STACK #151 May 2017

EXTRAS FEATURE

visit stack.net.au

was no way a formulaic and frothy Doris Day and Rock Hudson Hollywood movie was going to attract them to a cinema. Instead, these college-educated youngsters found the vibrant realism of European new wave films with a sociopolitical commentary more relevant and more to their taste. Jean-Luc Godard’s French gangster movie Breathless was still drawing in New York audiences two years after its US debut, as were the British “kitchen sink” dramas. Look Back in Anger , Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Taste of Honey  offered detailed examinations of controversial subjects like pre-marital sex, abortion, and homosexuality. As far as young American moviegoers were concerned, Hollywood’s answer to these realistic European films throughout that decade appeared to be the likes of pretty little Debbie Reynolds singing Tammy and Rex Harrison talking to the animals. Even when Hollywood adapted adult novels for the screen, such as From Here to Eternity and Butterfield 8, the “adult content” had to be totally sanitised; all American films were subjected to the censorious standards of the Motion Picture Production Code. Consequently, the films were stripped of the real meaning contained in the books that the American public had been reading for years. To counteract the rigid code, a few of Hollywood’s old guard directors had become creative in disguising the act of sex onscreen, such as moving the camera from a couple’s clinch to a log fire that suddenly flares up. More inventive was the final scene from Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, where Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint are seen embracing on the upper berth of a train compartment that then swiftly cuts to the train entering a tunnel. This was Hitchcock’s unique way of depicting that the couple’s relationship had actually been consummated and was, of course, completely missed by the censor. The wealth of realistic new wave European films – that were attracting large audiences into the US urban arthouses – triggered a one-man rebellion against the strict production code that impeded all Hollywood filmmakers from producing similarly themed

HOLLYWOOD'S SECOND GOLDEN AGE 1960-1967

Part 2: The Beginnings of a New Hollywood

F rench Nouvelle Vague  director, François Truffaut, had previously described the traditional French film industry’s productions as le cinema du papa (Grandad’s cinema); outdated and outmoded. Truffaut’s blunt criticism could also equally apply to a large section of Hollywood’s post-war movie output. Although the Hollywood studio system of manufacturing movies and stars was now defunct, the day to day operation of the film studios was still in the hands of the old regime who had founded the system in the late 1920s. The likes of Adolph Zukor, Jack Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck were now well into their seventies and eighties and many of the films they now independently financed and distributed reflected their age. By the early 1960s, family audiences, which for decades had provided the bread and butter for the so called “Mom & Pop” neighbourhood theatres, had practically disappeared – mainly due to the popularity of television. Subsequently, family audiences were now the minority audience, yet over 60 per cent of Hollywood movies with their ageing stars and recycled plots were still primarily family- friendly and pitched at an audience that rarely came anywhere near a movie theatre. Massive social upheavals during this era – such as the Red (Communist) scare, Cold War tensions, nuclear paranoia, the assassination of JFK, the birth control pill and

Poster for the British “kitchen sink drama” Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)

consequent sexual revolution, the increasing recreational use of marijuana, women’s liberation, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam war – shook the foundations of American society. This was now the Age of Aquarius, the era of the post-war baby boomers who had come of age, and there

Hitchcock’s “phallic scene” from North By Northwest (1959)

22

MAY 2017

jbhifi.com.au