The Films of 1960: Distrust, Betrayal, and Sex
An article in the Montreal Gazette provides this juicy Matthew Weiner quote:
The culture views the ’60s as this kind of golden glory. The election of John F. Kennedy is memorialized as a time of great innocence. And yet, reading the New Yorker from April 1960 and reading the movie reviews in there of Psycho and The Apartment, I thought to myself, ‘This is not a particularly innocent society.’ We forget that the wave of youth and enthusiasm that swept the country then was decided by about 100 votes.
Psycho and The Apartment? Where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah. Here’s a Mad Men conversation about The Apartment:
Aw, Red, that’s not how it is. Look, it was crude. That’s the way pictures are now. Did you see that ridiculous Psycho? Hollywood isn’t happy unless things are extreme.
Roger Sterling to Joan Holloway, Long Weekend
What were the big movies of 1960? I perused the IMDb (it’s like a home to me) and found:
Psycho
The Apartment
Inherit the Wind
BUtterfield 8
Elmer Gantry
Exodus
Midnight Lace
Little Shop of Horrors
Ocean’s Eleven
Spartacus
The Alamo
Murder, Inc.
Sons and Lovers
The Sundowners
Can-Can
I haven’t seen all of them, but there are some definite themes. They are movies about distrust, betrayal by authority, sexuality, isolation, sexuality that is isolating, religious tyrants, and noble rebellion against oppressive authority.
In the Great Hooker Oscars of 1961, Elizabeth Taylor won the Best Actress award for playing a whore in BUtterfield 8, defeating Shirley Maclaine’s tragic “other woman” in The Apartment; while Shirley Jones won Best Supporting Actress for playing a whore in Elmer Gantry, defeating Janet Leigh’s frankly sexual portrayal in Psycho. Heady stuff, and, while the previous year’s award show wasn’t exactly tame (Suddenly, Last Summer and Anatomy of a Murder saw to that), Ben-Hur, Some Like It Hot and Pillow Talk were considerably more wholesome.
Perversity plays a role in Little Shop of Horrors as well as Psycho. Spartacus and Exodus are optimistic fights against oppression, and praise religion as they fight authority, but Inherit the Wind and Elmer Gantry show the dark side of religious authority, and The Apartment is a screed against institutional authority, which destroys decent men and women unless they fight back.
The overall effect is remarkably dark, even though this is also the year of Pollyanna and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. The world is a dangerous place, twisting us up and spitting us out, turning women into whores and men into slaves and pawns.
For Mad Men Season 2, some interesting movies show up. 1962 gives us:
To Kill a Mockingbird
Lawrence of Arabia
Tom Jones
Hud
Irma La Douce
8 1/2
Lilies of the Field
The Manchurian Candidate
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
A lot of the themes continue, violating social norms, amorality, illicit sexual behavior are all present. The last two movies listed are about lies and divided men; the stories told about them versus who they are. They are Dick Whitman versus Don Draper movies. I think they are the Apartment and Psycho for next season; they paint a picture of some of the mysteries to be revealed.
In addition, two movies that address racism suggest another possible theme of season 2.
June 17th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Hey Everybody! I turned off my computer on Friday night and didn’t turn it back on until now (Tuesday).
Did I miss anything? ; )
June 17th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
I agree with MW. One of my all-time pet peeves is this idea that movies from the fifties were more innocent than the ones that are released today, an assumption that even some film critics will make. When you look at the cynicism underlying The Apartment and Sweet Smell of Success (to pick two New York movies), or Otto Preminger’s clinical descriptions of rape and murder in Anatomy of a Murder, or Billy Wilder’s blistering Ace in the Hole… it doesn’t hold up.
June 17th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
I think that Ace in the Hole and Anatomy of a Murder at least, maybe all four, kind of start with the premise that we are innocent, that there is a true shock quality to the dark cynicism of the rapacious men at the center of these stories.
I think the real difference between then and now is that now we assume the cynicism and aren’t shocked.
June 17th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Hee hee… even Pollyanna had a bit of a look at the dark side of religious authority, and corruption to boot!
June 17th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
I don’t think that’s it, although I agree that there’s a difference. I’m over-generalizing here, obviously; but I think the difference btw something like Psycho and Rob Zombie’s recent Halloween remake (for example; you could pick any number of other movies in the same vein) is that the latter is a self-identified self-conscious slasher movie. It’s in a genre, playing with genre tropes, so the proceedings take place with a set of quotation-marks around everything. Psycho isn’t trying to fulfill any genre expectations (quite the opposite), so it has a sense of reality that later movies lack.
Or, for another example, compare Sweet Smell of Success with your average neo-noir or government conspiracy movie, and the difference is clear. SSoS is about corruption and megalomania, yes, but in ways that were very real in New York City in 1957: Walter Winchell, the inspiration for the movie, was a powerful man who hobnobbed with J. Edgar Hoover and actively participated in the surveillance state that grew around McCarthyism. (I actually think Hoover is as much a target of the movie as anybody.) J.J. Hunsecker’s lifestyle and his dirty tricks are not that outrageous. Most noir-ish movies made in the past ten years (like Sin City, to take the most obvious example) aren’t mirroring reality; they’re aping other older movies.
In brief, I think the difference is that Wilder, Hitchcock, and other Hollywood directors were trying to mirror reality in a much more direct way than Hollywood blockbusters will now. In that way, taking us back to the point of the blog, I think Mad Men fits well in the finest Hollywood tradition.
June 17th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
Also what we have now is this thing call “test” audiences. I don’t believe they existed as such back then. It really takes the “edge” off movies in too many cases. Case example #1 being how the ending to “Fatal Attraction” was changed because of the test audience wanting their “pound of flesh”, as it were. The original ending had much more substance and was far more powerful emotionally, in my opinion.
SPOILER ALERT!
From IMDB:
Original ending had Alex committing suicide while dressed in white, and Dan being arrested for her murder…
(snip)
When preview audiences hated this ending, a new one was shot (where Alex is killed by Dan’s wife with a gun). The original ending still appears in the Japanese release and was added to the US video and laser editions.
June 17th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
I’m not sure your choice of comparisons is fair. Rob Zombie versus Hitchcock? Not so much.
I’d rather compare Sweet Smell of Success to, off the top of my head, Michael Clayton. Are you ever surprised by the depth of evil? Are you meant to be shocked to discover that corporations commit murder? No, it’s part of the backdrop of telling the tale. That’s what I’m talking about.
Or take something truly brilliant and original like No Country For Old Men. There are some shockingly horrific bad guys chasing a decent guy. But the decent guy himself is a cold motherfucker, and this isn’t a movie about sullied innocence. No Country is a good Hitchcock parallel; Josh Brolin isn’t the innocent of Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Knew Too Much, but he’s a decent guy, a family guy, and not a killer. Yet, in No Country, people either know the score, or they’re kind of stupid.
Is Janet Leigh stupid for not knowing the score in Psycho? Not at all. She’s innocent. That’s what I’m talking about.
June 17th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
OG, they definitely had test audiences then. They’d do a “sneak preview” in Oklahoma or someplace, and the audience would fill out comment cards. You can find period footage of people turning in their cards.
Hitchcock hated them, but it’s said that the ending of Suspicion was changed because of them.
June 17th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
I actually like Rob Zombie, and I think he’s a talented director; the comparison wasn’t meant to be one-sided. And I think the same thing is true about No Country for Old Men: it’s absolutely a fantastic movie, but I think the difference btw that and Psycho is more that the audience is assumed to be familiar with the _genre mechanics_, not more cynical about the world. It’s harder to put up with the hero who makes the same dumb mistakes that all the other heroes have made before him. I don’t think that necessarily translates into increased cynicism about the real world.
The same thing is true about Michael Clayton: it’s not surprising that there’s a conspiracy (of sorts) that goes to the highest levels of power, but that’s not because of Watergate (which most audience members wouldn’t remember), it’s because we’ve seen Enemy of the State, and The X-Files, and a bunch of other conspiracy movies. In comparison with SSoS, as I recall the bad guy was caught at the end of Michael Clayton while we have every reason to believe at the end of Sweet Smell of Success that the corrupt power structure will endure.
June 17th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Thanks for that info on test audiences, Deb.
Still, I can’t imagine that they were anywhere near as prevalent as they are now - with audiences being “tested” all around the country and not just in one or two places for the same movie. It’s got to be worse now.
June 18th, 2008 at 6:18 am
ST, interesting point about “genre mechanics;” I see what you’re saying. I think it’s both. Audiences may not remember Watergate, but the disinterest of the American public in the deceptions and corruptions of the current government seems to be in large part because they were expecting it. Watergate (which I do remember) shocked people; “Plamegate” didn’t—although IMO it should have.
OG, I don’t know the answer to that. The studio system was incredibly powerful, and there were far fewer independent filmmakers. OTOH, studios are owned by corporations now, who want to play it safer.
June 20th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
“Psycho isn’t trying to fulfill any genre expectations (quite the opposite), so it has a sense of reality that later movies lack.”
To me, this point says a great deal. There are plenty examples of lurid pop culture from back then. These were things that people saw or read, but didn’t talk about. They didn’t get written about in the New Yorker, or profiled in the New York Times Book Review. Psycho really paved the way for the kind of brutal depictions of life we’d begin to see in movies throughout the 1960s and 70s. No way filmmakers like Frankenheimer, Peckinpah, Penn, and later Craven, Carpenter, Zombie, or even Tarantino get to make the type of movies that they’re famous for, unless Hitchcock makes Psycho first. Even the schlock movies of the time from Roger Corman and others at American International Pictures didn’t have the same harshness about them. Psycho was different. It suggested a kind of grim futility that you just didn’t see in mainstream movies. It was an A-list movie by an A-list director, and released through a major studio. It was graphic, and it was brutal. From then on, movies would be different.
That isn’t to say there haven’t always been dark, cynical movies. Billy Wilder was particularly noted for his, especially Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole, The Lost Weekend, and Double Indemnity. Even his lightest, brightest comedies like Some Like it Hot and The Seven Year Itch had cynical undercurrents. Film Noir emerged as a separate genre in the 1940s as a reflection of the cynicism that was so prevalent in society. Plus there were pulp novels and so-called “comic” books, which also dealt with some of the seamier subjects of the time.
I don’t know where cultural historians and critics got the idea that there was a naivete or innocence about society back then because there were plenty of vehicles that suggested otherwise. Evil, corruption, cynicism–those all existed then, as they do now. The only thing we have today that differs from back then, is thousands of media outlets in search of content—24/7 news coverage needing “if it bleeds, it leads” stories, gossip as journalism, “infotainment.” We’re exposed to so much now, I just think we’re numb. The incessant blood, guts, and gore that make up the daily newscasts are used to sell soap and keep us distracted from the real issues that affect us.