Original subtitles

There. Save all this.

Mr. Von Ellstein! Would you come here please.

- You call that directing? - That is what l've been calling it for 32 years.

Why, there are values and dimensions in that scene you haven't begun to hit.

Perhaps they are not the values and dimensions l wish to hit.

l could make this scene a climax.

l could make every scene in this picture a climax.

lf l did, l would be a bad director, and l like to think of my self as one of the best.

A picture all climaxes is like a necklace without a string... it falls apart.

Look, when l want a lecture on the aesthetics of motion pictures, l'll ask for it.

And it won't be on my time...

and a cover-up for a shallow and inept interpretation of a great scene.

To be a director, you must have imagination.

Whose imagination, Mr. Shields? Yours or mine?

You know what you must do, Mr. Shields,

so that you will have it exactly as you want it?

You must direct this picture yourself.

To direct a picture,

a man needs humility.

Do you have humility, Mr. Shields?

"Film is a disease, "Frank Capra said.

When it infects your bloodstream,

it takes over as the number-one hormone.

It plays Ia go to your psyche---------------.

As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film.

Very nice!

l guess l have to say that when l was growing up in the '40s and '50s,

l spent a lot of time in movie theaters.

l became obsessed with movies.

At that time there was nothing really available that l could find written on film...

except one book...

sort of my first film book, although l couldn't afford to buy it...

and couldn't find a copy except the only one available from the New York Public Library.

l borrowed it from the library repeatedly.

lt's called A Pictorial History of the Movies by Deems Taylor,

and it was a pictorial history of the movies in black-and-white stills,

year by year up to 1949.

The book cast as pell on me...

'cause back then l hadn't seen many of the films shown in the book,

so all l had at my disposal to experience these films were these black-and-white stills.

l'd fantasize about them and they would play into my dreams.

l was so tempted to steal some of these pictures from the book-- a terrible urge.

After all, it's a book from the public library.

Well, l confess-- once or twice l did give in to that urge.

I remember quite clearly-- it was 1946 and I was four years old.

My mother took me to see King Vidor's Duel ln The Sun.

l was fanatical about westerns.

My father usually took me to see them, but this time my mother took me.

lt had been condemned by the Church...

Lust in the Dust, they dubbed it.

So she used me as an excuse to see it herself, obviously.

From the opening titles alone, I was mesmerized.

Bright blasts of deliriously vibrant color,'

the gun shots,' the savage intensity of themusic,'

the burning sun,'

the overt sexuality.

Jennifer Jones was a half-breed servant girl...

and Gregory Peck was the villain,

a ruthless rancher'son who seduced her.

For a child it was a puzzle.

I mean, how could the heroine fall for the villain?

It was all quite overpowering. Frightening, too.

The finalduelin thesun,

- whereJenniferJones shoots Gregory Peck,

was too intense for this four year old.

Icoveredmy eyes throughmostofit.

You double-crossin'bobcat!

A flawed film, but nevertheless...

the hallucinatory quality of the imagery has never weakened forme over the years.

It seemed that the two protagonists could only consummate their passion...

by killing each other.

l guess that does it.

Pearl.

Hey, Pearl!

l didn't know it, but in 1946 Hollywood had reached a zenith.

Two decades later, when l embraced filmmaking,

the studio system had collapsed and was taken over by giant corporations.

lt was during the '50s that my passion for films grew and became a vocation.

The movies were entering a new era...

the era of The Searchers and The Girl Can't Help lt;

of east of eden and Blackboard Jungle;

of Bigger Than Life and Vertigo.

My passion was fueled by all sorts of famous and infamous films,

not necessarily the culturally correct ones.

Films you may never have heard of.

The Naked Kiss;

Murder by Contract;

Don't you get restless?

lf l get restless, l exercise.

My girl lives in Cleveland.

- Well, this is not Cleveland. - l don't like pigs.

l do.

Human nature.

The Red House.

This is the way it could always be,Jeannie.

We don't need anybody else.

Ain't you Zeke Ward's kid?

Aaaaah!

Aaah! Mommy! Mommy!

Out on the lawn, Mommy! There it is! There it is!

John!

Mommy!

Directors that are sadly forgotten now...

Allan Dwan, Samuel Fuller,

Phil Karlson,Ida Lupino,

Delmer Daves, Andre De Toth,

Joseph H. Lewis,Irving Lerner.

Over the years l've discovered many an obscured films,

and sometimes they were more inspirational...

than the prestigious films that were receiving all the attention at the time.

But l can only talk to you about what has moved me or intrigued me.

l can't really be objective here.

This is like an imaginary museum,

and we just can't enter every room, unfortunately, because we just don't have the time.

So I'm talking to you about some of the films that colored my dreams,

that changed my perceptions and even my life, in some cases,'

films that prompted me, for better or for worse, to become a filmmaker myself.

As early as I can remember,

the key issue for me was: What did it take to be a filmmaker in Hollywood?

even today l still wonder: What does it take to be a professional,

or maybe even an artist, in Hollywood?

How do you survive the constant tug-of-war...

between personal expression and commercial imperatives?

What is the price you pay to work in Hollywood?

Do you end up with a split personality?

Do you make one for them, one for yourself?

How about making Ants In Your Pants in 1941 ?

- You can have Bob Hope, Mary Martin. - Maybe Bing Crosby.

- The Abbott Dancers. - Maybe Jack Benny and Rochester.

- A big-name band. - What? Oh, no.

l want to make O Brother, Where Art Thou?

From the beginning I saw film as ameans ofself-expression.

I was mostly interested in the directors,

especially the ones who circumvented the system to get their visions onto the screen.

This the sort of thing you had in mind?

- Course they need freshening up. They been hanging quite a while. - l can't get into this.

Sometimes it seemed everything conspired to prevent them from achieving personal expression.

This... This may be a problem, unless you get a thinner man.

For there are rules, many rules, in Hollywood's power game.

Shoulder pads. Straighten it right out.

This'll give you the effect. lt'll be good.

A poetor a painter can be aloner,

but the American film director has to be, first and foremost, a team player.

Most important was the collaboration between the director and the producer.

In The Bad And The Beautiful, possibly the best drama about Hollywood's creative battles,

Kirk Douglas plays the producer...

- What if... - Suppose we...

and Barry Sullivan the director.

They both dream of making great films,

but for their first project they have been assigned alow-budget thriller called...

The Doom of the Catmen.

Put five men dressed like cats on the screen, what do they look like?

Like five men dressed like cats.

When an audience pays to see a picture like this, what do they pay for?

To get the pants scared off'em.

And what scares the human race more than any other single thing?

- The dark! - Of course. And why?

Because the dark has a life of its own.

ln the dark, all sorts of things come alive.

Suppose we never do show the cat men. ls that what you're thinking?

- exactly. - No cat men!

Movies are a medium based on consensus.

In the old days you dealt with moguls and major studios.

Today you have executives and giant corporations instead.

But one iron rule remains true.'

every decision is shaped by the money men's perception of what the audience wants.

l've told you a hundred times, l don't want to win awards.

Give me pictures that end with a kiss and black ink in the books.

l'll make this picture, Harry, or l'll quit.

It was a time...

when the producer was the key figure.

l found it and licked it. l wanna produce it so much, l can taste it.

He chose the director... He cast the director...

that he thought would be right for the material,

which he had directed... acquired a novel, a play, an original, whatever...

and then given the green light.

Then he would cast the director.

That was pretty much the system when l came into the business.

Duel ln The Sun is a fascinating example.

Even an old master like King Vidor, who practically put Hollywood on the map,

was not necessarily calling the shots.

The major creative force on the film was the producer, David O. Selznick,

an obsessive perfectionist who wanted to top his greatest achievement,

Gone With The Wind.

The result was a kind of grandiose quality...

that was a bit over the top,

but to David it was great fun...

to exaggerate, to heighten.

Hisall-encompassing enthusiasm galvanized everybody.

That energy,'

that sense of play fulness,

of rascality...

that was Selznick.

About 1:00 or2:00 in the morning,

when the actors had to go to sleep,

David would settle down and rewrite the script...

and we'd get different pages the next morning.

That didn't always set too well with the directors, but it was David's picture.

It was his baby.

King Vidor was directing,

but David was overcome by his own enthusiasm at times...

and began more and more to direct over King's shoulder.

And that created considerable tension on the set,

finally leading to the moment when King stood up...

and told David he knew what he could do with the picture and walked off.

David's enthusiasm overwhelmed him...

and William Dieterle finished the picture.

This is King Vidor. Put him on.

- Have you made up your mind? - l've made up my mind, Arthur.

Get yourself another boy. l'm a director, not a butcher.

Somehow Vidor survived as an on-again/off-again team player.

He even worked again later with Selznick in television.

Vidor was probably the most resilient of the film pioneers,

one of the few who were able, time and again, to convince the moguls...

to let him experiment with the medium.

Throughout his career he succeeded in alternating studio assignments...

pictures like The Champ and Stella Dallas...

with personal projects like Hallelujah, Our Daily Bread...

or this most unusual film.'

MGM's Irving Thalberg agreed to finance it...

because Vidor had given the studio its greatest success of the silent era-- The Big Parade.

Sometimes Vidor was even willing to mortgage his house or gamble his own salary.

Somehow he found a way to do one fort he studios, one for himself.

Now, remember, the Hollywood of the classical era-- the '30sand '40s...

was based on a powerful, vertically integrated industry.

The studios, particularly the fiv emajors...

MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, RKO and Fox...

controlled everyphase of the process.'

production, distribution, even exhibition,

as they owned their own chains of theaters worldwide.

To produce 50 pictures a year,

each studio held its stars, writers, directors, producers...

and an army of skilled technicians...

underlong-term contracts.

They even cultivated a recognizable style, or a look, in their films.

MGM was more of a dream world...

where everything was idealized...

and somewhat sentimentalized.

That came, l think, from L.B. Mayer,

what he thought was classy.

And l think probably Fox leaned more towards,

uh, uh--

Well, l wouldn't exactly say gritty realism,

because they made Betty Grable musicals and ice skating pictures...

and all kinds of pictures.

But l think the things that Zanuck is remembered for...

are pictures with a social conscience...

and done with a degree of, of realism...

that probably would not be characteristic of MGM.

ln those days l could look at the picture and ife verything was in white silk... MGM.

l could look at the picture...

if it's a Fred Astaire-- RKO.

Subsequently, MGM.

Paramount was a little bit all over the place.

They did not have to...

They did have their own handwriting,

with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope...

or with Martin and Lewis and...

[ Sings Theme ] We knew exactly...

We went to the same restaurants. We had our own circle.

[Scorsese]Now, ifyou worked at MGM, you had to adjust to the MGM style.

And it was quite different from the WarnerBrothers or Paramounts tyle.

If they did not conform to the studio look, the mavericks were reigned in.

Some, like Erich von Stroheim, simply refused to be harnessed,

and he paid a heavy price.

Buster Keaton-- very free wheeling...

agonized when MGM put him under the yoke of their supervising producers.

His genius didn't survive the treatment.

On the other hand, those who could work comfortably within the system, they thrived.

They came to define their studios'style.

Clarence Brown at MGM,'

Henry KingatFox,'

Raoul Walsh at Warner Brothers,'

they were Hollywoodpros whorose from theranks.

Most of their lengthy careers were spent under one roof.

Take Michael Curtiz, for example, here directing The Charge of the Light Brigade.

This guy made no less than 85 films for Warner Brothers,

and Casablanca was his 63rd.

That's an average of three features a year over a period of 28 years.

Three features a year. Think of the incredible opportunities they were given...

to learn their trade and become a true professional.

There were also talents who needed the discipline of thes ystem to blossom.

A perfect example was Vincente Minnelli.

He knew and often acknowledged that the producer/director dynamic...

- was crucial to the quality and success of a picture. - [ Gunshots ]

An avant-garde Broadway choreographer,

he was lured to Hollywood by producer Arthur Freed...

and became MGM's resident artist for 30years,

thanks to sympathetic producers like Freedand, later,John Houseman.

Minnelli had all of the studio's resources at his disposal.

The cameras were his brushes and the sound stage shis canvas.

All that he hated and loved about Hollywood was distilled in the harsh story...

ofThe Bad and the Beautiful--

the ambition, the power, the opportunism and the betrayal.

No one was spared, not even the director.

Here Barry Sullivan hears from his ruthless partner...

what has become of their dream project.

What happened? Didn't he go for Gaucho?

Go for him? He had a hemorrhage. He... Shh.

The first time a star ever said he'd shine...

Kirk Douglas'character was loosely based on several actual producers,

among them David Selznick.

The Faraway Mountain's gonna be done just the way we want it.

A million-dollar budget; a location in Veracruz; Von ellstein to direct.

Uh, Gaucho, Wendy for the girl.

Ants Chapman formy cameraman.

Von ellstein to direct?

You're taken care of. lt won't be a separate panel, but your name'll be on screen.

Assistant to the producer.

- Thanks. - You know this story better than anyone else.

lt's your baby. l want you with me on the set all the time.

You don't have to talk to Von ellstein.

- Any ideas you have, l'll tell him. - Thanks again.

- Von ellstein to direct. - You always said he was the best in the business.

Sure he is.

Fred, l'd rather hurt you now than kill you off forever.

You'rejust not ready to direct a million-dollar picture.

But you're ready to produce a million-dollar picture.

With Von ellstein l am.

Now, to survive, to master the creative process,

each filmmaker had to develop his own strategy.

Some, like Frank Capra, Cecil B. DeMille or Alfred Hitchcock,

carved a niche for themselves...

by excelling in a certain type of story and being identified with it.

Their very name became a box office draw.

A few even achieved Capra's dream...

and secured their name above the title.

[Capra] They had wonderful directors at MGM, but you never heard their name.

But you heard about me.

l was the enemy of the major studio.

l believed in one man, one film.

l believed one man should make the film,

and l believed the director should be that one man.

One man should do it-- l didn't give a damn who.

But l thought the director had the most to do with it.

l just couldn't--

l just couldn't accept art as a committee.

l could only accept art as an extension of an individual.

If you haven't got the story, you haven't got anything.

Raoul Walsh used to say this, and this is another cardinal rule.

The American filmmaker has always been more interested in creating fiction...

than revealing reality.

early on the documentary form was discarded...

or relegated to a marginal status.

For better or worse, the Hollywood director is an entertainer.

He's in the business oftelling stories.

He's therefore saddled with conventions and stereotypes,

formulas and cliches,

and all these limitations were codified in specific genres.

This was the very foundation of the studio system.

Audiences loved genre pictures,

and the oldmasters never seemed reluctant to supply them.

When John Ford rose in the middle of a tempestuous meeting...

at the Directors Guildof America in 1950 and introduced himself, this is what he said.'

"My name is John Ford, and l make westerns."

He was not referring to his more honored pictures, such as The Informer...

or The Grapes of Wrath or How Green Was My Valley or The QuietMan.

The westerns were what he was most proud of.

Or so he may have wanted us to believe.

Eventually filmgenres would serve to organize assembly line production.

Each studio made so many westerns, so many musicals,

so many gangster films, and so forth.

Edwin S. Porter's THe Great Train Robbery.

This was one of the first attempts at scripting a story,

and fittingly it was also a western.

The first master story teller of theA mericanscreen was D. W. Griffith.

His sensibility was steeped inaliterary tradition,

that of Dickens and Tolstoy, Frank Norrisand Walt Whitman.

Yet, while borrowing from 19th-centuryliterature,

Griffith was forging the new art of the 20th century.

He explored the emotional impact of film,

and before the outbreak of World War One...

he had already delineated nearly every genre, even the gangsterfilm...

with his short The Musketeers of Pig Alley.

Any minute now it may be curtains for Roy earl.

[Scorsese]Genres were never rigid.

Creative filmmakers kept stretching their boundaries.

This was a classical art, where personal expression was stimulated,

rather than inhibited, by discipline.

[ Machine Gun Fire ]

Take Raoul Walsh, the most gifted apprentice and disciple of Griffith.

What's the idea, you? Get back where you belong.

His strongest films were variations ona few themes and characters.

The figure of the sympathetic outlaw, for instance,'

arebel in the tradition of Jesse James----------- inspired him time and again.

In High Sierra you didn't root for the police and the ordinary citizens--

you rooted for the gangster.

You knew he was doomed when he became separated from the only person who cared about him--

his tarnished angel, Ida Lupino.

Aw, be smart.Justyell up to him and tell him to put his gun away and come down.

Otherwise we'll get him sure.

[ Sighs ]

All right.

Go ahead and yell.

- No, l won't! - What's that?

- l won't, l tell ya! - We'll get him then.

He's gonna die anyway. He'd rather it was this way. Go on, kill him, all ofyou!

- [ Sobbing ] - [Shouting]Earl!

Come down! It's your last chance!

Come and get me! There's plenty of ya down there!

[Scorsese] At the end of his memoirs,

Walsh quotes Shakespeare, his constant inspiration.

"Each man in his time plays many parts."

This applies to Walsh himself, but also to his explosive characters.

These outcasts were bigger than life,' they stood beyond good and evil.

[ Barks ]

- Their lust forlife was insatiable, - [Barking Continues]

even as their actions precipitated their tragic destiny.

Mary!

The world was too small for them,

and Walsh would often give them a cosmic battle ground...

Mary! [ echoing ]

- Mt. Whitney and the High Sierras. - Mary!

[ Gunshot ]

[ Gasps, Screams ]

[ Gunshot ]

Eight years later Walsh filmed the same story as a western...

Colorado Territory.

Again he provided his desperado with a wide landscape...

which dwarfed human figures.

This time the Cityof the Moon in the Canyon of Death.

Hey, McQueen!

You gotno chance!

- Come on down! - Come and getme!

- We'll starve ya out! - Go ahead!

So dear to the heart of Raoul Walsh was his heroine, now a half-breedout cast,

that he gave her as much strength and character as the hero.

You don't wanna leave him up there, buzzards pickin' his bones clean.

Call him out, and we'll split the 20,000 reward with ya.

[ Spits ]

[Scorsese] You might even sense a mystical dimension...

at the end of the film...

that clearly transcended any genre limitation.

- The lost city is like a primitive cathedral. - [ Chanting ]

As he listens to the Navajos chanting in the night,

Joel McCre are flects on his fate...

and appears to accept it.

Wes! [ echoing ]

- Wes! - Colorado.

Wes, they're comin' at ya! They found a backway.

- [ Chamber Clicks ] - Come down, Wes!

Hurry, Wes! l got horses!

[Scorsese] Walsh used some of the same camera angles as in High Sierra,

but this time the messenger of death was a Navajo sharp shooter.

-[Gunshot] - [ Screams ]

Don't!

- Don't! They'll kill ya! - [ Gunshots Continue ]

[Scorsese] Andin Colorado Territory,

the tragedy was complete.

Both protagonists were doomed.

Now, to me the most interesting of these classic genres are the indigenous ones

the western, which was born on the frontier;

the gangster film, which was originated in the east Coast cities;

and the musical, which was spawned by Broadway.

They remind me of jazz...they allow for endless, increasingly complex,

sometimes perverse variations,

and when these variations were played by the masters,

they reflected the changing times.

They gave you fascinating insights into American culture and the American psyche.

You can see how film genre evolved...

just by watching three westerns John Ford directed...

with the same actor,John Wayne.

The character of the hero becomes richer, more complex with each decade.

The Ringo Kid of Stagecoach...

Sorry. No silver cups.

grew first into the benevolent father figure of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

They all put in the hat for it, sir.

There's a sentiment on the back of it.

"To Captain Brittles...

from C Troop."

[ Sniffles ]

"Lest we forget."

[Scorsese]Now watch Ford transform John Wayne...

into them is fit of The Searchers.

Ethan Edwards returns from years of wandering...

to discover that his love dones have been massacred by the Indians.

- Another one, huh? - John Wayne's heroic persona...

has turned dark and obsessive.

The physical death of the Indian is not enough.

Ethan wants to ensure his spiritual death as well.

This 'un come a long way----------- before he died, Captain.

Well, ethan, there's another one you can score up for your brother.

- [ Groans, Whimpers ] -Jorgensen!

Why don't ya finish the job?

[ Gunshot, echoing ]

[Continues Echoing]

What good did that do ya?

By what you preach, none.

By what that Comanche believes,

ain't got no eyes, he can't enter the spirit land.

He has to wander forever between the winds. You get it, Reverend.

Come on, blanket head.

[Scorsese] Gone is the simple black-and-white morality of the early days.

[ Gunshots ]

[ Thunder]

Gone are the old-fashioned values of the seasoned cavalry officer.

[Thunder Continues]

-[Bugle] - [ Gunshots ]

- Now look at Ethan Edwards of The Searchers. - Hyah! Get in there!

The same star,John Wayne,'

the same location, around Monument Valley,'

the same director,John Ford,'

but a different character, different attitudes, different conflicts,

almost a different country.

Ethan Edward shunts down his niece,

No, no! ethan!

abducted and raised by the Indians after the massacre of her parents,

because he believes she has been tarnished.

- [ Shouts, Grunts ] - Living with Comanches, he insists, is not being alive.

Ethan Edwards is actually the most frightening characterin the film.

- Debbie! - After years of searching,

when he finally finds Natalie Wood,

you don'tknow whether he's gonna kill her or save her.

No, ethan! No!

Let's go home, Debbie.

This is no happy ending, though.

There is no home, no family waiting forEthan.

He is cursed, just as he cursed the dead Comanche.

He is a drifter, doomed to wander between the winds.

The western also allowed for elaborate psychological and even Freudian dramas.

- Well, patron? - Hang him.

In Anthony Mann's The Furies,

the patriarchal cattle baron wantshis rebellious daughter...

to beg him for herlover's life.

You will not humble your self.

This l ask.

While John Ford only alluded to the darkside, Anthony Mann dwelled in it.

[ManSpeaking Spanish]

The proud Mexican chooses to die...

ratherthan allow his woman to humiliate herself.

[ Continues ln Spanish ]

Amen.

The Furies could'vebeen a Greek tragedy.

The powerful story, written by Niven Busch, the author of Duel in the Sun,

was actually inspired by Dostoyevsky's novel The ldiot.

Juan.

The kiss of a good friend.

'Til our eyes...

next meet.

'Til then.

Tears a body to see someoneyou love hurt, doesn't it?

Do you want me to beg? Do you want me on my knees to you for his life?

- l'd hang him anyway. - That's what he said.

He did, eh? He always was smart.

But you're not. You're old, getting foolish and you've made a mistake.

lt's meyou should've hung,

because now l hate you in a way l didn't know a human could hate.

Take a good, long look at me, T.C.

You won't see me again until the day l take your world away from you!

[ Murmuring Prayer ln Spanish ]

[Woman Whimpering] Juanito.

Juanito!

Juanito! [Wailing]

[Scorsese] The mythology of the frontier,

of a land in perpetual expansion,

has given way to greed, vengeance,

megalomania, sadistic violence.

- Roy! - Anthony Mann's brooding heroes were no saints.

Look out! Let go ofhim!

Seeking revenge was their obsession,

an obsession that would consume and nearly destroy them.

Even James Stewart, the all-American hero of Frank Capra's fables,

succumbed to outbursts of savage violence.

In The Naked Spur, you see him reel in his dead prey.

He has become a bounty hunter in order to buy back the ranch stolen from him...

- while he was away fighting in the Civil War. - Cut him loose, Howie!

l'm takin' him back!

This is what l came after, and now l got him! No partners, like l started!

He's gonna pay for my land!

It's no good if you take him back!

They're dead! Finished!

- He'll never be dead for you! - l don't care anything about that!

The money! That's all l've ever cared about!

Roy, he called the current. He said face up to it.

All right, that's what l'm doin'. That's what l'm doin'.

Maybe l don't fit your ideas of me, but that's the way l am.

-Jeff!. - Hey, Hank!

[Man] You all drop your guns and come on down.

[Scorsese]Budd Boetticher explored the bare essentials of the genre.

His style was as simple as his impassive heroes.

Let me see your hands, please.

- Deceptively simple. - Put 'em out there!

The archetypes of the genre were distilled to the point of abstraction.

Bull fighting had been Boetticher's first vocation.

The choreography of basic human passions was his forte.

What did you do with Hank?

- Who's he? - The station man here.

He's overyonder in the well.-----------

And the boy?

He's with 'im.

In the seven westerns he made with Randolph Scott,

Boetticher always gave precedence to character over action.

You let us go and we'll never breathe a word about this.

l know you won't. Do you go along with what he said?

lf l said yes, you wouldn't believe me.

Yeah, it's dumb even talkin' about it, ain't it?

Each adventure was a poker game,

and the player's complex moves were more important than the avowed goal.

- You know what's gonna happen to you? - l think so.

- You scared? - Yeah.

You're honest about it. l'll say that for ya.

- [ Thump ] - Ouch!

[ Laughing ]

Pour yourself a cup of coffee. [ Continues Laughing ]

In the power play, the hero and the villain were complimentary figures.

[ Continues Laughing ]

They shared the same loneliness, the same dreams...

and even the same ethical code.

Have a seat.

Over there.

[ Continues Laughing ]

Somehow, the gentleman and the desperado...

were fascinated by each other.

- You got a wife up on your place? - No.

- Should have. Ain't right for a man to be alone. - They say that.

Well, l oughta know.

- You cook good coffee. - Brennan.

Talk.

What about?

Your place. What's it like?

lt's not much. Not yet, anyway.

- You got stock on it? - Some.

Work the ground?

l plan to, yeah.

l'm gonna have me a place someday.

l thought about it. l thought about it a lot.

You figure you'll get it this way?

Well, sometimes you don't have a choice.

Don'tyou?

- Now, look, Brennan... - [Man]Frank!

[Automated One-Man Band]

[Scorsese]For decades the western genre embellished the reality of the west...

to make it more "interesting. "

But in the mid-'50s several films started questioning the myth...

perpetuated by Hollywood.

Arthur Penn, forinstance, presented Billy the Kid as a juvenile delinquent...

- [ Dinging ] - in search of a father figure.

By having aj ournalist follow the young misfit throughhis career of crime,

Penn suggested how history was distorted even as it was unfolding.

- Statey our name. - Garrett.

- Huh? How's that? - Garrett. Pat Garrett.

-[Click] - My--

Little case of the quick jump.

Somebody gonna get his head clipped off.

[Resumes]

Paul Newman portrayed Billy as a suicidal antihero...

who sought his own death.

You help me.

We don't want you.

Neither a vicious killer nora sympathetic outlaw,

Billy was arebel without a cause.

You help me.

His rage and confusion hadmore to do with them a laise of growing up in the 1950s...

than with there a lities of the Old West.

Please.

Billy, don'tgo for your gun.

Keep your hands away from your side.

- I don't wanna kill ya. - He's here.

Billy.

Come to me.

[ Gunshot ]

[Clint Eastwood]Just when you think the western has been exhausted,

that there's nowhere else to go with it,

something will come along with a new slant on things.

It's very exciting when that happens.

Unforgiven is a good example...

of what l mean when you can address a situation.

There's a lot of concern in society today...

about, about violence and gunplay,

and that film, even though it takes place in 1880,

it, uh, it addresses that now,

that in order... when you are a perpetrator of violence...

and you get involved in that sort ofthing,

you roby our soul...

as well as the person...

the person you're committing a violent act against.

[Scorsese]In Unforgiven, Eastwood plays a professional killer...

who has tried to reform and become a farmer.

Physically and mentally scarred,

he'shaunted by his dark and violent past.

Judgment night comes after his best friend has been tortured to death...

by Sheriff Gene Hackman.

- There's no glamour in killing anymore. -[Thunder clap]

The lawman behaves as badly as the renegade.

They're both former gunslingers who have shot people in the back or when they were unarmed.

Who's the fella owns this shithole?

- Uh, l-l own this establishment. - [Thunde rContinues]

- Bought it from Greeley for a thousand dollars. - [ Click]

You'd better clear outta there.

Yes, sir.

Just hold it right there. Hold it!

[ Screaming ]

[ Hammer Clicks ]

Well, sir, you are a cowardly son ofa bitch.

You just shot an unarmed man.

Well, he should armed himself...

if he's gonna decorate his saloon with my friend.

You'd be William Munny out of Missouri.

Killer of women and children.

That's right.

l've killed women and children.

Killed just about everything that walks or crawled...

at one time or another.

And l'm here to kill you, Little Bill,

for what you did to Ned.

[Thunder Continues]

You boys had better move away.

[Eastwood]I've always felt that the western movie...

is one of the fewart forms that Americans can lay claim to.

Americans are somewhat masochistic, l must say, about that.

Sometimes they can be very blase about their own art forms...

because it doesn't...

The grass is always greener, you know.

lt's, um...

lt's easy to look elsewhere...

when sometimes great art can be right in front ofyou.

[Scorsese] Of course, most American directors never claimed to be artists.

They prided themselves on appearing blase.

Holding one's cards close to the vest was a survival strategy.

Even an old masterlike John Ford, it seems, had to wear a mask.

- Watch how he plays the tight-lipped pro... - Take one.

in front of Peter Bogdanovich's camera.

"Take one"? Won't want more than one take, will they? Shoot.

[Bogdanovich] Mr. Ford, I've noticed that the, uh...

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 tha tchange in mood? - No. No.

Now that I've pointed it out,

is there anything you'd like to say about it?

l don't know what you're talking about.

Can I ask you what particularelement about the western...

appealed to you from the beginning?

l wouldn't know.

Would you agree that the point of Fort Apache...

was that the tradition of the army...

was more important than one individual?

Cut.

[Loud Banging]

[Scorsese] The gangster film.

Another rich genre which allowed filmmakers...

to dwell on America's fascination with violence and lawlessness.

- [Banging Continues] - lt's only a coal truck.

Hey, Tom. Wait a minute.

- What happened? - Aw, nothin'. l just got burned up, that's all.

[Loud Banging]

[Banging Continues]

[Machine Gun Fire]

[Gunfire Continues]

"There'saction only if there is danger. "

This was said by Howard Hawks, an authority on both the western and the gangster film.

"To stay alive or die; this is our greatest drama."

The gangster film predates World War One,

as with Griffith's Musketeers of Pig Alley...

or Raoul Walsh's picture of 1915 called Regeneration,

which was shot on location on New York's Lower EastSide.

Gangsters then were viewed as the victims of a depressed environment.

Neighborhood kids growing up on the mean streets.

But ten years later, Prohibition brought about a tide of movies...

that signaled a tremendous escalation in urban violence.

[Machine Gun Fire]

What struck me in Scarface was Howard Hawks'cool and distant objectivity.

Hey! That's O'Hara's mob.

Heshowed Tony Camonte, also known as AlCapone,

asa vicious, immature, irresponsible character.

- Hey, lookit! They got machine guns you can carry! - [Gunfire Continues]

- lfl had some ofthem, l could run the whole works in a month! - l'll get you one!

Yet, that world was almost attractive...

because of its irresponsibility.

And that was disturbing.

At times, ofcourse, the film is very funny.

Not surprising, as Hawks was as much a master of comedy as of action.

Swell! Look, it's little. You can carry it. Let's get outta here.

But at the endof the '30s came a really pivotal film... Raoul Walsh's Roaring Twenties.

Don't you ever say that to me again. Do you hear? Never.

This chronicle of the Prohibition era...

was the last great gangster film before the advent of film noir.

It readl ikea twisted Horatio Alger story.

The gangster caricatured the American dream.

Of all the dog-and-pony joints l've ever worked in, this tops 'em all.

Don't worry, honey. l likeya.

Well, happy New Year.

[Scorsese] This was the gripping saga of a war hero turned bootlegger...

and his downfall after the stockmarket crash.

- [ Gunshot ] - eddie! eddie!

It was actually the inspiration behind one of my student films, lt's Not Just You, Murray.

And l'd like to think, uh, GoodFellas comes out ofthe tradition...

of something as extraordinary as The Roaring Twenties and Scarface.

Drop it! Drop it!

eddie!

The gangster had now become a tragic figure.

eddie!

Walsh even dared to end the film...

on a semi-religious image...

that evokes a pieta.

He's dead.

Well, who is this guy?

This is eddie Bartlett.

What was his business?

He used to be a big shot.

After World War Two, the gangster turned into a business man.

The gang was taken over by anonymous corporations.

[ Whistles ] What a layout.

There's only one way to handle you. Kill me?

lfl have to, yeah. A guy's gotta fight for what's his.

[Scorsese] The first film to show the major changes in the underworld...

was Byron Haskins' underrated l Walk Alone.

Burt Lancaster,just out of prison, discovers the new world he's in.

Get him outta here.

He knows all my business. He stays.

You and your boys.

This isn't the Four Kings,'no hiding out behind a steeldoor and a peephole.

This is big business.

We deal with banks, lawyers and a Dunn and Bradstreet rating.

The world's spun right past you, Frankie.

ln the '20s you were great.

ln the '30s you might've made the switch, but today you're finished,

as dead as the headlines the day you went into prison.

- Regional associate... - Stop tryin' to dizzy me up!

Here. Now, l want simple answers, Dave. No diagrams.

Dink's got the full say around here, right?

- Yes. - Okay, then.

except that it's revocable by a vote of the board of directors of Regent Associates.

- Stop the double-talk. - l'm sorry, Frankie.

-Just what does Dink own? - ln which corporation?

[Scorsese] Some films,

notably Abraham Polonsky's Force of evil,

went even further and painted the whole society as corrupt.

The face of John Garfield, a lawyer for the mob,

was a landscape of moral conflicts.

[Man Thinking] People can be made to talk.

Was my phone talking too?

[ Dial Tone, Click]

[Scorsese] The social body itself was sick.

The system's violence became the issue, rather than individual violence.

You saw a corrupt world implode before your eyes.

Leo, l arranged with Tucker for you to quit tonight.

- l'll pay off your investments. - l don't want it,Joe.

The money l made in this rotten business is no good for me.

- l don't want it back. - The money has no moral opinions.

l find l have,Joe. l find l have.

Abraham Polonsky's dialogue was unusually poetic.

l'm glad you called me, Freddy.

l'm glad you thought it over to calm down and listen to me, so l can help you.

Coffee.

Please, Mr. Morse. All l want is to quit. That's all. Nothing else.

They won't let me quit, and l want to quit. l'll die if l don't quit.

l'm a man with heart trouble.

l die almost every day myself.

That's the way l live.

lt's a silly habit.

You know, sometimes you feel as though you're dying...

here...

and here.

Here.

You're dying while you're breathing.

Freddy, what have you done?

[ Car Doors Slamming ]

Freddy, what have you done to me?

- Take it easy, Pop, and you won't get hurt. - You're safe with us.

Come on! It can't take all night!

- Stand up and walk! - Stop him! Stop him! He knows me!

Kill him! Kill him! He knows me!

[ Moans ]

Where's my brother, Ben?

[Scorsese] You couldn't buck the system. You were indebted to the syndicate for life.

Where's my brother? Where's my brother?

Where did Ficco take my brother?

[Scorsese] They were forever using you.

They even wanted you to sacrifice your own family.

[Joe Thinking]I wanted to find Leo, to see him once more.

It was morning by then, dawn,

and naturally I was feeling very bad there as I went down there.

I just kept going downand down there.

It was like going down to the bottom of the world...

to find my brother.

[Scorsese] This madness culminated...

in Francis Coppola's The Godfather.

As Al Pacino discovered when he came back from World War Two,

the son had to follow his father's criminal path.

When you were a Corleone, there was no leaving the outfit.

It was an evil family bound by fear and torn by treachery,

but you served it without ever questioning its legitimacy,

as though it was your country.

American values... family, free enterprise, patriotism... became totally twisted.

even individualism was dead.

The organization was a state within the state;

the gangster, a chairman of the board; and crime was a way of life.

By the late '60s the gangster genre had proven so versatile...

it could even embrace an avant-garde style.

Watch the innovative editing here of John Boorman's Point Blank.

The images are literally flashing through CarrollO' Connor's mind...

as he realizes who Lee Marvin is...

a killer who slugged and smashed his way to the top of the organization...

in a desperate quest to find the man in charge, the man who can simply pay him.

- Aaaah! - Walker.

[ Mutters ] Walker.

You're a very bad, destructive man, Walker.

- Why do you do things like this? What doyou want? - l want my money.

I want my 93 grand.

Ninety-three thousand dollars?

You'd threaten a financial structure like this for $93,000?

- l don't believe you. What do you really want? - l-l really want my money.

l want my money!

Well, l'm not gonna give ya any money, and nobody else is!

- Don't you understand that? - [ Gunshot ]

Carter!

- Well, wh-who runs things? - Carter and l run things... I run things.

What about Fairfax? Will he pay me?

Fairfax is a man who signs checks.

No. Cash.

Cash, checks... Fairfax isn't gonna give you anything. He's finished.

- Fairfax is dead. He just doesn't know it yet. - Somebody's gotta pay.

Parallel to the gangster film was the rise ofa very different genre... the musical.

An interesting coincidence.

The harshness of the times... the Depression...

colored this most escapist of all film genres.

[ Singing ]

[Scorsese] With Busby Berkeley, the genre came into its own.

A former dance instructor,

Berkeley was the first to realize that a movie musical...

was totally different from a stage dmusical.

On film, everything was seen through one eye... the camera.

In designing his production numbers,

he would therefore rely on unusual camera movements and angles.

The camera itself would partake in the choreography.

Berkeley's ballets could not have existed outside of the movies.

They were pure cinematic creations.

Berkeley's films were viewed as pure entertainment,

but some time sheap plied his wizar dry to the grim realities of American life...

caught in the grip of the Depression.

[Woman] Remember my forgotten man?

You put a rifle in hishand.

You sent him faraway.

You shouted "Hip-Hooray. "

But look at him today.

Remember my forgotten man.

You had him cultivate thel and.

He walked behind a plow.

The sweat fell from his brow.

Butlook at him right now.

'Cause ever since the world began,

a woman's got to have aman.

For getting him, you see,

means you're forgetting me.

[Woman Screams] Aaaah!

[Scorsese]Always stretching the limits of the musical genre,

Berkeley even dared choreograph human tragedies.

Aaaah!

[Crash]

- [Gunshots] - [ Crowd Gasping Shouting ]

[ Women Scream ]

Aaaah!

[Crowd Murmuring]

- [Police Whistle Blows] - [Siren Wailing]

The big parade goes on foryears

l can't do it, l tell ya. l can't!

[Scorsese] Berkeley's early musicals at Warner Brothers...

offered back stage stories whose pacing was not unlike that of the gangster film.

l'm too nervous! l can't do it!

They were dominated by the figure...

of the crazed, manic, often embittered Broad way producer.

- What do ya wanna do, boss? - Bring up that curtain!

In Footlight Parade, you hadJ ames Cagney.

- All right, that's you! - No!

In 42nd Street, Warner Baxter.

Watch that tempo! Watch it, will you?

Get your feet off of the floor!

In these times, if you showed any ambition...

-you either became a gangster or as how biz performer, - Faster!Faster!

Come on! Faster! Faster!

at least in the fantasy world of Warner Brothers.

-Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! lt's brutal! -[Stops]

Ohh!

May l remind you that Pretty Lady's out-of-town opening is not far away?

lt's been advertised as a musical-comedy with dancing!

lfit isn't asking too much,

will you please show me a little?

- Come on. Ready,Jerry? Get into it now! - [Piano Resumes]

[Scorsese] Broadway offered a metaphor for a desperate, shattered country.

Director or chorus girl, your life depended on the show's success.

[Man Shouting]

Against all odds, Warner Baxter achieved his dream.

These directors make me sick. Take Marsh.

Puts his name all over the program, gets all the credit.

If it wasn't for kids like Sawyer, he wouldn't have a show.

Marsh would probably say he discovered her. Some guys get all the breaks.

[Scorsese]Buton opening night he was too drained...

to enjoy the production's triumph.

- [Crowd Chattering] - The show had taken on a life ofits own.

The task master's lot, in the end, was solitude.

They're sending me to New York for good,

to be head of the office of Fenton, Ray burn and Company.

- New York? - What?

New York?

[Scorsese] Ten years later, Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me ln St. Louis was a milestone.

- l simply don't believe it. - We'll leave right after Christmas.

l thought we'd all like to have Christmas in St. Louis.

[Scorsese] Firstofall, the story didn't have a Broadway setting.

New York is a big city.

It was a memory album set in the Midwestat the turn of the century.

Its protagonists were the members of amiddle-class household.

[ Tinkling ]

They did not need to be professional performers.

- [ Humming ] - Anyone could sing and dance, if they felt like it.

[ Continues ]

Singing and dancing became as natural as breathing or talking.

- La-da-dah, dah-dah-dah - Also, the tunes were designed to furt her the plot...

and reveal the characters.

They expressed the ebband flow----------- of personal emotions.

lf Santa Claus brings me any toys, l'm taking them with me.

l'm taking all my dolls; the dead ones, too.

l'm taking everything.

Of course you are.

l'll helpyou pack them myself.

You don't have to leave anything behind,

except your snow people, of course.

[ Laughs ]

Sometimes they were tinged with bitter sweet irony...

as the family faced an uncertain future in the big city.

Have yourself

A merry little Christmas

Make they uletide gay-----------------

Next year all our troubles

Will be miles away

Oh, have yourself

A merry little

Christmas

Now

Tootie.

[ Sobbing ]

Tootie!

[Scorsese] Sweet ness and innocence will prevail,

but with the explosion ofa child's pain and rage...

unexpected shadows were suddenly caston this nostalgic period piece.

Nobody's gonna have them! Not if we're going to New York!

l've got to kill them if we can't take them with us!

Tootie, darling, don't cry. You can build others now people in New York.

[ Sobbing ] You can't do anything like you do in St. Louis!

Oh, no, darling. You're wrong.

"The rabbit hunters have his private carrot patch surrounded,

and they're closing in.

And what's that sticking up over that bush?"

- Are you my daddy? - lt's, um-- Hmm?

- [ Chuckles ] No, l'm just your Uncle Doug. - Oh.

In themid-'40s something interesting happened.

Hey, fellas. Can Icomein?

[Scorsese]Darker currents seeped into the musical,

as they had in the western and the gangster film.

Even the more conventional musicals hinted at the post war malaise.

Root-too-toot-ooh Toot-ooh

Listen to that fiddle player slap, slap, slap

On the surface My Dream ls Yours had all the trappings...

of a Doris Day vehicle produced on the Warner Bros assembly line.

It seemed to be pure escapist fare.

Oh, it's so spacious and peaceful.

No sponsors or agents pushing me around.

Just hitch your wagon to me and you'll be a star.

No. Thank you, Gary, but l have too much to do on my own.

- My dream is yours - But the comedy had a bitter edge.

lt isn't much to give

You saw the performer's personal relationships...

turnings our and being sacrificed to their careers.

So, darling, may l say

Look, honey, let's have an understanding.

Two careers in one family is one too many.

We'll concentrate on mine, huh?

[Man]Come on. Hereheis!

The film made you aware of how difficult,

or even impossible, relationships are between creative people.

- [ Chattering ] - It was a major influence...

on my film New York, New York.

l'm through with spending time

Doris Day'sbigbreak comes when she has to replace Lee Bowman, the popular crooner she loves,

who's too drunk toper form on his own national radios how.

Gary, you can't go on. You're drunk.

Lee Bowman's character was an egotist who felt threatened by Doris Day'ssuccess.

My dream is yours

-It isn't much to give - In New York, New York, I took that tormented romance...

and made it the very subject of the film.

But while l live My dream is yours

-[Continues] - Lovely girl.

Lovely singer.

Handy with a knife, too.

Begins to shine

[Grunting, Groaning]

The pinnacle of the musical was reached in the early '50s.

Again we meet the incomparable Vincente Minnelli.

Look at The Band Wagon's finalproduction number, "The Girl Hunt Ballet. "

In this satire of Mickey Spillane's pulp novels,

you see the musical borrowing and absorbing the icons of film noi...

private eyes and dangerous sirens.

Minnelli's musicals celebrated the triumph of the imaginary over the real.

Any aspect of reality, however trivial,

could be transformed, stylized and incorporated into a ballet.

The world was a stage,

and it belonged to those who could sing and dance.

MGM was then the magic factory,

where producerArthur Freed nurtured such classics as On The Town,

An American in Paris, Singin' in the Rain,

lt's Always Fair Weather and, ofcourse, The Band Wagon.

He's drunk.

- How bad? - Very.

- What do you want me to do? - Keep him off.

A horse!

My kingdom for a horse!

George Cukor's A Star ls Born...

took the genre one step further.

Get a load of Norman Maine, will ya?

It gave us Judy Garland as a bandsinger who becomes a moviestar...

while James Mason, her mentor, sabotages his career.

Sure, but just a few. l promised the boys.

Take your hands of fme.

Actually, the story had been brought to the screen twice before...

in a non-musical form.

"The show must go on. " That is the performer's first commandment.

But Mason's Norman Maine couldn't take it anymore.

- That does it. -Just a few more.

- l said, that does it. - But you got plenty of time!

[Scorsese]He was trapped in the cruel worldof make-believe.

l-l'm sorry, gentlemen. No time.

He couldn't even bear to look at himself.

Are you trying to stop me from going on? ls that it?

[ Women Screaming ]

These broken mirrors were the first step toward self-destruction.

For the love that's truly true you gotta have me go with you

- You gotta have me - Why the holdout

And me

-Have you sold out - [Women Screaming]

- Time you woke up Time you spoke up - [ Screaming, Gasping ]

This line I'm handin'you

It's not a hand out

Asa team we'd beast and out Fallout

- You wanna live high on a dime - This was not a musical-comedy.

This was a musical drama about the sad ironies of show business.

- Boodely-ooh-boo - Why the holdout

Have you sold out

Time you woke up Time you spoke up

Ooh, you gotta have me go with you

Why the holdout Have you soldout

Time you woke up Timey ou spoke up

- This line l'm handin' you - [Audience Murmuring]

lt's not a handout

As a team we'd be a standout

- You wanna live high on a dime - [Audience Laughing]

[ Laughing ] You wanna have too harsh a climb

You gotta have me

Go with you

All the time

In spite of bold attempts by such choreographer-directors...

as Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen and Bob Fosse to open up new territories,

the musical ceased to exist as a film genre.

But the showbiz performer still remains a key figure in musical biographies.

Recently the most exciting effort was probably Bob Fosse's self-portrait, All ThatJazz.

[ Coughing ] lt's show time, folks.

The figure of the exhausted entertainer needing open heart surgery...

would fitright into Busby Berkeley's gallery of hard-driving, hard-drinking,

chain-smoking directors.

[Beeping]

We're glad that you're sorry

Now

- [Man]Cut! - [BellRinging]

You blew it. You forgot your line.

At the end ofthis number you're supposed to say, uh... What's he supposed to say?

He's supposed to say, "l don't want to die. l want to live."

[ Mumbling ]

Well, if you can't say it, you can't say it. We'll just have to cut it.

Cut it. Take me up. Next setup.

Of course it's not enough for American directors to be just storytellers.

So, as we continue our journey in parts two and three,

I'd like to show you how I think they need also to be illusionists,

sometimes smugglers...

and even at times iconoclasts.

That is, if they intend to express their own personal vision.

To tell a story, to implement his vision, the director has to be a technician...

and even an illusionist.

This means controlling and mastering the technical process.

Our palette has expanded tremendously...

through a century of constant experimentations.

The movies grew from silent to sound; black and white to Technicolor;

standard screen size to CinemaScope;

35 millimeter to 70 millimeter.

The American industry, it seems, never failed to embrace new technological developments.

Somehow, it moved faster and more decisively than its foreign rivals.

[Scorsese] As King Vidor said, "The cinema...

is the greatest means of expression ever invented,

but it is an illusion more powerful than any other,

and it should therefore be in the hands of the magicians and the wizards...

who can bring it to life."

Here, Buster Keaton, an aspiring cameraman,

is showing his footage to MGM executives...

in the hope of getting a job.

Unfortunately he has double exposed the film, and the screening is a disaster.

However, as every director will experience,

accidents can be the source of extraordinary poetry...

and beauty.

What Keaton"s cameraman needs is to learn and master the language of film.

Interestingly, most of the early film pioneers,

including D. W. Griffiith, had no formal education.

They were self-taught and often shared the prevailing prejudice...

that the cinema was a minor form of entertainment.

The American film probably came of age in February, 1915,

when D. W. Griffiith opened his first feature-length epic,

The Birth Of A Nation.

According to Raoul Walsh, who was one of Griffiith"s assistants at the time...

and who played the role ofJohn Wilkes Booth,

it took The Birth Of A Nation to convince Americans...

that films were an art in their own right...

and not just the illegitimate offspring of the theater.

How did Griffiith achieve this triumph?

Essentially through his composition and orchestration of the shots.

As Walsh put it, "The high and low angled shots...

turned a good picture into a great one."

One close-up was worth a thousand words.

Erich von Stroheim, also one of Griffiith"s assistants,

said that he was the pioneer of filmdom,

the first to put beauty and poetry into a cheap and tawdry sort of amusement.

l"ve always felt that visual literacy is just as important as verbal literacy.

And what the film pioneers were exploring was the medium"s specifiic techniques.

In the process, they invented a new language based on images rather than words.

A visual grammar, you might say.

Close-ups, :

irises, :

dissolves, :

masking part of the screen for emphasis, :

dolly shots, :

tracking shots.

Now these are the basic tools that directors have at their disposal...

to create and heighten the illusion of reality.

When Lillian Gish called D. W. Griffiith "the father of film,"

she used the same analogy.

She said, "He gave us the grammar of filmmaking."

He understood the psychic strength of the lens.

Half a century later, Stanley Kubrick may have had Griffiith in mind...

when he remarked that what is truly original in the art of filmmaking,

what distinguishes it from all the other arts,

may be the editing process.

Watch how Griffiith developed, two years before The Birth Of A Nation,

the technique of crosscutting.

He shows you two events happening at the same time...

and intercuts them to increase the tension of the suspense.

Now, at that time, Griffiith had to fight his distributors,

who feared that audiences would be confused by this innovation.

It was in the great epics of the silent era...

that the illusionists learned to use special effects and visual wizardry...

to conjure up some of their most compelling visions.

The American tradition of the great spectacle...

was born around 1915...

when D. W. Griffiith saw Cabiria,

an Italian super-production.

Watched it twice in one night. It inspired him.

Gave him the audacity to create his masterpiece, Intolerance.

Giovanni Pastrone"s Cabiria had all the right ingredients:

adventure, melodrama, pageantry, religion,

extraordinary production design...

and striking camera angles and lighting.

To film this scene, they actually dragged...

Hannibal"s elephants up onto a mountaintop.

Intolerance.

Much has been made of its extravagant budget,

real-size sets and thousands of extras.

The achievement is all the more extraordinary because Griffiith worked without a script.

It was all planned in his head, not on paper.

But Griffiith went even further.

Intolerance was a daring attempt at interweaving stories and characters...

not from the same period,

but from four different centuries.

Freely crosscutting from one era to another,

he blended them altogether in a grand symphony devoted to one idea:

passionate plea for tolerance.

Griffiith"s passion for history was balanced by his passion...

for simple people, the victims of history.

In modern day America, a young woman is deemed an unfit mother...

because her husband is in jail.

Oppression is represented by society matrons,

Puritan reformers who want to place her baby in an orphanage.

Griffiith"s distressed heroines carried with them...

the heart and soul of the picture.

For them, he composed his most eloquent close-ups.

Like Griffiith, Cecil B. DeMille liked to paint on a big canvas.

His ambition was to tell an absorbing personal story...

against a background of great historical events.

His first Biblical epic was inspired by one simple belief.

You cannot break the Ten Commandments, : they will break you.

Watch DeMille"s masterful staging of the exodus from Egypt:

the visual contrasts between the pharaoh"s war machine...

and the simple caravan of the Israelites, :

his sense of wonder, :

his attention to details, even in big crowd scenes.

His miniatures were as powerful as his frescoes.

DeMille even used an early two-strip Technicolor process here.

However, the grandiose set pieces were always subordinate to the story.

DeMille knew that spectacle alone would never make a great picture.

He spent much more time working on dramatic construction...

than on planning photographic effects.

"The audience,"he said, "is interested in individuals whom they can love or hate."

DeMille believed that he could translate the words of the Bible in the medium of film literally.

To achieve this, he devised extraordinary technical effects,

such as the parting of the Red Sea.

DeMille insisted that every detail be seen with equal clarity.

Here, for instance, notice the rocks and seaweed...

scattered on the sand to make the beach look like the bottom of the sea.

It was a last-minute inspiration on the part of DeMille,

who led his army of extras into the surf...

and showed them how to gather the kelp.

Of course, I never saw DeMille"s silent films when I was a boy.

His later epics are the ones that made an indelible impression on me.

[Narrator] Before the dawn of history,

ever since the first man discovered his soul,

he has struggled against the forces that sought to enslave him.

He saw the awful power of nature parade against him,

the evil eye of the lightning,

the terrifying voice of the thunder,

the shrieking, wind-filled darkness,

enslaving his mind with shackles of fear.

Fear bred superstition...

[Scorsese] And then there was DeMille"s own remake of The Ten Commandments,

which I have seen countless times.

- [Woman] Look! - [Man] Look! There!

- Where he struck the river, it bleeds. - The water turns to blood.

DeMille presented such a sumptuous fantasy that if you saw his movies as a child,

they stuck with you for life.

- The marvelous superseded the sacred. - [Woman Screams]

What I remember most vividly are the tableau vivant,

the colors,

the dreamlike quality of the imagery...

and, of course, the special effects.

God is a unique flame,

but the flame is a different color to different people.

These were the words of Rama Krishna which DeMille quoted to define his own faith.

Sokar, great lord of the lower world...

The great illusionists of the past, Cecil B. DeMille,

D. W. Griffiith, Frank Borzage, King Vidor,

were conductors.

They orchestrated visual symphonies...

what Vidor called "silent music."

It would fade away as Hollywood embraced sound.

But the legacy of the silent era was remarkable.

American movies had matured into a sophisticated art form...

with elaborate camera moves, long takes,

deep focus, expressive lighting, miniatures, et cetera.

I mean, in the late "20s, the most exciting experiments...

were taking place at the Fox Studios,

where the German master, Frederick Murnau,

was given carte blanche on the strength of his European triumphs.

His film, Sunrise, became the most expensive art film...

made in Hollywood.

[Horns Honking]

Rather than a plot, Murnau offered visions,

a landscape of the mind.

His ambition was to paint his characters"desires...

with lights and shadows.

This is how the frenzied city girl tempts the young farmer:

with a kaleidoscope of images.

She wants him to leave everything behind:

his land, his wife, his child,

the peace and innocence of the country life.

The vamp has planted a deadly thought in the young husband"s mind.

Murnau calls Sunrise "a story of two humans."

This song of the man and his wife is of no place.

You might hear it anywhere at anytime.

They don"t have a name,

but you experience every idea, every emotion that visits them.

He had George O"Brien"s shoes weighted with 20 pounds of lead...

to give the actor a more threatening presence.

[Bell Tolling]

[Tolling Continues]

Murnau was called "a cerebral director" by his Hollywood peers...

because he demanded that his actors fully understand...

the mind of their character.

He said, "I talked to an actor of what he should be thinking...

rather than what he should be doing."

"The camera,"said Murnau, "is the director"s sketching pencil.

It should be as mobile as possible

to catch every fleeting mood.

It must whirl and peep and move from place to place as swiftly as thought itself."

Later in theirjourney, the broken couple is reunited.

Fear and guilt fade away. They become invulnerable.

Nothing can harm them anymore, not even the city"s hustle and bustle.

Magically, subjective perceptions take on an objective reality.

A superimposition could serve as an inner vision...

or an inner monologue.

What Murnau is projecting onto the environment...

is their dream, their common dream.

- [Horns Honking] - At least for a brief moment.

- [Trolley Car Bell Ringing] - [Horns Honking]

In Sunrise, love and death are intertwined like day and night.

But in Seventh Heaven, love negated death itself.

Both films starredJanet Gaynor,

who commuted between the two sets,

working with Murnau during the day and with Borzage at night.

She is a street angel.

She"s saved by Charles Farrell, a street sweeper.

Reluctantly, he takes her to his lofty garret above the city.

He works in the sewers of Paris but insists that he lives near the stars.

Borzage was not a highly educated man,

let alone an art historian like Murnau.

His approach to the medium was more instinctive.

He was a maestro of the pantomime.

What inspired him was the sheer power of emotions.

This was the great mystery that elevated his melodramas...

into pure songs of love.

Directed by Borzage, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell...

formed a unique couple,

at once vibrant with sexual passion...

and wrapped in a mystical aura.

Their romance would lift them from the physical to the spiritual.

////[Marching Band]

War rips them apart.

[Clock Ticking]

[Ticking Continues]

[Ticking]

But as Borzage once stated, "Souls are made great through love and adversity."

Even when he"s blinded in the trenches,

the lovers remain in daily telepathic communication.

[Clock Tolling Five Times]

[Clocks Tolling]

[Cheering]

[Cheering Continues]

Borzage deeply believed in the transcendent power of love.

Time and space can be surmounted and abolished.

Because Diane refuses to accept Chico"s death...

she"s able to bring him back from the dead.

[Ticking]

[Ticking Stops]

////[Woman Singing]

////[Continues]

For the lovers, reality itself is immaterial.

The art of the pantomime had reached its zenith.

But the era of sound had arrived.

And for the silent film directors, this was a time of painful transition.

Even a script conference called for new skills.

We were so imbued and so living in, in pantomime...

that a fellow would come in and tell a story to, uh,

say, to Thalberg at MGM...

a comedy story, particularly... or, say, Mack Sennett...

He"d tell the whole damn story in pantomime.

He comes in and... Aah! And then, sock!

And, you know, everything was like that.

It looked like cartoon strips.

So all of a sudden we"re dealing with dialogue.

So, I had, from the time I was...

12 or 14 or something,

thought entirely in terms of images and pictures and movement.

Movement. I very much... What"s an interesting movement?

So here we are with words.

[Scorsese] The studios bowed to the tyranny of sound experts...

who knew little about filmmaking.

At first, they had the cameras enclosed in a soundproof booth...

or ensconced in a blimp.

As William Wellman put it, "Creaking floors received more attention...

than creaking stories."

Actors were kept anchored within the range of microphones.

Now, these had to be hidden sometimes in rather obvious props...

like this lantern in Anna Christie.

- Pretty, eh? - Gives you the creeps, though.

Film historians insisted that at that time movies stopped moving.

But the myth of the static camera has been dispelled...

now that so many films of the period have been rediscovered.

There were directors who refused to be shackled or paralyzed.

Directors such as Rouben Mamoulian, Frank Capra,

William Wellman, Tay Garnett,

all of whom can be credited with getting the camera moving again.

- ////[Swing] - Most Tay Garnett pictures of the early "30s...

feature fluid camera moves and even very long takes.

Two gins for Frankie.

Watch how skillfully the camera follows the tray across the dance floor.

////[Continues]

The choreography looks effortless.

But believe me, this shot must have been very hard to achieve.

[Whistle Blowing]

The dreamlike world of the silent film was no more.

With the talkies a more naturalistic approach seemed to prevail.

But in fact, sound encouraged the illusionists to heighten reality.

[Feet Stamping Simultaneously]

Here, in The Big House, the sound effects alone suggest...

- that the convicts are anonymous robots. - [Whistle Blows]

[Together] "Our Father, Who art in heaven,

hallowed be Thy name.

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done..."

But in the chapel, as soon as you hear their voices, they come alive.

[Men] "Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses...

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil."

They are given an identity and a purpose...

when their actions contradict the chorus of prayer.

"...forever and ever. Amen."

- A most effective counterpoint. - [Clattering]

- Sound can enhance the drama tremendously, - Not bad, huh?

particularly when it depicts an event that you"re not shown.

** [Whistling]

Just watch this one.

In Scarface, Howard Hawks demonstrated that sound and visual effects...

- [Gunfire] - can blend into a deadly metaphor.

[Gunfire]

Sound can tell the whole story,

as Wild Bill Wellman proved repeatedly.

Apoet of stark images and brutal understatements,

he loved to jolt, deceive and even frustrate his audience...

by depriving them of a spectacular scene.

[Gunfire]

[Woman Screams]

Here, in The Public Enemy,

- [Coughing] - [Screaming Continues]

he dared to stage the film"s climax and the hero"s comeuppance offscreen.

- [Typing] - Three-strip Technicolor.

In the mid-"30s this dramatically improved process...

was a wonderful gift bestowed on the illusionists.

- How"s that for an entrance? - Perfect.

What"s happened to you?

You"re deliberating whipping yourself into a fiit of hysterics.

Oh, no, I mustn"t do that.

It might disturb Mother and Ruth or wake up Danny.

In the old two-strip Technicolor, the one DeMille used...

in the silent Ten Commandments,

the color blue couldn"t be reproduced.

But now the three-strip process covered the entire spectrum.

Extra-wide cameras could expose three negatives simultaneously,

each recording one of the primary colors.

This is Gene Tierney, an angel face with the darkest of hearts.

Leave Her To Heaven was a fascinating hybrid, a film noir in color,

with the neurotically possessive woman...

destroying anybody who might come between her and her husband,

even the unwanted child she"s carrying.

[Screaming, Thudding]

We wouldn"t be separated for long.

- Just a few weeks. - No, l"d... l"d rather wait.

Her husband"s younger brother, a paraplegic boy, was in her way too.

Now you have to remember that color was rarely used for contemporary drama then.

- Think you can make it, Danny? - Aw, it"s a cinch.

It was more associated with period pieces and musicals.

John Stahl"s direction and Leon Shamroy"s cinematography...

conjured up an unsettling superrealist vision.

Don"t worry about your direction. l"ll keep you on your course.

- Okay! - This was a lost paradise.

Its beauty ravished by the heroine"s perversity.

l... I think l"m gettin" tired.

Take it easy. You don"t want to give up when you"ve come so far.

Okay. l"ll get my second wind in a minute.

[Panting] Oh!

The wa... water"s cold.

Colder than I thought.

Oh! I ate too much lunch.

I got a stomachache. Ellen!

It"s... It"s a cramp.

Ellen! It"s... It"s a cramp!

Ellen, it"s... Ellen, it"s...

Help me!

////[Whistling]

** [Whistling Continues]

Danny!

[Screaming] Danny!

Danny!

Rather than encourage realism, the Technicolor palette went even further...

and added flamboyance to the melodrama.

////[Piano]

The illusionist always knew that color itself...

can actually play a dramatic role.

This is what Nicholas Ray attempted in Johnny Guitar.

** [Strikes Chord, Resumes Playing]

- Joan Crawford was Vienna, - Are you satisfiied they"re not here?

- No! - the outsider,

persecuted by the so-called respectable citizens...

because of her ties to a band of renegades.

In this truly offbeat western,

Nicholas Ray reversed the genre"s traditional iconography.

Black was the color of Mercedes McCambridge and the vigilantes,

while the outcasts were endowed with rich colors or even pure white.

[Man] We came for the kid and his bunch.

l"m sitting here in my own house, minding my own business,

playing my own piano.

I don"t think you can make a crime out of that.

[Woman] You"re only a boy! We don"t want to hurt you!

Just tell us she was one of ya, Turkey, and you"ll go free!

[Man] Come on, Turkey. Tell us. l"ll give ya my word ya won"t hang.

What should I do? I don"t wanna die! What do I do?

Save yourself.

Well, was she?

[Whimpers]

You can mirror emotions with color.

Vienna"s gambling house was designed and adorned like the set of a baroque opera.

Colors were deliberately distorted or thrown off balance.

Blue was toned down in favor of deep, saturated colors.

When an insane jealousy compels McCambridge to destroy Joan Crawford"s palace,

the palette alone suggests a fury from hell.

Now, the size of the screen itself needed to grow. It couldn"t be contained.

In the mid-"50s it spilled over its boundaries into something much grander.

And I still remember one of the great experiences I had...

in, in fiilm-going back in 1953.

I was ten or eleven years old when I went to the Roxy Theater,

and the curtain began to open and continued to open and open...

on the biggest screen l"d ever seen.

It was the fiilm The Robe.

It was the first CinemaScope picture, shot in 1953.

[Narrator] Rome, master of the earth.

[Scorsese] Originally, the new aspect ratio was a commercial gimmick...

designed to give the film industry an edge over its rival, television.

[Narrator] From the foggy coasts of the northern sea...

[Scorsese] Yet many filmmakers resisted the innovation.

"It"s only good for funerals and snakes, "pronounced Fritz Lang.

////[Marching Band, Dissonant]

It was a new canvas, and directors were put to the test...

as they learned to master the new proportions.

////[Continues, Dissonant]

At first, Elia Kazan disliked them.

But East Of Eden showed that CinemaScope could suit an intimate family drama...

as well as vast frescoes.

You were not limited to landscapes or processions,

horizontal lines or diagonal movements.

Watch how Kazan plays with the configuration of his set,

whenJames Dean dares to enter his long-lost mother"s bordello for the first time.

Will ya let me talk to ya?

Please. I gotta talk to ya.

Joe! Joe!

Get out of here. Joe! Tex!

Actually, Kazan combined the old and the new proportions in his composition,

introducing narrower frames, such as doorways and corridors...

within the wide format itself.

I wanna talk to ya! I wanna talk to ya!

I wanna talk to ya!

Talk to me! Talk to me! Please! Mother!

Few were as skilled as Vincente Minnelli...

in using CinemaScope for dramatic effect.

Here in the tragic finale of Some Came Running,

the actors seem to blend into their surroundings.

[Man] They have a lot of souvenirs and a lot of free prizes for ya.

I got one of them, uh, them grammar books from the library.

I got it from that teacher who...

whom... whom is the objective...

- Whom says so? - Hmm?

The suspense actually derives from their integration...

into the environment.

You don"t know if and when the killer and his unsuspecting prey...

will come together in the same space.

CinemaScope allows Minnelli to deploy a more complex,

and therefore more threatening image.

The more open the frame, the greater the impression of depth...

and the more striking the illusion of reality.

We"re presented with a vibrant, chaotic canvas...

and it"s up to us to explore and interpret it.

[Gunshots Continue]

////[Carousel]

////[Continues]

////[Singing In Foreign Language]

The impact of the wide screen was particularly signifiicant...

on such genres as the western and the epic.

When he started Land OfThe Pharaohs,

Howard Hawks was nervous about the new format.

He complained, "It"s good only for showing great masses and movement.

It"s hard to focus attention, and it"s very diffiicult to edit."

However, his approach proved masterful.

[Narrator] Three million of such stones would be needed...

before the work was done.

Three million stones of an average weight of 5,000 pounds.

Every stone cut precisely to fit into its destined place...

in the great pyramid.

[Scorsese] It was the composition of the shots that helped us appreciate...

the human efforts and technical feats...

that the filmmakers attributed to the pyramid builders.

What is that stone, Father?

That"s the sarcophagus of the Pharaoh,

the stone that will hold his body after death.

Where does it go to?

Into a great chamber in the pyramid, but where that is, you must not know.

This was like a documentary made on location 2,800 years B.C.

The wide screen gave the sense we were really there.

This is the way people lived and worked.

This is what they believed, endured and achieved.

[Man] I just shot it the way you see a thing.

I shoot straightforward, too.

I don"t use any camera tricks or anything.

Camera usually is at eye height.

And the audience sees just what we see.

Today, a film like The Fall OfThe Roman Empire...

has the poignant beauty of a lost art,

for this was the autumn of the great American epics.

They simply became too expensive to make.

[Indistinct Howling]

Like Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann had been a master of the western.

The Fall OfThe Roman Empire offered a multilayered drama...

which was as intense as any of the director"s westerns.

His sense of space and dramatic composition has never been more evident.

Throughout the film, you could hear the gods laugh in the background,

a cruel laugh that spelled the doom of all the protagonists...

and of the Roman Empire.

[Howling Continues]

So, is the grand old tradition started by Cabiria and Intolerance obsolete?

Well, it would seem so. I mean, today there"s no need to drag...

Hannibal"s elephants up the Alps anymore.

They... They can be generated by the computer.

So is this the end of epic cinema or the dawn of a new art form?

Nobody can afford to buy 3,000 or 4,000 extras.

It"s just not economically feasible anymore,

"cause you have to costume them, you have to transport them,

you have to feed them.

Uh, and it... You move very slowly...

when you"re trying to direct a large group of people like that.

So doing that today is, is next to impossible.

[Lucas] But doing it digitally, which is, you get a small group of people,

say, 100 people, and you replicate them, you move them around.

You can have exactly the same effect for a tenth of the cost.

We"ve changed the medium in a way that is profound.

It is no longer a photographic medium.

It"s now a painterly medium, and it"s very fluid,

so that things that are in the frame you can take out,

move, put them over here.

And so, it"s almost like going from two dimension to three dimension...

in the dynamic that"s been created at this point.

[Man] There is a misconception that we are surrendering something of art...

to a technology that will do it for us.

That... That is never the case.

But cinema itself is technology.

And to say that, oh, well, it can"t be an art...

because it"s a mechanical device rushing celluloid through it...

is as naive as to say, well, you can"t create...

because now it"s a computer rushing numbers through it.

The technology is always an element of creativity.

But it never is the source of the creativity.

And, so, my attitude is to embrace technology as it comes...

[Man] In any kind of art form you"re creating an illusion...

for the audience to look at reality through your special eye.

The camera lies all the time.

It lies 24 times a second.

[Laughing]

[Scorsese] In other words, we"re all the children of D. W. Griffiith...

and Stanley Kubrick.

[Person Breathing]

Take 2001, the first film to link the camera and the computer...

in the creation of special effects for the spaceship"s journey into the unknown.

This was a breakthrough in technical wizardry.

Every frame of 2001 made you aware...

that the possibilities for cinematic manipulations are indeed infinite.

Like Griffiith"s Intolerance, like Murnau"s Sunrise,

it was at once a super-production,

an experimental film and a visionary poem.

////['Also Sprach Zarathustra"]

**

**

**

**

**

**

Whether the illusion is created through high-tech...

- or low-tech wizardry doesn"t really matter. - [Cat Meowing]

The magic will only be effective if it is carried by a strong vision.

[Meows]

And it can be achieved in so many ways.

Fifty years ago when he was assigned to a small "B"film called Cat People,

directorJacques Tourneur had practically no budget...

and, of course, none of today"s new technologies.

But he knew that the dark had a life of its own.

He decided not to show the creature threatening his protagonist.

[Growling]

- He"d only suggest a presence. - [Growling Continues]

And to do that, he simply conjured up an ominous shadow play.

[Growling, Hissing]

[Growling]

[Growling Continues]

- [Screeching] - [Screams]

- [Scream Echoes] - Help!

[Screaming]

Help!

Help! [Screams]

It was a sleight of hand that an early film magician...

could have performed at the turn of the century.

What is the matter, Alice?

Sorry to have disturbed you, Alice.

I missed you and Oliver, and I thought you might know where he is.

We waited for you at the muzeum. You"ll probably fiind him at home.

If you don"t mind then, l"ll run on.

Could I have my robe, please?

Sure.

Gee whiz, honey, it"s torn to ribbons.

Now, we talked about the rules, about the narrative codes, about the technical tools,

and we"ve seen how Hollywood filmmakers adjusted to these limitations.

They even played with them.

Now"s the time to look at the cracks in the system.

And what slipped through these cracks has always fascinated me.

I mean, there were opportunities, there were projects...

that allowed for the expression of different sensibilities,

offbeat themes or even radical political views,

particularly when the fiinancial stakes were minimal.

Less money, more freedom. I mean, the world of"B" fiilms was...

often freer and more conducive to experimenting and innovating.

The "40s directors found that they could exercise more control on a small-budget movie...

than on a prestigious "A" picture.

Also, they"d have less executives looking over their shoulder.

They could introduce unusual touches, weave unexpected motifs...

and even transform routine material into a much more personal expression.

So in a sense, they became, um, they became smugglers.

They cheated and somehow got away with it.

Style was crucial.

The first master of esoterica was Jacques Tourneur,

who began making his mark in low-budget, supernatural thrillers.

On Cat People he had a good reason not to show the creature.

He said, "The less you see, the more you believe.

You must never try to impose your views on the viewer.

But rather, you must try to let it seep in little by little."

This oblique approach perfectly defines the smuggler"s strategy.

[Growling]

[Pneumatic Brakes Hissing]

Climb on, sister. Are you ridin"with me or ain"t ya?

You look as if you"d seen a ghost.

Did you see it?

The son of pioneer Maurice Tourneur, Jacques Tourneur had the good fortune to find...

an extraordinary oasis of creative subversion...

in producer Val Lewton"s unit at RKO.

Lewton, a former story editor for Selznick, was once described...

as "a benevolent David Selznick."

Lewton worked extensively on all of the scripts that he produced.

But he never set foot on the set and left the director to his own devices.

Look at that woman. Isn"t she something?

A "B"film like Cat People only cost $ 134,000.

Looks like a cat.

But it touched a chord in America...

by exploring a young bride"s fear of her own sexuality.

Moia cectra?

Moia cectra?

[Scoffs] Now wait a minute. It can"t be that serious.

- Just one single word. - She greeted me.

She called me sister.

- [Growls] - When her deepest feelings for her husband are aroused,

the heroine is overwhelmed by shame and guilt.

She seems to be consumed by a malevolent spirit.

[Whispering]

Or if you will, by her inner demons.

You were saying, "The cats..."

They torment me.

I awake in the night,

and the tread of their feet whispers in my brain.

I have no peace,

for they are in me.

Tourneur"s films undermined a key principle of classical fiiction:

[Doctor] "In me"? "In me"?

[Scorsese] the notion that people are in control of themselves.

Tourneur"s characters were moved by forces they didn"t even understand.

Their curse was not fate in the Greek sense.

It was not an external force.

It dwelled within their own psyche.

So in its own way, Cat People was as important as Citizen Kane...

in the development of a more mature American cinema.

[Wind Howling]

In Tourneur"s second film with producer Val Lewton,

I Walked With A Zombie,

the heroine is a nurse assigned to a catatonic woman in the West Indies.

- She"s drawn into a parallel world... - [Indistinct Howling]

when she seeks the help of sorcerers to cure her patient.

[Howling Continues]

Jacques Tourneur was a modest craftsman.

He compared his work to that of a carpenter who simply carves a chair or table...

that he"s been hired to build.

But years later, at the end of his career,

Tourneur confessed that he had always been passionately interested in the supernatural.

A bit of a psychic himself, he made films about the supernatural...

because he believed in it...

and had even experienced it firsthand.

How did he smuggle this contraband?

Tourneur relied on the imagination of the audience.

He said, "When spectators are sitting in a darkened theater...

and recognize their own insecurity and that of the protagonist on the screen,

then they will accept the most unbelievable situations...

and follow the director wherever he wants to take them."

[Gasps]

- [Drums Beating] - Tourneur"s twilight zone was a labyrinth.

His were perilous journeys into the unknown...

and sometimes the occult.

Reality remained opaque and rarely were people what they appeared to be.

They stood at the frontier of a hidden world,

a shimmering canvas of distant murmurs and deep shadows.

[Drums Stop]

[People Murmuring]

- She doesn"t bleed. - Zombie.

Common to all of Tourneur"s films was a muted disenchantment,

a strange melancholy,

the eerie feeling of having embarked on an adventure...

from which there was no return.

[Woman Thinking] It seemed only a few days before I met Mr. Holland in Antigua.

We boarded the boat for St. Sebastian.

It was all just as I had imagined it.

I looked at those great, glowing stars. I felt the warm wind on my cheek.

I breathed deep, and every bit of me inside myself said,

- "How beautiful." - [Man] It"s not beautiful.

You read my thoughts, Mr. Holland.

It"s easy enough to read the thoughts of a newcomer.

Everything seems beautiful because you don"t understand.

Those flying fiish, they"re not leaping for joy.

They"re jumping in terror. Bigger fiish want to eat them.

That luminous water, it takes its gleam from millions of tiny dead bodies,

the glitter of putrescence.

There"s no beauty here, only death and decay.

You can"t really believe that.

Everything good dies here, even the stars.

After Tourneur opened Pandora"s box, things were never the same.

It may have gone unnoticed at fiirst, but a strange darkness crept into American fiilms,

a feeling of insecurity, disorientation and foreboding,

as though the ground could suddenly give way under your feet.

When my father was alive, we traveled a lot.

We went nearly everywhere. We had wonderful times.

I didn"t know you traveled so much.

- Oh, yes. - Perhaps we"ve been to some of the same places.

No, I don"t think so.

- We"re in Venice. - Yes, we"ve arrived. Now, where would you like to go next?

- France? England? Russia? - Switzerland.

Switzerland. Excuse me one moment while I talk with the engineer.

Again, appearances were as deceptive as they were beautiful...

in Max Ophuls"s elegies.

- You and the lady, are you enjoying the trip? - Very much.

- We"ve decided on Switzerland. - The romantic decor was a trap.

- There you are. Thank you. - Oh, thank you!

Switzerland!

Switzerland!

This was a carnival of illusions,

an imaginary journey for an imaginary romance.

Ophuls was an angel in exile in Hollywood.

The Viennese maestro suffered years of unemployment...

- [Tooting] - until producerJohn Houseman gave him a chance...

to adapt Stefan Zweig"s novella, Letter From An Unknown Woman.

Now, you know far too much about me already, and I know almost nothing about you, huh?

- It was his valentine to Vienna, - Except that you"ve traveled a great deal.

and a farewell to the culture of his youth.

Ophuls"s camera and his heroine moved in unison.

The fluid visual choreography allowed you to experience...

Joan Fontaine"s every heartbeat.

- [Woman] Stefan, the train is leaving. - Just a minute.

For a brief moment, happiness appeared within reach.

How long have you been standing here?

But Stefan will always remain unattainable.

I don"t want to go. Do you believe that?

l"ll be here when you get back.

Say "Stefan" the way you said it last night.

Stefan.

It"s as though you"ve said it all your life.

- [Man] Better hurry, sir. - Yes! Good-bye.

- [Woman] Stefan! - Yes! Good-bye.

Cold reality sets in at the train station.

Won"t be long. l"ll be back in, in two weeks.

The real one. Lisa will never travel with Stefan,

the frivolous pianist on whom she has projected her passions.

She"s left behind, pregnant with a child conceived that magical night.

Ophuls was just one of the European expatriates...

most of them refuges from Fascism...

who were largely responsible for the exploration of these new darker territories.

The others were well-known directors such as Fritz Lang,

Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder.

But also lesser known names such as Douglas Sirk, Robert Siodmak,

Edgar Ulmer, Andre De Toth.

To them, crime was a source of fascination.

It allowed them to probe the nature of evil.

Monstrosity was something banal, almost natural.

The criminal world cannot be conveniently isolated or circumscribed...

within the urban underworld as in the old gangster film.

Hello, Adele. I dropped over to the butcher shop like you told me to.

I got a nice piece of liver.

[Scorsese] It was everywhere, lurking under the surface.

Every man was a potential criminal.

How long have you known Katherine March?

Answer me!

I don"t know what you"re talking about.

How long have you known her?

Don"t get excited. Let me help you off with your coat.

You"re the one that"s excited.

Get away with that knife. Do you want to cut my throat?

[Scorsese] The common man falling in a trap...

Why"d you come here?

[Scorsese] as he succumbs first to vice, then to murder.

- To ask you to marry me. - What about your wife?

I haven"t any wife. That"s fiinished.

- For cat"s sake... - Her husband turned up. l"m free.

This was Fritz Lang"s favorite plot: reality turning into a nightmare.

I don"t care what"s happened.

l-I can marry you now.

l-I want you to be my wife.

We... We"ll go away together.

Way far off so you can forget this other man.

- [Crying] - Don"t cry, Kitty. Please don"t cry.

[Laughing] l"m not crying, you fool. l"m laughing.

Kitty.

Oh, you idiot. How can a man be so dumb?

Kitty.

[Continues Laughing]

l"ve wanted to laugh in your face ever since I first met you.

You"re old and ugly, and l"m sick of you. Sick, sick, sick!

- Kitty, for heaven"s sake. - You killJohnny? l"d like to see you try.

Why, he"d break every bone in your body. He"s a man.

You wanna marry me? You?

Get out of here! Get out!

Get away from me! Chris! Chris!

Get away from me! Chris!

[Screaming] Chris!

Violence has become, in my opinion,

a defiinite, uh, point, in a script.

It has a dramaturgical reason to be there.

You see, I don"t think that people believe in the devil...

with the horns and the forked tail.

And therefore, they don"t believe in punishment after...

they are dead.

So, my question was for me,

what are people...

In what belief people... Or, what are people fearing is better.

And that is physical pain.

And physical pain comes from violence.

And that, I think, is today the only,

uh, uh, uh, fact which people really fear,

and therefore it has become a-a defiinite part of life...

and naturally also of scripts.

[Scorsese] The phrase "film noir" was coined by the French in 1946...

when they discovered the Hollywood productions they had missed...

during the German occupation.

[Man Narrating] Did you ever want to cut away a piece of your memory...

or blot it out?

You can"t, you know. No matter how hard you try.

You can change the scenery, but sooner or later...

you"ll get a whiff of perfume...

or somebody will say a certain phrase or maybe hum something,

then you"re licked again.

[Scorsese] This was not a specifiic genre like the gangster film,

but a mood which was best described by this line from Ulmer"s Detour.

- Mr. Haskell. - "Whichever way you turn...

Mr. Haskell.

fate sticks out its foot to trip you."

Mr. Haskell, wake up. It"s raining.

Don"t you think we oughta stop and put up the top?

[Scorsese] In Detour, down-and-out pianist Tom Neal...

hitchhikes his way west to join his fiancée.

His life starts unraveling when the man who has given him a lift falls asleep.

[Man Narrating] Until then l"d done things my way,

but from then on something else stepped in...

and shunted me off to a different destination...

than the one I had picked for myself.

But when I pulled open that door...

Mr. Haskell, what"s the matter? Are you hurt?

Are you hurt, Mr. Haskell?

[Scorsese] Doom was written on Tom Neal"s face.

He was bewildered and afraid to go to the police.

Keeping the dead man"s car and cash was definitely a mistake,

but an even bigger mistake was picking up a female hitchhiker.

[Man Narrating] A few hours more, and we"d be in Hollywood.

l"d forget where I parked the car and look up Sue.

This nightmare of being a dead man would be over.

Where did you leave his body?

Where did you leave the owner of this car?

You"re not foolin" anyone.

This buggy belongs to a guy named Haskell. That"s not you, mister.

It just so happens I rode with Charlie Haskell...

all the way from Louisiana.

He picked me up outside of Shreveport.

[Scorsese] Detour was shot in six days for only $ 20,000.

Vera, open the door. Please, open the door.

If you don"t open the door, l"m going to kick it down, Vera.

[Scorsese] The director could only rely on his resourcefulness.

[Man] Vera, don"t call the cops. Listen to me.

l"ll break the phone.

[Scorsese] In fact, his idiosyncratic style...

grew out of such drastic limitations.

This is why Ulmer has become such an inspiration over the years...

to low-budget filmmakers.

Vera.

[Scorsese] Here we find Tom Neal...

after a second outrageous twist of fate.

[Man Narrating] The world is full of skeptics.

I know. l"m one myself.

In the Haskell business,

how many of you would believe he fell out of the car?

Now, after killing Vera without really meaning to do it,

how many of you would believe it wasn"t premeditated?

[Scorsese] Ulmer couldn"t even afford any special effects.

He simply let the shot go in and out of focus repeatedly,

an appropriate reflection of the character"s disoriented mental state.

[Man Narrating] Vera was dead, and I was her murderer.

Murderer!

[Scorsese] The hitchhiker"s journey...

turned into an ironic morality play.

Film noir showed how quickly an ordinary man could lose it all...

when he strayed from his path.

Lured by the prospect of sinful pleasures,

he ended up suffering hellish retribution.

[Billy Wilder] Film noir.

I don"t know, you know,

when I make a picture, I never classify it.

If this is a comedy, I wait until the preview.

If they laugh a lot, I say this is a comedy.

Or serious picture or fiilm noir.

I never heard that expression in those days.

I just made pictures that I would have liked to see.

And if I was lucky, it coincided with, uh,

with the taste of the audience.

I killed Deitrichson.

Me, Walter Neff.

Insurance salesman, 35 years old, unmarried, no visible scars.

Until a while ago that is.

Yes, I killed him.

I killed him for money and for a woman.

[Scorsese] Film noir revealed the dark underbelly...

of American urban life.

Its denizens were private eyes,

rogue cops, white-collar criminals,

femmes fatale.

As Raymond Chandler said,

"The streets were dark with something more than night."

[Man] This is not the right street.

Why did you turn here?

[Honking Horn]

What"re you doing that for?

- [Continues Honking] - What"re you honking the horn for?

[Strangulated Gasps]

[Scorsese] You couldn"t take anything for granted anymore.

Not even suburbia.

Not even the supermarkets of Southern California.

I loved you, Walter, and I hated him.

But I wasn"t going to do anything about it, not until I met you.

You planned the whole thing.

I only wanted him dead.

And l"m the one that fiixed it so he was dead.

Is that what you"re telling me?

And nobody"s pulling out.

If we went into this together,

we"re coming out at the end together.

It"s straight down the line for both of us. Remember?

[Andre De Toth] Life is a betrayal,

and, you know, sometimes you betray yourself, too, you know.

Let"s have the guts to admit it.

There isn"t anybody born here lately...

who didn"t play dirty sometime, somewhere in his life.

So, why to hide it?

Truth, honesty, that"s my key to fiilmmaking.

[Indistinct]

Do you have any identifiication?

Sure.

[Scorsese] Andre De Toth was one of the most persistent...

of the expatriate smugglers.

In Crime Wave he undermined the old cliché...

that in America you can always get another break.

- [Rings] - A second chance.

Phone.

- Hello. - Steve?

- Yeah. - Steve Lacey?

[Scorsese] Gene Nelson plays an ex-convict trying to go straight...

Hello, this is Lacey.

[Scorsese] who is haunted by his past.

- Hello. - [Phone Clicks]

They"re always passin" through town,

tryin" to put the bite on me for this or that.

I told you how it"d be.

And I didn"t mind, did I?

I love you. I wanted you.

And now that l"ve got you, I care a lot less.

I can"t fiigure it. What do you see in a guy like me?

I see a guy who"s swell.

[Scorsese] Sterling Hayden portrays the relentless cop...

who presumes he is guilty.

Lacey"s kept pretty straight since he got out.

Yeah, I know. Sober, industrious, expert mechanic on airplane engines.

A pilot before they sent him up,

- now works at a private airport in Sunland, right? - Right.

- Call him. - [Rings]

- [Woman] Don"t answer it, Steve. Let it ring. - [Ringing]

They"ll just want what they all want.

Let "em think you"re away, that you"re not here, and they"ll leave you alone.

- [Ringing] - [Steve] Once you"ve done a bit, nobody leaves you alone.

- Somebody"s always on your back. - [Woman] Steve.

No answer.

[Woman] There, you see?

I told ya.

Doesn"t look so good for Mr. Lacey.

[Scorsese] Even a sympathetic parole offiicer can"t save him.

You stay on your side of the fence. l"m looking for a cop killer.

l"m on my side. I don"t take things for granted.

I check and recheck. Lacey"s made good with me.

I have faith in him.

- Once a crook, always a crook. - That"s nonsense.

Sick men get well again.

Yeah? And you hate to lose a patient. Well, you"re gonna lose this one.

Stay here and fiind that dough.

Don"t worry about wrecking the joint. Just fiind it.

Right.

All right, hot shot.

Put out your hands.

[Andre De Toth] How long one has to pay for a mistake?

For a misstep in their life? When is enough enough?

You don"t like that, do you, Mrs. Lacey?

It can happen to you, too, if you"re covering up for this guy.

So don"t try to walk out. You"re a material witness.

[Lacey] Don"t stay here, Ellen. Forget about me.

Get out of town!

You fiinished, Mr. Lacey?

[Scorsese] There"s no reprieve in film noir.

You just keep paying for your sins.

Ida Lupino often used film noir visuals,

but for her own very specifiic purposes.

In Lupino"s films, it was young women who went through hell...

when their middle-class security was shattered by a traumatic experience.

Bigamy, parental abuse,

- [Whistles] - unwanted pregnancy, rape.

- [Horn Honks] - Taxi! Taxi!

Lupino would force the audience to experience from the inside...

the ordeal of her heroines.

Please! Please! Somebody help me!

[Horn Blares]

[Blaring Continues]

[Scorsese] In Outrage, she presents the ultimate female nightmare...

not as a melodrama, but as a subdued behavioral study...

that captures the banality of evil...

in an ordinary small town.

[Blaring Continues]

In an unusual move, actress Ida Lupino had become a director in 1949...

because she"d been suspended by Warner Bros.

She seized the opportunity to form a production company...

with her husband Collier Young.

They developed their own projects,

making a policy of discovering young talent...

and tackling unglamorous subjects...

such as the rape in Outrage.

I couldn"t move.

I couldn"t move!

How tall was he, dear?

Take him away! [Sobbing]

[Scorsese] Beyond the horror of the crime,

Ida Lupino illuminates the changes in the psyche of the victim,

a wounded young woman who"s about to be married...

but now has to learn how to overcome her pain and despair.

Go on! Take a good look!

Go on, all of you!

Hey, Annie.

l"m asking you to marry me now.

Or didn"t you hear me?

Yes, I heard.

Well?

No!

Anne! Hey!

- [Gunshot] - [Scorsese] InJoseph Lewis" Gun Crazy,

the focus was not on the victim,

but on the criminals themselves.

You were compelled to share their fear...

and even their exhilaration.

The audience was pulled into the action and became an accomplice.

You can"t shoot a man just because he hesitates.

Well, maybe not, but you can sure scare him off, like that hotel clerk.

- No, Laurie, I just don"t... - Oh, Bart, you know something?

- What? - I love you.

I love you more than anything else in the world.

[Alarm Ringing]

[Scorsese] Of course the fascinating pair of Gun Crazy...

belonged to the outlaw tradition of the "30s.

- Help! Help! - The tradition that would culminate in the "60s...

- with Arthur Penn"s Bonnie and Clyde. - Laurie, Laurie, don"t!

Come on. Get in!

But in Lewis"landmark film, the renegades were wild animals.

Sex and violence were totally intertwined.

- You were gonna kill that man. - He"d have killed us if he"d had the chance.

[Police Siren Blaring]

Shoot! Why don"t you shoot?

[Siren Continues]

Shoot!

- Shoot. Do you hear me? - All right!

[Gunshot]

Get "em?

Yeah.

[Scorsese] First and foremost, film noir was a style.

It combined realism and expressionism,

the use of real locations and elaborate shadow plays.

Here ace cinematographer John Alton deserves a mention.

The Hungarian-born master painted with light.

This was the title of his 1949 textbook...

which we were still using as students in the 1960s.

Extreme black and white contrasts, :

isolated sources of lighting, :

Pass key! Pass key!

ominous camera placement, :

deep perspective.

The most striking examples of Alton"s work...

are found in Anthony Mann"s early films such as this film, T-Men.

And in the same year, Raw Deal.

[Man] Five or ten minutes, we"ll be pullin"out.

Pullin"out for a new country,

leaving everything behind.

Maybe, maybe we can make a different life...

for ourself in South America.

A good life.

[Woman Thinking] Why didn"t he stop talking?

When the clock stopped moving,

he was singing everything l"d ever wanted to hear.

All my life, the lyrics were his, all right.

But the music... Anne"s, Anne"s.

And suddenly I saw that every time he kissed me...

he"d be kissing Anne.

Every time he held me, spoke to me, danced with me,

ate, drank, played, sang it would be Anne, Anne.

Anne!

[Scorsese] These were small B-productions...

where Alton was free to experiment...

and often took unusual risks.

Busy little man, eh, snooper?

Almost had ya, all of you.

Tony!

And you, Vanny, so smart.

Top-drawer crook. Lived with me and never caught on.

[Scorsese] "There is no doubt in my mind...

that the prettiest music is sad," he remarked.

- Knew all the angles... - [Gunshot]

'And the most beautiful photography is in a low-key with rich blacks."

[Dying Man] Sucker.

[Body Falls]

[Heavy Breathing]

[Scorsese] The paranoia of film noir reached its high point...

with Robert Aldrich"s film Kiss Me Deadly.

[Brakes Screech]

Out of the dark, a haunted woman appears to private eye Mike Hammer.

She"s running away from a mental institution and an unbearable secret.

She"s not mad, though.

Merely innocent, destined to be a sacrifiicial lamb.

- If we don"t make that bus stop... - We will.

If we don"t,

remember me.

[Tires Screech]

[Woman Screaming]

[Screaming Continues]

Stylized lighting and composition conveyed a deranged world.

- [Screaming] - There was no moral compass anymore.

Aldrich even turned Mickey Spillane"s detective Mike Hammer...

into an ambiguous figure, a guy who"s treated like dirt by everybody...

and is even described as a "sleazy, despicable bedroom dick."

Aldrich"s point, an important one during those McCarthy times,

was the end neverjustifiies the means.

- [Man] She"s passed out. - l"ll bring her to.

If you revive her, do you know what that would be?

Resurrection, that"s what it would be.

And do you know what resurrection means?

It means raise the dead.

And just who do you think you are that you think you can raise the dead?

[Scorsese] At the end of Kiss Me Deadly,

the duplicitous woman who stole this package from a secret government project...

was like the wife of Lot who refused to heed the warnings.

[Screams]

[Screaming]

[Scorsese] Aldrich"s tale led to a few cryptic, threatening words:

Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Trinity.

This time opening Pandora"s box...

meant universal annihilation, the apocalypse.

Of course, not all smugglers operated within film noir.

In Part 3, as we continue ourjourney,

l"d like to show you how they worked around more wholesome genres...

and even, at times, big Hollywood star vehicles.

We"ll also look at a different breed of directors,

those who attacked the system head on...

the iconoclasts.

I'm often asked by younger filmmakers, why do I need to look at old movies?

I've made a number of pictures in the past 20 years.

And the response I find that I have to give them is that I'm...

I still consider myself a student.

Um, the more pictures I made in the past 20 years, the more I realized I really don't know.

And I'm always looking for something to...

something or someone that I could, that I could learn from.

I tell the younger, the younger filmmakers and the young students...

that I do it like painters used to do, what painters do...

study the old masters, enrich your palette, expand the canvas.

There's always so much more to learn.

Now, take this forgotten "B" film, Silver Lode.

Now, this was directed by Allan Dwan,

one of the unheralded film pioneers who made the first of his 400 films...

back in 1911.

At the end of his long career, he was sort of relegated to low-budget genre films.

But low budget or not, watch the beautiful simplicity...

of the sweeping tracking shots that are literally guiding the desperateJohn Payne...

- toward his final sanctuary, the town church. - [Gunshot]

Dwan's finest movies featured simple people,

pastoral landscapes and the rural America of a bygone era.

But behind the lyrical images of the Old West,

Silver Lode suggests the fragility of our democratic institutions.

On Independence Day, the day of his wedding,

John Payne should be the happiest man in Silver Lode.

There he is! Look! There! There he is!

Instead, he has to fight for his life when he's unjustly accused of a murder...

and suddenly ostracized by the community.

Daringly, the fugitive's bride-to-be convinces the town that he's not guilty...

by forging a telegram from a U.S. Marshal.

"McCarty not what he represents himself to be.

[Man] Wanted for murder and cattle rustling. "

[Scorsese] So, persecuted for the wrong reasons, Payne is pardoned for the wrong reasons.

- Ya fixed it! - You have to remember that this was the era of the blacklists.

Shoot 'em all! How many bullets ya got left? Two? Three?

Political messages had to be smuggled in, cloaked in metaphors.

- [Gunshot] - [Bell Tolling]

Actually, the name of the villain, played by Dan Duryea,

was "McCarty."

And so a church bell and a fantastic lie saved the day.

[Man] McCarty's dead.

Dan, there isn't much that I can say.

But I think I can speak for all of us... we're sorry.

You're "sorry"?

A moment ago you wanted to kill me.

You forced me to kill, to defend myself, to save my own life.

But you wouldn't believe what I said.

A man's life can hang in the balance...

on a piece of paper!

[Scoffs]

And you're sorry.

The '50s... The '50s for me is a fascinating era...

when the subtext became as important as the apparent subject matter...

or even more important.

I mean, look at Douglas Sirk's film All That Heaven Allows, which he made in 1955,

or Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, made in 1956.

Now, you have to understand these were not "B" movies.

These were big-scale pictures with major studio stars.

Furthermore, they were Americanas,

the most wholesome genre of the period.

Jane Wyman, the widow in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows,

is not rejected by her community, she is immersed in it.

Her world becomes unhinged when she falls in love with Rock Hudson,

a much younger man who happens to be her gardener.

A spiritual descendant of Thoreau, he represents a solid and serene individualism...

that seems sadly out of place in the New England of the 1950s.

What a beautiful view of the pond. Why, you can see for miles.

Mm-hmm. The sun comes up right over that hill.

- Oh! - Do you like it?

Why, it's unbelievable.

Let's take your boots off, huh?

- Hello, Dan. - Hello, Cary.

- Cary, you know Miss Frisbee, Mr. Allenby. Mr. Kirby. - Yes.

- How do you do? - Oh, what's this I hear about your... Oh.

Haven't I seen you somewhere before?

Well, Mrs. Humphrey, probably in your garden.

I've been pruning your trees for the last three years!

Oh, yes, of course.

- Uh, Sara, I really must be going. - Excuse me. I'll be right back.

- Are you saying you don't want to marry me? - Oh, no, I'm not saying that.

I'm... I'm just asking you to be patient.

- It's only a question of time. - Only of time.

Well, right now everybody's talking about us.

We're a local sensation.

And like Sara said, if... if the people get used to seeing us together,

then maybe they'll accept us.

You mean, uh, we'll be invited to all the cocktail parties.

And, of course, Sara will see to it that I get into the country club.

I can see that you don't want to listen to anybody's ideas but your own.

And I can see that you're trying to make me choose between you and the children!

No, Cary, you're the one that made it a question of choosing.

So you're the one that'll have to choose.

All right.

It's all over.

Once she surrenders to the community's pressure, Jane Wyman is trapped.

Cary.

She's left suffocating in their world of pretense and illusions...

far from Hudson's Walden Pond.

Home, family, social roles...

can't fulfill the pursuit of happiness anymore.

Somehow, they've become the instruments of repression.

Beneath the surface of the seemingly ideal setting...

lay a sharp indictment of American small-town life.

? And heaven and nature sing

Both Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray stayed within the rules.

Their films had the required happy ending.

But they hinted at the dangers inherent in conforming to society's conventions.

[Man] You see, anything indirect...

is, uh, stronger,

in many cases, at least,

because you leave it or you hand it over to the imagination...

of your audience, you know.

And I've always been trusting...

my audience to have imagination.

Otherwise, they should stay out of the cinema.

- You know, you have to leave something open. - Mm-hmm.

The moment you start preach in the film... preaching in the film...

the moment you want to teach your audience,

you're making a bad film.

If you can't have a life, settle for its imitation.

- [Doorbell Ringing] - There's your present now.

This is whatJane Wyman receives from her children...

- Oh, please, Kay... - as a substitute for her lost love.

Mother! Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas, Mrs. Scott.

Television, the movie's rival medium in the 1950s,

was cast as the ultimate symbol of alienation.

All you have to do is turn that dial, and you have all the company you want...

right there on the screen.

Drama, comedy, life's parade at your fingertips.

Like Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray offers...

both the American family in suburbia and the psychotic elements:

The convention and the contradictions; the sugar and the poison.

Look at Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life.

James Mason portrays a frustrated schoolteacher...

who undergoes personality changes when he becomes...

hooked on cortisone, then an experimental drug.

Just use your reason calmly.

We'll have dinner the moment you've mastered this problem.

[Scorsese] Here he feels ten feet tall.

- Ed, dinner's been waiting two hours. - I'm sorry.

- Richie ought to eat. - I'm hungry too.

Ed, Richie didn't even have lunch.

The cortisone acts as a catalyst.

It reveals a mental and spiritual dissatisfaction...

and fuels Mason's growing desire to escape...

from the dull existence that stifles his soul.

Lou, it'll be better for all of us if you clearly understand one thing.

I will not tolerate your attempts to undermine my program for Richard.

Yes, darling.

Be good enough not to speak to me in that hypocritical tone of voice.

I see through you as clearly as I see through this glass pitcher!

If you imagine I'm going to be fooled by all this sweetness and meekness...

"Yes, darling, no, darling..."

you're even a bigger idiot than I took you for.

Let's clear this up once and for all!

I'm staying in this house solely for the boy's sake!

As for you personally, I'm completely finished with you.

There's nothing left. Our marriage is over.

In my mind I've divorced you.

You're not my wife any longer, I'm not your husband any longer.

Mason's family goes through hell as he starts questioning every tenet...

of family life in the 1950s.

"Momism," Sunday school, Little League sports...

and even the egalitarian principles of American education.

Lou! Lou!

You'll be happy to know you've won.

All of my efforts have been too late.

In this house, our son has become a thief.

My heroes are no more neurotic than the audience.

Unless you can feel that...

a hero is just as fucked up as you are...

that you would make the same mistakes that he would make...

uh, you can have no satisfaction...

when he does commit a heroic act.

Because then you can say, "Hell, I could have done that too."

And that's the obligation of the filmmaker, of the theater worker...

to give a heightened sense of experience to the...

people who pay to come to see his work.

"And they came to the place of which God had told him,

and Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac, his son,

and laid him on the altar upon the wood.

And Abraham stretched forth his hand...

and took the knife to slay his son."

But, Ed, you didn't read it all. God stopped Abraham.

God was wrong.

Ed! No! Ed! No! Ed! No!

Richie! Run out the window! Richie! Richie!

No! Richie! [Sobbing, Pounding On Door]

- ? [Carousel] - [Sobbing, Pounding Continue]

? [Continues]

? [Distorted]

? [Continues, Distorted]

Samuel Fuller's characters were no intellectuals.

His was a visceral cinema,

excessive, explosive.

He once defined film as a battlefield.

Love, hate, action, death. In one word, emotion.

Impact was his main concern.

Whether he was dealing with the Old West or Cold War America,

his images were bursting with violence and sexual energy.

In Pickup on South Street,

Richard Widmark is a pickpocket...

andJean Peters a prostitute.

Here he inadvertently takes a microfilm...

which Communist agents are trying to smuggle out of the country.

[Train Brakes Screeching]

How much is it worth to ya?

What are you pushin' me for?

You came here to buy, didn't you?

America's fate is in the hands of two outcasts.

She's just a runner who doesn't even know what side she's on,

while he's a cynic, willing to do business with all sides.

How much did ya bring?

I don't wanna talk about it.

- A former crime reporter, - How much?

- Fuller cultivated the shocks and hyperbole... - Five hundred.

That tabloids used in their headlines.

[Gasps]

You tell that Commie I want a big score for that film, and I want it in cash.

- Tonight! - What are you talkin' about?

You tell me. You people are supposed to have all the answers.

- Tell ya what? - Come on! Drop the act. So you're a Red.

Who cares? Your money's as good as anybody else's.

Now get your stern up those stairs and tell your old lady what I want.

I'll do business with a Red, but I don't have to believe one.

Playing both ends against the middle, Widmark defied all "isms,"

- even patriotism. - Get outta here!

Writer-director-producer Samuel Fuller's work...

was a potent antidote to America's complacency during the Cold War.

He was the most outspoken of the '50s smugglers.

No ideology escaped his scathing irony.

American hypocrisy was his constant target.

Fuller's heroes were hard to distinguish from his villains.

If you refuse to cooperate,

you'll be as guilty as the traitors that gave Stalin the A-bomb.

Are you wavin' the flag at me?

I know something in our side you should get...

Get this. I didn't grift that film, and you can't prove I did.

- Do you know what treason means? - Who cares?

- Answer the man! - Is there a law now I gotta listen to lectures?

[Man] When he says, "Don't wave the goddamn flag at me,"

Hoover objected to that and verbally objected it...

in my presence at Romanoff's table with Zanuck.

He objects that an American would say during the heat,

the hottest point of the Cold War with Russia,

"Don't wave the goddamn flag at me."

And Zanuck said, "He's right," to me. "He's right. We'll leave out 'goddamn.'"

And Hoover got very angry.

"You know damn well that's not what I mean."

And Zanuck explained very simply, and he was a friend of his... I mean, he knew him...

"This is his character talking, and that character doesn't give a goddamn about the flag.

It means nothing to him.

Any flag... You must be that character.

Otherwise, we are making a propaganda film.

And we don't make those kind of propaganda films."

Fuller had found a niche in "B" films and genre pictures,

but when the studio system collapsed,

- [Thunderclap] - he was relegated to low-budget, independent productions.

He had no money, no stars and only minimal sets.

But out of these limitations emerged an outstanding film,

- [Thunderclap] - Shock Corridor.

Ajournalist pretends to be a madman in order to investigate a crime...

that took place in a mental hospital.

But instead of winning the Pulitzer Prize, he goes mad.

[Thunderclap]

[Thunder Rumbling]

[Thunderclap]

[Thunder Rumbling]

Aaaah!

Shock Corridor was full of front page material.

The inmates were the product of Cold War paranoia and Southern racism.

- Every form of American insanity was represented. - [Man] Trent!

This baptizes a new organization, the Ku Klux.

- Sounds good. - No.

Ku Klux Klan.

Sounds more mysterious, more menacing, more alliterative.

- Ku Klux Klan. Say it. - Ku Klux Klan.

- KKK. - KKK.

It'll catch on quick. It'll drive those carpetbaggers back north.

Scare the hell out of'em. Tar and feather them.

Hang' em. Burn 'em.

Listen to me, Americans. America for Americans!

America for Americans!

Keep our schools white!

- Keep 'em white! - That's right! Keep 'em white!

- I'm against Catholics! - Hallelujah, man! Hallelujah!

- AgainstJews! Jews! - Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

- Against niggers! - Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

- Against niggers! - Hallelujah!

- Against niggers! - Hallelujah!

[Hooded Man] There's one!

Let's get that black boy before he marries my daughter!

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

[Shouting]

The metaphor was crystal clear.

In Fuller's vision, America had become an insane asylum.

[Shouting Continues]

Sadly, Fuller's later career was typical of the times.

To finance his unorthodox projects, he had to move to Europe.

And for a whole generation of smugglers, this was the end of the line.

The pioneers and showmen were gone.

The moguls were replaced by agents and executives.

Actors and directors were starting their own companies.

- Start the wind machine. - [Shouts In Italian]

Runaway production was the name of the game.

- Turn on the paddle wheel. - [Shouts In Italian]

- Roll 'em! - [Shouts In Italian]

- To make films you had to go to London, - Action!

Paris, Madrid and Rome.

A film like Two Weeks In Another Town captured the desperation of the times.

[Broken English] I have an offer... leave.

[Continues, Indistinct]

There's only one name for you.

On the streets of my village they call them...

- Welcome to Hollywood on the Tiber. - How dare you!

- You are behind schedule. - I need two weeks to finish shooting this picture.

You give me two extra weeks, and I'll give you a Maurice Kruger picture.

- Don't you want the best movie you can get? - No.

- Don't you have pride in what pictures you put your name on? - No.

Turn that off and get out. I want to get some sleep.

[Kruger] Tucino, you international peddler!

Take a good look at a movie that was made just because we couldn't sleep until we made it.

[Scorsese] Ironically, Two Weeks In Another Town...

- was the sequel to The Bad And The Beautiful. - Laugh the way he would have!

That's not a god talking, Georgia. That's only a man.

Both films were directed by Vincente Minnelli, produced byJohn Houseman...

and starred Kirk Douglas.

But in ten years, from 1952 to 1962,

the industry had undergone tremendous changes,

and Two Weeks In Another Town...

was a startling mirror of Hollywood's decline.

- Did it with style. - [Sobs]

L-It's all right, Mrs. Curry.

- Kruger, you're great. - [Woman Sobbing On-screen]

[Sobbing Continues]

I was great.

The golden age was over.

And for many a veteran director, this was a painful period of anguish and self-doubt.

Who in his right mind would expect me to settle for you?

A worn-out, dried-up, whining, meddling old hag!

My lawful wedded nightmare. Frustrated and stupid.

Sticking your fat nose into everything day and night!

Clara?

Clara?

- Clara. - [Sobbing]

Don't swallow all those sleeping pills.

The doctor will just have to come up and pump out your stomach again.

You know how sick that makes me.

[Sobbing Continues]

[Clock Tolling]

Oh, Clara. Clara.

L- I look at this film I'm shooting. I like it.

What if I'm wrong...

and it's another calamity?

Where do I go from here?

Took me two years to get this job, and that was a fluke.

How can a man go wrong and not know why?

What's happened to me?

Is it ego?

Self-indulgence?

Or...

am I just plain afraid?

Oh, my poor...

I've seen the film you're shooting, and it's beautiful.

Whereas the smuggler works undercover and his subversion is not detected immediately,

the iconoclast attacks conventions head-on...

and his defiance sends shock waves through the industry.

In Hollywood, the iconoclasts comprise the visionaries, the groundbreakers,

the renegades who openly defied the system and expanded the art form.

Often they were defeated. Sometimes they actually made the system work for them.

Hollywood has always had a love/hate relationship with those who break its rules,

extolling them one moment and burning them the next.

The Hollywood establishment often confused entertainment with escapism,

so borrowing from real life was deemed either boring or sometimes subversive,

particularly if it meant plumbing the lower depths.

But back in the silent era, a few filmmakers challenged...

the ideals of glamour and wholesomeness by injecting...

a dose of reality into their films,

generally within the framework of the melodrama.

D. W. Griffith, for instance, is often identified...

with quaint romanticism and Victorian sensibility.

But more than once, he went beyond the accepted melodrama of his time.

In Broken Blossoms, he showed how a sordid reality...

can destroy the purest dreams.

This was the most delicate interracial romance.

Physical and spiritual suffering is what unites Lillian Gish,

the waif battered by her boxing father,

and Richard Barthelmess, the young Buddhist who lost his religious fervor...

in the slums of London.

Their bodies, like their souls, are bent or stunted.

Both are broken blossoms.

Only when they find each other do they come alive.

So, for a brief moment,

they're allowed to dream before our eyes.

But when the racist father discovers the situation,

bigotry is exposed in its rawest form.

Sweetness and compassion turn to fury and savagery.

The young Chinese who didn't believe in violence...

picks up a gun to save his beloved.

He'll come too late.

Her punishment is death.

Erich von Stroheim was the most outrageous of the iconoclasts, and he fell the hardest.

The Wedding March is a fairy tale, but a tragic one,

with Fay Wray, a poor musician's daughter, as Cinderella,

and Stroheim, the scion of an aristocratic family, as her Prince Charming.

The setting was Vienna in the last days of the Hapsburg dynasty,

a decadent world that both fascinated and repelled Stroheim.

The city of waltzes and operettas was a pigsty.

Behind the romantic exterior, Stroheim revealed an ugly, cruel society...

ruled by greed.

The apple blossoms offered a brief refuge,

but they were an illusion.

Innocence was doomed from the start.

Stroheim's heroines were no madonnas.

Like their male counterparts, they were always endowed with strong sexual desires.

What Stroheim was after was a more honest depiction...

of human relationships.

Both lovers were victims.

The young girl who surrendered her soul...

and the prince who had not yet been corrupted by the hypocrisy of his milieu.

Stroheim's images could certainly be brutal,

and they inevitably got him into trouble with the censors.

But at heart, he was a romantic...

who was haunted by the loss and the corruption of love.

Rather than indulge in the splendors of imperial Vienna,

he exposed its moral squalor.

The young prince's father, a ruined aristocrat,

strikes a deal with a rich merchant, who's desperate to marry off his crippled daughter.

[Wedding Processional]

[Dissonant]

Stroheim paid a high price for his transgressions...

and his perceived intransigence.

The very qualities that made him a great artist undid him.

He was dubbed a megalomaniac and ended up losing control over most of his projects.

They would all be eventually truncated or disfigured.

All fragments of a broken vision.

In the '30s a few topical films...

allowed the grim reality of the Depression to seep into the movies,

particularly at Warner Brothers.

Young Darryl Zanuck, then head of production,

ordered his writers to draw their subjects from newspaper headlines.

I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang was probably the most famous...

of these hard-hitting exposes.

It even led to the reformation of the penal system in the South.

However, David Selznick at RKO...

jumped the gun on Zanuck by releasing his own indictment of the chain gang system...

several months earlier.

The film was called Hell's Highway.

Well, young fella, ya won't catch cold in that sweatbox.

It was one of the three films directed by Rowland Brown,

a forgotten figure whose meteoric career reputedly ended...

when he punched one of Hollywood's top executives.

[Howling]

[Howling Continues]

Carter's dead. Strangled to death in the sweatbox.

The contractor says the boy committed suicide.

- Carter's dead. - Carter's dead.

- Carter's dead. - Carter's dead.

Somehow, Rowland Brown's audacity epitomized the pre-Code era.

Those are the tumultuous years before rigid censorship rules,

known as the Production Code, came into effect.

- Where's Carter? - Yeah! Where is Carter?

[Men Shouting] Where's Carter?

- [Cane Pounds On Table] - Quiet there!

A convicted bank robber, Richard Dix is one of the forgotten men of the Depression.

His rebellious behavior is justified by the appalling conditions at the prison camp.

His desperation reflects that of the country.

Well, why don't you start?

The World War One veteran was once an all-American hero.

Social consciousness sparked Warner Brothers'stark dramas.

Films like William Wellman's Wild Boys OfThe Road and Heroes For Sale.

I have to get to my aunt's in Chicago someway.

- This is the only way I can do it. - Well, don't your folks mind?

My mother's dead.

And we got a big family.

With me gone, it means just one less mouth to feed.

That's why they were kind of glad to see me go.

Wild Boys OfThe Road was about teenagers who had been forced to leave home...

to find work because their parents lost theirjobs in the Depression.

Railroad dicks constantly harassed and abused them.

Cheese it! Railroad dicks!

The social and political context was painted in rather broad strokes,

but the dramas were contemporary, urgent, gripping.

Wild Bill Wellman had a natural feeling for the vagabond life,

for the homeless youngsters and their battles with authority.

His sympathy lay with the outcasts and with the rebels.

[Whistle Blowing]

- [Girl Screams] - Tommy!

Now, at the opposite end of the spectrum...

you find a different breed of iconoclast,

Baroque stylists such as Josef von Sternberg.

Like Stroheim, Sternberg demanded total control...

over all aspects of his productions.

But his was a voluptuous, dreamlike, supremely artificial world,

lovingly composed on the Paramount soundstages.

Sternberg's radical stylization proved as provocative...

as Stroheim's extreme realism.

Each film became a ceremonial with the director orchestrating...

the most elaborate, erotic rituals around his star,

Marlene Dietrich.

Of the seven films Sternberg made with Dietrich,

The Scarlet Empress was the most baroque and the boldest...

in its depiction of erotic manipulation...

as it traced the transformation of an innocent Prussian princess...

into Catherine the Great, the empress of Russia.

The woman you adore is quite close to you, isn't she?

Catherine, I love you, worship you.

As the heroine quickly discovered, political power and sexual power were inseparable.

Her battles were waged in the bedroom...

as she learned the art of choosing and changing lovers at the right time.

Catherine showed such considerable skills...

that she even challenged traditional sexual roles.

Behind the mirror, as you know, there's a flight of stairs.

Down below someone is waiting to come up.

Will His Excellency be kind enough to open the door for him carefully...

so that he can sneak in?

Nothing escaped Sternberg's artistic control.

He wrote the script, conceived the lighting,

composed some of the music,

directed the Los Angeles Symphonic Orchestra,

helped design the sets and sculptures,

Why did you send my mother away? What wrong had she done?

And probably selected every icon himself.

[Scorsese] He even claimed that Marlene was just another tool.

He said, "Remember that Marlene is not Marlene... I'm Marlene.

She knows that better than anyone. "

That must be Peter.

Go and see if it is and tell him to come here at once.

Your Imperial Highness, Her Majesty wishes to see you at once.

"To the artist," insisted Sternberg,

"the subject is incidental, and only his vision matters. "

He said, " The camera is a diabolical instrument...

that conveys ideas with lightning speed.

Each picture transliterates a thousand words. "

Perhaps the greatest iconoclast of them all was also the youngest...

Orson Welles.

The downright villainy of Boss Jim W. Gettys' political machine,

now in complete control...

[Scorsese] He was 25 when he landed in Hollywood.

I made no campaign promises...

because, until a few weeks ago,

- I had no hope of being elected. - [Laughing]

- [Audience Applauding] - Now, however, I have something more than a hope.

[Applause Continues]

- And Jim Gettys... - [Applause Stops]

Jim Gettys has something less than a chance.

[Scorsese] In the wake of his radio show War of the Worlds,

the young prodigy was given unprecedented latitude by RKO,

including what's known today as...

- [Loud Squawk] - the right to final cut.

At the time only screen legend Charlie Chaplin...

enjoyed such creative control over his productions.

For his first film Welles set out to explore the many facets...

of media baron William Randolph Hearst,

whose abuse of wealth and power defied America's democratic traditions.

Some in Hollywood were so incensed...

that they put pressure on RKO to destroy the negative.

Fortunately, they didn't succeed.

Welles was like a young magician enchanted by his own magic.

In fact, the most revolutionary aspect of Citizen Kane...

was its self-consciousness.

The style drew attention to itself.

Rosebud.

Now, this contradicted the classical ideal...

of the invisible camera and seamless cuts.

Welles used every narrative technique and filmic device...

deep focus, high and low angles, wide-angle lenses.

"I want to use the motion picture camera...

as an instrument of poetry, " he said.

And somehow Welles'passion for the medium...

became the great excitement of the piece itself.

[Welles] Now, you see, I had the best contract that anybody's ever had for Kane.

Nobody comes on the set; nobody gets to look at the rushes; nothing.

You just make the picture and that's it.

If I hadn't had that contract, they've would've stopped me at the beginning,

just by the nature of the script.

But it was such conditions... I've never had anything remotely equal...

to that contract since.

So it isn't just the success.

What spoiled me is having had the joy of that kind of liberty...

once in my life...

and never having been able to enjoy it again.

[Narrator] George Amberson Minafer walked homeward slowly...

through what seemed to be the strange streets of a strange city.

For the town was growing and changing.

It was heaving up in the middle incredibly.

It was spreading incredibly.

And as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself...

and darkened its sky.

[Scorsese] Orson Welles inspired more would-be directors...

than any other filmmaker since D. W. Griffith.

Yet Welles didn't change the status of the Hollywood director.

He actually lost all his privileges a year later...

on The Magnificent Ambersons,

which was chopped down and partially reshot in his absence.

Do you know that I always liked Hollywood very much.

- [Audience Tittering] - It just wasn't reciprocated.

[Audience Laughs]

Throughout his career, Welles pushed the creative envelope in so many ways.

To trace Kane's political ambitions, for instance,

he created fake newsreel footage.

To give it the appropriate look,

he had editor Robert Wise drag the film across a concrete floor.

Here was an opportunity for Welles to recall...

William Randolph Hearst's fondness for dictators.

You saw Kane posing with Hitler for the photographers.

Now, at the same time, in his first talking picture,

Chaplin dared to aim at the Fascist powers directly.

At the risk of infuriating America's isolationist forces,

Chaplin took on the dictator singlehandedly.

Und now, derJuden.

[Loud Snorting]

DerJuden!

[Shouting In Mock German]

[Continues In Mock German]

DerJuden.

Ohhhh, derJuden.

[Announcer] His Excellency has just referred to theJewish people.

[Scorsese] A comedy drawing on such topical horrors...

as racial persecutions and concentration camps,

The Great Dictator presented Chaplin with another major challenge:

He gave himself a double role,

that of the monster dictator Hynkel...

- [Whistle Blows] - and the victim, theJewish barber.

[Whistle Blowing]

[Crowd Shouting]

Of course, even the renegades like Chaplin and Welles had to work around the censors.

Attention!

The content of American films was still strictly controlled.

Adult themes and images were too often curtailed or suppressed.

But after World War Two,

audiences wanted pictures to be truer to life.

A few of our filmmakers started challenging the rules.

Hey, Stella!

You quit that howlin' down there and go to bed!

- Joyce, I want my girl down here! - You shut up!

[Scorsese] Elia Kazan led the assault.

Hey, Stella!

Hey, Stella!

His Streetcar Named Desire caused the first major breach in Hollywood's Production Code.

I wouldn't mix in this.

[Scorsese] Kazan fought tooth and nail, frame by frame,

to preserve the integrity of Tennessee Williams'drama when he adapted it to the screen.

This meant exposing the overtly carnal desires...

of Stanley and his battered, pregnant wife Stella.

Now, these close shots of Kim Hunter were not in the film...

as it was originally released...

because the Legion of Decency objected to their sensuality.

The studio decided to cut them...

and replace the jazz score with more conventional music.

[Gasps]

- Don't ever leave me, baby. - [Sobs]

[Man] The camera is more than a recorder...it's a microscope.

It penetrates. It goes into people.

You see their most private and concealed thoughts.

I'm able... I have been able to do that with actors.

I mean, I've revealed things that actors didn't know they were revealing about themselves.

You know, I seen you a lot of times before.

Remember parochial school out on Paluski Street?

Seven, eight years ago. Your hair... Had your hair, uh...

Braids. That's right.

Looked like a hunk of rope.

You had wires on your teeth and glasses, everything.

You was really a mess.

[Scorsese] I was 12 years old when I saw On The Waterfront.

It was a breakthrough for me.

Don't get sore. I'm just kidding you.

I just mean to tell you that you... grew up very nice.

Kazan was forging a new acting style.

[Knocking]

Edie?

Edie?

It had the appearance of realism,

but actually it revealed the natural behavior of people...

and the truth in that behavior that I'd never seen before on the screen.

Stay away from me!

"Brando, " Kazan said, "was the only actor I could describe as a genius.

He had that ambivalence that I believe is essential in depicting humanity..."

- [Knocking Continues] - Come on! Open the door, please!

- "both strength... - Stop it!

And sensibility. "

I want you to stay away from me.

I know what you want me to do, but I ain't gonna do it, so forget it!

I don't want you to do anything. You let your conscience tell you what to do.

Shut up about that conscience. That's all I been hearin'.

I never mentioned the word before. You just stay away from me!

Edie, you love me. I want you to...

I didn't say I didn't love you. I said stay away from me!

- I want you to say it to me. - Stay away from me!

[Moans]

[Scorsese] Elia Kazan paved the way for the iconoclasts of the '50s and '60s.

They were writer-directors and writer-producers,

men like Robert Aldrich, Richard Brooks,

Robert Rossen, Billy Wilder,

and among the younger generation...

Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah.

They all defied the guardians of public morality...

by daring to tackle controversial issues like racism,

inner-city violence, juvenile delinquency,

homosexuality, war atrocities,

the death penalty.

A new reality was hitting the screens.

I think producer-director Otto Preminger did more than anyone else...

to bring about the demise of the Production Code.

His crusade against censorship led him from The Moon Is Blue,

a comedy about professional virgins,

to Advise & Consent,

which exposed political corruption in Washington...

and even showed gay bars.

He was among the first to challenge the blacklists by hiring Dalton Trumbo,

one of the "Hollywood Ten,"

to write Exodus.

One of Preminger's most important victories was scored...

when he made the film The Man With the Golden Arm,

probably the first honest depiction of drug addiction...

on American screens.

Here's Frank Sinatra, in one of his most memorable performances,

as a heroin addict going through withdrawal.

[Panting]

[Moaning Intensifies]

Let me out!

Ohh!

Out!

Come on! Let me out!

Ohh!

Ohh!

And don't try to come back, or I'll throw you out again!

Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success...

exposed a different kind of addiction...

the addiction to power.

I love this dirty town.

The arena was Broadway, with Burt Lancaster portrayingJ.J. Hunsecker,

the master manipulator.

In Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman's screenplay,

the formidable newspaper and radio columnist was to show business...

what Senator McCarthy was to Cold War politics.

His fear and intimidation tactics...

made him a national institution,

but his ruthless world flickered in a moral twilight.

Manny, tell me, what exactly are the...

unseen gifts of this lovely young thing that you manage?

Well, she sings a little.

You know, she sings...

Manny's faith in me is simply awe-inspiring, Mr. Hunsecker.

- Actually, I'm still studying. - What subject?

Singing, of course.

Straight concert and...

Why, of course. You might, for instance, be studying politics.

Uh... me?

- Well, you see,J. J... - I mean, I?

Y-You must be kidding, Mr. Hunsecker.

Me, with myJersey City brains?

I know. That wonder boy of yours opens at the Latin Quarter next week.

- J.J., uh... - Say good-bye, Lester.

[Scorsese]J.J. 's power is based on a network of informers and sycophants.

That's the only reason the poor slobs pay you... to see their names in my column.

- Now I make it out you're doing me a favor? - I didn't say tha...

The day I can't get along without a press agent's handouts,

I'll close up and move to Alaska.

Sweep out my igloo. Here I come.

Manny, you rode in here on the senator's shirttails, so shut your mouth.

Now, come,J.J. That's a little too harsh.

Anyone seems fair game for you tonight.

This man is not for you, Harvey, and you shouldn't be seen in public with him.

Because that's another part of a press agent's life.

They dig up scandal about prominent people and shovel it thin...

among columnists who give them space.

There seems to be some allusion here that escapes me.

We're friends, Harvey.

We go as far back as when you were a fresh kid congressman, don't we?

Why is it that everything you say sounds like a threat?

Maybe it's a mannerism, because I don't threaten friends.

But why furnish your enemies with ammunition?

You're a family man, Harvey, and someday, God willing, you may want to be president.

And here you are, out in the open,

where any hep person knows that this one is toting that one around for you.

Are we kids, or what?

Next time you come up you might join me on my TV show.

Thanks,J.J., for what I consider sound advice.

Go now, and sin no more.

? It was an itsy-bitsy teenie-weenie ?

- ? Yellow polka dot bikini ? - Nein! Nein!

- ? That she wore for the first time ? - [Shouting In German]

[Scorsese] Let's not forget that comedies can be just as iconoclastic as dramas.

Billy Wilder's work, first as a writer in the 1930s,

then as a writer-director from the '40s on, is a perfect example.

Over the years Wilder's wit only grew more abrasive.

Instead of sweetening his brews, he kept adding more acid.

- Sind Sie ein Amerikanischer Spion? - Nein!

You won't find a more iconoclastic film in the Kennedy years...

than his film One, Two, Three,

[Warped Sound] ? It was an itsy-bitsy teenie-weenie ??

a savage political farce that dared ridicule all ideologies at the height of the Cold War.

- ? [Continues] - [Shouting In German]

- Hey! - [Greeting In Russian] MacNamara!

If it isn't my old friends Hart, Schaffner and Karl Marx.

- I see you bring blonde lady with you. - Ring-a-ding-ding!

James Cagney plays a Coca-Cola executive who has enrolled his secretary...

to hoodwink the Soviet commissars in East Berlin.

To what do we owe this unexpected pleasure?

- You're a trade commission. I thought we might trade. - Coca-Cola?

No. But I hear you boys would like Fraulein Ingeborg to go to work for you.

- You wanna trade your secretary? - Right.

- For Russian secretary? - Wrong.

I do not blame you. Ours is built like bowlegged samovar.

- [Laughs] - [Russians Laughing]

We find proposition very interesting. Now, what can we offer you?

All I want from you is a small favor.

Small favor, big favor. Anything.

There's a guy named Otto Ludwig Piffl being held by the East German police.

- For what reason? - Son of a gun stole my cuckoo clock.

- You want cuckoo clock back? - Wrong.

- You want Piffl back. - Right.

Impossible, my friend. We cannot interfere with internal affairs...

of sovereign republic of East Germany.

- No Piffl, no deal. Let's go, Ingeborg. - Wait! What is the hurry?

You're not giving us a chance.

Is old Russian proverb: You cannot milk cow with hands in pockets.

Herr Ober! Vodka! Caviar!

Herr Kapellmeister, more rock and roll!

? ["Sabre Dance"]

[Scorsese] Wilder's transgressions of political correctness...

matched his transgressions of good taste.

To Wilder, good taste was another name for censorship.

"I'm accused of being vulgar," he would say.

"So much the better, that proves I'm closer to life. "

[Billy Wilder] The picture was hit by a change in attitude.

The wall was built, nobody could get through East Berlin to West Berlin and vice versa.

The desire of the audience to laugh was strong.

About 25 years later,

it became a smash hit in Germany.

Everybody went to see it because...

the wall was gone and, uh...

it was not gone yet, but it had eased, you know, that whole thing.

And it became... it became, uh...

it became a kind of a historic vignette...

of the silliness of the Russians...

and the stupidity of the Americans.

Come on, everything. Get it up here.

[Scorsese] By the late 1960s the Production Code was almost defunct.

- Bonnie and Clyde put the nail in the coffin. - Clyde, where's the car?

- What did he do? Where's the car? - [Alarm Ringing]

Where did he go?

- Here! - [Engine Revving]

- [Alarm Continues Ringing] - [Man] The old studio system...

was so hypocritical.

They were constantly fearful of being accused of instilling in youth...

the glory of the outlaw.

So they had these rules, for instance,

that you couldn't even fire a gun in the same frame with somebody getting hit.

You had to have, literally, a film cut in between.

[Gunshot]

- [Alarm Continues Ringing] - [Shouting]

So I thought, if we're gonna show this, we should show it.

We should show what it looks like when somebody gets shot,

that shooting somebody is not a sanitized event.

It's not immaculate.

There's an enormous amount of blood.

There's an enormous amount of... of horror of change...

that takes place when that occurs.

[Penn] We were in the middle of the Vietnamese war.

What you saw on television was every bit...perhaps even more bloody...

than what we were showing on film.

Hey...

[Machine Gun Fire]

The Production Code didn't survive the late '60s.

Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch disposed of it.

Today the violence in films is certainly more graphic.

The last frontier may be sexuality,

and beyond sexuality the complexity of the human psyche.

This is the territory that Stanley Kubrick has been mining in his films.

Like Kazan, Kubrick was a New York maverick who grew into an iconoclast.

He emerged from independent production and film noir...

to create his own unique, visionary worlds.

His association with Kirk Douglas...

on Paths of Glory and Spartacus...

established him as a major player,

but he couldn't stand being an employee on studio projects...

and moved to London to make Lolita.

He stayed there and hasn't worked in Hollywood since.

He's one of the rare iconoclasts...

who's enjoyed the luxury of operating completely on his own terms.

Back here we have the kitchen.

- That's where we have our informal meals. - Perhaps if you'd...

My pastries win prizes around here.

If you'd let me have your phone number, that would give me a chance to think it over.

[Scorsese] Here's James Mason as a European intellectual discovering the trappings...

of small-town America.

Oh, you must see the garden before you go.

- [Radio] - My flowers win prizes around here.

They're the talk of the neighborhood.

Voilˆj!

- [Continues] - My yellow roses.

My... Uh... Oh. My daughter.

Uh, darling, turn that down, please.

- I could offer you a comfortable home... - [Volume Lowers]

With a sunny garden, a congenial atmosphere, my cherry pie.

[Scorsese] When Kubrick made Lolita,

the subject of a middle-aged man infatuated with a sexually precocious minor...

was still completely taboo.

We haven't discussed, uh, how much.

Oh, uh, something nominal. Let's say...

- [Scorsese] This was not the contraband of a smuggler, - 200 a month?

But open defiance.

Including meals and late snacks, et cetera. [Laughs]

- You're a very persuasive salesman, Mrs. Haze. - Thank you. Uh...

What was the decisive factor? Uh, my garden?

? [Continues]

I think it was your... cherry pies.

[Mrs. Haze Laughing] Ohh!

Why were you so late coming home from school yesterday afternoon?

Yesterday. Yesterday. What was yesterday?

Yesterday was Thursday.

That's right. That's right.

Michelle and I, um, stayed to watch football practice.

- In the Frigid Queen? - What do you mean, "In the Frigid Queen"?

I was driving around and I thought I saw you through the window.

Oh. Yeah. Well, we stopped there for a malt afterwards.

What difference does it make?

You were sitting at a table with two boys.

I told you, no dates.

- It wasn't a date. - It was a date.

- It wasn't a date. - It was a date, Lolita.

- It was not a date. - It was a date!

It wasn't a date.

Whatever it was that you had yesterday afternoon, I don't want you to have it again.

And while we're on the subject, how did you come to be so late on Saturday afternoon?

[Scorsese] Professor Humbert's fall befits his transgression.

- Where have you put her? - Get your hands off her!

- Where is she? - [Scorsese] Obsessed with Lolita,

who's now run away from him,

he undergoes a mental breakdown.

- Hold it now! - Don't let go!

The satirical comedy turns into a bizarre tragedy.

Let's get this business straight.

This girl was officially discharged earlier tonight in the care of her uncle.

If you say so.

Well, has she or hasn't she an uncle?

- All right, let's say she has an uncle. - What do you mean, "let's say"?

Uh, all right. She has an uncle.

Uncle Gus. Uh, yes, I remember now.

He was going t-to pick her up here at the hospital.

- L-I forgot that. - Forgot?

- Yes, I forgot. - All right, let him up.

Uh, she didn't, by any chance,

leave any... message for me?

No, I suppose not.

[Narrator] Five years in the army...

and some considerable experience of the world...

had by now dispelled any of those romantic notions regarding love...

with which Barry commenced life,

and he began to have it in mind,

as so many gentlemen had done before him,

to marry a woman of fortune and condition.

And, as such things so often happen,

these thoughts closely coincided...

with his setting first sight upon a lady who will henceforth play a considerable part...

in the drama of his life...

the Countess of Lyndon,

Viscountess Bullingdon of England,

Baroness Castle Lyndon of the kingdom of Ireland.

A woman of vast wealth and great beauty.

[Scorsese] Kubrick's boldest project...

was a period piece set in 18th-century Europe...

Barry Lyndon.

[Guests Murmuring]

[Man Mutters, Indistinct]

[Scorsese] He broke new technical ground,

having special lenses manufactured...

to capture the glow of the candlelit mansions of the aristocracy.

[Murmuring Continues]

[Scorsese] Instead of a picaresque tale,

Kubrick offered another grim journey of self-destruction...

the rise and fall of an opportunist.

[Guests Gasping, Murmuring]

[Scorsese] On the surface...

the approach was cool and distant, deceptive.

But I found this to be one of the most profoundly emotional films I've ever seen.

Samuel, I'm going outside for a breath of air.

Yes, milady. Of course.

Kubrick's style was strangely unsettling.

His audacity was to insist on slowness...

in order to recreate the pace of life...

and the ritualized behavior of the time.

A good example is this seduction scene,

which he stretches...

until it settles into a sort of trance.

What has always struck me is the ballet of the emotions in the film.

Watch the tension between the camera's movements...

and the character's body language,

orchestrated by the music in this scene.

[Woman Laughing]

[Scorsese] WithJohn Cassavetes'characters,

the emotion was always up front.

- [Laughing Continues] - That's great.

It was at once their cross and their salvation.

John's approach was warm, embracing, focused on people.

- Aah! No. No. No, no, no, no. - Yes. Yes.

Relationships were all he was interested in.

The laughter and the games, the tears and the guilt,

the whole roller coaster of love.

A middle-class housewife, in despair over the failure of her marriage,

has been picked up by a young man.

She takes him home for the night.

The next morning he finds her comatose.

Operator?

I want the emergency rescue squad.

My number?

My number is...

- [Shower Running] - Come on, now. Drink this, damn it!

Goddamn bitch. Drink this!

Come on, now. Don't go back out.

Cassavetes embodied the emergence of a new school...

of guerilla filmmaking in New York.

His films were literally made on the credit plan.

John was fearless, a true renegade setting up one psychodrama after another...

with the complicity of a whole close group of actor friends.

He insisted on having fun when making films...

while looking for some kind of truth.

Maybe even a revelation.

No. You gotta stay awake. Please.

- I don't want you to die. - [Sighs]

[Whispers] No.

Please, lady.

You gotta stay awake.

You gotta stay awake.

[John Cassavetes] To have a philosophy is to know how to love...

- You gotta stay awake. - and to know where to put it.

But you can't put it everywhere.

You've gotta be a priest saying, " Yes, my son, yes, my daughter, bless you. "

But people don't live that way.

They live with anger and hostility and problems...

and lack of money, lack of...

You know, tremendous disappointments in their life. They're...

So, what they need is a philosophy.

I think what everybody needs is a way to say...

"Where and how can I love, can I be in love...

so that I can live with some degree of peace?"

And so that's why I have a need for the characters...

to really analyze love, discuss it, kill it,

destroy it, hurt each other, do all that stuff...

in that war,

in that word polemic and picture polemic of what life is.

The rest of the stuff really doesn't interest me.

It may interest other people, but I have a one-track mind.

All I'm interested in is love.

[Laughing]

That's it! Hoo-hoo!

You're gonna cry! Ohh, geez! Come on!

Come on. I didn't want to hit you, but don't go to sleep on me.

Ohh! Come on, now! Cry! That's it! That's life, honey!

Tears of happiness, man. Just do it!

Come on, now. Ohh. [Kisses]

[Scorsese] All of Cassavetes'films,

they were all epics of the human soul.

Watching them brings to mind a comment made byJohn Ford to a collaborator...

who was complaining about the miserable weather conditions in the desert...

when they were trying to shoot a picture.

The guy said, " Look, Mr. Ford, what can we shoot out here?"

And Ford replied, "What can we shoot?

The most interesting and exciting thing in the whole world... a human face."

You want some coffee?

- Can I trust you? Huh? Huh? - [Whispers] Yeah.

Okay. I don't trust you anyway.

I don't...

Uh-huh. You little sneaky, you.

I'm gonna get you some coffee!

So, we're gonna have to stop...

because I can't go on any further.

Number one, we just don't have the time.

Number two, we've reached a different era.

It's the era of the late '60s, the years that I started making movies myself,

and, uh, it puts me in a different perspective.

We've reached a whole new chapter altogether and I really...

I could not really do justice to my friends who are making films...

and companions and, uh, my generation of filmmakers from the inside.

I can't... I can't do it.

Um, so the story really has no end,

and we haven't even started discussing...

such incredibly major figures as...

Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges,

Joseph Mankiewicz, John Huston,

George Stevens, Sam Peckinpah,

William Wyler or, of course, Alfred Hitchcock.

But fortunately they've been celebrated in so many ways,

in so many books and articles and in some, actually, wonderful shows.

Documentaries about film are becoming a genre unto themselves...

thanks to Kevin Brownlow and David Gill's invaluable 13-hour series...

about Hollywood in its silent era...

just the silent film alone, 13 hours;

Peter Bogdanovich's film Directed byJohn Ford,

Richard Schickel's series The Men Who Made The Movies,

and so many British and French portraits of filmmakers.

So many directors have inspired me over the years,

I wouldn't know how to stop mentioning their names, we're indebted to them.

As we are to any original filmmaker who managed to survive...

and impose his or her vision in a very competitive profession.

[Shouting, Yelling]

When we talk about personal expression,

I'm often reminded of Kazan's film America, America,

the story of his uncle's journey from Anatolia to America...

the story of so many immigrants who came to this country from a very, very foreign land.

[Policeman] You're blockin'traffic! Come on! Move it along!

[Scorsese] I kind of identified with it and was very moved by it.

Actually, I later saw myself making this same journey, but not from Anatolia.

Rather, from my own neighborhood in New York,

which was, in a sense, a very foreign land.

I made that journey from that land to moviemaking,

which was something unimaginable.

Actually, when I was a little younger there was another journey I wanted to make.

It was a religious one... I wanted to be a priest.

However I soon realized that my real vocation, my real calling,

was the movies.

I don't really see a conflict between the Church and movies... the sacred and the profane.

Obviously there are major differences,

but I could also see great similarities...

between a church and a movie house.

Both are places for people to come together and share a common experience,

and I believe there's a spirituality in films,

even if it's not one which can supplant faith.

I find that over the years many films address themselves to the spiritual side of man's nature...

from Griffith's film Intolerance toJohn Ford's The Grapes of Wrath,

to Hitchcock's Vertigo,

to Kubrick's 2001 and so many more.

It's as if movies answer an ancient quest for the common unconscious.

They fulfill a spiritual need that people have...

to share a common memory.