The phrase “history repeats itself” applies to cinema as much as it does to any human endeavor. In cinema, nowhere is it more apparent than in the saga of United Artists, the film studio without an actual studio, whose 90th anniversary is the subject of a five-week, 55-film retrospective beginning Friday at Film Forum.

Inaugurated in 1919 by top-of-the-bill movie royalty Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith, the United Artists production imprint began as a noble entrepreneurial experiment. Its partners, who had learned from experience that the movie industry had scant regard for its breadwinners, would broker their own bankability to create films under the direct creative control and profit participation denied them as contract employees of the studios. The reaction in Hollywood — then dominated by production fiefdoms, in which projects were greenlit by executives rather than by stars, and profits were disbursed to deal-makers and investors more than to talent — was uniformly derisive.

“The inmates have taken over the asylum,” Metro Pictures production chief Richard Rowland was alleged to have declared.

With actor Tom Cruise and his producing partner, Paula Wagner, now heading the company, United Artists, which was effectively neutered as a production entity in the last few years, has come full circle. And, arguably, if one factors in Mr. Cruise’s non-film-related public statements and TV appearances, Rowland’s words are more apt now than when he uttered them. But United Artists’s high-minded beginning and the twisted trail of ownership that commenced in the late 1970s overshadows a middle period, beginning in the 1950s, that nurtured some of the most varied and high-quality mainstream picture making in the history of American movies.

United Artists was also revolutionary for its business model, and not just the one pioneered by Chaplin and company. The style of management and means of production practiced by attorneys-turned-film producers Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin, who ran UA between 1951 and 1978, replaced the vertically integrated studio system, which had been reeling from the forced divestiture of theater chains in 1948, and remains the model for how the majority of films get made in Hollywood today.

While UA’s original marquee-friendly brain trust attracted a revolving door of independent producers (augmented, beginning in 1924, by its chairman, the financier Joseph Schenck), for most of its first three decades, the company struggled beneath the weight of rising costs and changing public tastes. The studio’s chief operating flaw was, according to the film historian Tino Balio, “that those traits of independence, flamboyance, and melodramatics that characterized the owners’ work as artists could not be checked in the board room.” Though UA had produced or distributed such masterpieces as D.W. Griffith’s “Broken Blossoms,” Buster Keaton’s (Schenck’s brother-in-law) “Steamboat Bill Jr.” and “The General,” and John Ford’s iconic Western “Stagecoach,” internecine acrimony dogged the company. By the end of World War II, UA’s production and distribution slate was empty and the sole remaining partners still invested in the studio were Pickford and Chaplin.

Fresh from the highly educational disaster of Eagle-Lion Pictures, a contentious American-British production collaboration financed by railroad magnate Robert Young, Krim and Benjamin approached Pickford and Chaplin about the possibility of running UA in a new way following the war. With little to lose (though Chaplin was reportedly against the deal, changing his mind only in 1952 when the American government revoked his visa), the two icons of the silent screen agreed to a five-year trial period in which Krim and Benjamin could take UA’s reins with an eye toward buying the two original inmates out if things went well at the box office. “God will reward you for adding 20 years to my life,” Pickford gratefully told the two young executives. The rewards for Krim, Benjamin, Pickford, Chaplin, and the investors and collaborators that followed were substantial, built on the backs of filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick and Robert Aldrich. The company was successful enough that the last two original owners standing took their buyouts before the five years were even up.

Before long, moviemaking clout in postwar Hollywood had shifted from studio heads to actors and the agents who represented them — just as Chaplin and Pickford had intended when they began the venture more than 30 years before.

Typical of UA’s finesse with Hollywood’s new power brokers was the arrangement Krim and Benjamin made with Burt Lancaster. MCA’s super-agent, Lew Wasserman, inked a lucrative multi-picture deal for his client that put Lancaster in charge of his own films at UA. Like all of the company’s new acquisitions, Lancaster and his producing partner, Harold Hecht, were given complete autonomy in developing and producing their films. UA would pony up the budget, Hecht-Lancaster Productions (as the star’s imprint was called) would develop, shoot, and edit the contracted films, UA would distribute, and profits would be divided between studio and producers. The fact that UA had no backlot or soundstages meant that overhead costs were virtually nil. It also freed filmmakers to shoot anywhere their visions took them, such as the streets of Manhattan in Hecht-Lancaster’s 1957 UA hit “Sweet Smell of Success.”

United Artists took chances on emerging talent, as well. After being approached by a first-time producer named James B. Harris, who was working with a young photojournalist named Kubrick, UA was sufficiently impressed with Kubrick’s previous, independently produced feature to handle both “The Killing” (1956) and “Paths of Glory” (1957). A decade later, in return for the rights to release the soundtrack recording on United Artists Records, Krim and Benjamin bankrolled the Beatles’ movie debut, “A Hard Day’s Night.” Most auspiciously, Krim and Benjamin were able to see the future franchise value in a spy novel adaptation entitled “Dr. No,” starring an unknown named Sean Connery as a British MI-5 assassin named James Bond.

Under Krim and Benjamin, United Artists also helped to level the moral playing field that had long been tilted toward the parochial by Hollywood’s hypocritical Production Code. For the executives at UA, challenging the American Legion’s Red-baiting boycott of Chaplin’s “Limelight” and the Legion of Decency’s condemnation of Otto Preminger’s “The Moon Is Blue” was simply a matter of protecting their investment. Releasing “Midnight Cowboy” and “Last Tango In Paris” with an “X” rating (in those pre-Linda Lovelace days, a designation closer to a contemporary “R”) was more a matter of marketing. Making both films initially hard to see but easy to talk about worked wonders at both the box office and the Academy Awards.

United Artists’ revolutionary run was eventually halted first in the ’70s by the mass exodus of Krim and Benjamin’s team in reaction to meddlesome interference by corporate owner Transamerica, and finally by Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate,” which sank the studio in 1980 and led to a move away from artist-driven film production and a shift toward greater studio control of films.

The studio’s name and catalog of films have changed ownership multiple times in the years since. But like their front-office counterparts at all of the majors, Mr. Cruise and Ms. Wagner will do business and strike deals in the same way that Krim and Benjamin pioneered. Whether they will do so with the same market savvy and taste remains to be seen. The 55 films in Film Forum’s retrospective represent a very tough group of acts to follow.

Through May 1 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).