The Big Screen (38 page)

In the first few years after the war, the picture business was carried away on a quick wave of optimism, no matter that anyone watching the audience carefully knew that attitudes had altered. But in the heady moment of victory, reunion, and reaffirmation, movie attendance reached a peak: from 1943 to 1946 the weekly attendance in the United States was steadily over eighty million.

It was a moment epitomized in the title
The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946), the Sam Goldwyn–William Wyler picture about veterans returning from war and trying to resume their lives. It is one of those occasions in popular entertainment that identified a widespread mood without strain. The film won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and the acting award for Fredric March, as well as an Honorary Oscar for Harold Russell (a real-life amputee playing Homer, the sailor who comes home to his girlfriend, Cathy O'Donnell, with hooks for hands). This was an impressive mixture of “real life” and novelette, and in 1946 few noticed any misfit. It was a great film when it opened, which is when the business says you need to be great. It got rentals of over $11.0 million on a total budget of $2.5 million (including a late boost for advertising). Moreover, the film was honest: it said vets faced tough problems, not least the greed and indifference of the mass of people who had stayed home. But it was a movie, too, so it assumed those problems would be overcome. Life would be okay—that confidence was there in the advertising, too, the air of reassurance after crisis had supposedly ended. Even the critic James Agee, who detected some coziness in the film, admitted, “This is one of the very few American studio-made movies in years that seem to me profoundly pleasing, moving, and encouraging.” He set his reservations aside because he felt the picture was good for us, just as the title was passed on by word of mouth without a trace of irony.

The credible domestic interiors of
Best Years
(shot in absorbing depth of focus by Gregg Toland) are “perfectly” dressed. But in 1946, in its mythic Midwest setting, “Boone City,” there is not a television set in sight. Television had been demonstrated before the war, and its technology had been enhanced by wartime research. But the economic sacrifices of wartime had postponed its arrival as a domestic entertainment, just as the war had delayed the eventual decision in the antitrust cases leveled at the movie conglomerates. War is not always unkind to show business.

But in the late 1940s, as the first television sets began to appear for purchase (laughably archaic to our eyes now), movie attendance was already falling. In popular history, that fall and the rise of television are put hand in glove. It's not the real story. Something was making audiences lose faith in moviegoing before they recognized television. From 1946 to 1947, weekly attendance fell from eighty-two million to seventy-three. In 1948 it was sixty-six million; in 1949 it was sixty-one; in 1950 it was fifty-five; and in 1951 it was forty-nine. Thirty million customers a week were gone in five years—a drop of nearly 40 percent. No wonder Selznick was gloomy that day in 1951; no wonder the studio was empty of work.

What was happening? It is still an area for speculation: reunited lovers sat in the dark for a few years, then they were pregnant and the owners of new homes and families. Such people have never been steadfast moviegoers: their show is at home; they are tired, and a whole menu of practical realities has usurped the role of fantasy in their lives. Some of them had been educated, matured, or saddened by the experience of war and travel. One reason Harold Russell (who had lost his hands in a wartime accident) was cast in
The Best Years of Our Lives
was because of a new respect for painful realities. That same spirit brought several of the new Italian “realist” films to America and then urged Ingrid Bergman to Italy. It had encouraged Billy Wilder to make
Double Indemnity
, a study of corrupt but alluring people who betray that unimpeachable American rock: insurance. The same curdled humanism had reveled in the plight of Ray Milland's alcoholic in
The Lost Weekend
. Then it gave up the ghost, and offended Mr. Mayer, by saying there was dysfunction inside those Hollywood mansions and the factories that supported them.

Don't jump to easy conclusions. In the postwar years, the Best Picture Oscar went to a run of films that were “real,” dark, culturally respectable, or suspicious of America: 1945,
The Lost Weekend
; 1946,
The Best Years of Our Lives
; 1947,
Gentleman's Agreement
(which admitted anti-Semitism as an American issue); 1948, Laurence Olivier's
Hamlet
; 1949,
All the King's Men
; 1950,
All About Eve
; 1951,
An American in Paris
.

To which you can say, well, all right,
An American in Paris
is none of the above, and who trusts the Oscars anyway? But in the same period, the Academy's stock was high, and other contenders included 1945's
Mildred Pierce
(more James M. Cain, with Joan Crawford's career woman getting it on the chin and her shadowed brow);
Crossfire
(1947);
It's a Wonderful Life
(1946; where the wonder survived only narrowly against a nightmare vision of Americana);
The Snake Pit
(1948);
A Place in the Sun
(1951);
A Streetcar Named Desire
(1951); and
High Noon
(1952; which says the cowardly, selfish Western town no longer deserves Gary Cooper as its sheriff). This is the moment of film noir, few of which were as prestigious as
Double Indemnity
, but which seeped into the American sensibility in a way only the Western had matched before.

On the other hand, the same years saw not just
An American in Paris
, but also the heyday of Danny Kaye, Bob Hope, and Bing Crosby; in nightclubs, in advance of movies, nothing matched the meeting of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. There were war films that celebrated war and the way it found character in the fellowship:
Battleground
,
Sands of Iwo Jima
,
Twelve O'Clock High
(where a leader, Gregory Peck, cracked, but morale and the unit held together).

Perhaps the deepest lesson (though few people perceived it at the time) was that the old unity of the audience no longer existed. There were many who still wanted fun, fantasy, happy endings, and a couple of hours of escape. But the atom bomb's shock waves passed through us, along with the truth about concentration camps and the witchcraft called the Red Menace. Was war really over?

We look back now on the late 1940s and the early 1950s as a kind of Norman Rockwell mindscape in which youngish people had new families, their first cars, and new homes. They seem impacted, or content, or like “the American people.” But rifts were showing: Were you outraged by Communists or relaxed? What were your feelings about blacks and their occupying normal roles in American society? Jackie Robinson first played for the Dodgers on April 15, 1947. The incidence of divorce surged. Questions were raised about old guarantees: did everyone really admire their parents? More important, more Americans were going to college. Twelve million people went to school on the GI Bill of Rights, many from families that had never known that experience before.

Suppose the movies were no longer quite a mass medium. There was some unease over the old models of fantasy and escapism. There was a yearning for new approaches. There were alternative escapes—the car is a movie unto itself; its windows are screens that give us a traveling show. And there were millions who wanted nothing to change. But there was not the reality or the illusion of a solid, unified mass. To be positive about it, you might say some of the previously huddled were standing up and looking around. But in a mass society, with so many fresh lessons on the ugliness of human nature, how do you allay chaos and panic, except with a mass medium? A new one was arriving.

By 1950 there were just under four million television sets working (sometimes) in the United States—if you recall Martin Scorsese's
Raging Bull
(1980), in the household of Jake LaMotta (a rich man), the reception was intermittent and close to invisible. Most TV sets were still on the East Coast, and in those places there was a sudden drop in movie attendance—like 30 percent. But as yet only about 9 percent of the national population had sets. By 1962 that level had reached 90 percent. It reached saturation point, but has begun to decline in this new century—because other screens are replacing the television set.

In Douglas Sirk's
All That Heaven Allows
(1955), the widow Cary Scott's (Jane Wyman) grown children are shocked when she contemplates a new marriage, to her gardener Ron (Rock Hudson). To calm her, or to fill her time, they make a Christmas gift to her of the one other thing she lacks besides a man—a cabinet television set. Sirk then cuts away to a piercing shot of Wyman's sad face reflected in the gray screen: she struggles with the age gap and the respectability gap between Hudson and herself. But she never notices the gap that any modern audience is waiting for—Hudson's fond, amused, but disinterested attitude to women. There is even a scene where Hudson's character passes some small talk about “being a man” in difficult situations, and Wyman's character responds, “And you want me to be a man?” Films are helpless in such winds of change, yet
All That Heaven Allows
contains pointed social criticism and a performance from Hudson that deserved a livelier actress.

Was that television set a kind gift? Although it seems a comfort, and a partner to the sofa, television is critically associated with crisis: the deaths of JFK or Princess Diana; an earthquake in Haiti; the tsunami in Japan; the end of the world. We guess if that moment comes we'll be close to our “set”—and then turn it off for final peace? That dread is wittily dealt with in
Poltergeist
(1982), officially directed by Tobe Hooper and coproduced by Steven Spielberg. The angered spirits in an old Indian burial ground turn nasty beneath a house in one of those infinite, bland and dead Southern Californian “developments.” The house shakes, the furniture flies, and the little girl is sucked into the television set, where the Beast lives. She is rescued of course (this is Spielberg), but when their house is ruined and the family retreat to a hotel, they quickly seize the television set in their room and put it
outside
, on the balcony. That is the last shot of the movie, and the stranded, dead eye of the set summoned the opening line of William Gibson's 1984 novel
Neuromancer
: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

The penetration of our society by television would far exceed that of the movies, even at their best moment. Television became not an entertainment but a service, and when I speak of the role of a mass medium as a safeguard against disorder and fear, just contemplate a sustained interruption of electric light and Internet service in our cities today. Out of touch, we'd be plunged back into the dark. Chaos is so close, and panic is waiting. Television is nearer to electricity than it is to movie, yet we were all raised to believe it had us watching moving imagery, constant sound, and programs or shows.

Samuel Paley was born in Brovary, a shtetl near Kiev in 1874. The family name may have been Palinski. His father, Isaac, brought him to America, to Chicago, in 1883, and Sam grew up there, tried a lot of different trades, and ended up making cigars. The business flourished, and his son William was born in Chicago in 1901—it is that first film generation again. Willie attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and he was headed for the family business.

As part of that plan, in 1927, the Paleys bought up a struggling Philadelphia radio station, the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System. Willie was put in charge of it; his mission was to advertise the family cigars. In a year, sales doubled.