Films of 1947

The year 1947 is most notable as the time when the Cold War began. Hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies escalated, lasting for almost the next 50 years, and were responsible for an incalculable amount of death, loss, and suffering—as well as for a lot of terrific movies. Communism became the boogeyman of the era, and the effort to stamp out any and all activity by “Reds” in America affected multiple industries.

Perhaps no business felt the wave of the Communist “witch-hunt” more than the film industry. The first systematic Hollywood blacklist was instituted on November 25, 1947. The day before, the writers and directors who came to be known as The Hollywood 10 were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The committee ground along in Washington, with the height of its influence from the late ʼ40s to the late ʼ50s. Its signature method of coercion was forcing famous members of the film community to name the names of their colleagues in show business who were suspected Communists.

At the same time HUAC was seeking to stamp out a Russian ideological force in cinema, another organization was embracing the teachings of a Russian philosophy that would have an even more profound and lasting effect on cinema. In New York, the Actors Studio was founded on October 5th, less than a month before the Hollywood 10 were charged. That organization of professional actors, playwrights, and theater directors famously changed American acting forever by teaching and practicing The Method. Method acting, a more internalized approach to performance than the somewhat presentational style of classical British acting, was originally developed by the Group Theatre in the 1930s, and based on the teachings of legendary Russian theater practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski.

One of the most famous film directors associated with both institutions was Elia Kazan, who cofounded the Actor Studio and who cooperated with you HUAC. The acclaimed director also won the Oscar for directing the year's Best Picture winner Gentlemen’s Agreement. Anyone who might think Harvey Weinstein started the concept of Oscar campaigning in the 1990s would be mistaken. Gentlemen’s Agreement producer and 20th Century Fox studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck’s quest to win the Academy’s top prize was every bit as shamelessly committed as anything Weinstein, or any other contemporary Oscar campaigners, have ever done. Zanuck was not happy that his previous two contenders Wilson and The Razors Edge had not won Best Picture and he made sure that Gentlemen’s Agreement would. In fact, Zanuck was so bitter about his Woodrow Wilson biopic not winning the big prize that he actually brought it up in his acceptance speech for Gentlemen’s Agreement. The film, in which Gregory Peck plays a journalist who poses as a Jew to research an exposé on Anti-Semitism, was practically engineered to win the Best Picture Oscar. It was just the type of prestige social issue movie that makes a statement without ruffling too many feathers that Academy voters love.

Zanuck was one of the only studio moguls who wasn't Jewish himself, and he campaigned as much for his image as a crusading humanitarian as for the movie. Like so many well-meaning social issue dramas the Academy has awarded its top prize to, Gentlemen’s Agreement is a perfectly good picture, but one that even two or three years after it won looked a little soft and middling. Much of 1947’s critical assessment of the film reads exactly like the disparaging contemporaneous reviews of later-day Best Picture winners Driving Miss Daisy, Crash, and Green Book in the years they won.

Another major Oscar campaigner was actress Rosalind Russell, who was heavily favored for her role in the film version of Eugene O'Neill's play Morning Becomes Electra. Like Zanuck, she had been nominated twice without winning, so this time she hired a famous publicist Henry Roger Crawford who had run a brilliant and successful campaign for Joan Crawford to win for Mildred Pierce the previous year. 1947 marked the very first time Las Vegas bookies offered odds for betting on an Oscar race. This form of gambling was apparently started at the behest of Henry Rodgers. He convinced casino operators to take bets on the race while he was simultaneously organizing Rosalind Russell fan clubs all over the country. Russell quickly rose to the top of all those Vegas odds and she won best actress at the then three years old Golden Globes. She was considered such a shoo-in that the producers of the Academy Awards broadcast moved Best Actress to the final award of the night after Best Picture (not the last time Oscar producers would make this mistake). When the envelope was opened, Loretta Young was pronounced Best Actress for The Farmers Daughter, a role originally offered to Russell who turned it down.

The biggest film trend of 1947 was its peak output of film noir. The term (first coined in 1946 by French critic Nino Frank) would not come into popular usage for a good many years. But during WWII, the dark, shadowy imagery and themes of pessimism and uncertainty that characterize this particular type of crime picture, often made by directors who had fled Europe for the US, became so popular that it birthed this new, unofficial genre. Even though the Allied forces had won the war, the public didn’t lose its taste for film noir, and Hollywood did not stop cranking out these popular and affordable pictures. In fact, movie audiences had grown so accustomed to seeing violence and the aftermath of unspeakable horrors in newsreels during wartime it all but required filmmakers to introduce a darker, grittier realism to their fiction features. Film noir protagonists started to become veterans of the war who found it difficult to assimilate after returning home. Some were directly discriminated against; some suffered undiagnosed PTSD that prevented them from maintaining jobs and relationships; and some found themselves replaced by younger men and by newly independent women. The ladies who had left the kitchen to enter the workforce had succeeded to a far greater extent than the male leaders who coaxed them into “doing their part for the war effort” had anticipated. This shake-up of traditional gender roles added to the insecurity and seemingly precariousness of the once-solid society many once believed in. So many men were so changed by their wartime experiences; they were unable to handle the challenges of peacetime. Thus, violent crime stories, tales of institutions that failed to deliver on promises, and stories of sexually emancipated femme fatales who brought about the downfalls of easily corruptible male heroes and anti-heroes surged.

Of the dozens of film noirs released in 1947, the most iconic are Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past. But there were pictures of this category all across the spectrum, from A-list studio releases like Dark Passage and Nightmare Alley to no-budget independents like The Guilty and High Tide. These productions not only gave Jewish ex-pat directors the opportunity to change the look of Hollywood filmmaking, they made room for independent producers to develop pictures inside and outside of the studio system. 1947 was a year that a director known primarily for melodramas, Douglas Sirk, directed a film noir, the first-rate Lured with Lucille Ball; a director most known for film noirs, Otto Preminger, directed two melodramas—the smash hit romantic adventure Forever Amber and the distinctly unsoapy Joan Crawford vehicle Daisy Kenyon.

Two producers who road the film noir wave were Joan Harrison, working outside the studio system, and Mark Hellinger, working within Universal Pictures. Hellinger came up as a colorful New York journalist and Walter-Winchell-style Broadway chronicler. Jack L. Warner brought Hellinger to Hollywood in the 1930s to develop screenplays imbued with his signature street-wise patter. He wrote a lot of screen stories in the ‘30s including for the gangster film The Roaring Twenties (1939) with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. Hellinger then became a top-tier producer making four pictures with Roaring Twenties director Raoul Walsh, which led to his moving to Universal where he was given his own producing unit. His biggest hits were the film noirs The Killers (1946), Brute Force (1947), and The Naked City (1948), the last of which he also narrated—that’s him saying, “There are eight million stories in the naked city.” Unfortunately, Hellinger died of a heart attack at age 44 around Christmas Eve of 1947, after reviewing the final cut of The Naked City.

Joan Harrison also had ink in her blood, as she was the daughter of a publisher of two local newspapers based in the small English town of Guildford. She was educated at Oxford University, where she reviewed movies for the student newspaper, and at the Sorbonne in France. In 1933, she met Alfred Hitchcock right around the time the up-and-coming director had signed a multi-film contract with the Gaumont-British company. Harrison became Hitchcock’s secretary, researcher, script reader, and most trusted associate next to his wife Alma Reville. When Hitchcock moved to Hollywood in 1939 to begin his contract with David O. Selznick, Harrison emigrated with him as his assistant and frequent screenplay collaborator. She became the first woman to be nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar when the category was introduced in 1940, and she was also the first screenwriter to receive two Academy Award nominations in the same year in separate categories: Best Adapted Screenplay for Rebecca and Best Original Screenplay for Foreign Correspondent. When she became a film producer in her own right, the majority of her films were noir, or noir-adjacent: Phantom Lady (1944), Dark Waters (1944), The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), and Nocturne (1946). This all culminated in They Won't Believe Me and Ride the Pink Horse both in 1947. She was also an uncredited screenwriter on Ride the Pink Horse, the second film directed by actor Robert Montgomery.

Montgomery (Night Must Fall, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Here Comes Mr. Jordan) was one of the first actors to successfully make the leap to the director’s chair, which he accomplished via film noir. After his long stint in the military, as an ambulance driver in France and then as a lieutenant commander in the navy piloting PT boats and taking part in the invasion at Normandy, John Ford hired him as second-unit director on the wartime PT boat drama They Were Expendable. That job not only helped Montgomery regain the self-confidence he’d lost during the war, it paved the way for his second career. His first two pictures as a director were low-budget noirs: the gimmicky The Lady in the Lake and the stylish Ride the Pink Horse. These two independent productions are somewhat less well-known entries in the film noir canon, but they each went on to cast their own long shadows of influence on the genre.

The films that succeeded the most at the box office, however, were distinctly upbeat fare. People flocked to the Bing Crosby pictures Welcome Stranger and Road to Rio; the Technicolor backstage musical Mother Wore Tights with Betty Grable; as well as Cecil B. DeMille’s trashy historical epic Unconquered and Victor Saville’s historical melodrama Green Dolphin Street. There were two extremely popular adaptations by the great writer Donald Ogden Stewart: the Sinclair Lewis romantic drama Cass Timberlane and Michael Curtiz’s film of Broadway’s longest-running non-musical play Life with Father. Also scoring big were the romantic comedies The Egg and I starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray, and The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer starring Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and teenage Shirley Temple.

The last of these top-ten box-office champs is pretty much the only one of 1947’s top-grossers that anyone would want to watch today. Not only is The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer a terrific screwball comedy with a wonderful cast, but it’s also a fascinating marker for the rise of teenage culture that began after the end of WWII. The term “bobby-soxers”—slang for young girls in poodle skirts and short socks who danced at “sock hops” in high school gymnasiums—may seem like an expression from the 1950s, but it dates back to this fascinating cultural point in post-war America. With White American families moving out of cities and into newly created suburbs, adolescence was getting extended. Of course, there had always been movies about young people. Mickey Rooney alone made sixteen Andy Hardy pictures between 1937 and 1946, and his frequent co-star Judy Garland made over twenty pictures in which she’s ostensibly playing a girl between twelve and nineteen years old. But by 1947, “teenagers” were suddenly a recognized age group, as well as a budding commercial market to be exploited by the music, film, and fashion industries, and a potential societal problem to be fretted about by handwringing moral gatekeepers. A full seventeen years before The Beatles’ performed live on The Ed Sullivan Show to hordes of screaming teenyboppers, the American population was growing increasingly younger and that demographic was edging into the focal point of public consciousness. It would take a few more years before Hollywood started to pander to the teenage audience, but I’d say its box office importance begins here.

Similarly, though film noir would continue into the 1950s and beyond, the “noir movement,” as it’s often colloquially referred to, began to wane after 1947. Part of the reason for this was that many of the great practitioners of what came to be called film noir were writers, directors, and actors who were blacklisted. Many of whose careers never recovered. Some, like Brute Force director Jules Dassin, relocated to England or Europe where they could continue to work, though with far less money and prestige. Some, actors especially, moved into the new medium of television where they weren’t exactly safe from the Communist witch-hunts but where there was enough work for them to maintain careers with low profiles. Television was also where Joan Harrison ended up. She returned to work for Hitchcock, where she produced his series Alfred Hitchcock Presents with another long-term Hitchcock associate, Norman Lloyd.

It was widely feared that television would destroy the film industry. Of course, that didn’t happen, but TV changed movies and moviegoing more than any other outside force. Studios made movies bigger, wider, louder, and eventually more risqué in order to compete with a visual narrative medium that came into everyone’s home essentially for free. Television was part of the shift in American life to a more suburban, homogenous mainstream culture. It was certainly a factor in both the demise of film noir and the rise of teen pictures. The 1950s would become known in the popular imagination as the most secure but also the dullest period in American history. When we think of the 1940s in cinema (but also in American popular culture), we tend to think of the eventful period between 1941 and 1948. Whereas when we think of the 1950s in cinema, we envision a less sharply defined, more languid and carefree period that stretches from 1949 to 1966. It was a time when mass entertainment, for the most part, did not reflect cultural changes and societal upheavals the way it had in the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s and would go on to in every other decade.

In terms of creative output, 1947 was not a measurably “greater” year in pictures than the year that preceded it or the one that followed it. But it was a year that looked back at the monuments events of its decade while simultaneously hinting at a coming future; a future even then being engineered by politicians, industry leaders, real estate developers, free-enterprisers, and all forms of media. These policy writers and tastemakers were manufacturing an ideal of America that looked and seemed far less dark and dangerous to the typical white suburban American male who stayed in line with his wholesome nuclear family that the prior eras of war, financial collapse, and societal chaos.