Review: It's the Pictures that Got Small: Hollywood Film Stars on 1950s Television by Christine Becker

Abstract

The 1950s were an unsettling time to be a film actor. The 1948 Paramount decision in which the courts instructed the Hollywood film studios to divest themselves of their theater chains, along with other factors which would see the bottom fall out of weekly movie attendance, had put an end to the dependable contract work that many had been able to rely upon. At the same time, a brand new medium, television, offered acting opportunities. From a mere surface interrogation, it all looked pretty simple. Those stars the studios still valued or those who could make lucrative deals as independents stayed in the movies. The struggling, fading, and cast-off had a devalued fallback that could at least preserve an income while permitting the continuation of an acting career. Christine Becker’s lucid, richly detailed, and perceptive study proves just how superficial such an assessment would be. She sketches out myriad factors that influenced the ways in which Hollywood stars chose to go to television and television tried to woo Hollywood stars. Did the star play him or herself or a fictional character? Was the program live or filmed, network or syndicated, shot in New York or Los Angeles, an anthology or a continuing-character format? How did the performer’s previous star image tie into the ways that television showcased him or her? How did gender and genre factor in? What made some stars click with television audiences while others of equal or greater reputation as film stars failed? Becker also subsumes these considerations into a larger historical arc. It begins when the television industry needs star luster to win network affiliates and persuade consumers to buy television sets, a business model that saw ad agencies and sponsors making most production decisions; and it ends a scant decade later with the home television market saturated, network–affiliate relations stable, and programs mostly developed by film studios who saw television as a place in which to audition and promote future stars rather than needing the more expensive participation of established ones. The new business model, Becker notes, “strove to regularize viewership, control costs, and reap syndication profits” (215). Becker devotes each chapter to one particular aspect of the move by film stars onto television. Each follows the same format: a wide-ranging and detailed survey comes first, sketching out the main issues; this is followed by discussion of trade reviews, star interviews, network publicity, and descriptions of some of the programs in question; to finish, there is a focused case study. The first chapter, on the production of new careers in television for film stars, is an account so historically grounded and convincing in its arguments that it would make an excellent assignment in any course taking an industrial approach to Hollywood film of the 1950s. It concludes with the example of Four Star Productions and how Dick Powell, along with David Niven and Charles Boyer, took stewardship of their television careers. The next chapter, on stars playing themselves in various presentational genres, focuses on Faye Emerson. The third, on the now extinct performance category of anthology-drama hosts, uses Adolphe Menjou as its exemplar. Chapter 4 deals with what Becker calls “continuingchar acter” roles, concentrating on the sitcom. She emphasizes the opportunities these presented especially to second-tier female movie stars and then provides an extended analysis of the Ida Lupino–Howard Duff Mr. Adams and Eve, in which the then-married stars played fictionalized versions of themselves. Finally she considers the prestige anthology drama, zeroing in on Playhouse 90, the most acclaimed of all but a show that debuted at nearly the moment when the genre was dying. In detailing the ascent of James Garner from 1950s television-bred favorite to bona fide movie star, the first part of Becker’s conclusion sums up the transition away from television’s love affair with the film actor. The book finishes with the most famous example of a less-than-A-list film performer who became a television icon, Lucille Ball, focusing on those episodes when Lucy Ricardo went to Hollywood and met many of the big-time stars the networks could only dream of hooking as continuing characters. From its pitch-perfect title to its many insights as to how discourses of television stardom, which emphasized authenticity and true acting ability through live performance and “off-casting,” “laid bare . . . the skeletons of the constructed star image” (9), Becker’s book draws much-needed attention MartIN FraDLey is currently editing a book about British filmmaker shane Meadows.