Category: Clips

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Hollywood Fights Back

A two-part archival recording of Hollywood actors protesting HUAC as part of a broadcast called, “Hollywood Fights Back” (1947). It features, among many others, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Lauren Bacall, John Huston, and two of the stars of the films screened this week—William Holden (Part I, 9:45) and Humphrey Bogart (Part II, 9:02) (see the latter’s quoted remarks, below):

“This is Humphrey Bogart. We sat in the committee room and heard it happen. We saw it—and said to ourselves, “It can happen here.’ We saw American citizens denied the right to speak by elected representatives of the people! We saw police take citizens from the stand like criminals, after they’d been refused the right to defend themselves.  We saw the gavel of the Committee Chairman cutting off the words of free Americans.  The sound of that gavel, Mr Thomas, rings across America, because every time your gavel struck it his the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.”

 

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Hollywood Musicals and Self-Reflexivity

Below are clips from two postwar Hollywood musicals, Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952) and The Band Wagon (Vincente Minelli, 1953), both of which portray and comment on events in American film history—in particular, the advent of sound in cinema, and the consolidation of Hollywood genres (like film noir). Watch them, and in the comments field below,  reflect on the movies’ treatment of film history, using the following questions as prompts:  a) How would you characterize the films’ attitudes towards  Hollywood? (Nostalgic? Critical? Celebratory?) b) How does the treatment of Hollywood on display in these two musicals differ (or overlap with) the one that emerges in the two noir films you screened?

  • Two scenes from Singin’ in the Rain (1952): in the first, silent film stars Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont attend the premiere of their new “talkie,” The Dueling Cavalier; in the second, near the the film, Lina performs for a crowd while being dubbed by an uncredited ingenue, played by Debbie Reynolds:

  •  Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse playing with noir conventions in the “Girl Hunt Ballet” sequence from The Band Wagon (1953):

P.S. For fun, you might also be interested in  comparing these two clips from Singin’ in the Rain and the Coen Brothers’ 2016 film, Hail, Caesar!, both of which portray stars’ trying to acclimate to new modes of production…(Hail, Caesar! is actually a great revisionist riff on Hollywood in the 50s, so I’d recommend watching if you’d like an additional, present-day perspective on the period!)