The Wide View 1957 - 1959 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 12

The twelfth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 12: The Wide View"

The Wide View

"Are we kids here or what?" Increasingly, the answer was "No" - for better or worse. As the fifties rolled to a close, American cinema underwent its first stirrings of adolescence. Puberty would strike with full force by the mid-sixties, crippling the movies for a time with growing pains, failed attempts at worldliness, and alienated lassitude. Yet initially this onset of maturity offered many Hollywood films a valuable edge. Whether locking a steady gaze on the brutality of war, shining a harsh light on the cynical modern media, or nakedly exposing the sexual voyeurism of audience and auteur alike, today's selections show hints of the quantum leap in content and style which would seize a moribund industry in 1967.

Some Came Running & Kiss Me Deadly

"You get on the merry-go-round and think you can get off any old time, but then it starts going too fast."

-Gabrielle, Kiss Me Deadly

The image of the merry-go-round is appropriate. Although there is no carousel in Kiss Me Deadly, the finale of Some Came Running features the full carnival assortment - merry-go-round, ferris wheel, various other whirligigs - as a backdrop for sudden violence. And both films feature impatient, restless characters who suddenly find themselves spinning out of control - it's all they can do to hang on for dear life as the machinery of modern life becomes too overwhelming. Some Came Running is a widescreen color melodrama, directed by Vincente Minnelli, and starring Frank Sinatra as an ex-G.I. inadvertently returned to his old hometown, where he decides to stick around (partly out of spite for his respectable, anxiety-ridden older brother). Kiss Me Deadly is a black-and-white late-stage noir, which positions itself on the sleazy streets of L.A. and sends the brutish private dick Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) on a rendezvous with the apocalypse. Both films, quintessential fifties movies in their own unique ways, recall the forties and anticipate the sixties. Both climax with acts of destruction which the respective films have been quietly building towards, but which nonetheless shock with their all-out assault on the viewer's senses. And both films use bodies of water, a vast river in Some Came Running, and the waves of an angry seashore in Kiss Me Deadly, to hint at the wider world which exists beyond their own claustrophobic borders.

A dirty dozen

My 12 films: Some Came Running, God's Country, Paris Belongs to Us, Rosemary's Baby, Pandora's Box, Daisies, Scarface, Baby Face, Air Force, Yellow Submarine, Last of the Mohicans, Easy Rider

Do memes last more than a week? It's been eight days since Piper at Lazy Eye Theatre challenged bloggers to program 12 films at the New Beverly Cinema. Eight days in the blogosphere seems like an eternity but I'll go ahead and bite (not that anyone asked me to). The idea is to create a rep program of twelve films, in themed couplets (for example, Piper sticks High Fidelity with Punch Drunk Love as romantic comedies, and Song of the South with Coonskin as half-animated, racially controversial adaptations of Uncle Remus' tales). Some have chosen to give the entire program an overarching theme; hats off to them, but I found it hard enough deciding what to include and what to leave out.

My pairs are themed, but the overall program is not, save that they are all among my favorite films, ones I would love to share with an audience. I tried for diversity, and there are some classics, some more recent films (nothing from the past 15 years, though), all in different styles and genres. There are silents and talkies, black-and-white and color, animated and live-action, even documentary. Admittedly, all but three or four are American. And one persistent consistency proved impossible to overcome: fully half the films are from the 60s, my favorite cinematic decade. It's a testament to that era's richness that the list still feels diverse. Anyway, on to the explanations...