Columbia scarcely noticed Capra’s departure due to
the imminent war boom. Like Universal and UA,
Columbia’s wartime surge was less dramatic than that
of the theater-owning Big Five studios, but Columbia
was able to sustain profits on a par with its Capra-era
peak and to increase its revenues considerably. That
enabled Cohn to increase A-class output and upgrade
the production values on top releases (particularly with
the use of Technicolor) and to expand his roster of top
talent. Columbia continued to produce its signature
romantic comedies, punctuating Capra’s departure with
two Hawks-directed hits, Only Angels Have Wings and
His Girl Friday (1940), both of which paired Cary Grant (1904–1986) with a contract star—Jean Arthur and
Rosalind Russell (1907–1976), respectively. A supporting role in the former went to Rita Hayworth (1918–
1987), who emerged as a top star in a cycle of musical
hits, teaming with Fred Astaire (1899–1987) in You’ll
Never Get Rich (1941) and You Were Never Lovelier
(1942) and with Gene Kelly in Cover Girl (1944).
Columbia also produced a steady supply of war films—
both home-front and combat dramas—including a few
A-class films like Sahara (1943), starring Humphrey
Bogart (1899–1957) (on loan from Warners), but mainly
composed of low-budget fare.
Columbia’s B-movie operation flourished during the
war, cranking out Lone Wolf, Blondie, and Boston Blackie series; serials adapted from radio and comic strips
including The Shadow, Brenda Starr, and Terry and the
Pirates; and comedy shorts featuring the Three Stooges,
Buster Keaton, Charlie Chase, and Harry Langdon.
Western programmers composed roughly half of the
studio’s wartime B-movie output—and fully thirty percent of Columbia’s total wartime releases (159 of 503
films). Most of these were subpar features that ran from
fifty-five to fifty-seven minutes and featured Charles
Starrett (1903–1986). He did seven or eight B westerns
per year from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, including some sixty-seven Durango Kid films. Columbia also
produced an occasional A-class western—Arizona
(1940), with rising star William Holden (1918–1981),
for example, and The Desperadoes (1943), a Glenn Ford
(b. 1916) vehicle that marked the studio’s first
Technicolor release.
By the end of the war, Columbia had built up a solid
roster of contract talent in all departments, including
stars like Hayworth, Russell, Holden, and Glenn Ford;
cinematographers Rudolph Mate´ (1898–1964) and
Burnett Guffey (1905–1983); art directors Stephen
Goosson, Cary Odell (1910–1988), and Rudolph
Sternad; editors Gene Havlick and Viola Lawrence
(1894–1973); musical director Morris Stoloff (1898–
1980); and writers Sidney Buchman and Virginia Van
Upp (1902–1970). Cohn continued to rely heavily on
outside directors in A-class productions, with contract
directors Charles Vidor (1900–1959), Alfred Green
(1889–1960), and Henry Levin (1909–1980) handling
top projects as well. Columbia’s expanded talent pool
meant more A-films and more homegrown hits like
Gilda, a noir classic co-starring Hayworth and Glenn
Ford, and The Jolson Story, a biopic starring little-known
character actor Larry Parks (1914–1975). Those two
1946 releases set the tone for the postwar era’s continued
success, and after record years in 1946 and 1947,
Columbia managed to hold on as Hollywood’s fortunes
plummeted—thanks largely to two huge 1949 hits, Jolson
Sings Again, a sequel to the 1946 biopic and All the King’s
Men, directed by Robert Rossen (1908–1966), a stunning, hyper-realistic portrait of political corruption, whose myriad awards included Oscars for Best Picture
and Best Actor (Broderick Crawford).
Columbia’s continued success in the 1950s was due
in part to Cohn’s experience in dealing with freelance
talent and independent production, and also to
Columbia’s ready acceptance of television when the other
studios were either dismissing or disparaging the upstart
medium. Columbia was the first studio to undertake TV
series production, via its Screen Gems division, which
under the supervision of Ralph Cohn, Jack’s son, produced hit series in multiple genres, from daytime variety
(House Party, 1952) and syndicated children’s and family
programming (Captain Midnight, 1954; Jungle Jim,
1955; Circus Boy, 1956) to network prime-time sitcoms
(Father Knows Best, 1954; The Donna Reed Show, 1958),
anthology dramas (The Ford Television Theatre, 1952;
Playhouse 90, 1956; Goodyear Theatre, 1957), and crime
dramas (Naked City, 1958; Tightrope, 1959). TV series
production absorbed much of Columbia’s B-movie operation, as Cohn reduced feature film output from around
sixty per year in 1950 and 1951 to less than forty by the
mid-1950s. B-western programmers were phased out
altogether, although Columbia still produced occasional
A-class westerns like The Man from Laramie (1955),
starring James Stewart, and a good many near-A’s
with contract stars Glenn Ford and Randolph Scott
(1898–1987).
In terms of top feature production, Columbia’s
greatest strength during the 1950s was its dual output
of weighty male-dominant dramas and hit romantic
comedies. The dramas included film noir classics like In
a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray (1911–
1979), and The Big Heat (1953), directed by Fritz Lang
(1890–1976), as well as stage adaptations like Death of a
Salesman (1951), The Member of the Wedding (1952),
The Caine Mutiny (1954), and Picnic (1955). While
these films clearly signaled their lineage and thus were
of a somewhat derivative quality, Columbia also produced hit dramas in the 1950s that, like All the King’s
Men, remain inconceivable as anything but films, whatever their medium of origin, and stand among the very
best films of that era. The most notable of these were From Here to Eternity (1953), On the Waterfront (1954),
and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which were
solid commercial hits and multiple Academy Award
winners, taking Oscars for Best Picture and Best
Director (Fred Zinnemann, Elia Kazan, and David
Lean, respectively)—and thus giving Columbia its best
Oscar run since the Capra era. Columbia also sustained
its trademark romantic comedy line, fueled by the talents
of the emerging star Judy Holliday (1921–1965) and the
director-writer duo of George Cukor and Garson Kanin
(1912–1999), who teamed for Born Yesterday (1950), The
Marrying Kind (1952), and It Should Happen to You
(1954). The latter co-starred the fast-rising Jack Lemmon
(1925–2001), who teamed with Holliday and newcomer
Kim Novak (b. 1933) in Phffft! (1954), thus adding two
more contract stars to Columbia’s comedy mix.