History

The Film History Trials of the 1950's & 1960's

The years 1950 to 1971 came to be known as the “Golden Age of Foreign Films”, beginning with two masterpieces from French director Henri-Georges Clouzot – “Wages of Fear” and “Diabolique”. However, these great films were not to play in America.

The 1950′s were the years of Senator Joe McCarthy (The infamous Communist “witch hunter”), the John Birch Society, the House Unamerican Activities Committee, and the “blacklist”. All four terrorized Hollywood, as countless lives were ruined. Their common mantra was “all foreign films are part of the “Communist Conspiracy”.

Hollywood vowed – “we will not import foreign films; we will not distribute them; we will not play them in the theaters that we control. A network of Censor Boards emerged, coast to coast.

Jim Selvidge, Cy Harvey, and a small band of other rebels exited the Korean War with a response: “OK. We will lease some of your theaters bankrupted by TV, import them and run them ourselves.” (Harvey founded Janus Films, the conduit for Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and the French “New Wave”.)

Selvidge launched the Ridgemont as an “art theatre” and for years spent many hours sweeping up broken glass and eggs, and wiping excrement from the theatre’s doors and box office windows. On the political side, he was forced to repeatedly appear before the Seattle City Council for “show cause” hearings as to retaining his business license, as well as being threatened with jail time.

Very few born since 1955 have knowledge of these decades. Selvidge headed a national campaign against film censorship; and in 1964 sued the City of Seattle, challenging the constitutionality of four enabling statutes. He won. The City appealed. In 1964, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in his favor. That brought an end to film censorship; Censor Boards collapsed like a row of dominoes.

At the end of the “Golden Age”, there were over 600 “art theatres” in America.