Producers watch films to ascertain how to make successful ones themselves, but viewers determine which films do succeed. And readers can decide if I succeed in naming five top pictures from the Golden Years. My criteria: each was a huge hit, penetrated its subject deeply and broke new ground in its time.
Sunset Boulevard (1950). Faded silent-film star Gloria Swanson forces struggling screenwriter William Holden to be her gigolo, with fatal consequences. For unexpected realism, director Billy Wilder cast old-timers Erich von Stroheim as her butler, Buster Keaton as her companion, and Cecil B. DeMille as himself, her idol. All About Eve (1950). Takes viewers into a witty backstage milieu to watch duplicitous ingenue Anne Baxter in her attempt to dethrone theater queen Bette Davis. Viewers feel drawn to the startled responses of the actresses’ mutual friends as they watch the challenge materialize.
The Bicycle Thief (1948). Filming in impoverished postwar Italy on a minuscule budget, director Vittorio De Sica tells the realistic story of a simple workingman whose job depends on his bicycle. When it is stolen, his young son spends a fretful week trying to recover it. The film’s fascinating, wry sequences were shot documentary-style on city streets with a no-name cast. A tour de force.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962). The story of the legendary British World War I soldier, T.E. Lawrence, who dressed as an Arab and gained Arab assistance against Britain’s then-enemy Turkey. Leads Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness and Omar Sharif spent months in the Saharan heat on camels and horses, blowing up railroads and troops. Enormous landscapes, enormous action, enormous hit.
Broken Arrow (1950). Giant U.S. movie audiences during World War II shriveled after 1945, until this film suddenly filled theaters. In this pure Western, Indian agent Jimmy Stewart befriends Indian outlaw Cochise (Jeff Chandler), becomes his blood brother and marries an Indian princess. Then the Indian war breaks open. Readers, take pride! The film was directed by Delmer Daves, ’26, and produced by Julian Blaustein, who later headed film studies at Stanford.
Bud Lesser, class correspondent for 1936, is a third-generation California film executive who served as an Oscar nominator for 14 years. He produced feature films starring Guy Madison, Rory Calhoun, Louis Hayward and Diana Dors, and the late 1950s TV series I Search for Adventure and Bold Journey.
