Moguls & Movie Stars, A History of Hollywood: The Attack of the Small Screens is the next chapter of Turner Classic Movies' seven-part Moguls & Movie Stars documentary, which will be shown twice tonight, at 5 and 8 p.m. PT.
The appropriately titled "The Attack of the Small Screens" tells the story of how television got perilously close to destroying the movies in the late '40s and early '50s. Hollywood, in fact, was attacked not only by Milton Berle and I Love Lucy, but also by the U.S. government: right-wingers went after liberals ("Communists"), destroying lives and careers, while the antitrust guys demanded that the studios divest themselves from their exhibition arms. (Where is the anti-oligopoly crowd now when we desperately need them?)
Accompanying Moguls & Movie Stars are four representative releases from the "more mature" '50s. No, not The Greatest Show on Earth, The Ten Commandments, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Gidget, How to Marry a Millionaire, That's My Boy, Father of the Bride, or The Robe.
We're talking serious (and not-so-serious) stuff in black and white, like Delbert Mann's Cannes Film Festival and Academy Award winner Marty (1955), Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and A Face in the Crowd (1957), and Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success (1957).
Marty is particularly relevant here because before it became a movie starring Oscar winner Ernest Borgnine and featuring blacklistee Betsy Blair, it was a television play written by Paddy Chayefsky, with Rod Steiger as the butcher who finds love in an unexpected place.
Despite the censors' scissors, in my view A Streetcar Named Desire, which Tennessee Williams adapted from his own play, is Elia Kazan's best movie by far and one of the greatest American movies ever made, period. Marlon Brando is the actor most people associate with the film, but as far as I'm concerned Streetcar fully belongs to Vivien Leigh's delicately unbalanced Blanche DuBois.
The reputation of Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success has grown with the passing of the years. Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman's story — about an ambitious publicist (Tony Curtis) and his relationship with an unscrupulous Walter Winchell-type (Burt Lancaster) — is good, but the handling is quite melodramatic.
I've yet to see A Face in the Crowd, which is supposed to feature one of Patricia Neal's greatest performances.
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