The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions (Decade Project Vol. 4)

[Rayon Vert]

The Seventh Seal (Bergman 1957). I’m pretty sure I wrote this up already for one of the previous list projects. Such a visually stunning film and a really compelling recreation of medieval times. Those scenes with the “witch”, and her raving eyes, are quite powerful, just as much as the equivalent scenes in Day of Wrath. As much as this is about death, it’s counterbalanced by a bursting sense of intense life throughout (and then that final curtain on the knight and his companions is followed by a cut to the little family off to a new start in another sunshiny beginning of the day), and it’s full of it – springtime, love, spirited questing, lust, a lot of humor (even if often gallows). I absolutely love Bjönstrand as the squire here, and the way he hisses like a cat when he’s put down by his master – he played so many great roles in Bergman films but I can’t think of a better one.


Bend of the River (Mann 1952). This one’s very underwhelming at first, even with the Indian attack early on with a more fuddy-duddy Stewart, not much seeming at stake, and a few really lousy studio backdrop shots in the night scenes. At near 40 minutes in, though, when McLyntock returns to Portland to find out what happened with the supplies, the film suddenly kicks into high-gear and doesn’t let up until the end – and Stewart gets to turn up the anger and vitality again. It isn’t as complex a film as Winchester, but it’s a rousing and suspenseful adventure thriller, with Mann excelling in the action scenes (quite impressive to imagine them filming some of those, for example with those horses and wagons almost collapsing coming down that steep icy mountain). There’s some powerful enough symbolism too in the community attempting to recreate an unsullied garden of eden in the wilderness, and a once bad man seeing if he can get reborn.



Gun Crazy (Lewis 1950). That moment when Bart

SpoilerShow

ditches the second escape car and decides to stick with Laurie,

and the intense romantic joy and glee they experience just then, perfectly summarizes the crazy heart of this movie. The way it ends, with the (anti-)heroes in the wildness, in a dreamlike environment, speaks to how slightly surreal the whole film is. There’s such an intensity to many of the scenes here, starting with that completely engrossing and strangely magical courtship scene the power of which twbb described so well. When Bart expresses at one point how fast this is all going and how it’s hard to make sense of how he got here, we are completely on board with him. He didn’t shoot the mountain lion but ended up entangled with his own wildcat. His character is the more psychologically real, but Laurie is fascinating in her own right. She can be mercenary in her drives, but at the same time she becomes completely devoted to Bart, and it’s her relentless energy that drives the movie. The film has enormous vitality and style, yet it wouldn’t be anything like it is without Cummins and Dall filling out those characters.

[alacal2]

The Ladykillers

Alexander Mackendrick's small but perfectly formed masterwork that uses the format of a comedy heist move to affectionately subvert Ealing Studios and Cul-de-sac England. And all told as a dream perhaps.

It has a particular resonance for me growing up as a child in the 50's in a lower middle-class family - Ealing's target audience - although I never first got to see it until my late teens due to my parents' religious beliefs. We were not supposed to watch TV or go to the cinema and had to throw a towel over the set whenever anyone from 'The Brethren visited (how very Ealingesque!)

However, it remained just an entertaining and 'comfortable' viewing for a number of years until I began to understand how nuanced and layered it was - and still is. I'm not sure how much my reading of this film is stating the obvious so I apologise if this is all a bit old hat but it's subtleties and ironies been a wonderful discovery for me and I don't understand why it got so little love in the last 50s list.

One of the pleasures of Ladykillers is the number of readings you can take away from it, one of the most accepted ones being that it is a dream. It's well known that the writer William Rose took the idea to Mackendrick based on a dream he'd had. The film starts with Mrs Wilberforce visiting her friendly neighbourhood police station to describe a dream her 'friend' had had about a spaceship. It ends with another visit to recount what has just happened (another alien'invasion?) in the film and to complain "I hope you don't think I'm imagining this". In between, she seems to float through the film like a Victorian wraith creating both order and disorder. The smoke from the railway cutting that envelops the disposing of the bodies towards the end contributes to this dreamlike vision. And for me, in essence, it seems to be a a sly critique of what Mackendrick clearly saw as Ealing's dream of an England of cosy communities and order - communities that only ever existed in Ealing's imagination.

The cul-de-sac setting is a pefect if perhaps obvious symbol of where Mackendrick thought England (and Ealing) was in the mid fifties. Literally a dead-end street where the railway line effectively becomes a mortuary. Mrs Wilberforce's house is small, cluttered and claustrophobic, subject to subsidence and water pipes that have to brought back to life by Mrs Wilberforce wielding a large mallet.
Into this decaying world, Mackendrick uses the appearence of the gang to attempt to both introduce change and illustrate its futility. Charles Barr's authoritative book on Ealing Studios sums the film (and Ealing) up persuasively when he states 'what it undeniably does is to enact a compulsive process of the of the dynamic by the static, of change by tradition, of the new by the old". Nowhere is this more brilliantly illustrated than in the scene where the gang find themselves hpelessly talked into a singalong with Mrs Wilberforces elderly female friends. Although the gang are clearly doomed a lot earlier when they almost unconsciously start referring to their landlady as "Mrs Lopsided" almost as a term of endearment.

Even if you take this film simply at straight value, there are many rewards - the three delightfully choreographed scenes featuring an escaped parrot, the heist and the self-destruction of the gang at the end (including a very Hitchcockian nod to Louie's death. The acting acting is almost pitch perfect apart from an OTT cameo appearance by Frankie Howerd and I found Alec Guiness's performance slightly over-mannered. There are two unnerving moments when his mental state is almost revealed but in the first the camera cuts away sharply and in the second its obscured by steam.The five members of the gang never seem arbitrary (Charles Bar actually suggests they could be a cross-section of the post-war Labour government (academics, ex-officers,manual workers and "hard liners"!) because their interaction with each other is superbly timed. Tristram Cary's neglected soundtrack gets a well-deserved mention on Philip Kemp's commentary on the film's 60th anniversary disc. The whole choreography of the railway sounds is superb.

Katie Johnson is an absolute delight as Mrs Wilberforce and a far more interesting character than her 'dotty old lady' appearance would suggest (another of Ealing's eccentrics that Mackendrick subverts).At the very beginning of the film she walks up the street, greeted by every shopkeeper and street cleaner almost as royaltyand then stops on the steps of the police station to coo at a baby in a pram. The baby seems to almost snarl and the pram shakes violently (for some reason this reminded me of Larry Cohen's Its Alive!) She wields the mallet on her water pipes with surprising ferocity. She creates bother order and disorder. She has her own soundtrack of a tinkling music box (an object that goes roun in circles) At the end she finally rejects her umbrella that was an unwelcome 'comfort blanket' for her. Her experience has clearly made an impact - shaken but not stirred.

Ladykillers virtues are many but for me what elevates it to being worthy of a strong place in this year's 50s List is that it's a film both of its time and timeless. And Mackendrick perceptively identified something endemically Ealingesque about Britain that has never gone away. In the year that Ladykillers came out, the studios were bought by the BBC (which was affectionately known as 'Auntie'). The Chief Superintendent in Ladykillers played by Jack Warner (then, the country's favourite bobby) returned to the small screen as Dixon of Dock Green until the mid 70s. The 50's were supposed to be the years of 'you've never had it so good'. In 1989, then then Prime Minister John Major dreamily prophesised 'Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and—as George Orwell said—old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist'. Tony Blair talked a lot about the Third Way but failed to ever define it. David Cameron attempted to invent/resurrect The Big Society and in the last few weeks we've had Boris Johnson floundering around in ant attempt to convince people that "British Common Sense" (another completely meaningless phrase) - not science - will defeat pandemics. Michael Balcon must be smiling in his grave.

[swo17]

My highest recommendation for a few 1950s shorts from Flicker Alley's experimental Blu-ray offerings. First, Disc 2 of the Masterworks of American Avant-Garde Experimental Film set covers the '50s-'70s with a good overview. I've droned on and on already about the joyous wonder of N.Y., N.Y. so allow me to pivot here instead to Hy Hirsh's Gyromorphosis, which is just a marvelous swirl of color and motion, all these intricate gears and spinning gridworks superimposed over each other, like the stargate sequence of 2001 if the spacecraft had also been in a tailspin. And because this is the '50s it's also scored to jazz.

There must be something special about this decade because it also got its own bonus disc from FA, Five American Experimental Films of the 1950s (sadly BD-R only, but don't let that stop you), and I kid you not, 80% of this disc is in severe danger of making my list. Granted, for some reason, N.Y., N.Y. is repeated here (because watch it) but the first three films are no less novel or stunning. First is Abstract in Concrete, apparently the only film ever made by one John Arvonio, and it's a lovely tale of loneliness, vice, and architecture mostly told through the reflections of neon lights on the rainy night pavement.

Following that are two films from Jim Davis, who is also featured on the main set, and whose filmography has been pretty well served by Anthology Film Archives if you can find their DVDs (Impulses on the Visible Energy DVD is the best of that lot). These two films are on another level though, and not just because they're presented in higher definition. The first, Analogies No. 1, nominally draws an analogy between visuals in nature (fascinatingly distorted through reflections in water) and abstract shapes of Davis's own making. The implication is clear: Davis is playing God, and he wins at it. Color Dances No. 1 can't hope to match that trick but it comes close with yet more sumptuous visuals, impossible blobs contorting themselves in dance, and little metallic wires and wisps leaving spectral traces of their erratic revelry.

I'm all out of flowery words so that will have to do for now

[Red Screamer]

Thanks for the writeups swo! Those Jim Davis films sound great. I've been watching and rewatching shorts recently too and, so far, have wound up with a brief director's guide and some assorted recommendations.

Len Lye
Color Cry (1952)
Life's Musical Minute (c. 1953)
Rhythm (1957)
All Souls Carnival (1957)
Free Radicals (1958)
Prime Time (1958)
Tal Farlow (c. 1958)

All of these films are available on the Len Lye Foundation DVD "Colour Box, 19 Films by Len Lye." Many of them are also on Re:Voir's Lye set or can be found online, in varying quality. In terms of how much people enjoy the moods his films strike or their flights of abstraction, Len Lye can be divisive. But for anyone interested in the formal and material history of cinema, his career and his restless innovations are never less than fascinating. And some of us just like to gape at pretty colors flying by, too.

Lye has a great ear for music, much groovier and more idiosyncratic than Fischinger or McLaren. The Sonny Terry recording used in Color Cry is an incredible piece and makes the film worth seeking out on its own. Lye's direct and rayogram animation comes in an impressive range of textures and layers, but his style is often too clean, gridlike, and graphic design-y here, and his images are outpaced, in intensity and invention, by the music. Rhythm is a bold editing experiment in the garb of a car commercial. I can't think of other examples of this kind of editing by 1957, which prefigures digital editing, especially music videos and internet videos, in its choppy, jagged movements and the near-plastic pliability of the footage. I wish it was longer and further developed, like Trade Tattoo, Lye's earlier attempt to capture work rhythms, because he's onto something really interesting.

All Souls Carnival is Lye's direct animation at its most baroque, encompassing a wide range of styles, moods, and materials (his primary tools were lacquer paint and felt-tip markers according to the DVD liner notes). I'm grateful that this film introduced me to the stunning piece of music by Henry Brant, composed specifically for this project. The interplay of images and music, much looser than is typical of the visual music genre, was intended by Lye and Brant to be left entirely to chance. That doesn't sound too exciting on the page, but it winds up working for the film, as its tone and feeling swings this way and that, always out of reach. Most of Lye's, McLaren's, et al. similar films are studied imitations of the music they use. Or, if not that, they rely on a shared exuberance and jazzy looseness to make the images and sounds roughly "agree". All Souls Carnival is instead built powerfully around principles of dissonance and progression, the soundtrack and the image track following their own internal movements, separately, together, in harmony, in cacophony. One of the great freakouts of the decade, and all the better for its emotional ambiguity, which makes me feel more, not less, than something as straightforward as Rainbow Dance or as polished as Begone Dull Care. Here's hoping the lost final five minutes are still out there somewhere.

Free Radicals is on the other end of the spectrum, as Lye's direct animation at its most minimal, and has rightly become one of the most celebrated experimental films of the decade. Its power lies in its funky simplicity, but Lye's gnarly figures also have a hypnotic and hard-to-achieve three-dimensional spiral to them, as if the drums are knocking the shapes into a slow-motion tailspin. I want to project this film on a river or into a forest. Prime Time and Tal Farlow are tinkering offshoots from Free Radicals and Life's Musical Minute is the same for Lye's earlier films. See them if you enjoy abstract animation as much as I do. Otherwise, they're missable.


Some other shorts:

Glas (Bert Haanstra, 1958) is a good companion to Lye's Rhythm, as a musical-documentary on glassmaking with Tatiesque visual humor. It combines the observational (in the photography) and the essay (in the editing) in a fun way.

A Castle Within a Castle (Carl Dreyer, 1955) isn’t great, but it’s worth checking out for its striking architecture photography & fascinating subject.

Orson Welles' The Fountain of Youth is an unproduced TV pilot for Desilu that's a weird hybrid of his radio, essay, and narrative modes. It's unusual, for him and for television, in how it plays with flat space and quick set changes, and the use of still photographs makes it some kind of ancestor to La Jetee.

Alain Resnais has a formidable array of shorts this decade, but I want to highlight his mysterious library doc Toute la Memoire du monde (1956), which is important in terms of Renais’ filmography (the openings of Hiroshima and Marienbad can be traced back to here) and in terms of the history of documentary, as Resnais reshapes it into a form as experiential as, though separate from, fiction. On the other hand, Les statues meurent aussi, which seems to have the higher profile of the two, really hasn’t held up well.

[swo17]

Hey, I just watched a lot of those shorts myself! Good call on the Lyes. I think that new DVD is a big improvement in quality over the Re:voir set, plus I believe it's the only way to see All Souls Carnival.

My favorite Dreyer short is Storstrømsbroen (1950), which simply showcases a bridge from a lot of different, inventive angles.

[alacal2]

Another Sky (Gavin Lambert 1954)

The only film by Gavin Lambert who was better known as a screenwriter (The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone etc). A close friend of Paul Bowles, his picture of the sexual awakening of Rose, a reserved governess hired as a companion to a wealthy English expatriate living in Morocco, has echoes of The Sheltering Sky. It was Lindsay Anderson -another close friend - who encouraged him to see if had the potential to be a director and the film is under-directed but an interesting failure. Suffice to say he was better off sticking with the 'day job' Padded out with shopping scenes in the Marrakech street markets, when Rose takes off to the mountains and desert in search of her Moroccan lover (and, by implication, North Africa) it does begin to convey something of the seductive power of what Lambert described as 'The Other'. It lingered in my mind for a few days but I think that was due more to the editing and cinematography of Walter Lassally. Never distributed in the UK I watched this on the Facets "Masterpiece Collection" disc. I wouldn't go out of your way to track it down but if like me you find it gathering dust in your kevyip, it's worth a spin.

[senseabove]

It Should Happen to You (Cukor, 1954) Gladys Glover doesn't need to think about it: she wants to be famous. That's what she came to New York for. So before packing it up and heading back to the midwest, she follows a last-ditch whim and stumbles earnestly and intentionally into fame. What's surprising is that, despite presenting her as a legendary ditz, the movie doesn't condescend to her. It mocks her relentlessly, but it also lets her figure out herself what she wants as it evolves, feels a little admirable of her resolute commitment to her dream, and allows that her blithering idiot savantness is what saves her from falling into what she doesn't want, like sleazy Peter Lawford's arms. She's a kind of social Mr. Magoo... While it's mid-tier Cukor at best, if you like the folks involved like I do, it's worth hunting down.

Tea and Sympathy (Minnelli, 1956) What a velvet hammer! The central relationship is remarkable, and both Kerrs do a just amazing job of balancing flailing desperation with timid urgency. And then the male fragility counterpoint is laid on with a trowel. The husband and the father are so incongruously ham-fisted in comparison to how carefully modulated Laura and Tom and Al are—which is probably an intentional contrast, but it's a great weakness to argue for understanding the complexity of one character's masculinity while caricaturing the others', even if part of the point is how flawed, mercilessly persecutory, and self-caricaturing the latter is. If only the husband had been played by someone who could have shaded in the written character with some interiority, it might have worked as a gradient between Al and the cartoonish father, but the both of them played so flat was too much too often... Still, Minnelli's sets, composition, and use of color—the turquoise!—are nonpareil. I'm inclined to say this is Minnelli's visual masterpiece. I can't wait to see it on film some day, as the unrepaired upscaled transfer I watched via TCM online is really, really rough in both quality and condition...

High Society (Walters, 1956) I didn't know this was a remake when I sat down to watch it... Unfortunately, it tries to swap out everything messy and complicated and wonderful about the original with a few songs, and fails to add anything of interest. More weirdly, it feels like it's relying on a familiarity with the original to do the emotional work in several of the scenes, so it can just lay in a little song and a few seconds of soft-shoe and say "we all know what happened here, right?" Grace Kelly's pretty good until we get into the telegraphed emotions of the back half and Sinatra and Crosby sing well together, but otherwise...

[therewillbeblus]

No Down Payment

HinkyDinkyTruesmith wrote up some great thoughts earlier in the thread, and while I can't argue that this film is ripe with sociopolitical analysis, it feels opposite to Peyton Place's systemic disruption of generational change through unstoppable time, in presenting us with a homogeneity of dislocation in static purgatory. I couldn't shake the sensation of a Twilight Zone episode of hopeless suffering without a departure from realism, where the horror is our familiar lives reflected back. I can understand the claustrophobia HDT mentions, but in the abstract rather than spatially. These characters populate pretty-looking areas where cold energies are swallowing the air between any two people, who are stuck with one another but mostly with themselves.

When they can emerge from self-pity and fatigued apathy, the lack of communication skills and internalized self-indulgence forces a divide between everyone who makes an effort. Of course the marriages are the go-to relationships to analyze, but even an interaction between two vets, who in most films would bond over shared nationalist group membership, fizzle out their ability to connect as soon as one is revealed to have not seen combat while the other has. This is a new age of comparing rather than identifying, where individualism separates from ideology's power in renouncing its religious holds, cast out into the desert of insignificance, and threatens to tailspin into a rabbit hole of solipsistic self-flagellation in shedding this support.

The similarity with Peyton Place is that the systems are distorted, but the difference is that the Robson film understands that this is the nature of life, and believes in resilience, adaptability, and recovery. No Down Payment's system is disintegrating without hopeful bonds to fight the dissolve through tangible methods. Even housewives sharing their troubles cannot bring themselves to be vulnerable, because there are no safe spaces in this vision of postwar America, a sour idea that not even Peyton Place's portrait of hushed-truth disharmony would ever allow into its worldview. These women's superficially-candid discussions quickly lead to self-conscious hard stops, as they talk right past each other, exactly like Randall's car salesman does to his 'clients.' I'm not sure if HDT was getting at this with his comment

But the film, better than any other 50s film I've seen yet, manages to diagnose the American individual's sickness: complacency, conformity, repression, self-medication, delusions of grandeur, smothering by objects, entitlement––you name it, this film savages it.

but I think all of these (very apt) observations are diagnosed as defense mechanisms to desperately cling to false stability despite evidence of their futility. Every one of these expressions is painfully sad to watch- even in the moments of celebration, the grandeur is false and withers away under the unavoidable truth that the individual is plagued with depleting self-esteem that no drink, dollar, marriage, or white picket fence will fix. I love the mid-point double date where we see all four people in the frame, in close proximity or even touching, yet every single one is uncomfortably numb- that feeling of being lonely at a party, projected on the screen. When one woman professes what feels like the first honest line in the film, she is still responding to emotions rather than preaching truth, attempting to claw her way out of a black hole. Randall's subsequent speech about not giving up means nothing because he's already given up- his words are just a few exhausted breaths into a life preserver to keep himself from drowning tonight, firefighting with a squirt gun.

Every character mirrors either Arthur Kennedy or Lana Turner from Peyton Place, attempting to evade powerless circumstances through destructive behaviors or blind complacency. Without the hope of that film's empowered youth, this makes for a great double bill with They Shoot Horses, Don't They? which might be its spiritual cousin from a different era, only eliminating the audience for the characters' pain. This is almost worse because in this picture there is no one, not a friend, stranger, or God, to validate their humanity. In a world where alcoholism, depression, and externalized harm- be it sexual assault or emotional abuse- all stem from the same seeds of conditioned environmental contexts, there is no safe formula to differentiate one's essence from another's, and that is a sick pill to swallow.

Any tidiness of an ending here -whether characters re-evaluating their lives, making up, or problems 'resolved'- is just another temporary bandaid on a mortal wound. If anything, the agility with which the rapist's life is cast aside only cements how hollow the value our our existence is. We can't even hold onto dramatic catharsis for the dismissal of an immoral villain, because he may not be any different than anyone else- when morality is only a dependent variable, ultrasensitive to a ubiquitous disease already dormant in our systems, ready to sprout.

[knives]

Haven't gotten to this one yet, but Martin Ritt is potentially the best American director of the decade which isn't too bad for someone that started off as a poor man's Fred Zinnemann. The Black Orchid is probably going to be a top five placer for me. Here's what I wrote up on it a million years ago:

As I watched this last night before bed my reaction became as if it was that this is the greatest film I've ever witnessed. Now clearly that's hyperbole, but the initial punch lasts so long that I feel confident saying it's at least a very great feature. It's biggest strength is how open and full the community is so that there are no real villains. The film flirts with an antagonist in the form of Quinn's daughter, but her reason's for acting the way she does is a horrid mix of tragedy and love that it becomes impossible to blame her for being so protective, or rather being so afraid, and reacting the way she does.

The film is a kindred spirit with Marty, A Day of Wine and Roses and all the other depressive self absorbed nonsense of the era, but smartly leaves that all to the fringes allowing it to naturally spill out so that this romance grounds the film. It's a problem picture with no problem! Most of these are one issue films that don't even know how to tackle the issue in any intelligent fashion, but this one takes on half a dozen at least and without ever commenting on them gives a fully realized presentation of what the problem is and how it affects those around it and possibly even causes other problems (i.e. the way that Loren's behavior feeds into Ralphie's). Fortunately the characters come first and any ax to grind is naturally borne from that.

It is also very fascinating how the film so much makes emphasis of the time and almost seems to want to date the film in an instant with all of these very strictly '50s immigrant culture being focused yet it, through what must be witchcraft, has this absolute timelessness through the characters every which one I know or am in real life. The utter sweetness of Loren fronted by the careful shouting; the need to be hard even when she's actually so kind and nervous is just like a mother. Even the little characters like Quinn's philosopher poker buddy have populated every town big and small I've lived in. What we see of their community is so fully realized it's easy to fill in the holes with one's own experiences.

Of course all of this well written stuff would still be nonsense without expert direction and acting and no question asked we get some of the best physical performances full of gestured punctuation around in edition to the best direction I've seen from Ritt who seems to work as perfectly in B&W as unevenly as he does in colour. This is easily Loren's best American performance with thought all over her face in the constant. From the first time she encounters Quinn 'til the end it becomes like she is not acting and is turning in a documentary performance. As for Quinn, well hopefully I don't need to expand on why his performance is great especially in this sort of role. Here's the real Marty, a man who can't tell when he's down so he never is, that manages to add so many layers to the already complex character that shows a wonderful longing and need for change that spits against the wind of his daughter. There's this moment where he confronts Ralphie as a real man that has to get a physical reaction out of the viewer his face tells it all ever as the script boils. The other actors give great performances too. The one playing the daughter especially deserves compliment given how impossible a role it becomes to play, yet she gives it all the uniqueness and complexity possible under the circumstances.

This is all benefited by the psychology of Ritt's direction usually a mix of medium shots and close-ups making some of the arty choices like a pair of zooms cut back and forth all the more powerful. He resists lingering upon the big Oscar moments like the daughter's room locking scene which prevents it from pushing down on the audience in a way that would turn this into comedy. No, we instead get enough to relay the experience fully.

[zedz]

Anyway, I might be the only person ever to prefer I Was Born, But...,

Actually dustybooks, we're at least two here. I like the film, but I don't find it as funny as the 30s film.

I think that's the critical consensus in general: I Was Born, But. . . has long been acknowledged as as one of his best silent films (and thus best films in general), whereas Good Morning is generally considered a minor but enjoyable work among his stellar 50s output. I think it's only because Good Morning for some reason was the first Ozu film released by Criterion, and for a long time the only one available on US DVD (I believe), that it acquired an inflated reputation in some quarters. They're both great films, but the silent film is the one that's historically had the heavyweight critical reputation.

[therewillbeblus]

That reminds me, I just discovered that the other best comedy of the decade, Has Anybody Seen My Gal?, is up in full for free on YT. The 50s weren't a particularly funny period, but anyone who wants a few hardy laughs and plenty more smiles should check it out. We need films like this in these dark times.

[swo17]

The 50s weren't a particularly funny period

I'm sending the Robot Monster to destroy you

[therewillbeblus]

The Adventures of Hajji Baba is a delightful adventure film that plays like music (plus there's great music). Every frame is pulsating full of colorful action, and even small exchanges between characters feel like lavish setpieces. Images are soaked in a pure affection for filmmaking through design, to the point of hitting an emotional space that elicits only shades of tempered joy. It's not a listworthy picture but you could fare worse than escaping into this fantasy for a little while.

Symphony in Slang may not be the best Tex Avery cartoon I've seen, but if not it's close enough. Surprisingly I hadn't seen this one before, and although every double entendre doesn't carry the same inspired success, the audio-visual gags are working overdrive to give more than their money's worth. Risqué ideas like the stork reference but especially "slinging hash" felt startling for '51, but I got hardier laughs out of "foothills" and those clever formulations. If any animated film makes my list, this will be one of the contenders.

Broken Lance: I watched this during the 40s project after domino compared it favorably to Mank's House of Strangers. A revisit of the TT highlighted its assets better to improve my overall esteem, but I don't find it to be quite the great film he does. Still, it's a fairly strong Shakespearean familial melodrama wearing the skin of a western, and Tracy -an actor I'm usually cool on- excels at using his own limited range perfectly. His self-serious, aloof moodiness and capacity for subtle kindness service the role of a detached, austere father not looking for trust in his kin but finding it anyways in a surprise to himself. This is the kind of change that is real, and in a film coated in glossy dressup there are several very honest conflicts bubbling introspectively. Widmark tones himself down to play the kind of entitled narcissist who feels human too, and Wagner is the kind of plain lead who is likeable and easy to root for because audiences can see parts of themselves in him. The writing sells much of these dramatic dynamics but Dmytryk's ability to draw emotion from his mise en scene effortlessly without drawing attention from his actors should not be overlooked. His best skill on display here is in evoking wonderfully moderate perfs from his cast, as I've already touched on, to great results of authenticity for what appears to be on the verge of slipping into artificial territory at any moment.

[Rayon Vert]

The Trouble with Harry (Hitchcock 1955). I wrote this one up before in the Hitchcock list project thread. It’s got its unique charms and I ended up appreciating even more the “old country” feel of it, as knives says, and the dry humor. It’s such a gorgeous film (why wasn’t every film made in VistaVision?! - it was kind of like the 4K of its day) – the fall colors, the framing and look of those porch discussion scenes. The idyllic setting, along with the characters’ detached reactions to the dead body, is part of what makes the contrast work so well.

(Maybe it’s the clarity of the VV, but has anyone noticed that fly that keeps reappearing in that long sequence at the end in Jennifer’s house? It’s especially obvious in the scene where she and Sam kiss. Surprising that such a perfectionist as Hitch would let that go.)


Armored Car Robbery (Fleischer 1950). In terms of originality, the film is about as creative as the title, but it’s a little gem – pure heist-and-escape suspense, tough, energetic, well-directed and –acted, and with no fat on the bones. It’s only 67 minutes but there isn’t a bad one.


Touchez pas au grisbi (Becker 1954). Really good write-up for this one by senseabove earlier in the thread. A terrific drama thriller - character-based, but with great mounting tension and wonderful action when the time comes. Surely one of Gabin’s best performances here. It’s a sordid world but a strong elegance comes through in the direction and photography. That, and the fact that it’s about an ageing gangster’s last job, are two things it has in common with Bob le flambeur, two mid-50s French noirs that were inspirations for the New Wave. I used to prefer the Melville, but now this one has clearly jumped ahead – less stylistically original perhaps, but it feels deeper and more engrossing.

(Is it just me or am I frequently catching the Kino releases to have wrong run-times on the back cover? They’re really underselling this one – “83 minutes” when it’s really 96.)


The Tin Star (Mann 1957). All the attention usually goes to the Stewart collaborations and Man of the West but this is on the same level of quality, and I actually prefer it to many of the other ones. Henry Fonda generates a commanding western hero demeanor again, delivering a really solid performance playing the aging, somewhat disillusioned but still completely honorable ex-sheriff-turned-bounty-hunter convinced into helping out the neophyte marshall Anthony Perkins. Really good, absorbing story with a lot of appealing episodes, and the film nicely integrates a racism angle. The child-and-widowed-mom dimension adds a bit of sweetness but without getting sentimental, and there’s a nice balance of tenderness and toughness throughout. Very well directed and photographed as usual.

There’s Hitchcock of course, and I’m sure several others, but Mann has to figure too in the list of the directors who made the largest amount of good-to-great films in the decade. (Men in War, which will be on my list, is a must-see.)


Ashes and Diamonds (Wajda 1958). Twbb mentioned the “formal mastery and strong characterization”, the two things that hit me the most, and it’s impressive to see the excellence Wajda achieved so early in his career. Really a multi-layered film that has a lot going on, including those humorous bits you tend to forget. The film’s center is obviously Maciek, but the film’s sympathies are broader, shining a light even into the secretary of the communist party’s concerns, and in his own group’s past struggles. The film brings home the sense of lives sacrificed for political ideologies, and the Polish blood continuing to be spilled (as underlined in The Red Poppies in Monte Cassino that the bar singer sings) for this “new dawn” in the nation’s history.

[senseabove]

Just a heads up that if anybody was tempted to pick up the currently available US StudioCanal release of The Ladykillers, it has no extras, despite the bevy of them still listed on the back of the package. The menu has options for playing the film and selecting the scene or language, a blank space where the "Extras" menu was on the original release, and a "Back" button to return to the country select screen. That's it. I even checked on my external BD drive to make sure they didn't just remove access for some reason—they re-encoded the disc on a single layer and I guess just used leftover disc art from the previous release. So if you want to pick this one up now, seems like the UK Vintage Classics release is the way to go.

[therewillbeblus]

Did you purchase the release advertised with the extras? That's so ridiculous.

[senseabove]

Yep, purchased and will now return...

[therewillbeblus]

Just doing a quick search online, there are Amazon reviews dating back to 2 years ago complaining about this very same false advertising on the StudioCanal blu. You'd think after what I'd imagine are many complaints in that time frame, this would be clarified across sites selling the disc.

[swo17]

So wait, does my UK edition not include extras? I have the StudioCanal 60th anniversary edition released in 2015, as yet unopened. It advertises a bunch of extras, many of them branded as "NEW"

[therewillbeblus]

So wait, does my UK edition not include extras? I have the StudioCanal 60th anniversary edition released in 2015, as yet unopened. It advertises a bunch of extras, many of them branded as "NEW"

I'm not seeing anything negative about the 2015 UK version on amazon.uk - so it may just be the U.S. version. But considering the U.S. jacket advertises these extras and doesn't contain them, there may be only one way to find out...

[senseabove]

So wait, does my UK edition not include extras? I have the StudioCanal 60th anniversary edition released in 2015, as yet unopened. It advertises a bunch of extras, many of them branded as "NEW"

I have a copy of that one on the way, so I'll report back when it arrives.

[therewillbeblus]

The Black Orchid started out as a typical melodrama and slowly grew on me until in the last act everything clicked and I realized why: this is an authentic demonstration of 'real' melodrama, transmitted through artifice of cinematic genre (technical choices, somber music, all the cues!) knives already wrote it best:

The film is a kindred spirit with Marty, A Day of Wine and Roses and all the other depressive self absorbed nonsense of the era, but smartly leaves that all to the fringes allowing it to naturally spill out so that this romance grounds the film. It's a problem picture with no problem! Most of these are one issue films that don't even know how to tackle the issue in any intelligent fashion, but this one takes on half a dozen at least and without ever commenting on them gives a fully realized presentation of what the problem is and how it affects those around it and possibly even causes other problems (i.e. the way that Loren's behavior feeds into Ralphie's). Fortunately the characters come first and any ax to grind is naturally borne from that.

The end of this paragraph gets at the film's greatest strength- honesty in showing how shifting in interpersonal systems affect all parts (people) of the system. The emotional space between any two characters, even in a classic shot-reverse-shot with heavy music pounding, is gentle in its precision of conveying a sharpness of ennui. The loudest exchanges aren't overblown but an exhibition of desperate and commendable actions to communicate despite the barriers obstructing these relationships from reciprocally growing. The pathos doesn't poison the hope, but -while they certainly affect one another- they also exist exclusively from one another, and the painful sadness can even feed into assisting the motivation to try harder to achieving the goal of the hopeful space. This is a film full of characters who don't know what to do, just like in life, and yet they find their blueprints for moving though it in themselves through relationships with other people. It doesn't get more truthful than that.

Ritt reminds me a lot of Robson here in his systemic theoretical comprehension, though his sensitivity toward subtle internalized experience is his greatest asset, and one that he harnesses into an optimistic view on socialization, compared to No Down Payment! Seeing the family act as a family with nonverbal communication, engaging in banal activities like eating a meal, we really get the sense of how much one can enjoy simple trivialities in day-to-day life when in a state of support, love, and gratitude.

[therewillbeblus]

Silk Stockings surprised me right out of the gate in revealing itself to be a musical version of Ninotchka! The strengths between them couldn’t be more distinct, for while the Lubitsch is a laugh riot, this one falters on the humor but has a few solid numbers to sway itself into a stagey light romanticism. I've always felt that the romance feels too heavy and curiously placed in the Lubitsch, which tries to strike a balance between cross-cultural comedy and drama by injecting the romance with self-seriousness that doesn't fit. The tonal shifts are better served here for embracing the mood of a breezy dream, where song and dance can convey what strong words and music cannot, retaining a safer modality to deliver the story that's far cuter and less intensely emotional than the prior adaptation. The film is not without its own comic moments (the typewriter sound effect gag is funny) but most attempts as humor fall flat, including the three Russians. They aren't a complete wash, and Lorre is inspired casting, but they don't take advantage of the potential in these terrific character dynamics.

The technical aspects were inconsistent too, at least for the non-musical parts, with the filmmakers seemingly undecided at how to shoot the action, especially in the first half. At times this feels like a play, with stagnant wide shots of dialogue exchange detaching me from the cinematic elements when lingering for an odd amount of time, before abruptly changing to medium shots and close ups with no triggering event. The numbers are another story. They range in quality but the weaker ones are still good and there are more than a few gems. Stereophonic Sound is incredible, using sound itself for noticeably witty effect during the singing portions, and some really unique reciprocal moves like the body crawl on the desk- plus the song is terrific too. Fated to Be Mated might beat it though, and the accompanying dance commands the set's space with confidence in a manner that reminded me of some of my favorite dances from Kiss Me Kate.

In the end, it's a bit too long and generally uneven in style and vibe, but the exciting numbers keep coming through the final act to stop this from petering out as it nears two hours. The always reliable Cyd Charisse comes more and more alive during this progression, which greatly helps as her character develops almost directly through dance, a liberation that evolves in a way few musicals pull off with purity. The second half saves the first half (although Stereophonic Sound and a few other strong scenes come early), I just wish the form of the whole movie was as tight and well-organized as the musical numbers.

[alacal2]

Just to confirm that the UK Studio Canal 60th Anniversary Edition of The Ladykillers DOES have all the extras listed. Philip Kemp's commentary is particularly informative.

[therewillbeblus]

Making my way through the rest of the musicals on domino's list yielded three strong first-viewings:

Kismet: I was scratching my head for the first twenty minutes of this nth iteration of the story until the number Not Since Nineveh revealed itself to be one of the most fluid pieces of choreographed camerawork I’ve seen in a 50s musical. From that moment this film soared for me. Ann Blyth’s natural combination of innocence and provocative sensuality worked wonders, especially in a song like Stranger in Paradise where she flaunts her confidence and then peels back to respond nonverbally with doe-eyed vulnerable longing to Damone’s affectionate declarations. I’ll be the first to admit that there is a subjective hurdle I must pass to give rope to these kinds of films with white actors in Middle Eastern garb, expressing themselves within a foreign culture through stereotypes. However, Minnelli goes for broke and succeeds in finding a rhythm that could have easily imploded into ridiculousness, partly by embracing its eccentric wildness with self-awareness.

The tone is pure romantic artifice, where these exaggerated takes on an unknown milieu can exist to transmit platforms for relatable comedic interpersonal gags and dramatic exposition on love’s pain and harmony. The actors sell a lot of what works, Blyth holding down the range of performance in gleeful passion and confounded pathos, but the others really challenge us to get on their goofy wavelength and effectively convince after a shaky start. The relentless energy allowed me to overcome that normally-difficult barrier to transcend, with even the bit parts animated with a confidence I had to admire, and stretch my attention to the beautiful mise en scene of lavish set and costume design. While I wasn’t invested in the actual narrative at play, I was entranced by the polarizing emotional shifts that added fuel to the fire of cinematic pleasures. It takes a great musical to make you emotionally floored and feel welcomed into a party of silliness at once, but this one pulls it off. The late numbers where Blyth is missing her love begins subtly somber in The Olive Tree, and before long has escalated to a loud command of screaming endearment, in what may be the film’s greatest moment, at the end of And This Is My Beloved. This is one that I’d kill to see on the big screen.


A Girl Can’t Help It is a riot, with Edmond O’Brien playing a cheesier version of his gangster persona on steroids of hamminess, and the salient, catchy theme song interrupting scenes with non-diegetic high volume. Mansfield works better than Monroe in her own self-reflexive roles, as Tashlin has her strutting around confusing men by embodying her stereotype. As Ewell tries to engage her in conversations that would give her complex shades of personality, Mansfield doubles down by admitting to being a unidimensional sexpot - even using the word! Watching him puzzled, continuously prompting and feeding her opportunities to give a typical rom-com answer to flesh herself out, only to have the pop-image reinforced, is another intricately-conceived and perfectly orchestrated Tashlin idea to add to the books. Of course this changes a bit organically when not being forced, or perhaps more in Ewell and us finding authenticity in Mansfield's persona rather than trying to make her different. This works best as a comedy rather than a musical- not that it isn’t refreshing to see and hear Little Richard and co. take the stage and weave their jams into the celluloid between bits - but it’s not the reason to tune in here. This is Tashlin exerting clever mechanics in social hierarchy and archetypes-as-reality to expose absurdist human behavior


Two Tickets to Broadway is the best musical I’ve seen in a long time, serving as an opposite to the Minnelli by winning us over immediately into the characters and dynamics at play. The way characters are introduced in the first act is magical in its diversity of ideas, and the screenwriting is terrific in allowing them to form dimensions through inferred roles. This is often done by guessing how they fit in based on the gender of a person one character ambiguously mentions in a prior scene, which concocts an intriguing and mysterious amalgamation of a plot forming before our eyes. The initial setup attends to feminine camaraderie, where fun personalities immediately flesh themselves out in playing off of one another, even before Leigh graces the screen and enters their clique. The gossip about men in their lives leaves the audience wondering who’s who in the next batch of introductions, and after a terrific comedy bit with a mismatched butcher duo (who may or may not double as pawn brokers for watches), Eddie Bracken inserts his own unique spirit into the puzzle and the plots overlap in a train station setpiece where a flamboyant cop facilitates a goofy backfiring sting. I was mesmerized by at least a handful of these actors and their blossoming dynamics, as well as being fed details on some of their hilariously resentful histories, by the time any romantic sparks fly.

Bracken’s histrionic heartbreaker is such a strange character for his staple loser qualities, but he makes it work by wavering between ignorant self-assurance and pathetic vulnerability. It’s easily one of my favorite roles of his- and I’ve never disliked him. His first song drives home the enigmatic blend, while the subsequent one with Leigh and Martin is beautiful in its modesty, captured from a God’s-eye-view marveling at their budding attraction. The feminine gang isn’t wholly disrupted by the inclusion of men, as they get their own great tapdancing number in color-coated dress. The entire ensemble is so alive and bursting with affection for the genre, and the filmmakers help in demonstrating a keen understanding of the comic possibilities in these fantasy-worlds, building it with the bricks of involving mechanisms for the audience, to scratch a new cinematic itch in every scene. This is definitely one of the most purely entertaining musicals, drawing on the most intelligently-organized character dynamics to drive these successes. Leigh continues to harp on strangers as a less obvious running joke, which further emphasizes how every character has a strong personality getting them in trouble and yet serving as a key for participation in this crazy social world. To add to its eclectic focus, the film also combines several types of musicals, giving us toned down, whimsical numbers in the private backyard, as well extravagant ones on a circus stage. It’s not a novel method but it’s done exceptionally well.