Hollywood in the Fifties

Take, for instance, Alfred Hitchcock’s run of films from “Strangers on a Train” and “Rear Window” through “The Wrong Man,” “Vertigo,” and “Psycho”; films by Nicholas Ray, including “In a Lonely Place,” “Johnny Guitar,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” and “Bigger than Life“; Anthony Mann’s run of Westerns with James Stewart, plus his “Man of the West” and the graceful, poignant “The Glenn Miller Story“; Douglas Sirk‘s melodramas, including “All that Heaven Allows,” “Magnificent Obsession,” and “There’s Always Tomorrow“; Fritz Lang’s later works, such as “Human Desire,” “The Big Heat,” and “While the City Sleeps.” Otto Preminger created such sharp, ambivalent treasures as “Angel Face,” “The Man with the Golden Arm,” “Bonjour Tristesse,” and “Anatomy of a Murder”; Allan Dwan, who started in 1911, was still in business, making such jarring films as “Slightly Scarlet“ and “Tennessee’s Partner.” Ida Lupino made incisive melodramas, including “The Bigamist“; Jacques Tourneur made “Stars in My Crown“; Robert Aldrich made the ultimate film noir, “Kiss Me Deadly“; Joseph L. Mankiewicz made such sharp and discerning films as “All About Eve,” the medical comedy “People Will Talk,” and the inside-Hollywood melodrama “The Barefoot Contessa,” and got Brando and Jean Simmons to sing, splendidly, in “Guys and Dolls.”

There were Westerns, films noirs, and bullfighting dramas by Budd Boetticher; there were exhilaratingly violent yet tender-hearted films by Samuel Fuller, such as “Pickup on South Street“ and “Park Row” and “Forty Guns”; there were the great comedies of Frank Tashlin (”Susan Slept Here,” “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?“), the many musicals, melodramas, and comedies of Vincente Minnelli (“An American in Paris,” “The Bad and the Beautiful,” “The Cobweb,” “Designing Woman,” “Some Came Running”), the musicals of Stanley Donen (“Singin’ in the Rain,” “The Pajama Game“). John Ford had a run of masterworks that included “The Sun Shines Bright,” “The Quiet Man,” “The Searchers,” and, in 1962, he made the greatest American political film, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance“; in 1960, Jerry Lewis got his start as a director with the wildly inventive “The Bellboy“; Orson Welles made “Mr. Arkadin“ and “Touch of Evil”; and Howard Hawks bracketed the decade with, at one end, “Monkey Business“ and “The Big Sky” and, at the other, “Rio Bravo.”