Best Years of Our Lives, Time, 25 November 1946, p. 103.
53 Review of Best Years of Our Lives, Newsweek, 25 November 1946, p. 104; review of Lost Boundaries, Newsweek, 4 July 1949, p. 72; review of Home of the Brave, Newsweek, 16 May 1949, p. 86.
54 Review of Best Years of Our Lives, Commonweal, 13 December 1946, p. 230.
55 Review of Lost Weekend, Newsweek, 10 December 1945, p. 112.
56 Review of The Lawless, Time, 3 July 1950, p. 76.
57 Bosley Crowther, Review of The Lost Weekend, The New York Times, 3 December 1945.
58 James Agee, Review of Crossfire, The Nation, 2 August 1947, p. 129.
59 Bosley Crowther, Review of Gentleman's Agreement, The New York Times, 12 November 1947; review of Pinky, The New York Times, 30 September 1949.
60 Frank Eugene Beaver, Bosley Crowther: Social Critic of the Film, 1940–1967 (New York, NY: Arno Press, 1974), p. 36.
61 See, for example, review of Gentleman's Agreement, Life, 1 December 1947, p. 82.
62 Phillip Dunne, memo to Darryl Zanuck, 19 April 1948, Phillip Dunne Collection, Doheny Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
63 Darryl Zanuck, memo, 1 February 1949, Box 2420.2, 20th Century Fox script archive.
64 Darryl Zanuck, story conference memo, 2 December 1946, Box 2364.2, 20th Century Fox script archive. Elsewhere, Zanuck ponders Night and the City's Academy Award chances in his discussion of No Way Out's approach. Memo on final script, 7 June 1949, Box 2420.9, 20th Century Fox script archive.
65 Trailer script, Box 5300, MGM script archive, Special Collections for Cinema and Television, Doheny Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
66 Gentleman's Agreement exploitation report, Charles Schlaifer Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California; ‘Audience research on Crossfire a cue to pix biz on similar films’, Variety, 10 December 1947, p. 3; ‘Inside stuff’, Variety, 30 November 1949, p. 18.
67 Report on Gentleman's Agreement campaign, 10 November 1947, Charles Schlaifer collection. See also a letter from Darryl Zanuck to Laura Hobson dated 15 November 1947 in the same collection.
68 Charles Schlaifer, memo to Spiras Skouros, 21 November 1947, Schlaifer Collection.
69 1949 advertising budget, 20th Century-Fox, Charles Schlaifer Collection.
70 George Thomas, internal UA publicity memo, Collection 161, Box 18, Stanley Kramer collection.
71 For instance, see Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1972).
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