1959 – Bigger Horizons
I’m not a movie buff. Rather like wine drinkers unwilling to address a sophisticated palate, I prefer to respond to queries by saying, “I know what I like”. In admitting this I am offering you three options. You can stop reading now, as I’ve just admitted I know very little about cinema, and I’m probably mistaken or confused on key issues. Or you can read on to discover something of my strange likes and dislikes these comments will reveal, almost certainly convincing you of what you had already guessed about me. Or, finally, you can read on in the hope that what I say might be just enough of interest to justify your time and attention. You have been warned!
Accepting my limitations, prejudices and preferences, I want to suggest 1959 made very clear some of the major shifts taking place in cinema. Above all, it was a year in which watching films was becoming a thrillingly different and international experience, especially if you lived in the UK. In the years following the end of the Second World War, the USA, and Hollywood in particular, had dominated the movies. The late 1940s saw a continuation of thrillers, war films, and plays filmed and reproduced for cinema. Almost all were set piece stories, with a beginning, development and end. However, the seeds of change had been evident as the 1950s unfolded.
At the beginning of the 1950s, Kurosawa’s Rashomon was released, and introduced the west to a violent and unfamiliar world. However, the film is far more than that, at many different levels. Kurosawa uses the technique of having different characters tell the story of a rape and fatal fight, each seeing and reporting the events in a different way, and, contrary to those who sought an ‘ending’, leaves the viewer uncertain as to what had really taken place. With only three scene settings, shots often ran for several minutes, and sometimes dialogue takes place while the camera rests on one person, but not the one speaking. Four years later, Kurosawa released a second groundbreaking film, The Seven Samurai, with other plot devices which today seem commonplace, but not back then. The story begins with villagers recruiting the seven warriors who will become the major actors in the story, and it ends with the seven heroes clearly the losers, the villagers who hired them the real victors. While violent, both these films are among my favourites. Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai was later remade in the US by John Sturges, but his version, The Magnificent Seven, was a Western. For many, including me, it blurred the sharp characterization of the seven fighters, putting more emphasis on their relationships with others. No matter, by 1959, new perspectives on film-making had emerged from Kurosawa’s beginning.
Another director to have a major influence over the next decade was Alfred Hitchcock. In 1954, Rear Window hit the screens. This was another moment where a director chose to change how a film is constructed, this time setting the whole film in a room overlooking a set of apartments, to be seen across a courtyard. Recovering from an injury, Jeff Jeffries (James Stewart) watches his neighbours; we see everything as he sees it, and we are gently, almost surreptitiously, pulled into accepting the world he’s observing. Hitchcock was already a dominant figure in the 1950s, and in 1959 he completed another outstanding film, North by Northwest, but I’ll return to that later.
As we move through the 1950s, other innovative directors had begun to make their mark on the movie business. From India, Satyajit Ray’s film Pather Panchali appeared in 1955. Slow moving and focussed on characters rather than a compelling story, the film follows a young boy, Apu. An example of a neo-realist genre, it is almost a documentary, lingering on the lives and privations of the poor and downtrodden. It is hard to pull yourself away from what you are seeing and remember this is just a film. Just a film? It is a confronting account of a life of hardship, fact as fiction, if you like. Films like this became increasingly popular over the decade. Ingmar Bergman, in Sweden, often used a similar technique, in movies ranging from bedroom farces (Smiles of a Summer Night,1954) to historical dramas (The Seventh Seal, 1957). Often confrontingly realistic, his films dwell on sexual relations, misunderstandings and confusions, many with very dark undertones. When I watch an Ingmar Bergman film, I usually need a glass or two of red wine, and be in a positive frame of mind, as I may finish up less happy! Troubling but fascinating, his later films draw you in, an unexpected observer of a sombre world.
That realist approach was seeping into cinema in many countries over the decade. In the UK, there were several ‘kitchen sink’ plays converted into uncomfortably real films about furtive affairs and infidelities. Without doubt, one of the best has to be Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a Karel Reisz film starring Albert Finney as a machinist who spends his time drinking, having a good time, carrying on an affair with a married woman (stunningly played by Rachel Roberts) while courting another woman, still living with her mother (also brilliantly played by Shirley Anne Field). The cinematography and acting is so real it almost bites you.
That film was in the 1960s, and so I should return to this review of some highlights before 1959. It is time to cross over to the Continent, where, as usual, the French, Italians and others were following their own paths! We English know about those crazy continentals. Perhaps just three outstanding film-makers deserve comment, only one of whom was in that realist tradition, Andrzej Wadja, whereas the other two were clearly not!
Wadja, like Reisz, portrays the grime, misery and desperate hopelessness of lives. In two films set in Poland, he examines the Second World War and its aftermath. The first, Kanal (1956), covers the 1944 Warsaw Uprising; the second, Ashes and Diamonds (1958), explores Polish patriots and political assassinations. Just as in Reisz’s film portraying the dirty and polluted world of manufacturing in Nottingham, so Wadja’s films linger on the garbage and the ruins to be found in Warsaw and Polish small towns: fiction as documentary. They seems so far away from Hollywood and the UK’s Ealing Studios, it seems hard to believe they were made at the same time as The Lavender Hill Mob and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I know, that’s unfair. In the same period Rebel Without a Cause, 12 Angry Men, Touch of Evil, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof appeared on screens. However, if you do watch a Wadja film, you won’t forget it.
In France, Alain Resnais had begun his career working on traditional documentaries, albeit with a twist. His 1956 short film, Toute la Mémoire du Monde, was intended to be a survey of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In 21 minutes, he managed to turn it into a wry reflection on the potential and limits of organised and archived human knowledge. You could sense back then he was going to move on to innovative fiction. In Italy, Frederico Fellini completed his first major film, La Strada (in 1954). While it has the structure of a story, the film is episodic, a series of cruel and pointless events, and the conclusion left for the viewer to determine its significance. Alongside Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni was beginning to make films, most notably at this early stage a black and white tragedy, Le Amiche (1954), charting the slow downfall of a woman and her four female friends. Clearly, these three were going to end up as big names in cinema.
When we come to 1959, the horizons of cinema were almost unlimited. For me, five great films that year demonstrated how wide that world had become.
Hollywood was still making great dramas, and Alfred Hitchcock was in his prime. We all have our favourites, but for me North by Northwest was almost perfect. A spy thriller, it stars Cary Grant in a case of mistaken identity, pursued by a spy played by James Mason, with the whole story further complicated by Eva Marie Saint, who is later revealed as an undercover government agent. Visually, it has some stunning moments. In one scene Cary Grant is alone in a cornfield in the mid-west when he’s attacked by a crop duster; later we see him hanging on to the supports of a house jutting out into space; and finally, Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint flee for their lives across the top of Mount Rushmore. Hitchcock style Hollywood drama, at its best.
A second great Hollywood film from 1959 was Some Like it Hot. You must have seen it. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis are on the run after witnessing a gang massacre, and, disguised as women, join an all-female band headed to Miami. On the train they meet Marilyn Monroe, the bands vocalist and ukulele player. From that moment on, humour reigns, sparks begin to fly, while cross-dressing and homosexuality take centre stage – two themes that had hitherto been banned by the Hays Code. The Hays Code was a self-censorship policy that had been agreed in 1934, and would eventually disappear in 1968, but back in 1959, Billy Wilder’s brilliant film had just about demolished it.
Overseas, French directors had released two extraordinary films. The first, by François Truffaut, The 400 Blows, was a masterpiece from the emerging New Wave Cinema. It covers part of the life of a young boy growing up in Paris in the 1950s. From a broken home, he plays truant from school, steals and is caught, and ends up in a centre for troubled youth. He runs away, and the film ends as we see him run into the sea. This was a major innovation in cinema, combining gritty realism with an incomplete story as we’re left to ask, ‘what’s going to happen?’.
A second French new wave film that year was Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour. Told partly in flashbacks, it explores a brief affair between two married people, punctuating their moments together with scenes from the past. Elle had fallen for German soldier during the war: she was to run away with him, but he was shot before the war was over. Lui was a survivor from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima: a Japanese Imperial soldier, but as luck would have it he was away from the city when the bomb fell. The film is hypnotic, real at times, and occasionally quite dreamlike. The film ends with us realising Lui and Elle will separate after their brief affair, but, as in The 400 Blows, we’re uncertain about anything much else.
Finally, in India, Satyajit Ray’s third film in his Apu trilogy was released. The World of Apu finds Apu is now a young man, a would be writer. It is a strange story, unsettling in many ways. By chance, Apu finds himself in an arranged marriage, and when the couple have a son, his wife dies in childhood. He leaves his son to be cared for by his wife’s parents, and starts to wander, only ending in a strange reconciliation with his son some years later. For a western audience, the film was made all the more mysterious by Ravi Shankar’s sitar music accompanying the action.
While these films were released, in another part of the cinema universe, Fellini and Antonioni were busy. On location in Rome, the Aeolian Islands and Sicily, Michelangelo Antonioni was shooting L’Avventura, which would appear in 1960. The film concerns a mystery, but it is also mysterious, following three characters, Sando, Claudia and Anna, and then later just Claudio and Sandro as they search for Anna who had disappeared while they were in the islands. The search is almost leisurely, the evidence inconclusive, and the ending unclear. What have we been watching? We don’t know, but we can’t take our eyes away from the screen.
At the same time, Fellini was filming La Dolce Vita, also to appear in 1960. If L’Avventura made us spectators to an unsolved mystery, Fellini threw us into an equally confusing world. Marcello Rubini, played by Marcello Mastroianni, is a journalist, observing the party scene among the dissolute and affluent in Rome. Is he there to write a story? Perhaps, but we sense he is searching, searching for connection, for love, even for some kind of fulfilment. In a way that parallels French New Wave cinema, Fellini combines realism with an episodic film structure, leaving the viewer to make sense of the underlying story, if you felt the need to stitch together a narrative. One thing is quite clear: Marcello Mastroianni is the new heart throb, darker than a Cary Grant, sardonic, cigarette smoking, paving the way for the next generation: not Sean Connery as James Bond, but rather the cynical Dirk Bogarde in The Servant and in Darling.
The US film scene was about to see some further great films by Hitchcock and Wilder. Psycho appeared in 1960, fulfilling Hitchcock’s scary vision, and Billy Wilder released The Apartment. However, wider horizons continued to flourish in France and Italy, with Last Year at Marienbad, by Alain Resnais an avant-garde masterpiece, lacking any sense of story, confusing time, episodes and behaviour, leaving the viewer mystified and uncertain! Similarly, Antonioni completed L’Elisse, a haunting account of an apparent affair and its failure, and Fellini’s 8 ½ hit the screens. Cinema had changed, and now directors were free to abandon reliance on a structured series of episodes with a resolution. From 1959 onwards, it was ‘anything goes’.
I could have picked popular music, especially as 1959 was a relatively quiet year, but also a time of transition. Bill Haley and His Comets were in decline, although Joey’s Song got to #1 in Australia. Elvis Presley would return from the military in 1960 with Elvis is Back, and one of his better films, G I Blues. Cliff Richard and the Shadows had their first #1 hit with ‘Living Doll’. The Beatles were a year off forming under that name. Buddy Holly died in a plane crash. What’s this? The Sound of Music was on in New York for 1443 performances, from 1959-1963.
As I look back to 1959, all the future promise of television, cinema and the LP was beginning to emerge. Directors were taking major steps away from the traditional narrative form, and stories with a tidy ending. Anomie, sexual confusion and episodic lives were central, often thrown together with uncomfortable realism. At the same time, growing audiences were being exposed to movies far away from the familiar and local, with films and television dramas from Europe and Asia, and, more slowly, to access to music from non-western traditions. It was as if the blinkers had been taken off, and we were able to see so much more.
What we couldn’t see in 1959 was the 1960’s would see another change. Radicalism and revolutionary movements were about to explode across the USA, UK and Europe, fuelled by a new generation, comfortable and often rather spoiled, experimental, and disengaged from past traditions. If only we had better understood the changes in cinema, music and books, we might have anticipated they heralded the beginnings of a different era, a world of bigger horizons.
