Moving forward in Mark Cousin’s The Story of Film, we’ve reached the mid 1950’s. By now, the rise of television in America was making a definite impact on Hollywood. Film-going in the US, which was at its peak in 1946, was declining, especially now that TV sets were affordable to the public. And television was going through its original “Golden Age”, broadcasting early, classic sitcoms like I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, and high quality, dramatic anthology series written by people like Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose, Gore Vidal, & Rod Serling. But even with gimmicks like 3-D and the use of widescreen cinematography offering moviegoers something they couldn’t get on TV, Hollywood would never fully recover its lost audience.
Not that Hollywood wasn’t trying to find new audiences. When pictures like Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without A Cause and The Blackboard Jungle, dramas about the “juvenile delinquency problem,” ended up appealing to teenagers as well, studios began looking for ways to tap into the “youth market.” Glossy melodramas like Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows and Magnificent Obsession were marketed as “women’s pictures” to lure in female audiences, who were often surprised by the film’s tragic plotlines and social criticism. And while Westerns remained an audience draw, they developed a darker edge with films like Red River and The Searchers featuring flawed protagonists instead of shining heroes.
But as Hollywood was facing the challenge of a dwindling audience, talented new filmmakers were on the rise in other countries. India’s film industry had been growing since the late 1940’s, beginning what is regarded as the “Golden Age” of Indian cinema. The parallel cinema movement, which focused on social realism, would produce the great Indian film director Satyajit Ray. Like the films of the Italian neo-realists, Ray’s work centered on the poor, dealing with their daily struggles to survive in a deeply classist society. Ray’s first film, the classic Pather Panchali, which tells the story of a young boy growing up in rural Bengal, used non-professional actors to capture the naturalistic feel wanted by the director. The film would be a great success and Ray would direct two more movies, Aparajito and Apura Samsara, following Pather Panchali’s main character Apu.
India was not the only country whose film industry was experiencing a “Golden Age.” The 1950’s would see a wealth of great films released in Japan, with directors like Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story, Floating Weeds) and Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu) producing some of their best work. The ‘50s would also see the rise of one of Japan’s greatest directors: Akira Kurosawa. Though Kurosawa had begun directing in the early 1940s, it wouldn’t be until the end of World War Two that he would direct his first major works, including Rashomon, Ikiru, and his most famous film, the epic Seven Samurai. And all of this was just the first stirrings of a new wave of cinema that would soon reach every corner of the world.
~ Posted by Deanna H.
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