STACK Issue 151 May 2017

22 / 92

22 MAY 2017
consequent sexual revolution, the increasing
recreational use of marijuana, women’s
liberation, the civil rights movement, and
the Vietnam war – shook the foundations
of American society. This was now the Age
of Aquarius, the era of the post-war baby
boomers who had come of age, and there
was no way a formulaic and frothy Doris
Day and Rock Hudson Hollywood movie was
going to attract them to a cinema. Instead,
these college-educated youngsters found
the vibrant realism of European new wave
films with a sociopolitical commentary more
relevant and more to their taste.
Jean-Luc Godard’s French gangster
movie Breathless was still drawing in New
York audiences two years after its US
debut, as were the British “kitchen sink”
dramas. Look Back in Anger, Room at the
Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
and A Taste of Honeyoffered detailed
examinations of controversial subjects like
pre-marital sex, abortion, and homosexuality.
As far as young American moviegoers were
concerned, Hollywood’s answer to these
realistic European films throughout that
decade appeared to be the likes of pretty little
Debbie Reynolds singing Tammy and Rex
Harrison talking to the animals.
Even when Hollywood adapted adult
novels for the screen, such as From Here
to Eternity and Butterfield 8, the “adult
content” had to be totally sanitised; all
American films were subjected to the
censorious standards of the Motion Picture
Production Code. Consequently, the films
were stripped of the real meaning contained
in the books that the American public had
been reading for years. To counteract the
rigid code, a few of Hollywood’s old guard
directors had become creative in disguising
the act of sex onscreen, such as moving the
camera from a couple’s clinch to a log fire
that suddenly flares up. More inventive was
the final scene from Hitchcock’s North By
Northwest, where Cary Grant and Eva Marie
Saint are seen embracing on the upper
berth of a train compartment that then swiftly
cuts to the train entering a tunnel. This was
Hitchcock’s unique way of depicting that
the couple’s relationship had actually
been consummated and was, of course,
completely missed by the censor.
The wealth of realistic new wave European
films – that were attracting large audiences
into the US urban arthouses – triggered
a one-man rebellion against the strict
production code that impeded all Hollywood
filmmakers from producing similarly themed
French Nouvelle Vague director, François
Truffaut, had previously described
the traditional French film industry’s
productions as le cinema du papa (Grandad’s
cinema); outdated and outmoded. Truffaut’s
blunt criticism could also equally apply to a
large section of Hollywood’s post-war movie
output. Although the Hollywood studio system
of manufacturing movies and stars was
now defunct, the day to day operation of the
film studios was still in the hands of the old
regime who had founded the system in
the late 1920s. The likes of Adolph Zukor,
Jack Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck were now
well into their seventies and eighties and
many of the films they now independently
financed and distributed reflected their age.
By the early 1960s, family audiences, which
for decades had provided the bread and butter
for the so called “Mom & Pop” neighbourhood
theatres, had practically disappeared –
mainly due to the popularity of television.
Subsequently, family audiences were now
the minority audience, yet over 60 per cent
of Hollywood movies with their ageing stars
and recycled plots were still primarily family-
friendly and pitched at an audience that rarely
came anywhere near a movie theatre.
Massive social upheavals during this
era – such as the Red (Communist) scare,
Cold War tensions, nuclear paranoia, the
assassination of JFK, the birth control pill and
HOLLYWOOD'S
SECOND
GOLDEN AGE
1960-1967
visit EXTRAS FEATURE
Hitchcock’s “phallic scene” from North By
Northwest (1959)
Part 2:
The Beginnings of a New Hollywood
Poster for the British “kitchen
sink drama” Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning (1960)