Action
Action Films have tremendous impact, continuous high energy, lots of physical stunts and activity, possibly extended chase scenes, races, rescues, battles, martial arts, mountains and mountaineering, destructive disasters (floods, explosions, natural disasters, fires, etc.), fights, escapes, non-stop motion, spectacular rhythm and pacing, and adventurous heroes - all designed for pure audience escapism with the action sequences at the core of the film. Action films and adventure films have tremendous cross-over potential as film genres, and road films often overlap with action films. (See the adventure film genre listings for examples of these action/adventure pictures.) Both types of films come in a variety of forms or genre-hybrids: sci-fi or space, thrillers, crime-drama, war, horror, westerns, etc. Oftentimes, action films are great box-office hits, but lack critical appeal because of their two-dimensional heroes or villains.
The main action centers around a male action hero or protagonist - portrayed by these most prominent actors: Bruce Lee, Steven Seagal, Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Bruce Lee, Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Chuck Norris, and Jean Claude Van Damme. Women in action-films usually play the roles of accomplices or romantic interests of the hero, although modern action films have featured strong female characters to broaden demographic appeal.
They almost always have a resourceful hero(ine) struggling against incredible odds, life-threatening circumstances, or an evil villain, and/or trapped or chasing each other in various modes of transportation (bus, auto, ship, train, plane, horseback, on foot, etc.), with victory or resolution attained by the end after strenuous physical feats and violence (fist fights, gunplay). Action films have traditionally been aimed at male audiences, ages 13 to the mid-30s in both American and world-wide markets.
The Beginnings:
This film genre actually began with the silent era's serial films around the time of Edwin S. Porter's classic action-western The Great Train Robbery (1903). And it has remained strong throughout all of cinematic history. Action films then expanded in the 80s and 90s, with the growth of special effects techniques and in response to jaded audiences who demanded faster plots (coherent or not), greater violence, and stimulation.
James Bond - Agent 007 Spy Series:
According to Guinness World Records, the most profitable film series of all time is "James Bond." It is also the longest continuing series of English language films. The modern day action-hero - the James Bond '007' character that was employed for Her Majesty's Secret Service - was loosely based on the character in Britisher Ian Fleming's twelve James Bond novels. A number of Fleming's short stories were developed by other writers. Before the movies, Bond made his first appearance on TV, debuting on CBS in 1954, with Barry Nelson as the American 007 agent named Jimmy Bond in an adaptation of Fleming's first Bond novel Casino Royale. Fleming made his sole cameo appearance in the Bond film From Russia With Love (1963).
Beginning in the Cold War 60s (after restrictions on violence and sex were lifted somewhat), the slick, escapist Bond action/adventure Spy Films appealed to large audiences with their exotic, travelogue locales, tongue-in-cheek humor and dialogue, nifty gadgets and ingenious toys to combat evildoers, fast-action suspense and audacious stunts, and gorgeous scantily-clad sexy women. The action-oriented, sophisticated and skillful agent, with a taste for fancy clothes (often tuxedos), dry martinis ('shaken, not stirred') and cars (notably the Aston Martin DB5, the Lotus Esprit, and various BMWs), battled various types of eccentric, deadly and infamous criminals who planned to assault the world. The intriguing superhero lead role has been played by six actors - Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig.
Adventure
Adventure Films are exciting stories, with new experiences or exotic locales. Adventure films are very similar to the action film genre, in that they are designed to provide an action-filled, energetic experience for the film viewer. Rather than the predominant emphasis on violence and fighting that is found in action films, however, the viewer of adventure films can live vicariously through the travels, conquests, explorations, creation of empires, struggles and situations that confront the main characters, actual historical figures or protagonists.
Adventure films were intended to appeal mainly to men, creating major male heroic stars through the years. These courageous, patriotic, or altruistic heroes often fought for their beliefs, struggled for freedom, or overcame injustice. Modern adventure films, some of which have been successful blockbusters, have crossed over and added resourceful action heroes (and oftentimes heroines).
Under the category of adventure films, we can include traditional swashbucklers, serialized films, and historical spectacles (similar to the epics film genre), searches or expeditions for lost continents, "jungle" and "desert" epics, treasure hunts and quests, disaster films, and heroic journeys or searches for the unknown. Adventure films are often set in an historical period, and may include adapted stories of historical or literary adventure heroes (Robin Hood, Tarzan, and Zorro for example), kings, battles, rebellion, or piracy.
Adventure films share many elements with other genres - there are numerous examples of sci-fi, fantasy, and war films with characteristics of this genre. Adventure films, in a broader context, could include boxing movies, motor racing films, and films adapted from literary novels (i.e., King Solomon's Mines (1937 and 1950), The Thief of Bagdad (1924 and 1940), The Three Musketeers (1916, 1921, 1933, 1935, 1948, 1973, and 1993), and The Prisoner of Zenda (1937, 1952)).
Directors and Stars of Classic Adventure Films:
Individual directors often associated with adventure films include Cecil B. DeMille, Henry Hathaway, Michael Curtiz, Howard Hawks, John Huston, David Lean, Zoltan Korda, and Raoul Walsh. The major adventure film stars through the years have included Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (and Jr.), Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Johnny Weismuller, Tyrone Power, Gary Cooper, Stewart Granger, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Charlton Heston, Alan Ladd, Sabu, Cornel Wilde, Sean Connery, John Wayne, and Harrison Ford. The female stars in these movies often were secondary figures, or romantic interests for the male leads.
Serials:
The action/adventure film first became popular with weekly Saturday serials, running in installments that often had 'cliff-hanging' endings to entice viewers to return for the next show. Heroine Pearl White in the 20-episode The Perils of Pauline (1914) was the first major super-star of the silent serials. Besides Pearl White, there were other queens of the sound serials, including Kay Aldridge (as jungle Queen Nyoka in Nyoka and the Tigermen (1942)) and Linda Stirling (in the 12 part serial Zorro's Black Whip (1944) and as the "Tiger Woman" in another 12-episode serial, Perils of the Darkest Jungle (1944)).
Other action-adventure heros of B-picture adventure films included Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers. 'Buster' Crabbe was the most famous of all the serial action heroes in the 1930s and 1940s, starring as both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. But there were others: Kane Richmond (as the "Spy Smasher," "The Shadow," and a star in the "Cliffhanger Serials" and the "Rin-Tin-Tin" adventure serial), Tom Tyler (as "Captain Marvel" with countless episodes, and "The Phantom of the West"), and Don "Red" Barry (as "Red Ryder"). [See this site's writeup of superheroes in fantasy films.]
Modern-Day Homage to the Earliest Adventure Films:
Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) was an affectionate return and tribute to the early days of Saturday morning matinees and cinema, with comic-book archaeology hero Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) battling the Nazis while searching for the sacred Ark of the Covenant - the first in a very successful trilogy of films. So were the adventure-action-romance-comedies Romancing the Stone (1984) and its sequel The Jewel of the Nile (1985) starring Michael Douglas as the American soldier-of-fortune, and Kathleen Turner as a romance novelist.
The Swashbuckler and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr:
The first major form of adventure film was the swashbuckler with energetic Hollywood, beefcake action-heroes in historically atmospheric settings of the 18th or 19th centuries. Swashbucklers included lavish sets, costumes, and weapons of the past, and were often built upon action scenes of sea battles, castle duels, sword and cutlass fighting, etc., and the romancing of damsels in distress.
The first successful swashbuckler star of the 1920s was the charming, exuberant, gracefully-athletic, gymnastic actor Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who performed most of his own stunts and daring swordplay in a wide range of costume adventures, starring as Zorro, Robin Hood (in the large-scale film version Robin Hood (1922)), and the acrobatic D'Artagnan (in the film adaptation of Dumas' adventure classic The Three Musketeers (1921)). Moving from comedy-adventures to derring-do costume adventures at the start of the decade, Fairbanks starred in director Fred Niblo's silent The Mark of Zorro (1920), adapted from Johnson McCulley's novel The Curse of Capistrano. He starred in the dual role of Don Diego and the dashing young swordsman Zorro - the hero of the oppressed poor by tyrants ruling in California in the 1830s. This portrayal established Fairbanks as the predominant dueling swashbuckler in the silent era, in a duel against Noah Beery.
Fairbanks reprised his legendary role as the son of the masked avenger in director Donald Crisp's two-hour sequel Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925), while romancing and saving Mary Astor. One of the best silent swashbucklers was Robin Hood (1922) in which he starred as the famed adventurer in love with Maid Marian - he also wrote the film's screenplay and financed the expensive film. Fairbanks also appeared in the title swashbuckling role as The Gaucho (1927) and danced a hot tango with co-star Lupe Velez. [The Robin Hood story is one of the most-often filmed swashbucklers - also the animated Robin Hood (1973), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), and Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993).]
In the first of four film versions of The Thief of Bagdad (1924), this one directed by Raoul Walsh, Fairbanks played the role of a roguish thief who used a giant genie's magic to outwit Bagdad's evil Caliph, and win the heart of princess Julanne Johnson. Its imaginative special effects still dazzle. His most typical starring role was represented by The Black Pirate (1926) (filmed in two-strip Technicolor), in which he played a shipwrecked mariner who sought revenge against bloodthirsty pirates. The exciting film included a cutlass duel, an underwater swimming raid on the pirate ship, and Fairbanks' most famous stunt - riding down a ship's sail on the point of his knife.
The Zorro Tales:
Creative director Rouben Mamoulian stylishly remade the Fairbanks' 1920 Zorro tale almost two decades later as the historical swashbuckler The Mark of Zorro (1940) with Tyrone Power as the dashing, masked and foppish hero Don Diego Vega in old California, who duels with a villainous oppressor (Basil Rathbone) to the death in the film's climax. The 1940 version also featured glowing and gorgeous Linda Darnell and Gale Sondergaard as the good and bad female characters respectively.
There have been many other versions of the Zorro tale: the serialized Zorro Rides Again (1937), the Italian-French production Zorro (1975), Disney's Zorro (1957-9) - a TV series starring Guy Williams, the tongue-in-cheek parody Zorro, The Gay Blade (1981) with George Hamilton as the foppish dandy, and Anthony Hopkins as an aging Zorro and Antonio Banderas as his younger protege in The Mask of Zorro (1998).
Other Classic, Silent Swashbucklers:
Another leading swashbuckler was Ramon Novarro, who starred in Metro Pictures' and director Rex Ingram's lush, dramatic adventure tale Scaramouche (1923), derived from Rafael Sabatini's novel. [Sabatini's literary works also inspired the making of Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk - see below.] The story, set in pre-revolutionary France, followed the exploits of a law student (Novarro) seeking revenge (in the guise of a clown named Scaramouche) after the murder of an agitator/friend by feared nobleman Marquis de la Tour d'Azyr (Lewis Stone). The film was remade in 1952 by director George Sidney - Scaramouche (1952), with Stewart Granger and Mel Ferrer in the lead roles - well-reknowned for a six-minute fencing duel. Another of the earliest swashbucklers was director Alan Crosland's Don Juan (1926), starring distinguished American stage and screen actor John Barrymore as the famed lover. It featured the silent screen's longest sword-fight between Montague Love and Barrymore.
Errol Flynn in Swashbucklers:
Fairbanks, in the silent era, was succeeded by the dashing Australian actor Errol Flynn - the major swashbuckling male star of the 30s and early 40s adventure films in the sound era. His first of many historical, costume adventure films was director Michael Curtiz' Captain Blood (1935) about an Irish surgeon named Dr. Peter Blood who was charged with treason, sold into slavery, and ultimately became a buccaneer in the Caribbean. This was Flynn's first film (of eight features) with a young and lovely 19 year-old Olivia de Havilland, and the film featured the first original film score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Flynn played a 19th century British army officer stationed in India in the military swashbuckler The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), and he portrayed Sherwood Forest's 12th century legendary outlaw in the three Oscar-winning The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). The latter was his most popular film and the quintessential adventure-tale swashbuckler about the Robin Hood legend. The Technicolor film was noted for the lengthy swordfight in Nottingham Castle between Flynn and Basil Rathbone (as Sir Guy of Gisbourne), and Flynn's love for leading lady Olivia de Havilland.
Later, Flynn also appeared in Michael Curtiz' swashbuckler The Sea Hawk (1940) as an English privateer (like Sir Francis Drake) who aided Queen Elizabeth I (Flora Robson reprising her role from a 1937 film) with plundering and attacks on the Spanish Armada. The film featured superior monochromatic cinematography by Sol Polito. [Flynn was a star in a number of Westerns and war films during the same period.] One of Flynn's last romantic epic swashbuckling appearances was in The Adventures of Don Juan (1949) as the famous 16th century swordsman who fought for Queen Margaret of Spain. He also starred in Against All Flags (1952) with Maureen O'Hara (as a female buccaneer) and Anthony Quinn (as the head of a pirate band), by portraying Brian Hawke - a British naval officer who spied for the English by infiltrating a pirate haven.
Historically-Based Swashbucklers of the 30s and 40s:
Other historical swashbuckler films included the retelling of Alexandre Dumas' classic novels. In Dumas' often-told tale of revenge in The Count of Monte Cristo (1912, 1934, 1974, and 2002), an unjustly imprisoned sailor Edmond Dantes escaped after fifteen years from an island prison and returned to 1820s Paris to find revenge. British-born actor Robert Donat appeared in the 1934 version - the only film he made in Hollywood. Director James Whale's The Man in the Iron Mask (1939 and 1998) was about twin brothers (one - the tyrannical Louis XIV, the other - exiled and imprisoned with an iron mask) in 18th century France separated at birth - one eventually became a swashbuckling member of the Three Musketeers. Alexander Dumas' classic, The Corsican Brothers (1942) repeated the plot twist of twins (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in both roles) separated at birth but later reunited to join together to defeat a tyrannical Corsican baron.
And the oft-filmed The Three Musketeers (1916, 1921, 1933, 1935, 1948, 1973, and 1993) highlighted three 17th century French court swordsmen who battled evil Cardinal Richelieu to save France with a justice-seeking nobleman named Gascon D'Artagnan (Fairbanks). In director Fred Niblo's 1921 film, often acclaimed as the best of the lot, Eugene Pallette, George Siegmann, and Leon Barry starred as the musketeers. Fairbanks reprised his 1921 role as D'Artagnan in The Iron Mask (1929), his last silent film. The most-entertaining sound version was director George Sidney's 1948 version, with an acrobatic Gene Kelly as D'Artagnan, and Lana Turner as Countess Charlotte de Winter - in her first Technicolor picture. The adventure film At Sword's Point (1951) was a variation on Dumas' The Three Musketeers, featuring Cornel Wilde and Maureen O'Hara. (There was also a version with four leads: Richard Lester's The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge (1975).)
Additional historical swashbucklers included: producer Alexander Korda's The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934) starring Leslie Howard with a dual identity as an English aristocrat (Sir Percy) who saved other French aristocrats from being guillotined during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) - a Best Picture winner of the historical mutiny of the HMS Bounty in 1788 against a tyrannical and merciless Captain Bligh (Charles Laughton) led by Fletcher Christian (Clark Gable), A Tale of Two Cities (1935) - a Dickens film adaptation with Ronald Colman as lawyer Sydney Carton who sacrificed himself during the French Revolution, and Fire Over England (1937), about a young naval officer who spied in the Spanish court for Queen Elizabeth I (Flora Robson), was a dramatic adventure regarding Elizabethan England's stand against the huge Spanish Armada - and noted as the film that first united husband and wife team Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.
In Mervyn LeRoy's Best Picture-nominee Anthony Adverse (1936), Fredric March starred as the 18th century illegitimate son of an Italian nobleman who must battle against various adversaries across the globe to rightfully claim the family fortune. And in The Prisoner of Zenda (1937), David O. Selznick's screen adaptation of Anthony Hope's adventure tale, Ronald Colman starred as an heroic British commoner posing as his distant 'twin' cousin (the kidnapped King of Ruritania) during a Balkan coronation ceremony in order to save the throne from take-over. And Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. also made an appearance as Rupert of Hentzau. [Earlier versions were made in 1914 and 1922 (with Ramon Novarro and Lewis Stone), and an uninspiring, inferior version was also remade in 1952 starring Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr, James Mason, and Jane Greer.] Reprising his Broadway role from 1946, Jose Ferrer appeared as the long nosed, 17th century braggart and swordsman Cyrano in director Michael Gordon's Cyrano De Bergerac (1950), and won the Best Actor Academy Award. The film's story was based on Edmond Rostand's 1897 poetic comedy.
Comedy
Comedy Films are "make 'em laugh" films designed to elicit laughter from the audience. Comedies are light-hearted dramas, crafted to amuse, entertain, and provoke enjoyment. The comedy genre humorously exaggerates the situation, the language, action, and characters. Comedies observe the deficiencies, foibles, and frustrations of life, providing merriment and a momentary escape from day-to-day life. They usually have happy endings, although the humor may have a serious or pessimistic side.
In mid-June 2000, the American Film Institute (AFI) selected America's 100 Funniest Movies with a blue-ribbon panel or "jury" of more than 1,800 leaders of the American movie community including actors, directors, screenwriters, editors, cinematographers, and critics. AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs revealed America's 100 funniest movies from a list of 500 nominated movies. According to the AFI, these are "the films and film artists that have made audiences laugh throughout the century."
Types of Comedies:
Comedies usually come in two general formats: comedian-led (with well-timed gags, jokes, or sketches) and situation-comedies that are told within a narrative. Both comedy elements may appear together and/or overlap. Comedy hybrids commonly exist with other major genres, such as musical-comedy, horror-comedy, and comedy-thriller. Comedies have also been classified in various subgenres, such as romantic comedy, crime/caper comedy, sports comedy, teen or coming-of-age comedy, social-class comedy, military comedy, fish-out-of-water comedy, and gross-out comedy. There are also many different kinds, types, or forms of comedy, including:
(1) Slapstick
Slapstick was predominant in the earliest silent films, since they didn't need sound to be effective, and they were popular with non-English speaking audiences in metropolitan areas. The term slapstick was taken from the wooden sticks that clowns slapped together to promote audience applause.
This is primitive and universal comedy with broad, aggressive, physical, and visual action, including harmless or painless cruelty and violence, horseplay, and often vulgar sight gags (e.g., a custard pie in the face, collapsing houses, a fall in the ocean, a loss of trousers or skirts, runaway crashing cars, people chases, etc). Slapstick often required exquisite timing and well-honed performance skills. It was typical of the films of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, W. C. Fields, The Three Stooges, the stunts of Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (1923), and Mack Sennett's silent era shorts (for example, the Keystone Kops). Slapstick evolved and was reborn in the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s (see further below).
More recent feature film examples include the comedic mad chase for treasure film by many top comedy stars in Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), French actor/director Jacques Tati's mostly dialogue-free Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953, Fr.), the Blake Edwards series of Pink Panther films with Peter Sellers as bumbling Inspector Clouseau (especially in the second film of the series, A Shot in the Dark (1964) with Herbert Lom as Clouseau's slow-burning boss and Burt Kwouk as his valet and martial arts judo-specialist), and Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura, Pet Detective (1993) and The Mask (1994). Cartoons are the quintessential form of slapstick, i.e., the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, and others.
(2) Deadpan
This form of comedy was best exemplified by the expression-less face of stoic comic hero Buster Keaton.
(3) Verbal comedy
This was classically typified by the cruel verbal wit of W. C. Fields, the sexual innuendo of Mae West, or the verbal absurdity of dialogues in the Marx Brothers films, or later by the self-effacing, thoughtful humor of Woody Allen's literate comedies.
(4) Screwball
Screwball comedies, a sub-genre of romantic comedy films, was predominant from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. The word 'screwball' denotes lunacy, craziness, eccentricity, ridiculousness, and erratic behavior.
These films combine farce, slapstick, and the witty dialogue of more sophisticated films. In general, they are light-hearted, frothy, often sophisticated, romantic stories, commonly focusing on a battle of the sexes in which both co-protagonists try to outwit or outmaneuver each other. They usually include visual gags (with some slapstick), wacky characters, identity reversals (or cross-dressing), a fast-paced improbable plot, and rapid-fire, wise-cracking dialogue and one-liners reflecting sexual tensions and conflicts in the blossoming of a relationship (or the patching up of a marriage) for an attractive couple with on-going, antagonistic differences (such as in The Awful Truth (1937)). Some of the stars often present in screwball comedies included Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant, William Powell, and Carole Lombard.
The couple is often a fairly eccentric, but well-to-do female interested in romance and a generally passive, emasculated, or weak male who resists romance, such as in Bringing Up Baby (1938), or a sexually-frustrated, humiliated male who is thwarted in romance, as in Howard Hawks' farce I Was a Male War Bride (1949). The zany but glamorous characters often have contradictory desires for individual identity and for union in a romance under the most unorthodox, insane or implausible circumstances (such as in Preston Sturges' classic screwball comedy and battle of the sexes The Lady Eve (1941)). However, after a twisting and turning plot, romantic love usually triumphs in the end. (See more discussion later in this section.)
(5) Black or Dark Comedy
These are dark, sarcastic, humorous, or sardonic stories that help us examine otherwise ignored darker serious, pessimistic subjects such as war, death, or illness. Two of the greatest black comedies ever made include the following: Stanley Kubrick's Cold War classic satire from a script by co-writer Terry Southern, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) that spoofed the insanity of political and military institutions with Peter Sellers in a triple role (as a Nazi scientist, a British major, and the US President), and Robert Altman's M*A*S*H (1970), an irreverent, anti-war black comedy set during the Korean War. Another more recent classic black comedy was the Coen Brothers' violent and quirky story Fargo (1996) about a pregnant Midwestern police chief (Oscar-winning Frances McDormand) who solves a 'perfect crime' that went seriously wrong.
Hal Ashby's eccentric cult film Harold and Maude (1972) was an oddball love story and dark comedy about a suicidal 19 year-old (Bud Cort) and a quirky, widowed octogenarian (Ruth Gordon), with a great soundtrack score populated with songs by Cat Stevens. (See examples of other feature films below for more.) John Huston's satirical black comedy Prizzi's Honor (1985) starred Jack Nicholson as dimwitted Mafia hit man Charley Partanna for the East Coast Prizzi family, who fell in love with West Coaster Irene Walker (Kathleen Turner) - another mob's hitwoman. The film included an Oscar-winning performance from Anjelica Huston as the vengeful granddaughter of Nicholson's Don. Tim Burton's dark and imaginative haunted house comedy Beetlejuice (1988) featured Michael Keaton as the title character in a dream house occupied by newlywed spirits Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin. The shocking but watchable first film of Peter Berg, Very Bad Things (1998) told the dark and humorous story of a 'bachelor' weekend in Las Vegas gone bad for five guys when their hired stripper/prostitute was accidentally killed.
(6) Parody or Spoof - also Satire, Lampoon and Farce
These specific types of comedy (also called put-ons, send-ups, charades, lampoons, take-offs, jests, mockumentaries, etc.) are usually a humorous or anarchic take-off that ridicules, impersonates, punctures, scoffs at, and/or imitates (mimics) the style, conventions, formulas, characters (by caricature), or motifs of a serious work, film, performer, or genre.
Crime
Crime and Gangster Films are developed around the sinister actions of criminals or gangsters, particularly bankrobbers, underworld figures, or ruthless hoodlums who operate outside the law, stealing and violently murdering their way through life. In the 1940s, a new type of crime thriller emerged, more dark and cynical - see the section on film-noir for further examples of crime films. Criminal and gangster films are often categorized as post-war film noir or detective-mystery films - because of underlying similarities between these cinematic forms.
Crime stories in this genre often highlight the life of a crime figure or a crime's victim(s). Or they glorify the rise and fall of a particular criminal(s), gang, bank robber, murderer or lawbreakers in personal power struggles or conflict with law and order figures, an underling or competitive colleague, or a rival gang. Headline-grabbing situations, real-life gangsters, or crime reports have often been used in crime films. Gangster/crime films are usually set in large, crowded cities, to provide a view of the secret world of the criminal: dark nightclubs or streets with lurid neon signs, fast cars, piles of cash, sleazy bars, contraband, seedy living quarters or rooming houses. Exotic locales for crimes often add an element of adventure and wealth. Writers dreamed up appropriate gangland jargon for the tales, such as "tommy guns" or "molls."
Film gangsters are usually materialistic, street-smart, immoral, meglo-maniacal, and self-destructive. Rivalry with other criminals in gangster warfare is often a significant plot characteristic. Crime plots also include questions such as how the criminal will be apprehended by police, private eyes, special agents or lawful authorities, or mysteries such as who stole the valued object. They rise to power with a tough cruel facade while showing an ambitious desire for success and recognition, but underneath they can express sensitivity and gentleness.
Gangster films are morality tales: Horatio Alger or 'pursuit of the American Dream' success stories turned upside down in which criminals live in an inverted dream world of success and wealth. Often from poor immigrant families, gangster characters often fall prey to crime in the pursuit of wealth, status, and material possessions (clothes and cars), because all other "normal" avenues to the top are unavailable to them. Although they are doomed to failure and inevitable death (usually violent), criminals are sometimes portrayed as the victims of circumstance, because the stories are told from their point of view.
Early Gangster Films Until the Dawn of the Talkies:
Criminal/gangster films date back to the early days of film during the silent era. One of the first to mark the start of the gangster/crime genre was D. W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) about organized crime. Raoul Walsh's first feature film, The Regeneration (1915) showcased violent lawlessness on the streets of New York (it was shot on location in NYC's Bowery District on the Lower East Side), and the rise of an Irish-American slum boy who grew up to become a gangster due to repressive social conditions in the environment. Even Edwin S. Porter's silent short western, The Great Train Robbery (1903) was a classic hold-up story.
Josef von Sternberg's gangland melodrama Underworld (1927) with George Raft and Clive Brook, often considered as the first modern gangster film, had many standard conventions of the crime film - and it was shot from the gangster's point of view. It won the Best Story Award for Ben Hecht - the first Oscar ever awarded for an original screenplay. [The first 'gangster' pulp had the same title, Underworld, a breeding ground for many crime thriller plots.] And Lewis Milestone's The Racket (1928), a Howard Hughes-produced film, concentrated on big-city corruption and a municipality controlled by the mob, and was banned in Chicago because of its negative depiction of the police.
The Gangster Film in the Era of the "Talking Picture":
It wasn't until the sound era and the 1930s that gangster films truly became an entertaining, popular way to attract viewers to the theatres, who were interested in the lawlessness and violence on-screen. The events of the Prohibition Era (until 1933) such as bootlegging and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929, the existence of real-life gangsters (e.g., Al Capone) and the rise of contemporary organized crime and escalation of urban violence helped to encourage this genre. Many of the sensationalist plots of the early gangster films were taken from the day's newspaper headlines. The allied rackets of bootlegging, gambling and prostitution brought these mobsters to folk hero status, and audiences during that time vicariously participated in the gangster's rise to power and wealth - on the big screen. They vicariously experienced the gangster's satisfaction with flaunting the system and feeling the thrill of violence. Movies flaunted the archetypal exploits of swaggering, cruel, wily, tough, and law-defying bootleggers and urban gangsters.
The talkies era accounted for the rise of crime films, because these films couldn't come to life without sound (machine gun fire, screeching brakes, screams, chases through city streets and squealing car tires). The perfection of sound technology and mobile cameras also aided their spread. The first "100% all-talking" picture and, of course, the first sound gangster film was The Lights of New York (1928) - it enhanced the urban crime dramas of the time with crackling dialogue and exciting sound effects of squealing getaway car tires and gunshots. Rouben Mamoulian's City Streets (1931) from a story penned by Dashiell Hammett was reportedly Al Capone's favorite film, starring Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sydney as two lovers trapped by gangland connections. And Tay Garnett's violent Bad Company (1931) was the first picture to feature the gangland massacre on St. Valentine's Day.
Fritz Lang's Gangster Films: Dr. Mabuse
Another of the most influential post-war films that helped to launch the entire genre in the 1930s was German director Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (Parts I and II) (1922-1923) - a two-part crime melodrama about an evil, criminal boss capable of disguise, conspiracy, and tremendous hypnotic powers.
Lang's mastermind character Mabuse was resurrected in his second sound feature, the crime thriller The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) (aka Das Testament das Dr. Mabuse), with the ruthless genius (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) running a crime ring while imprisoned, and a tenacious Scotland Yard detective (Otto Wernicke) in pursuit. The film was noted for a spectacular car chase scene, explosions, and murders. The government interpreted the film as subversive and having anti-Nazi sentiments - causing Lang to hurriedly leave Germany (he soon relocated in the US and ended up directing in Hollywood by 1936). Ironically, the legendary director's swan-song film (his first film made in Germany since 1933), The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), spotlighted the same arch-criminal character.
Three Classic Gangster Stars and Warners' Early Gangster Films:
Warner Bros. was considered the gangster studio par excellence, and the star- triumvirate of Warners' gangster cycle, all actors who established and defined their careers in this genre, included: Edward G. Robinson James Cagney Humphrey Bogart
Others who were early gangster stars included Paul Muni and George Raft.
Three great classic gangster films (among the first of the talkies) marked the genre's popular acceptance and started the wave of gangster films in the 1930s in the sound era. The lead role in each film (a gangster/criminal or bootleg racketeer of the Prohibition Era) was glorified, but each one ultimately met his doom in the final scenes of these films, due to censors' demands that they receive moral retribution for their crimes.
The first two films in the cycle were released almost simultaneously by Warner Bros.:
(1) Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar (1930) starred Edward G. Robinson as a gritty, coarse and ruthless, petty Chicago killer named Caesar Enrico (or "Rico") Bandello (a flimsy disguise for a characterization of Al Capone), who experienced a rise to prominence and then a rapid downfall; Robinson was the first great gangster star
(2) William Wellman's The Public Enemy (1931) starred James Cagney (in his first film) as a cocky, fast-talking, nasty, and brutal criminal/bootlegger named Tom Powers - most memorable in a vicious scene at the breakfast table where the snarling gangster assaults his floozy moll girlfriend (Mae Clarke) by pressing a half grapefruit into her face. [Both are still in their pajamas, indicating that they spent the night together.] The startling finale included the door-to-door delivery of Cagney's mummy-wrapped corpse to his mother's house - the bandaged body falls through the front door. [The same stars were reunited in another Pre-Code quasi-gangster/comedy film, Lady Killer (1933) with Mae Clarke as Cagney's moll, and Cagney as the head of a New York crime ring who must relocate and hide out in Hollywood.]
(3) Howard Hawks' raw Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932), a Howard Hughes' produced film from UA starred Paul Muni as a power-mad, vicious, immature and beastly hood in Prohibition-Era Chicago (the characterization of Tony Camonte was loosely based on the brutal, murderous racketeer Al Capone). Other stars were George Raft (as his coin-flipping emotion-less, right-hand killer) and Ann Dvorak (as Tony's incestuous sister Cesca).
The ultra-violent, landmark film in the depiction of Italian-American immigrant gangsters included twenty-eight deaths, and the first use of a machine gun by a gangster. It was brought to the attention of the Hays Code for its unsympathetic portrayal of criminals, and there was an ensuing struggle over its release and content. The disturbing portrayal of irresponsible behavior by the gangsters almost encouraged its attractiveness. [In tribute over fifty years later, Brian de Palma remade the film with Al Pacino in the title role of Scarface (1983). Ironically, this film was also criticized as being too brutal.]
The Influence of the Hays Production Code on Gangster Films:
The coming of the Hays Production Code in the early 1930s spelled the end to glorifying the criminal, and approval of the ruthless methods and accompanying violence of the gangster lifestyle. The censorship codes of the day in the 1930s, notably the Hays Office, forced studios (particularly after 1934) to make moral pronouncements, present criminals as psychopaths, end the depiction of the gangster as a folk or 'tragic hero,' de-glorify crime, and emphasize that crime didn't pay. It also demanded minimal details shown for brutal crimes.
One way the studios quieted some of the protest and uproar over "America's shame" was to shift the emphasis from the criminal to the racket-busting federal agents, private detectives, or "good guys" on the other side of the law. In William Keighley's G-Men (1935), the best example of this new 'gangster-as-cop' sub-genre, screen tough guy James Cagney starred as a ruthless, revenge-seeking, impulsive, violent FBI agent to infiltrate criminal gangs on a crime spree in the Midwest. Although he was on the side of the law working undercover, he was just as cynical, brutal, and arrogant as he had been in his earliest gangster films.
A police detective (Edward G. Robinson in an against-type role) goes undercover and joins a NYC racket in Bullets or Ballots (1936), and in Anatole Litvak's The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938), Robinson portrayed a brainy crime specialist who joined Rocks Valentine's gang (led by Humphrey Bogart) and soon was masterminding heists. Robinson also starred as a college law professor - and special prosecutor who pursues justice in I Am the Law (1938). Anthony Mann's T-Men (1947) explored the similarities between Treasury Department agents and the counterfeiting criminals they pursued, and emphasized how villains were caught by semi-documentary style crime detection procedures (lineups, fingerprinting analysis, lab work, etc.).
Another developing 'Cain-and-Abel' sub-genre emphasized that crime didn't pay, in films such as Manhattan Melodrama (1934) with childhood friends William Powell and Clark Gable choosing two diametrically opposed lifestyles - prosecuting attorney and gambler/racketeer, and Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) with two young slum kids, James Cagney and Pat O'Brien, following two different paths - a criminal lifestyle (that was idolized by the Dead End Kids on New York's lower East Side) and the priesthood. In the electrifying finale, Cagney was taken on a long walk to his execution. William Wyler's gangster melodrama Dead End (1937) portrayed the efforts of New York slum dweller (Sylvia Sidney) to keep her gang member brother Tommy (Billy Halop, one of the Dead End Kids) from emulating gangster Humphrey Bogart. The adolescent gang actors (veterans of the Broadway version of Dead End) were introduced in this film and later evolved into the East Side Kids and The Bowery Boys.
Warner Bros. Stars - Cagney and Bogart:
Warner Bros. found itself in the late 1930s with three tremendous talents - James Cagney, director Raoul Walsh, and a new actor named Humphrey Bogart. Bogart was catapulted to fame by playing escaped killer Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936). In various combinations, this trio made three memorable gangster films: the realistic, documentary-style, historical saga and chronicling of the Prohibition Era in Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties (1939) - with Cagney and Bogart in remarkable roles as bootlegging gangster rivals; it was the last great gangster film before the arrival of film noir in the early 1940s; it ended with Cagney's memorable and tragic death scene (evoking Michelangelo's Pieta) on snowy church steps the dramatic cult classic They Drive By Night (1940) Bogart in his first starring role as a more sympathetic character - a newly-released, aging criminal Roy "Mad Dog" Earle who fell in love with an innocent lame girl (Ida Lupino) in High Sierra (1941)
Bogart's most famous starring roles were in film noir-ish masterpieces as a private detective fighting crime, first as hard-boiled Sam Spade in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), a faithful adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's "B" novel and the first in a string of marvelous film noirs and crime films in the 40s. And then as Philip Marlowe, another investigative detective (derived from Raymond Chandler's novel) in Howard Hawks' complex film The Big Sleep (1946), starring opposite Lauren Bacall. Bogart and Bacall were once again paired in John Huston's memorable crime drama set in the Florida Keys, Key Largo (1948) with Edward G. Robinson resurrecting his iconic gangster image as the infamous Johnny Rocco.
Drama
Drama Films are serious presentations or stories with settings or life situations that portray realistic characters in conflict with either themselves, others, or forces of nature. A dramatic film shows us human beings at their best, their worst, and everything in-between. Each of the types of subject-matter themes have various kinds of dramatic plots. Dramatic films are probably the largest film genre because they include a broad spectrum of films. See also crime films, melodramas, epics (historical dramas), biopics (biographical), or romantic genres - just some of the other genres that have developed from the dramatic genre.
Dramatic themes often include current issues, societal ills, and problems, concerns or injustices, such as racial prejudice, religious intolerance (such as anti-Semitism), drug addiction, poverty, political unrest, the corruption of power, alcoholism, class divisions, sexual inequality, mental illness, corrupt societal institutions, violence toward women or other explosive issues of the times. These films have successfully drawn attention to the issues by taking advantage of the topical interest of the subject. Although dramatic films have often dealt frankly and realistically with social problems, the tendency has been for Hollywood, especially during earlier times of censorship, to exonerate society and institutions and to blame problems on an individual, who more often than not, would be punished for his/her transgressions.
Social Problem Dramas:
Social dramas or "message films" expressed powerful lessons, such as the harsh conditions of Southern prison systems in Hell's Highway (1932) and I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), the plight of wandering groups of young boys on freight cars during the Depression in William Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road (1933), or the lawlessness of mob rule in Fritz Lang's Fury (1936), or the resourcefulness of lifer prisoner and bird expert Robert Stroud (Burt Lancaster) in John Frankenheimer's Birdman of Alcatraz (1961), or the tale of a framed, unjustly imprisoned journalist (James Cagney) in Each Dawn I Die (1939). In Yield to the Night (1956), Diana Dors relived her life and crime as she awaited her execution. A tough, uncompromising look at New York waterfront corruption was found in the classic American film, director Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) with Marlon Brando as a longshoreman who testified to the Waterfront Crimes Commission. The film drew criticism with the accusation that it appeared to justify Kazan's informant role before the HUAC.
Problems of the poor and dispossessed have often been the themes of the great films, including The Good Earth (1937) with Chinese peasants facing famine, storms, and locusts, and John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) about an indomitable, Depression-Era Okie family - the Joads - who survived a tragic journey from Oklahoma to California. Martin Scorsese's disturbing and violent Taxi Driver (1976) told of the despairing life of a lone New York taxi cab driver amidst nighttime urban sprawl. Issues and conflicts within a suburban family were showcased in director Sam Mendes' Best Picture-winning American Beauty (1999), as were problems with addiction in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000).
Films About Mental Illness:
Two films from different eras that dealt with the problems of the mentally ill and conditions in mental institutions were Anatole Litvak's The Snake Pit (1948) with tormented Olivia de Havilland's assistance from a psychiatrist, and Milos Forman's adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) with Jack Nicholson as a rebellious institutional patient who feigned insanity but ultimately was squashed by Nurse Ratched and the repressive system.
Bette Davis played a neurotic and domineering woman in John Huston's In This Our Life (1942). Sam Wood's Kings Row (1942) examined the various fears and phobias in a small-town. Repressed and prohibited from consummating her love with Warren Beatty, Natalie Wood exhibited signs of insanity in Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961). Another teenager (Kathleen Quinlan) felt suicidal tendencies due to schizophrenia in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977). And 1930s-40s actress Frances Farmer (Jessica Lange) tragically declined due to a mental breakdown and subsequent lobotomy in Frances (1982). The repressed emotions and tragic crises in a seemingly perfect family were documented in Robert Redford's directorial debut Best Picture and Best Director-winning Ordinary People (1980).
Films About Alcoholism:
A hard look was taken at alcoholism with Ray Milland as a depressed writer in Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945) and Jack Lemmon (and Lee Remick) in Blake Edwards' Days of Wine and Roses (1962). An aging alcoholic singer (Bing Crosby) desperate for a comeback was the theme of The Country Girl (1954) - the film that provided Grace Kelly with a Best Actress Oscar. Susan Hayward acted the decline into alcoholism of 1930s star Lillian Roth in Daniel Mann's biopic I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955). More recently, Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway played the parts of two fellow alcoholics in Barbet Schroeder's Barfly (1987).
Films about Disaffected Youth and Generational Conflict:
Juvenile delinquency, young punks and gangs, and youth rebellion were the subject matter of Dead End (1937), Laslo Benedek's The Wild One (1953) with biker Marlon Brando disrupting a small town, Richard Brooks' The Blackboard Jungle (1955) with Glenn Ford as an idealistic teacher in a slum area school, and Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955) with James Dean as an iconic disaffected youth.
Race Relations and Civil Rights Dramas:
Films that were concerned with race relations included Hollywood's first major indictment of racism in producer Stanley Kramer's and director Mark Robson's Home of the Brave (1949), the story of a black WWII soldier facing bigoted insults from his squad. Then, there was John Sturges' Bad Day At Black Rock (1955) about small-town Japanese-American prejudice uncovered by a one-armed Spencer Tracy, Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones (1958) with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as bound-together escaping convicts - and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) about an inter-racial couple (Sidney Poitier as WHO doctor John Prentiss and Katharine Houghton as SF socialite Joanna Drayton) planning on marrying who needed parental approval from Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy (in their ninth and last film together). Also, In the Heat of the Night (1967) featured a bigoted sheriff and a black homicide detective working together to solve a murder, and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) - about racial tensions and eventual violence during a hot Brooklyn summer.
Strong indictments toward anti-Semitism were made in Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement (1947) with writer Gregory Peck posing as a Jew, and Crossfire (1947) about the mysterious murder of a Jew. The Japanese film classic from Akira Kurosawa titled Rashomon (1951) examined a violent ambush, murder and rape in 12th century Japan from four different perspectives.
Courtroom Dramas:
Courtroom legal dramas, which include dramatic tension in the courtroom setting, maneuverings between trial opponents (lawyers, prosecutors, and clients), surprise witnesses, and the psychological breakdown of key participants, were exemplified in films such as the following: William Dieterle's film noir The Accused (1948), with Robert Cummings defending college professor Loretta Young's self-defense murder 12 Angry Men (1957) with Henry Fonda and eleven other jurists in a tense deliberation room Billy Wilder's intriguing and plot-twisting Witness for the Prosecution (1957) based on an Agatha Christie play Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959) with James Stewart as a defense lawyer for accused murderer Ben Gazzara Compulsion (1959) the Navy court-martial trial based on the Herman Wouk play of the same name in The Caine Mutiny (1954) - a film with a memorable performance of Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg the historic Scopes Trial battle in Inherit the Wind (1960) pitting Spencer Tracy against Fredric March in a case brought against a schoolteacher for teaching Darwinism the social drama regarding the Nazi war crimes trials in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) with Burt Lancaster as a Nazi judge defended by Nazi defense attorney Maximilian Schell in a 1948 court ruled by Chief Allied Judge Spencer Tracy the defense case of a black accused of rape in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), adapted from the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel by Harper Lee about civil rights
In addition, director Robert Benton's Best Picture-winning Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) focused on the subject of a nurturing father (Dustin Hoffman) trying to win a child custody case with divorced Meryl Streep. An Australian film, Breaker Morant (1980) was another tense courtroom drama - the true story of soldiers in the Boer War who were used as scapegoats by the British Army. The award-winning drama, Sidney Lumet's The Verdict (1982) featured Paul Newman as an alcoholic, has-been Boston lawyer fighting a case of medical malpractice against James Mason. Glenn Close defended lover/client Jeff Bridges in Richard Marquand's who-dun-it Jagged Edge (1985). Assistant DA Kelly McGillis defended the bar-room gang-raped Jodie Foster (an Oscar-winning role) in The Accused (1988).
A Soldier's Story (1984) examined racial hatred in a 1940s Southern military post in a dramatic courtroom murder/mystery. And A Few Good Men (1992) portrayed the courtroom conflict (known for its catchphrase: "You can't handle the truth!") between established Marine Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) and two young Naval attorneys (Tom Cruise and Demi Moore) regarding the circumstances surrounding the hazing ("Code Red") death (by asphyxiation due to acute lactic acidosis) of Private Santiago - a Marine stationed at Guantanamo Naval Air Station in Cuba. Jonathan Demme's AIDS drama, Philadelphia (1993) examined discrimination against AIDS and the legal defense of an AIDS sufferer (Tom Hanks) who was fired.
Political Dramas:
Political dramas include Frank Capra's two political tales - State of the Union (1948) with Tracy/Hepburn, and his classic story of a naive Senator's fight against political corruption in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Conversely, the award-winning, potent story of a corrupt politician was dramatized in Robert Rossen's All the King's Men (1949) with Broderick Crawford as the rising politician. Alexander Knox starred as President Woodrow Wilson in Henry King's epic, big budget bio Wilson (1944). In Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent (1962), stars Charles Laughton (in his last film), Franchot Tone, and Lew Ayres portrayed scheming Senators during Henry Fonda's crisis-threatened Presidency. The controversial The Manchurian Candidate (1962) questioned the Cold War brainwashing of a Korean War hero. Michael Ritchie's The Candidate (1972) examined the harsh reality of the campaign trail with political hopeful Robert Redford starring as an attorney running for the Senate. Oliver Stone's conspiracy-centered drama, JFK (1991), attempted to disprove the theory that President Kennedy's killer acted alone.
Journalism, the Press and Media-Related Dramas:
Dramatic films often center around the theme of journalism, the world of reporters and news. Often regarded as the best film ever made, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) was an insightful character study of a newspaper magnate. Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men (1976) was a docu-drama of real-life journalists Bernstein and Woodward investigating the Watergate scandal. Sidney Lumet's Network (1976) with Peter Finch as a despairing newsman was a critical look at TV news, while Sydney Pollack's Absence of Malice (1981) told about an over-earnest journalist (Sally Field) and a wrongly-implicated defendant (Paul Newman). James L. Brooks' Broadcast News (1987) focused on the world of network news shows, editors, and reporters.
Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957) showed how a down-home country boy (Andy Griffith in his film debut as Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes) could be transformed into a pop television show icon and political megalomaniac. Through the eyes of a cameraman, Haskell Wexler's docu-drama Medium Cool (1969) covered the corruption and events surrounding Chicago's 1968 Democratic Convention. In Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously (1962), Mel Gibson played the role of an Australian journalist working during the time of President Sukarno's coup in mid-60s Indonesia. And in Oliver Stone's Salvador (1982), James Woods played the role of a photographer in war-torn El Salvador.
WWII Homefront Dramas:
Dramatic films which have portrayed the "homefront" during times of war, and the subsequent problems of peacetime adjustment include William Wyler's Mrs. Miniver (1942) about a separated middle-class family couple (Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon) during the Blitz, Clarence Brown's The Human Comedy (1943) with telegram delivery boy Mickey Rooney bringing news from the front to small-town GI families back home, John Cromwell's Since You Went Away (1944) with head of family Claudette Colbert during her husband's absence, and another William Wyler poignant classic The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) with couples awkwardly brought back together forever changed after the war: Dana Andrews and Virginia Mayo, Fredric March and Myrna Loy, and Harold Russell and Cathy O'Donnell.
Historical
Epic Films often take an historical or imagined event, mythic, legendary, or heroic figure, and add an extravagant setting and lavish costumes, accompanied by grandeur and spectacle and a sweeping musical score. Epics, costume dramas, historical dramas, war film epics, medieval romps, or 'period pictures' are tales that often cover a large expanse of time set against a vast, panoramic backdrop. In an episodic manner, they follow the continuing adventures of the hero(s), who are presented in the context of great historical events of the past.
Epics are historical films that recreate past events. They are expensive and lavish to produce, because they require elaborate and panoramic settings, on-location filming, authentic period costumes, inflated action on a massive scale and large casts of characters. Biopic (biographical) films are often less lavish versions of the epic film.
Epics often rewrite history, suffering from inauthenticity, fictitious recreations, excessive religiosity, hard-to-follow details and characters, romantic dreamworlds, ostentatious vulgarity, political correctness, and leaden scripts. Accuracy is sometimes sacrificed: the chronology is telescoped or modified, and the political/historical forces take a back seat to the personalization and ideological slant of the story (i.e., the 'poetic license' of Oliver Stone's controversial JFK (1991) immediately comes to mind).
Epics often share elements of the more elaborate adventure films genre and swashbuckler subgenre (e.g., the Robin Hood tale of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)). They may be combined with other genre types too, including: epic/historical westerns (i.e., Cimarron (1930), Dances with Wolves (1990)) epic science-fiction (i.e., Star Wars (1977)) epic/historical dramas (i.e., Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987)) epic war films (i.e., The Longest Day (1962)) unconventional epics (i.e., Robert Altman's Nashville (1975)) auteur epics (i.e., Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), Warren Beatty's period film Reds (1981), and theatrical director Julie Taymor's adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus (1999) (Andronicus) - her debut film with innovative production design)
Epics have existed since the earliest days of American cinema, from D. W. Griffith's ground-breaking The Birth of a Nation (1915), to Cecil B. DeMille's Joan the Woman (1916), The Ten Commandments (1923) and The King of Kings (1927), to the giant Civil War epic and Best Picture winner Gone With The Wind (1939), to the fairly-recent Schindler's List (1993), Titanic (1997), and Ridley Scott's revamped 'sword and sandal' epic Gladiator (2000). Irreverent spoofs of Biblical films have also emerged, such as The Life of Brian (1979), with the Monty Python cast.
Epics are often called costume dramas, since they emphasize the trappings of a period setting: historical pageantry, costuming and wardrobes, locale, spectacle, decor and a sweeping visual style. They often transport viewers to other worlds or eras: ancient times, biblical times, the Middle Ages, the Victorian era, or turn-of-the-century America. Unlike true historical epics, period films choose a specific historical period, and then superimpose fictional characters or events into the setting.
Two of the Earliest Epics from Italy: Quo Vadis? and Cabiria
Along with Enrico Guazzoni’s epic Quo Vadis? (1912, It.) - often considered the first successful feature-length motion picture and one of the first films with over two hours running time, the influential three-hour Italian silent film from Giovanni Pastrone, Cabiria (1914, It.), was an early example of spectacular and monumental epic film-making. It laid the pattern and groundwork for future big-budget feature-length films (by the likes of D.W. Griffith - for his Judith of Bethulia (1914), The Birth of a Nation (1915), and later his Babylonian sequences in Intolerance (1916) - and Cecil B. DeMille). Its story of 3rd century BC Ancient Rome included sequences of the eruption of Mt. Etna and Hannibal's crossing of the Alps with elephants (with an early example of tracking shots). The landmark film was shot on location in North Africa, Sicily and the Italian Alps. It was also the first film to be screened at the White House.
Silent Epics of D. W. Griffith:
The first great category of cinematic epics are the silent epics. The first American epic was early cinematic pioneer D. W. Griffith's Biblical spectacle Judith of Bethulia (1914), a little known four-reel feature film weaving together two Apocryphal stories about the 40-day Assyrian siege of the walled Judean city of Bethulia. Griffith's most influential and complex film, noted for its technical virtuosity and dynamic editing (although controversial for its southern point of view) was the first blockbuster film The Birth of a Nation (1915). It reproduced the Civil War and Reconstruction Periods (including various battles, Lincoln's assassination, and the aftermath) and told of the war's effects upon two families (the Northern Stonemans and the Southern Camerons) with a specific ideological slant that distorted its historical veracity. This almost three-hour film's screenplay was based upon Thomas Dixon's novel and play The Clansman.
The next Griffith film was another silent epic: Intolerance (1916), that studied the effects of injustice and intolerance in four separate yet inter-connected and parallel stories in different time periods (its Babylonian sequence with massive sets is still remarkable). Its theme of "Love's struggle throughout the ages" and its passionate plea for tolerance was a response to his Birth of a Nation critics. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm (1921) was set against the backdrop of pre-Revolutionary France, and followed the paths of two sisters (the Gish sisters) who were separated and raised in different environments - one by aristocratic nobles, the other by thieving peasants.
Silent Epics of Cecil B. De Mille: The Biblical Epic Subgenre
Griffith's directorial counterpart, who specialized in extravagant epics throughout his entire career spanning both the silent and sound eras, was film showman Cecil B. De Mille. In reaction to Griffith's epic Intolerance (1916), Cecil B. DeMille (still at Famous Players-Lasky Corp., soon to be Paramount) went on to make his first large scale spectacle/epic film titled Joan the Woman (1916), one of the first epic biopics. It was DeMille's version of the Joan of Arc story starring opera star Geraldine Farrar and Wallace Reid. Its release coincided with the US entry into The Great War (and echoed the raging conflict), and the film served as propaganda for the Allies, with its framing story set in the English trenches of World War I. The film received critical acclaim and was greeted with modest box-office success.
De Mille continued during his early film career with a series of silent Biblical or religious epics - a specific subgenre. These 'swords-and-sandals' films, with a strong religious viewpoint, were set during Roman times in the ancient world, and were noted for casts of thousands in crowd scenes. His two-part silent version of The Ten Commandments (1923) included spectacular special effects for the parting of the Red Sea. This film foreshadowed the advent of future De Mille spectacles. He followed The Ten Commandments with King of Kings (1927), a beautifully-lavish yet reverential story of the life of Christ with a climactic resurrection scene (in color) and ascension. [King of Kings was re-released in 1931 with a synchronized musical score.]
Other Silent Era Epics:
Director Fred Niblo spent millions and two years to create the most expensive film of its time - MGM's silent-era Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1926), that starred Ramon Novarro and Francis Bushman as rivals Ben-Hur and Messala, respectively. The film included two colossal sequences: the sea galley battle with pirates and the famous chariot-race. Rex Ingram's anti-war film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), a star-making vehicle for Rudolph Valentino, was about two Argentinian brothers who ended up fighting on different sides in WWI. A non-Biblical epic of the silent era was Erich Von Stroheim's monumental masterpiece titled Greed (1924), a severely-edited tale about the corruptive influences of avarice on a San Francisco dentist, his wife and an associate.
Raoul Walsh's imaginative Arabian Nights fantasy The Thief of Bagdad (1924) starred Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. with magical special effects and lavish production values including flying carpets and a giant genie. King Vidor's epic war film The Big Parade (1925) told the heart-wrenching tale of the love between a French peasant girl and an American doughboy fighting WWI in Europe. Russian director Sergei Eisenstein's silent masterpiece The Battleship Potemkin (1925) portrayed the 1905 revolution through a microcosmic view of a mutinous uprising aboard a Russian battleship. Its pioneering montage/editing sequences in the bloody Odessa Steps sequence changed filmmaking forever.
MGM - Epic Maker:
In the mid-1930s, MGM won the Best Picture with its adapted version of Charles Nordhoff's and James Norman Hall's historical non-fiction novel, the sea-adventure epic Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). It featured on-location shooting in Tahiti, and Charles Laughton as the definitive Captain Bligh and Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian (both nominated for Best Actor, along with co-star Franchot Tone). It was MGM's most expensive film production since their Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1926), at $2 million. [An inferior remake, Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), starred Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian.] Soon after, MGM produced the epic The Good Earth (1937), the last film of legendary producer Irving Thalberg - it was also an adaptation - of the Pearl S. Buck novel about Chinese peasants who faced, among other things, a devastating locust plague.
During the 40s, epics didn't fare very well, due to the scarcity of the war years. One exception was the British Shakespearean film from Laurence Olivier, Henry V (1944), with an American release in 1946. Best Picture and Best Actor-nominated Olivier won a special Academy Award for "his outstanding achievement as actor, producer and director in bringing Henry V to the screen."
Cecil B. De Mille's Biblical and Roman Empire Epics of the Sound Era:
Beginning around the mid-1930s, De Mille's The Sign of the Cross (1932) featured Charles Laughton as a depraved Emperor Nero, Christians being consumed by lions in the arena, Roman orgies, and Claudette Colbert as the Emperor's wife in a bathing scene. In the following year, his version of Cleopatra (1934) featured Claudette Colbert again as the temptress Queen of Egypt. After a long hiatus, the famous director returned to his Biblical epic format with the first major post-war epic derived from the Book of Judges in the Old Testament - Paramount's extravagant spectacle Samson and Delilah (1949). It starred ravishing Hedy Lamarr as the vixenish, vindictive Philistine woman who seduced long-haired Danite strongman Victor Mature. In the most spectacular scenes, Samson fought with a lion, destroyed an army with the jawbone of an ass, and brought down the Temple of Gaza. [Two others with dual-character titles also appeared during the era: Henry King's David and Bathsheba (1951) with a miscast Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward, and King Vidor's expensive Solomon and Sheba (1959) with Yul Brynner (replacing the deceased Tyrone Power who passed away during filming) and Gina Lollobrigida.]
Showman De Mille reshot his own silent era 1923 film in the mid-1950s in the wide-screen Technicolor format on a grander scale. His 70th (and final film), The Ten Commandments (1956) starred actor Charlton Heston as the Hebrew leader Moses, performing special effects plagues before Yul Brynner as the Pharoah Rameses, and parting the Red Sea for the Israelites. The film's sole Oscar win was for its special effects. [In the same year, producer Michael Todd's epic travelogue presentation of Jules Verne's 1872 novel Around the World in 80 Days (1956) won Best Picture.]
Other 50s and 60s Grand-Scale Biblical and 'Sword and Sandal' Epics:
In the 50s, the sound era brought more Biblical, historical, or Grecian/Roman times epics, alongside the development of colorful wide-screen CinemaScope to lure viewers away from their home televisions with free programming. Mervyn LeRoy's and MGM's full-scale, big-budget Quo Vadis? (1951) with Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr, told the tale of Emperor Nero's (Peter Ustinov) times and Christian persecution, and included great spectacle, costumes, romance, and action. Using sets left-over from Quo Vadis? (1951), MGM followed with Joseph L. Mankiewicz's hit Julius Caesar (1953), a star-studded, faithful Shakespearean adaptation with James Mason, John Gielgud, Louis Calhern (as Julius Caesar) and Marlon Brando (as Marc Antony). In the same year, Columbia produced the opulent, non-widescreen historical/religious epic Salome (1953) with Rita Hayworth as the title character Princess and Charles Laughton as King Herod.
Director Henry Koster's and 20th Century Fox's The Robe (1953) was the first widescreen CinemaScope feature film. The landmark film starred Richard Burton as young Roman tribune Marcellus Gallio whose life was affected by Jesus' robe, Victor Mature as his converted slave Demetrius, and Jean Simmons as Diana. Its success spurred the development of a sequel of sorts, Delmer Daves' Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), again with Victor Mature and also Susan Hayward. Mature, one of the mainstays of the ancient epic, also starred in Fox's intelligent film about 14th century BC Egypt in the same year - The Egyptian (1954), with supporting roles from Gene Tierney, Jean Simmons, and Peter Ustinov. It also included a score from Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann. Douglas Sirk's first Cinemascope film was the uncharacteristic 'sword and sandal' historical costume adventure The Sign of the Pagan (1954). It starred Jeff Chandler as a Roman centurion battling the forces of long-haired Attila the Hun (Jack Palance!) with a Fu Manchu mustache.
By the mid-50s and for the decade afterwards, many of these kinds of epics were typecasting various players, such as Victor Mature, Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Richard Burton, Jean Simmons, Peter Ustinov, and Stephen Boyd. Richard Burton starred as the title character in writer-director-producer Robert Rossen's Cinemascopic epic Alexander the Great (1956). [Other epic films about Alexander the Great, directed by Oliver Stone and Baz Luhrmann, are to be released in 2004 and 2005 respectively.]
William Wyler's and MGM's beautifully framed, eleven Oscar-winning blockbuster film Ben-Hur (1959), derived from Major General Lew Wallace's A Tale of the Christ, was a remake of the earlier classic silent film of the same title with Ramon Novarro and Francis X. Bushman. This newer version, a $15 million three and a half-hour remake, starred Charlton Heston as the title character, and Stephen Boyd as his childhood friend/Roman enemy Messala, and included the same exciting slave galley battle scene and memorable chariot race.
The 1960s opened with Stanley Kubrick's intelligent gladiator-revolt epic Spartacus (1960) - it was based on Howard Fast's novel (with a script by Fast and Dalton Trumbo, both blacklisted during the McCarthy 'witch hunts') about an aborted Roman slave uprising in 73 B.C. Its original director Anthony Mann was fired two weeks into production - the opening shots of the film remain from his work. Spartacus was the first film to list a black-listed writer's name on the screen.
Epic star Charlton Heston portrayed legendary 11th-century medieval Spanish hero/warrior Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar (El Cid) who united the Moors and Christians under one King, with Sophia Loren in Anthony Mann's spectacular and handsome-looking El Cid (1961), an adaptation from French playwright Pierre Corneille's work. Nicholas Ray reprised the intelligently-told King of Kings (1961), another tale of the life of Christ starring Jeffrey Hunter and narrated by Orson Welles. Dino De Laurentis produced Barabbas (1962) which starred Anthony Quinn as the murderous thief who was haunted for life after being freed by Pilate and exchanged for Jesus. Another Biblical epic, director Robert Aldrich's Italian-made Sodom and Gomorrah (1962) depicted the destruction of the two sinful cities with expensive production values.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed the all-star costly, opulent, four-hour version of 20th Century Fox's flop Cleopatra (1963) starring Elizabeth Taylor as the provocatively-costumed Egyptian Queen, Richard Burton (in his best epic appearance) as Marc Antony, and Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar. Taking five years to prepare and 10 months to shoot on a budget that grew to $44 million, the film nearly bankrupted Fox Studios. Taylor became the first star to be paid $1 million for this role.
Anthony Mann's big-budget historical epic The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) with Stephen Boyd chronicled events in ancient Rome. And George Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) featured many Hollywood and international stars in unexpected roles - including Charlton Heston as John the Baptist and Max Von Sydow as Jesus. Director John Huston's epic three-hour The Bible (1966) was a misnomer when all the other directors in producer Dino De Laurentiis' extensive project bowed out. [A subtitle was added to the film's title, making it The Bible: In the Beginning, referring to the fact that only the first 22 chapters of Genesis were included, with the story of Creation, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Noah's Ark and the flood (with Huston as Noah himself), and the patriarchal story of Abraham and Sarah.]
Biographical (Biopics):
Another subgenre of epics are 'biopics' or biographical works, that dramatize the life of an actual historical figure (usually a 'Great Man', politician or President, entertainer, inventor/scientist, military leader, artist, sports hero or celebrity). Genre hybrids are common in this sub-genre. In many cases, these films put an emphasis on the larger events (wartime, political or social conditions) surrounding the person's entire life as they rise to fame and glory.
A few examples in early film history include: two award-winning, Warner Bros. historical/biographical films, both starring Paul Muni - William Dieterle's The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) about the famous French scientist, and the fictionalized Best Picture-winning The Life of Emile Zola (1937) about the famous French writer and court defender. Other examples include Norman Taurog's children's dramatic film Young Tom Edison (1940) about the famed inventor (Mickey Rooney), the historical drama Marie Antoinette (1938), about the famous Austrian princess who married future King Louis XVI, John Ford's quasi-biography Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) with Henry Fonda in the title role, and Raymond Massey in an adaptation of Robert Sherwood's Pulitzer Prize winning play, Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940). Although the film traces the career of a fictional newspaper tycoon (patterned after William Randolph Hearst), Citizen Kane (1941) can be considered a life-story 'biopic.' Henry King's historical/political drama Wilson (1944) immortalized the life story of WWI's US President Woodrow Wilson, much like the film biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's life in Sunrise at Campobello (1960).
Artists and literary authors have also inspired biographical film epics, such as two films from Vincente Minnelli. His film Madame Bovary (1949) starred James Mason as Gustave Flaubert on whose classic novel the film was based, and another film, Lust for Life (1956) featured Kirk Douglas as tormented Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh. Also, Billy Wilder's The Spirit of St. Louis (1957) dramatized the historical figure of 27 year old Charles Lindbergh (James Stewart), the "Lone Eagle." (Also see the dramas genre for sports biopics).
More recent examples of biographical epics include the following films: George C. Scott's unforgettable portrayal of the cantankerous WWII general in the highly-regarded Patton (1970) Sir Richard Attenborough's $22 million production of Gandhi (1982) featured Oscar-winning Ben Kingsley as the saintly 20th century Indian Mahatma - pacifist and spiritual leader the multiple award-winning film adaptation of the musical Broadway hit Amadeus (1984), from director Milos Forman, viewed the antics of young musical prodigy Mozart (Tom Hulce) [In its year of winning the Oscar competition, it was running against two other big pictures: David Lean's A Passage to India (1984) and The Killing Fields (1984)] Bernardo Bertolucci's honored epic of the Chinese Ching Dynasty and the life of Pu Yi, China's last emperor in the Best Picture-winning The Last Emperor (1987) Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995) with Anthony Hopkins as the scandalous 37th President of the US and Joan Allen as his supportive, long-suffering wife Pat writer/director Spike Lee's epic film Malcolm X (1992) told the life story of the slain civil rights leader with a great performance from Denzel Washington Attenborough's reverential Chaplin (1992) chronicled the life story of silent comedian and film-maker Charlie Chaplin (Robert Downey, Jr.) Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1995) was about the maverick, low-budget, Hollywood director (Johnny Depp) of cult films Alan Parker's musical biography Evita (1996) showcased Madonna playing the role of beloved Argentinian Eva Peron
Horror
ve audience, starring David Staller and Elizabeth Walsh Il Fantasma Dell'Opera (1998, It.) (aka The Phantom of the Opera), d. Dario Argento, a loose adaptation with daughter Asia Argento as Christine and Julian Sands as the nameless Phantom (without a mask); with great production values including more sex, graphically-bloody gore, and a musical score by Ennio Morricone The Phantom of the Opera (2004), d. Joel Schumacher, with Gerard Butler as the lead character, and starlet Emmy Rossum (a trained opera singer) as Christine; also with Minnie Driver and Miranda Richardson]
Lon Chaney also starred as a sunken and dark-eyed, vampirish character in a lost film by Tod Browning titled London After Midnight (1927), the first Hollywood vampire film. [James Cagney played the role of Chaney in Man of a Thousand Faces (1957) and recreated the star's roles as the Phantom and Quasimodo in two of horror's greatest achievements.] Many of these early silent classics would be remade during the talkies era.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Films:
John Barrymore starred in the first version of the Jekyll/Hyde story, a silent film titled Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), taken from Robert Louis Stevenson's story about a doctor/scientist whose evil side was brought out by a magic formula. It was later re-made in many versions, but the two most noteworthy versions were: Fredric March's Oscar-winning portrayal of the transformed, villainous scientist in director Rouben Mamoulian's first sound version Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), starring Fredric March in the title role and Miriam Hopkins as the slutty Cockney barmaid Ivy, and Victor Fleming's MGM production (which won the Academy Award for black and white cinematography) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), starring Spencer Tracy in the title role and Ingrid Bergman as the "wicked" prostitute. [In the psycho-sexual thriller Mary Reilly (1995), Julia Roberts starred as the innocent maid of the infamous Dr. Jekyll to provide a new perspective.]
The Advent of Classic Horror Films of the 30s: Universal Studios
Actor Conrad Veidt and German expressionistic director Paul Leni were recruited by Universal's boss Carl Laemmle in the mid-1920s. Paul Leni was already known in his homeland for the spooky horror classics Backstairs (1921) and Waxworks (1924). After moving to Hollywood, Leni directed The Cat and the Canary (1927), a derivative from a stage-bound 1922 melodrama. The influential film is considered the first Gothic 'haunted house' horror film. Veidt was cast as an ever-smiling, grotesque carnival freak named Gwynplaine in Leni's next film for Universal, The Man Who Laughs (1927), a superb romantic melodrama.
By the early 1930s, horror entered into its classic phase in Hollywood - the true Dracula and Frankenstein Eras, with films that borrowed from their German expressionism roots. The studios took morbid tales of European vampires and undead aristocrats, mad scientists, and invisible men and created some of the most archetypal creatures and monsters ever known for the screen. Universal Studios was best-known for its pure horror films in the 30s and 40s, horror-dom's characters (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, the Invisible Man, and the Wolf Man) and its classic horror stars, Hungarian matinee idol Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.
The Dracula Films:
According to Guinness World Records, the character most frequently portrayed in horror films is Dracula, with over 160 representations (at the present count). With Tod Browning's direction, Universal Studios produced a film version of Lugosi's 1927 Broadway stage success about a blood-sucking, menacing vampire named Dracula (1931), released early in the year. [Lon Chaney, Sr. was one of many actors considered to play the title character, but he died in 1930.] The atmospheric, commercially-successful film adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel played upon fears of sexuality, blood, and the nebulous period between life and death. The heavily-accented voice and acting of Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in his most famous portrayal as the 500 year old vampire was elegant, suave, exotic and stylish - and frightening to early audiences - while the undead villain hypnotically charmed his victims with a predatory gaze. [An impressive-looking Spanish version, with director George Melford in place of Browning, was shot simultaneously on the same sets at night, but with a different cast and crew (Carlos Villar?as replaced Lugosi, and Eduardo Arozamena as Van Helsing, along with provocatively-dressed actresses Lupita Tovar as Eva (Mina) and Carmen Guerrero as Lucia (Lucy)).] [In director Tim Burton's horror/comedy Ed Wood (1994), Martin Landau won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as the aging, morphine-addicted horror star Bela Lugosi, a friend of one of Hollywood's worst directors.]
In the same year, Danish writer/director Carl Theodor Dreyer's dreamlike, atmospheric, seminal horror film Vampyr (1931) was released. The unsettling film, Dreyer's first sound feature, was loosely based on a collection of horror stories (In a Glass Darkly (1972) written by Sheridan Le Fanu). It was alternatively titled The Strange Adventure of David Gray - the story of a man (Baron Nicholas de Gunsberg, aka Julian West) in a remote country inn who slowly believes he is surrounded by vampires - and who dreams of his own death and coffin burial. And Fritz Lang's M (1931) introduced a terrorized criminal, child-murdering deviant character (portrayed by Peter Lorre in his mesmerizing film debut) who was based on the real-life, notorious serial killer Peter Kurten - the 'Vampire of Dusseldorf.'
The Original Frankenstein Film:
The first Dracula film was followed closely by the definitive, quintessential combination of science fiction and Gothic horror in a 'mad doctor' thriller. This classic monster/horror film - Frankenstein (1931) - was James Whale's adaptation from Mary Shelley's novel about Dr. Henry Frankenstein with a virtually unknown actor - Boris Karloff. With a boxy forehead and neck electrodes (and other features created from Whale's sketches by make-up artist Jack Pierce), Karloff's poignant portrayal of the pathetic created Monster's plight gave a personality to the outcast, uncomprehending character with a lumbering and lurching gait.
The Wolf Man Cycle of Films:
Without resorting to an existing literary horror figure, such as Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or The Invisible Man, Universal also created a new and 'original' creature in two films - the werewolf - the last of its great original horror characters. The first US werewolf film was Stuart Walker's well-made The Werewolf of London (1935) with Henry Hull as Dr. Glendon - the scientist who brings the 'wolf' curse upon himself. The second, most famous and definitive Wolf Man character was in director George Waggner's excellent B-grade film, The Wolf Man (1941) with Lon Chaney, Jr. in his first appearance as the accursed Larry Talbot - his portrayal came to be his best-known role. The "transformation" scene from man-to-wolf, involving complicated cosmetic/makeup artistry, was remarkably realistic. [The makeup artist used yak hair and a rubber snout.]
Unfortunately, the Wolf Man role hopelessly typecast Chaney, Jr. for life. He was forced to star in a series of very poor sequels, teamed up with other Universal horror stars in B-grade films including Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943), and in two films adding Dracula to the mix: House of Frankenstein (1944) (the first all-star get-together with Glenn Strange as Frankenstein, John Carradine as Count Dracula, Boris Karloff as a mad scientist, and Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Wolf Man) House of Dracula (1945) - an immediate sequel to the House of Frankenstein (1944) film, with Lon Chaney, Jr. as the Wolf Man and John Carradine as Dracula - again
The worst ignominy suffered by Chaney, Jr. was in Universal-International's comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) with the two screen comedians. Here was evidence that classic horror films in the genre were beginning to go out of style after the real 'horrors' of World War II, and Universal was attempting to crank out more and more sequels. Another unrelated 'wolf-man' film was She-Wolf of London (1946), with June Lockart as Phyllis Allenby, an innocent young girl in London - and the alleged perpetrator of gruesome murders.
Musicals
Musical / Dance Films are cinematic forms that emphasize and showcase full-scale song and dance routines in a significant way (usually with a musical or dance performance as part of the film narrative, or as an unrealistic "eruption" within the film). Or they are films that are centered on combinations of music, dance, song or choreography. In traditional musicals, cast members are ones who sing. Musicals highlight various musical artists or dancing stars, with lyrics that support the story line, often with an alternative, escapist vision of reality - a search for love, success, wealth, and popularity. This genre has been considered the most escapist of all major film genres. Tremendous film choreography and orchestration often enhances musical numbers.
Introduction:
With the coming of talking motion pictures, the musical film genre emerged from its roots: stage musicals and operettas, revues, music halls and vaudeville. They were the last of the major film genres, because they were dependent on sound captured on film. (How could a movie be "all-singing, all-dancing" without sound?) Musicals are often described as Broadway on film, although many other forms of musicals have been made (e.g., rock 'n' roll movies and disco/dance films). Recently, animated films (with musical soundtracks, such as Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), and Tarzan (1999)) have emerged as one of the major musical forms, and many of them have won Best Original Song Oscars.
The Earliest Examples of Sound/Dance Films:
One of the earliest films with a famous dance sequence was The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), noted for Latin lover Rudolph Valentino's sensuous tango performed in a smoky cantina while dressed in an Argentine gaucho costume. In 1926, Warner Bros. had produced Don Juan (1926), the first full-length silent film released with a complete musical score on a Vitaphone soundtrack. The groundbreaking film cleverly synchronized canned sound effects and dubbed music to the action.
Warner Brothers' Experiments with Sound:
Warner Bros. had launched sound and talking pictures, with Bell Telephone Laboratory researchers, by developing a revolutionary synchronized sound system called Vitaphone. It was a short-lived system sound-on-film process developed in 1925 that became obsolete by 1931. This sound-on-disk process allowed sound to be recorded on a 16" phonograph record that was electronically linked and synchronized with the film projector. Each disc corresponded to one reel of film, or about ten minutes. The process was first used for short one- and two-reel films, mostly comedies and vaudeville acts.
The Jazz Singer (1927): A Landmark Film
With the coming of the talkies, the film musical genre naturally emerged with the first full-length, revolutionary 'talkie' (with speech and song) that premiered in New York City at the Warner Theatre on October 6, 1927. It was a "musical" of sorts - Warner Bros.' The Jazz Singer (1927). Contrary to popular belief, it was not the first sound feature film, since it was mostly silent, and it was not the first Hollywood musical (The Broadway Melody (1929) holds that honor). It was also not the first instance of sound-on-film.
In reality, the landmark part-talkie singing film was an old-fashioned melodrama about Jewish-bred 'jazz singer' Jakie Rabinowitz/Jake Robin (charismatic Broadway mega-star Al Jolson). It featured seven songs (including "Blue Skies," "Toot-Toot-Tootsie," and "Mammy" - famous for the image of Jolson on one knee holding out his arms to embrace the audience), and a few lines of screen dialogue (including one long emotional homecoming speech to Jolson's mother, played by Eugenie Besserer). After Jolson had sung his first song, "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face", he delivered a portentous, spellbinding line that was ad-libbed and left in the film, before singing his next song. His naturally-spoken words were the first ever heard in a full-length movie:
Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You ain't heard nothin' yet. Wait a minute, I tell ya, you ain't heard nothin'! Do you wanna hear 'Toot, Toot, Tootsie!'? All right, hold on, hold on. (To the band leader) Lou, Listen. Play 'Toot, Toot, Tootsie!' Three choruses, you understand. In the third chorus I whistle. Now give it to 'em hard and heavy. Go right ahead!
In the next year - 1928, the hot star Al Jolson teamed up once more with Warner Bros. for his only other big hit - director Lloyd Bacon's part-talkie, part-silent high-grossing tearjerker The Singing Fool (1928). This follow-up film for Jolson was an even bigger success and soon became the biggest-grossing film of all time - until Gone With the Wind (1939). In fact, this film was the one that really introduced the public to the sound film. It was a sophisticated variation of the earlier hit in which Jolson crooned seven songs, including: "Sonny Boy," "I'm Sittin' on the Top of the World," "There's a Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder," and "It All Depends on You." The first film-related hit record was Al Jolson's Sonny Boy, sung three times in Jolson's second feature film.
Three more ground-breaking films featured Jolson at the end of the decade, although none of them approached his earlier success. They were: Lloyd Bacon's Say It With Songs (1929), director Michael Curtiz' Mammy (1930) - a melodrama with a few Irving Berlin songs and Technicolor sequences, and Big Boy (1930).
Upheaval in the Industry:
The other major film studios (Paramount, Loew's, First National and UA) realized the expensive and challenging ramifications of the sound revolution that was dawning, and that talkie films would be the wave of the future. Most of the studios started to convert from silent to sound film production - a tremendous capital investment. Thousands of existing theaters had to be rewired for sound. In 1927, only 400 US theatres were wired for sound, but by the end of the decade, over 40% of the country's movie theatres had sound systems installed. Many Hollywood actors/actresses lacked good voices and stage experience, and their marketability decreased. By 1930, the silent movie had practically disappeared, and by the mid-1930s, film industry studios had become sound-film factories.
Most early musicals were crudely made, due to technical limitations, and often just adaptations or photographed versions of recent stage hits. Broadway stars were called in to become musical film stars. Broadway legend and popular Ziegfeld Follies star Fannie Brice (in her sound film debut) performed some of her inimitable sketches and songs ("I'd Rather Be Blue Over You" and the title song) in director Archie Mayo's and Warners' musical My Man (1928) - one-third of which was silent. The film was not financially successful, and Brice was not an overnight success on film, until her "Baby Snooks" character became popular. RKO's first major production was the stage adaptation Rio Rita (1929), one of the first musical spectaculars (filmed in black and white with one rare Technicolor sequence). Starring Bebe Daniels as the Hispanic title character and John Boles as a Texas Ranger, it was a costly adaptation of Florenz Ziegfeld's 1927 successful Broadway stage musical hit shown virtually whole. Two of its stars from the original show, comics Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, went on to later fame in the early 30s for the studio.
On stage, the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein II Show Boat debuted in 1927 - it was the first Broadway musical play, differing from previous musical revues (a series of musical numbers strung together). In two years, Universal released the part-talkie film version Show Boat (1929) - the first of many versions (James Whale's 1936 version with Paul Robeson - usually considered the best, and George Sidney's 1951 version with Howard Keel) of the popular adaptation from Edna Ferber's book.
The First Genuine Musical: The Broadway Melody (1929)
The first genuine musical, fully integrating singing and dancing into a 'backstage musical' plot was also MGM's first full-length musical, The Broadway Melody (1929). It premiered in Hollywood in early February of 1929 at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, and was the first widely-distributed sound feature. It was proudly advertised as "All Talking - All Singing - All Dancing", and the popular film brought in a profit of over $1.6 million. It was the first musical film - and the first sound film as well - to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. The film inspired three more "Broadway Melody" films - in 1935 (the best of the series), 1937, and 1940.
The landmark musical starred Anita Page (as Queenie) and Oscar-nominated Bessie Love (as older sibling Hank) as two sisters seeking fame in the New York theatre - known as the Great White Way - while both were attracted to song-and-dance man Charles King (as Eddie). The musical is outdated today and exhibits its clumsy vaudevillian, stage-bound roots (with Jack Benny as master of ceremonies). However, it featured the innovative use of two-colors in "The Wedding of the Painted Doll" sequence, a mobile camera, and slangy dialogue. The film was also revolutionary for two sound engineering firsts: it used a pre-recorded soundtrack (for "The Wedding of the Painted Doll" sequence) it had post-production sound effects and editing
The pioneering sound film was produced by young production head Irving Thalberg, and its original score was written by the team of Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed - the film's hit song was "You Were Meant For Me." [Freed remained with MGM and eventually was responsible for some of the studio's most successful and sophisticated musicals, beginning in the 1940s and continuing into the 1950s. Brown's and Freed's songs were later recycled into Singin' in the Rain (1952).] Other songs included "Give My Regards to Broadway" (George M. Cohan), "The Wedding Day of the Painted Doll", "Love Boat," "Broadway Melody," "Boy Friend," and "Truthful Deacon Brown" (Willard Robison).
The Boom in Musicals:
The 1930s were considered the beginning of the "Golden Age of the Musical" with a greater variety of musical vehicles and stars. Musical arrangers, song-writers, conductors, and dance instructors hurried to the West Coast to be part of the onslaught of 'talking' musicals. In particular, backstage musicals became the rage during the Great Depression, encouraging the production of other imitators with similar characters: a struggling stage producer, wise-cracking chorus girls practicing and on the lookout for rich husband prospects, and the opening night opportunity for stardom for an inexperienced chorus girl filling in for the leading lady. Paramount's Astoria, Long Island studios were the earliest to master the musical genre. Some of the leading songwriters and lyricists, such as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin, began to write original screen musicals or provide words and music. The studio associated with all-star extravaganzas and revue-type productions was MGM.
MGM's follow-up film to its successful Best Picture entry in 1929 was Chasing Rainbows (originally titled The Road Show) (1929), again bringing together stars Bessie Love (as Carlie) and Charles King (as song-and-dance man Terry), with the memorable tune "Happy Days Are Here Again" - the future Presidential campaign song for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.
Musicals experienced a significant boom during the late 1920s and early 1930s, many of them with Broadway stars lured westward to Hollywood. Eddie Cantor was attracted to Hollywood from Broadway, where he made his first sound film Whoopee! (1930), based on Flo Ziegfeld's 1928-1929 Broadway production (with the same cast) and filmed almost intact.
Silent film stars Corinne Griffith, Colleen Moore, and others found themselves in sound films with dialogue. Pretty star Nancy Carroll appeared in the part-talkie comedy Abie's Irish Rose (1928) - making her the first Hollywood actress to sing and dance on a sound stage, and also in the early sound musicals Sweetie (1929) and Honey (1930), among others. Janet Gaynor's first all-talking film was Fox's popular early musical Sunny Side Up (1929), one of the first musicals created directly for the screen - and featuring the film debut of young Jackie Cooper. She took the role of heroine Molly and sang "I'm a Dreamer (Aren't We All?)", "If I Had a Talking Picture of You", and the title song. Also, Gaynor was again teamed with silent film romantic partner Charles Farrell for the first time in a talkie.
Early Operettas:
Many of the first musical sound films were generally heavy-handed, stage-bound adaptations of operettas that looked much like photographed stage plays. The first all-talking, all-singing operetta was Warners' and Roy Del Ruth's The Desert Song (1929) with some Technicolor sequences, which was based on the 1927 operetta of the same name with music by Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II. It starred John Boles as the Red Shadow - the handsome masked bandit leader of the French Moroccan Riffs, and Carlotta King as heroine Margot. Myrna Loy also starred in an early role as the exotic native girl Azuri. It was produced two more times by Warner Bros, in 1944 and 1953.
MGM's Best Picture-nominated musical comedy The Rogue Song (1930) was another Technicolor musical adapted from the 1912 operetta Gypsy Love, starring ex-Met baritone Lawrence Tibbett in his first screen role (Oscar-nominated as Best Actor) as Yegor - the dashing leader of an outlaw band called The Robbing Larks. New Moon (1930) (remade in 1940 with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy), featured Metropolitan Opera soprano diva Grace Moore and ex-Met baritone Lawrence Tibbett. [Moore's debut film was in MGM's musical A Lady's Morals (1930) as the 'Swedish Nightingale' Jenny Lind.]
All-Star Revue Musicals:
Every studio in the late 20s produced lavish, star-studded musicals of the "all-talking, all singing, and all dancing" variety that contained smorgasbord lineups of specialty or vaudeville acts, comedy sketches, musical numbers, short dramas, and other production numbers (some of which had color sequences). In many cases, actors with no musical talent whatsoever were recruited into these musical revue films.
One of the first "variety" shows was MGM's elaborate, Best Picture-nominated The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929) noted for two highlight songs: "While Strolling Through the Park One Day" and "Singin' in the Rain". Its star-studded cast included Joan Crawford (singing and dancing to "Gotta Feeling For You"), Marion Davies (performing "Tommy Atkins on Parade" and also tap dancing), Bessie Love (performing "I Never Knew I Could Do a Thing Like That"), comedy sketches from Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and Marie Dressler (singing "For I'm the Queen"), and other star performers. It was hosted by Jack Benny and Conrad Nagel and was most notable for an early version of "Singin' in the Rain", performed by Cliff Edwards (known as "Ukelele Ike") during a rainstorm.
Another was Warners' color film The Show of Shows (1929), that featured comedienne Winnie Lightner singing the first renditions of "You Were Meant For Me" (with Bull Montana) and "Singing in the Bathtub" - to mock the song in MGM's film. It also starred Myrna Loy, John Barrymore, comedian Ben Turpin, 'Eight Sister Acts' and more, and was hosted by Master of Ceremonies Frank Fay.
Other "variety" or "revue musicals" included: Fox's Movietone Follies of 1929 (1929), and the best of the entire lot -- Paramount's and female director Dorothy Arzner's Paramount on Parade (1930) - a patchwork from eleven different directors, featuring Nancy Carroll (with "Dancing to Save Your Sole" performed on top of a shoe with rubber-legged dancer Al Norman), Maurice Chevalier (singing "All I Want is Just One Girl"), Clara Bow (singing "I'm True to the Navy Now"), George Bancroft, Kay Francis, William Powell, Warner Oland, Ruth Chatterton (performing "My Marine") and many more; the film's Technicolor finale was titled "Rainbow Revels" with the chorus and Chevalier appearing as chimney sweeps and singing "Sweeping the Clouds Away". The only major Paramount star not included in the film was Jeanette MacDonald.
Early Musical Directors: Ernst Lubitsch
A few of the more notable early musicals were from director Ernst Lubitsch, who had already established a reputation as a director of sophisticated, risque romantic/sex comedies in the silent era. He was adept at effectively integrating songs into his narratives involving sexual indiscretions and liaisons. One of his major innovations was to shoot his pictures without sound (it would be dubbed in later), thereby giving him more freedom of camera movement. He also introduced the world to the wonderful pairing of French cabaret star Maurice Chevalier and soprano Jeanette MacDonald.
His first sound and musical film was at Paramount, The Love Parade (1929). Lubitsch skillfully used sound and smoothly avoided making it stage-bound and over-acted like many of the early talkies. The film featured the delightful pairing of red-haired singer Jeanette MacDonald (in her first film, debuting as the frustrated Queen Louise of Sylvania) and French entertainer and the film's sole star Maurice Chevalier in his second sound picture (as womanizer Alfred Renard and MacDonald's consort/prince). The film included such delightful songs as "Dream Lover," a duet of the title song, and "Anything to Please the Queen." It received Academy Award nominations for Outstanding Production, Best Actor (Maurice Chevalier), Best Director (Ernst Lubitsch), Best Cinematography, Best Interior Decoration and Best Sound Recording. One of MacDonald's 1930 musical films, also directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Monte Carlo (1930), contained the famous sequence of her singing "Beyond the Blue Horizon".
The amusing romantic comedy The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), again with Maurice Chevalier (as an Austrian lieutenant) in addition to Claudette Colbert (as Franzi, the leader of an all-girls' band) and Miriam Hopkins (as Princess Anna), was a charming Viennese-flavored operetta (based upon the 1907 operetta A Waltz Dream by Oscar Straus) - and a box-office hit.
With uncredited co-director George Cukor, Lubitsch re-made his earlier silent film comedy The Marriage Circle (1924) into a witty romantic comedy-sound musical, renaming it One Hour With You (1932), again starring Jeanette MacDonald with Maurice Chevalier as husband and wife. (It was nominated for Best Picture but lost to Grand Hotel (1932).)
For his last musical, Lubitsch brought MacDonald and Chevalier together again, at MGM, for one of the greatest, most lavish operettas ever filmed, The Merry Widow (1934). It was loosely based on Franz Lehar's 1905 operetta, with a Rodgers and Hart score.
Early Musical Directors: King Vidor
One of the early landmark musical films was King Vidor's and MGM's melodramatic musical Hallelujah! (1929). It was King Vidor's first talkie and only musical. It was a risky film to make, given its questionable box-office potential, and the fact that it was shot mostly on location in Memphis. [He was already known for his great silent films, including The Big Parade (1925) and The Crowd (1928).] And it was the first all-black feature film in the sound era with a soundtrack composed of various spirituals and traditional songs, such as "Swing Low, Swing Chariot" and "Swanee River."
It was also the first film with a dubbed, asynchronous soundtrack added later in the studio in Hollywood - a technological, post-production advancement. Although the film contained some racial stereotypes, over-done acting, and primitive techniques, it remained a powerful tale of murder and redemption in the Deep South, regarding black man Zeke (Daniel Haynes) who was led to commit manslaughter and murder within a love triangle involving seductive temptress Chick (Nina Mae McKinney) and her lover from the past Hot Shot (William E. Fountaine).
Early Musical Directors: Rouben Mamoulian
In the early 1930s, director Rouben Mamoulian was most adept at stylizing musicals, using various devices in his pictures, such as slow motion (to create dreamy interludes and imaginary settings), a moving camera, swift transitions between scenes, a double-channel soundtrack with overlapping dialogue, and reversed films. Mamoulian's directorial debut (and his first sound film) was titled Applause (1929). It was an inventive, refreshingly-realistic, seamy, sordid and grim drama of backstage life, with rough dialogue, unattractive characters, and an uncompromising tragic ending regarding a mother-daughter relationship. It was one of the earliest talkies to feature Broadway's legendary 1920s musical star Helen Morgan (in her screen debut) as fading burlesque (singer-stripper) queen Kitty Darling.
Mamoulian's Lubitsch-inspired romantic musical Love Me Tonight (1932) is considered among the greatest musicals of the 1930s. This charming and sparkling Paramount Studios' film featured the ever-popular, effervescent stars Jeanette MacDonald as bored and frustrated countess Princess Jeanette, Chevalier as tailor Maurice Courtelin mistaken for a baron, and Myrna Loy as man-hungry Countess Valentine, in a tale set in Paris. The stars wove witty dialogue and songs together that advanced the plot. The superbly-integrated Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart songs included "Isn't it Romantic?," "Lover," and Chevalier's trademark song "Mimi."
Science Fiction
Science Fiction Films are usually scientific, visionary, comic-strip-like, and imaginative, and usually visualized through fanciful, imaginative settings, expert film production design, advanced technology gadgets (i.e., robots and spaceships), scientific developments, or by fantastic special effects. Sci-fi films are complete with heroes, distant planets, impossible quests, improbable settings, fantastic places, great dark and shadowy villains, futuristic technology and gizmos, and unknown and inexplicable forces. Many other SF films feature time travels or fantastic journeys, and are set either on Earth, into outer space, or (most often) into the future time. Quite a few examples of science-fiction cinema owe their origins to writers Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
They often portray the dangerous and sinister nature of knowledge ('there are some things Man is not meant to know') (i.e., the classic Frankenstein (1931), The Island of Lost Souls (1933), and David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) - an updating of the 1958 version directed by Kurt Neumann and starring Vincent Price), and vital issues about the nature of mankind and our place in the whole scheme of things, including the threatening, existential loss of personal individuality (i.e., Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)). Plots of space-related conspiracies (Capricorn One (1978)), supercomputers threatening impregnation (Demon Seed (1977)), the results of germ-warfare (The Omega Man (1971)) and laboratory-bred viruses or plagues (28 Days Later (2002)), black-hole exploration (Event Horizon (1997)), and futuristic genetic engineering and cloning (Gattaca (1997) and Michael Bay's The Island (2005)) show the tremendous range that science-fiction can delve into.
Strange and extraordinary microscopic organisms or giant, mutant monsters ('things or creatures from space') may be unleashed, either created by misguided mad scientists or by nuclear havoc (i.e., The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)). Sci-fi tales have a prophetic nature (they often attempt to figure out or depict the future) and are often set in a speculative future time. They may provide a grim outlook, portraying a dystopic view of the world that appears grim, decayed and un-nerving (i.e., Metropolis (1927) with its underground slave population and view of the effects of industrialization, the portrayal of 'Big Brother' society in 1984 (1956 and 1984), nuclear annihilation in a post-apocalyptic world in On the Beach (1959), Douglas Trumbull's vision of eco-disaster in Silent Running (1972), Michael Crichton's Westworld (1973) with androids malfunctioning, Soylent Green (1973) with its famous quote: "Soylent Green IS PEOPLE!", 'perfect' suburbanite wives in The Stepford Wives (1975), and the popular gladiatorial sport of the year 2018 in Rollerball (1975)). Commonly, sci-fi films express society's anxiety about technology and how to forecast and control the impact of technological and environmental change on contemporary society.
Science fiction often expresses the potential of technology to destroy humankind through Armaggedon-like events, wars between worlds, Earth-imperiling encounters or disasters (i.e., The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), When Worlds Collide (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), the two Hollywood blockbusters Deep Impact (1998) and Armageddon (1998), and The Day After Tomorrow (2004), etc.). In many science-fiction tales, aliens, creatures, or beings (sometimes from our deep subconscious, sometimes in space or in other dimensions) are unearthed and take the mythical fight to new metaphoric dimensions or planes, depicting an eternal struggle or battle (good vs. evil) that is played out by recognizable archetypes and warriors (i.e., Forbidden Planet (1956) with references to the 'id monster' from Shakespeare's The Tempest, the space opera Star Wars (1977) with knights and a princess with her galaxy's kingdom to save, The Fifth Element (1997), and the metaphysical Solaris (1972 and 2002)). Beginning in the 80s, science fiction began to be feverishly populated by noirish, cyberpunk films, with characters including cyber-warriors, hackers, virtual reality dreamers and druggies, and underworld low-lifers in nightmarish, un-real worlds (i.e., Blade Runner (1982), Strange Days (1995), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and The Matrix (1999)).
Hybrid Genre Blending and Borrowing:
The genre is predominantly a version of fantasy films ( Star Wars (1977)), but can easily overlap with horror films, particularly when technology or alien life forms become malevolent (Alien (1979)) in a confined spaceship (much like a haunted-house story). Quite a few science-fiction films took an Earth-bound tale and transported it to outer space: High Noon (1952) became Outland (1980), The Magnificent Seven (1960) was spoofed in Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), and the chariot race of Ben-Hur (1959) was duplicated in the pod-race of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999). Further, there are many examples of blurred or hybrid science fiction films that share characteristics with lots of other genres including: westerns (Outland (1980)) romances (Somewhere in Time (1980)) adventure films (The Thing From Another World (1951)) action films (Terminator 2 - Judgment Day (1991)) comedies (Sleeper (1973)) serials ( Star Wars (1977)) cop-buddy films (Alien Nation (1988))
The Earliest Science Fiction Films:
Many early films in this genre featured similar fanciful special effects and thrilled early audiences. The pioneering science fiction film, a 14-minute ground-breaking masterpiece with 30 separate tableaus (scenes), Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902), was made by imaginative, turn-of-the-century French filmmaker/magician Georges Melies, approximating the contents of the novels by Jules Verne (From the Earth to the Moon) and H.G. Wells (First Men in the Moon). With innovative, illusionary cinematic techniques (trick photography with superimposed images, dissolves and cuts), he depicted many memorable, whimsical old-fashioned images: a modern-looking, projectile-style rocket ship blasting off into space from a rocket-launching cannon (gunpowder powered?) a crash landing into the eye of the winking 'man in the moon' the appearance of fantastic moon inhabitants (Selenites, acrobats from the Folies Bergere) on the lunar surface a scene in the court of the moon king a last minute escape back to Earth
Otto Rippert's melodramatic and expressionistic Homunculus (1916, Ger.) - mostly a lost silent film - was a serial (or mini-series) composed of six one-hour episodic parts. It told about the life of an artificial man (Danish actor Olaf Fonss) that was created by an archetypal mad scientist (Friedrich Kuhne). The monstrous, vengeful creature, after realizing it was soul-less and lacked human emotion, became a tyrannical dictator but was eventually destroyed by a divine bolt of lightning. Its importance as an early science-fiction film was that it served as a precursor and inspiration to Universal's Frankenstein (1931) film and many other plots of sci-fi films (with mad scientists, superhuman androids, Gothic elements, and the evil effects of technology).
The first science fiction feature films appeared in the 1920s after the Great War, showing increasing doubts about the destructive effects of technology gone mad. One of the greatest and most innovative films ever made was a silent film set in the year 2000, German director Fritz Lang's classic, expressionistic, techno-fantasy masterpiece Metropolis (1927) - sometimes considered the Blade Runner of its time. It featured an evil scientist/magician named Rotwang, a socially-controlled futuristic city, a beautiful but sinister female robot named Maria (probably the first robot in a feature film, and later providing the inspiration for George Lucas' C3-PO in Star Wars), a stratified society, and an oppressed enslaved race of underground industrial workers. Even today, the film is acclaimed for its original, futuristic sets, mechanized society themes and a gigantic subterranean flood - it appeared to accurately project the nature of society in the year 2000. [It was re-released in 1984 with a stirring, hard-rock score featuring Giorgio Moroder's music and songs by Pat Benatar and Queen.]
Another Lang film, his last silent film, was one of the first space travel films, The Woman in the Moon (1929) (aka By Rocket to the Moon). It was about a blastoff to the moon where explorers discovered a mountainous landscape littered with raw diamonds and chunks of gold. [The film introduced NASA's backward count to a launch - 5-4-3-2-1 to future real-life space shots, and the effects of centrifugal force to future space travel films.]
Alexander Korda's epic view of the future Things to Come (1936) was directed by visual imagist William Cameron Menzies and starred Raymond Massey (as pacifist pilot John Cabal). The imaginative English film was based on an adaptation of H. G. Wells' 1933 The Shape of Things to Come and set during the years from 1940 to 2036 in 'Everytown.' It included a lengthy global world war (WW II!), a prophetic Brave New World-view, a despotic tyrant named Rudolph (Ralph Richardson), the dawn of the space age, and the attempt of social-engineering scientists to save the world with technology. An attempt to prevent scientific progress - and the launch of the first Moon rocket - was vainly led by sculptor Theotocopulos (Cedric Hardwicke). David Butler's Just Imagine (1930), a futuristic sci-fi musical about a man who awakened in a strange new world - New York City in the 1980s, provided prophetic inventions including automatic doors, test tube babies, and videophones.
Early Science-Fiction - Horror Film Blends: The 30s
The most memorable blending of science fiction and horror was in Universal Studios' mad scientist-doctor/monster masterpiece from director James Whale, Frankenstein (1931), an adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel. Her original 1818 book was subtitled Frankenstein - The Modern Prometheus, and she used this allusion to signify that her main character Dr. Victor Frankenstein demonstrated 'hubris' against god/nature in his experimental desire to create life from dead body parts, and afterwards abandoned his monstrous ugly creature. Like the Titan god, who stole fire from the gods to benefit mankind, he did not realize the ramifications of his actions. (Although there were civilizing results of having fire, it also brought the ability to work with metals, which could be shaped into weapons, that could then be used in warfare.) Many other derivative works, including numerous sci-fi films, have featured mad scientists, and artificially-created monsters that run amok killing people.
This was soon followed by Whale's superior sequel Bride of Frankenstein (1935), one of the best examples of the horror-SF crossover, and one of the first films with a mad scientist's creation of miniaturized human beings. The famed director also made the film version of an H. G. Wells novel The Invisible Man (1933) with Claude Rains (in his film debut in the starring title role) - it was the classic tale of a scientist with a formula for invisibility accompanied by spectacular special effects and photographic tricks.
Mad Scientists in Early Horror/Sci-Fi Films:
In the 1930s and early 40s, American sound films with hybrid science fiction/horror themes included an oddball collection of mad scientist films, with memorable characters who created mutated or shrunken creatures: The Vampire Bat (1932) - a low-budget Majestic Pictures film in which Lionel Atwill starred as mad doctor Otto Von Niemann, responsible for creating bloodsucking nocturnal bats in a small German town; with a cast including dark-haired, 'scream-queen' Fay Wray, Melvyn Douglas, and Dwight Frye (the crazy Renfield character in Dracula) Doctor X (1932), a First National (later Warner Bros.) film, in pioneering two-strip Technicolor by director Michael Curtiz, about another mysterious mad scientist named Doctor X-avier (Lionel Atwill) and his daughter (Fay Wray) The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), another First National film in two-strip Technicolor, about an insane, wax-dummy maker-sculptor, again pairing Atwill and Wray, and featuring Glenda Farrell as a fast-talking, wisecracking reporter; famous for the shocking 'face-mask crumbling' scene; [re-made in 1953 as House of Wax with Vincent Price] The Black Cat (1934) - the first and best of all the Karloff-Lugosi pairings at Universal, featuring Boris Karloff (as a crazed devil worshipper) and Bela Lugosi (as a vengeful architect) The Invisible Ray (1936) - although he usually played a grotesque monster, Karloff starred as experimental physicist Dr. Janos Rukh in this film; after traveling to Africa with his colleague Dr. Benet (Bela Lugosi) and becoming infected by radiation (Radium X) in a meteor of the nebula Andromeda, Karloff was transformed into a murdering, radiation-poisoned megalomaniac as he hunted down his enemies and projected death rays at them from his eyes (glaring from under a soft felt hat) Tod Browning's off-beat The Devil Doll (1936) - with Devil's Island escapee and scientist Paul Lavond (Lionel Barrymore), disguised as a macabre elderly woman ("Madame Mandelip"), vengefully terrorizing his enemies by creating shrunken "devil dolls" to seek out his revenge; with landmark special effects, and Maureen O'Sullivan in a supporting role as Lavond's daughter Ernest Schoedsack's and Paramount's Dr. Cyclops (1940) - the first Technicolor horror/sci-fi fi