Top Billing for William Holden

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

It's tempting to formulate a detailed, wholehearted argument for the 1950s as the pre-eminent golden age of movie production both domestic and international. There's no scarcity of distinguished titles in either sector.

Why underrate a body of work that extends from "Sunset Boulevard" and "Singin' in the Rain" to "On the Waterfront" and "Some Like It Hot" in the Hollywood sphere? This range of examples might be surpassed by imports, from "Rashomon" and "La Strada" to "Pather Panchali" and "The Seventh Seal."

Given the reverence now accorded film noir, the 1950s could keep doctoral candidates purring forever. Lest we forget, it was the last decade in which black-and-white cinematography predominated, enhancing the atmospheric magnetism of noir.

Considering the reverence that also surrounds such mid-1950s landmarks as "The Searchers" and "Vertigo," it's a little surprising that any resistance to the decade's enshrinement still exists.

Conventional wisdom used to scorn the 1950s for social conformity. This complaint has looked stale and shallow for at least a generation. If a great deal of your moviegoing tastes and partialities were formed during the decade, as mine were, it seems ill-bred to pretend that all those titles you enjoyed were somehow diminished by the supposed complacency of a generation fixated on getting and spending.

Those similarly reluctant to apologize for growing attached to movies during the first complete decade of the Cold War may welcome the tonic effect of programming on Turner Classic Movies in September. TCM devotes Wednesday evenings to a retrospective on William Holden, who emerged and pretty much peaked as a Hollywood star during the 1950s.

On Tuesday evenings, the channel offers a 50th-anniversary tribute to the art-house distribution company Janus Films, whose distinctive, craggy, double-faced logo became synonymous with the discovery of such European directors as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Francois Truffaut.

Mr. Holden (1918-1981) was born William Beedle Jr. in southwestern Illinois and raised for the most part in Southern California. A potentially precocious start in the movie versions of famous plays -- Clifford Odets' "Golden Boy" and Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" -- failed to result in immediate success in 1940. The young Mr. Holden (his surname was borrowed, with permission, from a L.A. newspaperman) found himself in prolonged servitude to a pair of major studios, Paramount and Columbia, which kept him employed in tandem, usually in Westerns, light romantic comedies and war melodramas.

Off the screen for three years during the real war (he was assigned to public relations chores at an Army base in Texas, where baseball great Hank Greenberg also was stationed), Mr. Holden returned to a double-track treadmill in Hollywood. Despite a virile presence and distinctive voice, he feared he was congealing into a type he mocked as "Smiling Jim."

He was rescued by Billy Wilder's need for an ambivalent leading man in "Sunset Boulevard." Like numerous breakthrough roles, the opportunistic screenwriter Joe Gillis transformed Mr. Holden's career because another actor had turned down the role. First choice in this case had been Montgomery Clift, who decided it would be a career blunder to portray a young man seduced by a crazed older woman.