Hollywood in the 1950s

Hollywood in the 1950s is presented not as a sealed-off golden age but as a working inheritance: a style of emotional melodrama, a set of familiar star and television images, and a generation of performers whose lives were marked by war and alcohol. The decade’s movies and conventions remain active in the later story, where changing tastes unsettle established careers. For Cliff Booth, the period opens a path into foreign cinema; for Rick Dalton, its screen identity becomes both a professional liability and material he can begin to reshape.

Film Culture and Cliff Booth’s Education

After the violence of the forties, American culture is described as turning toward emotional melodrama, associated with Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, the Actors Studio, and Playhouse 90. Against that background, Cliff Booth begins driving to Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, West Los Angeles, and Little Tokyo to see black-and-white foreign films with English subtitles. His outings are not a passing curiosity: they establish a lasting, self-directed education in movies that asks him to read, wait, and work out what he has seen.

His viewing ranges across La Strada, Yojimbo, Ikiru, The Bridge, Rififi, Bicycle Thieves, Rocco and His Brothers, Open City, Seven Samurai, Le Doulos, and Bitter Rice. Rick Dalton teases him for going to movies to read. Cliff accepts the teasing with a smile, but takes pride in grappling with subtitles and difficult ideas. A new Rock Hudson or Kirk Douglas picture, he thinks, has disclosed what it has to offer within twenty minutes; some foreign films require watching the whole work before its meaning comes into focus. His interest has limits, too: he thinks Hiroshima Mon Amour is a failure and considers Michelangelo Antonioni fraudulent. The distinction matters to him. Difficulty is no guarantee of value; a film still has to work as a movie.

Akira Kurosawa becomes a particularly important discovery. Yojimbo draws Cliff’s attention beyond its star and story, and Throne of Blood confirms his response. Although Cliff usually finds movies less exciting than driving laps at a track or riding a dirt bike through a motocross course, Kurosawa’s film absorbs him. The decisive image is Toshiro Mifune in charcoal-black-and-white military armor, covered in a hundred arrows. Cliff becomes a Kurosawa fan through the force of the image and the staging, not through a prior allegiance to Shakespeare, whose work he says he never responded to.

Kurosawa, Melodrama, and the Working Director

Cliff’s response to Kurosawa also becomes a judgment about criticism and artistic labor. He believes his wartime experience fighting the Japanese and being held captive gives him a perspective on Kurosawa’s films that American critics lack. In his view, Kurosawa has an innate gift for staging drama, melodrama, and pulp, as well as the framing skill of a comic-book illustrator; Cliff is himself a devoted Marvel comics reader. He particularly admires the director’s dynamic compositions, but resists critics’ description of Kurosawa as a fine artist. Cliff sees a working director who first made movies for a living and for other working men, and whose talent lies in making popular drama artistically vivid.

That view connects Kurosawa to the decade’s taste for melodrama without reducing him to it. Cliff thinks American critics praise the films partly because they do not understand them, while he recognizes both their dramatic force and their pulp construction. In his account, Kurosawa himself later becomes susceptible to his own acclaim: by the mid-sixties, with Red Beard, Cliff sees him changing from a movie director into a Russian novelist. The contrast marks a boundary in Cliff’s enthusiasm. He admires the earlier combination of craft, drama, and visual wit, but not an artist who seems to have left the working-director identity behind.

Cliff’s engagement with foreign films continues beyond the decade that began it. He likes some of Federico Fellini’s early black-and-white films but loses interest when Fellini makes life into a circus; he finds Ingmar Bergman boring and does not respond to François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Later, he admires Shintaro Katsu’s Zatoichi films and the Baby Cart series, while a Sunday-afternoon screening of Mifune’s Samurai Trilogy leaves him so bored that he avoids Japanese films for two years. These later preferences make his initial foreign-film habit more than a badge of sophistication: it is an active, discriminating taste, open to discovery and capable of disappointment.

The Decade’s Screen Types and Their Revision

The television western offers another measure of the decade’s continuing influence. When Rick Dalton reads the Lancer pilot, he recognizes a premise that recalls Bonanza and The High Chaparral but turns darker, more violent, and more cynical. Murdock Lancer is no kindly, stern patriarch in the Ben Cartwright mold; Scott Lancer retains the recognizable good-guy function, though his Eastern-dandy clothes distinguish him from conventional cowboy leads. Johnny Lancer is the sharpest departure. He has the mystery and doubtful past usually given to a guest character on a western, but is written as the series lead rather than a visitor who will be redeemed or killed by the established hero.

By 1969, director Sam Wanamaker wants Lancer to depart from the familiar westerns of the previous decade. The newer western style favors younger stars, more striking costumes, and antiheroes. Actors previously known for playing villains, including Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Lee Van Cleef, and James Coburn, have become heroes and movie stars; the new villains, meanwhile, are increasingly sadistic. Wanamaker cannot reproduce the violence of films such as The Wild Bunch in a CBS series airing at 7:30 on Sunday nights, but he can pursue the changed atmosphere through costume and Johnny Lancer’s shady character. A network restriction on facial hair makes that negotiation concrete: Jim Stacy and Wanamaker want Johnny to wear a mustache, but CBS refuses and directs them to put one on the heavy instead.

Rick’s casting as Caleb DeCoteau gives the revision a second edge. Jim Stacy is pleased that Rick Dalton, already associated with the television-western hero Jake Cahill, will play the heavy in the pilot. Wanamaker has passed over Joe Don Baker in favor of using a well-known cowboy actor against type. The choice makes Johnny’s victory carry the added charge of defeating an established television icon. For Rick, the role initially looks like another reminder of his old image, but it also gives him a different part to play within the changed genre.

Star Image, Work, and the Afterlife of the Decade

Rick’s career meeting with Marvin Schwarz gives that problem its bluntest formulation. As Marvin lays out the logic of replacement casting—producers may want a major star but settle for someone available—Rick feels tears begin to form. The agent tells him that Italian filmmakers may want Steve McQueen but, when they cannot get McQueen, may want a McQueen they can get: Rick. The comparison hurts because it makes Rick’s appeal sound derivative. Yet the Lancer set later lets him see the possibility of change. In Caleb DeCoteau’s fringe jacket, boots, and hat, and without his familiar pompadour, Rick sees a figure who looks less like an aging cowboy actor from the fifties and more like a modern performer who could belong in a Sam Peckinpah film. The costume that first seemed to hide him begins to suggest that his established screen identity is not the only one available.

A story Marvin tells Rick about Lex Barker supplies an earlier example of a performer crossing national and genre boundaries. In the fifties, German companies made westerns from the novels of Karl May, whose American frontier stories were written by a novelist who had never visited America. Marvin arranged for the French actor Pierre Brice to play Winnetou and his American client Lex Barker to play Old Shatterhand. Barker had made American films and played Tarzan, but his marriage to Lana Turner had left him identified as Mr. Lana Turner. He initially resists the prospect of a German western with a French actor playing an Apache. Marvin’s example frames an unfamiliar foreign production not simply as a demotion but as a possible new professional identity. The story becomes a precedent for the advice Rick is resisting when he considers whether to work in Italy.

The era’s human costs also remain visible in the later timeline. The book describes alcohol as the burden of many Screen Actors Guild members before drugs and marijuana became commonplace, noting that some performers drifted into drinking while others carried the effects of military service. Many leading men of the fifties had served in World War II, and many actors entering the profession in the late fifties and early sixties had served in Korea. A culture that understood what those men had seen often tolerated their drinking on set. Neville Brand and Lee Marvin could be drunk at work without the insurance company shutting down a production. Years later, Marvin reportedly drank himself into a stupor before a scene in The Spikes Gang because the young co-star brought to mind a soldier he had killed.

Aldo Ray’s June 1969 night in a Spanish hotel supplies a harsher afterimage of a former star’s career. Sitting in a stuffy room, he thinks not about his past work with George Cukor, Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh, Jacques Tourneur, and Anthony Mann, but about getting a bottle. The book observes that twenty years later this desperate night would seem like the good old days. Rick’s distress is different: after drinking eight whiskey sours, forgetting how he got to bed, and failing lines he had worked to learn, he fears that he no longer looks like the professional he means to be. Yet his later exchange with Trudi Frazer restores a view of the work that the decade’s career anxieties had obscured. He recalls the actors, actresses, places, stories, and pleasures his career has brought him, along with the house paid for by pretending to be a cowboy since boyhood. The 1950s screen world remains a source of both constraint and memory, but it does not have the final word on what acting has meant to him.