The year 1960 was important in the history of cinema. Jean-Luc Godard’s debut Breathless, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Aventurra were all released to varying degrees of enthusiasm. These films – and their filmmakers – are amongst the most revered in the European arthouse tradition. Another film released that year has also gone on to be regarded as a classic every sense, but didn’t begin its journey as such. The early critical and public reception of Alfred Hitchcock’s now-iconic Psycho is well known. The reaction of journalists was lukewarm, but it was instantly celebrated by the public. Despite its tumultuous production – which is explored in countless books and films – the thriller continues to make an indelible impact on filmmaking, film criticism and film scholarship, and is understood as the film that solidified what we today call the horror genre.
The change from critical derision to praise can be attributed to changing tastes and cultural stigmas, but this is not adequate when identifying the salient, commendable aspects of quality cinema. This phenomenon is evident in countless films now regarded as classics.
The films I consider here have been explored and analyzed countless times. However, this is not a concerted analysis of their individual merits and influences, but how the engendered initial reaction has been entirely rewritten to class these films as true classics, and how the route to broader success in the present day is emblematic of a deeper issue surrounding culture and art.
The Rules of the Game
Jean Renoir’s lyrical, inescapable and engrossing ensemble piece The Rules of the Game is classed alongside the likes of Citizen Kane, 8 ½ and 2001: A Space Odyssey as one of the greatest films ever made. The film follows the bourgeoisie, rich upper-class and their servants during a get-together at a French Chateau on the cusp of World War II. Made after his initial successes La Bete Humaine and La Grande Illusion, Renoir engaged in a daring exercise with The Rules of the Game, utilizing multiple narrative strands and deep-space cinematography, but pertinently putting the bourgeoisie and their corrupt attitudes and actions front and center.
The influence of Renoir’s masterpiece reverberates throughout film history, from Orson Welles to the films of Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson. This influence has been well documented, and is visible in the works of the aforementioned directors. However, initially, the response was vehemently negative. As Alexander Sesonske notes in his essay for The Criterion Collection’s release, the film’s premiere was met with howling and whistling. The mood didn’t improve, as The Rules of the Game became a qualified commercial disaster. These reactions – likely borne out of the public’s disavowal of the criticisms toward the bourgeoisie – were inconsequential in the context of the immediate fate of the film itself. In addition being re-cut due to a violent response to the film’s premiere in 1939, the original negative was demolished during World War II. It wasn’t until 1959 that a re-released version of the film – sanctioned by Renoir himself – reached audiences. The Rules of the Game has been an undeniable classic ever since.
The Night of the Hunter
Fast-forward sixteen years, and actor Charles Laughton begins a turn in his career. Having already established his legacy as an accomplished thespian, starring in the likes of Mutiny on the Bounty and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, he took to the director’s chair in 1955 to adapt Davis Grubb’s novel The Night of the Hunter. The Night of the Hunter follows Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), who marries a widow and tries to learn where her previous husband buried $10,000 in stolen cash – the location of which is only known by the dead-husband’s two children. An enticing premise from a best-selling book, backed by a first-time director, meant that a stable reaction wasn’t predestined. Bosley Crowther’s 1955 review of the film for the New York Times argued “that Mr. Laughton, undertaking his first film directorial job, has not brought forth a wholly shattering picture is easy to understand.”
Distinct in approach, the film is now renowned for its nuanced stylizations that were reminiscent of the silent era, whilst also including uses of cinematography and design that harkened to the German expressionism of Fritz Lang and F.W Murnau. Ultimately, The Night of the Hunter was the first and last film Charles Laughton directed, but his specific, measured approach to style and story evident in that film ensured his legacy was destined to be rewritten.
Psycho
Like The Night of the Hunter, the aforementioned Psycho developed a language of cinema that centered on the use of suspense and shock to cajole the audience, centering on a woman’s theft and her subsequent entanglement in the personal and violent conflicts of a motel owner. Upon its release in 1960, Time Magazine contended that instead of the venerable joys provided by chase scenes in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief, the trail instead leads to “a sagging, swamp-view hotel and to tone of the messiest, most nauseating murders ever filmed.” The review goes on to lament how Hitchcock “bears down too heavily in this one, and the delicate illusion of reality necessary for a creak-and-shriek movie becomes, instead, a spectacle of stomach-churning horror.” That this contention is viewed in the negative when assessing a thriller illustrates the prevailing approach to horror during this time.
Conclusion
Through a basic understanding of the numerous aforementioned titles, we can surmise that there is no singular lens to assess classic films – unlike classical films. This distinction is important, as the classical is bound by its approach to form, predicated on a ‘pastness’ that it is tied to, and labelled as such in the present. The ‘classic’, however, can be a classic in spite of its classicalness, not because of it. Psycho’s innovative editing and narrative techniques, the use of enmeshed influences that led to inspired cinematography is at the heart of The Night of the Hunter, the narrative and thematic resilience of The Rules of the Game, all signal the marks of a “classic” in how it differentiated itself.
Polarizing initial reception signals the ability of the film to push boundaries, try something new, and pursue change and changing perspectives. It is these films that try to better understand and exploit the capacity of cinema to be more and do more than we as an audience can comprehend, accept, and appreciate – at least at first glance. Ultimately, the classic is not made in the studio, but in the seats of the cinema, in esteemed scholarly publications, and on groundbreaking online film magazines based in Toronto (hint hint). However, these bodies, distinct in approach but unified in their desire to see the cinema that reflects their taste, can get it wrong. This supposed failure is not a reflection of their lack of ability to find greatness in cinema, but is rather proof of a medium that is influx, constantly rewriting the notion of classics and what they entail. Culture at large attempts to isolate the select few works of art that are raised on pedestals, unknowing of the true reasons a select few are left on ground-level: true artistry.