5. Troubled Sexuality in the Popular Hollywood Feature

THOMAS R. ATKINS

MARLON BRANDO in a leather jacket astride a motorcycle in The Wild V JL One. Marilyn Monroe’s skirt lifted by a sudden breeze from a subway grating in The Seven Year Itch. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr embracing in the surf in From Here to Eternity. Jayne Mansfield clutching two bottles of milk against her breasts in The Girl Can’t Help It. Rosalind Russell ripping off William Holden’s shirt in Picnic. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in drag in Some Like It Hot. Elvis Presley singing and gyrating in Jailhouse Rock. Carroll Baker in a crib sucking her thumb in Baby Doll. Natalie Wood going berserk in the bath in Splendor in the Grass.

The popular erotic icons that Hollywood offered its public in the fifties and early sixties are often strikingly different from those of any other period. Some of the screen images are satiric, some serious, others downright silly; but most are characterized, like the decade itself, by a curious ambiguity, a sometimes schizoid duality. All are transitional images—products of what André Bazin called American film’s “long, rich, byzantine tradition of censorship” and precursors of the more permissive cinema of the next decade. In their deviousness and cleverness these images belong to the past, to the years of the Production Code administered by the Breen office which forced directors to deal indirectly with sex through suggestion and innuendo; but they point to the future in being unmistakenly and often blatantly obsessed with sex, particularly the frustrated and compulsive variety.

Contrary to the popular notion of the Truman-Eisenhower years as bland and passive, the era was actually seething with contradictions and conflicts: a time of the McCarthy hearings, the Rosenberg executions, the Korean police action, fallout shelters, flying saucers, and Sputnik. The cool, seemingly disengaged exterior style of the fifties—its world of crew cuts, duck tails, pegged pants, sock hops, hot rods, and drive-ins—masks a turbulent interior, which erupts with violent impact in the late sixties and seventies. The cultural and sexual revolutions of the next decade, the protest movements that split and altered American society, resulted from forces that were smoldering and festering beneath the square, apathetic facade of the fifties.

The Graduate, Easy Rider, Carnal Knowledge, The Last Picture Show, Walking Tall, and many other contemporary box office hits are based on formulas and themes that evolved in the previous troubled decade. In Badlands the renegade hero seems modeled after James Dean; and American Graffiti, a nostalgic and extremely funny tribute to teenagers’ lifestyles in the early sixties, relies upon many of the same stock characters and situations that can be found in Rebel Without a Cause. Although these later movies are more graphic verbally and physically— superficially more liberated—they still reflect basically the same stereotypes of human identity and divided attitudes toward sexuality as their earlier counterparts, but usually without the pervasive sense of repressed anxiety and ambiguity that makes many fifties movies so compelling.

Stanley Kubrick’s use of the Gene Kelly title song as a counterpoint to Alex’s violent antics in A Clockwork Orange is especially appropriate, for Singing’ in the Rain, which appeared in 1952, is one of the last pure examples of old-style Hollywood escapism at its best—a lavish musical satire about show biz in the Roaring Twenties, featuring Kelly as a popular movie star, Debbie Reynolds as a nice young actress, and Jean Hagen as a blonde sexpot who tries to become a sound star using Reynolds’ dubbed-in voice. The mood is light, spontaneous, confident, with no trace of the ambiguous undercurrent of troubled sexuality that flows through many fifties films.

By the time Singin in the Rain was made, the monopolistic studio system it satirized was already dying, its demise hastened by U.S. antitrust decisions which ended studio control of theater chains around the country, by television which began to drain away its mass audience, and by the investigations of J. Parnell Thomas and the House Un-American Activities Committee, which wrecked the careers of countless actors, writers, and directors and eroded what was left of Hollywood’s sense of community. Moreover, changing postwar social and moral attitudes had begun to undermine the power of the Breen office, whose censorship Code had once spoken not only for the film industry but for the popular values of the general American public as well.

As the general public or “home audience” switched to TV for their escapism and entertainment, the television networks developed their own censorship— a set of guidelines regulating program content and ethics that, as formulated in 1951, were even more puritanical and conservative than the movie censorship of the mid-thirties and forties. Ostensibly designed to protect the sensibilities of the family audience, the television code was actually a reflection of the commercial values of sponsors and advertisers who, while professing moral decorum, utilized sexual association and innuendo to market their products in much the same manner as Hollywood exploited sex to sell movies. The popular early TV shows, featuring such stars as Milton Berle, Gertrude Berg, Jackie Gleason, and Kukla, Fran and Ollie, were usually completely devoid of sex; but the commercials were experimenting with lines like “Why don’t you pick me up and smoke me sometime?” for cigars and “Does she or doesn’t she?” for a hair dye.

Meanwhile, Hollywood tried desperately to compete with the magic box with a series of technical gimmicks, such as 3-D and Cinerama, and by turning out expensive blockbusters, historical epics like The Robe, The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, and the forty-million-dollar flop Cleopatra or adaptations of bestsellers like Marjorie Morningstar, Not as a Stranger, Magnificent Obsession, and Giant. In spite of these spectacular efforts, television continued to win the battle for audiences; by 1955 sixty-five million viewers watched Mary Martin soar through the air in a TV version of Peter Pan.

The influx of foreign movies that were attracting audiences in smaller thea- ters in New York and other major cities suggested another lucrative possibility to Hollywood: movies on adult themes that were too hot for TV. Such films as Max Ophiils’ La Ronde, Ingmar Bergman’s Monika, Alf Sjöberg’s Miss ՝Julie, and HenriGeorges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear dealt with sexuality in a more mature fashion than ever attempted in Hollywood. Ulla Jacobsson went skinny-dipping with her boyfriend in One Summer of Happiness, and later in the decade Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman and Jeanne Moreau in The Lovers displayed more skin than had been available previously on U.S. movie screens.

Bolder European directors and performers encouraged Hollywood filmmakers to take the first tentative, insecure steps in the direction of movies made chiefly for adult audiences. In 1951 when television presented its viewers shows like I Love Lucy, Amos ‘n’ Andy, The Cisco Kid, and Mr. District Attorney (all based on early movie or radio formulas), the film industry offered A Streetcar Named Desire, adapted by Tennessee Williams from his own play, and starring Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, and Kim Hunter.

Director Elia Kazan fought with the Breen office to preserve certain essential elements of the script, particularly the crucial scene where Stanley Kowalski rapes his sister-in-law Blanche DuBois and Blanche’s story of the suicide of her young homosexual husband. The Code Board permitted a modified version of the rape, but Kazan and Williams had to cut references to homosexuality and soften the movie’s ending by implying that Stella Kowalski rejected Stanley for his brutal treatment of her sister. Later without Kazan’s knowledge, the Catholic Legion of Decency pressured Warner Brothers into making further changes, such as dropping “on the mouth” from Blanche’s line to the young man from the Evening Star, “I would like to kiss you softly and sweetly on the mouth.”

By 1956 when Kazan filmed the black comedy Baby Doll, he was able to refuse to make any changes that would weaken the heady sensuality of Williams’ script—partially because the Code had gradually become more tolerant and also because he had shot it on location in Mississippi away from Hollywood studio politics. In open defiance of the Legion of Decency, Kazan placed a huge ad on Broadway showing Carroll Baker as child-bride Baby Doll Meighan in a crib with a thumb in her mouth.

Two years after Streetcar independent director Otto Preminger demonstrated the weakening power of the Code board by releasing The Moon Is Blue without a seal of approval. A banal bedroom comedy with William Holden and Maggie McNamara uttering such taboo words as virgin, mistress, and pregnant, The Moon Is Blue was successful at the box office and showed other directors that the Code was not all powerful. Controversy also surrounded Fred Zinnemann’s film version of James Jones’ From Here to Eternity, about Army life in Hawaii shortly before Pearl Harbor. The Code board was disturbed by an affair between a sergéant played by Burt Lancaster and an officer’s wife, Deborah Kerr, and particularly by their love-making scene on the beach which was later exploited in the ads for the movie (and satirized by Billy Wilder in his 1955 sex farce The Seven Year Itch). The beach scene remained, but even the mildest four-letter words were deleted and an important Honolulu whorehouse setting was changed to a social club. A considerably cleaned-up but still powerful interpretation of the barbarity of the military life, From Here to Eternity won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

But a movie that did not win any Academy Awards in 1953 was probably the most significant, sociologically if not aesthetically. Laslo Benedek’s The Wild One concerns the terrorizing of a small town by two packs of motorcyclists, one gang led by Marlon Brando and the other by Lee Marvin. Actually a blend of the Dead-End Kid formula and the Western genre, using motorcycles instead of horses, the movie is a sentimentalized and safe comment on the problem of juvenile delinquency.

Despite a few menacing episodes such as the sequence where the gang frightens the telephone operator and temporarily cuts off the town’s communication with the outside world, most of the rebels are characterized as misguided but fundamentally good boys who speak jive talk and just want to scramble with girls. To further glamorize the subject, Brando’s character has a romance with a policeman’s daughter who longs to escape the town. But the real importance and power of The Wild One lies in the effective portrait of the claustrophobic small-town environment and its petty-minded, fearful citizens—a dominant motif of the fifties—and in Brando’s inarticulate, tough/tender, sexually ambiguous rebel leader.

In the role of Johnny in The Wild One, as well as with his performances as Stanley in Streetcar and the longshoreman in On the Waterfront, Marlon Brando established the basic outline for the major cult figure of the decade and the dominant acting style that still prevails in American movies today. James Dean, Sal Mineo, and Elvis Presley are variations on this basic rebel image; and actors like Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, and Jack Nicholson use essentially the same Method acting techniques.

Derived from Konstantin Stanislavsky’s rehearsal methods at the Moscow Art Theatre and interpreted by the Group Theatre and Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio in New York, Method acting is the perfect style for the self-conscious and divided mood of the fifties. On one hand it emphasizes ensemble playing and group relationships, while at the same time it stresses each character’s separate interior reality and emotional duality. In Method acting the most important element is the inner subtext which emerges, often in silences between the lines, from the character’s struggle with the group and with himself, his divided nature. The most effective Method acting roles, such as Johnny in The Wild One or Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause, are usually characters with a subtle anxiety within them but with little external power to cope with it. Because of the pressure of this conflict, they constantly seem on the verge of breaking down, falling to pieces, or becoming violent.

Brando, Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, Eli Wallach, Patricia Neal, Kim Hunter, Anthony Perkins, Rod Steiger, and the other Method performers who emerged in the fifties are best in divided parts based on the unresolved tension between an outer social mask and an inner reality of frustration that usually has a sexual basis. In contrast, the popular roles played by earlier actors such as Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, James Cagney, Bette Davis, or Fredric March seem exceptionally well-integrated and direct. Fifties audiences responded instinctively to the new Method performances not only because they were often technically superb, but because the moviegoers themselves were experiencing a similar duality, largely unacknowledged and unexpressed, within themselves and their society.

The cool, self-confident pose adopted by Brando’s character in The Wild One disguises a person who is actually insecure and anxious—still the child who was harshly beaten by his old man—which explains why he treasures a stolen racing trophy and fights Chino to protect this popular emblem of masculine victory. Throughout the movie Johnny alternates between the roles of a rather sullen, shy boy and a brooding, menacing adult. From his first entrance leading the swarm of motorcycles, this man/boy is established as a figure of considerable sexual power which he communicates almost effortlessly to all of the other characters. His sexual magnetism, in fact, is shown to be an extremely ambiguous force— Johnny appeals to males and females alike, and while this is never openly expressed by the character, there are unmistakable signs that he needs the adoration of both sexes.

The true romantic triangle lurking just below the surface of The Wild One features a wholesome girl-next-door type, Kathy, and a wise-cracking hood, Chino—both of whom are in love with Johnny. He is also pursued by a slut type named Britches, but the only characters who ever break Johnny’s cool and arouse his anger are Kathy and Chino. Lee Marvin’s Chino, supposedly a mean, freaky counterpart to Johnny, is really his brother under the skin—a crude and somewhat comic embodiment of a hidden aspect of Johnny. Once both belonged to the same motorcycle group, until Johnny got disgusted with the childish behavior of Chino’s boys and split with his own boys. But like a doppelganger, Chino follows him, hoping to reunite the old gang and crying out to him mockingly, “I love you, Johnny.”

This buried and feared taboo side of Johnny’s character was acknowledged later in Kenneth Anger’s underground film, Scorpio Rising, in which Johnny appears as a flickering fantasy image on the TV set of the hero, who models himself after Brando and James Dean and leads a gang of bike boys whose entertainments include a drag party and an initiation ceremony that is explicitly homosexual. (The nearest that the hipsters in The Wild One ever get to this type of exhibitionistic behavior is dancing in front of the local beauty parlor with hair dryers on their heads or scaring the cop’s daughter by chasing and circling her on their motorcycles.) The closeup of Brando that appears in Scorpio Rising emphasizes his male stud qualities—the brooding, babyish features; the dreamy, heavy-lidded eyes; and the thick, sensual lips which suddenly curl into a strange smile.

In contrast to the subversive tone of Scorpio Rising, Benedek’s bike film is tame and respectable. The latent elements in the plot are seldom permitted to surface. Although they tease the town girls, the outlaw cyclists never engage in any graphic sex talk. All potential eroticism between Johnny and Kathy is communicated furtively in looks and disguised gestures. When Britches, a parody of the tough B-girl stereotype from earlier movies, gets drunk and makes a direct pass at Johnny, he takes a swig of her beer and rejects her with disdain, far more cruelly than he had rejected Chino.

The only sequence in The Wild One that comes close to realizing the sexuality implicit in the story is Kathy’s long motorcycle ride with Johnny through the dark countryside. After stopping his rebels from tormenting her with their cycles, Johnny says only, “Get on,” and then when they have reached their destination, a quiet spot in a park, he says, “Get off.” The ride seems to release her wilder impulses and she reveals her secret desire to go away with him. But Johnny becomes angry and insulting, causing her to run away in tears. A group of paranoid male townsfolk, led by4 the local bully, assume that Kathy has been assaulted and give Johnny a beating, a punishment he bears stoically until he escapes and weeps beside his bike.

As a low-angle closeup emphasizes Brando’s upturned, anguished face— surely one of the most famous shots of the fifties—one might well ask why is the leader of the Black Rebels crying? Because the unjust beating by older males reminded him of his father’s rough treatment? (”My old man hit harder than that," he said defiantly to the men.) Or because he wishes he had run away with Kathy to start a “normal" life? Or perhaps returned with Chino to a deviant hipster life? Or rather is Johnny weeping because he doesn’t know what style of life he prefers, and wishes both the squares and the crazies would let him alone?

In the final sequences, after being exonerated of the death of the old dishwasher who was accidentally struck by his bike, Johnny receives moral counselling from a sheriff—a concession demanded by the Breen office to clarify the meaning of the movie for the audience. Finally Johnny returns to Bleeker’s Cafe where Kathy is a waitress and passes his stolen racing trophy across the counter to her. Then like a mysterious, isolated, romantic hero from a western, he climbs on his cycle and roars out of Wrightsville—back to the open highway and the gang lifestyle.

While the motorcycle formula was revived many times after The Wild One, most notably in Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels, the genre did not become big business until 1969 when Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider captured the under-twenty- five audience by presenting a story that confirmed their popular tastes and values. Like The Wild One, Hopper’s movie pretends to be serious social criticism, while actually offering a skillfully-made escapist fantasy in the traditional Hollywood mode. Although Billy and Wyatt of Easy Rider are superficially freer in that they openly smoke grass, go skinny-dipping, and get laid, they are still not too far from the boys in The Wild One in their fundamental distrust of females and their preference for male companionship and the open road.

The villains of the formula—the paranoid, middle-aged townsfolk—have grown nastier over the years and, instead of merely giving the troublemakers a beating as they did in Benedek’s film, they shotgun the heroes of Easy Rider. In the late sixties and seventies the final ritualistic slaughter of young male and female outlaws, beginning with Bonnie and Clyde and continuing through such movies as Thieves Like Us, becomes with repetition a plot cliche as arbitrary and phony as last-minute rescues and happy endings were to earlier movies.

After The Wild One, the most significant and revealing movie of the fifties is Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without A Cause, with James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo (and Dennis Hopper in a minor role). A popular box office hit in 1955, the movie used a formula that is potentially more threatening than the bike genre and made more explicit some of the latent sexual elements in The Wild One. Dean’s extraordinary performance was a major factor in the movie’s success. Starring in only three movies, East of Eden, Giant, and Rebel (he died in an auto crash one month before Rebel was released), Dean became a cult hero in the Brando mold but with stronger appeal to “straight” middle-class youth as well as a large homosexual following.

“This is Jim Stark, teenager from a ‘good’ family,” states a Rebel poster, showing Dean in T-shirt, red jacket, and jeans and emphasizing that the character is not one of the hoods of Blackboard Jungle or the bikers of The Wild One. Because the bike genre deals with social outcasts, gypsy figures roaming the highways, it is for most members of the audience basically a safe and romantic experience. But Rebel and movies such as Blue Denim, The Young Stranger, Splendor in the Grass, and The Graduate, are closer to the audience’s lives in their portraits of the social and sexual traumas within the American household. The middle-class family is not attacked by freaky outsiders but by its own children who no longer accept its cherished attitudes and values. Typically, in the troubled youth genre, parents and other adult figures are callously authoritarian, while the kids are portrayed as sensitive, misunderstood creatures.

Under the credits for Rebel, Dean falls to the sidewalk beside a mechanical monkey in a red cap. He winds up the monkey, plays with it, then puts it to bed by covering it with a newspaper—a lost child sheltering an abandoned toy. Taken to the police station for drunkenness, Dean meets two other disturbed teenagers: Sal Mineo’s Plato who has been arrested for shooting some puppies with his mother’s pistol and Natalie Wood’s Judy, a girl in bright red lipstick and coat who was found wandering the streets. All three teenagers are stranded at the station in the middle of the night because, emotionally, they are homeless. Jim’s father is a weak, indecisive fool totally dominated by his wife and her mother; Judy’s father reacts with hostility whenever she approaches him for much-needed affection; and Plato’s divorced parents have left his upbringing to a black maid, who is among the few likeable adults in the film.

Dawson High School, where Jim is a new student, is respectable on the surface but actually dominated by teenage gangs who amuse themselves by testing outsiders. Judy’s boyfriend Buzz is a close kin to the toughs in The Wild One, except that he and his followers use hot rods instead of bikes. On a field trip to Griffith Planetarium, where the students are shown a film depicting the end of the world, Jim is provoked into a switchblade fight with Buzz. This encounter leads to the “chicken run,” the central image of the film, a night sequence in which Jim and Buzz race in stolen autos towards a cliff’s edge. The first driver to abandon his vehicle is the chicken. Judy’s intense excitement, as the two cars rush past her toward the cliff, underscores the sexual implications of the contest. Jim escapes at the last minute before his car tumbles over the edge, but Buzz catches his jacket sleeve in the door handle and plunges to a fiery death. Later when Jim tells his father and mother about the accident, they are afraid that this scandal may ruin their reputations and urge him not to go to the police. Like nearly all of the adults in Rebel, Jim’s parents are more concerned with outer appearance than with the realities of their children’s lives.

The rest of the action builds to the death of Plato. Like The Wild One, Ray’s movie focuses on a sexually confused trio consisting of one female and two males—but in Rebel the homosexual potentiality of the males’ relationship is more apparent. Plato is clearly infatuated with Jim and substitutes him for his absent father, while Jim understands and responds sympathetically to the younger boy’s attention. As with Chino and Johnny, Plato and Jim may be seen as separate aspects of the same schizoid personality. Both characters are linked by their hypersensitivity, insecurity, and repressed violence. But Plato’s homosexuality makes him too vulnerable and, in keeping with Hollywood’s usual treatment of such characters, he is identified from the beginning as doomed. All of the other students, except for Jim and Judy, irrationally reject or torment Plato who, when frightened, steals his mother’s nickel-plated .45 kept beneath her satin bed pillows.

Finally, hiding in a deserted mansion in the hills near the planetarium, Jim, Judy, and Plato act out a fantasy of the happy life they have never experienced. Jim rests his head on Judy’s lap while she sings Plato to sleep with a lullaby. Their childlike dream is interrupted by Buzz’s gang who try to trap Plato in an empty swimming pool. Wounding one of them, Plato flees to the planetarium, where he is eventually shot by the police when they see his gun. He dies wearing Jim’s red jacket, but Jim had already emptied the weapon and shouts from the planetarium steps, “I’ve got the bullets.” Despite a superficial reconciliation between Judy, Jim, and his parents, the overall impact of Rebel Without a Cause carries a sense of deep, irreconcilable conflict between the values of the older generation and the new. Plato’s useless death is a bleak forecast of things to come.

Rebel spawned many lesser screen imitations in the fifties, and Sal Mineo continued to play a wayward teenager in such movies as Crime in the Streets and Dino; but one of the most offbeat and strangely memorable treatments of adolescent torment was Gene Fowler’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf, the start of a series of low-budget horror movies aimed at exploiting the growing youth market. Teenage Werewolf made several million dollars in its first year, packing in young audiences across the country and enjoying a special popularity at drive-in theaters where its peculiar blend of horror and humor could perhaps best be appreciated.

Michael Landon, later to become Little Joe of the TV series Bonanza, plays a disturbed high school student, having problems with teachers and his girlfriend’s family. But instead of turning into a switchblade-carrying delinquent, Landon becomes a victim of lycanthropy—a more direct expression of his sexual hangups and his latent hostility towards the family and society that has victimized him. His repressed tendencies released by a psychiatrist’s secret treatment, he acts out impulses that normal teenagers must keep hidden. Half wolf, half adolescent (still wearing his school jacket), Landon roams the woods at night—a hairy embodiment both of adolescent frustration with the adult world and of adult paranoia about the teenage culture.

Still another interesting variation on the troubled youth formula are the numerous rock and roll movies, generally despised by adults and relished by teenagers—titles such as Rock Around the Clock; Rock, Pretty Baby; Don’t Knock the Rock; Mister Rock and Roll; and Frank Tashlin’s rock satire The Girl Cant Help It. Rock and roll music originated in the bold rhythm and blues music of the black music stations and most of the rock numbers in these movies featured black performers like Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chubby Checker, and Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps. Their lyrics and beat were often outrageously sexual, even though the rock and roll genre plots were generally antiseptically clean. The uninhibited musicians are usually kept on one side of the bandstand and the white teenagers on the other.

The first white male performer of the fifties to really let it all hang out was Elvis Presley, who learned his style from black rhythm and blues artists like Bo Diddley and used it to excite millions of screaming white teenagers. Although his TV and movie images were considerably toned down—chiefly by shooting above the waist—Presley’s live performances were explicitly erotic, earning him the nickname “the Pelvis.” His resemblance to Brando in The Wild One and the aggressive sexuality of his performances were a direct challenge to the repressive atmosphere of the fifties, and teenage fans responded with hysteria to the release his music seemed to offer. Yet in all of his fifties movies, such as Love Me Tender, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, Presley’s sensuality is muted, disguised, until finally, as critic Radley Metzger has observed, he got “wholesomed to death” and became in the next decade an acceptable object of nostalgia for middle-aged audiences.

Although made in 1961 and set in the twenties and thirties, Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass, scripted by William Inge, is essentially a fifties movie, particularly in its strong portrait of high school kids struggling in a small Kansas town against insensitive families and outmoded social customs. Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood appear as “nice” teenagers, Bud and Deanie, both driven by libidinous urges they have difficulty controlling and kept apart by selfish parents with other plans for their childrens’ lives. Barbara Loden is extremely effective as Bud’s sister, a naughty, exhibitionistic flapper type who taunts Deanie for her good-girl image.

When Bud is sent away to Yale by his wealthy father, Deanie remains passively at home until eventually she cracks up under the pressure of pent-up emotions. (The script doesn’t explain why Bud doesn’t also fall to pieces; the implication is that sexual repression doesn’t affect men as much as women, a standard Hollywood myth recurring in many movies.) According to writer Murray Schumach, Kazan shot a sequence in which Deanie became hysterical in the bath and raced naked down the hallway to get away from her mother. But the Production Code ruling against nudity—a ruling which was to disappear later in the decade—forced Kazan to delete the hallway dash. The final image of Splendor in the Grass is quiet and poignant—after having decided to marry other people (Bud is already married, Deanie will wed her doctor), the couple meet briefly for the last time, silently consider the separate directions their lives have taken because of their parents’ interference and then separate forever.

John Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down, made in 1962, offers yet another variation on youthful identity problems and sexual anguish. Written by William Inge from the novel by James Leo Herlihy, this movie features Warren Beatty as Berry-Berry, a spoiled son idolized by his parents and younger brother, Clinton, played by Brandon de Wilde. The mother and father, Angela Lansbury and Karl Maiden, are extensions of the oppressive parents in fifties movies. Beatty’s role is a descendant of the Brando and Dean characters, as well as the Tennessee Williams stud heroes, but he has turned sour and cynical—Berry-Berry loves only himself. The sexual tension emerges when Echo O’Brien, Eva Marie Saint, arrives in the household and attracts both brothers. Naturally, in keeping with Holly- wood stereotypes, this mature woman is irresistibly drawn to the narcissistic stud who cons, mistreats, and eventually causes Echo to commit suicide. Disillusioned by his older brother’s behavior, Clinton departs in search of other heroes.

Brandon de Wilde shows up again as an adolescent with an identity crisis in Martin Ritt’s Hud, one of the most popular box office hits of the early sixties and a major transitional work pointing to movies of the seventies. Based on the Larry McMurtry novel Horseman, Pass By, the movie combines the troubled youth genre with the western framework. The story, which is set on a twentieth-century cattle ranch, concerns the conflict between an aging ranch owner, played by Melvyn Douglas, who looks upon the values of the new age with contempt, and his son, Hud, who feels that his father’s values are impractical. McMurtry described his hero as “a gunfighter who lacks both guns and opponents,” a man “whose capacities no longer fit his situation.” Instead of gun or horse Paul Newman’s Hud has a Cadillac which he drives around the dull little Texas town, searching for some excitement, chiefly fights, drink, and women. In Midnight Cowboy Joe Buck admires a poster of Hud, but never manages to achieve Newman’s smooth confidence and self-control.

Patricia Neal won an Academy Award for her characterization of Alma, the housekeeper who functions both as a substitute mother figure in the Bannon home and a sexually attractive woman who arouses Hud and his nephew, Lon, the Brandon de Wilde role. Much of the movie’s power derives from the subtle interplay of this triangle—especially from the different ways Alma deals with each male, and from her recognition of her own bruised identity, Lon’s adolescent traits, and Hud’s wilder reality. In contrast to Echo in All Fall Down, Alma is no pushover for the stud cowboy. She is, in some ways, very much like Hud—a loner toughened by her experiences, hanging on to her independence.

The ending is a bit contrived and pat: Hud’s attempt to force himself upon Alma, Lon’s discovery and realization that he must break loose of his uncle’s influence. Lon rejects his uncle because he isn’t a noble cowboy like Shane, but one point of the movie is that even if Hud had wanted to—which he didn’t—he couldn’t become such a heroic figure in the modern west. Yet despite all the attacks on his character and his rejection by the other characters, the movie sides with Hud and expects the audience to do likewise. The self-righteous old rancher, Homer, may appeal to the spectator’s conscience, but Hud’s reckless nature and gunfighter qualities speak to more basic emotions.

It is significant that George Lucas set American Graffiti in 1962, during John F. Kennedy’s administration, for events in the following year made it painfully clear that a different era was beginning. The uptight fifties were obviously over, and we were headed into the turbulent sixties. Late in 1963 a nation of television viewers watched Kennedy’s funeral in Washington, D.C., and saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas. This was also the year of the “March on Washington” led by Martin Luther King, and the Vietnam War was beginning to appear more frequently on home TV sets. A year later the Beatles, accompanied by deafening shrieks from the studio audience, made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The Age of Aquarius was not far away.

The next decade in Hollywood saw further re-adjustments in the studio system as more independent productions were shot in other parts of the world, the end of the traditional “glamorized” star system, the rise of new “authentic” stars, the final collapse of the censorship code, and the subsequent leap “from prudery to pornography,” as Molly Haskell has described the change that occurred in the screen’s treatment of sex. The over-thirty audience continued to desert movies for television, until by 1970 the major portion of the filmgoing public were urban youth between twelve and twenty-five years old.

As the Greaser Age faded, the obsessive and often disguised motifs of the fifties—rebellious youth, deviant sexuality, questioning of middle-class values and loss of faith in established institutions—came to dominate the screen in the sixties and seventies. The young alienated rebel reappeared in scores of movies, but his character underwent radical changes. His evolution can be traced through Brando, Dean, Mineo, Presley, Beatty, Newman, up through Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Alan Arkin, Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Ryan O’Neal, and the heroes of Summer of ’42 and American Graffiti. The rebel figure begins as a neurotic, ambiguous, electric and potentially dangerous character and declines into softer, safer, more vulnerable and victimized types.

Later movies using the rebel character are also less apt to treat the character in a completely serious fashion as in the fifties; instead they offer a mingling of seriousness and absurdity, pain and humor, that encourages audience disengagement and laughter rather than straight identification. Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, which Warren Beatty starred in and produced, distances us from the Barrow gang of the Depression era and romanticizes them at the same time by using slapstick comedy techniques and Lester Flatt-Earl Scruggs music. The movie achieves a Keystone Cops hilarity, until Clyde is attacked by a butcher during a grocery holdup and then later happens to shoot a man in the face during the getaway from a bank robbery; afterwards in the car chases and gun battles the comedy is always mingled with real pain, creating an unsettling effect—the audience is not sure whether to laugh or cry—right up to the final sacrificial slaughter of Bonnie and Clyde by villainous Texas Rangers.

Aside from its zany-serious atmosphere and slow-motion massacre, the thing that sets Penn’s movie apart from its predecessors—such as Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once, Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night or Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy—is the treatment of the principal characters not as pathetic, innocent victims led astray into crime but as cute, fun-loving country kids, not overly talented or smart, who get a kick out of playing bank robbers and follow their stories in the tabloids, where their minor exploits are elevated into heroic feats admired by the Okies. Extremely conscious of his public image, Clyde always introduces himself to persons that he is about to rob. Bonnie composes a ballad for the newspapers. What the newspapers don’t know, however, is that their famous gangster, in his own words, “ain’t much of a lover boy” because he suffers from impotence, an ailment that is miraculously cured shortly before he is killed. His tattooed sidekick, C. W. Moss, also appears to have a sexual malady, though unfortunately it is not explored in the movie. The writers, David Newman and Robert Benton, considered making Clyde homosexual, but this condition would have been more difficult to cure and would have spoiled the “young love” image that is the basis of much of the movie’s popularity.

During that same year, 1967, Mike Nichols’ comedy The Graduate, with Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, and Katharine Ross, rose to fame and glory with another story of young love. Celebrated by many critics as a “milestone” in American film, the first movie to deal maturely with the generation gap and the realities of modern young people, The Graduate has become the most successful troubled youth film ever made—ranking seventh on Variety’s 1975 list of AllTime Box-Office Champions, having earned nearly fifty million dollars. Based on Charles Webb’s 1962 novel, it focuses on Benjamin, graduate of an eastern college, who comes home to the suburbs of Southern California where he is seduced by Mrs. Robinson, wife of his father’s business partner. The situation is complicated by the fact that Benjamin falls for Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, Elaine, a swinging Berkeley chick. This offbeat sexual triangle prompted critic Stanley Kauffman to praise the movie’s “daring” moral stance, in accepting “the fact that a young man might have an affair with a woman and still marry her daughter.”

Actually, what is most clever, as well as somewhat deceptive, about The Graduate is the way it manages to appear morally complex and liberated, while really taking a stance that confirms the most conventional morality. This is accomplished by making all of the adults “heavies,” but particularly Mrs. Robinson who, instead of being a complicated human being, becomes a one-dimensional stereotype of the evil older woman—a fantasy figure similar to the wicked Queen in Snow White. Benjamin, on the other hand, is clean-cut, almost virginal, and clearly made uncomfortable by Mrs. Robinson’s aggressive sexuality. “This is the sickest, most perverted thing that’s ever happened to me,” Benjamin says of the affair. The moral stance towards their relationship is one of strong disapprovai, verging on repulsion, especially when the older woman tries to prevent Benjamin from seeing her daughter. In the end Benjamin and his long-haired princess, Elaine, get all of the audience’s sympathy and adoration simply because they are young, earnest, and apparently untainted by any of Mrs. Robinson’s disturbing sexual urges. As Stephen Farber and Estelle Changas have observed, Nichols’ movie is “rather offensively prudish in splitting sex and love, implying that sexual relationships are sick and perverted.”

The Graduate is at times an extremely funny movie, obviously the work of a skilled though conservative satirist—but it is no landmark of maturity. If it had been less escapist and truly liberated, The Graduate probably would not have been greeted so warmly by its public. Although still somewhat skittish and moralistic in its approach to sex, Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge, made in 1971 from a Jules Feiffer script, is a more successful work, dealing effectively and often humorously with two males who manage to retain their adolescent sexual hangups and immature attitudes toward females well into adulthood. In The Graduate the hero seems undersexed; the heroes in Carnal Knowledge think of little else, constantly planning strategies in which life is treated as one big make-out contest. Ultimately the males in Nichols’ movie derive more excitement from describing their sexual tactics and exploits to each other than in the sexual activities themselves.

Jonathan and Sandy are cartoonlike in their simplicity and their women are caricatures; yet this flat mode of characterization works in Carnal Knowledge because it is consistent with the purpose of the movie, which is about people imprisoned in rigid stereotyped attitudes and roles. Moreover, the deck isn’t stacked so unfairly against one set of characters, as in The Graduate; instead it is stacked rather heavily against all the characters, born losers whose carnal games bring them little fun, mostly pain and misery. Finally, when both heroes are in their forties, Jonathan treats Sandy and his new teenage “love teacher” from the Village to a slide show, with caustic commentary, of all his sexual encounters and conquests since age eleven. Titled “Ball-busters on Parade,” the show horrifies Sandy and reduces his girlfriend to tears. But Jonathan quips, “What are you crying for? It’s not a Lassie movie.”

The frankness of Carnal Knowledge and many other movies that followed was made possible by a period of freedom unprecedented in the history of the film industry. Despite some problems with the MPAA classification system adopted in 1968 and the recent Supreme Court decision redefining the guidelines for obscenity, American directors today can do or say pretty much anything on the screen; yet, with some exceptions, popular movies made in Hollywood in recent years have continued with depressing regularity to rehash the fifties youth formula and the young antihero. The major exceptions have been movies like Deliverance, Scarecrow, Papillon, The Longest Yard, and the Academy Award winners The French Connection, The Godfather, and The Sting—all male adventure or police stories, usually treating women and sex only incidentally.

Surrounded by a vast range of potentially exciting contemporary material, many directors in the seventies have played it safe by restricting themselves almost exclusively to life as viewed from the younger side of the generation gap, either in the context of the old west (Bad Company, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid), the thirties (Paper Moon, Thieves Like Us), the forties (Summer of 42 י, Class of ’44), or the fifties (The Last Picture Show, American Graffiti, Badlands, The Lords of Flatbush). Except for disc jockey Wolfman Jack, a few policemen, teachers, and other minor figures, there are hardly any adults at all in Lucas’ 1973 movie American Graffiti, a low-budget project that has become one of the most popular box office hits of recent years. It concentrates on a group of kids, mostly high school class of ’62, driving their cars around the streets of Modesto, California, during one summer night.

Although based partly on the director’s life, American Graffiti does not use a documentary tone but instead shows us a past transformed by rock and roll and beach party movies, as Lucas has acknowledged. While cruising the neon-lit streets around Mel’s Drive-In Restaurant, the kids listen to a montage of com- mentary and banshee howls by Wolfman Jack and songs by artists like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, the Flamingos, and the Beach Boys. Lucas and his cameraman Haskell Wexler worked out a “jukebox” style of lighting to give the movie an unreal, carnival-like atmosphere.

Like a beach party or hot rod movie, American Graffiti offers a very slim, uncomplicated plot structured around a few communal events—such as a sock hop and a drag race—and a cast of characters who resemble types from fifties movies. The ghost of James Dean haunts Big John Milner who wears a T-shirt, jeans, and boots and puts on an air of tough indifference as king drag racer. Like Brando in The Wild One, he gives a memento—his gearshift knob—to a female, although in Big John’s case the girl is a thirteen-year-old who happens to be cruising with him that night. There is also a sexy, bourbon-drinking blonde, Debbie, who thinks she looks like Sandra Dee. She teams up with a short, homely underdog, Terry the Toad, who wears white bucks and fancies himself a cool dude. The other lead couple features Steve, a clean-cut, class president type, and Laurie, head cheerleader who wants Steve to settle down and marry her. Curt, the sensitive, intellectually-inclined loner and the movie’s real hero, spends his time either in romantic pursuit of a blonde in a white Thunderbird or fooling around with some local hoods called the Pharaohs, while trying to decide whether to depart in the morning for college.

Lucas obviously enjoys capturing the desperately horny mood of the cruising adolescents and their humorous graffiti, sexual slang like “snatch . . . porking . . . coping a feel” and silly pranks like shooting squirt guns from cars, jerking down Toad’s pants, dangling a bra from a car or throwing a moon by pressing bare buttocks against a car window. Nearly everybody is on the make, hoping to score. Feeling high on Coke and Old Harper, Debbie and Toad make out in a field near a canal bank, while Steve tries to “go all the way” with Laurie but is pushed out of the car. Big John threatens to seduce Carol, his thirteen-year-old passen- ger, in order to trick her into revealing her address so he can take her home. But the sexual tension in American Graffiti is, like Big John’s threat, essentially harmless, exploding into jokes and merriment instead of violence.

American Graffiti avoids being simple nostalgia by subtly emphasizing mortality and change—chiefly through Big John with his sense of the dangers of dragging ("All the ding-a-lings get it sooner or later," he says) and his awareness that “the whole strip is shrinking,” as well as through Curt who is the only character in the movie to escape from Modesto. In the morning, as his transistor plays “Goodnight Sweetheart” and the blonde in the white T-bird cruises below on the highway, Curt heads into the future in a DC-3. There is no sudden traumatic loss of innocence as in Rebel Without a Cause; instead Curt experiences a gradual awakening and recognition that he must grow up, partly inspired by the Wolfman’s advice to get his “ass in gear” because “there’s a whole big beautiful world out there” beyond the limits of his hometown. Eventually Curt becomes a writer living in Canada. Although we learn from the brief cameos in the end that Big John was killed by a drunk driver and Toad was reported missing in action in Vietnam, the final effect of the movie, like its music, is light, upbeat, and reassuring.

American Graffiti recreates the teenage styles and the popular culture of the fifties in an unselfconscious and seemingly effortless manner. In spite of similar techniques—the use of actual locations, authentic radio shows—Robert Altman’s 1974 movie Thieves Like Us, another Bonnie and Clyde story set in the thirties, appears stagey and artificial. The Coke bottles, pop culture, and ornaments of the era are emphasized like set pieces or road signs to remind us that we’re in the thirties. The skinny, plain-looking protagonists, Bowie and Keechie, are perfect in appearance; but their “romance” lacks intensity and their lives are too pathetic and helpless.

Bowie and Keechie’s first love scene is played against the background of a thirties’ radio broadcast of Romeo and Juliet, an arty device that comments too obviously on the action and undercuts serious involvement. A later bath scene in which Keechie is briefly seen nude seems perfunctory, with no real purpose beyond emphasizing her already-established vulnerability. Typically, any interest in sex displayed by older characters is shown as somewhat unnatural; one of the older gangsters, T-Dub, is presented as a lecher, unable to keep his hands off younger women. The presence of the stereotyped dirty old man, of course, emphasizes the innocence and purity of the young lovers.

Just as the subterfuges and strategies of fifties movies are now transparent, so our own disguises, evasions, and fantasies in dealing with sexuality will be apparent, perhaps even laughable, to future movie audiences. We have moved from the neurotic, high-risk relationship to sex displayed by fifties heroes and heroines to the more casual, low-risk attitude of seventies characters, who are, like Bowie and Keechie, chiefly accommodating victims swept along helplessly by events. But in the exchange something valuable has been lost. These newer screen characters hold few surprises, are rarely spontaneously alive and compeiling, and consequently we seldom care as much about their problems.

Hollywood and its audience are in the midst of a transitional period, resembling the crisis of the early fifties, when many of the accepted characters and cherished formulas no longer seem to be working. Once again, as in the fifties, a few gutsy European directors are leading the way into unexplored territory, particularly in their complex treatments of sexual identity. After having come through the rather frenziedly “liberated” late sixties and early seventies, most American directors appear to have grasped the basic techniques of the striptease but without fully understanding the essentials—the more intangible, mysterious elements that make the dance truly erotic and meaningful. This next step, creatively and imaginatively using the screen’s freedom to explore the full experience of sexuality, its joys as well as pains, in characters of all types and ages, will involve considerably more risk.