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  Hollywood
faced a major problem in the 1950s. The industry feared and despised
TV but it could not ignore it. Box office receipts were hit badly and
Sam Goldwyn summed the situation up thus; "Why should people go and
pay money to see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad
television for nothing?"
At first the studios tried to fight back - by forbidding their
contract players to appear on TV - but with little effect. After all,
TV did not need movie stars - It made its own. Hollywood's final
solution was 'the gimmick'. The first idea was to make it easier to
see films, which led to a craze of building drive-in cinemas. Then it
started to make movies bigger, if not better . . .
CinemaScope (a wide-screen process using a single lens) was
pioneered by 20th Century Fox in 1953 with the biblical epic, The
Robe. During the decade, Hollywood also introduced stereophonic
sound and (with less success) 3D.
Hollywood studios eventually realized they were not going to beat
TV so they had to find a way of living alongside it, and by 1958 every
major studio had sold its entire pre-1948 output to TV companies.
 The 1950s was a period of great transition for the British film
industry. In the previous decade, British movie makers had held their
own on the world stage and had developed a very British visual style.
But in the 50s they experienced difficulties coming to terms with
American innovations such as CinemaScope, Eastmancolor and
VistaAvision.
This is by no means an attempt at an exhaustive listing of movies
from the 50s. It is a recollection of some of the movies which are
either personal favorites, or which are particularly representative
of the era (without necessarily being critically acclaimed).
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