The Brief History of American Film
Special Contribution by Eszter Torma
The Golden Age of American Cinema
When Harvey Wilcox bought a piece of land in Southern California in 1887
and named it ‘Hollywood’, he had no idea that only a few years later filmmakers
would make this spot the movie center of the world. However, it was Thomas
Edison who laid the first milestone in American cinema history by
inventing his Kinematoscope in 1891. In 1894
Among the earliest movie stars we find the impersonation of innocence or
‘
The mild climate and the year-round sunshine drew more and more
filmmakers to
In the 1920s a new genre, the slapstick
comedy started to gain ground in film production with such names as
Fatty Arbuckle or British-born Charlie Chaplin who
eventually became his own star, director, and producer. He developed the
character of the Tramp, a comic but also pathetic figure in overlarge
gentleman’s clothes, bowler hat and grotesquely big shoes, and made several
movies in this role: The Kid (1921),
The Gold Rush (1925), etc. Chaplin
kept making basically silent movies in the sound era as well, e.g. Modern Times
(1936), but his talkie The Great Dictator (1940)
with its caricature of Adolf Hitler was also a popular success. Chaplin’s
greatest rival was the stony-faced Buster Keaton who
always played the perfect scapegoat and was famous for never smiling on screen. His best
film is considered to be Steamboat Bill (1928).
Besides slapstick comedies, the major genres were swashbucklers,
historical films and melodramas, although filmmakers were experimenting with
all kinds of genres throughout the decade.
The premiere of The Jazz
Singer in 1927 launched a new technological breakthrough, the
talking picture, or talkie, with the result that the silent film had
practically disappeared by the 1930s. The careers of many actors were broken as
they could not live up to the demands of this new way of moviemaking. Among
those who survived we find Greta
Garbo, Joan
Crawford, or Gloria
Swanson. Also in 1927, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) was founded and the first Academy Awards (popularly known as Oscars,
after the nickname of the statuette given to the winners) were presented in
February 1929.
The Golden Age of American Cinema: the 1930s to the 1940s
With the appearance of the ‘talkie’ a new era of filmmaking began in
As opposed to today’s practice producers, directors, actors, technicians,
etc. were kept on salaries at the different studios, each studio having its own
personnel. The studios also owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns
where they were able to show their own films. Big business went hand in hand
with infamous relationships and scandals, and by the beginning of the 1930s
In the 1930s also new genres appeared such as the adventure or fantasy
movies. This was the time of Johnny Weissmuller’s
first film, Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), which was followed by Tarzan
and His Mate (1934) and several others. David O. Selznick,
one of the most famous producers of the period, introduced the first classic
monster in movie history, King Kong, in
1933. Another great adventure hit came when Charles Laughton
came to
Another new development of the decade was the horror film. In 1931 the
Hungarian Bela Lugosi
appeared as a vampire in Dracula and Boris Karloff as
the monster in Frankenstein,
laying the foundation of a long tradition. The 1930s also saw the unfolding of
the gangster movie genre with Howard Hawks’ Scarface
(1932), and the Hungarian-born director Michael Curtiz’s Angels With
Dirty Faces (1938).
New movie comedians also surfaced beside Chaplin: such figures appeared
as the group named the Three Stooges in Woman Haters (1934),
and they went on producing slapstick comedies until 1959. The best film of the
popular pair of comedians Laurel
and Hardy, Sons of the Desert, also came out in 1933.
After World War I numerous European artists came to
The greatest year in the 1930s was probably 1939 when such movies
appeared as The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind
(winning eight Oscars that year with British actress Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in the
leading roles), Stagecoach
(directed by John Ford, one of
the finest directors of the time), or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
The 1930s also marked the beginning of the famous feature-length animation film
production of the Disney Company with
the classic Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Other famous cartoons of the
company were soon to follow: Cinderella
(1950), Sleeping
Beauty (1959), and One
Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961).
This was also the decade when the first great stars as we know them
appeared: Clark
Gable, Vivien
Leigh, Katharine
Hepburn, Bette Davis, just to name a few, while others,
for example Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers were best known for their dancing
talents.
As noted above, Alfred Hitchcock came to
1941, the year in which the
Film noir as a genre had its bloom in the 1940s. It expressed the dark
and skeptical mood of the general public through its dark black-and-white
pictures where lights and shadows stand in great contrast to each other, and
disillusioned or corrupt characters. The first film noir to appear in the
In the 1940s, John Ford started to produce his most famous war
movies and westerns (e.g. Fort Apache
(1948), Rio
Grande (1950)), besides the movie adaptation of such literary classics
as The
Grapes of Wrath (1940).
In the late 1940s, early 1950s a paranoid fear of Communism developed in
Hollywood when producers, directors and actors were expected to testify on Communist
activities within the industry. Many artists were accused and put on the
blacklist (the existence of which has always been denied officially) and banned
from working in
The end of the 40s also brought the end of the studio system, which was
marked by the federal antitrust action separating the production of films from
their exhibition. This meant that the studios had to give up their theater
networks and had to depend solely on production.
In the 1950s television became cinema’s greatest rival. In order to keep
their audiences, studios started to produce big-scale spectacular widescreen
films that could only be shown in movie theaters. At the same time, as the
novelty of television declined, audiences realized that it was the cinema that
provided the sort of quality entertainment they were looking for, and the
number of viewers began to rise again. Also, the 1950s and 60s marked the end
of the Production Code thus more challenging topics, such as sexuality and
violence, were also allowed to be filmed.
Ever since the 1950s American films are divided more and more into two
categories: blockbusters and independent films. Studios tend to make expensive,
star oriented, spectacular films whereas independent filmmakers are regarded to
be more innovative and quality driven, as they do not depend on the studios’
money.
In the decade of the 1950s, new, rebellious heroes emerged: James
Dean, Paul Newman, and Marlon
Brando along with their female colleagues Kim Novak and Marilyn
Monroe. Brando’s first famous appearance was in A
Streetcar Named Desire (1951) for which he also received an
Oscar nomination. Dean played his most remembered role in Rebel Without a Cause
(1955).
The age of rock and roll created a new kind of music film,
starting with Rock
Around the Clock (1956). Elvis
Presley’s first appearance in a film came in 1956 with Love Me Tender,
and continued with Jailhouse Rock
(1957) and other films all the way into the late 60s. Among the most successful
musicals of the decade we find An American in Paris
(1951), Singin’
in the Rain (1952, depicting the difficulties silent film actors
had to face when talkies came to be popular) with Gene Kelly in the
leading role, The King and I
(1956) and Porgy
and Bess (1959). Besides musicals, spectacular epics also had a
bloom in the 50s beginning with The Robe
(1953), The Ten
Commandments (1956), Ben Hur (1959)
starring Charlton Heston and
winning eleven Oscars out of twelve nominations, and Spartacus
(1960) with Kirk Douglas in the
leading role.
The 1950s also saw the adaptation of the major contemporary dramas, such
as Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Managerie (1950), A Streetcar Named
Desire (1951) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958),
or Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1951).
To continue the epic tradition of the 1950s, 20th Century Fox
decided to make Cleopatra in 1963, with Elizabeth
Taylor as Cleopatra and Richard
Burton as Marc Antony. While the epic turned out to be a flop, the
musical and comedy genres proved to be more successful among the audiences by
this time. One of the greatest and sweetest actresses in these genres was Audrey Hepburn who won the Best Actress
Award for Roman
Holiday (1953) in which Gregory Peck acted as her well-suited partner. Her career was
also notable in the 1960s when she shot Breakfast at Tiffany’s
(1961) and the musical My Fair Lady (1964)
with Rex Harrison at her
side. Other notable music films of the decade were the adaptation of Doctor Dolittle
(1967) also with Harrison, the partly animated Disney classic, Mary Poppins
(1964) and the by now classic The Sound of Music
in 1965 both starring Julie Andrews, and West Side Story
(1961), a modern version of Romeo and Juliet in a contemporary New York
setting.
It was in the 1960s that Stanley
Kubrick established his position as one of the most famous
auteurs of the century. If his war
drama Paths of Glory
(1957) was considered controversial, then his films Lolita (1962),
the scandalous story of an adult man’s pedophile passion for an underage girl,
or Dr.
Strangelove (1964), a dark satire about the outbreak of the
nuclear Third World War, aroused even more heated criticism but also a lot of
critical acclaim. His greatest masterpiece is considered to be 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968) which is widely hailed as the greatest science-fiction film ever made.
In the late 1960s Kubrick moved to
One of the decade’s masterpieces was Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde
(1967) which already showed the weakening of the Production Code: despite its
graphic violence and sympathetic gangsters the film was not banned. Similarly Dustin
Hoffman’s first film The Graduate
(1967), depicting an ambiguous sexual relationship between a young man and an older
married woman as well as rebellion against boring suburban life, turned out to
be a popular success. The code was further undermined in the 1970s.
War movies were also popular in the decade and films like Judgment at Nuremberg
(1961), The
Longest Day (1962) and The Dirty Dozen
(1967), an impossible mission in World War II with John Cassavetes, Telly
Savalas, Donald Sutherland and Charles
Bronson in the leading roles, ran with enormous success.
The period between 1967 and roughly 1980, is called New
Hollywood or post-classical Hollywood, which was marked by
the appearance of a new group of filmmakers, such as Francis
Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George
Lucas, and Martin Scorsese, also called the ‘movie brats’.
This was the time when several new, bold, innovative but also successful films
were made by the young generation. Coppola’s The Godfather
(1972) about the Corleone gangster family ruling in
Two of the most influential horror-thrillers of the decade are William
Friedkin’s The
Exorcist (1973), and Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). George Lucas’ Star
Wars (1977), a science fantasy combining elements of science fiction
stories with traditional fairy-tale motifs, has become one of the biggest
box-office successes of all time, and created a new standard for the industry
by its high-quality convincing special effects. Star Wars later developed
into a trilogy with the release of The
Empire Strikes Back (1980) and The
Return of the Jedi (1983). Three more prequels – the so-called
Episodes I, II and III – were added between 1999–2005.
Lucas went on to produce other blockbusters such as Spielberg’s Indiana
Jones series beginning with Raiders of the Lost Ark
in 1981.
Scorsese’s Taxi
Driver (1976) was the decade’s most shocking film with its new
extremes of violence, showing how a cab driver (Robert DeNiro)
tries to save a 13-year-old hooker (Jodie Foster) after
not being able to find success with ‘normal’ women. The film’s realism and
graphic violence, its depiction of child prostitution and the underworld was
without precedent.
Besides new directors also a new type of actors established themselves in
the era, for example Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, or Dennis
Hopper. Also during this decade the VHS video market developed,
creating a new boom in movie making as many films were now produced that were
not intended for the big screen but already for the new medium.
Woody Allen emerged
in the 1970s as an original comic genius who usually wrote, directed and played
in his own movies. His directorial début came in 1969 with his film Take the Money and Run
and continued with the success of Play it Again Sam
(1972) and Sleeper
(1973). His major breakthrough came with Annie Hall
(1977), a partly biographical love comedy, which won four Oscars in 1978,
including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress in a Leading Role for Diane Keaton. Allen
has continued to produce a seemingly endless series of films ever since, and
although few of them became major box office hits – exceptions are Manhattan
(1979), The
Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Hannah and Her Sisters
(1986) – he developed an international cult following,
particularly in Europe, where his ironic, intellectual, self-doubting brand of
humor is more strongly appreciated. The other outstanding comedy series of the
era was the Pink
Panther series with brilliant British comedian Peter Sellers as
bumbling French Inspector Clouseau. The first movie was The Pink Panther
(1963) followed by three sequels in the 1970s until the death of Sellers.
Just like each decade, the 1970s also had its successful musical films,
but light-hearted traditional musicals gave way to more dramatic and darker
stories like the persecution of Eastern European Jews in Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
or the rise of Nazism in
In the 1980s it is difficult to discover any new trends in the film
industry as filmmakers tended to depend on the success plan developed in the
previous decade, making spectacular disaster epics, action and adventure
stories, or buddy movies. This was also the time of MTV that created a new
generation of moviegoers. The first producer to exploit this trend was Don
Simpson who made Flashdance
in 1983. The film tells the story of Alexandra Owen (Jennifer Beals) who works
at a construction site during the day and dances at a bar at night, but she
really dreams of being a ballet dancer. Flashdance
was not the only movie about women transforming on the dance floor, as the
audience could also witness Baby in Dirty Dancing (1987)
turning into a ballroom dancer by the help of Johnny (Patrick Swayze) against
the will of her parents.
Simpson also started a new kind of film genre, the buddy movies, by
releasing Beverly
Hills Cop in 1984. The film starred Eddie
Murphy whose other buddy action comedies, 48 Hrs. (1982) and Another 48 Hrs. (1990) were also great
favorites of the time. Lethal
Weapon (1987), the
first of a 4-part sequence about a bold and sometimes suicidal widower police
officer (Mel
Gibson) and his aging partner (Danny Glover) also became one of the most
popular action comedies of the 80s and 90s. Although in the Die Hard sequel (1988-1995) we only find one,
lonesome hero, a
Beside action comedies, many significant Vietnam war
movies were also released. Among them we find the first part of the Rambo
series, starring Sylvester
Stallone. The first movie shows the difficulties and persecution of
a former
Other characters in movies were fighting against different evils,
imaginary monsters. The horror genre was blooming in this period. Among the
most important sequels we find A Nightmare on Elm Street
(1984-2003), introducing the monstrous Fred Krueger (Robert Englund) with his
dirty green-grey shirt and glove with sharp knifes as fingers, killing those to
whom he appears in their dreams, Friday
13th (1980-2003) or Halloween
(1978-2005) which begins with a six-year-old boy brutally killing his sister on
Halloween night, and fifteen years later, as he escapes from the mental
institution, he continues what he started.
Seeing the success of the Star Wars sequence, Spielberg set out to
direct another sci-fi fantasy, E.T. the
Extra-Terrestrial (1982), about the adorable alien who after
being stuck on Earth is found by the ten-year-old Elliot. Eventually Elliot
helps E.T. contact his species and he is taken away from Earth while Elliot
stays here. After this successful movie, the production of the Back to the Future
sequel (1985, 1989, 1990) brought Spielberg even more
fame as audiences found traveling back and forth in time a fascinating idea,
especially in the comic way it is illustrated in the film. Other popular
science-fiction or cartoon based stories of the time were James Cameron’s The Terminator
(1984) and Tim
Burton’s Batman
(1989) which also turned out to be a sequel all the way into the late 1990s. In
all these movies the studios were concentrating on blockbusters with famous
stars, simple stories stuffed with more and more special effects that
‘everybody had to see’ regardless of the films’ real quality or meaning.
Beside sci-fi and horror films, we can of course find popular films with
serious themes, among them Milos Forman’s surprise hit Amadeus (1984),
about Mozart the great composer. In 1988 Rain Man won
four Oscars, among them the Best Actor in a Leading Role award to Dustin
Hoffmann, who provides a fascinating performance in the role of the autistic
Raymond. Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy
(1989) starred the then 81-year-old Jessica Tandy who
received an Academy Award for her role as Miss Daisy. The film is set in the
South before the civil rights movement and tells the story of an old lady and
his African American chauffeur in a society full of prejudices. For younger
audiences Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society
(1989) was a movie of major significance, showing how an unconventional
teacher, John Keating (Robin Williams)
teaches his students to stand up for themselves, form their own ideas, and find
their own ways no matter what those around them think about it.
It was in the late 1980s and early 1990s that independent films (or ‘indies’)
became more and more successful. The term independent film covers movies that
are made by uncompromising directors and writers who make low-budget original
films outside the studio system. The new generation of independent filmmakers
includes Spike
Lee, Steven Soderbergh, and Quentin
Tarantino just to name the most significant. Soderbergh proved his
talent and independence from mainstream movie making by sex, lies and videotape
(1989) and his breakthrough Erin Brockovich
(2000, bringing an Oscar to one of the decade’s most famous actresses, Julia
Roberts). The film is about an unemployed single mother who gets a
job at a lawyers’ office and eventually discovers how a powerful company
poisons the water of the town of
Other than the independents, already acknowledged directors were also
active in the decade. Among them we need to mention again Steven Spielberg and
George Lucas. Spielberg’s Jurassic Park
(1993) and The Lost
World: Jurrasic Park (1997) about the re-creation of long lost
dinosaurs was a great success by the audiences, while his films Schindler’s List
(1993), about a German businessman who saved over 1000 Polish Jews from death
camps in World War II, and Saving Private Ryan
(1998), a shockingly realistic account of the Omaha Beach landing on June 6,
1944, hit a much more serious tone. George Lucas, on the other hand, based his
filmmaking on the success of the Star Wars fantasy
saga and created the so called prequel trilogy, that provided the beginning of the story filmed in the 1970s
and 1980s. The three part of the trilogy are The
Phantom Menace, Attack
of the Clones, and Revenge
of the Sith.
Most of the above mentioned films made increasing use of the developing
digital technology and special effects; animated films ran along a similar
course, utilizing computer-based animation instead of the traditional method,
with great success. The row started with Disney’s Toy Story
(1995, 1999) and Monster
Inc. (2001), continued by the surprise hit Shrek (2001,
2004) about the ugly but charming green monster, and 20th Century
Fox’s Ice Age (2002,
2006) in which animals are fleeing from the ice age by searching for a warmer
climate, while a mammoth, a ground sloth, and a saber-toothed cat try to save a
human baby. While animated films have been very popular, the declining musical
genre has been carried on by Walt Disney’s famous cartoons, such as the The Little
Mermaid (1989), The
Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992),
and The Lion King
(1994).
Aside from light entertainment serious themes were also present in the
filmmaking of the 1990s. One of the most popular of these movies was Philadelphia
(1993), a story about a young homosexual who gets fired because he contracts
AIDS and sues his own company for it. The title role brought Tom Hanks an
Academy Award, which was followed by another Oscar already the year after that
when he played the main character in Forrest Gump
(1994), a hilarious satire on post-war American history. Another talented actor
of the decade was Australian-born Russel Crowe, who
starred in two Oscar-winning movies in successive years, first in Gladiator
(2000) and then in A Beautiful Mind
(2001) in which he plays John Nash, the talented but schizophrenic
mathematician. Of course,
Although the decade started with the chilling thriller Silence of the Lambs
(1991) with Anthony Hopkins and Jodie
Foster in the leading roles, receiving several award nominations,
and was followed by success films as seen above, the greatest box-office hit of
the decade was James Cameron’s Titanic (1997).
The film is about the disaster of the famous cruiser in 1912 with a touch of
romance, and it won 11 Oscars sharing this achievement in film history with
only Ben-Hur. Although Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ
(2004), about the last twelve hours of Jesus Christ, did not win so many
awards it was still one of the most debated films released after 2000.
At present audiences seem to be interested in the magical, fairy tale
world of J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling. The sequels
adapted from their novels The Lord
of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003), the great epic battle between
good and evil, with Frodo Baggins, the ring bearer in the center, and Harry Potter
(2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007), about the adventures of the young wizard in the
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, rule presently both the market and
the Annual Academy Awards celebrations.
Sources:
http://www.filmsite.org/filmh.html