The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011): Season 1, Episode 5 - Post-War Cinema - full transcript
a new art form flickered into life.
It looked like our dreams.
Movies are a multimillion-dollar
global entertainment industry now,
but what drives them
isn't box office or showbiz.
It's passion, innovation.
So let's travel the world to find
this innovation for ourselves.
We'll discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,
who made 'Singin' in the Rain'.
And in Jane Campion in Australia.
And in the films of Kyoko Kagawa,
who was in perhaps
the greatest movie ever made.
And in Amitabh Bachchan,
the most famous actor in the world.
And in the movies of Martin Scorsese
and Spike Lee,
Lars von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.
Welcome to The Story of Film:
An Odyssey,
an epic tale of innovation
across 12 decades,
six continents and a thousand films.
In this chapter,
we discover the brilliance
of Orson Welles,
and explore the darkening
of American film in the 1940s.
Italy. 1939.
Mass rallies.
This salesman, Mussolini,
is selling an idea -
of order, superiority, purity.
He becomes friends
with this man - Hitler.
These two mates ruin
a lot of the world.
Out of the ruins of Italy comes
a new movie language, neorealism,
a type of filmmaking that'll
deal with the trauma of war.
This is one of its most famous
moments, filmed in real streets,
urgent and tragic.
WOMAN: Francisco! Francisco!
(SHOUTS IN ITALIAN)
(GUNFIRE)
Mama!
Movies in the 1940s
had to get this raw
because life had become this raw.
But before they did so,
before they entirely sobered up,
there was the little matter
of 'Stagecoach'
and Orson Welles.
The camera rushed into his face.
Hey, look, it's Ringo!
Yeah.
Hello, Kid.
Hello, Curly.
Hiya, Buck. How's your folks?
It was the 94th film
made by John Ford.
Here in his beloved Monument Valley,
The interview shows how much
Ford hated analysis.
Take one? There won't be more
than one take, will there?
Shoot.
BOGDANOVICH: Mr Ford, I've noticed
that...that your view of the West
has become increasingly sad
and melancholy over the years.
I'm comparing, for instance,
'Wagon Master' to 'The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance'.
Have you been aware of that...
No.
..change in mood?
No.
Now that I point it out,
is there anything you'd like
to say about it?
I don't know what you're
talking about.
Would you agree that
the point of 'Fort Apache'...
..was that tradition -
the tradition of the army -
was more important
than one individual?
Cut.
COUSINS: Ford didn't want
to say much about his movies,
but others did.
One critic wrote that he captures
"the twitches of life
"and the silhouettes of legend."
'Stagecoach' is a movie legend.
It's about a bunch of misfits
on a journey.
One of them,
a saloon girl and prostitute,
is cold-shouldered by the others.
But she's befriended
by a cowboy called Ringo Kid.
Many of the shots
in the coach itself
are filmed with back projection.
Ford contrasts the claustrophobia
of the stagecoach
with classically composed,
pastoral wide shots like this one.
In this setting,
the Ringo Kid is brave enough
to challenge the snobbery
against the girl.
I am really a coward.
I know I am.
So that's why I did foolish things.
And I was decorated
eight or nine times.
Tried to prove that
I was not a coward.
But after it was all over
I still knew - I still know -
that I was a coward.
I have always found that
the little, quiet little man...
..that nobody pays any attention to
usually has more guts and courage...
..than those big blow-hard...
the big, noisy...
..you know,
the big outspoken fellow.
It's the little man that does
the courageous thing.
In this scene,
Ringo and the girl
start a new life together
in the mythic, meritocratic West.
Well, Kid, I told you
not to follow me.
Ford stages the scene in deep space.
'Stagecoach' helped create
a new visual fashion
for deep space and deep focus
in the 1940s.
As we've seen, in Japan
a few years previously,
Mizoguchi was staging things
in depth too.
But Ford and his cameraman combined
deep staging with deep focus.
The trend in cinema had been for the
flattering effects of long lenses,
which create shallow focus -
eyes sharp, hair soft,
background out of focus.
Deep focus uses a wide-angle lens,
allowing actors and objects
to be really close to the camera
and really far away.
Both can be seen crisply.
And deep focus emphasised
the distance between them.
It was great at rooms, especially
if you kept the camera low,
because then you'd see
the ceiling in,
which plunged into the background,
making a bold compositional line.
Such deep staging and deep focus
allowed the audience
to choose where to look.
As early as 1929,
Sergei Eisenstein had suggested it
as an alternative to editing.
Our eyes do the editing
within the frame,
jumping around from place to place.
'Stagecoach's innovations
changed film history.
One person who saw 'Stagecoach'
30 times in 1940
was this man, Orson Welles,
who strode the movie stage,
the magician of cinema
who became its colossus.
Your kind indulgence.
A miracle of the ancient East.
In this scene from his
first film, 'Citizen Kane',
Welles and his cinematographer
Gregg Toland
seem to be pushing deep staging
as far as it can go.
Welles plays a hubristic
newspaperman.
He's less than
a metre from the camera.
Everett Sloane is so far away that
he's smaller than Welles's nose.
Such deep staging forces scale.
It's as expressionist
as the shadows of 'Caligari'.
More than any film of the time,
'Citizen Kane' challenged
the soft and shallow look
of romantic American cinema.
But why did it do so?
Because of the talent and instincts
of the magician who made it.
RKO studio,
where Welles made 'Citizen Kane'.
He was staging Shakespeare
at the age of four.
His mother died when he was 8
and his father when he was 12.
He lived in Shanghai,
visited the palaces
of faded emperors,
got to know the story of power
and tramped through its ruins.
He should have been
the DW Griffith of the sound era.
In fact, in a career that
lasted nearly 50 years,
he didn't direct
a single foot of film
for any of the four
major Hollywood studios.
Norman Lloyd played the poet Cinna
in Welles's acclaimed staging
of 'Julius Caesar'.
The story of the staging was told,
inaccurately,
in the recent film
'Me and Orson Welles'.
What is my name?
Whither am I going?
Where do I dwell?
Enough!
This is worse than terrible.
Cinna is Shakespeare's indictment
of the intelligentsia.
He's a lofty, Byronic figure.
You know, I completely disagree.
I never had that
kind of argument with Orson.
And as I watched that,
I was embarrassed,
because I never would have had
that kind of argument with Orson.
But just as an actor like Lloyd
revered Welles,
so Welles revered his own heroes.
Though he learnt much
from 'Stagecoach',
the great force in his films,
their battering ram,
comes from theatre and elsewhere.
Here he plays Shakespeare's
Falstaff,
a buffoon shot in deep space.
He was interested
in Italian Renaissance painting.
His attraction to powerful people -
kings, tycoons, inventors -
is like Shakespeare's.
Also like Shakespeare,
he looked to the past,
to times before democracy
and liberalism.
A virtuous man,
I've often noticed...
Here it's the world of 'Henry IV' -
John Gielgud dwarfed by
a massive empty cathedral.
The Prince of Wales and I must have
some needful conference alone.
Citizen Kane thinks of himself
as a Medici or a Mughal emperor.
Kane is full of the lust for power.
His world is massive but empty.
Maybe the last time he felt
anything real was as a boy,
playing in the snow
on his Rosebud sledge
in this incredible scene
in deep space with tracking camera.
Tell him now?
Yes.
I'll sign those papers...
'Citizen Kane' denounced
the grandeur, egomania
and maybe, even,
the cinematic hubris
that made 'Cabiria's
tracking shots...
..and 'Intolerance's epic scale...
..and 'The General's
outlandish production values.
Keaton's film was
famously expensive.
Shakespeare and the Medicis,
the Mughals, Ottomans
and 'Stagecoach'
were not the only sources of
Welles's visual and human ideas.
There was the fact
of his own body and voice.
Both were enormous, mature,
unfeasible even.
It was like he was
painted by Holbein.
He could never play a young person
or a teenager or an ordinary guy
or a 20th-century everyman.
The space in his films was gigantic
because his persona was gigantic.
And the sound was gigantic too -
whispers in close-up,
echoes from miles back.
49,000 acres of nothing
but scenery and statues!
I'm lonesome!
Till just yesterday,
we've had no less than 50
of your friends at any one time.
I think if you look
carefully in the west wing, Susan,
you'll find about a dozen
vacationers still in residence.
He extended the overlapping
dialogue of Howard Hawks's comedies
to fill a whole film.
Excuse me, Mr Kane...
Can you prove it isn't?
This just came in...
Mr Bernstein, meet Mr Thatcher.
I'll just borrow...
How are you doing?
Leland -
Mr Thatcher, my ex-guardian.
We have no secrets from our readers,
Mr Bernstein.
Mr Thatcher is one of
our most devoted readers.
The visual ideas
of Toland and Welles
about deep focus and deep space
excited filmmakers around the world.
Look at the depth of this scene
in 'The Maltese Falcon'.
Humphrey Bogart's thumb, no more
than 20 centimetres from the camera,
is clearly in focus.
Look at this incredible
scene in a bar
in 'The Best Years of our Lives'.
The older man, Fredric March,
asks the younger, Dana Andrews,
to end his romance
with the older man's daughter.
Andrews agrees to do so, and goes
to call her in a phone box.
As the phone call's
the main drama in this scene,
you'd expect director Wyler
and DP Gregg Toland
to set up their camera near the box
so that we can see and hear
the action.
But, instead, they put it far away,
beside this piano,
where a war veteran
who's lost his hands is playing.
The father's at the piano too,
but anxiously looks to the tiny
booth in the extreme background.
(MEN PLAY 'CHOPSTICKS')
It's as if the crucial action has
been sucked away by a black hole.
We're forced to imagine
the conversation,
just as, in real life,
we can't always see everything
that we want to see.
Years later, the Austrian
Michael Haneke used deep space
to show a woman on a train
getting away from harassment.
And the Hungarian Bela Tarr
used deep space
to move our eyes from
foreground to background
and then to foreground again.
In each case the effect
was one of tension,
as if the world is in a force-field
in which the people are held.
Deep staging in American cinema
would become less fashionable again
in the 1950s.
The new colour, widescreen
film stocks
were just not sensitive enough
to suck in all that
information at once.
So here,
in 'How To Marry A Millionaire',
the space is shallow
and the actors are displayed
across it like a washing line.
Very long lenses
in the '60s and '70s
excited directors about
very shallow focus.
Here, filmed with a long lens,
Anouk Aimee floated
in her own visual world,
like Garbo in the 1920s.
And in the 1990s,
Michael Mann's film 'Heat',
influenced by pop videos,
used the newest types of long lens
to create focus so shallow
that the lights behind Al Pacino in
this shoot-out became dreamy blobs.
But it was this place, Italy,
that was at the centre
of the movie world in the 1940s.
(TENOR SINGS IN ITALIAN)
This film school,
Centro Sperimentale,
was opened under Mussolini
in the 1930s.
This famous film studio...
..where great sets had been built,
where Italian epics and comedies
had been made,
had been used as an army barracks
during World War II.
And film lights were limited.
So filmmakers took to the streets.
Before the war,
central Rome looked like this.
(CHURCH BELL RINGS)
But by 1945 it looked like this.
People still went about their lives,
but the world had changed,
the city had changed,
the film industry had changed.
And so, in a series of films
made in Italy between 1945 and 1952,
the language of film changed.
What became known
as 'rubble movies' were born.
The first was this one -
'Rome, Open City',
directed by Roberto Rossellini.
The film started as a documentary
about a priest in Rome
during World War II,
but grew into a portrait of the city
struggling to resist
fascism and Nazism.
This is how the actress in the film
was shot and lit -
old style, glamour, a negligee.
But look at how the older woman
in the film is presented -
deglamorised, single light source.
She's pregnant but not married -
daring for the time -
and she's antifascist.
Another antifascist in the film,
Don Pellegrini,
is the priest in this church.
Rossellini wanted his images
plain, unadorned,
so he used lenses of about 50mm...
..rather than the Wellesian
wide-angle lenses...
..or longer lenses.
He didn't care too much
if the shot wasn't in focus.
And whilst not hand-holding
the camera much,
he seemed to have his DP
loosen the head of the tripod
to give loads of movement.
Light bulbs were bare
in Italian neorealism.
And Martin Scorsese says
that they influenced
the bare light bulbs
in 'Raging Bull'.
I'd much rather recite.
That's entertainment.
And it's said that in
these neorealist films,
we saw one of these
for the first time.
Rossellini said that if, by chance,
he made a beautiful shot,
he'd cut it out.
If the nature of movie beauty
changed in Europe in the late 1940s,
it was partly because of
a writer called Cesare Zavattini.
He said, "Before this, if one was
thinking over the idea of a film
"on, say, a strike,
one would immediately invent a plot,
"and the strike itself became
only background to the film."
"Today,"
he said in a later interview,
"we would describe
the strike itself.
"We have an unlimited trust
in things, facts and people."
This was revolutionary -
the reduction of plot.
De-dramatisation.
And Zavattini said something
even more revealing.
"When we've thought out a scene,
we feel the need to remain in it,
"because it can contain so many
echoes and reverberations."
This was, again, revelatory.
Things took place in real time.
Ordinary details mattered.
Where Alfred Hitchcock was to say
that cinema was life
with the boring bits cut out,
Zavattini and the neorealists
said that cinema IS the boring bits.
The most famous film that Zavattini
wrote, 'Bicycle Thieves',
is about an unemployed man
who has his bike -
his only chance of getting
casual work - stolen.
He and his son look
all over Rome for it.
In the end, worn out
and afraid of not being able
to get even basic work,
he himself steals a bike.
Director Vittorio de Sica has the
scene shot starkly, in harsh light,
and keeps the camera
far back from the theft,
as if not to intrude
on the father's shame.
(MEN SHOUT ANGRILY)
But then the boy sees
the father's theft.
We're close to him.
This tracking shot shows that
films like 'Bicycle Thieves'
are not afraid of
conventional filming, empathy,
point of view,
tension and emotion.
But this scene, a few moments
earlier, is more unusual.
The boy nearly gets hit by a car.
Twice.
In a Hollywood film,
the dad would have seen this
and grabbed the boy
and scolded him or comforted him,
but also realised
how much he loves him.
But in Italian neorealism,
such moments just happened
without cause or effect.
It was a loose end.
It didn't play back into the plot.
Prewar stories were chains
of cause and effect.
But in Italian neorealism,
the chain was sometimes broken.
Neorealism turned the realist
dissidence of '20s cinema
into a national film movement
in the '40s,
then swept around the world.
(TENOR SINGS IN ITALIAN)
Far away from neorealism
and the rubble of Europe,
the mythic capital of the American
movie industry, Hollywood,
started to get less glossy
in the 1940s too.
A starlet called Peg Entwistle
killed herself
by jumping from this letter
in the 'Hollywood' sign.
After a long day in the sunshine
in LA, night-time falls.
There are few streetlights,
so it's really dark.
Hardly anyone walks, so those that
do can hear their own footsteps.
The eucalyptus and orange blossom
smells almost sickly sweet.
The grilles on windows
cast shadows like prisons.
Throughout World War II, Hollywood
kept making this kind of film.
(UPBEAT BIG-BAND MUSIC)
(SINGS) # Did, did
Did-id-id-id you hear? #
Betty Grable,
in her feathers and decor,
was one of wartime's
most popular stars.
But America's most curious
filmmakers went abroad,
or just watched newsreels
and saw this.
And this, the documentary tragedy
of 'Rome, Open City'.
(GUNFIRE)
The romantic exuberance
of Hollywood ebbed.
Its paradise got a bit lost.
And it showed.
Between 1941 and 1959,
more than 350 dark films
were made in Hollywood,
films that became known
as film noir.
One of the earliest and most
influential was this one -
'Double Indemnity'.
MAN: (INSIDE) Who do you suspect?
Look at this scene in it.
The actress and the wall
at the far end of the corridor
are both in focus -
the visual depth of Mizoguchi,
'Stagecoach' and 'Citizen Kane'.
MAN 2: See you at the office
in the morning.
MAN: Yeah.
The situation is this.
The insurance man
who's coming out of the door
has fallen for the woman
who hides behind the door,
the wife of one of his clients.
She convinces him
to help her kill her husband
and share the insurance pay-out.
They do so.
The man's boss, in the dark suit,
begins to suspect that
the wife is the murderess,
and goes to the man's apartment
to tell him his hunch.
If the boss saw the wife there,
it would confirm his hunch
and implicate the man, his employee.
So the wife hides behind
the man's outward-opening door.
Goodnight, Keyes.
So long, Walter.
'Double Indemnity's director,
Billy Wilder,
was an Austrian Jew
who fled the Nazis in 1933.
Ironically filmed here in
the bright sun of Santa Monica,
his films were thematically dark.
Like many emigres
who made great film noir -
Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak,
Otto Preminger,
Michael Curtiz, Jacques Tourneur -
he loved the unpretentiousness
of America
but hated its worship of money.
The wife in this scene lusts for it.
The man lusts for her,
and, because he's weak and flawed,
for money too.
Robert Towne,
who wrote the film 'Chinatown'.
Cinema...cinema noir...
Um...
The characters are fated,
in one way or another, and it's
a character flaw of some kind.
They are like moths and flames.
You look at Walter
in 'Double Indemnity'.
WALTER NEFF: And I wanted
to see her again, close,
without that silly
staircase between us.
TOWNE: He just can't resist
a pretty anklet.
You look at Robert Mitchum
in 'Out of the Past'.
He can't...
You know, he wants to be
with a decent girl,
but he can't stay out of the way.
It's usually a femme fatale.
Even when he wants to disentangle
himself, he can't avoid it.
Gittes with 'Chinatown'.
They...they...there is
some flaw in them,
that drives them to their fate,
even as they try to avoid it.
And...not just a dark world
where they get kind of beaten up.
They are men who...
..at some deep, unconscious level,
seek out their fate,
even as they try to avoid it.
Paul Schrader, who wrote
'Taxi Driver' and 'Raging Bull'.
The flawed hero which, you know,
first sort of appeared in Freud,
influenced films, you know,
but it never really took hold
till after the war
and you had these guys
came home from the war.
And you had all of that
social dislocation
where women who had gotten jobs
in the war
were now expected
to give up their jobs,
and men who fought in the war
came home and didn't have any money.
There was a lot of frustration,
and so that kind of Freudian hero
started feeling like
a much more realistic hero
than he had felt like
in, you know, the '30s and '40s.
War, the city of LA,
flawed characters
and social and legal collapse
created noir,
but so did other things.
The lattice of shadows
of German expressionism can be seen.
In this German film,
light casts a grid of shadows,
but the handrail is a lattice too.
'Double Indemnity' was co-written
by Raymond Chandler,
who, along with Dashiell Hammett,
created the character types
and situations of noir.
Howard Hawks filmed Chandler's
'The Big Sleep' in 1946.
Humphrey Bogart played
Philip Marlowe.
The film crackled
with snappy dialogue,
a feature of the best noirs.
May I use your phone, Mr Marlowe?
Hello. Police headquarters, please.
Hello. This is Mrs...
Hello. What do you want, please?
MAN: I don't want a thing.
What?
You called me.
I called you? Say, who is this?
This is Sgt Reilly at headquarters.
Sgt Reilly?
There isn't any Sgt Reilly here.
I know there's not!
Wait a minute.
You better talk to my mother.
I don't wanna talk to your mother!
'The Big Sleep' was the most
influential film noir
since 'Double Indemnity'.
Its complex plot set a fashion.
The film was co-written
by Leigh Brackett,
another great female screenwriter,
who co-wrote this film, 'Rio Bravo',
in which Angie Dickinson
gets the best lines.
You see...
..that's what I'd do...
..if I were the kind of girl
that you think I am.
And Brackett co-wrote this film,
'Star Wars - The Empire
Strikes Back'.
In the film's climax,
Luke discovers - in the style
of a Hollywood romance -
that Darth Vader is his father.
Brackett had helped bring
traditional movie storytelling
into the '70s.
The women in film noir
haunt the films.
Jane Greer in 'Out of The Past'
takes her time, moves like velvet,
knows that the man is weak,
enjoys his gaze,
turns it to her advantage.
Usually in noir
it's an immoral advantage.
And yet of the 350 or so noirs,
only one, this one,
was directed by a woman.
Ida Lupino.
She mastered the form, using spot
lighting and subjective camera.
A film with downturned eyes.
Directing in American film had
become, by this stage, a boys' club.
And there's so much more
to say about film noir.
The pugnacious presence
of actor Edward G Robinson
in 'Double Indemnity'
is a reminder of how noir
was fascinated
by the sort of gangster films of
the '30s in which Robinson appeared.
In those he was disdainful,
dapper.
And its pessimism came, in part,
from the poetic realist films
of France in the 1930s,
such as this moody encounter between
two lost souls in 'Quai des Brumes'.
If proof is needed that France
influenced America in the '40s,
look at this film, 'La Chienne'
directed by Jean Renoir.
A man falls in love with
a hard-hearted young woman.
It was remade as 'Scarlet Street'
by Fritz Lang in America
14 years later.
The scene where the man pleads for
the woman's love is very similar.
Its star? Edward G Robinson.
Here in Montrose,
a suburb of Los Angeles,
a B movie called 'Gun Crazy'
was shot in 1950.
It was one of the most innovative,
passionate noirs ever made,
and shows how documentary and
neorealism influenced the genre.
It was directed
by this Hemingwayesque man
speaking on his fishing boat,
the great B movie
director Joseph H Lewis.
A man and a woman,
passionate and reckless,
are about to rob a bank.
Their hearts are beating.
In a conventional noir,
we'd see their faces, sweaty brows.
Here, Lewis keeps the camera
behind them.
His DP sat in the back seat
on a jockey saddle.
He made a special board
on which the camera could pan.
Lewis then had new button
microphones put on the actors
and on a policeman
we're about to see,
and gave the performers
free rein to improvise.
MAN: There's a car just pulled out.
We can get in there.
We'll have to... Yeah, yeah.
OK, right in here.
Fast as you can.
Don't worry. I won't be a minute
longer than I have to.
Here goes nothing.
OK.
Filming a stick-up
in the conventional way
was scheduled to take four days.
Lewis claims to have shot this
in three hours,
and says that the unbroken shot
covers two miles of ground.
Get out...
out of the way, copper, go on.
That's right, stand right there.
OK.
The camera and DP on the jockey
saddle move forward and right.
Another sound recordist was strapped
to the top of the car.
Well, that's a nice get-up.
I like it.
Good-looking gun.
Thanks.
That's English, ain't it?
That's right.
What show are you with?
Cheyenne Rodeo and Carnival.
The rest will be coming
through in a few minutes.
I got too far out in front.
You gonna play here?
No.
Well, it's an easy town on shows.
Three tickets and you've covered
the whole police force.
That's a pretty nice gun
you've got too.
I'm sorry,
I don't let anybody handle it.
I killed a man with it last year.
Did he have it coming to him?
Yes, but it wasn't much fun
watching him go down.
He had no idea he was getting...
(ALARM RINGS)
The staging looks so real
that passers-by yelled,
"They've held up a bank!"
Take off!
The deadly passion and stylistic
innovation of 'Gun Crazy'
were a major influence
on a much later film,
'Bonnie and Clyde', about the
anxiety of a couple that robs banks.
Your mama could take this bank.
WALTER NEFF: Straight
between the eyes.
She didn't fool me for a minute.
Not this time.
Paul Schrader says that
noir died out in 1958,
but its influence
can be seen much later
in 'LA Confidential',
in which Kim Basinger
pretends to be Veronica Lake
in 'This Gun for Hire'.
In 'Blade Runner',
in which Sean Young walks through
shadows in a pool of light,
like a film noir femme fatale.
In 'The Dark Knight', in which
the city is fetid and morally dark.
And even in Mumbai Noir
such as 'Shiva',
directed by Ram Gopal Varma,
all shadows and low camera angles.
The influence of film noir
has travelled the world.
So American film in the '40s
was newly serious,
but did film noir smash
the bauble of romantic cinema?
If you've seen this,
the sweeping camera moves
and sweeping emotions of 'Titanic',
you'll know that the answer is no.
Romantic cinema continued.
But even to live in LA
in the late '40s and '50s
started to feel different.
Ernst Lubitsch died in 1947.
DW Griffith and Greg Toland,
American cinema's civiliser
and its deep space experimenter,
both died in 1948.
Louis Lumiere in France died too,
as did Eisenstein in the USSR.
Judy Balaban's dad Barney
ran Paramount Studios for decades,
so she was at the centre of it all,
and was engaged to Montgomery Clift.
Originally our friends
were very...light-hearted
and there was a lot
of socialising and parties
and small talk
and vacations and whatever.
I mean, you know,
we were close to Janet and Tony,
and Dean and Jean Martin,
and I was close to Sammy Davis
from New York,
so we were close to Sammy and,
you know, the whole Rat Pack thing.
Sinatra and...
Gene Kelly lived across
the street from us,
and, you know, Debbie and Eddie...
I mean, it was just a lot of people
having a lot of parties, frankly.
(CHUCKLES)
But there came a moment in time
where a lot of that shifted.
I was married to
Tony Franciosa by then.
But the world began to be
more conscious of itself
in the larger sphere
than just simply the insular sense
of whatever your
own neighbourhood was,
whether it was in the Midwest
or Hollywood.
Suddenly there was a more
universal consciousness.
I look at periods where movies
seem to be ahead of everything,
and then there are periods
where they seem to be behind
everything else in the world.
So that, for example...
..the McCarthy era would be a time
when movies were caught in the more
backward part of that era.
(NEWSREEL MUSIC)
MAN: Calling the House Un-American
Activities Committee to order,
chairman J. Parnell Thomas
of New Jersey opens an enquiry
into possible communist penetration
of the Hollywood film industry.
The committee is seeking
to determine
if red party members
have reached the screen
with subversive propaganda.
MAN: That is not the question.
The question is have you ever been
a member of the Communist Party?
I'm framing my answer
in the only way
in which any American citizen
can frame his answer...
Then you deny...
..to a question which invades his...
absolutely invades his life.
Then you deny...
You refuse to answer that question.
At these hearings,
which started in 1947,
50 studio bosses and producers
agreed to sack any of their
employees who would not co-operate
with the Government's
new anti-communist
House Un-American
Activities Committee.
I told you before, I will
answer this question fully.
Your purpose is to use this
to disrupt...
This new poison in Hollywood life
also helped create
the seriousness of film noir.
The most principled filmmakers
refused to testify against leftists.
..could be a more efficient
government without...
Others named names,
and great artists were
banned from working - blacklisted.
Those affected included
Abraham Polonsky, Charlie Chaplin,
Dolores del Rio, Paul Robeson
and Dalton Trumbo.
The House Un-American Activities
became the single biggest trauma
in American cinema.
The great cinematographer
Haskell Wexler
shot 'America, America'
for director Elia Kazan,
who testified against the leftists.
Kazan was a tremendously
talented man,
and, um...
..I talked to him
a couple of times about it,
but one of the things
I remember he said
that the main thing about directing
is casting. (LAUGHS)
When Kazan's name came up
for a Lifetime Achievement Award
on the Academy,
I didn't think that Gadge, as we
called him, should get that award.
And Karl Malden said,
"Look, he's...he's dying.
"He's a great director.
"I'm going to vote for him."
So I did, and I wrote to Gadge
and I said...
.."Dear Gadge,
"I...voted for you
"because I think you deserve
the Lifetime Achievement Award.
"I thought...I think
it might be good
"if you said something
which may sound euphemistic,
"but you're saying that you're sorry
"that you may have hurt
some people."
I forget the exact words I used,
but...
And...and my nickname was Pete
for many years,
given to me
by a whore in Puerto Rico.
And she...and Kazan wrote me back,
um..."Pete, go fuck yourself.
"Gadge."
And that's...and that's the way
he was to the moment he died.
COUSINS: He must have felt guilt
that he couldn't admit.
Well, I don't...
I mean, it certainly was
an important thing.
He didn't have to squeal.
He didn't have to.
He was on the top...he was on
the top of the world. You know?
And you're right.
Rod Steiger and a lot of other
people didn't, uh...
..would not accept
anything about him.
Kazan's Oscar award
was televised, of course.
The famous reaction shots
of the Oscar broadcast
were more telling than ever.
Karl Malden and Warren Beatty
stand and clap Kazan.
Steven Spielberg sits and claps.
Ed Harris and Amy Madigan
don't clap at all.
Meryl Streep
and Lynn Redgrave clap.
Nick Nolte doesn't.
(APPLAUSE)
Back in 1949, the House Un-American
Activities Committee chairman,
J. Parnell Thomas,
was sentenced to prison
for embezzlement.
The Walk of Fame
in Hollywood Boulevard
has stars dedicated to
minor showbiz personalities,
but still doesn't carry the name
of many of the black-listees.
And there were other
momentous changes
in the American film industry
at the time.
In 1948,
the five main studios were forced
by the US Supreme Court
to sell their cinemas.
One of them, Paramount,
sold 1,450 of them.
The government began
the anti-trust action against them
because they said
you cannot produce,
distribute and exhibit a product
without being, you know...
violating anti-trust laws.
And so the government began
this investigation
and sued against the industry.
It went on for some years,
and my father could see, as he felt,
that the handwriting was on the wall
and that no matter how long they
fought it, they were going to lose.
So he made a decision
on behalf of what he felt
was the right thing
for the shareholders of the company
that...they should
stop fighting this,
stop spending money on it
and figure out how to, you know,
restructure the company
so that there were two
separate organisations,
one of which would produce
and distribute films
and the other one of which
would be a theatre company.
But in the early '50s,
just as the studio system,
what Stanley Donen called
'the garden', was dying,
so it produced some of
its most splendid blooms.
(QUIET, ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC)
(LOUD, VIBRANT MUSIC)
At MGM, cosmopolitan producer
Arthur Freed
gave sophisticates like Gene Kelly,
Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen
a chance to show that the studios
still had joy in them,
and beauty too.
This extended dance sequence
in 'An American in Paris'
was influenced by the success
of the remarkable one
in the British film 'The Red Shoes'.
Flashing red lights,
painted studio backdrops
Gene Kelly was a leftist,
and abhorred the anti-communist
witch-hunts,
but both he and Stanley Donen,
who started as a choreographer,
were Americans born and bred,
not emigres,
and at first their outlook
was optimistic...
..drawn from vaudeville
and clowning, as this scene shows.
(SINGS) # Make 'em laugh - ha ha!
# Make 'em laugh - ha ha ha ha! #
Like many of his generation,
Donen found the design,
dance and sexuality
of the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers
musicals of the '30s entrancing.
I was nine years old,
and I was a little boy in
a southern town in South Carolina,
where I was born and grew up,
and I had never experienced
anything like that,
and I was not in any way...
My family wasn't related to dancing
or movies or anything,
and this moment of...
..transcended life, real life.
There they were...
..dancing to the music,
enjoying being alive,
expressing their feelings.
DONEN: The idea of Gene Kelly
singing in the rain
and letting the rain hit him
is a...
..is a...that's the idea -
that he is so joyful
that rain is a pleasure,
he is not worried about
getting wet,
he's thrilled with being in love.
COUSINS: The camera expresses
the joy in itself
without Gene...without even
Gene Kelly just being there.
Just the uplift of the camera.
It's not the uplift of the camera,
it's the photograph of the camera
being uplifted.
It's what the camera sees
that does it.
The camera does nothing.
It just does what we tell it to do.
I can't talk to the camera
and say, "Now lift up.
"I want to feel the joy
of being weightless."
I've said to people before,
if you say to a writer,
you know, "Does the pencil
write the story?
"Of course it doesn't!
"And the camera is just the pencil
that we're working with."
In 'Singin' in the Rain', Donen and
Kelly did a kaleidoscopic sequence
to make fun of the Busby Berkeley
numbers which they hated.
(CHEERFUL SINGING)
(LUSH, ROMANTIC SINGING)
DONEN: I used to think
they were terrible.
Absolutely terrible.
I thought they were awful
for a long time.
And now when I look at them,
I think they really are
unique and wonderful
and they have a point of view
and I like them a lot.
What's interesting is they didn't
change at all. I changed.
They are what they are.
A film locks it.
It's like the written word
on the page. It doesn't change.
It's only our opinion
of what it means that changes.
Wrong word. Not in the theatre.
Well, the president
isn't in the theatre.
(LAUGHS) No, that's right.
COUSINS: The change
in Donen's life and work
echoes the change
in Hollywood itself.
In his film 'Indiscreet', starring
Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman,
for example, he used an innovative
technique to challenge censorship.
I found a play I like.
DONEN: The leading man
and leading lady,
even if they were married,
couldn't be in bed together.
It was censorship.
If they were married they had to
be in twin beds in the same room.
And I wanted to show
how intimate they were.
And so I said, "I have an idea
how I'll have them in bed together
"and the censors wont be able
to do anything about it."
In order to do it
so I could time it and everything,
I built both sets, both bedrooms,
on the same sound stage.
I had a camera on each person.
We did it all at once,
and I could watch them and say,
you know, "Do this. Do that."
And so it was done as
a spilt screen,
but we photographed it as though
it was all happening at once.
How long is this going to go on?
How long is what going to go on?
The pretence that we're happy?
We've never pretended we're happy.
Who's pretending?
You are. That we're happily married.
That you wanted to stay with me.
And, as in American cinema
in general,
melancholia entered Donen's cinema.
'Two for the Road'
was about a married couple.
We see one of the first road trips
they took together
and one of the last.
The movie intercuts
the time periods.
You have to admit it.
We've changed.
I admit we've changed.
It's sad, but there it is.
DONEN: People back then used
to say to me, "I love that movie.
"It's so romantic."
And I would be stunned and say,
"But it's such a hard,
tough look at marriage."
"Why do you think of it
as romantic?"
Because that's what
I wanted it to be -
to show you how people
could live together -
the abrasions, the...the buffeting
against each other,
and yet the way that you really
appreciate your partner.
COUSINS: By this time,
Donen had made 21 films,
some of the greatest
to come out of Hollywood.
He was just 43 years old.
Did you feel as if
you'd run out of things to do?
Oh, God, no. No.
I mean, if you feel
you've run out of things to do,
it means you think you're stupid,
you have nothing more to say.
I don't...I didn't think that.
I don't...I don't even
think it now.
What else did you have to say then,
and what else
do you have to say now?
I think of Diaghilev with Nijinsky.
You know, Diaghilev is supposed
to have said to Nijinsky
when he was asking him
to do a ballet,
"Etonne moi" - astonish me.
Well, that's what
I'm still trying to do.
I still want to astonish you
about my understanding
of what it's all about, how it is,
how we react to it,
and what can I do?
Just as Donen's films would do,
so mainstream American cinema
on the whole
grew up in the '40s and early '50s,
the years of devastation.
Under the influence of war
and Italian realism,
American movies became darker.
Life in mainstream American cinema
was no longer a bowl of cherries.
And deep focus, deep staging,
film noir lighting
and the influence of Orson Welles
had all given American film style
new punch and portent.
In Britain in the '40s and '50s
we find films that best sum up
the movie complexities
of this time of war.
An RAF bomber pilot's plane
has been hit and is on fire.
He has no parachute
so is about to die.
His last words are to an American
woman on a ground control base.
plunge us into a moment of
searing drama, romantic dialogue,
shallow focus, rich colour,
and lighting that hides tears.
What's your name? Are you in love
with anybody? No, don't answer that.
I could love a man like you, Peter.
I love you, June.
You're life and I'm leaving you.
Where do you live? On the station?
No, in a big country house about
5 miles from here. Lee Wood House.
Old house?
Yes, very old.
Good. I'll be a ghost
and come and see you.
You're not frightened of ghosts,
are you?
They formed a company together
in 1942
and made films like this one
which were almost mystical
in their Englishness, their romance,
their opposition to documentary.
The airman seems not to die
but, instead, to have
suffered brain damage.
During losses in consciousness,
he imagines going to heaven
to argue for more time on earth
because he has fallen in love
with the American woman.
Heaven's in black and white,
an art director's fantasy.
The title of the film,
'A Matter of Life and Death',
tells us what it deals with -
the biggest things in life,
especially when the world's at war.
Powell and Pressburger
showed that moviemakers
didn't have to choose between
honesty about the trauma of war
and the high style
of romantic cinema.
No other filmmakers of their time
could so combine the two.
And another English filmmaker
of the '40s
told us that war and trauma
bring out the best in us.
Here he is - Humphrey Jennings.
Posh, skinny, playing a postman
who's so devoted to his duty
that even after he's tied up,
he still gets his letter delivered.
Soon he was directing,
with a poetic style all his own.
The great British director
Terence Davies reveres Jennings.
Oh, yes, even if he had only made
'Listen to Britain'.
It's one of the great poems.
That's a voice.
(PLAYS PIANO FLUENTLY)
The most moving sequence
is around the National Gallery
when the people are just
enjoying the song
and it might be their last summer
where they're free,
and then you see Myra Hess playing
one of the Mozart piano concertos,
and you just think what he's saying
is that something that is
quintessential British,
that no-one one else has got,
we've got that and we were
prepared to fight for it.
Jennings believed that
because British people
share the same landscapes,
history and culture,
they've got a collective
unconsciousness,
what he calls
"the legacy of feeling",
the thing that gets people
through trauma together.
And in terms of film style,
Jennings felt that there's
a force-field between shots.
Look at this moment,
again from 'Listen to Britain'.
A half-dozen tin hats.
Then cut to five bare-headed women,
their heads where the hats were.
Then a statue of Charles I,
who was beheaded.
Three images together giving us
an eerie feeling
of the vulnerability of heads,
the cinematic sum
greater than its parts.
Eisenstein's 1+1=3 again.
And in 1949, a final British film
marvellously summed up the changes
in Western cinema,
the trauma, poetics, expressionism
and shadow play in these years.
'The Third Man' is set
in Vienna after World War II,
a city split between the victors.
The film's writer, the Catholic
novelist Graham Greene,
planted at the heart of the story
a great moral crime.
A man, Harry Lime,
played by Orson Welles,
is making money
by selling penicillin
that's supposed to treat children.
Director Carol Reed liked
the seriousness of this idea.
Its pessimism reminded him
of the '30s French poetic realist
films he so admired.
He and his cinematographer filmed
many shots off the horizontal axis,
to show the moral imbalance.
NARRATOR: Wearing down
German sea power...
Director Reed had edited this
Oscar-winning wartime documentary...
Miles of wire netting
for the beaches.
7,200 tonnes of petrol per day.
With an underwater pipeline
to carry it to France.
A white star is
the emblem of liberation.
COUSINS: ..and, like the Italians
and some of the American filmmakers,
felt that cinema had to engage
more with reality.
Come out, come out, whoever you are.
This sequence in 'The Third Man',
in which Welles's Harry Lime
is first revealed,
had the expressionist bravura of
Welles's own film, 'Citizen Kane'.
(WOMAN COMPLAINS IN GERMAN)
Harry!
(GRUMBLES IN GERMAN)
(HORN TOOTS)
(FOOTSTEPS RUN OFF)
In this famous ending,
Lime's decent, disappointed friend,
Holly Martins,
stands to the left of the image,
waiting for Anna,
Lime's old girlfriend,
whom Holly has come to love.
She walks towards him
from the extreme distance -
the deep staging of Welles.
Reed doesn't cut the shot
or dissolve the walk as Scorsese
would later do in 'Taxi Driver'.
Reed lets Anna walk the whole way
in real time -
the de-dramatised time
of Italian neorealism.
Writer Greene envisaged
a happy ending,
where Anna would take Holly's arm.
As Roman Polanski would do
decades later
with the ending of 'Chinatown',
Reed rejected such optimism.
Anna turns away from Holly
and walks out of shot.
She prefers the memory of the rogue
Harry Lime to the weak, decent man.
One of the most daring endings
in mainstream film history.
One of the greatest films ever made,
'The Third Man' is a compendium
of '40s cinema.
The new moral seriousness
of the movies,
their realism and deep staging,
would sweep across the world
in the '50s,
to India, Africa, South America
and Japan.
New continents of filmmaking
would emerge,
new stories and styles,
framings and visions.
For the first time in the story
of film, cinema would be global.
It looked like our dreams.
Movies are a multimillion-dollar
global entertainment industry now,
but what drives them
isn't box office or showbiz.
It's passion, innovation.
So let's travel the world to find
this innovation for ourselves.
We'll discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,
who made 'Singin' in the Rain'.
And in Jane Campion in Australia.
And in the films of Kyoko Kagawa,
who was in perhaps
the greatest movie ever made.
And in Amitabh Bachchan,
the most famous actor in the world.
And in the movies of Martin Scorsese
and Spike Lee,
Lars von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.
Welcome to The Story of Film:
An Odyssey,
an epic tale of innovation
across 12 decades,
six continents and a thousand films.
In this chapter,
we discover the brilliance
of Orson Welles,
and explore the darkening
of American film in the 1940s.
Italy. 1939.
Mass rallies.
This salesman, Mussolini,
is selling an idea -
of order, superiority, purity.
He becomes friends
with this man - Hitler.
These two mates ruin
a lot of the world.
Out of the ruins of Italy comes
a new movie language, neorealism,
a type of filmmaking that'll
deal with the trauma of war.
This is one of its most famous
moments, filmed in real streets,
urgent and tragic.
WOMAN: Francisco! Francisco!
(SHOUTS IN ITALIAN)
(GUNFIRE)
Mama!
Movies in the 1940s
had to get this raw
because life had become this raw.
But before they did so,
before they entirely sobered up,
there was the little matter
of 'Stagecoach'
and Orson Welles.
The camera rushed into his face.
Hey, look, it's Ringo!
Yeah.
Hello, Kid.
Hello, Curly.
Hiya, Buck. How's your folks?
It was the 94th film
made by John Ford.
Here in his beloved Monument Valley,
The interview shows how much
Ford hated analysis.
Take one? There won't be more
than one take, will there?
Shoot.
BOGDANOVICH: Mr Ford, I've noticed
that...that your view of the West
has become increasingly sad
and melancholy over the years.
I'm comparing, for instance,
'Wagon Master' to 'The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance'.
Have you been aware of that...
No.
..change in mood?
No.
Now that I point it out,
is there anything you'd like
to say about it?
I don't know what you're
talking about.
Would you agree that
the point of 'Fort Apache'...
..was that tradition -
the tradition of the army -
was more important
than one individual?
Cut.
COUSINS: Ford didn't want
to say much about his movies,
but others did.
One critic wrote that he captures
"the twitches of life
"and the silhouettes of legend."
'Stagecoach' is a movie legend.
It's about a bunch of misfits
on a journey.
One of them,
a saloon girl and prostitute,
is cold-shouldered by the others.
But she's befriended
by a cowboy called Ringo Kid.
Many of the shots
in the coach itself
are filmed with back projection.
Ford contrasts the claustrophobia
of the stagecoach
with classically composed,
pastoral wide shots like this one.
In this setting,
the Ringo Kid is brave enough
to challenge the snobbery
against the girl.
I am really a coward.
I know I am.
So that's why I did foolish things.
And I was decorated
eight or nine times.
Tried to prove that
I was not a coward.
But after it was all over
I still knew - I still know -
that I was a coward.
I have always found that
the little, quiet little man...
..that nobody pays any attention to
usually has more guts and courage...
..than those big blow-hard...
the big, noisy...
..you know,
the big outspoken fellow.
It's the little man that does
the courageous thing.
In this scene,
Ringo and the girl
start a new life together
in the mythic, meritocratic West.
Well, Kid, I told you
not to follow me.
Ford stages the scene in deep space.
'Stagecoach' helped create
a new visual fashion
for deep space and deep focus
in the 1940s.
As we've seen, in Japan
a few years previously,
Mizoguchi was staging things
in depth too.
But Ford and his cameraman combined
deep staging with deep focus.
The trend in cinema had been for the
flattering effects of long lenses,
which create shallow focus -
eyes sharp, hair soft,
background out of focus.
Deep focus uses a wide-angle lens,
allowing actors and objects
to be really close to the camera
and really far away.
Both can be seen crisply.
And deep focus emphasised
the distance between them.
It was great at rooms, especially
if you kept the camera low,
because then you'd see
the ceiling in,
which plunged into the background,
making a bold compositional line.
Such deep staging and deep focus
allowed the audience
to choose where to look.
As early as 1929,
Sergei Eisenstein had suggested it
as an alternative to editing.
Our eyes do the editing
within the frame,
jumping around from place to place.
'Stagecoach's innovations
changed film history.
One person who saw 'Stagecoach'
30 times in 1940
was this man, Orson Welles,
who strode the movie stage,
the magician of cinema
who became its colossus.
Your kind indulgence.
A miracle of the ancient East.
In this scene from his
first film, 'Citizen Kane',
Welles and his cinematographer
Gregg Toland
seem to be pushing deep staging
as far as it can go.
Welles plays a hubristic
newspaperman.
He's less than
a metre from the camera.
Everett Sloane is so far away that
he's smaller than Welles's nose.
Such deep staging forces scale.
It's as expressionist
as the shadows of 'Caligari'.
More than any film of the time,
'Citizen Kane' challenged
the soft and shallow look
of romantic American cinema.
But why did it do so?
Because of the talent and instincts
of the magician who made it.
RKO studio,
where Welles made 'Citizen Kane'.
He was staging Shakespeare
at the age of four.
His mother died when he was 8
and his father when he was 12.
He lived in Shanghai,
visited the palaces
of faded emperors,
got to know the story of power
and tramped through its ruins.
He should have been
the DW Griffith of the sound era.
In fact, in a career that
lasted nearly 50 years,
he didn't direct
a single foot of film
for any of the four
major Hollywood studios.
Norman Lloyd played the poet Cinna
in Welles's acclaimed staging
of 'Julius Caesar'.
The story of the staging was told,
inaccurately,
in the recent film
'Me and Orson Welles'.
What is my name?
Whither am I going?
Where do I dwell?
Enough!
This is worse than terrible.
Cinna is Shakespeare's indictment
of the intelligentsia.
He's a lofty, Byronic figure.
You know, I completely disagree.
I never had that
kind of argument with Orson.
And as I watched that,
I was embarrassed,
because I never would have had
that kind of argument with Orson.
But just as an actor like Lloyd
revered Welles,
so Welles revered his own heroes.
Though he learnt much
from 'Stagecoach',
the great force in his films,
their battering ram,
comes from theatre and elsewhere.
Here he plays Shakespeare's
Falstaff,
a buffoon shot in deep space.
He was interested
in Italian Renaissance painting.
His attraction to powerful people -
kings, tycoons, inventors -
is like Shakespeare's.
Also like Shakespeare,
he looked to the past,
to times before democracy
and liberalism.
A virtuous man,
I've often noticed...
Here it's the world of 'Henry IV' -
John Gielgud dwarfed by
a massive empty cathedral.
The Prince of Wales and I must have
some needful conference alone.
Citizen Kane thinks of himself
as a Medici or a Mughal emperor.
Kane is full of the lust for power.
His world is massive but empty.
Maybe the last time he felt
anything real was as a boy,
playing in the snow
on his Rosebud sledge
in this incredible scene
in deep space with tracking camera.
Tell him now?
Yes.
I'll sign those papers...
'Citizen Kane' denounced
the grandeur, egomania
and maybe, even,
the cinematic hubris
that made 'Cabiria's
tracking shots...
..and 'Intolerance's epic scale...
..and 'The General's
outlandish production values.
Keaton's film was
famously expensive.
Shakespeare and the Medicis,
the Mughals, Ottomans
and 'Stagecoach'
were not the only sources of
Welles's visual and human ideas.
There was the fact
of his own body and voice.
Both were enormous, mature,
unfeasible even.
It was like he was
painted by Holbein.
He could never play a young person
or a teenager or an ordinary guy
or a 20th-century everyman.
The space in his films was gigantic
because his persona was gigantic.
And the sound was gigantic too -
whispers in close-up,
echoes from miles back.
49,000 acres of nothing
but scenery and statues!
I'm lonesome!
Till just yesterday,
we've had no less than 50
of your friends at any one time.
I think if you look
carefully in the west wing, Susan,
you'll find about a dozen
vacationers still in residence.
He extended the overlapping
dialogue of Howard Hawks's comedies
to fill a whole film.
Excuse me, Mr Kane...
Can you prove it isn't?
This just came in...
Mr Bernstein, meet Mr Thatcher.
I'll just borrow...
How are you doing?
Leland -
Mr Thatcher, my ex-guardian.
We have no secrets from our readers,
Mr Bernstein.
Mr Thatcher is one of
our most devoted readers.
The visual ideas
of Toland and Welles
about deep focus and deep space
excited filmmakers around the world.
Look at the depth of this scene
in 'The Maltese Falcon'.
Humphrey Bogart's thumb, no more
than 20 centimetres from the camera,
is clearly in focus.
Look at this incredible
scene in a bar
in 'The Best Years of our Lives'.
The older man, Fredric March,
asks the younger, Dana Andrews,
to end his romance
with the older man's daughter.
Andrews agrees to do so, and goes
to call her in a phone box.
As the phone call's
the main drama in this scene,
you'd expect director Wyler
and DP Gregg Toland
to set up their camera near the box
so that we can see and hear
the action.
But, instead, they put it far away,
beside this piano,
where a war veteran
who's lost his hands is playing.
The father's at the piano too,
but anxiously looks to the tiny
booth in the extreme background.
(MEN PLAY 'CHOPSTICKS')
It's as if the crucial action has
been sucked away by a black hole.
We're forced to imagine
the conversation,
just as, in real life,
we can't always see everything
that we want to see.
Years later, the Austrian
Michael Haneke used deep space
to show a woman on a train
getting away from harassment.
And the Hungarian Bela Tarr
used deep space
to move our eyes from
foreground to background
and then to foreground again.
In each case the effect
was one of tension,
as if the world is in a force-field
in which the people are held.
Deep staging in American cinema
would become less fashionable again
in the 1950s.
The new colour, widescreen
film stocks
were just not sensitive enough
to suck in all that
information at once.
So here,
in 'How To Marry A Millionaire',
the space is shallow
and the actors are displayed
across it like a washing line.
Very long lenses
in the '60s and '70s
excited directors about
very shallow focus.
Here, filmed with a long lens,
Anouk Aimee floated
in her own visual world,
like Garbo in the 1920s.
And in the 1990s,
Michael Mann's film 'Heat',
influenced by pop videos,
used the newest types of long lens
to create focus so shallow
that the lights behind Al Pacino in
this shoot-out became dreamy blobs.
But it was this place, Italy,
that was at the centre
of the movie world in the 1940s.
(TENOR SINGS IN ITALIAN)
This film school,
Centro Sperimentale,
was opened under Mussolini
in the 1930s.
This famous film studio...
..where great sets had been built,
where Italian epics and comedies
had been made,
had been used as an army barracks
during World War II.
And film lights were limited.
So filmmakers took to the streets.
Before the war,
central Rome looked like this.
(CHURCH BELL RINGS)
But by 1945 it looked like this.
People still went about their lives,
but the world had changed,
the city had changed,
the film industry had changed.
And so, in a series of films
made in Italy between 1945 and 1952,
the language of film changed.
What became known
as 'rubble movies' were born.
The first was this one -
'Rome, Open City',
directed by Roberto Rossellini.
The film started as a documentary
about a priest in Rome
during World War II,
but grew into a portrait of the city
struggling to resist
fascism and Nazism.
This is how the actress in the film
was shot and lit -
old style, glamour, a negligee.
But look at how the older woman
in the film is presented -
deglamorised, single light source.
She's pregnant but not married -
daring for the time -
and she's antifascist.
Another antifascist in the film,
Don Pellegrini,
is the priest in this church.
Rossellini wanted his images
plain, unadorned,
so he used lenses of about 50mm...
..rather than the Wellesian
wide-angle lenses...
..or longer lenses.
He didn't care too much
if the shot wasn't in focus.
And whilst not hand-holding
the camera much,
he seemed to have his DP
loosen the head of the tripod
to give loads of movement.
Light bulbs were bare
in Italian neorealism.
And Martin Scorsese says
that they influenced
the bare light bulbs
in 'Raging Bull'.
I'd much rather recite.
That's entertainment.
And it's said that in
these neorealist films,
we saw one of these
for the first time.
Rossellini said that if, by chance,
he made a beautiful shot,
he'd cut it out.
If the nature of movie beauty
changed in Europe in the late 1940s,
it was partly because of
a writer called Cesare Zavattini.
He said, "Before this, if one was
thinking over the idea of a film
"on, say, a strike,
one would immediately invent a plot,
"and the strike itself became
only background to the film."
"Today,"
he said in a later interview,
"we would describe
the strike itself.
"We have an unlimited trust
in things, facts and people."
This was revolutionary -
the reduction of plot.
De-dramatisation.
And Zavattini said something
even more revealing.
"When we've thought out a scene,
we feel the need to remain in it,
"because it can contain so many
echoes and reverberations."
This was, again, revelatory.
Things took place in real time.
Ordinary details mattered.
Where Alfred Hitchcock was to say
that cinema was life
with the boring bits cut out,
Zavattini and the neorealists
said that cinema IS the boring bits.
The most famous film that Zavattini
wrote, 'Bicycle Thieves',
is about an unemployed man
who has his bike -
his only chance of getting
casual work - stolen.
He and his son look
all over Rome for it.
In the end, worn out
and afraid of not being able
to get even basic work,
he himself steals a bike.
Director Vittorio de Sica has the
scene shot starkly, in harsh light,
and keeps the camera
far back from the theft,
as if not to intrude
on the father's shame.
(MEN SHOUT ANGRILY)
But then the boy sees
the father's theft.
We're close to him.
This tracking shot shows that
films like 'Bicycle Thieves'
are not afraid of
conventional filming, empathy,
point of view,
tension and emotion.
But this scene, a few moments
earlier, is more unusual.
The boy nearly gets hit by a car.
Twice.
In a Hollywood film,
the dad would have seen this
and grabbed the boy
and scolded him or comforted him,
but also realised
how much he loves him.
But in Italian neorealism,
such moments just happened
without cause or effect.
It was a loose end.
It didn't play back into the plot.
Prewar stories were chains
of cause and effect.
But in Italian neorealism,
the chain was sometimes broken.
Neorealism turned the realist
dissidence of '20s cinema
into a national film movement
in the '40s,
then swept around the world.
(TENOR SINGS IN ITALIAN)
Far away from neorealism
and the rubble of Europe,
the mythic capital of the American
movie industry, Hollywood,
started to get less glossy
in the 1940s too.
A starlet called Peg Entwistle
killed herself
by jumping from this letter
in the 'Hollywood' sign.
After a long day in the sunshine
in LA, night-time falls.
There are few streetlights,
so it's really dark.
Hardly anyone walks, so those that
do can hear their own footsteps.
The eucalyptus and orange blossom
smells almost sickly sweet.
The grilles on windows
cast shadows like prisons.
Throughout World War II, Hollywood
kept making this kind of film.
(UPBEAT BIG-BAND MUSIC)
(SINGS) # Did, did
Did-id-id-id you hear? #
Betty Grable,
in her feathers and decor,
was one of wartime's
most popular stars.
But America's most curious
filmmakers went abroad,
or just watched newsreels
and saw this.
And this, the documentary tragedy
of 'Rome, Open City'.
(GUNFIRE)
The romantic exuberance
of Hollywood ebbed.
Its paradise got a bit lost.
And it showed.
Between 1941 and 1959,
more than 350 dark films
were made in Hollywood,
films that became known
as film noir.
One of the earliest and most
influential was this one -
'Double Indemnity'.
MAN: (INSIDE) Who do you suspect?
Look at this scene in it.
The actress and the wall
at the far end of the corridor
are both in focus -
the visual depth of Mizoguchi,
'Stagecoach' and 'Citizen Kane'.
MAN 2: See you at the office
in the morning.
MAN: Yeah.
The situation is this.
The insurance man
who's coming out of the door
has fallen for the woman
who hides behind the door,
the wife of one of his clients.
She convinces him
to help her kill her husband
and share the insurance pay-out.
They do so.
The man's boss, in the dark suit,
begins to suspect that
the wife is the murderess,
and goes to the man's apartment
to tell him his hunch.
If the boss saw the wife there,
it would confirm his hunch
and implicate the man, his employee.
So the wife hides behind
the man's outward-opening door.
Goodnight, Keyes.
So long, Walter.
'Double Indemnity's director,
Billy Wilder,
was an Austrian Jew
who fled the Nazis in 1933.
Ironically filmed here in
the bright sun of Santa Monica,
his films were thematically dark.
Like many emigres
who made great film noir -
Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak,
Otto Preminger,
Michael Curtiz, Jacques Tourneur -
he loved the unpretentiousness
of America
but hated its worship of money.
The wife in this scene lusts for it.
The man lusts for her,
and, because he's weak and flawed,
for money too.
Robert Towne,
who wrote the film 'Chinatown'.
Cinema...cinema noir...
Um...
The characters are fated,
in one way or another, and it's
a character flaw of some kind.
They are like moths and flames.
You look at Walter
in 'Double Indemnity'.
WALTER NEFF: And I wanted
to see her again, close,
without that silly
staircase between us.
TOWNE: He just can't resist
a pretty anklet.
You look at Robert Mitchum
in 'Out of the Past'.
He can't...
You know, he wants to be
with a decent girl,
but he can't stay out of the way.
It's usually a femme fatale.
Even when he wants to disentangle
himself, he can't avoid it.
Gittes with 'Chinatown'.
They...they...there is
some flaw in them,
that drives them to their fate,
even as they try to avoid it.
And...not just a dark world
where they get kind of beaten up.
They are men who...
..at some deep, unconscious level,
seek out their fate,
even as they try to avoid it.
Paul Schrader, who wrote
'Taxi Driver' and 'Raging Bull'.
The flawed hero which, you know,
first sort of appeared in Freud,
influenced films, you know,
but it never really took hold
till after the war
and you had these guys
came home from the war.
And you had all of that
social dislocation
where women who had gotten jobs
in the war
were now expected
to give up their jobs,
and men who fought in the war
came home and didn't have any money.
There was a lot of frustration,
and so that kind of Freudian hero
started feeling like
a much more realistic hero
than he had felt like
in, you know, the '30s and '40s.
War, the city of LA,
flawed characters
and social and legal collapse
created noir,
but so did other things.
The lattice of shadows
of German expressionism can be seen.
In this German film,
light casts a grid of shadows,
but the handrail is a lattice too.
'Double Indemnity' was co-written
by Raymond Chandler,
who, along with Dashiell Hammett,
created the character types
and situations of noir.
Howard Hawks filmed Chandler's
'The Big Sleep' in 1946.
Humphrey Bogart played
Philip Marlowe.
The film crackled
with snappy dialogue,
a feature of the best noirs.
May I use your phone, Mr Marlowe?
Hello. Police headquarters, please.
Hello. This is Mrs...
Hello. What do you want, please?
MAN: I don't want a thing.
What?
You called me.
I called you? Say, who is this?
This is Sgt Reilly at headquarters.
Sgt Reilly?
There isn't any Sgt Reilly here.
I know there's not!
Wait a minute.
You better talk to my mother.
I don't wanna talk to your mother!
'The Big Sleep' was the most
influential film noir
since 'Double Indemnity'.
Its complex plot set a fashion.
The film was co-written
by Leigh Brackett,
another great female screenwriter,
who co-wrote this film, 'Rio Bravo',
in which Angie Dickinson
gets the best lines.
You see...
..that's what I'd do...
..if I were the kind of girl
that you think I am.
And Brackett co-wrote this film,
'Star Wars - The Empire
Strikes Back'.
In the film's climax,
Luke discovers - in the style
of a Hollywood romance -
that Darth Vader is his father.
Brackett had helped bring
traditional movie storytelling
into the '70s.
The women in film noir
haunt the films.
Jane Greer in 'Out of The Past'
takes her time, moves like velvet,
knows that the man is weak,
enjoys his gaze,
turns it to her advantage.
Usually in noir
it's an immoral advantage.
And yet of the 350 or so noirs,
only one, this one,
was directed by a woman.
Ida Lupino.
She mastered the form, using spot
lighting and subjective camera.
A film with downturned eyes.
Directing in American film had
become, by this stage, a boys' club.
And there's so much more
to say about film noir.
The pugnacious presence
of actor Edward G Robinson
in 'Double Indemnity'
is a reminder of how noir
was fascinated
by the sort of gangster films of
the '30s in which Robinson appeared.
In those he was disdainful,
dapper.
And its pessimism came, in part,
from the poetic realist films
of France in the 1930s,
such as this moody encounter between
two lost souls in 'Quai des Brumes'.
If proof is needed that France
influenced America in the '40s,
look at this film, 'La Chienne'
directed by Jean Renoir.
A man falls in love with
a hard-hearted young woman.
It was remade as 'Scarlet Street'
by Fritz Lang in America
14 years later.
The scene where the man pleads for
the woman's love is very similar.
Its star? Edward G Robinson.
Here in Montrose,
a suburb of Los Angeles,
a B movie called 'Gun Crazy'
was shot in 1950.
It was one of the most innovative,
passionate noirs ever made,
and shows how documentary and
neorealism influenced the genre.
It was directed
by this Hemingwayesque man
speaking on his fishing boat,
the great B movie
director Joseph H Lewis.
A man and a woman,
passionate and reckless,
are about to rob a bank.
Their hearts are beating.
In a conventional noir,
we'd see their faces, sweaty brows.
Here, Lewis keeps the camera
behind them.
His DP sat in the back seat
on a jockey saddle.
He made a special board
on which the camera could pan.
Lewis then had new button
microphones put on the actors
and on a policeman
we're about to see,
and gave the performers
free rein to improvise.
MAN: There's a car just pulled out.
We can get in there.
We'll have to... Yeah, yeah.
OK, right in here.
Fast as you can.
Don't worry. I won't be a minute
longer than I have to.
Here goes nothing.
OK.
Filming a stick-up
in the conventional way
was scheduled to take four days.
Lewis claims to have shot this
in three hours,
and says that the unbroken shot
covers two miles of ground.
Get out...
out of the way, copper, go on.
That's right, stand right there.
OK.
The camera and DP on the jockey
saddle move forward and right.
Another sound recordist was strapped
to the top of the car.
Well, that's a nice get-up.
I like it.
Good-looking gun.
Thanks.
That's English, ain't it?
That's right.
What show are you with?
Cheyenne Rodeo and Carnival.
The rest will be coming
through in a few minutes.
I got too far out in front.
You gonna play here?
No.
Well, it's an easy town on shows.
Three tickets and you've covered
the whole police force.
That's a pretty nice gun
you've got too.
I'm sorry,
I don't let anybody handle it.
I killed a man with it last year.
Did he have it coming to him?
Yes, but it wasn't much fun
watching him go down.
He had no idea he was getting...
(ALARM RINGS)
The staging looks so real
that passers-by yelled,
"They've held up a bank!"
Take off!
The deadly passion and stylistic
innovation of 'Gun Crazy'
were a major influence
on a much later film,
'Bonnie and Clyde', about the
anxiety of a couple that robs banks.
Your mama could take this bank.
WALTER NEFF: Straight
between the eyes.
She didn't fool me for a minute.
Not this time.
Paul Schrader says that
noir died out in 1958,
but its influence
can be seen much later
in 'LA Confidential',
in which Kim Basinger
pretends to be Veronica Lake
in 'This Gun for Hire'.
In 'Blade Runner',
in which Sean Young walks through
shadows in a pool of light,
like a film noir femme fatale.
In 'The Dark Knight', in which
the city is fetid and morally dark.
And even in Mumbai Noir
such as 'Shiva',
directed by Ram Gopal Varma,
all shadows and low camera angles.
The influence of film noir
has travelled the world.
So American film in the '40s
was newly serious,
but did film noir smash
the bauble of romantic cinema?
If you've seen this,
the sweeping camera moves
and sweeping emotions of 'Titanic',
you'll know that the answer is no.
Romantic cinema continued.
But even to live in LA
in the late '40s and '50s
started to feel different.
Ernst Lubitsch died in 1947.
DW Griffith and Greg Toland,
American cinema's civiliser
and its deep space experimenter,
both died in 1948.
Louis Lumiere in France died too,
as did Eisenstein in the USSR.
Judy Balaban's dad Barney
ran Paramount Studios for decades,
so she was at the centre of it all,
and was engaged to Montgomery Clift.
Originally our friends
were very...light-hearted
and there was a lot
of socialising and parties
and small talk
and vacations and whatever.
I mean, you know,
we were close to Janet and Tony,
and Dean and Jean Martin,
and I was close to Sammy Davis
from New York,
so we were close to Sammy and,
you know, the whole Rat Pack thing.
Sinatra and...
Gene Kelly lived across
the street from us,
and, you know, Debbie and Eddie...
I mean, it was just a lot of people
having a lot of parties, frankly.
(CHUCKLES)
But there came a moment in time
where a lot of that shifted.
I was married to
Tony Franciosa by then.
But the world began to be
more conscious of itself
in the larger sphere
than just simply the insular sense
of whatever your
own neighbourhood was,
whether it was in the Midwest
or Hollywood.
Suddenly there was a more
universal consciousness.
I look at periods where movies
seem to be ahead of everything,
and then there are periods
where they seem to be behind
everything else in the world.
So that, for example...
..the McCarthy era would be a time
when movies were caught in the more
backward part of that era.
(NEWSREEL MUSIC)
MAN: Calling the House Un-American
Activities Committee to order,
chairman J. Parnell Thomas
of New Jersey opens an enquiry
into possible communist penetration
of the Hollywood film industry.
The committee is seeking
to determine
if red party members
have reached the screen
with subversive propaganda.
MAN: That is not the question.
The question is have you ever been
a member of the Communist Party?
I'm framing my answer
in the only way
in which any American citizen
can frame his answer...
Then you deny...
..to a question which invades his...
absolutely invades his life.
Then you deny...
You refuse to answer that question.
At these hearings,
which started in 1947,
50 studio bosses and producers
agreed to sack any of their
employees who would not co-operate
with the Government's
new anti-communist
House Un-American
Activities Committee.
I told you before, I will
answer this question fully.
Your purpose is to use this
to disrupt...
This new poison in Hollywood life
also helped create
the seriousness of film noir.
The most principled filmmakers
refused to testify against leftists.
..could be a more efficient
government without...
Others named names,
and great artists were
banned from working - blacklisted.
Those affected included
Abraham Polonsky, Charlie Chaplin,
Dolores del Rio, Paul Robeson
and Dalton Trumbo.
The House Un-American Activities
became the single biggest trauma
in American cinema.
The great cinematographer
Haskell Wexler
shot 'America, America'
for director Elia Kazan,
who testified against the leftists.
Kazan was a tremendously
talented man,
and, um...
..I talked to him
a couple of times about it,
but one of the things
I remember he said
that the main thing about directing
is casting. (LAUGHS)
When Kazan's name came up
for a Lifetime Achievement Award
on the Academy,
I didn't think that Gadge, as we
called him, should get that award.
And Karl Malden said,
"Look, he's...he's dying.
"He's a great director.
"I'm going to vote for him."
So I did, and I wrote to Gadge
and I said...
.."Dear Gadge,
"I...voted for you
"because I think you deserve
the Lifetime Achievement Award.
"I thought...I think
it might be good
"if you said something
which may sound euphemistic,
"but you're saying that you're sorry
"that you may have hurt
some people."
I forget the exact words I used,
but...
And...and my nickname was Pete
for many years,
given to me
by a whore in Puerto Rico.
And she...and Kazan wrote me back,
um..."Pete, go fuck yourself.
"Gadge."
And that's...and that's the way
he was to the moment he died.
COUSINS: He must have felt guilt
that he couldn't admit.
Well, I don't...
I mean, it certainly was
an important thing.
He didn't have to squeal.
He didn't have to.
He was on the top...he was on
the top of the world. You know?
And you're right.
Rod Steiger and a lot of other
people didn't, uh...
..would not accept
anything about him.
Kazan's Oscar award
was televised, of course.
The famous reaction shots
of the Oscar broadcast
were more telling than ever.
Karl Malden and Warren Beatty
stand and clap Kazan.
Steven Spielberg sits and claps.
Ed Harris and Amy Madigan
don't clap at all.
Meryl Streep
and Lynn Redgrave clap.
Nick Nolte doesn't.
(APPLAUSE)
Back in 1949, the House Un-American
Activities Committee chairman,
J. Parnell Thomas,
was sentenced to prison
for embezzlement.
The Walk of Fame
in Hollywood Boulevard
has stars dedicated to
minor showbiz personalities,
but still doesn't carry the name
of many of the black-listees.
And there were other
momentous changes
in the American film industry
at the time.
In 1948,
the five main studios were forced
by the US Supreme Court
to sell their cinemas.
One of them, Paramount,
sold 1,450 of them.
The government began
the anti-trust action against them
because they said
you cannot produce,
distribute and exhibit a product
without being, you know...
violating anti-trust laws.
And so the government began
this investigation
and sued against the industry.
It went on for some years,
and my father could see, as he felt,
that the handwriting was on the wall
and that no matter how long they
fought it, they were going to lose.
So he made a decision
on behalf of what he felt
was the right thing
for the shareholders of the company
that...they should
stop fighting this,
stop spending money on it
and figure out how to, you know,
restructure the company
so that there were two
separate organisations,
one of which would produce
and distribute films
and the other one of which
would be a theatre company.
But in the early '50s,
just as the studio system,
what Stanley Donen called
'the garden', was dying,
so it produced some of
its most splendid blooms.
(QUIET, ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC)
(LOUD, VIBRANT MUSIC)
At MGM, cosmopolitan producer
Arthur Freed
gave sophisticates like Gene Kelly,
Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen
a chance to show that the studios
still had joy in them,
and beauty too.
This extended dance sequence
in 'An American in Paris'
was influenced by the success
of the remarkable one
in the British film 'The Red Shoes'.
Flashing red lights,
painted studio backdrops
Gene Kelly was a leftist,
and abhorred the anti-communist
witch-hunts,
but both he and Stanley Donen,
who started as a choreographer,
were Americans born and bred,
not emigres,
and at first their outlook
was optimistic...
..drawn from vaudeville
and clowning, as this scene shows.
(SINGS) # Make 'em laugh - ha ha!
# Make 'em laugh - ha ha ha ha! #
Like many of his generation,
Donen found the design,
dance and sexuality
of the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers
musicals of the '30s entrancing.
I was nine years old,
and I was a little boy in
a southern town in South Carolina,
where I was born and grew up,
and I had never experienced
anything like that,
and I was not in any way...
My family wasn't related to dancing
or movies or anything,
and this moment of...
..transcended life, real life.
There they were...
..dancing to the music,
enjoying being alive,
expressing their feelings.
DONEN: The idea of Gene Kelly
singing in the rain
and letting the rain hit him
is a...
..is a...that's the idea -
that he is so joyful
that rain is a pleasure,
he is not worried about
getting wet,
he's thrilled with being in love.
COUSINS: The camera expresses
the joy in itself
without Gene...without even
Gene Kelly just being there.
Just the uplift of the camera.
It's not the uplift of the camera,
it's the photograph of the camera
being uplifted.
It's what the camera sees
that does it.
The camera does nothing.
It just does what we tell it to do.
I can't talk to the camera
and say, "Now lift up.
"I want to feel the joy
of being weightless."
I've said to people before,
if you say to a writer,
you know, "Does the pencil
write the story?
"Of course it doesn't!
"And the camera is just the pencil
that we're working with."
In 'Singin' in the Rain', Donen and
Kelly did a kaleidoscopic sequence
to make fun of the Busby Berkeley
numbers which they hated.
(CHEERFUL SINGING)
(LUSH, ROMANTIC SINGING)
DONEN: I used to think
they were terrible.
Absolutely terrible.
I thought they were awful
for a long time.
And now when I look at them,
I think they really are
unique and wonderful
and they have a point of view
and I like them a lot.
What's interesting is they didn't
change at all. I changed.
They are what they are.
A film locks it.
It's like the written word
on the page. It doesn't change.
It's only our opinion
of what it means that changes.
Wrong word. Not in the theatre.
Well, the president
isn't in the theatre.
(LAUGHS) No, that's right.
COUSINS: The change
in Donen's life and work
echoes the change
in Hollywood itself.
In his film 'Indiscreet', starring
Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman,
for example, he used an innovative
technique to challenge censorship.
I found a play I like.
DONEN: The leading man
and leading lady,
even if they were married,
couldn't be in bed together.
It was censorship.
If they were married they had to
be in twin beds in the same room.
And I wanted to show
how intimate they were.
And so I said, "I have an idea
how I'll have them in bed together
"and the censors wont be able
to do anything about it."
In order to do it
so I could time it and everything,
I built both sets, both bedrooms,
on the same sound stage.
I had a camera on each person.
We did it all at once,
and I could watch them and say,
you know, "Do this. Do that."
And so it was done as
a spilt screen,
but we photographed it as though
it was all happening at once.
How long is this going to go on?
How long is what going to go on?
The pretence that we're happy?
We've never pretended we're happy.
Who's pretending?
You are. That we're happily married.
That you wanted to stay with me.
And, as in American cinema
in general,
melancholia entered Donen's cinema.
'Two for the Road'
was about a married couple.
We see one of the first road trips
they took together
and one of the last.
The movie intercuts
the time periods.
You have to admit it.
We've changed.
I admit we've changed.
It's sad, but there it is.
DONEN: People back then used
to say to me, "I love that movie.
"It's so romantic."
And I would be stunned and say,
"But it's such a hard,
tough look at marriage."
"Why do you think of it
as romantic?"
Because that's what
I wanted it to be -
to show you how people
could live together -
the abrasions, the...the buffeting
against each other,
and yet the way that you really
appreciate your partner.
COUSINS: By this time,
Donen had made 21 films,
some of the greatest
to come out of Hollywood.
He was just 43 years old.
Did you feel as if
you'd run out of things to do?
Oh, God, no. No.
I mean, if you feel
you've run out of things to do,
it means you think you're stupid,
you have nothing more to say.
I don't...I didn't think that.
I don't...I don't even
think it now.
What else did you have to say then,
and what else
do you have to say now?
I think of Diaghilev with Nijinsky.
You know, Diaghilev is supposed
to have said to Nijinsky
when he was asking him
to do a ballet,
"Etonne moi" - astonish me.
Well, that's what
I'm still trying to do.
I still want to astonish you
about my understanding
of what it's all about, how it is,
how we react to it,
and what can I do?
Just as Donen's films would do,
so mainstream American cinema
on the whole
grew up in the '40s and early '50s,
the years of devastation.
Under the influence of war
and Italian realism,
American movies became darker.
Life in mainstream American cinema
was no longer a bowl of cherries.
And deep focus, deep staging,
film noir lighting
and the influence of Orson Welles
had all given American film style
new punch and portent.
In Britain in the '40s and '50s
we find films that best sum up
the movie complexities
of this time of war.
An RAF bomber pilot's plane
has been hit and is on fire.
He has no parachute
so is about to die.
His last words are to an American
woman on a ground control base.
plunge us into a moment of
searing drama, romantic dialogue,
shallow focus, rich colour,
and lighting that hides tears.
What's your name? Are you in love
with anybody? No, don't answer that.
I could love a man like you, Peter.
I love you, June.
You're life and I'm leaving you.
Where do you live? On the station?
No, in a big country house about
5 miles from here. Lee Wood House.
Old house?
Yes, very old.
Good. I'll be a ghost
and come and see you.
You're not frightened of ghosts,
are you?
They formed a company together
in 1942
and made films like this one
which were almost mystical
in their Englishness, their romance,
their opposition to documentary.
The airman seems not to die
but, instead, to have
suffered brain damage.
During losses in consciousness,
he imagines going to heaven
to argue for more time on earth
because he has fallen in love
with the American woman.
Heaven's in black and white,
an art director's fantasy.
The title of the film,
'A Matter of Life and Death',
tells us what it deals with -
the biggest things in life,
especially when the world's at war.
Powell and Pressburger
showed that moviemakers
didn't have to choose between
honesty about the trauma of war
and the high style
of romantic cinema.
No other filmmakers of their time
could so combine the two.
And another English filmmaker
of the '40s
told us that war and trauma
bring out the best in us.
Here he is - Humphrey Jennings.
Posh, skinny, playing a postman
who's so devoted to his duty
that even after he's tied up,
he still gets his letter delivered.
Soon he was directing,
with a poetic style all his own.
The great British director
Terence Davies reveres Jennings.
Oh, yes, even if he had only made
'Listen to Britain'.
It's one of the great poems.
That's a voice.
(PLAYS PIANO FLUENTLY)
The most moving sequence
is around the National Gallery
when the people are just
enjoying the song
and it might be their last summer
where they're free,
and then you see Myra Hess playing
one of the Mozart piano concertos,
and you just think what he's saying
is that something that is
quintessential British,
that no-one one else has got,
we've got that and we were
prepared to fight for it.
Jennings believed that
because British people
share the same landscapes,
history and culture,
they've got a collective
unconsciousness,
what he calls
"the legacy of feeling",
the thing that gets people
through trauma together.
And in terms of film style,
Jennings felt that there's
a force-field between shots.
Look at this moment,
again from 'Listen to Britain'.
A half-dozen tin hats.
Then cut to five bare-headed women,
their heads where the hats were.
Then a statue of Charles I,
who was beheaded.
Three images together giving us
an eerie feeling
of the vulnerability of heads,
the cinematic sum
greater than its parts.
Eisenstein's 1+1=3 again.
And in 1949, a final British film
marvellously summed up the changes
in Western cinema,
the trauma, poetics, expressionism
and shadow play in these years.
'The Third Man' is set
in Vienna after World War II,
a city split between the victors.
The film's writer, the Catholic
novelist Graham Greene,
planted at the heart of the story
a great moral crime.
A man, Harry Lime,
played by Orson Welles,
is making money
by selling penicillin
that's supposed to treat children.
Director Carol Reed liked
the seriousness of this idea.
Its pessimism reminded him
of the '30s French poetic realist
films he so admired.
He and his cinematographer filmed
many shots off the horizontal axis,
to show the moral imbalance.
NARRATOR: Wearing down
German sea power...
Director Reed had edited this
Oscar-winning wartime documentary...
Miles of wire netting
for the beaches.
7,200 tonnes of petrol per day.
With an underwater pipeline
to carry it to France.
A white star is
the emblem of liberation.
COUSINS: ..and, like the Italians
and some of the American filmmakers,
felt that cinema had to engage
more with reality.
Come out, come out, whoever you are.
This sequence in 'The Third Man',
in which Welles's Harry Lime
is first revealed,
had the expressionist bravura of
Welles's own film, 'Citizen Kane'.
(WOMAN COMPLAINS IN GERMAN)
Harry!
(GRUMBLES IN GERMAN)
(HORN TOOTS)
(FOOTSTEPS RUN OFF)
In this famous ending,
Lime's decent, disappointed friend,
Holly Martins,
stands to the left of the image,
waiting for Anna,
Lime's old girlfriend,
whom Holly has come to love.
She walks towards him
from the extreme distance -
the deep staging of Welles.
Reed doesn't cut the shot
or dissolve the walk as Scorsese
would later do in 'Taxi Driver'.
Reed lets Anna walk the whole way
in real time -
the de-dramatised time
of Italian neorealism.
Writer Greene envisaged
a happy ending,
where Anna would take Holly's arm.
As Roman Polanski would do
decades later
with the ending of 'Chinatown',
Reed rejected such optimism.
Anna turns away from Holly
and walks out of shot.
She prefers the memory of the rogue
Harry Lime to the weak, decent man.
One of the most daring endings
in mainstream film history.
One of the greatest films ever made,
'The Third Man' is a compendium
of '40s cinema.
The new moral seriousness
of the movies,
their realism and deep staging,
would sweep across the world
in the '50s,
to India, Africa, South America
and Japan.
New continents of filmmaking
would emerge,
new stories and styles,
framings and visions.
For the first time in the story
of film, cinema would be global.