20TH CENTURY-FOX: THE FIRST 50 YEARS (Van Ness, FoxStar, AMC 1997) Image Entertainment

The history of 2oth Century-Fox is perhaps no more or less fascinating than the creation of any other premiere ‘dream factory’ to emerge from Hollywood during the first part of the last 100 years. At the turn of the last century, Hollywood was a sleepy community unaccustomed and, arguably, unprepared to become the dominant force in filmed entertainments. True, by the time William Fox and 2oth Century Pictures amalgamated – virtually all of its rivals had been pumping out the stardust for well over a decade. Rather effectively, 2oth Century-Fox sidestepped the silent era, and dove headstrong into this new age, fronted by Darryl F. Zanuck, a mogul whose start in the biz began by writing stories and producing pictures for other studios to profit by. Zanuck’s verve for story-telling afforded him the deepest admiration for the writer – an appreciation unique among his ilk of executive, who considered writers a dime a dozen and hired and fired such luminaries as Steinbeck, Hilton, Hecht and Hemmingway with an alarming disregard for their prowess and purpose as an integral ‘cog’ within their vast machineries. Given the demise of 2oth Century-Fox today, a studio that, not unlike MGM before it, is now but a subsidiary of a larger holding company, the title of this documentary, 2oth Century-Fox: The First Fifty Years, seems more than a little apropos, as Fox will never have another. What must the Zanucks - Darryl and Richard - be thinking from beyond the grave; their life’s work transformed into a rummage sale for Disney Inc., with the future of its illustrious past on home video cast into veritable uncertainty.

At the outset, 2oth Century-Fox had a lot of catching up to do. The last of the majors to emerge from this fertile filmdom, Zanuck’s empire would eventually become not only one of its leaders in the industry but also a pioneer and trendsetter. Yet, perhaps the great different between Fox and other studios of its vintage lay in Zanuck’s casting as its president; a uniquely American mogul – irascible – some would suggest oversexed – and fueled by a relentless passion to tell stories of social significance, Zanuck was a film maker in both theory and practice. His personal hallmark and imprint on the golden era of Fox is an enduring legacy steeped in showmanship par excellence. Apart from amassing a talent pool to enviably rival MGM – the biggest and brightest of the picture-making conglomorates, Fox’s film output throughout the 1940’s was highly regarded as some of the finest entertainments the world has ever known; including Oscar-winning Best Pictures, How Green Was my Valley and Gentleman’s Agreement, splashy musicals, Down Argentine Way, and, The Dolly Sisters, moody noir thrillers, Hangover Square, and, Laura, and, a copious catalog of dramas, comedies, historical epics, actioners, etc. that have since entered the collective consciousness as bona fide classics; The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Black Swan, The Keys of the Kingdom, The Grapes of Wrath, Leave Her To Heaven, The Mark of Zorro, and so on. Even Zanuck’s costly flops, The Razor’s Edge, Wilson and Forever Amber emerged with noteworthy distinction; finely wrought, expertly tailored vehicles, afforded Zanuck’s exceptional attention, as well as the studio’s growing affinity for the lurid and luscious hues of 3-strip Technicolor.

The essence of 2oth Century-Fox in its heyday was indissoluble with Zanuck’s own passions. Hence, the films made under his aegis all bear the mark of his personal investment and reflect Zanuck’s robust determination to set his studio’s product apart from the rest. Lacking the physical stature of some of his contemporaries, at 5 ft. 6 in., and, with crooked teeth and a sloppy crop of curly hair to have otherwise marked him as a book-keeper, not a genius, the diminutive Zanuck nevertheless towered over Hollywood and willed a kingdom, home to some of its most glamorous stars. That he had his way with what later became known around the back lot as his ‘five o’clock girls’ – starlets, destined never to make it beyond the backroom badinage of this man whose own sexual appetites could not be contained in marriage to just one woman – Virginia (who tolerated most of it, until her husband’s very public indulgences with one Bella Darvi, whom Zanuck had desperately tried to will into the next Greta Garbo, put an end to that union), Zanuck’s first reign at Fox was to end in disenchantment of a different kind when, tired of the chronic tug-o-war with his stockholders to get his kinds of movies made, the mogul decamped in 1956 for an extended pursuit in Europe as an indie producer.

Fox’s management was left in the hands of Greek theater exhibitor, Spyros P. Skouras, whose verve for number-crunching nearly cost the studio everything when monumental overruns on Cleopatra (1963) threatened to close its doors for good. And Zanuck, having had quite enough of being his own master, swooped down, seemingly from the heavens like a Hessian in full battle-gear, with a display of intercorporate sponsorship to mesmerize and dazzle his Board of Directors, regain control of Fox, and appoint his son, Richard as head of production. It should have been the start of a beautiful friendship – except, the years had withered and frayed the relationship between father and son. Thus, Richard took sides with David Brown, while Darryl became entrenched in a battle royale to control every aspect of the studio’s output, as he had done in the grand ole days when he was the irrefutable monarch of the realm. In the end, it was more their combined investment in quality film fare that, unfortunately failed to find its audience – super-musicals like Doctor Doolittle (1967), Star! (1968) and Hello Dolly! (1969), and Darryl’s entrenchment in the costly fiasco, Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970, which he likely believed would be his greatest achievement since The Longest Day, 1962) that put a period to the Zanuck dynasty at Fox.

Given the richness of Fox’s film output, not to mention all of the fascinating personalities to have passed in and out of its front gates on their own paths to immortality – great stars like Tyrone Power, George Sanders, Betty Grable, Rex Harrison, Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Temple, Sonja Heni, Gene Tierney, Richard Burton, Julie Andrews, and so on, the Van ness, FoxStar, Twentieth Television and American Movie Classics documentary, meant to immortalize this period in the studio’s artistic growth, is more than a little short on intrigues and back story. Hosted by legendary actor, James Coburn, 2oth Century-Fox: The First Fifty Years is but a Cole’s Notes’ tour of that hallowed studio backlot with its myriad of filmic treasures wedged into a loosely strung together thumbnail sketch, written and directed by Kevin Burns. To be certain, there are interviews – vintage and new – from surviving contributors to the Fox vault, including sound bites from actresses, Debbie Reynolds and Julie Andrews, director, Robert Wise and executive, David Brown, among others.

The first half of this documentary is relatively evenly paced – charting the developmental process of creating the iconography for Fox films. We get to see Zanuck in rare outtakes, enjoy snippets of Shirley Temple (Fox’s biggest star of the 1930s) and Marilyn Monroe in all their glory,  and, witness the eventual morphing of Fox from the Zanuck’s ‘personally run empire’ into an autonomously managed ‘corporate conglomerate’. However, unlike the lavishly appointed documentary, MGM: When The Lion Roars (Turner/Warner Bros.), 2oth Century-Fox: The First 50 Years virtually steers clear of investigating the guts as well as the brains behind this back lot. Indeed, we never get to appreciate Zanuck or any of his other behind-the-scenes creative personnel as real people, steering this grand ship on to glory. The narrative written by Burns plays it very safe – too safe, in fact, to make us care one way or the other. Instead, what’s here is a tale as one might have discovered it, lazily riding the tram on the fifty-cent back lot tour; cleansed of all innuendo, rumor and the more probing details of what life at Fox during its golden period was truly like beyond the footlights. We get the highlights – but only just, and yet, not even enough of these to superficially gloss over such immortal Fox product as Pinky, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Sound of Music or Patton. The stellar cast assembled to offer sincere reflections here are cut off before they can actually get to the meat and potatoes of their life’s stories. All that we are left with then, are the movies. Yet, these we know. So, without personal glimpses into the people that made their mark in them, what follows is a fairly bland trek through movie-land antiquity.

Worse, the last few minutes of this 129-minute, needlessly truncated TripTik concludes with a very shabby gloss-over of the last 50 years leading up to 1997 – the year, this documentary had its debut on AMC. Nimbly skipping over trailer from Hello Dolly! and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid to poster art for latter-age megahits like Die Hard and Speed, our journey into the past ends with a miserly summation of where the studio’s greatness had arrived. Were that Fox had continued in perpetuity, it might have marked the first half of its next hundred years with a better distillation of the facts.  Regrettably, 2oth Century Fox: The First 50 Years is not all that deserving of a second glance on DVD. If anything, Burn’s bungled documentary does not retain the viewer’s appetite for a more thorough investigation of the studio or its stars. It merely provides short shrift of an intricate history – playing as if a ‘coming attraction’ that never actually gives us our backstage pass to go behind the scenes, to bask in the glories of yesteryear.

Image Entertainment’s DVD delivers an overall pleasing visual presentation. Regrettably, all the clips in this documentary are presented full frame – rather defeating the purpose of the segment illustrating Zanuck’s creation of Cinemascope; the first widescreen process to be universally embraced by the industry. Varying quality in actual film footage makes for an uneven visual presentation at best. The audio is stereo surround. Inexplicably, Image Inc. has chosen to make this a 2-disc set, the second disc, a shoddily slapped together compendium of four vintage featurettes. These include a 1936 short subject, a studio tour hosted by Zanuck in 1937 and ‘The Big Show’ (1958) in which then newly-appointed Fox President, Spiros P. Skouras is painfully ill at ease, and reading his cue cards with sweaty palms and darting eyes, while introducing the coming attractions in the studio’s pipeline for 1959. Boring! Bottom line: 2oth Century-Fox: The First 50 Years is a fairly abysmal way to celebrate one of the greatest movie studios of all time. This one was surely disappointing.  Even for the novice, what’s to be gleaned here isn’t anything one could not readily find, documented with more involvement and finesse on any number of internet movie sites – this one included!

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

1.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

3.5

EXTRAS

2