When Hollywood Was Hip and How It Got That Way

Something tectonic was happening in fifties Hollywood, but it was nearly undetectable up close; most American critics couldn’t see the trees for the forest, missed the mighty art of individual films and filmmakers because of their inextricable Hollywood roots. A decade ago, I threw together a casual cornucopia of great fifties Hollywood directors; if I were doing it again today, in light of subsequent viewings, I might need two cornucopias. The fifties was a golden age of daring and original direction—but it was also largely unrecognized, in part, because of historical trends that Hirsch details. Intellectual disdain for Hollywood remained high, for a variety of reasons. There was the spinelessness of studios during the McCarthy era—the alacrity with which, caving to pressure from Congress and right-wing groups, they went about blacklisting politically suspect writers, directors, and actors. There was an increase in technology-fuelled spectacle—part of a frenzied effort to compete with television—with such gewgaws as 3-D, various wide-screen formats, and stereo sound. No new technique is intrinsically dubious and each is a potential boon to artists, but, at the time, the hasty and ballyhooed deployment reeked of brazen commercialism. The result was that Hollywood sold its gems as costume jewelry, not through mercenary cynicism but because the studio potentates were no more aware of the enduring art being produced under their aegis than were critics or, for that matter, viewers.

Against this background, there was a remarkable liberation of directors in Hollywood. The phenomenon was partly industrial, a result of the weakening of the studio system and the corresponding rise of independent producers. It was partly migrational; the rise of Hitler and the Second World War had brought an influx of great European filmmakers (including Sirk). And it was partly the legacy of Orson Welles, who, for all the troubles he experienced in Hollywood, had definitively proved, with “Citizen Kane,” that a studio director—and a twenty-five-year-old one to boot—needn’t be any less of a key artist of his time, and needn’t yield to creators in any other field in regard to comprehensive originality. (Since Welles did little in Hollywood in the fifties, he’s only a bit player in Hirsch’s book.) In the best Hollywood movies of the fifties, there’s a fury, a wildness, a violence (sometimes physical, principally emotional), a sense of resistance to a stifling or menacing order, a sympathy with the free spirit of youth and a view of its subjection to oppressive norms. (For instance, Ray and Minnelli are among the great cinematic poets of frightened children and desperate youths.) Just as pop music in the fifties was being roiled by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and other fervent musicians of youth in revolt, so Hollywood was also in the grips of a youth rebellion—albeit not the one that one immediately thinks of. Of course, young stars such as James Dean and Natalie Wood did capture audiences’ imaginations, but more enduringly important was the work of directors—whether relative newcomers who’d started their careers in the wake of Welles’s or veterans well into middle age who were suddenly enjoying a cinematic second youth.

Why didn’t American critics of the time see this? (The title of Pauline Kael’s bitter 1956 essay “Movies, the Desperate Art” could stand in for much received opinion at the time.) The failure to recognize the greatness that was in the air was a failure of psychology, of imaginative sympathy—not with characters in the movies but with the character of the directors responsible for the movies themselves. And it took outsiders, seeing American movies far from the collective clamor of Hollywood—not just the place but the idea, the symbol—to discern the flourishing of artistry and the vigorous rejuvenation that powered it. These outsiders were a new generation of critics who, inspired by Welles, understood the art of the director to be the art of youth and of the times. They wanted to make movies themselves and watched movies thinking like directors. They felt and lived movies as if from behind the screen; they understood what their mentors, role models, and future peers were doing, precisely because they saw them not as cogs in a system or as craftspeople in a commercial guild, but as fellow-artists. They understood more about movies than the meaning of images and the shaping of dramas; they experienced movies holistically, ethically, even metaphysically, grasping the gestalt of a film (images, text, tone, performance) as the reflection of the directors’ inner worlds.

It happened that these critics were French, working and living in Paris, congregating at the journal Cahiers du Cinéma (founded in 1951), and watching movies at the Cinémathèque Française. They were young—the eldest, Éric Rohmer, was born in 1920; the rest, such as François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Jean-Luc Godard—were approximately a decade younger, and had started publishing criticism around the age of twenty. What they saw in Hollywood was an artistic youth, a youth younger than any they saw in the literature or the painting of the time. No matter that many of their favorite directors—such as Hawks, Hitchcock, and Fritz Lang—had been born in the nineteenth century; the image of Welles making “Citizen Kane” at twenty-five clinched, for them, the notion of American cinema as the youthful force they wished to emulate. When they started to make their own movies, their own cinema of youth, in the late fifties and early sixties, they borrowed, channelled, and transformed the styles, forms, and moods of recent Hollywood movies. The Hollywood fifties gave rise to their movement—the French New Wave—as surely as the rise of American rock and roll, in the fifties, gave rise to the British Invasion.