Casual Conversation September 15 with Foster Hirsch

On the Ides of September, i.e., September 15, a Sunday at 3 pm ET, we will be having a Casual Conversation with Foster Hirsch, Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, and board member of the Film Noir Foundation.  He is the author most recently of Hollywood and Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher—Television (Knopf 2023).

I met Foster at The Brattle Theater in Boston where he was a host for films shown at the Boston celebration of films noir.  The films were great, and he was a knowledgeable and engaging host who captivated his audience.  At a break between the afternoon and evening sessions (of two films each), we spoke, and he generously accepted my invitation to be a guest at a Casual Conversation to talk with us about his most recent book about the films of the 1950s.  Foster has written 16 books, including one on film noir, another on the producer and Sondheim collaborator Hal Prince, and one on Dartmouth graduate and film director Joseph Losey.

His book, at 596 pages including the prologue, is a treasure trove of information, reappraisals, and analysis.  I learned in the very first pages that “Cinerama” is an anagram for “American.”  And much more later on.  I came away from the book with a commitment to try again to appreciate Douglas Sirk and his ironic view of suburban America.   To look again at Cinemascope to see the depth of focus and the extraordinary mise en scene created by the director and actors who could no longer be just stick figures but would have to act no matter where they were, or how far back they were, on the screen.  About 3-D, which I had looked down on (having seen only one in my life, Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder), I wanted to understand the technical and artistic potentials of the technique:

If properly handled, 3-D is a wonderfully flexible and expressive medium; whether popping out of the frame from any direction or extending the illusion of depth, 3-D is a means of heightening, enrichening, and intensifying cinematic space.

Surprised?  Intrigued?  I was.  He spends time explaining the power of the major actors new to film in the 1950s: James Dean, Montgomery Clift, and Marlon Brando, to Foster, the greatest film actor ever.  Now, I am not a fan of Brando, but I am of Montgomery Clift, who brings a tortured sensibility to each of his major films, e.g., The Heiress, The Manchurian Candidate, From Here to Eternity, A Place in the Sun, Raintree County, and is a Method actor surrounded by old school actors raised in the traditional presentational style.  By the way, Foster attended classes at the Actors Studio and explains the different styles of The Method and the battling schools that taught and promoted them.

And that is just a small sample of what Foster has to offer.  (He is definitely not a fan of schlock master Roger Corman, who died recently at age 98, and received a month-long tribute from Turner Classic Movies.) He writes a chapter on race (Black, Asian, Native American) films, another on films by, with and about gays (e.g., Clifton Webb, Tennessee Williams, Rebel Without a Cause) and Jewish-themed movies, and a chapter on dark films, a/k/a film noir (including a discussion of Loretta Young’s striking performance in Cause for Alarm!, which should be seen with her pre-Code Midnight Mary.).  And in that last chapter there is a special treat for us.  Foster’s discussion of The Steel Trap causes him to mention the writer and director Andrew L. Stone and describe him as “the unsung noir maestro of the decade.”   Andrew Stone is the father of our classmate Andy Stone.  When I emailed Andy, he replied that he would be present at the Casual Conversation.  Foster, when I told him, was thrilled.

Foster, four years our senior, describes his process of writing this book in a way that should resonate with all of us, when we look back through the years and over the experiences of our lives:

Reseeing many films I had first encountered during a decade when I aged from seven to seventeen, inevitably I kept running into my younger selves.  The films hadn’t changed, but of course I had.  These are the questions I kept asking: Which films did I respond to in ways that resembled my original reactions?  Which one was I now impatient with?  Which films despite changes in taste, style, and ideology, had passed the perilous test of time, and why?  Which films disappointed and why?  Why and how could some films be reclaimed for contemporary audiences, and why are others most likely beyond recovery?

Bring your films, your actors, your directors, and your memories.  But be there.  After all the ‘50s were the decade of Attack of the Fifty Ft. Woman, The Tingler, Shane, A Star is Born, and Marty.  And us.

Usual rules apply.  Let me know at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com , if you want to join us by the close of business on the Friday before the Casual Conversation: September 12.

Arthur Fergenson