The first movie I can remember seeing was The War of the Worlds (also known in promotional material as H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds). My uncle took me to a neighborhood movie theater (remember those?) in 1953 to see this film directed by Byron Haskin, produced by George Pal, and starring Gene Barry and Ann Robinson.
You know the story: the Martians invade the Earth with cool weapons and flew around zapping humans. All I know is that War of the Worlds blew my mind and made me a movie fan.
In the 1950s, my parents took me and my siblings to mostly Disney movies. It wasn’t until 1957 when another mind-blowing movie wowed me: my uncle took me to see Forbidden Planet! (I was 8 years old.)
While I fell in love with movies in 1950s and early 1960s, Foster Hirsch makes a serious case that the Fifties was the most important decade in Hollywood history: “As the studio system slowly but inexorably unraveled, the traditional seven-year contract also began to be dismantled. Actors, directors, producers, designers, cinematographers, and screenwriters who had the protector of a major studio throughout their careers were suddenly cut loose. ” (p. xvi)
Hirsch asserts that massive changes started in the Fifties and changed the trajectory of the movie industry. “Today’s young audiences have no way of gauging what going to the movies was like in mid-century America. Back then, we saw films in large, architecturally flamboyant theaters designed in a variety of fanciful historical styles ranging from Spanish baroque to Mayan to Egyptian to neoclassical revival to Far Eastern. Unlike the anonymous multiplex auditoriums of the present, single-screen movie houses at midcentury were temples of enteraintment with blinking neon marquees, enticing display cases, and spacious lobbies.” (p. xviii)
Hirsch takes the reader through the strategies the various studios took to adjust to the decade of massive changes. Howard Hughes at RKO released most of his movies in wide-screen SuperScope. Paramount, Warner Brothers, and 20th Century Fox opted for CinemaScope. Bigger was better in screen size. Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Samuel Goldwyn, and other movie moguls grappled with the growing threat of television: “At the end of the war in 1945, there were fewer than ten thousand sets in American homes. By 1949, consumers began to buy televisions at the rate of approximately one hundred thousand every week. By 1950, there were six million sets; a decade later, in 1960, 90 percent of American homes had a television. Thoughtout the decade, as Hollywood struggled to lure patrons back into theaters, the threat of in-home entertainment was relentless. ” (p. xv)
Now with 110 inch flat screen TVs, surround sound, and streaming services, movie theaters seem to be an endangered species. How long can AMC and REGAL survive? GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
PROLOGUE: The Past is a Foreign Country — ix
PART ONE: THE ROOMS AT THE TOP
Showdown at Tiffany’s — 3
The Fox — 32
A madman in charge — 49
All for love — 65
The man you love to hate — 70
The stix nix hix pix … or do they? — 87
Who Is Y. Frank Freeman? — 99
Last man standing — 109
New game in town– 124
PART TWO: RUNNING SCARED
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Cinerama!” — 143
“A lion in your lap, a lover in your arms” — 160
The miracle mirror screen — 192
The finer things/the bottom feeders — 243
Race films — 282
(Out of sight) — 301
PART THREE: THE RED AND THE BLACK
At the Waldorf — 319
The red menace! — 346
On the other hand — 367
PART FOUR: THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD
The senior class (I) — 399
The senior class (II) — 419
New faces (I) — 430
New faces (II) — 445
PART FIVE: LAST RITES
Darker than night — 481
The time for parting — 497
How do pharaohs speak? — 506
Magnificent obsessions — 518
The long distance runners — 538
In the beginning — 551
Epilogue : the lessons of the past — 569
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS — 575
NOTES — 577
BIBLIOGRAPHY — 589
INDEX — 597
Whether your local theater in the ’50s was a lavish “temple of entertainment” probably depended on whether you lived in a large city. There were three second-run houses nearest my WVa hometown at the start of the decade, only one of which survived into the ’60s. The next nearest city had five theaters, one of which tended to show low-rent stuff — by the ’70s, softcore skin movies. I don’t recall any of them as palatial, although all had balconies. At the second-run theater in Montgomery, Friday and Saturday nights tended to draw teenagers who sometimes dumped popcorn from the balcony onto irate viewers in the seats below. The first movie I ever saw, as far as I recall, was THE KING’S JESTER with Danny Kaye. I expect the fortunes of AMC and Regal will fall further with dwindling interest in superhero pictures and the onset of the next pandemic.
Fred, we had a neighborhood movie theater that charged 25 cents for admission to a Saturday Double Feature (plus cartoons!). I spent a lot of Saturdays there in the 1960s. It closed in the 1970s and now it’s a 7-ll.
THE COURT JESTER, not THE KING’S JESTER. Hey, it was 69 years ago. “The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle . . .”
Fred, I think I saw THE COURT JESTER sometime in the Sixties.
Don’t know if it was the first, but the first I remember was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), with Kirk Douglas singing “A Whale of a Tale,” whose lyrics I still remember. In 1957 (I think) my father took me and my brother to see Rodan. The early scenes scared me – I still don’t like the idea of narrow tunnels.
Channel 5 or 9 (can’t remember) in New York had a show called Million Dollar Movie, where they ran the same movie every afternoon for a week from 3:30 to 5:00, then again all day on Saturday. I remember watching King Kong and Mighty Joe Young (“Mr. Joseph Young of Africa!”) over and over, the mediocre Son of Kong, not so much.
Jeff, our local TV stations featured LATE NIGHT MOVIES on the weekends. That’s when films like RODAN, GOZILLA, etc. were shown.
A lot of cities had a Million Dollar Movie offer on a station or another, with the extra appeal being able to call in and win a prize of a certain amount of money…in those days, usually not a million, but as Musk can tell you, a million doesn’t buy what it used to.
Todd, Elon is trying to buy Wisconsin now.
That is the target of my reference, indeed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6pmIA11ilc&list=PLeskMkEaHJYcxsm_e32icLajviKrMLhM_ THE DAILY SHOW on Musky.
I think my first was DADDY LONGLEGS, a strange choice but it might have been DUMBO. After that, I remember going with girlfriends on Saturday afternoon. I still do that today.
Patti, I remember DUMBO. My mother took me and my siblings to a movie theater when we were on vacation in Niagara Falls (we lived in the small town of Lyndonville about 50 miles away). I can’t remember if it was THE CATARACT or THE STRAND–both were beautiful art deco designs. I was impressed because I thought we were in a sumptuous castle!
Speaking of beautiful theaters, I remember going with my mother and grandmother to Radio City Music Hall to see some mediocre movie. But the theater was – and is – gorgeous!
Jeff, Radio City Music Hall knocked me out, too, when Diane, Patrick, Katie, and I went to see the Rockettes a couple Thanksgivings ago! Magnificent building! I can’t believe they wanted to knock it down!
My first movie was a drive-in showing of the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnez comedy THE LONG LONG TRAILER. I was seven and probably fell asleep before the ending (I know my younger brother did and he was pissed when he found out). I only remember being highly amused at one bit, where Desi was driving and asked Lucy for directions: ‘Do I turn left?” “Right.” So he did, right into disaster. I thought this was the height of comedy, which may explain my current sense of humor.
In those days, television had already taken hold, and I was entranced by Hopalong Cassidy and the Saturday morning cartoons; my mother (when she watched) tuned into ART LINKLETTER’S HOUSE PARTY; our elderly babysitter had a thing for DRAGNET, QUEEN FOR A DAY, and BEAT THE CLOCK. Simpler times.
Jerry, my parents took us to the local drive-in occasionally. I remember seeing AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS. My siblings–all younger than me–would fall asleep but I always hung in there until the very end of the movie.
My first theatrical movie was a reissue of Disney’s “Snow White” at the appropriately named Temple Theater in downtown Saginaw, MI (it’s still in business). We had numerous neighborhood theaters throughout my early childhood although all but one had shuttered by the seventies. We were a family of six so most of the movies we saw were at the drive-in for budgetary reasons (with my brother and I hiding under the station wagon’s fold down seats to save a few extra bucks). Now that I thinj about it, most of the movies I saw growing up were of the ABC Move of the Week” variety and a good chunk of them were on the portable B&W on the kitchen counter.
I abhor multiplexes and have refused to visit them since they all installed those ridiculous giant seats and forced me pick my seat before I even entered the theater. Fortunately there are three great vintage theaters within a half-hour drive. The one at the Detroit Institute of Arts is a grandly ornate palace as is the nearby Redford Theater that is decked out in lavish Japanismo style with the stage designed as a huge pagoda.
“War of the Worlds” is my favorite early television memory and I still watch it every year. The restored edition on Blu-ray is stunning.
My current television is modest sized by contemporary standards and that’s just fine for my needs. I have no need for a Jetsons wall screen and most of what the streamers are calling movies don’t interest me in the slightest.
Mainstream theaters may well go extinct but single specialty screens will survive and for people like me that will be just fine. This looks like a great read and I’ll try to find a copy.
Byron, you’ll love HOLLYWOOD AND THE MOVIES OF THE FIFTIES! I’m going to order that restored edition of WAR OF THE WORLDS on Blu-ray right now!
I do also remember seeing DUMBO and PINOCCHIO. And LADY AND THE TRAMP.
Jeff, Diane, when she was about six years old, saw BAMBI (and cried). Months later, Diane’s father–who was a hunter–came home with a deer strapped to his vehicle. Diane took one look and cried to her father: “You’ve killed Bambi!”
Silly Diane. It was Bambi’s father that he killed.
Jerry, you might be right…
I’m not at all sure what was the first film I saw in a theater or drive-in might’ve been, but I was taken to the local Jerry Lewis Theater on occasion as a child in the Boston ‘burbs in the earliest ’70s. Not too much first-rate there, I suspect. Among the earliest films I recall seeing in theaters/dis were such non-masterpieces as WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, DOCTOR DOOLITTLE, and DEATH RACE 2000. Watching the PBS and Kaiser TV stations in Boston gave me a wider access to better films (Conan O’Brien was also heavily influenced by the Kaiser station, Ch. 56’s, film-heavy programming, including the Creature Double-Feature on Sat. afternoons after THE OUTER LIMITS rerun…I think I mostly enjoyed the TOL, but there were some memorable films in the CDF, even good ones on occasion…)…Channel 38 would dig out some interesting baseball-related films with the Sox were rained out (I’d watch films, not the games).
Todd, our local PBS station delivered plenty of classic movies in the Seventies. But when cable TV showed up, the films migrated to the cable networks.
The Criterion Film Collection was spun off from a Boston art theater which was working hand in glove with WGBH in those early years, and the packages were made available to other stations to some extent.
Kaiser, for its part, was interested in putting money into their stations, as they sought to found another commercial network…on rather firmer ground, such as having owned-and-operated stations in major markets, as opposed to the United Network or even the rather less haphazard NTA Film Network.
Todd, I have a number of CRITERION FILM COLLECTION movies and love them all!
The Janus Theater, as I didn’t look up nor recall yesterday…hence the Janus Film Collection on PBS stations (and, indeed, notably if briefly on the quickly dark Monitor Channel, a product of THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, on cable in the ’90s…along with Mort Sahl’s show and decent TV news work generally, it’s a very mild surprise the MC didn’t do at least a little better). And the Janus Collection led directly to Criterion, and what has followed.
Todd, I have to restrain myself when I see a group of new CRITERION Blu-rays!
That is the target of my reference, indeed.
Weird, This one repeated on me!