HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1982: In which horror went mainstream when we weren't looking, and the New Age of the Producer has begun

The question of authorship of 1982's Poltergeist is not going to be resolved here. It is one of the great stubbornly unanswered question of film production in modern days: whether producer/scenarist/co-writer Steven Spielberg (it is one of only three films for which he took a screenwriting credit) in fact directed the movie for which Tobe Hooper received credit, or if he was simply a very, very, very hands-on producer. It is a situation that undoubtedly happens more often than anybody supposes, and the history of the studio system is thick with movie for which the producer had more of a firm hand on the final product than the director, or directors (for it is also the case that many more old films than you could imagine went through multiple directors, with only the last one, or the one who did the most work, getting the onscreen credit; the studios were factories then, not art classes). But in this case, fanboyism kicks in: an anxiety over whether the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the director, also in 1982, of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial "really" made Poltergeist, and how we're supposed to value it as a result. Which is nonsense, of course; whether Hooper was just there to facilitate Spielberg's vision, or if he was just there to serve as a blind for the DGA while Spielberg facilitated his own vision (and what is not contested is that Hooper had little to nothing to do with post-production, where the bulk of any film's actual personality emerges anyway), there was never any point whn Hooper might possible have ended up as the auteur of what is, every inch, a Spielberg film. And this is not the first time that a producer, and not the director, served as the primary creative spirit behind a movie: one needn't look beyond David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind and Duel in the Sun for two especially clear-cut examples. The desire to discover who "really" directed Poltergeist is a farrago, mired in 1970s-style belief in Director as God and the way that singular artistic visions can be communicated though an especially collaborative art form. But we are in the 1980s now; the director's artistic vision is dead, and it is now time for branding and marketing and a new iteration of the old studio machine to make movies for us, and not individual genius so much.

Anyway, the point of any film is the film, and whoever really directed Poltergeist, the film does not cease to be the thing it has always been and will always be: a fascinating and in some ways disastrously compromised dark twin to E.T. that also represents a weirdly family-friendly horror movie from an era when "horror movies" almost exclusively meant stories of grotesque psychos stabbing sexually active teenagers with lots of stage blood ensuing. It's one of those haunted house movies about the unpredictable terrors of home ownership, looking at the literal suburban hell faced by the Freeling family: dad Steve (Craig T. Nelson), who got the gorgeous new tract home they all live in as a perk for being the most awesome of all the sales reps for the Cuesta Verde subdivision; mom Diane (JoBeth Williams), teen daughter Dana (Dominique Dunne), young son Robbie (Oliver Robins), and youngest of all, little Carol Anne (Heather O'Rourke), who's the first member of the family to actively notice the odd shifts and bumps that everybody else overlooks. She also develops, early in the movie, a peculiar fascination with the static that the family television receives when programming ends for the evening (ah, the days when TV wasn't broadcasting every hour of every day!). In fact, by the end of the first scene, she'll end up staring intently at the blasting white noise with an implacable look of calm on her face that contrasts mightily with the raging flickers of white light that make her close-up look unnaturally freakish for such a small child.

Something or someone is communicating to Carol Anne through that static, and it starts to mess with the Freeling household at large, creating a weird zone in the kitchen where objects and people slide across the floor, while also battering things about and shaking the house to no end. Inexplicably, the family doesn't take this as their cue to leave immediately; it's not until one particularly violent event during a terrible storm results in Carol Anne having been spirited right out of the house that Steve and Diane begin to suspect that something terrible might be going on; this sends them to call on local parapsychologist Dr. Lesh (Beatrice Straight) to help figure out what the hell is happening, and when she proves no better equipped to to explain the paranormal activity, she brings in the psychic Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), whose beatific attitude in describing the unholy nexus of dark psychic energy residing in the Freeling home is the freakiest part of the whole movie.

Poltergeist is a garden variety haunted house movie in a lot of ways; it benefits most from coming at a time when, after years and years of treating horror as a shoddy B-commodity to be hidden with shame, the studios were starting to realise, en masse, that there was some money to be made in the genre. And it especially benefits from being a pet project of Spielberg's right in the window of time when he could basically do no wrong: he had, between 1975 and 1981, directed three of the most indescribably enormous hits in the history of American cinema (and also the mega-flop 1941, from which he sprung back quickly), and if he wanted to oversee the first special effects horror extravaganza of the new popcorn movie era, nobody was likely to step in and tell him no. And so Poltergeist is executed with a tremendous array of cinematic tricks that were the absolute state of the art in 1982, most of which have aged fairly well. Though a lot of it feels sort of identical to his 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and therein lies the problem.

Poltergeist is a Steven Spielberg movie. I've said it, but it needs to be repeated: whether Tobe Hooper "directed" it or not, he was only executing Spielberg's very specific and very characteristic vision. That the film came from the exact same period in Spielberg's adulthood reminiscing about Spielberg's childhood as E.T. is absolutely impossible to miss, as both present a version of the California suburbs as a nexus for childhood fantasies - happy fantasies of finding a best friend and having adventures in E.T., scary fantasies of looming spooky trees and creepy clown dolls and the ineffable terror of thunderstorms in Poltergeist. But Steven Spielberg, for all the thrillers dotting his career, has an attitude that is completely at odds with the impulses of horror, and however much influence Hooper had on the pre-production and production (and nobody denies that he was active in the film's pre-production), the fingerprints of a man who certainly isn't known for his family-friendly work are clearly to be felt in patches here and there. So we have, on the one hand, a writer and producer whose instincts are unyieldingly safe and juvenile in focus: let's make Poltergeist a spooky story about the things that scare little kids, but not too spooky. And on the other, we have a collaborator who made America's most widely-seen film about cannibalism prior to The Silence of the Lambs. Given how much of the film ends up walking back all of the actual scary material with lengthy conversations about metaphysics and light shows in which ghosts look like even more gentle Spielbergian aliens, it's remarkable that Hooper, or whoever, was able to get as much of the legitimate nightmare fuel smuggled into the film as he was: it's never sustained for more than a scene, and it's usually only a single isolated effect at a time, but there's a reason Poltergeist started the conversation that ultimately led to the creation of the PG-13 rating. Rotting flesh hallucinations and giant hell-skulls and some acutely terrifying sound effects come along just often enough to pierce through the "let's tell a scary bedtime story!" attitude that is Poltergeist's main mode for it to feel legitimately darker and harsher than a first approximation of the story and the way the story has been told would ever lead one to believe.

At the same time, it leaves the film feeling erratic and lumpy: not like the largely gentle-touch of the horror was a deliberate choice to let those occasional high-impact moments land harder, but like the film was being torn in two directions. And again, we don't know that happened; but the story about how Jerry Goldsmith (hired to give a disappointingly generic John Williams impression) was shocked to find that he'd be working with the producer, not the director seems awfully telling in at least one respect. For the score, more than anything else, is the film's keenest tool in knocking the edge off its horror with a sweetness and even Romantic air that significantly undercuts the moody lighting and looming camera angles (particularly in the very last shot, which seems for all the world like it should be brooding, except that the music insists, in a most bullying way, "all is well, the heroes have won, la-la").

The production values alone are enough to make this one of the 1980s' most distinctive and important horror movies, showcasing what the genre could do when given unprecedented resources and support; its thematic concerns - living in the suburbs is actually bad for your soul! - make it essential viewing for any even semi-serious Spielberg aficionado, of whom I understand that there are at least one or two out in the world. Its interpolation of enormously ambitious shot set-ups and effects sequences into the modest domestic setting of a single family home set it out as one of the most unique of the first generation of post-Star Wars effects showcases. And yet for all that I'd basically recommend it as necessary viewing for everybody, I can't convince myself that Poltergeist actually works all that well. Truly, it achieves the exact goal it sets for itself, to provide the most intense scary movie experience that the whole family can enjoy. But speaking as a grown-up horror fan, I can't help but wish for more out of this one-of-a-kind marriage of Spielbergian extravagance with genre mechanics, and while Poltergeist does not fail on its own terms, it still feels very much like a missed opportunity.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1982
-Austrian bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger learns what is best in life in Conan the Barbarian, and becomes the most unexpected superstar in generations
-The lingering memory of the Holocaust poisons the present, as Meryl Streep is forced to make Sophie's Choice
-Fast Times at Ridgemont High is the film that launched a thousand puberties, and proved the teen sex comedy could be pretty darn good cinema, too

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1982
-The Palme d'Or victory for Yol brings Turkish cinema to new international prominence
-In the last year of his life, ultra-prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder releases his final masterwork, Veronika Voss
-Contemporary history is solemnly embalmed by the British-Indian co-production Gandhi

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1975: In which the quickly-changing world is subjected to enthusiastic, if wildly clumsy satire

1975's The Stepford Wives has long since become one of those movies for which the twist ending of its central mystery has become the single thing that most people know about it. This is never a fair place for a work of narrative art to find itself, but it's especially unfortunate for this film, which is good in almost all ways until the twist ending, which makes a complete hash of the social commentary that is one of the film's two main reasons for existing. I shall return to that point; even though the twist ending is the only that most people know about the film, it's still the ending, and I'd like to hold off on spoiling a 39-year-old movie as long as possible.

The film, based on a 1972 novel by Ira Levin (whose Rosemary's Baby traffics in similar "the life of a paranoid housewife" themes, and was also turned into a rather more effortlessly successful movie seven years prior), dives right into the ramifications of Woman's Liberation, the major social progressive activity of the 1970s as the Civil Rights Movement was in the 1960s, though one which perhaps resulted in fewer clear-cut victories. Still, it was successful enough to make The Stepford Wives feel like a thematic visitor from another civilisation, with far different expectations about the importance of rigidly-policed gender roles. For one thing, even the most outspoken feminists in the film don't actually go so far as to think that women should be employed outside the home; the story's battlegrounds are set entirely around what they do with the time that they spend not having paying jobs.

Our outspoken feminist for the evening is Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross), who has recently moved with her husband, Walter (Peter Masterson), and their two daughters, Kim (Mary Stuart Masterson, Peter's daughter), and Amy (Ronny Sullivan), from the lively and dangerous world of New York to the soothing bedroom community of Stepford, Connecticut. We ken long before Joanna admits as much that this was Walter's choice, believing as he does that life in the suburbs is far more rewarding than the hectic, filthy life of an urbanite - "I just saw a man carrying a naked lady", says one of the daughters as they leave, speaking of a garden-variety pervert with a blow-up sex doll, to which Walter pleasantly notes, "That's why we're moving to Stepford", telling us from the first minutes that Stepford is the place without naked ladies, and that will be important.

As it turns out, Stepford is more sterile and unforgivingly blank than Joanna's worst nightmares. All of the men in town belong to a thing called the Stepford Men's Association, which seems to exist largely so there's a place that women absolutely can not go; and virtually all of the wives of those men are freakishly docile, not just by '70s standards, but by the most alarmist caricature of the Eisenhower '50s. Obsessed with cooking, housecleaning, and nothing else, the Stepford wives are like soulless, sexless objects, and only another recent transplant, Bobbie Markowe (Paula Prentiss), matches Joanna's attitudes, or shares her belief that something is seriously amiss with this town and the incomprehensibly retrograde gender attitudes it fosters.Eventually, Joanna and Bobbie stop just noticing this weirdness and begin to investigate it; and eventually, Joanna figures out what's going on, for all the good it does her.

That gives us enough to go on; the best and most lasting parts of The Stepford Wives have very little to do with what is discovered about the rotten underbelly of Stepford, and everything to do with the woman discovering it. The film in its present state came about as the result of not always friendly wrangling between director Bryan Forbes and screenwriter William Goldman, the latter of whom had some very accurate complaints about what Forbes's decisions did to the story's internal logic, particularly the decision where he cast his talented but somewhat dowdy wife Nanette Newman as head Stepford wife Carol Van Sant. But we'll get to the film's rickety narrativity in due course; there's so much of it that actually works, quite splendidly, that I'm reluctant to give into Goldman and confess that yes, this actually is kind of half-baked and illogical when all is said and done.

Forbes, whose career highlights aren't remotely as well-known as they should be, was first and above all a terrific director of actresses: in The L-Shaped Room, from 1962, he pulled the first truly great performance out of Leslie Caron; and in The Whisperers, from 1967, he helped the legendary Dame Edith Evans along to what is likely the very best screen performance of her estimable career. He was also, specifically, great at positioning his wonderful leading ladies in the context of thrillers about warped domestic spaces: The Whisperers, again, with Evans going slightly, slowly insane in her run-down flat, and 1964's Seance on a Wet Afternoon, with a sterling Kim Stanley as a demented psychic who perpetrates a kidnapping to prove her skills. The Stepford Wives fills both roles wonderfully: in it, Ross gives an absolutely superb performance that's miles beyond anything she does in her best-known roles, as the milksop girl in The Graduate and the charmingly bland woman spoiling the homoeroticism between the leads of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And she does it in part because the film so obligingly presents her as the very Rosemary-ish woman who finds herself trapped in a town that seems obviously, oppressively "off" to her, even though virtually nobody around her seems to reealise it.

Forbes doesn't play things subtly: he and the great cinematographer Owen Roizman soak the film in jagged shadowy interiors harshly contrasting with eye-bleachingly bright, saturated exteriors, both of them suggesting something very artificial and threatening; and the film also boasts a remarkably dated but even more remarkably successful score by Michael Small that uses some of the most banal, '70s TV-movie cues to establish the soporific ordinariness of Stepford, and then its increasingly vile secrets, as the score begins to have minor-key counter-melodies and electronic orchestrations creeping around the edges to inform us, sonically, that All Is Not Well.

It's a fine, if somewhat overworked paranoia thriller from the era that genre was at its best; Ross's increasingly frantic but reliably strong-willed performance makes her an ideal subject for the mechanics of the film, which is where it works best. And in every detail of the production design, the music, and the costuming, it uses the visual language of the kind of soppy films pandering to women in an ironic, biting way, clearly underlining its angry, satiric goals: this life, this kind of filmmaking, is the sort of box that a certain kind of men want to keep women locked away in, docile and unchallenging and in no way politically dangerous.

And back we thus come to the satire, which is clearly the main takeaway from the movie, even though it's a much, much better thriller than social commentary. As you know - as I know, long before I watched the movie - as the post basically up and tells us - the Stepford wives are robots, made by the mysterious Dale Coba (Patrick O'Neal), who used to build audio-animatronics for Disney. And this is the point Goldman made, and every hetero* male critic has made since, and we're all of us completely right: if you give the kind of conservative, woman-threatened man the movie portrays the ability to replace his wife with a completely docile robot clone who will uncomplainingly do every thing he wants, it's not going to be wearing hilariously demure dresses that go right up to the neck. It will be wearing skin-tight miniskirts that barely contain it's enormous, imbalancing breasts. And it won't have time to take care of the house, the kids, and the cooking, because of the sheer quantity of blowjobs it performs in the course of a normal day. For Goldman, this meant that all of the Stepford wives should also be caricatured, gorgeous trophy wives; casting Newman scotched that, and the movie had to become suddenly very contrived and inapt in its central satiric message as a result (though the fake Joanna does have curvier hips and larger breasts than Ross naturally possesses). Even if we conceive that the chauvinist's dream in the '70s was for a parodic version of the '50s to come back, it certainly wouldn't have come at the expense of the Sexual Revolution, which benefited men every inch as much as it benefited women.

Regardless of the specifics, it doesn't make sense except strictly in the realm of symbolism and metaphor, a flaw that didn't affect Rosemary's Baby, which was metaphorical and internally coherent within the universe the film was creating. Forbes's atmosphere and theatricality do an excellent job of putting the reveal over with enough intensity that the logical holes are hard to spot: the confrontation between Joanna and her new replacement is tremendously captivating horror filmmaking.

And besides, whatever intellectual cheats it has to take to get there, the important part is less "what's going on?" than "what does it it mean for our characters?" Joanna and Bobbie are extraordinary movie heroes, sharply-written and brilliantly performed. As long as the film remains in a horror/thriller mood, presenting their discovery of the sheer scale of the entrenched anti-woman worldview they're facing as a sort of Kafka-esque nightmare, it works beautifully. Intellectually, it could be a lot sounder, but its rhetorical skills are of secondary concern to the way it all feels, and it feels bone-chilling. Not the tightest paranoia thriller, not the most persuasively horrifying in its implication, but far better than the generally soft reputation it has suffered from ever since the '70s, and a fine work of craftsmanship from a director whose thrillers are some of the best that you've almost certainly never seen.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1975
-Hotshot kid director Steven Spielberg almost fails to make the first movie to ever break $100 million at the box office, Jaws
-After years in the making, Robert Altman brings to the big screen the long-awaited Nashville, with 24, count 'em, 24 of your favorite stars
-Edgy animator Ralph Bakshi makes Coonskin and immediately embroils himself in racial controversy

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1975
-Belgium's Chantal Akerman creates a new feminist visual vocabulary with which to showcase three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
-The simmering Australian New Wave bursts out in its full form with Picnic at Hanging Rock, a cryptic anti-mystery by Peter Weir
-Sholay becomes among the highest-grossing films in the history of Indian cinema, past, present, or future

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1958: In which post-war psychological and social trauma is explored with more sophistication and ambivalence than had previously been possible

That are certain expectations that immediately present themselves in connection with a film made at MGM in 1958, starring Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and directed by Vincente Minnelli, and not the least merit of Some Came Running is that it completely defies them. It's not a musical, for one thing, though that's a superficial way to start off. Many films - I daresay most films - are not musicals. Even a great many Minnelli films are not musicals, though his best work all is clustered in that genre.

But there's not-musical, and there's something as caustic and bitter in its not-musicality as Some Came Running, which I am tempted to call one of American cinema's first great masterpieces about the psychological dislocation of the war generation in the years following the war (it followed, by two years, an actual MGM musical on the same topic, the Comden & Green masterwork It's Always Fair Weather, directed by Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly); it is based on a massive novel by James Jones, the chronicler of wartime anomie whose books also found cinematic expression in From Here to Eternity (another Sinatra picture - the one he won his Oscar for, no less) and The Thin Red Line, and it is probably the brusquest, cruelest of those films. Which is no mean feat coming from a director whose better-known film from '58 is the romantic, if also distinctly, wearily worldly musical Gigi, and whose masterpiece is the nostalgic, and sharply melancholic Meet Me in St. Louis. So perhaps it's not that surprising, on the face of it.

Still, it's a bleak movie. Sinatra plays Dave Hirsh, a onetime promising writer who has taken his time about coming home after war - which war, and exactly how long ago it ended, is something the film rather conspicuously refuses to detail, and by the time it pins things down to 1948 deep in the second half, it's far too late for the film to end up feeling schematic or overtly sociological, thank God. And longer still it would have taken him, except that after a bender in Chicago, he was put on a bus to his hometown of Parkman (an American Everytown that is specified to Indiana the same time that 1948 is named), with a blackout drunk on, and a dimwitted party girl named Ginnie Moorehead (Shirley MacLaine) by his side, convinced that the meager attention the blazed Dave threw her way was proof of his deep affection for her.

Parkman is one of those '50s soap opera towns where everybody is in everybody else's business, and then is shocked, shocked, to find that everybody is in their business in return, and superficially, Some Came Running is a soap, though the sheer caustic energy of the film, particularly in the form of Sinatra's scorched-earth performance (it is the best work he ever gave on film) makes it hard if not completely impossible to file the film into the same generic box as the tawdry, heaving Peyton Place. And the subplots that remain from what I gather to be a much more sprawling, ensemble-based book certainly give the impression that a more typical soap is to be found somewhere in the material; I am pleased that screenwriters John Patrick & Arthur Sheekman, along with Minnelli, elected not to focus on that aspect of the story, because the most broadly melodramatic sequences are also by far the film's worst: the bits about Dave's brother Frank (Arthur Kennedy) having an affair and being found out by his daughter (Betty Lou Keim) stop the film dead in its tracks.

No, where the film lives most electrifyingly is in a battle of wits between Dave and the whole stinking, rotten world: the world of Nice People like Frank and his oh-so-prim wife Agnes (Leora Dana, absolutely terrific despite being a performer that you never, ever heard of), the kind who behave in shitty and hypocritical ways but understand the social codes that make it okay and even respectable to do so. But it's not a stock "lone truth-teller against the nasty suburban world" story, because for all that the film clearly looks down on Parkman and the kind of judgmental people who live there, it doesn't do much to sugarcoat Dave, either, seeing him as a brooding force of indiscriminate anger who has more or less lost the ability to function around people - his unrelentingly dismissive, sarcastic treatment of Ginnie (perhaps the only person in the cast that the film genuinely sympathises with, even as it paints her as an undereducated floozy) comes from a place of real bitterness and cruelty that, if it doesn't quite turn him out to be an anti-hero, sure as hell makes it problematic to see him as a valorous figure in the face of small town small-mindedness.

This is about as far outside of Minnelli's wheelhouse as I'm aware of him ever having gone (the only greater outlier is perhaps the romantic drama The Clock, mostly because it was made in black and white at a time when he'd graduated to color), which makes it incredibly fascinating as an auteur theory test case; and MGM's most florid stylist certainly managed to put a stamp on the film, though in some very odd ways. It's a visually-driven film, it hardly seems possibly to deny that: the set design and the placement of the camera within those sets is at least as important as the words and deeds performed by the characters in exploring the themes of the piece. It's in CinemaScope, as would certainly have been expected from a top-tier MGM production of that period, and it uses the expansive spread of that frame tremendously well, just about as well as any American film had up to that (point, nerdy aside: the film came out the same year as The Hidden Fortress, the first film by Kurosawa Akira in anamorphic widescreen - between the two of them, I think we have the first truly great works of the format). What jumps out, in looking at the compositions, is their frequent emptiness, and remove from the characters: while many directors, Minnelli among them, had been prone to treating CinemaScope as just a special case of normal filmmaking, with the same blend of shots that anybody had ever used, in Some Came Running, the director and cinematographer William H. Daniels exploit its capacity for making scenes into tableaux, stressing isolation and loneliness within spaces. The interiors, often as not, look like fish tanks, with far too few fish in them. And when combined with the unique blankness and monochromatic feel of Willam A. Horning and Urie McCleary's art direction, the result is a film that feels lifeless.

Minnelli was, above all things, a great director of color: all of his best musicals use the full range of Technicolor to create lush spectacle that doubles as marker of narrative and psychological development. In this regard, Some Came Running is an outlier, even a renunciation, for much of its running time: the first act especially is a tremendously, unrelentingly brown movie, with more than one scene of Dave, in his drab uniform, melding into the tastefully, soullessly beige walls of the town. The first real burst of color comes from a bar where he meets the hard drinking gambler Bama (Dean Martin), and where Ginnie re-enters the picture - MacLaine, throughout the film, is particularly draped in bright, contrasty color by costume designer Walter Plunkett - and throughout, there's a tension between neutral colors and bold splashes of color that obviously symbolises Dave's passions coming into conflict with the tamped-down mores of Parkman. But because it is obvious, does not mean it doesn't work, and the visual scheme of Some Came Running does absolutely splendid work of suggesting the mental imbalance of a man having conformity shouted at him from one side while liveliness and emotion beckon from the edges. I half wonder if the imagery isn't a bit more sophisticated than the script entirely deserves (it does have those drifting subplots, and some scenes that feel like they make their point a couple of times before finally ending), but that's obviously silly thinking. The result is pretty great, and who doesn't want great: an examination of how a man comes home from the War to find that he is unfixed and unable to position himself within the places he finds himself.

What this does tend to mean, and it's not really a problem although I can see where it would annoy plenty of people, is that Some Came Running isn't necessarily populated by characters, so much as personifications of ideas and attitudes: this is most evident, sadly, in the women, Ginnie and schoolteacher Gwen French (Martha Hyer), the latter being the woman Dave bullishly courts in an attempt to find himself an anchor. Ginnie is an especially rough job for MacLaine, who to her credit does amazing things to make the character's aching neediness feel like it speaks to an emotional void and not the male screenwriters' decision to over-write a shrill stock figure; while I can't imagine the character filling any other function in the movie than she does, and it's a function that needs to be filled, it's not remotely to modern tastes how much she serves as a facilitator for Dave's arc, rather than as an individual in her own right.

But this is really true of every single character in the film - it is, in fact, why I think the Frank subplot feels so off to me, it's predicated on a Frank who has a more autonomous personality than the one we necessarily get onscreen. For all its clear and deliberate lack of melodrama (though in a melodramatic genre) and tender emotion (though made by an especially tender filmmaker), both of which would apparently speak to its hard-boiled realism, Some Came Running isn't really realist. It's myth-making, really, the formation in real time of a myth of mid-century American life, and its mode is more expressionist than anything, though that expressionism is mostly of a peculiarly low-key and deceptively naturalist sort.

That, anyway, helps to explain the final sequence, the most visually potent in the film, in which Minnelli finally uncorks all his characteristic technique for a busy carnival that fills the wide frame to the point of bursting with lights and color and visual noise that all build up to something oppressive and horribly frenzied. It is the point where Dave's experiment in rejoining small-town life (what's more small-town than a carnival?) finally explodes, tragically, in the one scene of gentle, real emotions, with a dead body flopping like a bird that some kid couldn't save, and a bit too much music from Elmer Bernstein that tells us a bit too explicitly what we are meant to be Feeling. But one tiny misstep is a little thing in such a roundly impressive passage, in which Dave's mental state goes from being subtly intimated by the movie and suddenly threatens to devour it. In a decade that spent quite a lot of energy depicting people who didn't Fit In to the strongest culture of conformity that its country ever lived through, I can't name anything that depicts the failure to conform - the willful refusal to conform - with more impact, and though many films have done exemplary work in portraying the weariness and discomfort of post-WWII modernity, nearly all of them feel, to me, like they're working mostly within this one film's shadow.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1958
-Joshua Logan's heinous butchery of South Pacific does not prevent it from being the year's highest-grossing film
-Director/producer Stanley Kramer makes his first message picture, The Defiant Ones
-Orson Welles returns to America long enough to direct Touch of Evil, usually cited as the final film of the classic noir period

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1958
-Youssef Chahine's Cairo Station broadens the world's awareness of Egyptian cinema
-At Britain's Hammer Film Productions, Christopher Lee plays the vampire Count Dracula for the first time
-The three film producer Shaw brothers of Shanghai buy a Hong Kong-based studio and thereby form the basis for that territory's future action movie industry

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1955: In which America's greatest era of bourgeois conformity is critiqued from within; and also, In which we weep, like, buckets and buckets of tears

Years of intense critical re-evaluation, from Marxist theorists, feminist theorists, queer theorists, and structuralists, have brought the career of German emigrant Douglas Sirk to a level of respectability and significance that he was not generally accorded in the 1950s, when he was regarded as one of several nobodies churning out "women's pictures", and producing what is now regarded as his most important work. And while those theorists and scholars deserve all our thanks for bringing to light one of the great visual stylists working in America between the end of the Second World War and the 1970s, I think we must be leery losing sight of the fact that, class commentary this and gay coding that aside, Sirk made really fucking good melodramas.

Take, if you will, his 1955 All That Heaven Allows, the film upon which perhaps most of the theory raising him to the level of auteur based itself; I think we can fairly securely call it his signature film (his "best" is another matter, and we don't need to jump down that rabbit hole). It is nonsense, undoubtedly: the director himself acknowledged that Peg Fenwick's script, from a story by Edna L. Lee and Harry Lee, was "impossible", and he had to fix and re-shape it over the course of shooting the movie. But however florid and hokey (that is to say: however melodramatic), there's never a moment where it feels like Sirk wasn't treating the story with absolute commitment on its own terms. The colors, the blocking, the music: all of it builds to legitimise and enrich that impossible story, not to undercut or subvert it.

The action picks up in a small town in New England during the autumn, where we meet widowed Cary Scott (Jane Wyman), mother of two grown children, the young professional Ned (William Reynolds) and the college student Kay (Gloria Talbott). She has a best friend in Sara Warren (Agnes Moorehead), who keeps her abreast of all the gossip with the country club wives who make up the closest thing Cary has to a social circle, but mostly, as far as we can tell, she spends her time in the quiet, alone. That being said, there's no obvious evidence that she has the imagination to realise that she's bored or unfulfilled, until the fateful morning when Sara has to cancel lunch and that leaves Cary with nobody to talk to but the gardener: one Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), who has been pruning her trees for years, and who took over from his late dad, who pruned the trees before him. And it takes very little contact with Ron before Cary starts to have all kinds of funny feelings, both of a heightened, philosophically and emotionally reflective kind, and of the more grubby, sweaty kind as well. Ron, for his part, more than reciprocates, and by the time winter sets in, they're engaged. But this sets Cary against a society in which the appearance of propriety is everything, and widows are expected to wither away of respectability, or at best to only ever have romantic entanglements with miserable tedious assholes of their own social group and age bracket. And so their love is attacked and challenged, in both subtle and raging explicit ways, by very nearly every one of Cary's friends and family members. Ron's friends, meanwhile, are Thoreau-reading bohemians who couldn't give less of a shit.

What's amazing to me is not that at some point in the late '60s or '70s, scholars started to tease out how this could possibly function not just as a tearjerker but also as Sirk's caustic attack on social values of the mid-'50s; it's amazing that it might ever have been read any other way. Make Cary's neighbors space aliens instead of boring white suburbanites, and taa-daa! you have Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a parable for the fetish of conformity that marks the decade in the public consciousness. All That Heaven Allows isn't a parable; it's much too blunt and direct for that word to apply.

But still, melodrama is like sci-fi or horror in that it's privileged to say things in a direct, high-impact way, without the gentility of Respectable, Dignified Drama. It gets to be sharp-toothed and blood red, and the way that the film demonstrates how pointlessly nasty all of the Good People are being in condemning Cary for the crime of having desires and acting on them is merciless and unmissable - every time I watch the film, knowing exactly where it's going, I still get blindsided by how disgusting the Scott children turn out to be in their final appearance, and remain freshly impressed by how Sirk and his invaluable cinematographer Russell Metty foreshadow this development by showcasing Kay's guilt-tripping freakout - the moment above all else that breaks Cary's resolve and self-interest - in a kaleidoscope of gaudy colored lighting that plays like a disconcerting bad dream even in a film where bright color clashes are to be found somewhat often, and in which Kay in particular is often staged against a context of jarring gaudiness, often paired with self-important body language involving taking off her glasses, standing erect and inclining her head in a clear "I'm smarter than you are, so listen to my smartness" gesture. Boy, does Sirk ever enjoy mocking Kay.

Color is always an important signifier in this film, with every scene and damn near every shot doing something very particular and purposeful, especially in contrasting hot colors with cooling ones. In the beginning of the film, Cary is associated with reds and oranges: her clothes, the bright autumnal trees that require pruning by a rugged American man-hunk like Ron (incidentally, I'm not terribly keen on readings of the film that foreground Hudson's homosexuality, even though I do not necessarily disagree with them, for this reason: if we read gay coding into Ron, it deprives Cary of her unambiguously heterosexual blossoming. And it's her movie more than it's Ron's). The first beat of the plot, properly speaking, finds Sara showing up in a blue dress in a blinding robin's egg blue car, violating the frame-filling field of reds, the moments of greatest passion between Cary and Ron, or more properly speaking between Cary and Ron's way of life, are those in which reds, yellows, and oranges are contrasted with the whites, blues, and greys visible through windows and in backgrounds. When she gives in to peer pressure, she's reduced to wearing greys and blues, spotting reds only here and there in the frame. Worst of all is when Cary is presented, against her stated will, with a television, and we see her reflected in its cramped, boxy frame, all the color sucked out until she's just a grey and gold shadow. No sign of post-war affluence has ever looked so hideously squat and threatening and deadening as that TV.

That's dime store visual analysis, of course; any halfwit who just learned that "red = lust" in Western color symbology can watch All That Heaven Allows and come to those conclusions. But that, I'd argue, is exactly what makes the movie great melodrama: it works on such a basic, direct level, it's like being punched in the gut, hard, for 89 minutes. Subtleties that need to be teased out with great labor and attention are wonderful and all, but there's something to be said about something so potently obvious that it just roars over you. These are primal emotions, in melodramas: sex and desire, the awareness of one's own self as distinct from the society that tries as hard as it possibly can to erase the self, especially the self of a woman, especially the self of a middle-aged mother and widow. More than any other Sirk movie - hell, more than any other American film from the '50s that I can think of having seen - All That Heaven Allows is a drama about a woman attempting to claim ownership of her own life despite absolutely everything in her past conspiring to deny her that agency. I haven't seen every movie made between 1953 and 1961, but I'm deeply tempted to call it the most gender-progressive American movie of the Eisenhower era, even if it ends, in a scene that's already a bit leaden for other reasons, with the suggestion that Cary has to be a nurse before she can be a lover.

And like all truly great progressive drama, it succeeds at that because it's not constantly speaking about it. The most persuasive and compelling scenes in All That Heaven Allows are the ones where the story and characters are foregrounded more than social messaging, more even than the film's own second-half indulgence in painting all of the suburbanites as The Will To Conformity, rather than individuals. The most effective, persuasive sequences are the ones where Cary is simply allowed to be happy in a way she's plainly never felt before, with Wyman's face slowly and methodically opening itself into relaxed, joyful pleasure (it's really difficult to put into words just how perfect Wyman is in this role: it gives a great deal of opportunity to her, and she returns the favor by doing everything in exactly the right register of obvious without being broad, vividly emotional without being overwrought). The acting and the warmth of the cinematography showcase that, along with the cozy, beautiful design of all the scenes set in Ron's world (the art direction was by Alexander Golitzen and Eric Orbom), in contrast to the plush but uncomfortably open and non-living rooms of Cary and the country clubbers. The difference, I think, can be best summed up in a scene where Ron's friend Alida (Virginia Grey), hosting a party of all the oddballs and outsiders, gushes with unforced enthusiasm "oh, what a beautiful cake!" to one of her guests' contribution to the dinner, as the camera rushes forth to look at what is most certainly not a beautiful cake, but is probably tastier and more lovingly-made than all the fussy food eaten everywhere else in the film.

This is pleasure / that is cold - everything in the visuals and performances of All That Heaven Allows focuses on creating that one dichotomy, and then watching as the protagonist finds herself traveling between the two halves of that dichotomy for the first time, feeling alive and passionate against all the best efforts of society to prevent her. It's top-shelf cinematic sophistication in service to brute, angry sentiment about how fucked-up society and propriety are, and if it's not the bestest best melodrama that ever could be - frankly, I think at least two other Sirk films are even better - it is, nevertheless, proof that there is artistry and glory in a genre that never had to apologise for itself, not when it was this confident, beautiful, and good.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1955
-Oklahoma! is the first of many deeply unsatisfying Rodgers & Hammerstein musical adaptations released by 20th Century Fox
-James Dean debuts, becomes a superstar, and dies, all in the span of about seven months
-Rock & roll and juvenile delinquency enter the cinematic A-list with MGM's Blackboard Jungle

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1955
-In Denmark, Carl Theodor Dreyer makes Ordet, the most shattering of films about faith and the spirit
-Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali brings Indian cinema to the attention of the whole world
-The Polish Film School movement is ushered in by Andrzej Wajda's A Generation

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