Great Adaptations: Columbia in the 1950s

A Raisin in the Sun is about a Black Chicago family whose tensions and frustrations are exacerbated by the claustrophobic tenement flat where three generations live on top of one another—with a shared bathroom in the hall. Hansberry’s groundbreaking play, the first by a Black woman to open on Broadway, tackles housing discrimination, abortion, and generational conflicts, embedding these issues in the texture and rhythms of daily life. In the film, scenes unfold in long takes and medium shots that keep most of the players in the frame, including those on the sidelines; we are forced to stay in the middle of the family’s anguished arguments and confrontations, aware of every reaction, perspective, and shifting current of feeling. The film preserves almost the entire cast of the original Broadway production: Sidney Poitier at his most electric, kinetic, and furious; Ruby Dee in a devastating portrait of quiet, worn-down stoicism; and Claudia McNeil as the tree-of-life matriarch. The camera grants an intimacy the stage could not, letting us see the tear-tracks and winces, for instance in a lacerating exchange between Poitier’s character and his mother, when he tells her that money is life. “Once freedom was life, now it’s money,” she sighs, to which he bitterly retorts, “It was always money, we just didn’t know it.”

If A Raisin in the Sun calls for unvarnished simplicity in its presentation, Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer demands a combination of baroque style and straight-faced conviction. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1959 film manages to preserve the play’s allusions to incest, rape, homosexuality, and cannibalism, as the lushly lurid story moves between insane asylums and a New Orleans mansion set in a jungle garden (shot in a London studio). The home’s doyenne, Violet (Katharine Hepburn), descends upon guests via a cage elevator, seated in a flowing gown and chattering like a demented goddess. References to flesh-eating are seeded throughout, from the garden’s Venus flytrap to a gruesome story of birds devouring baby sea turtles to the accusation that Violet and her son, Sebastian, “fed on life.” Violet wants to lobotomize her niece Cathy (Elizabeth Taylor), to stop her from talking about how her adored son really died the previous summer. The whole play revolves around this absent character, variously described as a martyr and a predator, saint and sinner, pure poet and decadent cynic. If Sebastian did appear, could anyone possibly have played the role? Perhaps, in his younger days, Montgomery Clift—but by this point substance abuse and ill health made him barely employable, and his friend Taylor got him the part of the kindly doctor who helps the traumatized Cathy. His fragility, unexplained by the text, adds an intriguing wobble to the script’s overwrought contrivance.

Six years earlier, Clift was at his pinnacle in From Here to Eternity, playing Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a proud and stubborn soldier who endures bullying for his refusal to join the division boxing team. Director Fred Zinnemann was determined to cast Clift, finally telling Cohn (who wanted Aldo Ray for the part) that he would not do the film without him. One can’t blame Cohn for being dubious: with his delicate beauty, sensitivity, and slouchy, rail-thin build, Clift was no one’s idea of a boxer or a military man. But while plenty of actors could project toughness and integrity, no one else had the inner radiance that convinces us of Prewitt’s quiet strength, the soul that seems to shine through his eyes like a diamond.

The film is a sprawling ensemble piece about an army unit in Hawaii in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor. It was shot in black and white to save money, but the choice was fortunate, keeping attention on the actors instead of the colorful splendor of beaches and loud Hawaiian shirts. The screenplay by Daniel Taradash divides its time between Prewitt, Sergeant Warden (Burt Lancaster)—embroiled in an adulterous, surf-splashed affair with his commanding officer’s wife (Deborah Kerr)—and the irrepressible, hotheaded Maggio (Frank Sinatra, in a vibrant performance that revived his slumping career). But Prewitt is by far the richest character, a man of rare talent whose deepest principles of individualism and conscience (“A man don’t go his own way, he’s nothing”) are in terminal, self-destructive conflict with his devotion to the army, which demands adherence to the group and obedience to the rules. Clift decided that the way to play Prewitt, whom he considered “a limited man of unlimited spirit,” was to give away as little as possible, and he trimmed his own dialogue and underplayed dramatic scenes, resulting in a performance whose force is channeled through a narrow opening, like the pure wail of the bugle he plays.

Burt Lancaster said that when he filmed his first scene opposite Clift, it was the only time in his career that he could not stop his knees from shaking: “He had so much power, so much concentration.” Clift worked out, studied boxing and bugling, and forged a close, bibulous friendship with James Jones, who had based his novel partly on his own experiences in the army. To obtain cooperation from the military and permission to film on location in the Hawaiian barracks, Columbia agreed to soften Jones’s harsh critique: where the movie’s despicable Captain Holmes is forced to resign for encouraging the hazing of Prewitt, the book’s equivalent is promoted.

A more uncompromising attack on the military mind came in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai. Its source was a 1952 French novel by Pierre Boulle, who had been a prisoner of war in Indochina and created a fictionalized account of a Japanese prison camp in Thailand and the building of the Burma-Siam railway, during which some 13,000 Allied prisoners died. Independent producer Sam Spiegel, who purchased the rights, had forged an arrangement under which Columbia financed and distributed his films, including On the Waterfront; Suddenly, Last Summer; and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Such deals with independents were common at the studio, even though it was hard for Harry Cohn, the only studio president who also acted as head of production, to surrender control. He would call a screenwriter in the middle of the night to query a single line in a script, and Zinnemann recalled how he “constantly got into our hair . . . worrying about casting, wardrobe, and locations.” Cohn had a fit when he discovered that there was not a single white woman in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and demanded the insertion of a scene where William Holden’s escaped POW enjoys a dalliance with a blond nurse on a tropical beach.

The original script was written by Carl Foreman, who was blacklisted in Hollywood and working in the United Kingdom. Lean detested this screenplay, which he thought reduced the story to superficial action-adventure, and brought in another blacklisted screenwriter, Michael Wilson, to work with him on revising it. Since neither man could be named, the screen credit—and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay—were given to Pierre Boulle, who did not speak English and had no involvement with the film. (Eventually, the credits were revised to name Foreman and Wilson.) It was Lean and Wilson who rewrote the character of Colonel Saito, the commander of the POW camp, changing him from a drunken, raving villain to a flawed human trapped in a rigid code that brands failure as disgrace. In his last great performance, former silent-movie idol Sessue Hayakawa viscerally embodies Saito’s frustration and shame as he loses a battle of wills with the martinet Colonel Nicholson, commander of a newly arrived group of British prisoners.

Spiegel talked a reluctant Alec Guinness into playing Nicholson, and while Bridge’s hero is William Holden’s antiheroic American, Shears, the complexity of Nicholson is the watch-spring driving this three-hour wide-screen epic. He is a good officer loved by his men, but also a stickler so inflexible that he is willing to consign himself and his men to suffering and death for a point of order—namely the Geneva Convention’s provision that officers cannot be forced to do manual labor. Worse still, he is someone for whom war is a game and the letter of the law is more important than causes or consequences. Therefore, once he has won his skirmish about the rules, he sees no problem with throwing his best efforts into building the bridge the Japanese have struggled to complete. He has three motives: to boost morale and discipline among his men, to show up his captors with a smug display of British colonial efficiency, and to create a lasting monument as he confronts his own impending mortality. He succeeds in all three. It took eight months for crews on location in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to build the wooden railroad bridge, and it is a thing of beauty. Its handcrafted elegance adds poignancy to the film’s climax, as Nicholson’s love for his bridge shades into obsession and madness, while a group of commandos including a reluctantly drafted Shears make their way through the jungle to blow it up.

Many people, including Guinness, felt that the conception of Nicholson was anti-British, though Boulle (like the London-based Spiegel, an avowed Anglophile) had been inspired by the complicated notions of honor he observed in collaborationist Vichy French officers. If Saito is an antagonist and also a double of Nicholson, so is Warden (Jack Hawkins), the leader of the commandos, another English gentleman whose soft-spoken, civilized exterior conceals a fanaticism that becomes a “stench of death,” as Shears puts it disgustedly. Every time Malcolm Arnold’s cheerful military march rises on the soundtrack, it sounds more bitterly ironic, finally blaring over a scene of utter waste. Harry Cohn, who notoriously claimed that his rear end itched when a movie went on too long, wanted to cut down The Bridge on the River Kwai, but Spiegel fought for every minute.

Throughout the 1950s, alongside its prestige projects Columbia continued to produce the smaller-scale genre films for which it was known, including a rich seam of film noir (In a Lonely Place, The Big Heat, The Reckless Moment) and some of the decade’s finest westerns, crowned by Budd Boetticher’s gracefully austere Ranown Cycle. Delmer Daves’s 3:10 to Yuma (1957) is relatively modest in scale—the heart of the film is a duel of wills and words between two men cooped up in a hotel room—but few westerns can match its visual beauty or its largeness of spirit. The source was a spare short story by Elmore Leonard about a deputy sheriff charged with getting a captured outlaw aboard a train in the face of his gang’s vow to spring him.

The film grants the two men equal time and leaves us to judge them. Glenn Ford, one of Columbia’s biggest male stars, gives his best performance as the intelligent outlaw, Ben Wade; he exudes cool confidence and easygoing charm, but the first thing we see him do is kill two men without batting an eye. The deputy becomes an ordinary rancher, Dan Evans, who takes the job out of desperation as his drought-stricken family faces financial ruin; Van Heflin plays him without an ounce of glamour, slowly laying bare the grit beneath the nervous sweat. As they wait for the train and the likely fatal showdown it will bring, Wade tries to bribe, frighten, and humiliate his captor, but ends up forced to respect Dan’s bravery and decency, and perhaps even envy the family man with the loyal, loving wife. The script’s humanism is enriched by the exceptional beauty of the black-and-white cinematography: the low, hard winter light raking across a bleached landscape, throwing slanted shadows and shining through dust and steam. Recurring crane shots that float down to or rise up from the earth take in the lonely emptiness surrounding the characters. Many westerns pay lip service to the wish that problems could be settled by some means other than guns, but 3:10 to Yuma stands as one of the only entries in the genre that can actually imagine an alternative to climactic violence.

Harry Cohn died in 1958, but the studio that he built and bossed survived him; he would surely relish the fact that in the twenty-first century Columbia, as a subsidiary of Sony Pictures Entertainment, occupies the former lot of MGM. His death came at a moment when all of the original Hollywood studios were floundering amid a barrage of economic, technological, and cultural changes; the sixties would bring frantic efforts by the old guard to appeal to the youth market. Many of Columbia’s best films from the fifties seem less dated than what followed, because they sprang from an earnest if sometimes compromised effort to make movies for adults: movies that acknowledged ambiguity and disappointment, that dealt with moral conflicts and awakenings; movies that were ambitious and serious in ways not always “cool.” Even viewed on the small screen, these films are—in the best way—big.