ONE of the major weapons against boredom these days is the joyless rumination one can expend over the success in the “culture underground” of efficient, hard-working mediocrities who threaten to wipe out the whole idea of “felt,” committed art. I am referring to the revolution that is occurring simultaneously in jazz (Brubeck, Guiffre, Getz); painting (Rivers, Kline, Hartigan, Brooks); the novel (Salinger, Bellow, Cheever); and films (Chayefsky, Delbert Mann, Kazan). The revolution that has introduced a “new” type into what is known as advanced, radical, experimental, progressive, or, simply, avant-garde art. The figure who is engineering this middle-class blitz has the drive, patience, conceit, and daring to become a successful nonconforming artist without having the talent or idealism for rebellious creation. The brains behind his creativity are those of a high-powered salesman using empty tricks and skills to push an item for which he has no feeling or belief. Avant-gardism has fallen into the hands of the businessman-artist.
The similarities between a Rivers diary-type abstraction, a Brubeck jazz record, and the Lumet-Rose film Twelve Angry Men are startling. Each work presents a clever, racy surface, peppered with enough technical smash and speed to make any spectator suspect he is in the presence of a disturbing original talent. However, nothing is explored in depth: Washington does not cross the Delaware in Rivers’s famous painting; in fact, this badly composed work barely makes it to a stage of tasteful joie de vivre (tentative cobwebby lines, messy water color, and open canvas) that every painting crosses in its early, more facetious moments. By removing the soul from creativity and leaving an easy-to-read exposé of modernity, Rivers paints what amounts to a come-on for every clerk who dreams of greatness in a more romantic occupation. Anyone with necessary brass, drive, restlessness, and lack of taste can not only play the game but become a champion.
An interesting thing about these artists is that they are wonderfully neat and quick technicians. The new jazzmen—Guiffre, Getz, Brubeck—are unbelievably deft and crisp in their run-on gimmicks with instrument and composition. But, by removing everything in accomplishment that gets in the way of technique, they have landed a long way from that which had been planned for progressive jazz by its founding fathers. Without the human involvement and probing of Parker’s sax-playing—the pain-wracked attack, as well as the playfulness and sudden spurts of wildly facetious slang—Getz turns the baritone sax into a thing that can be easily mastered, like a typewriter.
It is a mild pleasure simply watching TV director Sidney Lumet’s control in Twelve Angry Men, bringing a hundred tiny details of schmaltzy anger and soft-center “liberalism” into a clean mosaic. His pointed control and swift exploitation of the beadlike detail is dazzling compared to the slow, camera-milked style of a more perceptive and meticulous Huston, who takes an age of screen time to get across the idea of a stomach growl. In Giant, the ponderously traditionalist craftsman George Stevens deliberates through reels of finicky realism to build a slum background for Mexican peons, while Lumet works the same sentimental route to a do-gooder’s heart with one line of Reginald Rose dialogue. Within the Stevens triteness (Elizabeth Taylor descending like Miss Nightingale on the poor little adobes of Poker Flat), there are a hundred minor thrills of coloring, tone, texture, time, sunlight, and architecture that are far beyond Lumet’s moderate Philco-Hour technique. Nevertheless, it is the shrill tingle of Lumet’s counterfeit moviemaking that is helping to drive the Stevens type of architectural craftsmanship into obsolescence.
The most morbid fact about the “revolutionists” is that their leaders are made artists, basically blacksmiths who have acquired expedient techniques through long hours of insensitive hard work. Obvious examples of the deadly hand with craft are the current champions of avant-garde fiction whose near best sellers are basically the products of a stale, conservative charm camouflaging an immeasurable vacuity of thought. This “New Yorker–Partisan Review axis” writer has built an impressive and odious style that has the solemnity and emptiness of a small-town library room. It features words that are anchored to the page by lead weights, characters who are wobbly, unrecognizable reconstructions of chic art attitudes, and ideas impossible to understand because they come out of a fog of stupidity.
It is hard to say where the business mind first entered the door of modern American creativity. Tracing its antecedents is like working backward across a terrain of quicksand, but one fact keeps thrusting forward: in the rise of cold, short-stack, grounded Macy’s artistry, there is an aroma of mean commercial competitiveness.
The new ultrasmooth “radicals” have succeeded on no art front as quickly as they have in films, where fourth-rate talents in compressed flurries of artiness have made the crucial films of the giant screen. The crews responsible for these films are mostly exiles from Broadway, who developed a rigid, eclectic movie technique to go with mean-spirited “liberalism” that always pretends it is being wonderfully kind, curious, and civic-minded about people from the Upper Bronx, Lower Manhattan, and Piggott, Arkansas. The group discussed here (writers Serling, Chayefsky, Willingham, Schulberg, Rose, Lehman and directors Delbert Mann, Ritt, Mulligan, Lumet, Frankenheimer, Cook, Garfein) started its rise in 1955 with Marty, a souped-up, genteel counterfeit of the quaint Preston Sturges–Sam Fuller B-film technique, and continued through a string of successes, each a slightly rougher snap version of something that was controversial in the art of the 1920’s and 1930’s.
The most immediate effect in each of their hits is that of seeing a fast copy of some art image from the past. In Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, there is a preciously knitted shot of two distant silhouette figures walking up a lonely rural road through an atmosphere that suggests barley-textured sunlight, a stock exit that has been a pet of many semigenuine artists (including Chaplin). In the new eclectic style, familiar angles engulf the entire story structure. The social conscience ping-pong in Twelve Angry Men is heavily indebted to Steinbeck’s tender concern for infinitesimal underdogs. A Face in the Crowd makes a lunging sophomoric attempt to show up the boobs and crackpots connected with “jes’ plain folks” programs, recalling Sinclair Lewis’s caricaturing and Henry Miller’s candid, slapstick sex. The Broadway vultures in The Sweet Smell of Success plot each other’s destruction with fancy dialogue that bounces Clifford Odets into Damon Runyon and Molly Goldberg. The slick-magazine psychoanalysis of a lonely traitor in The Rack and a deranged ballplayer in Fear Strikes Out take you back to the late 1930’s, when movies like Blind Alley were bringing Freud to proletarian art.
The most painfully amusing thing about this devotion to “ancient” modern art is that it also borrows from the big era in TV drama, the early 1950’s, which gave the world Chayefsky, Reginald Rose, and many other businessmen “radicals.” The scripts that are fed into the noisy films about New York employ concision and coercion maneuvers that were invented so that a full-scale drama could be squeezed in between the commercials of such hour shows as the Kraft Cheese program. By using these same maneuvers in full-length films, the picture-makers have invented a new type of play-movie and also managed to produce the most vertical movies in film history.
The story is unfolded by savage emotionalizing and trouble-injecting dialogue while two people are in between the events of life (i.e., walking from the cloakroom of the 21 Club to the table of the big-shot columnist). As in the Dr. Rex Morgan comic strip, life is a horrible mess that transpires in the speeches of upright citizens who seem to be glued against a gray backdrop that is always underlit and hard on the eyes. Their run-on speeches (“I don’t know what’s the matter with me, I keep getting so depressed. I’m going to quit night school. My nerves are shot”) invariably touch some trouble that is supposedly bothering each spectator in the theater. For this reason, many people, including the critics of The New Yorker and Time, think the movies are full of “ideas”—“disturbing,” “offbeat,” and even “three-dimensional.”
Nevertheless, the basic fault of the New York film is that it has no living at all. Though the screen is loaded with small realities—flickering hands, shadows, grunts, squirms, spinal sag, lip-clenching, an old brassiere in a bum’s suitcase, homely first names like Sidney and Charley repeated endlessly—the New York films seem to shriek for one ordinary casual action, realistically performed, such as Bogart’s succinct repairs on the overpopulated tank in Sahara.
No matter how hard the actors try to hide under a mantle of ordinariness, an extraordinary conceit pours from them in timing, emphasis, posture, and mood. It shows up in the smirking, overcooked accent of a pregnant wife in a housing project. It even creeps into the unusually humble acting of Henry Fonda, who, as a tender-hearted intellectual on the jury of Twelve Angry Men, knocks off his Nero Wolfeian crime analyses as though he were swatting flies. The actors and directors of these New York films tunnel through problems as though they were made of paper. In The Sweet Smell of Success, the dialogue spills out of realistically mannered mouths before you expect it. The “dumb-blonde” cigarette girl minces and whines in a quick unfolding as though she had been cranked like a toy. Newspapers are read and flung away in a violently stylish way and the frozen-lipped delivery of repartee makes the columnist look like a pompous orangutan. It is inconceivable that this high-glossed, ultrasophisticated drama hinges on a dope-planting act in a nightclub that is carried on with as little difficulty as water has finding its way through a sieve. The self-confidence of these new picture-makers is of a kind that feels the audience’s eye will accept anything, no matter how dull or unconvincing, if it is dressed up in some sort of trappings borrowed from “Art.”
The characters in New York films are usually nonentities, the kind that have been filmed only occasionally, as in Preston Sturges’s earliest low budgets—a meek old man whose only individuality is a horrible glint of self-satisfaction in his eye, an untalented baton-twirler who has nothing except a determined leg kick and a hawklike opportunism in her limply pretty high-school face. Starting with something in their favor, these faceless characters remind you of the dried-up, joyless atavisms inhabiting the great comic strips of middle-class defeat: “Out Our Way,” “Boarding House,” “The Bungles,” “Colonel Hoople.” After being mauled by what Life and the New York Post call “New Talent,” these average characters are the most schmaltzed-up, pushy group of unlikables to cross the screen, far worse than the money-soaked glamour that traipsed up and down the Georgian staircases of MGM and Irving Thalberg.
The New York films, which make an almost useless item of the camera, are carried to popularity by their pop-pop-pop type of masochistic acting, which is usually in the hands of Strasberg-influenced performers. The idea behind their florid act is to exploit the worst in people until the effect is like spit, pus, or garbage. The idea of intense character criticism is all right, but the way the New York films do it is close to sickening. No matter how modest or quiet the acting seems—Paul Newman’s traitor in The Rack or Pat Hingle’s hard-rock plebe in The Strange One—there is a priggish, superior-smart feeling underlining the performance and making it unbearable. When these actors put a character under the light, the result is apt to be a comic-strip characterization rather than a movie figure. The bulges, bumps, and bubbling in Newman’s doubting, worrying, unaggressive soldier are like the short-stroked venom that is scratched into the form of a Colonel Hoople. Though the figure is in constant play, there is no movement or characterization. Newman’s job is made up solely of torment, much of it interesting and all of it irrelevant to the idea of a continuously developing, forming personality.
Except for a few interesting situations like the delicately drawn web of secretarial malice, jealousy, and insecurity around a water cooler in Patterns, the most obvious ruts are followed to expose types that have been victimized in American art as far back as Horatio Alger. It is actually a comic-strip world for stereotyped victims—the domestically hounded bookkeeper, slug-headed football star, pimple-brained ball fan, oily fixer—with acting clichés piled on top of a stock character. In sparking two films with his baseball-rowdy bit, Jack Warden does fascinating things with scorn and world-weariness, but his basic attack is so rancidly corny as to kill the mobility of the role. There is only one word to describe such inverted acting that whipsaws nothing but triteness, the word being “corrupt.”
Also, the acting has so much pitch and roll that there is overflow with each performance. From Pat Hingle (mild smirking), Ben Gazzara (facial showboating), Tony Perkins (coy simpering fragility), Don Murray (boyish earnestness), Anthony Franciosa (well-oiled glibness), E. G. Marshall (superiority), John Cassavetes (aggressive conceit), and Paul Newman (surreptitious modesty), the spectator gets a load of self-consciousness along with the piles of role-bitching sawdust. Thus, one of the neatest jobs in New York films, Lee Remick’s ungifted, eye-wandering baton-twirler in A Face in the Crowd, is marred by a slight knowingness that surrounds an otherwise unpolished sex-bomb miniature living in a small-town nowheres. Another good effort, the nonactorish playing of academy troublemakers in The Strange One, is nearly ruined by Gazzara’s self-satisfied pantomime and three bit players who use banality to plug up the slapdash generalizing of Willingham’s script. The result: there hasn’t been a dumber “dumb tackle,” a more weasely crawler, a snottier mamma’s-boy snot. For people who like the taut, life-worn fluidity of Dailey-Nolan-O’Brien-Marvin-Cagney-Bogart-Armstrong-Darro-MacLane acting, the New York film portraiture, which made its debut in some early Judy Holliday films, sweats too much around the edges.
The Kazans and Schulbergs of the “Talent Revolution,” who glory in their grasp of American ordinariness, are incapable of touching any figure or locale with warmth, charm, or respect. Where modestly skillful Pat Neal is ground into tightness by the Kazan-Schulberg brass knuckles in A Face in the Crowd, the fate of newcomer Andy Griffith, who plays a cute hillbilly crashing his way to the top of TV and then falling off, is more like massacre. Off his comically “hick” records of a few years back, Griffith should be a close fit for the soft-shoe backwoods joker, a-wailin’ and a-wanderin’ Rhodes, who is supposed to be the hero-villain of this barrel-house epic. Instead, Griffith is put in a hyperbolic strait jacket by Kazan’s predilection for “mean-animal” acting; only one scene—Rhodes’s first encounter with the camera—is played close to the truth of the Ernie Ford type of left-field TV entertainer.
In that scene, as Griffith cuddles with the technicians, makes obvious jokes about the complicated TV machinery, and likens the camera eye to his uncle’s drink-soused orb, he scores the only troubling notes in a boringly seething film. In mid-stride, the scene then crumbles into a Capraesque carnival of hokey “documentary shots”—little Americans throwing coins at the needy; Negroes in silent gawking at Rhodes’s democratic “dare” and sure-shot confidence. The professionally sly fumbling and stop-go improvising of the hayseed smoothie is never again seen in a film that is supposedly dedicated to revealing the hypnotism of such performers.
These new ambassadors to Hollywood concentrate on the fleetingly seen situation and itinerant figures that must supply most of the immense backlog of material that feeds into dreams. The situations are like stray bits of nothing picked up out of the corner of the eye: the party of drunken office workers at the largest table in a crowded Italian restaurant, a mysterious conversation amongst jazz buffs in the dark alley behind a nightclub, an attempted pickup in the center of a jammed subway car, the jazz-infected body of a slim delinquent stretched across the stairway in a precinct station-house, a tourist couple seen at the end of a hotel hallway, evidently teetering on the edge of some problem. Each film has one or two expanded episodes that break the rhythm of these veiled impressions, a big scene that usually involves a complicated attempt at prostitution, promiscuity, or, as in A Face in the Crowd, some long-distance wooing that transpires between a judge and contestant in a baton-twirling contest at the local football stadium. It is in these big-deal moments, where the movie suddenly switches from quickly gimmicked sketches to a fully developed event, that the New York film technique shows up in all of its rickety melodramatic thinness.
Though the New York films like the side-of-the-eye perception, each director makes sure that his film is cluttered with classy examples of “self”-expression. Thus, it is not hard to locate those effects that show the director breathing hard on the story. In each film, one notices that the handling—Delbert Mann’s use of spongy acting in an otherwise stiff nighttime scene, Mackendrick’s svelte, speeded-up stylizations of the “money-mad American” cliché, Garfein’s heavily ironic direction of actors, which seems to stretch characters to a stock Greek-tragedy size—is as sleek as glass, and that it differs from old-fashioned Hollywood direction in that the style parades in front of the film instead of tunneling under a seminaturalistic surface. In other words, from Mulligan’s ethereally delicate ballplayer to Mackendrick’s mannered columnist, the salient effect is preciousness.
In each story, a marred character stumbles heavily over most of the hurdles, eaten up by a fashionable sickness, like megalomania, a hunger for great financial security, a cowardice brought on by the absence of parental love. An Iago-type hipster, in The Strange One, runs a military academy as though it were an easy game of sadistic checkers. A ballplayer breaks down under an unbearable perfectionist load placed on him by a demanding father. A shrewd personnel manager rises like helium in a Wall Street firm while despising the tactics of his patron saint and boss. One doesn’t mind the crawling acceptance of cures, motives, troubles that have been rubber-stamped by endless usage in fiction and plays as much as the mechanical feints made at the idea of human complexity.
The most consistently used maneuver in these scripts is the one that throws a switch on characterization. It is predictable that the hard, sure, convoluted sadist in a Southern academy will at some point show a small-scale worry, cowardice, and need for friendship; that the malevolently biased cop will be switched to simply an overworked humanist; that the outspoken “geetar” player, who befriends a homeless Negress at 2 A.M. on the corner of Beale and Handy, will end up shouting incredibly written filth—“dressed-up black monkeys”—at his help.
But the most tiresome of all Chayefsky-Willingham-Rose maneuvers is the voyeurlike use of supposedly daring material. Manhattan types are always tiptoeing towards a seamier LIFE but never opening its green door. Prostitutes, lesbians, bathroom culture, sordid bedroom setups, strippers, pornography, and immoral cops move into the orbit of the central characters so that the production team can mince, tickle their toes in the kind of subject that is supposed to give an enormous boost to those who want to reach the avant-garde circle. The peak of movie-script boredom is reached when, in the long Bachelor Party funeral through Greenwich Village, a groom’s sex trouble is taken up every stair of a prostitute’s walk-up, through tons of fear, nausea, and doubt and finally taken downstairs, without encountering one detail that could “realistically” occur anywhere in the world. In terms of all-around inflexibility and genteel observation, the whole scene is reminiscent of the insipid, stiff jerkiness of Charley Chase boxing in two-reel comedy with Jim Jeffries.
Although the new TV exiles to Hollywood are cagey and deft in their social-conscience sell, the New York films, at their best, do a cold deviling of the middle class. Chayefsky creates an unbearably cute prison camp in which pale-gray New Yorkers are humiliated intellectually, shrunk in courage, robbed of wit and grace, given a variety of Freudian pimples and scars, and generally misused in a tender way. There is a half-minute bit in Twelve Angry Men in which the halo-wearing minority vote on the jury, a pinch-faced architect (Henry Fonda), is seen carefully drying each fingernail with a bathroom towel. It is a sharply effective, stalling-for-time type of adverse detailing, showing the jury’s one sensitive, thoughtful figure to be unusually prissy. Unfortunately, this mild debunking of the hero is a coldly achieved detail that sits on the surface of the film, unexplored and unimportant. After being exposed to such overplanned thrusts at a host of enemies—prejudice, stupidity, Madison Avenue affectation, sadism, meek conformity, perfectionism—the spectator leaves the theater feeling mildly entertained by clever craftsmanship, and slightly ill from swallowing rancid education in good citizenship.
The same type of repetition that drives TV fans crazy during the commercial is used in “New Talent” films. One trip to the market of trouble isn’t enough for Chayefsky’s Little Fear character; he keeps cutting back, circling, returning to the same trouble, until you feel he’s caught in a series of revolving doors. In The Young Stranger, the handsome bowlegs (James MacArthur), who punches a movie-owner and ends in a police court, keeps renewing the experience. A worried indigestion (Begley) in Patterns keeps swallowing pills for heart sickness and feeling guilty about not taking the kid to see the Giants. The peculiar note in this repetition, which gives a treadmill effect to the scenario, is that it is played with the overstated vehemence of a TV spieler. The actors—Begley, MacArthur, Tony Curtis, who, as Sydney in The Sweet Smell of Success, breaks the Olympic record for fast acting—don’t chew their roles so much as storm past them, like a train going through a nightmare tunnel that never ends, and with a grating monotony about the forward-motion performance, in which actions and words seem hardly to affect the acting. One leaves these films with a buzzing head, plus a feeling that the jingle-jangle of hard-sell cinema is a long way from the complicated art of simple picture-making, as it has been employed by the unrecognized Hawks, Walsh, Anthony Mann, and John Farrow.
The worst TV play has more on-the-spot invention than the best hard-sell film, and occasionally on TV one notices a Hollywood oldie that is haunting for the fact that it is completely the product of quiet improvisation in the face of a miserable, pulpish story. In such TV “repeats” can be seen the amount of natural, uncompromised picture-making that has been displaced by the new hack saws of artiness. One of the fixtures on TV movie shows, a lovely Raoul Walsh film called The Roaring Twenties, journeys with niggling intricacy and deceptive footwork in a lot of grayed rice pudding, capturing the most poignant aspects of the twenties’ background and movement. One pounds along with a broken gun on walks and fights that are tensely coiled with forlorn excitement. They are not walks so much as anatomical probings of densely detailed backgrounds that give a second level of formed life to a movie about the last throes of Capone-type gangstering.
Watching the detailing and steering in Walsh’s most minor shot of a worn-out chanteuse singing “Melancholy Baby,” the viewer can estimate the damage of the Kazan-Chayefsky tribe. These newcomers, in being so popular and influential, have all but destroyed background interest, the gloved fluidity of authentic movie acting, and the effect of a modest shrewdie working expediently and with a great camera eye in the underground of a film that is intentionally made to look junky, like the penny candies sold in the old-time grocery. In place of the skillful anonymity of Pickup on South Street, The Lusty Men, or The Thing, there is now a splintering and caterwauling that covers gaping holes with meaningless padding and plush.
The mess we are facing in movies and other media promises to be the worst era in the history of art. Not even the ponderously boring periods, similar to the one in which Titian and Tintoretto painted elephantine conceit and hemstitched complication into the huge dress-works affair called Venetian painting, can equal the present inferno of American culture, which is so jammed with successful con men. One can only glance back in wonderment at those sinkings in each art form where the “shrewdster” gained a decisive entrance. In painting, it occurred in the late 1940’s, when certain eruptions combined to bring about a glib turning in avant-garde painting (art-dealer Putzel’s death, stylistic hardening of the introsubjective leaders, arrival of businessmen appreciators like Soby, Sweeney, Kootz, Janis, and backing of the entire radical school by all kinds of high-powered critics and publications).
In movies, the Ice Age started to set in with another weird combination of forces (giving up the experimental “B,” the ultraconservative turn of big shots like Huston, the decline of the action directors, and explosion of the gimmick: big screen, the “liberal” insight, Freudian symbols, arts-and-crafts Wellesian photography). In the case of each medium, the crucial moment occurred when immense popularity became an important factor in the field of difficult, naturally talented expression. At that moment, the businessman-artist appeared with his quick formulas for achieving “daring,” the “original look,” and his skills for maneuvering into, and holding, favorable corners in the world of high culture.
Now that the middle class has found serious art, it is almost impossible for a natural talent—good, bad, or in between—to make any headway. In other words, if you are wondering what has happened to the tough, impersonal, against-the-grain innovator in our times—the type of artist who has the anonymous strength of a Walker Evans, the natural grace of a James Agee, the geographic sense of an Anthony Mann, the bitingly exact earthiness of a J. R. Williams, the suavely fluid humanism of a Howard Hawks—he has been hidden by a fantastic army of commercial fine-artists, little locustlike creatures who have the dedication of Sammy Glick, the brains of Happy Hooligan, and the joyful, unconquerable competitive talents of the Katzenjammer Kids.
November 1, 1957