Overrated garbage

Rating: 1/10 (20 January 2020)

The 50s were a weird time for cinema. It almost feels like there was two separate film cultures, one producing overblown epics and insipid romances, the other producing masterpieces like The House On Haunted Hill. Of course, as someone who idolizes Roger Corman and William Castle, it might not be surprising that I have little patience for the safe, mainstream, risk-averse world of old Hollywood; but hear me out. With mainstream cinema of the time, much like mainstream cinema today, the goal is to appeal to the widest possible audience. That might not sound so bad, but think about what that would be like in the 50s. Most of the people would have no interest in anything too outlandish (preventing horror or science fiction from flourishing in the mainstream); there would be a significant contingent of people who would demand that everything was in line with 'traditional values' (such people still exist, but fortunately they hold much less of a sway over filmmaking than they did back then), limiting the creativity allowed to mainstream directors; and production codes prevented studios from including very much sex or violence in their movies, making most of them tedious and very difficult to watch (but very popular with the people who think that being 'family-friendly' or having 'good values' is a good reason to give a movie a positive review and prevent crap like God's Not Dead from making it onto the bottom 100). Of course, I wasn't around at the time, but I've done my research, and my position has led me to see enough of them to make a judgment on the era. I fully expect to get a lot of flack for this review from boring people who still think that the Academy Awards represent the best in filmmaking, but if I can get one person to abandon the safe world of traditional popular cinema, I will have already won. Yes, I may be a pretentious, amoral, desensitized 20-something year old with no respect for the classics, but at least I'm not boring.