Part six of Moguls & Movie Stars on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), Attack of the Small Screens (1950-1960), marks the arrival of television. This episode of TCM’s History of Hollywood series premieres on Monday, Dec. 6, scheduled with films including the excellent Marty (1955) starring Ernest Borgnine, Elia Kazan’s biting A Face in the Crowd (1957) starring Andy Griffith as a folksy O’Reilly/Olbermann type TV blowhard (also with Patricia Neal), Sweet Smell of Success (1957) with Burt Lancaster and the maudlin A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).
Among the highlights in this one-hour feature are bits on Lucille Ball, a woman with real studio power in Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer and others including Judy Garland, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock, who, after describing himself as a producer and being asked what he produces, responded with the answer: “goosebumps.” The episode covers an important period of transition in movies, which someone rightly remembers as an “era of philosophical disturbance”, from classic romantic fare to realism with stark, neurotic themes and method actors such as Marlon Brando (On the Waterfront) and Montgomery Clift (Red River). Also covered here: Jimmy Stewart, Jack Warner, James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Stanley Kramer, Sidney Poitier, Burt Lancaster, and the influence of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey.
TCM’s fine host Robert Osborne explains why wealthy comedian Charlie Chaplin was run out of Tinseltown at the age of 63, after it was discovered that the preachy Communist was not an American citizen and therefore did not pay income tax like everyone else. The segment on Walt Disney, who is seriously underreported in this series, is informative, reveling in the Midwesterner’s intermedia interests in creating arts and sciences across multiple platforms and his brilliant plan to finance the creation of Disneyland through a television network (ABC, now owned by the studio that bears his name) featuring his innovative motion picture-driven theme park as a work in progress.
But the series’ problems continue, with a feminist’s attack on actress Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), one of the screen’s most talented comediennes, who is also one of Hollywood’s most innocent victims, reduced here without objection to a tart who “makes women look bad,” an outrageously baseless assertion from a bitter source. I have never heard such an explicit assault on this skilled, feminine actress, one of the few truly deserving of the term movie star, the premise of this television series. Besides more falsehoods about anti-communism, more blather about nothing from Gore Vidal (who offers no value in the series), and a distinct lack of performance and film clips, the most glaring omission is one of the decade’s top box office stars: Doris Day, an immensely talented artist who is completely ignored. But, after the shockingly misogynistic attack on Marilyn Monroe, it’s hard to take this seriously.
For the repeat of this episode on Wednesday, Dec. 8, TCM announced that they plan to run the unforgettable Sunset Blvd. (1950) starring William Holden with Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) starring Cary Grant and Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958) with Disney board member Sidney Poitier and the late Tony Curtis, among other pictures. The series concludes with the next episode, which covers America’s new, emergent cultural depravity: the darkness of the 1960s.