During the Second World War, strict rationing rendered opu-
lence outré, and simplicity politically correct. That all changed
on February 12, 1947, when Christian Dior launched his
first postwar line, christened the “New Look” by AIT16fiC311
Harper’s Bazaar. With his yards and yards of soft sumptuous
fabrics, tight fitted jackets nipped in the waist, and full bloom-
ing skirts, Dior did away with the brawny shoulder pads and
durable wartime fabrics of the early forties. In their place, he
reintroduced the hourglass figure and the long-lost bust: all
at once, women were allowed to be womanly again. (In fact,
the New Look was so lavish, it was briefly condemned by the
British Board of Trade.)
Now, to be truly faconnable, a woman needed girdles and
waist cinchers. For those who couldn’t afford Victorian corsetry,
there was the practical (but shapely) shirtwaist dress, which, in
the words of its master, Edith Head, was "tight enough to show
you’re a woman and loose enough to show you’re a lady.” In
other words, the New Look was Edith’s Look, but by this time it
was an old look. What Sabrina Fairchild needed was to look new.
Through the late fifties and early sixties, Peter Gurm was
the epitome of cool. Where most hard-boiled PIs were as
burned out as the hoods they trailed, Gunn was an Ivy-league
playboy closer to James Bond th‘an Philip Marlowe and intro-
duced network audiences to the next thing in soigné. With
the aid of his cinematographers, Edwards developed a highly
cinematic look for his show, complete with severe chiaroscuro
(not the regular dull grays), eccentric angles, and disorienting
camera moves. Adding to the hipness was Henry Mancini’s
chart-topping theme, which used modern jazz at a time when
most TV was scored with a more formal orchestral sound.
jurow and Shepherd wanted that hip feeling for Breakfast at
T ifianys.
Blake was working on a picture called High Time when they
called in May of 1960. No matter what they told him, he knew
they were taking a chance.
BENG CflO$EY EN A E#RE$S
Blake Edwards, a pipe lodged in his mouth, settled down in his
director’s chair stationed squarely behind the camera and took
a long, slow look around the set.
What a mess. High Time, a moronic “teenage” comedy with
Bing Crosby, was undoubtedly the most useless picture he’d
ever made. What the hell was the studio thinking? The scene
they were setting up called for Bing to dance around in a
pink taffeta hoopskirt, but that wasn’t the problem (actually,
I
LIKING IT "K39
it was the funniest thing in the picture); the problem was the
story, the dialogue, the acting, dealing with Bing himself, and
the inexorable reality that no matter what he did or how smart
he was about it, there was no way Blake could clean up the
mess. What do you do with a movie about a fifty-year-old
widower who decides to go back to college, hang with jive
talkers, pledge a frat, rally for the big game, and romance a
French professor on the school hayride? All the world’s whip
pans, flashy dissolves, and state-of-the-art postproduction
effects-—if Blake used them (and he did)—would only make
him look like a plastic surgeon cutting up a corpse.
Okay, so he Wasn’t yet Billy Wilder, but why did he say yes
to this shit? Right: he was making money. But that was about
all he was making.
High Time was proof positive that the industry was panicked
about the new generation. Who were these kids? They had
sex, they did drugs, and like everyone else, they went to the
movies. But what did they want to see? In 1960, no one in
Hollywood had a clue: the year’s top films were Swiss Family
Robinson and Psycho. Meanwhile, the success of foreign films
by Bergman, Fellini, and—~if you wore a beret-—Antonioni were
challenging the home court advantage. Should the studios get
artier too? Ordinarily, getting young people to the movies was
a cinch for Hollywood because kids Wanted to see what their
parents saw. Way back when, families used to go to the movies
together. That’s what Mickey Rooney was for. Shirley Temple,
Depression-era antitoxin, was a box-office queen from 1934 to
1939. But this strange generation of youngsters—-“teenagers”
they were called——was impossible to pin down.
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