If I was unfamiliar with the water while wading into the '60s and the '70s, I'm even more unfamiliar with the '50s. I realized that so many of my cultural touchstones came out of the '60s, from the James Bond movies to "The Twilight Zone." With the '50s, it feels like I'm exploring a new continent. Though I'm familiar with many of the Golden Age stars of the time, like Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, and Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, it's very rare that I come across anyone still active in films now - I spotted a very young Tsai Chin in "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness," and Richard Beymer in "The Diary of Anne Frank."
You definitely get a sense of the film world narrowing down a bit this far back in time. There were fewer films made, and from fewer sources. Looking at foreign films, there was almost nothing coming out of South America and Africa, while other countries' film industries were still in their nascent stages. However, the '50s were when Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray were making some of their best work, and Alfred Hitchcock really got going. I keep coming across wonderful experiments like the Czech sci-fi film "Invention for Destruction," that uses elaborate sets and animation to bring a world of vintage Jules Verne illustrations to life. In Hollywood, the studio system was in full swing, and the major genres of the day were musicals, westerns, and melodramas. Epics were also popular, including many war films. In the wake of WWII, there was a lot more military presence across all genres, and heroes were often former soldiers of one kind or another.
As I've mentioned previously, I've been reluctant about getting into '50s films because the social mores are so different, especially when it comes to race and gender. Pre Civil Rights era, the mainstream studio films were fairly awful at portraying anyone who wasn't white. Blackface was out, but there was still plenty of brownface and yellowface in use. And pre "The Feminine Mystique," somehow I'm not surprised that the big female star of the era was sexy airhead Marilyn Monroe - who I know wasn't really an airhead in real life. And yet, the late '50s had several movies about interracial relationships that were very progressive for their time. The goalposts were in a very different place, but the basic outlines of your standard social justice picture advocating for more tolerance and acceptance are very familiar. And once you got away from the big, expensive spectacles, you could find films like "The Crimson Kimono," where James Shigeta gets the white girl in the end. And alongside Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte was a legitimate leading man in films like "Odds Against Tomorrow" and "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil."
That said, the biggest smash hit of 1958 was "South Pacific," and I can't begin to describe all the ways that "South Pacific" is utterly deplorable from a modern POV. I couldn't even enjoy Ray Walston in the film, and I love Ray Walston. When it comes to adventures in foreign lands, especially in the East, the white savior trope is everywhere. Well-meaning pictures like "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness" are wildly inaccurate and condescending. And romance really isn't what it used to be - and thank goodness. After sitting through a string of musicals with bad boy heroes like "Kiss Me Kate," "Pal Joey" and "Jailhouse Rock," the predatory, patriarchal nonsense can really start to grate. Elvis and Frank Sinatra's music were a big part of my childhood, but I doubt I'll ever look at either of them the same way again.
I have turned up a few new favorites and films worth seeing, that couldn't be made today for one reason or another. I prefer 1958's "A Night to Remember" to "Titanic." I love Gregory Peck making a stand for nonviolence in "The Big Country." And even though the film is a highly, highly misleading account of actual facts, "I Want to Live!" is one of the best film noir I've seen, and a scathing takedown of the tactics of the press, right up there with "Ace in the Hole."
I've got an awful long way yet to go, but the mountain doesn't look as insurmountable as it once did. Happy watching.
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