All language subtitles for A.Personal.Journey.With.Martin.Scorsese.Through.American.Movies.1995.DVDRip_Eng

- [People Chattering]
- [Man] Cut!

There.
Save all this.

[Man] Mr. Von Ellstein!
Would you come here please.

[Chattering Continues]

- You call that directing?
- That is what I'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 I wish to hit.

I could make this scene a climax.

I could make every scene
in this picture a climax.

If I did, I would be a bad
director, and I like to think
of myself as one of the best.

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

Look, when I want
a lecture on the aesthetics
of motion pictures, I'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?

[Martin Scorsese]
"Film is a disease, “Frank Capra said.

When it infects your bloodstream,

it takes over as the number-one hormone.

It plays lago to your psyche.

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

Very nice!

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

I spent a lot of time
in movie theaters.

I became obsessed with movies.

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

except one book...

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

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

I borrowed it from
the library repeatedly.

It'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 a spell on me...

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

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

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

I 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, I confess... once or twice
I 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 In The Sun.

I was fanatical about westerns.

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

It 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.

- [Gunshot, Bullet Ricochets]
- ♪[Orchestra, Dramatic]

From the opening titles alone,
I was mesmerized.

Bright blasts of
deliriously vibrant color, ;

the gunshots, ;
the savage intensity of the music, ;

the burning sun, ;

the overt sexuality.

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

and Gregory Peck was the villain,

a ruthless rancher's son
who seduced her.

For a child it was a puzzle.

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

[Thunderclap]

It was all quite overpowering.
Frightening, too.

[Rifle Cocking]

The final duel in the sun,

- where Jennifer Jones
shoots Gregory Peck,
- [Gunshot]

Was too intense for this four year old.

I covered my eyes through most of it.

[Gunshot, Bullet Ricochets]

You double-crossin' bobcat!

A flawed film, but nevertheless...

the hallucinatory quality
of the imagery has never
weakened for me over the years.

[Gunshot]

[Gasps]

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

by killing each other.

I guess that does it.

Pearl.

Hey, Pearl!

[Gunshot, Bullet Ricochets]

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

Two decades later,
when I embraced filmmaking,

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

It 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 It;

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.

- [Man Mumbling]
- The Naked Kiss;

Murder by Contract;

Don't you get restless?

If I get restless, I exercise.

My girl lives in Cleveland.

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

I 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!

[Baby Wailing]

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

[Crying]

[Baby Continues Wailing]

John!

[Screaming, Wailing Continues]

Mommy!
[Continues Crying]

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 I've discovered
many an obscured film,

and sometimes they were
more inspirational...

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

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

I 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.

[Gasps]

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 I 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.

I want to make
O Brother, Where Art Thou?

[Scorsese] From the beginning I saw
film as a means of self-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.
- I 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.
It'll be good.

[Scorsese]
A poet or a painter can be a loner,

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
a low-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.

In the dark,
all sorts of things come alive.

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

- Exactly.
- No cat men!

[Scorsese] 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.

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

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

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

[Gregory Peck] It was a time...

when the producer was the key figure.

I found it and licked it. I wanna
produce it so much, I 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 I came into the business.

[Scorsese] Duel In 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.

[Peck] 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.

His all-encompassing enthusiasm
galvanized everybody.

That energy, ;

that sense of playfulness,

of rascality...

that was Selznick.

About 1:;00 or 2:;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.

- [Man On Phone]
Have you made up your mind?
- I've made up my mind, Arthur.

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

[Scorsese] 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 for the studios, one for himself.

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

was based on a powerful,
vertically integrated industry.

The studios,
particularly the five majors...

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

controlled every phase
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...

under long-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, I think, from L.B. Mayer,

what he thought was classy.

And I think probably
Fox leaned more towards,

uh, uh...

Well, I wouldn't exactly say
gritty realism,

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

and all kinds of pictures.

But I 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.

In those days I could look at
the picture and if everything was
in white silk... MGM.

I 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, if you worked at MGM,
you had to adjust to the MGM style.

And it was quite different from
the Warner Brothers or Paramount style.

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 freewheeling...

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 King at Fox, ;

Raoul Walsh at Warner Brothers, ;

they were Hollywood pros
who rose from the ranks.

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 the system 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 30 years,

thanks to sympathetic producers
like Freed and, later, John Houseman.

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

The cameras were his brushes
and the soundstages his canvas.

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

of The 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 for my cameraman.

Von Ellstein to direct?

You're taken care of.
It 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.

It's your baby. I want you
with me on the set all the time.

You don't have to talk
to Von Ellstein.

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

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

Sure he is.

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

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

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

With Von Ellstein I 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.

I was the enemy of the major studio.

I believed in one man, one film.

I believed one man should make the film,

and I believed the director
should be that one man.

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

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

I just couldn't...

I just couldn't accept art
as a committee.

I 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
of telling stories.

He's therefore saddled with
conventions and stereotypes,

formulas and clichés,

and all these limitations were
codified in specific genres.

This was the very foundation
of the studio system.

Audiences loved genre pictures,

and the old masters
never seemed reluctant to supply them.

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

at the Directors Guild of
America in 1950 and introduced
himself, this is what he said: ;

"My name is John Ford,
and I 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 Quiet Man.

The westerns were
what he was most proud of.

Or so he may have wanted us to believe.

Eventually film genres 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 storyteller of
the American screen was D. W. Griffith.

His sensibility was steeped
in a literary tradition,

that of Dickens and Tolstoy,
Frank Norris and Walt Whitman.

Yet, while borrowing
from 19th-century literature,

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 gangster film...

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
on a few themes and characters.

The figure of the sympathetic outlaw,
for instance, ;

a rebel 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. Just yell 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, I won't!
- What's that?

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

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

- [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 for life 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 battleground...

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 City of the Moon
in the Canyon of Death.

Hey, McQueen!

You got no chance!

- Come on down!
- Come and get me!

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

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

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 McCrea reflects on his fate...

and appears to accept it.

Wes!
[Echoing]

- Wes!
- Colorado.

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

- [Chamber Clicks]
- Come down, Wes!

Hurry, Wes!
I 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 sharpshooter.

- [Gunshot]
- [Screams]

Don't!

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

[Scorsese]
And in 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 a 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 the misfit of The Searchers.

Ethan Edwards returns
from years of wandering...

to discover that his loved ones
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 Edwards hunts 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 character in the film.

- Debbie!
- After years of searching,

when he finally finds Natalie Wood,

you don't know 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 for Ethan.

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, patrón?
- Hang him.

In Anthony Mann's The Furies,

the patriarchal cattle baron
wants his rebellious daughter...

to beg him for her lover's life.

You will not humble yourself.

This I ask.

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

[Man Speaking Spanish]

The proud Mexican chooses to die...

rather than allow his woman
to humiliate herself.

[Continues In Spanish]

Amen.

The Furies could've been
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 Idiot.

Juan.

The kiss of a good friend.

'Til our eyes...

next meet.

'Til then.

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

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

- I'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.

It's me you should've hung,

because now I hate you in a way
I 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
I take your world away from you!

[Murmuring Prayer In 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 of him!

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!

I'm takin' him back!

This is what I came after, and now
I got him! No partners, like I 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!
- I don't care anything about that!

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

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

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

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

Bullfighting 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 over yonder 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.

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

If I 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?
- I think so.

- You scared?
- Yeah.

You're honest about it.
I'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, I oughta know.

- You cook good coffee.
- Brennan.

Talk.

What about?

Your place.
What's it like?

It's not much.
Not yet, anyway.

- You got stock on it?
- Some.

Work the ground?

I plan to, yeah.

I'm gonna have me
a place someday.

I thought about it.
I thought about it a lot.

You figure you'll get it this way?

Well, sometimes
you don't have a choice.

Don't you?

- 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, for instance,
presented Billy the Kid
as a juvenile delinquent...

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

By having a journalist follow the young
misfit through his career of crime,

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

- State your 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
nor a sympathetic outlaw,

Billy was a rebel without a cause.

You help me.

His rage and confusion
had more to do with the malaise
of growing up in the 1950s...

than with the realities of the Old West.

Please.

Billy, don't go 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 I 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 of thing,

you rob your 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's haunted 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.
- [Thunderclap]

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-I own this establishment.
- [Thunder Continues]

- 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 of a bitch.

You just shot an unarmed man.

Well, he shoulda 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.

I've killed women and children.

Killed just about everything
that walks or crawled...

at one time or another.

And I'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 few art forms
that Americans can lay claim to.

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

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

because it doesn't...

The grass is always greener, you know.

It's, um...

It's easy to look elsewhere...

when sometimes great art
can be right in front of you.

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

They prided themselves
on appearing blasé.

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

Even an old master like 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 that change in mood?
- No. No.

Now that I've pointed it out,

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

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

Can I ask you what particular element
about the western...

appealed to you from the beginning?

I 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]
- It's only a coal truck.

Hey, Tom. Wait a minute.

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

[Loud Banging]

[Banging Continues]

[Machine Gun Fire]

[Gunfire Continues]

"There's action 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 East Side.

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.

He showed Tony Camonte,
also known as Al Capone,

as a vicious, immature,
irresponsible character.

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

- If I had some of them,
I could run the whole works in a month!
- I'll get you one!

Yet, that world was almost attractive...

because of its irresponsibility.

And that was disturbing.

At times, of course,
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 end of 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 read like a twisted
Horatio Alger story.

The gangster caricatured
the American dream.

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

Don't worry, honey. I like ya.

Well, happy New Year.

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

and his downfall
after the stock market crash.

- [Gunshot]
- Eddie! Eddie!

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

And I'd like to think, uh, Good Fellas
comes out of the 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 pietà.

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 businessman.

The gang was taken over
by anonymous corporations.

[Whistles] What a layout.

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

If I 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 I 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 steel door 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.

In the '20s you were great.

In 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 associates...
- Stop tryin' to dizzy me up!

Here. Now, I 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.
- I'm sorry, Frankie.

- Just what does Dink own?
- In 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, I arranged with Tucker
for you to quit tonight.

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

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

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

I find I have, Joe.
I find I have.

Abraham Polonsky's dialogue
was unusually poetic.

I'm glad you called me, Freddy.

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

Coffee.

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

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

I'm a man with heart trouble.

I die almost every day myself.

That's the way I live.

It'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
down and 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 Carroll O'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 do you want?
- I want my money.

I want my 93 grand.

Ninety-three thousand dollars?

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

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

I want my money!

Well, I'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 I 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 of a 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 staged musical.

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 sometimes he applied his wizardry to
the grim realities of American life...

caught in the grip of the Depression.

[Woman]
Remember my forgotten man?

♪

You put a rifle in his hand.

♪

You sent him far away.

You shouted "Hip-Hooray."

But look at him today.

♪

Remember my forgotten man.

♪

You had him cultivate the land.

♪

He walked behind a plow.

The sweat fell from his brow.

♪

But look at him right now.

♪

'Cause ever since the world began,

♪

a woman's got to have a man.

♪

Forgetting 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 for years ♪

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

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

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

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

They were dominated by the figure...

of the crazed, manic,
often embittered Broadway producer.

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

In Footlight Parade,
you had James 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 a show biz performer,
- Faster! Faster!

Come on!
Faster! Faster!

At least in the fantasy world
of Warner Brothers.

- Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! It's brutal!
- ♪[Stops]

Ohh!

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

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

If it 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] But on opening night
he was too drained...

to enjoy the production's triumph.

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

The taskmaster's lot,
in the end, was solitude.

They're sending me
to New York for good,

to be head of the office
of Fenton, Rayburn and Company.

- New York?
- What?

New York?

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

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

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

[Scorsese] First of all, the story
didn't have a Broadway setting.

New York is a big city.

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

Its protagonists were the members
of a middle-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 further the plot...

and reveal the characters.

They expressed the ebb and flow
of personal emotions.

If Santa Claus brings me any toys,
I'm taking them with me.

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

I'm taking everything.

Of course you are.

I'll help you pack them myself.

You don't have to leave anything behind,

except your snow people, of course.

[Laughs]

Sometimes they were tinged
with bittersweet irony...

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

♪ Have yourself ♪

♪A merry little Christmas ♪

♪ Make the yuletide gay ♪

♪ Next year all our troubles ♪

♪Will be miles away ♪

♪ Oh, have yourself ♪

♪A merry little ♪

♪ Christmas ♪

♪ Now ♪

Tootie.

[Sobbing]

Tootie!

[Scorsese]
Sweetness and innocence will prevail,

but with the explosion
of a child's pain and rage...

unexpected shadows were suddenly
cast on this nostalgic period piece.

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

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

Tootie, darling, don't cry. You can
build other snow 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?
- It's, um... Hmm?

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

In the mid-'40s
something interesting happened.

Hey, fellas.
Can I come in?

[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 postwar malaise.

♪ Root-too-toot-ooh
Toot-ooh ♪

♪ Listen to that fiddle player
slap, slap, slap ♪

On the surface My Dream Is 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 I have too much to do on my own.

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

♪ It isn't much to give ♪

You saw the performer's
personal relationships...

turning sour and being sacrificed
to their careers.

♪ So, darling, may I 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. Here he is!

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.

♪ I'm through with spending time ♪

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

who's too drunk to perform on
his own national radio show.

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

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

♪ 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 I 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
final production 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 noir...

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 producer Arthur Freed
nurtured such classics as On The Town,

An American in Paris,
Singin' in the Rain,

It's Always Fair Weather
and, of course, 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 Is Born...

took the genre one step further.

Get a load of Norman Maine, will ya?

It gave us Judy Garland as a band singer
who becomes a movie star...

while James Mason, her mentor,
sabotages his career.

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

Take your hands off me.

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.

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

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

L-I'm sorry, gentlemen.
No time.

He couldn't even bear
to look at himself.

Are you trying to stop me
from going on? Is 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 handout ♪

♪As a team we'd be a standout
Fall out ♪

- ♪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 sold out ♪

♪Time you woke up
Time you spoke up ♪

- ♪This line I'm handin' you ♪
- [Audience Murmuring]

♪ It'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 show biz performer still remains
a key figure in musical biographies.

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

[Coughing]
It's show time, folks.

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

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

chain-smoking directors.

♪

[Beeping]

♪We're glad that you're sorry ♪

♪Now ♪♪

- [Man] Cut!
- [Bell Ringing]

You blew it.
You forgot your line.

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

He's supposed to say,
"I don't want to die. I 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. Griffith,
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. Griffith opened
his first feature-length epic,

The Birth Of A Nation.

According to Raoul Walsh, who was one
of Griffith's assistants at the time...

and who played the role
of John 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 Griffith 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 Griffith'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.

I've always felt that visual literacy is
just as important as verbal literacy.

And what the film pioneers
were exploring was the medium's
specific 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. Griffith
"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 Griffith 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 Griffith 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, Griffith
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. Griffith 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 Griffith
worked without a script.

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

But Griffith 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.

Griffith'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.

Griffith's distressed heroines
carried with them...

the heart and soul of the picture.

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

Like Griffith, 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. Griffith,
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 their journey,
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 starred Janet 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.

A poet 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 off screen.

- [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 fit 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, I'd... I'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 super realist vision.

Don't worry about your direction.
I'll keep you on your course.

- Okay!
- This was a lost paradise.

Its beauty ravished
by the heroine's perversity.

L... I think I'm gettin' tired.

Take it easy. You don't want to
give up when you've come so far.

Okay. I'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 satisfied 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.

I'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.
I'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 film-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 I'd ever seen.

It was the film 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,

when James 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 significant...

on such genres as the western
and the epic.

When he started Land Of The 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 difficult 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 Of The 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 Of The 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. Griffith...

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 Griffith'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,

director Jacques 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 museum.
You'll probably find him at home.

If you don't mind then,
I'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 financial stakes were minimal.

Less money, more freedom.
I mean, the world of"B" films 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 $ 1 34,000.

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 fiction: ;

[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 fish,
they're not leaping for joy.

They're jumping in terror.
Bigger fish 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 first, but a strange darkness
crept into American films,

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 producer John 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?

I'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.
I'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 finished.

- For cat's sake...
- Her husband turned up. I'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] I'm not crying,
you fool. I'm laughing.

Kitty.

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

Kitty.

[Continues Laughing]

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

You're old and ugly, and I'm sick
of you. Sick, sick, sick!

- Kitty, for heaven's sake.
- You kill Johnny?
I'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 definite, 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 definite 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 specific 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 I'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.

I'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,
I'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.

I'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.
I'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 film 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 I'm the one that fixed 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 filmmaking.

[Indistinct]

Do you have any identification?

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 I've got you,
I care a lot less.

I can't figure 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 officer can't save him.

You stay on your side of the fence.
I'm looking for a cop killer.

I'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 find that dough.

Don't worry about wrecking the joint.
Just find 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 finished, 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 specific 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.

I'm asking you to marry me now.

Or didn't you hear me?

Yes, I heard.

Well?

No!

Anne! Hey!

- [Gunshot]
- [Scorsese]
In Joseph 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
I'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 sacrificial 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 never justifies the means.

- [Man] She's passed out.
- I'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 our journey,

I'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 desperate John 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 what Jane 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...

and Jean 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.

A journalist 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!

- Against Jews! 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 by John 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
Of The 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 Of The Road
was about teenagers who had
been forced to leave home...

to find work because their parents
lost their jobs 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 the Jewish 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, the Jewish 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 portraying J.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 my Jersey 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.

Voilà!

- ####[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]
With John 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 by John 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 by John 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
to John 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.