Tarantino is Wrong About ‘50s Cinema

I get it, Quentin Tarantino’s comments about the ‘50s being one of the worst decades for cinema stems from his belief that the Hays Code limited artistic expression in Hollywood during that decade. However, if you set ‘Hays’ aside, it was still one of the more fruitful cinematic decade ever.

In case you missed it, on Tarantino and Roger Avary’s The Video Archives Podcast, the filmmaker took aim at the films of today, as well as those from the ‘50s and ‘80s. His theory was that they were bad decades for filmmaking due to the censorship and/or political correctness that seeped through the zeitgeist during those times:

“Even though the ‘80s was the time that I probably saw more movies in my life than ever – at least as far as going out to the movies was concerned – I do feel that ‘80s cinema is, along with the ‘50s, the worst era in Hollywood history,” Tarantino recently said on his “The Video Archives Podcast” (via NME). “Matched only by now, matched only by the current era!” 

The restriction of creativity and cinematic innovation, the requirement to stick to the status quo prevented the most important filmmakers from this decade from properly flourishing in the industry. That’s the claim Tarantino seems to be making. And I highly disagree.

Even if there was censorship, the ‘50s was a total boom for the progress of modern-day filmmaking. There was an explosive diversity in both subject matter and cinematic technology during that decade.

How could great movies not be created when this was the decade that saw the peak in genres such as WWII, film noir, the Western — to not mention European neorealism. We also saw incredible advances in color technology. There were many new ways to tell a story.

I counted 50 films from the 1950s that are stone-cold classics:

Vertigo, The Searchers, Touch of Evil, Singin' in the Rain, Ordet, Ugetsu, Sunset Boulevard, Rear Window, A Man Escaped, Sweet Smell of Success, 12 Angry Men, Ace In the Hole, The Killing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dial M For Murder, Los Olidavos, In A Lonely Place, The Earrings of Madame De, Umberto D, Wages of Fear, Sansho the Bailiff, The 400 Blows, Night of the Hunter, Rio Bravo, Diabolique Journey to Italy, Pickpocket, The River, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Imitation of Life, The Big Heat, Written in the Wind, Some Came Running, The Band Wagon, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Quiet Man, Johnny Guitar, A Bigger Life, Night and Fog, Pickup on South Street, On the Waterfront, North By Northwest, Some Like It Hot, Wild Strawberries, The Bridge on the River Kwai, High Noon, The Quiet Man, All About Eve, Paths of Glory, Strangers on a Train, The Band Wagon

I can’t think of many decades that produced this many great movies. Maybe the ‘60s and ‘70s, but that’s about it. You had filmmakers such as Hitchcock, Ford, Wilder, Welles, Lumet, Kazan and Ray working at the top of their game.