|
Milestones and Turning Points in Film History The Year 1943 |
 Timeline of Greatest Film History Milestones and Turning Points (by decade and year) Introduction | Pre-1900s | 1900s | 1910s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s |
| Event and Significance | |
| 20th Century Fox began distributing three million pinups of leggy actress Betty Grable, in her famed white swimsuit photo (with her hands on her hips and an over-the-shoulder smile), mostly to GIs serving in armed forces overseas. She was declared their favorite pinup. The actress' handprints (and one leg) were immortalized in cement in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood on February 15, 1943. Lloyds of London insured her legs for up to one million dollars in 1943. At $300,000 a year salary in 1946-47, the US Treasury Department declared that she was the highest-salaried American woman. | |
| Columbia Pictures released its first Technicolor film, a western called The Desperadoes (1943) with Glenn Ford and Randolph Scott. | |
| Director Vincente Minnelli's Cabin in the Sky (1943) opened, starring Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, and Ethel Waters. Stormy Weather, starring Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and Fats Waller, was also released. | |
| The War Production Board ordered theaters to dim their marquee lights at 10 p.m. | |
| 50 year-old British actor Leslie Howard, famous for his role as Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind (1939), was killed when onboard a DC-3 plane that was shot down by German Luftwaffe fighters over the Bay of Biscay near Lisbon, Portugal (considered a war zone). | |
| Beginning a directorial career that spanned 57 years, Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa directed the action film Sanshiro Sugata (1943, Jp.) (aka Judo Saga), his directorial debut film, but it was not released in the US until 1974. | |
| The UPA (United Productions of America) was formed by a group of animators who broke away from Disney, following a five months artists' strike in 1941. The intentions of the film production company were to promote freedom of expression in the field of animation. | |
| Many movies of the ’30s and ’40s troubled the Motion Picture Production Code but none quite as much as obsessed billionaire producer/ "director" Howard Hughes' controversial B-grade western The Outlaw (1943). Bankrolled by the eccentric billionaire, the sexed-up melodramatic western featured busty (36-D) starlet Jane Russell in a breakthrough role. It was considered too racy for contemporary audiences in 1941 when it was screened for the Hays Office. Its original release had to be postponed for two years until 1943 - and then only in very limited release to theatres, thanks to Jane Russell's cleavage, Hughes' salacious marketing campaign and refusal to excise any controversial shots. After the one-week run in 1943, Hughes decided to withdraw and shelve the film for three years after which it was finally placed in general wide release in 1946 (in a cut version) without a seal of approval (even then), and then again in 1947. | |
| The precursor of Italian neo-realism was Luchino Visconti's gritty Ossessione (1943, It.), the Italian director's first film. Loosely adapted from James M. Cain's pulp novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, it enraged fascist censors and inspired the term neo-realism. The movement would really take hold from the mid-40s to the mid-50s, with its main exponents being Visconti, Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. | |
| Female director Dorothy Arzner directed the war melodrama First Comes Courage (1943), her last feature film, starring Merle Oberon. | |
| Director/producer Alfred Hitchcock's best American film (and second film with Universal Studios) was the thriller Shadow of a Doubt (1943) - and it was purportedly his own personal favorite. The cynical, film-noirish, war-time film was shot on location in the small, story-book town of Santa Rosa, California - a representative place of sacred, wholesome, middle-American values where dark corruption was hidden within a family. Joseph Cotten played beloved relative Uncle Charlie who lived with his sister's family until his niece (Teresa Wright) discovered his murderous secret. | |
| Influential Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein published The Film Sense, a film theory book that took a critical look at film and its impact, using his experiences in creating Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925), October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1927), Old and New (1929), and Alexander Nevsky (1938), and including a defense of his use of "montage". | |
| The 18-minute silent, surrealistic feminist film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), co-directed by husband and wife Alexander Hammid and Maya Deren (who also starred as the film's two major characters, The Man and The Woman) and shot in 16mm, was influential in ushering in the post-WW II American avant-garde (experimental) film movement. It was called a "dream" or "trance" film, due to the fact that its day-dream plot (filled with poetic imagery of the subconscious) was filmed without a script. | |
| Superhero Batman was the first Detective Comics (DC) character to have his own serial - Batman (1943), Columbia Pictures' 15-episode wartime serial with cliffhangers. It marked the first cinematic representation of the character of Batman. It starred Lewis Wilson as smug playboy Bruce Wayne and alias Batman - "America's No. 1 crime fighter." | |
| The emotionless, meek, slow-moving, slow-talking, deadpan-voiced, yet stoic Droopy Dog made his nameless debut in MGM's Dumb-Hounded (1943). His first line of dialogue was: "Hello all you happy people...you know what? I'm the hero." Besides Tom & Jerry, the other biggest MGM cartoon character, Droopy (known as "Happy Hound") was Tex Avery's most famous and long-lasting character at the studio. The cartoon character finally received the name "Droopy" in his fifth cartoon, Senor Droopy (1949). | |
| Supported by the Screen Actor's Guild (SAG), Olivia de Havilland filed a far-reaching lawsuit against her studio, Warner Bros, eventually winning in a 1945 ruling called the DeHavilland Law. It declared that a studio could not indefinitely extend a performer's contract. It imposed a 7 year limit on contracts for service unless the employee agreed to an extension beyond that term. The decision ultimately limited the oppressive contract-power of studios over their performers. | |
| Paramount's all-star musical film Star-Spangled Rhythm (1943) opened in Hollywood - it was the first of the plotless WW II morale-boosting, patriotic entertainment films. | |
| Controversy was engendered when 54 year-old Charlie Chaplin wed 17 year-old Oona O'Neill, the daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill (who cut ties with her and disowned her following the marriage). It was Chaplin's fourth marriage, and they eventually had eight children, one of whom was future actress Geraldine Chaplin. | |
| A Los Angeles jury found Errol Flynn not guilty of statutory rape charges brought against him in 1942 by two teenage girls (Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee). | |
| Actor Clark Gable served in the armed forces during WWII, and as a US Army Air Corps Lieutenant, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal after participating in five combat missions in 1943. After one of those close calls, MGM studios were worried about the fate of their box-office star, and requested that his assignment be transferred to non-combat duty. |
