Ch12 Hollywood in Transition

• protégé of Ernst Lubitsch

• instrumental in vanquishing the blacklist by challenging the Code & hiring Dalton Trumbo (one of the "Hollywood Ten")

• The Moon is Blue, Anatomy of a Murder, Exodus

• moralist with a taste for irony & great literature who lived in the tension between cinematic style & value statements

• the winners in his films were those who accept the limits of their humanity & navigate a moral crisis, or are flexible / resourceful enough to modify their projects

• the losers (though still captivating characters) are obsessed, inflexible overreachers

• Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, The Maltese Falcon

• Cold War liberal in era of Hollywood blacklisting

• had the problem of making social-problem films that would neither offend an audience or cost him his job

• solved in public life by cooperating with HUAC; solved in film by turning social problems in "human" problems

• sustained his message pictures w/dynamic performances from Method actors

• A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, East of Eden

• fled Europe when Hitler came to power (Jewish)

• started as a screenwriter, would later reject flashy "distracting" cinematography of Hitchcock & Welles

• wrote w/specific actors in mind to maximize on their limitations & directed 14 actors to Oscar nominations

• opposed HUAC, & was 1 of only 2 directors in the guild to vote against an "oath of allegiance" proposed by anti-communists (the other was John Huston)

• comedies & film noirs Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, The Apartment

• melodramas of contradicting qualities

• slick depictions of the most tawdry values of materialistic, middle-class life

• brutally funny comments on this same tawdriness

• "women's weepies" Imitation of Life, All That Heavens Allows

• made female audiences fall in love with Thoreau-like man of nature roles in which he ironically cast Rock Hudson

• loner & rebel on the fringes of Hollywood establishment (came to LA as Elia Kazan's assistant)

• consistently identified with oddballs who saw themselves as different from everyone else

• Rebel Without a Cause

Staying awake in this class? That's pretty serious...