1940s - Part 2
Year
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Event and Significance
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1944
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The first Golden Globe awards ceremony took place at 20th Century Fox Studios, at first marked by the awarding of scrolls (not statuettes) to honorees (not nominees) who were announced earlier.
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1944
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The US government eased restraints on the depiction of brutality by the Japanese.
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1944
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A Los Angeles court ruled, in the so-called "Havilland decision" - that Warner Bros. had to release actress Olivia de Havilland after her seven-year contract expired, ruling that the studio could not add time to her contract to make up for the periods when she was on suspension. This ruling undercut studios' ability to lock actors into long-term contracts.
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1944
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The federal government reopened its anti-trust cases against the studios, and called for the divestiture of the studios' theaters.
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1944
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Billy Wilder's cynically-dark masterpiece, Double Indemnity, a hard-boiled tale adapted from another James M. Cain novel (with Raymond Chandler as the co-scenarist), represented the peak of 'film noir'. Both lead actors, Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray (both playing against type) gave the performances of their careers, with MacMurray providing an effective first-person narration. Although the film had a steamy crime plot (an adulterous evil woman plots the murder of her husband through her association with an insurance investigator), it was able to follow the prescriptions of the Hays Code while still infusing the story with controversial sex and murder scenes.
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1944
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Producer/director Otto Preminger's mystery drama Laura, was one of the most stylish, elegant, moody, and witty classic film noirs ever made, featuring an ensemble cast of characters. Trailers for the compelling film promised: "Never has a woman been so beautiful, so exotic, so dangerous to know!"
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1944
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The first TV ad for a film was broadcast by Paramount, in the second TV station (KTLA) that the studio had launched/established in Los Angeles in 1943.
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1944
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The first film advertised on TV in a 30-minute promotion in 1944 was the classic Preston Sturges comedy The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.
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1945
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At the conclusion of the war, the federal government ended restrictions on the allocation of raw film stock, midnight curfews, and bans on outdoor lighting displays as well as censorship of the export and import of films.
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1945
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Roberto Rossellini's influential landmark film Open City formally introduced Italian Neo-Realism, marked by a gritty, authentic and realistic post-war film style. Characteristics included the use of on-location cinematography, grainy low-grade black-and-white film stock and untrained actors in improvised scenes. The socially-aware, documentary-style film captured the despair and confusion of post-World War II Europe. [Another film that provided a seminal example of this post-war style was Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief (1948).] Italian Neo-Realism, portrayed by film-makers Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica, lasted until 1952. It would have a tremendous influence on the development of future 'avant-garde' films with intense character studies (i.e., surrealistic cinema from Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, cinema verite, the French New Wave and the maverick films from the New Hollywood).
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1945
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The Screen Extras Guild (SEG), a union representing the interests of persons regularly cast as extras, was organized.
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1945
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The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), an organization created in 1938 with the goal of domestically stopping subversive activities, un-Americanism and communism, was made into a permanent standing committee under Congressman John Rankin (of Mississippi). By 1947, the Hollywood motion picture industry became one of its main targets when the committee initiated an investigation of Communist influence there.
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1945
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Marcel Carné's three-hours in length French resistance romantic classic The Children of Paradise (aka Les Enfants du Paradis, Fr.) was made during a time of Nazi occupation in France, and filmed in secret over a two-year period.
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1945
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The rarely-seen film Momotaro: The Holy Soldier of the Sea, financed by (and starring) the Japanese Imperial Navy and directed by Mitsuyo Seo, was the first feature-length anime film ever made. The unique art form of anime films from Japan, characterized by stylized colorful graphics depicting vibrant characters in fantastic or futuristic action-filled plots, would become increasingly popular in the 1980s.
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1945
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One of the earliest (if not the first) Hollywood film to feature the use of judo (martial arts) in fight sequences was in Blood on the Sun, starring James Cagney as an American newspaper editor who exposed militaristic plans for Japanese expansion.
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1945
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The first "musical biography" based on the life of a composer/songwriter was Warners' Night and Day, with Cary Grant as Cole Porter.
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1945
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The first of three films director Alfred Hitchcock made with star Ingrid Bergman was Spellbound (1945), followed by Notorious (1946) and Under Capricorn (1949).
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1946
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The Cannes Film Festival debuted in France on the French Riviera. Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945) was the first Best Picture Oscar-winning film to also win Cannes' top prize (known now as the Golden Palm or Palme d'Or).
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1946
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Universal Pictures merged with the independent production company International Pictures to become Universal International.
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1946
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Disney's first live-action feature film The Song of the South was released, with three major segments of animation; it was based upon Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus folk tales regarding Br'er Rabbit; due to extensive protests (mostly by the NAACP) over the stereotypical representations of blacks in the film and the film's romanticizing of slavery, the controversial film was never released on home video for US audiences; the film's hit song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" won the Academy Awards Oscar for Best Song.
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1946
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Bobby Driscoll, the child star of Song of the South and Treasure Island (1950), was the first actor to sign a long-term contract with Disney Productions.
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1946
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David O. Selznick announced that he would release his films by himself rather than through United Artists.
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1946
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Director William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives debuted, and won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor in 1947. It was a classic post-war film that accurately and poignantly portrayed the readjustment of veterans and their families after their return home. Double amputee and amateur actor Harold Russell (as Homer Parrish) became the only actor to win two Oscars for playing the same role. He was awarded a special Academy Award for "bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans," and then also won the year's Oscar as Best Supporting Actor.
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1946
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The impressionistic, fantasy-romance film Beauty and the Beast (aka La Belle et La Bête, Fr.), directed by Jean Cocteau, was released in post WW II France. It was an adaptation of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont's 1756 fairy-tale. It inspired the Disney animated classic Beauty and the Beast (1991), the first and only full-length feature animated film to be nominated for Best Picture by AMPAS.
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1946
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The Motion Picture Association of America (MPPA) withdrew its seal of approval for obsessed producer/director Howard Hughes' controversial 'sexy' western epic about Billy the Kid titled The Outlaw (1943), featuring busty starlet Jane Russell in a low-cut peasant blouse. (The film was released for a 10-week run in 1943, then withdrawn, and re-released three years later.) Hughes refused to submit film ads in his ad campaign (such as "What are the two reasons for Jane Russell's rise to stardom?") to the MPAA for seal approval, and sued the organization, but eventually backed down. The release of the mediocre, fictional film ended up as an example of triumphant ballyhooing and film marketing.
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1946
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The Motion Pictures Code allowed films to show drug trafficking so long as the scenes did not "stimulate curiosity."
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1946
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The first ever "original soundtrack album" was MGM's release of the soundtrack for its film musical Till the Clouds Roll By -- it was first soundtrack album ever made from a live-action film musical; its first release was on a 78 RPM album, then later on 33 RPM LP and on compact disc. The Jerome Kern soundtrack was MGM Records' first soundtrack album. [Note: Disney's movie soundtrack of a few of the songs from its animated musical film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) were available on a limited RCA two-record set - the only other previous soundtrack released.]
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1947
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The Supreme Court ruled that the practice of block booking violated federal anti-trust laws. When the court failed to order the studios to divest themselves of their theaters, government prosecutors appealed.
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1947
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The Actors Studio, a rehearsal group for professional actors, was established in New York City by Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford. It soon became the epi-center for advancing "the Method" - a technique of acting that was inspired by Konstantin Stanislavski's teachings. It later gained fame through the leadership of Lee Strasberg in the 1950s, whose clients included Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean.
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1947
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In Washington, D.C., the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) subpoened 41 witnesses, its first wave of witnesses in an investigation of alleged communist influence in the Hollywood movie industry. Witnesses included the 'unfriendly' "Hollywood 19" (13 of 19 were writers). In 1948, the "Hollywood 10" (Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo) were charged with contempt of Congress and jailed for refusing to cooperate with its inquiries and answer the question, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" 84 of 204 supporters of the Hollywood 19 or 10 who signed an amici curiae Supreme Court brief were blacklisted. Many promising and established careers were destroyed by anti-Communist blacklisting - reflected in the growth of sci-films showing paranoia of aliens and anything foreign in the 50s decade.
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1947
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The Motion Pictures Code forbade derogatory references to a character's race.
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1947
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Britain imposed a 75 percent duty on Hollywood films and the American studios responded by boycotting the British market. The boycott ended in 1948.
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1947
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Director Alfred Hitchcock's last film under contract with producer David O. Selznick was The Paradine Case.
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1947
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MGM's Cynthia (1947) was the coming-of-age film for budding 15 year-old screen star Elizabeth Taylor, in which she played the title role of small-town, physically-frail, musically-talented teenager Cynthia Bishop. She received her first (grown-up) on-screen kiss from beau Ricky Latham (Jimmy Lydon) in a scene on a front porch following their attendance at the Spring Prom.
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1948
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The Supreme Court's anti-trust Paramount Decree or Decision ruled that the major movie studios were guilty and had to end their monopolization of the industry. They were forced to divest themselves from owning theater chains, by selling them off. RKO announced that it would divest itself of its movie theaters. Block booking, the system by which an exhibitor was forced to buy a whole line of films (both popular films and B films) from a studio was also deemed illegal by a court decision that legislated the separation of the production and exhibition functions of the film industry. This marked the beginning of the end of the studio system.
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1948
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Warner Bros. was the first to show a color newsreel -- its subject was the Tournament of Roses Parade (Pasadena, CA) and the Rose Bowl.
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1948
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Director Alfred Hitchcock's first color feature film was the experimental Rope, the first of four films with James Stewart, followed by Rear Window (1954), the remake The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Vertigo (1958).
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1948
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Hamlet was both the first British production and the first non-American or non-Hollywood (foreign-made) film to be presented with the industry's top honor - Best Picture. Its British director/actor/producer, Laurence Olivier, was the first actor to direct his own Oscar-winning performance (a Best Actor Academy Award). He was the first non-American director to win Best Picture.
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1949
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Vittorio De Sica's landmark, post-war The Bicycle Thief (1948), was another superb example of film-making from the Italian Neo-Realism movement. It was honored with a Special Academy Award in 1949 as the "most outstanding foreign film" many years before an official category was created. [The film served as the impetus for the creation of an official Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1956.] And it was the 1950 Golden Globe Award winner for Best Foreign Film. De Sica's film was also noted as the first film widely-distributed without the Hays Office seal of approval (for its refusal to cut two scenes involving urination and a bordello).
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1949
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Paramount signed a consent decree, agreeing to separate its production and distribution activities. Loew's (owner of MGM), 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros. were ordered to divest themselves of their theaters.
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1949
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Hollywood made one of its earliest attacks on racism with director Elia Kazan's melodrama Pinky, one of the many post-war 'problem pictures'. The film was noted for using a white actress (Jeanne Crain) to portray a light-skinned black woman who fell in love with a white man.
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1949
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Scandalizing herself, Ingrid Bergman and her lover and Italian film-maker Roberto Rossellini (both married at the time) started a family, eventually having three children together. She was pregnant at the time of her marriage, branded as "Hollywood's apostle of degradation," denounced by senators, religious leaders, and citizens' groups, and forced to move away from the US.
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1949
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Inspired by the work of Willis O'Brien in King Kong (1933), Ray Harryhausen animated the stop-motion gorilla in Mighty Joe Young, although the work was mostly credited to O'Brien. This was Harryhausen's first feature film for which he created stop-motion animation. His career in stop-motion animation would last until his final feature film, Clash of The Titans (1981).
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1949
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The first musical feature film to be shot (partially) on location (in New York City, including exterior sites such as Coney Island, the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Plaza, and Central Park), was MGM's On the Town, although most of the film was shot in the studio.
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1949
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The first appearance of both the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote was in the Warner Bros' cartoon Fast and Furry-ous. Intended to be a one-time only appearance, their popularity called for another cartoon produced 3 years later, Beep, Beep (1952), and then a continuing series.
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1949
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Director Robert Rossen's Best Picture-winning All the King's Men was a fictionalized account (based upon the Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling 1946 novel by Robert Penn Warren) of the rise and fall of a backwoods rebel - a story inspired by the rule (and abuse of power) of Louisiana's colorful and dictatorial state governor (1928-32) and Democratic U.S. Senator (1932-35) - the notorious Huey Pierce Long - "The Kingfish."
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Late 40s
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Now that the big studios (such as Warners) were forced to divest themselves from owning lucrative theater chains, many Hollywood stars were making their last films (or were about to make their final film) under long-term contracts with the studio (i.e., Olivia de Havilland in 1946, Ida Lupino in 1947, Edward G. Robinson in 1948 (with Key Largo), Ann Sheridan and Bette Davis in 1949 (with Beyond the Forest), Humphrey Bogart in 1951 (with The Enforcer), and Errol Flynn in 1953).
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1950s - Part 1
Year
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Event and Significance
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1950
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Hollywood began to develop ways to counteract free television's gains by the increasing use of color, and by introducing wide-screen films (i.e., CinemaScope, Techniscope, Cinerama, VistaVision, etc.) and gimmicks (i.e., 3-D viewing with cardboard glasses, Smell-O-Vision, etc.).
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Early 1950s
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Film theater attendance drastically declined due to the rise of television.
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1950
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John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo were imprisoned and the eight remaining members of the Hollywood Ten were convicted of contempt of Congress.
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1950
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Japanese director Akira Kurosawa released Rashomon.
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1950
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Studio control of stars further eroded when James Stewart signed a precedent-setting independent (or free-lance) contract to share in the box-office profits (45% of the net profits) of the Anthony Mann western Winchester '73, and for the film version of the stage comedy Harvey. In fact, for all his Universal Studios films (including Bend of the River (1952), and The Far Country (1954)), Stewart took no salary in exchange for a large cut of the profits -- a very lucrative deal. As a result, he earned increasingly high salaries, became a pioneer of the percentage deal (a performer accepted a reduced or non-existent salary in exchange for a percentage of the box office profits), and was the industry's top box-office star by mid-decade. For Winchester '73 alone, Stewart earned $600,000.
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1950
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The career of former silent star Gloria Swanson (nominated and lost for Best Actress) was revitalized with the release of Billy Wilder's black comedy Sunset Boulevard. It was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won three - for Story and Screenplay, B/W Art Direction/Set Decoration, and Best Score. Swanson was nominated for Best Actress (and lost). Wilder's film was controversial for its unflinching look at the Hollywood studio system and its politics, and for its casting of former and current Hollywood legends as themselves to add a touch of reality (Cecil B. DeMille, Hedda Hopper, Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, H.B. Warner, Ray Evans, Jay Livingston) or a close facsimile (Erich von Stroheim).
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1950
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The melodramatic, sordid underbelly of theater show biz with dozens of quotable lines, producer Darryl F. Zanuck's All About Eve, earned a then-unmatched record of 14 Academy Award nominations and won six, including Best Picture (Zanuck), Best Director (Joseph L. Mankiewicz), and Best Supporting Actor (George Sanders). Although widely considered to be Bette Davis' best film role as the petulant, angry aging diva Margo Channing -- who uttered one of the most famous lines in film history ("Fasten your seatbelts - it's going to be a bumpy night!") -- she, along with co-star Anne Baxter in the title role of Eve Harrington cancelled each other out and lost Best Actress honors to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. Thelma Ritter and Celeste Holm were also nominated in supporting roles, giving All About Eve a record four female acting nominations.
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1950
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James Dean participated in a Pepsi-Cola commercial - his first acting job (paying $30) that launched his career.
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1950
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King's Solomon's Mines was the first MGM film in the talkie era made without a musical score.
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1950-1952
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Animator Jay Ward, working with Alexander Anderson, Jr (whose idea was first turned down at Terrytoon Studios), created the immensely-popular animated, serialized NBC-TV show Crusader Rabbit, through their new company Television Arts Productions. It was the first American animated series produced especially for television. The show originally aired from 1950 -1952 and also had a color version in 1957, with both Lucille Bliss and GeGe Pearson providing the voice of the Don Quixote-like title character. It told about knight-in-armor Crusader Rabbit and his tiger companion Rags, combatting nemesis Dudley Nightshade, with episodes ending in a cliffhanger.
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1951
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Legendary film critic and theorist Andre Bazin established the influential and distinguished Cahiers du Cinéma (literally 'cinema notebooks'), arguably the most influential film magazine in film history. Future filmmakers and critics, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette contributed to the publication, advocating the auteur theory and proposing the use of more individualistic styles. Their ideas and writing gave rise to the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) by the end of the decade, and brought respectability to the idea of film as a legitimate field of study.
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1951
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The Motion Pictures Production Code specifically prohibited films dealing with abortion or narcotics.
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1951
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HUAC opened a second round of hearings in Hollywood to investigate communism in the film industry, leading to the blacklisting of 212 individuals actively working in Hollywood at this time.
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1951
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Indebted United Artists was sold to a syndicate headed by two New York entertainment lawyers, Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin.
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1951
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Marking the decline of the old Hollywood studio system, this was the first year in which the Best Picture Oscar was given to the film's producers rather than to the studio that released the film.
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1951
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To combat the threat of television, the Cohn brothers (of Columbia Pictures) founded a television production company subsidiary named Screen Gems.
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1951
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Christian Nyby's The Thing, (ghost-directed by Howard Hawks), one of the earliest examples of an alien invader film, featured filmdom's first space monster.
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1951
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One of the most thoughtful science-fiction films ever made, Robert E. Wise's allegorical The Day the Earth Stood Still, was released, featuring the most famous phrase in sci-fi history -- "Gort, Klaatu barada niktu" -- as well as stunning, state-of-the-art visual effects and a Bernard Herrmann score. The classic cult film was also the first of many 50's Cold War-inspired science-fiction films, and featured the first modern robot, the silver giant Gort.
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1951
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MGM's lavish, big-budget, Technicolor historical epic Quo Vadis was released, starring Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, and Peter Ustinov. It was filmed on location in Italy with a cast of thousands, in the pre-Cinemascope era. According to sources, it set the record for the number of costumes used (32,000) in a single film. This film also marked Sophia Loren's film debut -- in a bit part as a slave.
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1951
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A Streetcar Named Desire was the first film ever to win three Acting Oscars. Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden, and Kim Hunter succeeded and were presented with awards, although Marlon Brando lost in the Best Actor category to Humphrey Bogart for The African Queen.
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1951
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Disney's Alice in Wonderland failed at the box-office, offsetting its profits from the previous year's successful full-length animation Cinderella (1950).
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1952
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To avoid losing the battle with television, Hollywood counterattacked with 3-D films. The first feature-length 3-D sound film released was Bwana Devil, inspiring a flood of other quickly (and often cheaply made), but sometimes successful 3-D features, such as Robot Monster (1953), It Came From Outer Space (1953), and House of Wax (1953). [The first feature-length 3-D film was The Power of Love (1922).]
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1952
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Paramount's wrap-around, big-screen Cinerama debuted - a break-through technique that required three cameras, three projectors, interlocking, semi-curved (at 146 degrees) screens, and four-track stereo sound. A travelogue of the world's vacation spots, with a thrilling roller-coaster ride was shown in This Is Cinerama - it premiered as the first Cinerama film shown to the public. Paramount's wrap-around, big-screen Cinerama was the first real widescreen feature film format.
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1952
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Universal International was sold to Decca Records.
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1952
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Although generally considered the greatest screen musical of all time, Singin' in the Rain had only two Oscar nominations (without a win) -- Best Score and Best Supporting Actress (Jean Hagen).
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1952
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The first film to win a Golden Globe award for Best Motion Picture (comedy or musical) - a newly-created category - was An American in Paris (1951), in the 1952 awards ceremony.
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1953
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In further warfare against television and rival 3-D movies, Hollywood developed wide-screen processes, such as 20th Century Fox's anamorphic CinemaScope, first seen in Henry Koster's Biblical sword-and-sandal epic The Robe.
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1953
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Otto Preminger's The Moon Is Blue, used the then-forbidden word "virgin" - this deliberately violated the Motion Picture Production Code and led to picket lines. It was the first studio-produced film from Hollywood that was released without an approved code seal from the Production Code Administration - deliberately as a test case. It proved to be a major hit film (grossing $6 million) despite its lack of a seal of approval.
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1953
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The Academy Awards were televised for the first time - (on March 19, 1953), on black and white NBC-TV.
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1953
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Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu's classic family drama Tokyo Story (aka Tokyo Monogatari, Jp.), the best film of his entire career, illustrated how changing times in Japan had severed the virtue of honoring one's parents.
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1953
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Following the lead of James Stewart a few year earlier, seven-year contracts with actors were replaced by single-picture or multi-picture contracts.
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1953
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Actress Ida Lupino (one of the few female directors of her era) directed the thrilling, noirish B-film drama The Hitch-Hiker -- the most successful film in her career. It was the story, based on a true-life account, of a cold-blooded, sadistic, psychotic mass murderer and kidnapper (William Talman). Its release during the height of the McCarthy "Red Scare" era reflected US paranoia about strangers.
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1953
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Director George Stevens' mythic western Shane was released - it was the second film of his "American trilogy," positioned between A Place in the Sun (1951) and Giant (1956). It was nominated for five Oscars (Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor - Brandon de Wilde, Best Supporting Actor - Jack Palance, Best Director, and Best Screenplay). It won the Oscar for Best Color Cinematography.
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1953
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Buena Vista Distribution Company was formed to act as Disney's film distributor.
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1953
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The first animated 3-D cartoon in Technicolor, Melody, was premiered.
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1953
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Warner Bros' first 3-D film, the horror classic House of Wax, by director Andre de Toth, was the first 3-D film released with a stereo soundtrack. It also effectively launched the horror film career of Vincent Price, who portrayed horribly disfigured sculptor Prof. Henry Jarrod.
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1953
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Although MGM's Kiss Me Kate was often noted as the first stereo-optic 3-D musical - in full Technicolor, it could be argued that Paramount's Those Redheads From Seattle (1953) with Rhonda Fleming was first by about a month.
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1953
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Two classic, alien-invasion science-fiction films reflected Cold War tensions, the Red Scare and paranoid anxiety - typical of many 50s decade films: William Cameron Menzies' Invaders from Mars, and Jack Arnold's It Came From Outer Space -- also made in 3-D. The best of these films arrived a few years later: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).
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1953
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To promote the launch of the B-movie The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Warner Brothers ran an expensive $200,000 publicity campaign aimed at teens, including heavily advertising it on TV and radio. It was one of the first films to exploit the medium of television (that was ironically taking away business from movie theaters) and to employ a theatre booking strategy of launching the film in a large number of theaters. The strategy worked, and the film became the sleeper hit of 1953 - creating a whole sub-genre of atomic age, giant monster action films.
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1953
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The provocative film, From Here to Eternity (1953), was based on James Jones' hefty, 859-page smoldering 1951 novel of the same name. Its sprawling and complex story-line about Army life with its bold and explicit script (with strong language, violence and raw sexual content) was at first considered unsuitable (and unfilmable) for the screen. The ground-breaking film's subjects (ill-suited for television) included prostitution, adultery, military injustice, corruption and violence, alcohol abuse, and murder.
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1953
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Director Henri-Georges Clouzot's suspenseful thriller The Wages of Fear (aka Le Salaire De La Peur, Fr/It) established the director's reputation as the "French Hitchcock" with its tension-filled tale of the death-defying truck driving of nitroglycerine across treacherous terrain in Central America.
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1953, 1954
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Walt Disney achieved a milestone in the 1954 awards ceremony - as the individual with the most Oscar wins (4) in a single year. He won the award in four awards categories: Best Cartoon Short Subject: Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (1953), Best Documentary Short Subject: The Alaskan Eskimo (1953), Best Documentary Feature: The Living Desert (1953), and Best Two-Reel Short Subject: Bear Country (1953).
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1954
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Federico Fellini released the classic Italian film La Strada (aka The Road, It.). It won the first official Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, awarded in 1956.
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1954
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Paramount Studio's first VistaVision widescreen production was director Michael Curtiz' hit film White Christmas, an Irving Berlin musical.
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1954
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The adult-themed Animal Farm (1954), an allegorical tale based on George Orwell's 1945 satirical political novel, was the first animated color feature film made in England.
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1954
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Dorothy Dandridge was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress, the first African-American ever nominated, for her role in Carmen Jones. (Ironically, in 2000, Halle Berry - the first African-American actress to ever win the Best Actress Oscar for Monster's Ball (2001), won the Emmy and the Golden Globes awards playing the title role in the critically-acclaimed HBO television movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999).)
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1954
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Graphic design genius Saul Bass began his legendary career (spanning over 40 years until his last film Casino (1995)) as title designer for Carmen Jones, and later gained his first major recognition for his work for The Man With the Golden Arm (1955). His revolutionary work broke tradition by using jagged lines and bold designs to redefine title credits and poster images. He was best known for his work with Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Stanley Kubrick - and later with Martin Scorsese.
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1954
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On the Waterfront nearly swept the Academy Awards with eight wins, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Marlon Brando), Best Supporting Actress (Eva Maria Saint), and Best Director (Elia Kazan).
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1954
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Japan gave birth to the long-running series of Godzilla monster films with Ishiro Honda's Gojira, featuring Godzilla in his screen debut.
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1954
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Akira Kurosawa's epic tale Seven Samurai reinvented the western film genre. (It was remade by John Sturges as The Magnificent Seven (1960).)
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1954
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Dragnet from Warner Bros. was the first theatrical film based on a TV show of the same name (the then-popular B/W TV show ran from 1951-1959). Its star Jack Webb (as Sgt. Joe Friday) turned it into a feature (color) film, and served as the director.
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1954
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The American Releasing Company was founded by James H. Nicholson and Hollywood lawyer Samuel Z. Arkoff -- the precursor of American International Pictures (AIP) in 1956, noted for its low-budget exploitation films and drive-in movies for the profitable teenage market. Their first film was writer/producer Roger Corman's The Fast and the Furious (1954) starring John Ireland and Dorothy Malone. The horror films of Bert Gordon, Roger Corman's series of adapted Edgar Allan Poe horror films with Vincent Price, biker and drug-related films in the 60s, the 'beach party' films of Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, the teenage monster film cycle (i.e., I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)), and the earliest films of Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich (and many others) were AIP productions. Emphasis on these sensationalist sub-genres (beach party films, kung fu films, biker films, juvenile delinquency pictures, monster and horror films, women-in-prison films, etc.) would be imitated by countless other independent production companies and film-makers.
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