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

An ongoing project to survey the best films of individual decades, genres, and filmmakers.
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Rayon Vert
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#826 Post by Rayon Vert » Sun Sep 20, 2020 4:29 pm

I wasn't left feeling the same way about Heflin's character by the denouement of the film, though, obviously. Great performance on his part.

Re: Crime Wave - it's ranking no 56 for me, so won't make the cut, but it's not on the orphan list, so maybe it's already got a couple of votes.

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swo17
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#827 Post by swo17 » Mon Sep 21, 2020 9:22 am

In case anyone needs a reminder, you have until the end of the day Sunday to send me revisions to your lists. You are also welcome to submit a list even if you didn't initially submit one before the Round 1 deadline

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Minkin
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#828 Post by Minkin » Fri Sep 25, 2020 3:13 pm

I'm sorry that I haven't been involved in this project. I wanted to put in some effort though before the second round ends. I ended up with 29 orphans. I'm not going to make the case for any of them (as its far too late for that), instead I'll be nice and rescue a bunch of orphans. So, whoever voted for the following films, keep on voting for them, as I plan to rescue them!

The Hidden Fortress (Akira Kurosawa, 1958)
The Trouble with Harry (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)
The War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953)
Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955)
Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954)
Harvey (Henry Koster, 1950)
Summer with Monika (Ingmar Bergman, 1953)
Un chant d'amour (Jean Genet, 1950)
The African Queen (John Huston, 1951)
The Prowler (Joseph Losey, 1951)
The Court Jester (Melvin Frank & Norman Panama, 1951)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958)
Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958)
Robot Monster (Phil Tucker, 1953) - the list needs more B movies
=========

If anyone has any shorts (like less than 10 minutes) - I'll do my best to watch them, but I can't make any big promises. I do have a lot of spots open still for more orphan rescues.

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Feego
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#829 Post by Feego » Fri Sep 25, 2020 4:44 pm

Minkin wrote:
Fri Sep 25, 2020 3:13 pm
So, whoever voted for the following films, keep on voting for them, as I plan to rescue them!

The War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953)
Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954)
Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958)
Thanks! :D

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movielocke
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#830 Post by movielocke » Fri Sep 25, 2020 7:24 pm

I voted for the following orphans btw, so don't discard them from your list:

La Pointe courte
rabbit of seville
donald in mathmagic land
what's opera doc?
african queen
the world the flesh and the devil
the hitch-hiker
the horse's mouth
friendly persuasion
the little house
harvey
corn chips
invention for destruction
one froggy evening
seven brides for seven brothers.

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swo17
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#831 Post by swo17 » Sat Sep 26, 2020 11:39 am

Just realized I'd listed Claude Autant-Lara's The Red Inn/L'auberge rouge (1951) as an orphan, when what was actually voted for was his The Red and the Black/Le rouge et le noir (1954). My apologies for the error

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therewillbeblus
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#832 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Sep 26, 2020 1:19 pm

[*RV drops everything to concoct last-minute defense*]

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Rayon Vert
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#833 Post by Rayon Vert » Sat Sep 26, 2020 1:26 pm

:lol: I'm guessing I was probably the one whose inclusion of it was originally mistaken as swo made his post not longer after I sent my revised list and I'd also written the title down in the original French (rouge must account for the confusion), which makes my day 'cause it means someone else voted for it - hopefully you blus!

Very nice write-up on The Long Gray Line btw - I'm guessing that means it's another vote for it. It's def on my list, albeit a bit low.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#834 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Sep 26, 2020 1:29 pm

Image

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therewillbeblus
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#835 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Sep 26, 2020 1:31 pm

Rayon Vert wrote:
Sat Sep 26, 2020 1:26 pm
Very nice write-up on The Long Gray Line btw - I'm guessing that means it's another vote for it. It's def on my list, albeit a bit low.
I think I’ll have to find room for it, along with a handful of others, but I have no idea how

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Rayon Vert
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#836 Post by Rayon Vert » Sat Sep 26, 2020 1:37 pm

Don't sweat it, I say - it's impossible to make a top 50 without sacrificing a lot of favorites.

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swo17
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#837 Post by swo17 » Sat Sep 26, 2020 1:43 pm

Rayon Vert wrote:
Sat Sep 26, 2020 1:26 pm
which makes my day 'cause it means someone else voted for it - hopefully you blus!
Sorry to ruin your day, but it's still an orphan. And now I'm going to go watch it out of guilt

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domino harvey
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#838 Post by domino harvey » Sat Sep 26, 2020 2:29 pm

I think my days of gamifying these lists are behind me: unless someone felt truly passionate about a new discovery gleaned from an orphaned title, I’d much rather see the usual idiosyncratic tastes that reflect one’s actual top 50 rather than rescuing someone’s pick by sacrificing their own of somewhat transitive personal value. Thus I really felt no compulsion to advertise for any of my orphans, and seeing more than one title I actively dislike getting bandied about for “saving” from some fellow sucker’s list tells me it’s all a fool’s errand anyways. Of course, I would be the one to come up with a way to justify having a lot of orphans, wouldn’t I

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therewillbeblus
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#839 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Sep 26, 2020 5:14 pm

Well that's the thing- I have no intention of sacrificing my orphans, and since these lists are really just a fleeting arrangement of personal opinions depending on the day, my 40s list would certainly look different, as may my 50s after a two week window, but not enough to get rid of the eccentric entries. The ones I want to "save" are really just the next few that were already on my list until the last minute, plus maybe one new watch

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swo17
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#840 Post by swo17 » Sat Sep 26, 2020 5:25 pm

Yeah, I don't necessarily encourage "gaming" though I will make any revisions submitted no questions asked. Also, I guess if someone is that willing to abandon their orphans, they must not have loved them that much to begin with

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dustybooks
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#841 Post by dustybooks » Sat Sep 26, 2020 11:06 pm

I kept about half my orphans and replaced the other half with films I very much love that were in the orphan rescue list and one that I happened to see for the first time in the interim. I dunno, it's all just a bit of fun.

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domino harvey
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#842 Post by domino harvey » Sun Sep 27, 2020 12:12 am

Unfortunately Fun was an orphan for me on the 90s List

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dustybooks
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#843 Post by dustybooks » Sun Sep 27, 2020 1:54 am

I'm afraid it's now my solemn duty to invoke Marilyn Manson.

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the preacher
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#844 Post by the preacher » Sun Sep 27, 2020 6:55 am

swo17 wrote:
Mon Aug 31, 2020 2:22 pm
Where Chimneys Are Seen (Heinosuke Gosho, 1953) 19
Takekurabe (Heinosuke Gosho, 1955) 32
Elegy (Heinosuke Gosho, 1957) 45
I would have liked to rescue a Gosho, but again there is no room available for him. Besides I slightly prefer Dispersed Clouds to Chimneys.

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#845 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun Sep 27, 2020 10:50 am

the preacher wrote:
Sun Sep 27, 2020 6:55 am
I would have liked to rescue a Gosho, but again there is no room available for him. Besides I slightly prefer Dispersed Clouds to Chimneys.
Alas, that's a Gosho I haven't seen yet.

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swo17
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#846 Post by swo17 » Sun Sep 27, 2020 5:51 pm

Welp, I'm going to have to find room* to rescue Trnka's Old Czech Legends, which is available on a lovely English-friendly DVD if you search on eBay. I wasn't necessarily expecting much from the still images I'd seen, but that's only because I didn't know that the camera would be filming its subjects in the most sweeping, epic manner possible. The technique here is simply astounding, making its crude puppets seem larger than life and evoking the mythic quality the film's title implies. Are any of Trnka's other features available on DVD like this? And if not, why?

*by dropping a big film that I have ranked rather low as opposed to an orphan, which makes much more sense to me

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therewillbeblus
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#847 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Sep 27, 2020 7:51 pm

That was really cool, thanks for the rec - it's even intermittently a musical (well at least the opening!)

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Red Screamer
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#848 Post by Red Screamer » Sun Sep 27, 2020 9:10 pm

Life has gotten in the way of me writing up more of my watches the past month but I wanted to share some thoughts about a couple orphans before we cross the finish line.

Trial (Mark Robson, 1955) and The Well (Leo Popkin and Russell Rouse, 1951) both have weird turns halfway through that split them into two distinct parts. The first half of each concerns a town's racist reactions to a young girl’s death and the resulting mob violence and lynching attempts. Then The Well becomes a suspense picture about professionals doing a difficult job (think of the opening landing attempt in Only Angels Have Wings) and its filmmaking becomes much tighter and more effective, even as it backs away from the fiery from-the-headlines drama of the first half, which is staged more functionally. Trial, on the other hand, goes from a cynical social issue movie about lawyers dealing with the racist assumptions of jurors to an overbaked red scare movie. The idea that left and right both throw the young man under the bus for different reasons could be a fertile idea for a movie, but instead the secondary oppressors become a scapegoat which, in their theatricality, supersede the first. Which is why everyone remembers Arthur Kennedy’s communist lawyer as the movie’s villain more than the Klan members from the beginning. And of course, the thing about many Communist villains in Hollywood is that, with few exceptions (one being The Steel Helmet’s North Korean POW who talks a lot of sense), they’re overgrown capitalists, greedy tax evaders and labor abusers, as Kennedy's character is here. I actually liked the scene of Dorothy McGuire’s confession to Ford about her communist past. There, the script found a surprising angle of critique, taking aim at American communists' ideological purity tests and reliance on the Soviet party line instead of internal support for policies. But the other red scare material is laughable. It’s plain bad screenwriting to have the teen’s mother pinball back and forth in her convictions as the plot needs her to, and the movie ending with Elisha Cook Jr’s assurance that HUAC doesn’t target people who don’t “deserve” it is straight up sickening.

TLDR: Trial is a slick and entertaining genre movie but it’s ultimately pretty brainless and backs away from the more interesting aspects of its first half. The Well is a more amateurishly made independent feature, but offers an alternative to Hollywood message movies…except in how the town sweetly comes together to do the right thing in the (more formally satisfying) second half. Overall, two flawed movies worth seeing, especially if you’re interested in broadening your sense of American politics in 50s movies. Though I doubt that hardcore fans of one movie will find much to like about the other.

The Trouble with Harry (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955) is Hitchcock’s Rio Bravo. Or maybe Peyton Place as a sitcom. His visual style gets loose and his touch gets light as he focuses on the rapport between his camera and the actors. MacLaine and Forsythe’s quiet dialogue on the porch (no music, no ambient sound IIRC) has to be one of the most quietly magical scenes in Hitchock, for its directness and gentle surprises. Forsythe’s role is fascinating as a Romantic testament to the power of art and how the artist’s outlook transforms the world. Not to play biographer-critic, but that essentially describes how the comedy works in this movie, not for laughs as much as to spin the story’s dark circumstances into the most optimistic outcomes through a series of tiny shifts. I never thought a later Hitchcock film would contain one of the single most romantic onscreen proposals! It was also a shock to see one of his recurring ideas in this period of his work, characters staging scenes for other characters like film directors, have positive consequences, compared to the tragic consequences of staging scenes in The Wrong Man and Vertigo, among others. That said, not all of it worked for me, with the MacLaine and Forsythe material being much stronger than everything else. But it’d be a contender for my list if Hitchcock didn’t already have so many stone cold masterpieces this decade.

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swo17
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#849 Post by swo17 » Sun Sep 27, 2020 10:55 pm

As a reminder, I'll accept revisions until I wake up tomorrow morning. I feel like there are people here who have hinted they'll be submitting one but haven't sent it to me yet

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movielocke
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Re: The 1950s List: Discussion and Suggestions

#850 Post by movielocke » Mon Sep 28, 2020 1:25 am

Since I forgot about the list for the first round, I used letterboxd to make my initial cull of 120ish titles, then went through the orphans and other lists here looking for things I may have missed, mixed it all up together on a fresh sheet, then I went through and sorted and resorted things, and had a lot of orphans on my list in the end.

I would never have thought of Donald in mathemagic land on my own, but once I saw it on the orphan list I knew it HAD to be on my list, I passionately adored that movie when I was 7 or 8 and watched it probably sixty or seventy times, and I still enjoy watching it. But I’ve never logged it in letterboxd and honestly didn’t know it was a fifties film, so I’d have completely missed it.

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