Pressure from Television.

As television became an increasingly popular entertainment medium throughout the 1950s, the movie industry did everything within its power to pull people away from the box in the living room and into the theaters. Bigger became the byword for the movies. Wide-screen techniques such as CinemaScope and Vista Vision were used to add a panoramic effect to spectacles, swashbucklers, musicals, and otherwise splashy movies with big-name stars, big casts, big sets, and big budgets. Although hard-hitting social dramas on both small and large scales had an impact, they were overshadowed at the box office by the melodramatic woman's picture. Science-fiction and horror movies proved more commercially viable than ever, and some were filmed in the short-lived 3-D process.

Spectacle.

Historical epics with huge casts were a mainstay of the 1950s. Many of them drew on the Bible: The Robe (1953) was the first...