For better or for worse
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday December 10, 2009
Gloria Swanson famously purred: 'I am big, it's the pictures that got small.' More than a half-century later Garry Maddox finds all is not lost. There have been some huge hits at the cinema this year that have each been seen by more than 3 million ticket-buyers: notably Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and The Twilight Saga: New Moon.Many smaller and less obviously commercial releases have also found appreciative audiences, including Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and, from Australia, indigenous romance Samson & Delilah and the emotional Mao's Last Dancer.But how do this year's movies stack up against the best from other eras?On the face of it, this year's crop is certainly bigger, brighter and has immeasurably better visual effects than movies released, say, 50 years ago.Even in tough economic times, their entertainment value has kept us going to the cinema during what could be the first $1 billion year at the Australian box office.But are filmmakers from Hollywood and elsewhere getting better at delivering what we want? Or are movies just marketed better these days?In 1959 - a time of Robert Menzies, Dwight Eisenhower and the start of the space race - the best picture Oscar went to the musical Gigi. It beat the comic Auntie Mame, the Paul Newman-Elizabeth Taylor drama Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the David Niven-Burt Lancaster-Rita Hayworth drama Separate Tables and The Defiant Ones, which had Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis chained together as escaping prisoners.While that's a solid list, more impressive are the wide range of strong movies released that same year, some undeniable classics. There was Ben-Hur, which won 11 Oscars the following year, North by Northwest, Some Like it Hot, Anatomy of a Murder, Rio Bravo, Imitation of Life, The Diary of Anne Frank, On the Beach, Suddenly, Last Summer, The Nun's Story, Porgy and Bess, A Summer Place, The Young Philadelphians, The Mouse That Roared, Room at the Top, Pork Chop Hill, The Last Angry Man and Disney's animated Sleeping Beauty.Among the acclaimed directors working in other languages, there was Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Satyajit Ray's The World of Apu, Marcel Camus's Black Orpheus, Luis Bunuel's Nazarin and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour.It is often said that 1939, which produced Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz and Mr Smith Goes to Washington, is Hollywood's greatest year. The New York Times once plumped for 1962, the year that produced Lawrence of Arabia, The Manchurian Candidate and To Kill a Mockingbird.Last year, US critic John Hartl nominated 1959, calling it "the 12-month period when Alfred Hitchcock, Marilyn Monroe, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Otto Preminger, Jimmy Stewart and William Wyler all hit career peaks"."There was something fresh and genuine about many of 1959's movies," he said.Not that 1959 was a golden year in every sense. It was only on January 1 that the Motion Picture Association of America repealed a ruling that blocked anyone sympathetic to communism from being nominated for an Academy Award - the shameful blacklist era. Elsewhere in the world, censors seemed to be banning provocative films regularly.Film historian Graham Shirley says the impressive line-up 50 years ago came as Hollywood was fighting back against the new threat from television and the decline of the old studio system."Hollywood was trying to prove that it was capable at that time of tackling contemporary and relevant subjects in those postwar 15 years or so, where a lot of people had emerged from the war - writers, directors, miscellanous crew members and actors, of course - who had an ideal for defining a postwar world," he says.Shirley, the senior curator for films at the National Film and Sound Archive, says the growth of film societies and festivals was helping re-energise the importance of cinema as an art form in the late 1950s."Even in the heyday of the studio system, where most of the films that were produced were what you'd call fairly stable audience fodder, there was always room for the studios to either produce or invest in distinctive and important films," he says.But where are the provocative and important films now? At first glance, there is pretty strong evidence Hollywood is still in the "audience fodder" business - making commercial decisions to target homogenised movies at a much younger audience than 50 years ago.The result this year: endless sequels and movies based on material already familiar from somewhere else, including hit novels (Angels and Demons), comic books (Watchmen and X-Men Origins: Wolverine), self-help books (She's Just Not That Into You), old television shows (Star Trek), toys (the Transformers sequel), remakes (Star Trek again) and reliable formulas (the many permutations of the romantic comedy)."Hollywood has gone through cycles of predominant commerce as opposed to art," Shirley says. "And I think at the moment the economic reality is that commerce rules above all else."When Jaws introduced an era of wide-release, marketing-driven movies, the effects were long-lasting. The blockbuster mentality - making big movies to pull in huge box-office numbers around the world - brought marketing budgets that seem terrifyingly large from the perspective of Australian filmmakers.An average studio movie that costs $US70 million ($77 million) to make could have a marketing budget of $US35 million in North America alone.As the Hollywood executive Mark Gill said of the studios in a famous speech last year: "There's an average of more than $US100 million at risk every time they get up to bat. And if they're going to lose $US75 million or more, they know it by 2pm Los Angeles time on opening day."The idea of making quality movies - that the US can produce a lot more than just commercial entertainment - has rested during the past decade with leading directors (including Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Steven Soderbergh and the Coen brothers), the studios' independent divisions, newer production and distribution companies (such as the now-defunct Miramax) and a very lively strata of independent producers. With regular infusions of creative energy from other parts of the world, these have been the sources of so many Oscar-winning movies - and the deserving ones that didn't win.But another film historian, Quentin Turnour, the head of cinema programming at the national archive, argues against any idea that movie quality has been declining."It's not been the strongest year by any means but that's not a sign that anything is fundamentally wrong," he says. "In the last few years, I've thought that Hollywood in that Miramax zone produced two or three extraordinary films in one year - There Will Be Blood and the Coens' last film [No Country for Old Men]. And there were a number of other films which I thought were major achievements."Turnour says anyone condemning franchise movies should note the interesting things happening in comic-book movies."As the comic-novel stuff takes over, there's clearly a generation who are using them as avenues for ideas. I think Watchmen is a great film. And that's clearly a sign that the audiences are probably smarter than they ever were," he says.While the studios' "indie" divisions and the US independent sector have been hit hard by the financial crisis, the best filmmakers always find a way to leave a lasting impact.At the Oscars this year, it was Slumdog Millionaire, an inspired British-Indian collaboration that cost just a few million dollars but won audiences around the world. Then there was animated Up, the latest brilliant piece of storytelling from the Pixar team. Closer to home, Warwick Thornton was justifiably acclaimed for the potent Samson & Delilah.All these films share heart, integrity, strong stories and characters the audience cares about.Even if it often seems to be an era dominated by homogeneity, quality filmmaking is still making it to the screen. And when it does, we filmgoers are responding.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald