Entertainment

03:27 PM CST on Monday, November 28, 2005

By PHILIP WUNTCH, JEROME WEEKS, LAWSON TAITTE and JANET KUTNER / The Dallas Morning News

The introduction of fast food and the McDonald's chain. The publication of Lolita. The first independently produced movie to win a best-picture Oscar. The rise of the abstract expressionists. The debut of the play Inherit the Wind in Dallas.

All of these events occurred in 1955, a pivotal year in American history.

Today, in the final installment of a two-day package, Dallas Morning News critics look back 50 years and help explain how American culture got to where it is today.

On March 21, 1956, Oscar got a new face. It was the face of indie prod, industry slang for independent production, and a Bronx butcher named Marty was the purveyor.

On that date, Marty, released by independent company Hecht-Lancaster, was anointed best picture of 1955. The Oscar race, as well as the American movie industry, would never be the same.

Also taking home the prize were actor Ernest Borgnine, director Delbert Mann and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky.

Its story of two plain, lonely people (Mr. Borgnine and Betsy Blair) was far from the Hollywood norm. In the mid-'50s era of CinemaScope, Marty had a 20-day location shoot in the Bronx, with only a few Hollywood interiors.

The public embraced its naturalistic approach. The movie didn't even end in a romantic clinch between the lovelorn duo. Its final scene is nothing more complex than Mr. Borgnine's Marty asking Ms. Blair's Clara for a date. The movie was a breath of fresh air, Bronx-style, to audiences that had recently rejected such spectacles as Lana Turner playing a pagan goddess in The Prodigal.

The movie's dialogue became part of the public vernacular, similar to Pulp Fiction's "cheeseburger Royale" debate 40 years later.

In Marty, the most quoted lines were an exchange between the title character and one of his cronies. "Whatta you wanna do tonight?" ... "I dunno. Whatta you wanna do tonight?" was repeated by stand-up comics, talk show hosts and politicians for years.

Behind the scenes, Marty was not completely non-Hollywood. The Lancaster in the Hecht-Lancaster production company was none other than mega-star Burt. But Mr. Lancaster scorned studio politics and had a maverick reputation. He also started the tradition of stars producing films without starring in them.

Trade paper Variety felt that Marty's Oscar coup reflected the end of the Hollywood studio system. With each studio no longer having a minimum of 50 academy members under contract, the mainstream studios no longer could rely on voting blocs.

Marty's victories heralded other traditions. The film cost a paltry $343,000 to produce, but Hecht-Lancaster spent $400,000 campaigning for Oscars. Starting in the mid-1990s, Miramax, a leading indie company, was criticized for spending big bucks on Oscar campaigns. Even today, indies have to try harder. Sometimes that old homily is at least partly true. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Philip Wuntch

The mid-'50s were the beginning of the end for obscenity trials against books in America (prosecutions against movies, on the other hand, were just warming up). Allen Ginsberg's Howl, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer: They were all written, in part, to subvert, appall or transcend a complacent and complicit America. And from 1957 to 1965, America mostly greeted them with customs and postal bans.

But not Lolita. Fifty years ago, Vladimir Nabokov's novel was published in English in Paris – where the French, of all people, banned it, then unbanned it. But it never faced prosecution in America, where it was published in 1957. Perhaps that's because by then, Mr. Nabokov's story of a middle-aged pedophile who falls in love with a 12-year-old girl was already infamous as the dirty book without a dirty word. It would be difficult to convict a novel of explicit lewdness when its most lubricious description is narrator Humbert Humbert's tongue at work proclaiming his love's name: "My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

Criminal authorities may have found Mr. Nabokov's nymphet too slender and elegant to handcuff, but she caused a firestorm of controversy nonetheless. Graham Greene in the London Times and Elizabeth Janeway in The New York Times were among the very few critics not to express disgust. To them, Lolita wasn't another humorless, D.H. Lawrence-like ode to earthy urges, a deliberate provocation. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, author Azar Nafisi and friends risk imprisonment to read a book they find "hopeful, beautiful even, a defense not just of beauty but of life."

Lolita's publication in Paris by Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press marks the book as coming from that now-seemingly ancient age when anything in print from France was considered possibly racy and immoral and, well, French.

Mr. Girodias was borderline disreputable – Mr. Nabokov didn't even know he published porn. Yet his business plan was more admirable than many media conglomerates' today. He peddled paperbacks such as Tender Is My Flesh, while taking a chance on what became boundary-breaking landmarks of postwar literature, including Terry Southern's Candy and works by Samuel Beckett.

But if Lolita's publication dates it to the not-so-conformist '50s, the novel remains witty, sad, elegant – and creepy. From the many rejections by American publishers, Mr. Nabokov glumly concluded that offensive subjects – mass murder, rape, incest – could be treated in an artistic manner that wouldn't offend. Except this one. Writing about pedophiles in any manner other than outrage, it seems, will only trigger outrage.

Even, to a degree, today – even after the thuddingly explicit writings of Kathy Aker or Dennis Cooper. Ours is an age when pop singers sell themselves as sexed-up virgins as long as they can. But it's also an age when we know so much more about child abuse.

Lolita was deeply troublesome then, and rightly so, even amid Mr. Nabokov's characteristically sly humor. The scenes of Lolita weeping after sex, Humbert's realization that he has destroyed the girl he loved – these are heartbreaking still. But nowadays, Mr. Nabokov's success in making Humbert tragically human is all the more remarkable. And unnerving.

Jerome Weeks

Broadway still pretty much was the American theater in 1955 – all the more so because the "Texas tornado," Margo Jones, died of a freak poisoning accident in her Dallas apartment that spring.

Ms. Jones had just sent her last transfer to Broadway – Inherit the Wind, which made the politics of evolution vs. religion a financial success. But she had been the foremost pioneer in the movement to make regional theater a major player on the national scene. Her loss wasn't just a tragedy for Dallas but for the American theater. Dallas wouldn't get its own native professional theater again until the end of the decade.

The great American playwrights of the era all had new plays on Broadway that year. Arthur Miller had written a double bill of one-acts headlined by A View From the Bridge, and Thornton Wilder produced his The Matchmaker (later a runaway success in its musical adaptation, Hello Dolly!).

The greatest artistic achievement came, not too surprisingly, from Tennessee Williams. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was the playwright's last huge hit. It was also highly controversial because it captured the sexual zeitgeist all too powerfully for some people's tastes.

By creating a heroine unafraid to talk about her sexual needs and a hero hung up on a dead college buddy, the play broke new ground in frankness.

Still, Broadway mostly exuded its old-fashioned stuffiness, as well as its old-fashioned glamour. There was a Gilbert-and-Sullivan retrospective, and Jean Anouilh – now considered the epitome of the genteel – had two of the more prominent new plays.

The off-Broadway revolution hadn't begun to gain momentum yet, though the Greenwich Village Threepenny Opera returned for a second run after its success the previous year.

Otherwise, musicals still looked old-fashioned. The quasi-operatic glories of My Fair Lady, The Most Happy Fella and Candide were a year away. The tidal wave of European avant-gardism was still a few months in the future, too: Broadway would soon get two casts (one all-white, the other all-black) in Waiting for Godot. But that wouldn't be until 1956.

Lawson Taitte

The tide was turning in 1955. Abstract expressionism, the movement that catapulted New York into a position of prominence over Europe in the 1940s, was on its way to being canonized as one of the greatest developments in American art history. But beneficiaries of a booming postwar economy were looking for the next new thing.

The same year Willem de Kooning did his last abstract expressionist distortion of a woman was the one in which Jasper Johns began his paintings of the American flag, an iconic symbol that paved the way for the pop art craze that took hold in the '60s.

Jackson Pollock, the tormented leader of the abstract expressionist school dubbed "action painting" after his "drip-and-splash" technique, stopped working altogether in 1955. A year later he was gone, having crashed his convertible while driving drunk, killing himself and an acquaintance and seriously injuring his other passenger.

Andy Warhol, whose Brillo boxes and Campbell's soup cans would make pop art a household word, was still earning a living as an illustrator, but the Museum of Modern Art put him in a group show that marked his first entree into the establishment.

Another star was on the rise. Robert Rauschenberg, the Port Arthur native famous for his stated desire to bridge "the gap between art and life," was busy making "Combines" – works that were part painting, part collage and part ready-mades, or found objects. Rebus, a quintessential example from 1955, was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in June. It marks a milestone, much like the 1955 White Flag owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is the largest of Mr. Johns' flag paintings and the first in which the flag is done in monochromes.

Marcel Duchamp, the French-born artist who inspired both Mr. Johns and Mr. Rauschenberg, became an American citizen in 1955. All three artists are featured in a current Dallas Museum of Art show titled "Dialogues," which also presents works by Joseph Cornell.

Janet Kutner