1950s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[knives]

But I think most of the criticisms I could level at the movie are also critiques I could make of Sunrise, and as with Sunrise the sheer poeticism of the story (particularly the journey across the river and the climax of the Genjuro/Wakasa arc) overwhelm the issues I have with it. I'm not sure I wound up getting the ghost story I was expecting, exactly, but it did feel like a well realized sort of fairy tale, one which expresses and reinforces a culture's underlying ideology. I may not like that ideology, but I don't think I can reject the story nor the beautifully expressive telling of it.

You're right, though I find Sunrise's style to be far more fascinating and I think generally on gender politics if not the class stuff Murnau's career illustrates more complexity on this issue while Mizoguchi reinforces the sexist attitude. I've spent enough ink on the man though so I should spend it on something new.

Carousel
Given the reputation of R&H here I'm very embarrassed to admit I liked this one a well bit. The story doesn't entirely translate well to America and the music here is significantly worse than that in Carmen Jones and The Sound of Music, but not to the extant where it detracts from the film. Obviously casting is the big thing here and fortunately everyone works great. I'm curious to see what Frank Sinatra would have done with the role, but MacRae plays our ghost in such a way that Sinatra could never do. Compared to the other attempts by King to pull off a more feminine story this is aces.

David and Bathsheba
Wish I could be so embarrassed here, but aside from a few ballsy attempts at subverting expectations this is pretty generic slop that isn't composed very well. Speaking to the subversion I do like how we have this giant lavish biblical epic that is one of the most famous, yet we get a domestic drama instead. When the big slaying scene does come up it's played almost for laughs and is gone in a blink. Hell even Peck isn't bad in the role though Hayward does most of the heavy lifting. I guess my big problem is with the writing then which while not bad could use some significant tightening.

Demetrius and the Gladiators
So much better than The Robe and actually this might be the best sword and sandals of the decade (small compliment I realize). Everything's improved from the original here done to the performances (Mature's not annoying, the guy playing Caligula gets to showoff even more). It's not a particularly deep piece, but it manages to do what most of these cinemascope epics try and fail at. Be exquisite and overly entertaining.

Helen of Troy
I seriously did not intend this this week, but an other sucker is present, this time from Warner's. There's nothing really to say. It's a slightly goofy film from Wise with some terrible acting mixed with some people slumming it. It's not as bad as some of these, but isn't really good. It just sits there as a comfortable meh.

The Rising of the Moon
This is top of the line Ford doing some of what he does best and a lot of what he usually has trouble with greatly. There's not a false note to the picture as Ford starts us with the time to appreciate the main character of the piece his beloved Ireland (and sorry Dom, but this first story is probably my favorite) before giving us a few laughs and a really interesting reprise of his Irish dramas of the '30s. That last story is far more successful than it's immediate predecessors with a pretty funny ending that still manages to have dramatic heft.

Les Enfants Terrible
This was a delightfully different melding of two very different personalities. Going in I actually had no clue how Melville's style was going to meld with Coteau's, but it seems that wasn't a worry at all as Melville drastically changes that for the film. There's still his touch throughout the film particularly with regards to faces, but he also seems to change to something more playful and bouncy in fitting with Cocteau's wry grin. Easily the most successful example I've seen of extreme personalities working when they shouldn't.

The White Sheik
I went into this thinking it was going to be at best B level Fellini and coming right after Variety Lights gave me less hope, but despite it's toss off nature the film remains very fun without losing the dramatic sentimentality that only Fellini can seem to work with. If there is a great element to the film is how it plays with those Fellini concepts of the real versus the hoped for. How the lead wants the sheik to be and the very pathetic person he actually is is an amazing triumph of emotional toying. We get in her head so much with this concept that it's easy to ignore the hints of who he is until it just punches us in the face. Also adored the little pre-cameo of Cabiria.

The Greatest Show on Earth/ Around the World in 80 Days/ An American in Paris
With these three I finally got all of the '50s BPW. None are particularly bad though the Minnelli has some pretty glaring flaws. They're all pretty fun distractions with enough smarts to realize they're just that.

Suddenly, Last Summer
This is one of the best Tennessee Williams adaptations I've seen (and really the only great gay one) with one of the most haunting endings I've ever seen. The final tip to the iceberg is rather silly (sea urchins), but Taylor amazingly sells it using all the talent she has in her body for a great monologue situated in just the right way to make things funny. Hepburn really steals the show though with her pure venom. You need only to see her introduction to understand how Sebastian got to be so cruel. I blame Williams entirely for how complex he becomes over the course of the film being more real than had he actually showed up. What I can't give him credit for is just how cinematicly every moment in communicated. If not for All About Eve I'd say this was Mank's triumph of the decade. Hell, his end of the deal is so good that for the average director this would be a career great.

[puxzkkx]

If you haven't seen Un si jolie petite plage yet, I strongly recommend it. I doubt it'll change your mind about his misogyny, but hey, there's one sympathetic female character!

Common opinion is that Yves Allégret started to decline after the noir trilogy of Dédée d'Anvers, Un si jolie petite plage and Manèges. Then again, Cahiers du cinéma considered him among the best French filmmakers ("the ambitious") as late as 1956. Unfortunately, so few of his films from this decade are available, so I don't know who to believe.

Truffaut didn't like him, did he?

I found both of these films interesting even if they weren't fantastic - even if those are known as his best I believe that The Proud and the Beautiful still has quite a good reputation. I've been looking for Une si jolie petite plage without luck, and I don't know if I'd even be able to find Dédée d'Anvers outside of a French opshop!

[Tommaso]

Les Enfants Terrible
This was a delightfully different melding of two very different personalities. Going in I actually had no clue how Melville's style was going to meld with Coteau's, but it seems that wasn't a worry at all as Melville drastically changes that for the film. There's still his touch throughout the film particularly with regards to faces, but he also seems to change to something more playful and bouncy in fitting with Cocteau's wry grin. Easily the most successful example I've seen of extreme personalities working when they shouldn't.

Yes, it's basically like a Cocteau film, and Cocteau's influence here is at least as overwhelming as it had been seven years earlier with Delannoy's "L'éternel retour". It starts with the narration and the lighting, and even the more claustrophobic atmosphere of some scenes isn't dissimilar to Cocteau's own "Les parents terribles" made the year before. All this doesn't work to the detriment of the film, which is wonderfully intense and 'poetic' in the particular sense in which Cocteau used the word. Definitely on my list, even though of course Orphée will get the higher position (I have it at #1, actually).

Talking about French films with a supernatural drift, I would recommend Jacqueline Audry's Huis clos aka No Exit (1954), based on Sartre's stage play of the same name in which we learn that 'hell is other people'. Indeed, so we see a couple of newly arrived people in hell, which is shown as a posh hotel, and how they begin to torment each other because of their different personalities and the way they continue to try to live the lies the way they did when they were still alive. Some of it doesn't work anymore, like the 'quasi-cinema showing' of what is going on in the lives of the people they once loved, but it's very well filmed in general (those empty corridors beyond the room in which the central three people sit!), there's a great intensity to their verbal duels, and Arletty as one of the main characters gives a knock-out performance.

[puxzkkx]

Speaking of Sartre, he provided the story for Allégret's The Proud and the Beautiful and was Oscar-nominated for it. The result seems appropriately 'his' except for that uncharacteristic ending.

[thirtyframesasecond]

After watching There's Always Tomorrow and A Time To Love and A Time To Die, I am slightly worried that Sirk (and Nicholas Ray) might take up a lot of places in my list for the 50s.

[knives]

Yes, it's basically like a Cocteau film, and Cocteau's influence here is at least as overwhelming as it had been seven years earlier with Delannoy's "L'éternel retour". It starts with the narration and the lighting, and even the more claustrophobic atmosphere of some scenes isn't dissimilar to Cocteau's own "Les parents terribles" made the year before. All this doesn't work to the detriment of the film, which is wonderfully intense and 'poetic' in the particular sense in which Cocteau used the word. Definitely on my list, even though of course Orphée will get the higher position (I have it at #1, actually).

Oh yes. For fear of offending anyone I didn't want to explicitly state that, but it really does become Cocteau's own which is a bit funny considering how possessive Melville supposedly was on the project. I'm not really a fan of Orphée so unless Cocteau has some secret third film for the decade I'm guessing this will be his only chance for the decade (next decade though he may steal my number one slot).

[Tommaso]

So you like "Testament" better than Orphée? I wouldn't have expected to hear that (from anyone), but somehow it's good to see that someone appreciates that film so much, as it is often slightly dismissed in the Cocteau canon. Unless you have "Thomas l'Imposteur" in mind for the next decade, of course.

[domino harvey]

So you like "Testament" better than Orphée? I wouldn't have expected to hear that (from anyone), but somehow it's good to see that someone appreciates that film so much, as it is often slightly dismissed in the Cocteau canon.

The Cahiers crew thought the same, though given its wild self-reflexivity, that's not too surprising. I can't stand it (or the Melville), but I love Orphée

[knives]

Absolutely thinking of Testament which I think manages to interestingly reflect on Cocteau's career and toy with narrative as being something other than telling linear stories while being just the funnest thing under the sun.

[Tommaso]

Yes, it's charming, simply because of Cocteau playing himself and revisiting his whole ideas and the main concerns of Orphée itself, but it's also pretty self-indulgent. The non-linear narrative strikes me more as an absence of narrative for the most part, but that's not a problem. It's also nice to see all his friends and fellow artists making an appearance; it almost feels like a summing-up of an era. So, I really don't have anything against "Testament", but for me it still isn't on the same level as Orphée, which I find wonderously inventive, exceedingly well written, a masterpiece of astonishingly simple special effects, and completely touching in its final scenes in which Madame La Mort becomes the loving and vulnerable woman that one has always suspected behind her austere appearance. Really a one-of-a-kind film; it might be the film I've watched most often in my life and I always return to it on a very regular basis, perhaps even more often than I re-watch "The Red Shoes" or "Der Kongress tanzt". And don't get me started on Maria Casarès in the first place...

[knives]

Orphée is actually probably my least favorite Coteau anything so I doubt we'll ever agree ultimately on this. That said as a personal philosophy I think it's impossible to have an absence of narrative. Even Brakhage presents an intellectual arc to his pieces and Cocteau certainly doesn't go that far. In fact I'd say the film at it's core has a pretty simple story of the poet from the first film reliving his life to understand if it was worth it. It's almost like Wild Strawberries in that very broad sense.

[swo17]

Speaking of strange opinions, I suppose I have my own about Minnelli. Though perhaps it is not terribly surprising that the guy whose favorite '40s Minnelli was I Dood It would favor in the '50s

Spoiler

Kismet

This is what happens domino when I don't have your guides to guide my viewing!

[knives]

There's nothing to be embarrassed about there. I adore the movie too though it's not his best in the decade by a long shot (Bandwagon's got my vote).

[domino harvey]

This is what happens domino when I don't have your guides to guide my viewing!

Guilty as charged (though breathe easy, Kismet'll be red )-- now's terrible for me, but in two weeks it's Spring Break and I intend to crank out the dozen or so remaining auteur guides I promised. Patience, &c

[Calvin]

I'd like to nominate as my spotlight title Nikos Koundouros' O Drakos (known in English as The Dragon, The Ogre of Athens or The Fiend of Athens) which is practically the dictionary definition of 'forgotten masterpiece'. Recently, it was voted the best Greek film of all time by the Greek Film Critics Association and it's not hard to see why - it's a terrific film noir that follows the conventions of a Greek Tragedy and contains a very energetic element of satirical black comedy. The lighting is particularly masterful and if you didn't know better it could easily have been directed by Carol Reed or Orson Welles. Peter Bradshaw summed it up more eloquently than I could.

As far as I'm aware, there is no DVD release (at least with English subs) but there are English-subtitled copies floating around on the web.

[starmanof51]

Spoiler

Kismet

Way better than it's reputation at any rate. I was tapping fingers and losing patience until Dolores Gray showed up, and then it was all guns firing, Vic Damone be damned!

[matrixschmatrix]

Les Cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959)

For almost exactly half of this movie, I thought it was absolutely awful, some sort of pick up artist field guide demonstrating how a misogynistic asshole is immensely socially successful while a wallflower (who doesn't seem to have any especially likable characteristics in his own right) is dominated at every turn. There seemed to be no nuance, no subtlety, and no hook to draw me in beyond the further adventures of an asshole in his social circle full of people who hang out with assholes. I was so frustrated with the movie that I started over and watched the commentary up through where I had gotten- and the commentary is absolutely excellent, apart from any consideration of the movie's quality- and then turned it off.

Tonight, I went back and picked up where I left off, and oddly, the movie seemed far more interesting from that point. The scene immediately after the halfway mark, wherein Paul and Clovis browbeat and humiliate Florence, is almost unbearable- but is also the first situation in which we actually see how much of Paul's character is a put-on, touch bottom with his moral character, and see him show a tenderness and an unwillingness to play out the game he started, but which Clovis has pushed to an infinitely crueller place. Paul is not genuinely a sadist or a nihilist, any more than Charles is genuinely a complete innocent, and it's at this point he becomes a sympathetic character, trapped by the image he has created of himself.

Though the rest of the movie plays out more or less as though Paul was what he pretends to be- certainly, the situation into which he pushes Charles and Florence is as cruel as anything we see the Satanic Clovis do- that glimpse of the real him totally changes the character of the movie. It's also clear that Paul isn't particularly out to crush Charles, but that Charles is so damnably self-defeating that Paul more or less can't stop it happening. Even Paul's goddamn douchebag goatee becomes an affectation within the movie rather than something genuinely reflecting his character. The fact that it makes him look like a jerk only heightens the sense that his lifestyle isn't some marvelous reward for vice, but a trap as sure as that into which Charles has pushed himself.

The actual characters still drive me up a wall- Paul's intolerable, Charles is weak (and eventually demonstrates a misogynistic streak of his own), and Florence seems incapable of asserting herself- but I suppose that's only reasonable, as the movie seems to be about the characters people find themselves playing and how they become unbearable. I'm not sure that I think the movie is a masterpiece, but neither does it feel like the worthless exercise in cruelty I thought it for fifty minutes or so. I'd be fascinated to watch more developed Chabrol works, too.

[puxzkkx]

Earl McEvoy's The Killer That Stalked New York is the kind of creatively put-together low-budget thriller that would have contributed to the French beatification of those directors working within the oppressive structures of 'B' pictures. Now, the film is still fascinating but the interest factor of the unusual story structure comes off as more accidental than anything.

The story details the last days of Sheila Bennet (Evelyn Keyes), who has smuggled jewels from Cuba to NYC for her Latin (? - the accent is bizarre) boyfriend, who has been cheating on her with her own sister. She has been suffering from headaches and body pains - unbeknownst to her, she has contracted smallpox and has been spreading it around since her return to the city.

Her sister commits suicide when the two-timing boyfriend takes the jewels and runs - the film balances the story of Sheila's quest for revenge against her ex-lover with two procedural storylines - the Treasury Dept. men following her for the jewel theft and the doctors readying a citywide vaccination programme after noticing symptoms of smallpox in several people that had contact with Sheila.

Keyes' Typhoid Mary figure links the three plots, and the film creates interesting tensions in audience identification, as the leads of each story strand are presented as protagonists despite Sheila providing a 'villain' role in two of them. The creativity of this approach appears to be a happy accident - the clichés of every 'issue film' of the time are on full parade here. Keyes was never a great actress but acquits herself well here, the rest of the cast is fine save for a bizarre Charles Korvin

[Siddon]

I'm curious to know what peoples takes are on the classic "B" pictures of this era. I think that this is a period of time when we had so many film movements in foreign countries (Japan, France, Sweden) that we sort of neglect the American genre pictures.

Are people going to vote for Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Forbidden Planet, Day The Earth Stood Still, House on Haunted Hill, The Thing from Another World, The Tingler, Curse of the Demon/Night of the Demon, Them, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and Creature From the Black Lagoon.

House on Haunted Hill may just be my personal number one film from the 50's. I feel like William Castle is sort of a genius in the sense that most horror films are all about the building of suspense and the final act. Castle sort of throws that idea to the wind. Castle was a man about commercialization of film, when he shot Hill he had Television in mind and set up the commercial breaks in his own film. For most Auteurs this idea would seem beneath them but Castle going against the grain in my eyes makes him a maverick. I don't know if their is a movie you can watch over and over and over again like you can watch Hill. The only other movie I can think of is Clue (1985) and that's basically a followup to House on Haunted Hill.

And even though I fell in love with the structure of the film it does have some pretty great acting in it as well. Vincent Price isn't an actor for everyone but this is his best work. This film sort of embodies what made him so great the way he could walk that line between good and evil with an effeminate or aristocratic nature that is missing from most actors. Nowadays every lead character has to a "man of the people" that rarely do you have leads that are interesting characters. You also had a great supporting performance from Elisha Cook Jr, who plays this sadsack. He's a character that is aware of his death and plays it as such, 99% of horror actors seem to have no self awareness Cook's character seems to have total knowledge.

[colinr0380]

The other really important "B" film here is The Incredible Shrinking Man.

While Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the high water mark, don't forget about Inavders From Mars and all of the other possession/alien invasion films such as I Married A Monster From Outer Space (quite Lewton-esque in its surprisingly sensitive treatment of a lurid title!), It Came From Outer Space, the wonderful This Island Earth and It! The Terror From Beyond Space!

I also have a soft spot for those disaster/post-apocalypse movies such as The Day The World Ended (in which the end of civilization is primarily used as an excuse for a rubber-suited monster to run amok!) and on the other end of the budget spectrum the excellent When Worlds Collide a film which still feels influential to this day, with certain elements from it turning up in everything from Deep Impact to 2012.

[knives]

Vincent Price isn't an actor for everyone but this is his best work.

I think you're missing out on several of his works with this statement. Witchfinder General (which I'll vote for next decade) alone is very superior to his work here (though I still think it's a good effort). To be honest I despite their massive popularity I don't think the B movies of the '50s are as good as their '40s or '60s peers. They're just too in between the two decades styles to work entirely. There is certainly a few titles like The Wasp Woman that work, but most are either just terrible (everything by Ray Kellogg) or a certain funless blandness.

[matrixschmatrix]

Forbidden Planet and This Island Earth are both possibles on my list- the former is stodgy and crawls a bit in places, but the sense of seeing a movie that brings to life an Amazing Stories cover is something it does as well or better than anyone since, modern era included. And I love the touch of having our heroic crew running around in a flying saucer without ever making a big deal out of it.

This Island Earth is probably the more entertaining of the two- though I love the Mystery Science Theater movie so much that part of my joy in watching it may be my memories of that- but the really genius, imaginative section on the alien homeworld is so damned short that I feel like it's taunting me.

(And Vincent Price's best movie is While the City Sleeps, it's the perfect amalgam of the sly bastard side of his persona he usually worked in the fifties and the noirish juvenile lead he played in Laura.)

[colinr0380]

This Island Earth is probably the more entertaining of the two- though I love the Mystery Science Theater movie so much that part of my joy in watching it may be my memories of that- but the really genius, imaginative section on the alien homeworld is so damned short that I feel like it's taunting me.

This B movie discussion reminded me of a 1960s animated film that I was really fascinated with as a child (I remember pestering my dad to let me re-hire it out from the video store about two or three times in a row!) called Pinocchio In Outer Space. I don't remember any of the plotting or exactly why Pinocchio needed to be in outer space - I just remember being fascinated by one particular sequence in a Martian underground complex where the characters explore a couple of large caverns pulsing with red and green lights, then being kind of fascinated by the characters running back through the same caverns to escape as they collapse around them (It was probably the nearest thing that a seven or eight year old could get hold of in the disaster movie vein!). In retrospect I guess it is doing the Invaders From Mars trick (one later picked up by video games) of rushing you through grand areas, first to keep the plot momentum going and then to escape, something which makes the areas seem bigger and more fascinating somehow.

[knives]

(And Vincent Price's best movie is While the City Sleeps, it's the perfect amalgam of the sly bastard side of his persona he usually worked in the fifties and the noirish juvenile lead he played in Laura.

You've got me at the disadvantage that I haven't seen that one yet (despite seeing Green Hell where he barely features). I adore all of his personas equally though so a combination should only stand as better.

[zedz]

Of the b-movies mentioned above, the only contender for me is Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which I feel has a lot more to offer (in terms of subtext, style and the sheer cast-iron creepiness of the premise) than the pulpy appeal of most of the other ones noted, though I've also got a soft spot for The Incredible Shrinking Man, again because it effectively drills down to the existential horror of its outlandish sci-fi concept.