The Cool and the Crazy

Peter Stanfield

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813573007
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Explosive! Amazing! Terrifying! You won’t believe your eyes!    Such movie taglines were common in the 1950s, as Hollywood churned out a variety of low-budget pictures that were sold on the basis of their sensational content and topicality. While a few of these movies have since become canonized by film fans and critics, a number of the era’s biggest fads have now faded into obscurity. The Cool and the Crazy examines seven of these film cycles, including short-lived trends like boxing movies, war pictures, and social problem films detailing the sordid and violent life of teenagers, as well as uniquely 1950s takes on established genres like the gangster picture.  
  Peter Stanfield reveals how Hollywood sought to capitalize upon current events, moral panics, and popular fads, making movies that were “ripped from the headlines” on everything from the Korean War to rock and roll. As he offers careful readings of several key films, he also considers the broader historical and commercial contexts in which these films were produced, marketed, and exhibited. In the process, Stanfield uncovers surprising synergies between Hollywood and other arenas of popular culture, like the ways that the fashion trend for blue jeans influenced the 1950s Western. 
  Delivering sharp critical insights in jazzy, accessible prose, The Cool and the Crazy offers an appreciation of cinema as a “pop” medium, unabashedly derivative, faddish, and ephemeral. By studying these long-burst bubbles of 1950s “pop, ” Stanfield reveals something new about what films do and the pleasures they provide. 
     

1

Monarchs for the Masses

Boxing Films

In this chapter, the cycle of postwar boxing movies is opened up on three fronts: the first examines the films in terms of an expressed desire on the part of their makers to engage in public debate on the state of the nation; the second front considers a countertendency toward a nostalgia for a lost sense of community and an authentic masculinity; and the third front looks at the cycle not as a melancholic longing for a more certain past, or as films with a social conscience, but as examples of a highly evolved dialogue between the movies and the everyday world experienced by its audience.

Champion (1949) opens and closes with a ringside radio commentator setting the scene for Midge Kelly’s defense of his championship title: “Listen to the crowd. Actually, they’re cheering more than a man tonight. They’re cheering a story; a story that could only have been lived in the fight game: a story of a boy who rose from the depths of poverty to become champion of the world.” After being brutally battered by his opponent, Kelly, played by Kirk Douglas, makes a dramatic comeback in the final round of the bout and holds on to his title. His victory comes at a high price, and he dies in his dressing room from a brain hemorrhage. The hero’s rise from the gutter of ghetto life to the dizzying heights of a penthouse overlooking the city, followed by an equally dramatic fall, was already pure formula by the time Carl Foreman had turned Ring Lardner’s short story into a screenplay. RKO, however, contested the idea of common ownership of this formula when it took Stanley Kramer, Champion’s producer, and the production company Screen Plays II to court on the grounds that they borrowed too freely from its own production of The Set-Up. Attorneys for Screen Plays II and United Artists, the film’s distributor, countered that the two films were sufficiently different and that the Howard Hughes–run corporation was attempting a spoiling action against box office competition. Their cry of corporate bullying went unheeded, and the judge ruled that Champion should be shorn of its offending scenes.1 These scenes were relatively minor moments in a film that shared the same premise not only with The Set-Up but also with many other boxing movies—that mobsters control boxing, and that corruption, inside and outside the ring, is endemic to the sport. The struggle against moral depravity is as much a part of the formula as the struggle against economic deprivation.2

Following and paralleling the critical and box office success of Body and Soul (1947) and Champion (1949), the major studios and new independents produced a number of films that exploited the sport of boxing. These included Killer McCoy (1947), Big Punch (1948), Whiplash (1948), In This Corner (1948), Leather Gloves (1948), Fighting Fools (1949), Duke of Chicago (1949), Ringside (1949), Right Cross (1950), The Golden Gloves Story (1950), Iron Man (1951), Roaring City (1951), Breakdown (1952), The Fighter (1952), Kid Monk Baroni (1952), The Ring (1952), Flesh and Fury (1952), Champ for a Day (1953), The Joe Louis Story (1953), Tennessee Champ (1954), The Square Jungle (1955), Killer’s Kiss (1955), The Leather Saint (1956), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), The Harder They Fall (1956), World in My Corner (1956), The Crooked Circle (1957), and Monkey on My Back (1957). The cycle continued sporadically into the latter part of the decade before ending with Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962). Boxing also featured prominently in a number of comedies—The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), Sailor Beware (1952), and Off Limits (1953), for example—and in crime films and melodramas: The Killers (1946), Till the End of Time (1946), Nobody Lives Forever (1946), Brute Force (1947), The Street with No Name (1948), Tension (1949), The Big Night (1951), Glory Alley (1952), The Turning Point (1952), The Quiet Man (1952), From Here to Eternity (1953), On the Waterfront (1954), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and The Big Combo (1955); boxing even featured in musicals such as It’s Always Fair Weather (1955).

Filmmakers understood that the boxing story offered a particularly viable vehicle for broad social commentary, with its proletarian protagonist, his struggles with organized crime, and an unforgiving social and economic order. Body and Soul is exemplary in this regard with its tale of a poor New York Jewish boxer who throws aside friends, family, and lovers in his obsessive drive to succeed. The factors that led the film’s star, John Garfield, its screenwriter, Abraham Polonsky, and its producer, Bob Roberts, to choose a boxing story for the actor’s first post–Warner Bros. film are complex and convoluted, but some are relatively clear. They had originally planned Body and Soul to be an account of the life of Barney Ross, an ex-marine and world champion across three divisions (lightweight, light welterweight, and welterweight) from 1933 to 1935. What drew them to Ross’s story was the self-evident fit with Garfield’s screen persona—street tough, New Yorker, and ex-soldier (Garfield was 4-F but had played military personnel in a number of wartime films, notably in the 1945 movie The Pride of the Marines). Ross’s biography would eventually be filmed in 1957 as Monkey on My Back. That film showed little interest in Ross’s boxing or military story, preferring instead to exploit his drug addiction in a bid to capitalize on the recent notoriety of The Man with the Golden Arm, released a year earlier.3 Just as important in the decision to make a boxing movie was the knowledge that there was a viable tradition of stories told about the sport, most notably Clifford Odets’s 1937 drama Golden Boy. Overshadowing all of this detail, however, was the cool fact that boxing was an extremely well liked form of entertainment—after baseball it was America’s favorite sport—and so mass interest in the fight game would have been self-evident to these filmmakers. It was this popularity they sought to exploit.

Like other filmmakers with a social conscience and an interest in their heritage, Roberts and Garfield were attracted to the history of Jewish involvement in boxing, both inside and outside the ring. The novelist and critic Meyer Levin wrote in 1953: “Remember that Jewish boy in the Fannie Hurst era, that sensitive son of the unworldly Talmudist? He wanted to become a great violinist, a great surgeon, a great lawyer. His breed has vanished from today’s fiction about the East Side. We are more ‘realistic’ now and our typical Jewish lads become prizefighters, hoodlums, gangsters, and what not.”4 In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Jews were the dominant ethnic group in the sport; there were twenty-seven Jewish world champions between 1910 and 1940, among them Benny Leonard, Barney Ross, and “Slapsie” Maxie Rosenbloom. The list should also include Max Baer; he was a heavyweight champion and Hollywood actor who fought with a Star of David on his trunks but, according to some sources, was only passing as a Jew.5 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, fully one-third of all professional boxers were Jewish. By 1950, however, Jews had almost no presence in the ring at all, with Italian boxers superseding the Jewish champions by the end of the 1930s. Greater social and cultural integration into the mainstream of American life, economic advancement, and high postwar attendance in postsecondary education meant that boxing was no longer viewed by Jews as a lucrative road out of the ghetto.

As a social historian of boxing, Jeffrey T. Sammons, writes: “The succession had gone from Irish to Jewish and would pass on to Italians, to blacks, and to Latins, a pattern that reflected the acculturation strategies of those ethnic groups located on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. As each group moved up, it pulled its youth out of prizefighting and pushed them into more promising and meaningful pursuits.”6 Though Jewish presence in the ring declined rapidly, Jews maintained a significant presence outside the ring through management (Al Weill for Rocky Marciano, Irving Cohen for Rocky Graziano), promotion, match-making, journalism (New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling), and publishing (Nat Fleisher with Ring magazine), training (Mannie Seamon and Charlie Goldman, respectively Joe Louis’s and Marciano’s trainers), and sportswear manufacture (Everlast). As Allen Bodner, a historian of Jews in boxing, notes, throughout the 1920s and 1930s neighborhood and championship boxing matches were significant “social and political events” in the life of East Coast Jewish communities.7 The films with a social conscience in the boxing cycle draw covertly or overtly upon this heritage, building a formula that engages with the wider world of the sport in its various incarnations as live spectacle, as radio entertainment, and later as a key component in television’s popularity, as well as linking with more romantically inclined ideas of the sport’s role within working-class life and culture.

Numerous films featuring boxing had been made in the 1930s, but they differed significantly from their counterparts in the 1940s and 1950s in that they downplayed or avoided the issue of moral and economic struggle. There is no emphasis on a boxer’s ethnicity, and the films tend to eschew a downbeat ending. Boxing movies such as The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933), The Personality Kid (1934), and Cain and Mabel (1936) highlight romantic intrigue, often across class boundaries, and the display of partially naked men provides ample opportunity for the expression of female sexual desire. None of these elements are absent from the postwar cycle, but they are now contained within a narrative framework that valued social verisimilitude over romance.

Midway through Robert Aldrich’s 1955 adaptation of Clifford Odets’s The Big Knife (1949), friends of the Hollywood movie star Charlie Castle (Jack Palance) gather in the early evening to watch one of his old movies, a fight film made eight or nine years previously, when Charlie still “had a lot of steam.” The end of the picture shows Charlie’s character recovering from a near knockout to win the fight. Charlie asks Hank, a scriptwriter who has grown disgusted with Hollywood and has plans to return to New York and write “the great American novel,” what he thinks of the picture. “I keep wondering what would happen if you lost the big fight,” replies Hank. “Uncommercial,” responds a cynical Charlie, adding, “Kid thinks he’s still writing for Mercury and the Group. It would have turned out to what Uncle Hoff describes as ‘disaster.’” Hoff (Rod Steiger) is Charlie’s domineering producer. Charlie once had dreams of making socially aware movies and great art, a dream he nurtured in the politically progressive theater of the 1930s (represented by his allusion to the socially committed Mercury and Group Theatres). But now that dream has soured and he is owned by Hoff, body and soul.

Odets’s play looks back to the 1930s, from the perspective of a once radical playwright who, at the height of the McCarthy witch hunts, must try to come to terms with the loss of his youthful ideals.8 Charlie’s estranged wife, Marion (Ida Lupino), challenges him to stand up to Hoff. “What do you believe in now?” she asks him. “What do you want?” he answers, and then continues: “The wide-eyed kid I was, nursing a cup of coffee in Walgreens, yelling about the sad state [waving his arms] . . . of whatever. . . . And, anyhow, what is all this arty bunk? You know this industry is capable of turning out good pictures, pictures with guts and meaning.” Marion replies: “Sure, sure, we know some of the men who do it, Stevens, Mankiewicz, Kazan, Huston, Wyler, Wilder, Stanley Kramer, but never Stanley Hoff.” These filmmakers were the cream of Hollywood’s post-witch-hunt liberals, including the ex-Communist Elia Kazan, but unlike Kazan, Charlie does not even have a home within Hollywood’s liberal community. As Eric Mottram concludes in his analysis of the play, Charlie eventually “chooses right and is defeated by his own character, becoming the typical hero of the thirties rather than the postwar years—the American failure whose defeat exposes his fundamental decency in a bad time.”9

Unique to the film adaptation are the boxing movie Charlie starred in and an opening sequence that shows him sparring with a trainer, as the voice-over narration informs the viewer that “Charlie Castle is a man who sold out his dreams, but he can’t forget them.” These images of boxing link back to Odets’s earlier drama Golden Boy (1937), a play formed in the hothouse of New Deal politics and first performed by the Group Theatre.10 Golden Boy was made into a film in 1938 (released in 1939), directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Barbara Stanwyck and William Holden. It is the story of a young man’s tentative and short-lived claim on fame and glory as a boxer. Joe Bonaparte is the son of an Italian immigrant who has grown up in the polyglot world of New York’s Lower East Side. His brother is a union organizer, and his brother-in-law is a Jewish cabdriver. His father talks to his best friend, a Jewish store owner, about his dream that Joe will become a concert violinist. There is no money in being a musician, and the modern, fast-moving world is no place for the sensitive male. Joe rejects his father’s dream and becomes a boxer. “You could build a city with his ambition,” a character says of Joe. Joe wants the high life: “Bury me in good times and silk shirts,” he says. Joe is in a hurry to get somewhere, anywhere, as long as it’s out of the ghetto: “That’s what speed’s for, an easy way to live,” he says. To achieve his ambition to become “the monarch of the masses,” Joe, like Charlie in The Big Knife, signs a contract with a manager who provides for his every whim, and in return Joe also gives himself up body and soul.

Boxing provided Odets with an overdetermined masculine story form in which to consider the role of the artist within an exploitative capitalist society. The subject of prizefighting enabled him to couch these bourgeois concerns within a drama that he believed had the potential to reach out to the mass audience that was drawn in the hundreds and thousands to live boxing events in the 1930s. On the other hand, The Big Knife was a chronicle of the failure to provide and sustain a socially engaged art for the masses. The preeminent left-wing dramatist of the age, Bertolt Brecht, had also shown some interest in boxing. In 1926 he began production on what was to be an unfinished work called The Human Fighting-Machine, a collaboration with the then German middleweight champion Paul Samson-Koerner. Brecht’s aesthetic interest in boxing was for its formal properties—the ring as a theatrical space, the “hard seats and bright lights,” and an audience “smoking and observing”—rather than, as with Odets, for its thematic potential.11

Odets’s and Garfield’s paths crossed repeatedly during the 1930s and 1940s, but they only once worked together on film, an adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s Humoresque (1946). When The Big Knife opened in New Haven in January 1949, its star was John Garfield. I...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Monarchs for the Masses: Boxing Films
• Chapter 2. War Fever: Korea—Timely! Powerful! Exploitable!
• Chapter 3. Got-to-See: Teenpix and the Social Problem Picture
• Chapter 4. Teenpic Jukebox: Jazz, Calypso, Beatniks, and Rock ’n’ Roll
• Chapter 5. Intent to Speed: Hot Rod Movies
• Chapter 6. Punks! JD Gangsters
• Chapter 7. Dude Ranch Duds: Cowboy Costume
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author