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

[swo17]

Hm, Tarpilot's comment that he linked to made me wonder- which directors have placed in every decades list thus far? Hawks, Ford, Lang, and Dreyer, I think? Did I miss any?

Probably also Chaplin, Lubitsch, and Walsh.

[knives]

If I'm understanding this thought Murnau probably counts too.

[tarpilot]

Hitchcock

EDIT: whoops, forgot about pre-1920s

[zedz]

Hawks wouldn't have had any in the pre-1920s list either.

[matrixschmatrix]

If I'm understanding this thought Murnau probably counts too.

I don't think Murnau made the 40s list.

Hawks wouldn't have had any in the pre-1920s list either.

My bad, I don't think Hawks even made the 20s list.

So the contenders right now are Chaplin, Lang, Lubitsch, Ford, Walsh, and Dreyer? Of whom Lubitsch can't possibly continue into the 50s?

[knives]

Pretty much and unfortunately I doubt Walsh will make the cut.

[matrixschmatrix]

Chaplin's at risk, too- I think Limelight was an also-ran last time.

On the other hand, Ford and Dreyer both seem like they've got a good shot at making not only this list but the 60s list as well, which is pretty astonishing- there's something shocking about the idea of one filmmaker going from the primitive silent era (and in Dreyer's case, being a really major silent filmmaker) into the New Wave generation- it's as though John Dowland had also cut some pretty sweet rock and roll 45s.

[knives]

Really? I'm not a Chaplin fan, but Limelight is amazing. It was an also ran for me, but I would love it to make the list in even just a low position.

[Shrew]

As loaded as my 50s list is, I'd be perfectly happy to rewrite history and vote for To Be or Not to Be again.

Speaking of which, I just realized I have practically no comedies on my list, which I suppose is inevitable with the departure of Lubitsch, Sturges, and screwball in general. There are some musicals and lots with comic elements, but I think the only out and out comedy is going to be The Horse's Mouth.

[matrixschmatrix]

I've got that one, Harvey, Mon oncle, and The Ladykillers- though unexpectedly, Harvey's the highest ranking one.

[knives]

I found Les espions pretty funny, but I suppose not everyone would call it a comedy even though Sam Jaffe's haircut should automatically consider it as part of the genre. Also of course all of America's greatest comedians for this decade are in animation. I wonder if it is too late to give an impassioned plea for Land of the Pharaohs which is not just Hawks' best film of the decade, but one of his best films ever posing a humongous challenge to his personal that he sets off with flying colours. Just the way he directs crowds is amazing turning these large bodies into a whole human in a way I've only ever seen Walter Hill do. It is perhaps his most visually expressive and stunning work while maintaining a real human touch that reminds me of Altman at his best.

[tarpilot]

[-X Frank Tashlin says hi

[Dansu Dansu Dansu]

Only five more days until the deadline, everyone.

Random observation for the day: With a few more lists now in, there's a major director whose generally most celebrated film (at least this was my impression) is currently an orphan, whereas what I would have thought was one of his less highly regarded films is currently in the top 10, with three people already putting it in their top 3. (Of course, maybe my impressions are just off the mark.)

Could it be Tokyo Story? If I'm reading this correctly, we're talking about the director's most celebrated film, not just the most celebrated of the decade. Tokyo Twilight could earn votes from someone who isn't necessarily a devotee of Ozu since it is unique in his oeuvre, yet arguably a fantastic film, whereas if someone voted for Early Summer, I would expect to find Tokyo Story on that list as well, since they are both exemplary of his traditional style.

[swo17]

It could in theory be Tokyo Story. But it isn't. And in any case, with five or so more lists in, that clue is completely false now anyhow.

[matrixschmatrix]

Fritz Lang double feature!

Rancho Notorious

This movie's a bit strange- there's a mixture of programmer B-Western stolidness and Fritz Lang brutality that never quite settles into something predictable, such that our hero is both a decent and fairly likable fellow and a man demonically bent on revenge, the outlaws are both a likable bunch of rapscallions and a group of monsters happy enough to countenance rape and murder of innocents, and there are any number of incidents like Frenchy's breakout, which plays out like a lighthearted episode of Gunsmoke but also has undertones of lynching, corruption, and murder. It's not a weakness, per se- though I did keep wanting it to break out into full The Big Heat mode- but I never knew quite what manner of thing I was looking at.

Part of that is the shocking artificiality of the sets- in a decade full of gorgeous outdoor photography, this movie has painted backdrops that are so close I keep expecting the actors to bump into them- and the glorious incongruity of Marlene Dietrich, who though an absolute delight seems impossible to believe in this kind of setting (as she did, for me, in Destry Rides West, only moreso here). It's certainly entertaining throughout, but one of the things I've come to expect from most of the Westerns I watch is that the makers of them wear the genre like an old glove- Ford, Hawks, Boetticher, Mann, even Fuller and Ray, they all seem to have the imagery of Westerns playing in the backs of their minds throughout their films, choosing consciously to go with them here or reject them there- and glib though it may be to say, with Lang it feels a bit like a second language, not bad or incorrectly executed, just a little less worn in, a little less comfortable. I'll need to watch it again to say how good I actually think it is, though.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

Whooo, this movie gets delightfully goofy at the end. There are good elements- Dana Andrews fits into the Lang universe marvelously well, and the DA works beautifully as someone who isn't corrupt, per se, but is clearly more interested in self promotion than in justice, but good God is that a ridiculous plot.

I mean, first of all, that plan is crazy. You'd have to be a sociopath blithely to assume that it was pretty much ok to get yourself convicted of murder and figure your fiancee was going to be pretty much all right with that, and while I'm enormously against the death penalty I'm not sure that 'well a guy could be innocent and get executed anyway if he were consciously planting evidence against himself' is all that strong an argument in any case. The execution of it's ok- there's a lot of it that goes exactly as expected in sort of a plodding way, though even knowing the plan I still get angry at a prosecutor railroading a defendant in the courtroom- but, good Lord, that ending.

Spoiler

So, I knew going in the twist was that one of the people planning the fake murder was actually the killer, but I'd thought it was the Austin Spencer character- it makes reasonable movie sense to figure you'll throw everyone off the case by setting someone else up, and of course you could have had the big twist where Andrews appeals for the planted evidence and is denied, and the drama of his daughter deciding whom she trusts. What we actually get way more off the rails- first, apparently Spencer did plan ahead lest he should die before the verdict, but not well enough to leave anything where anyone would actually find it for like three months. Second, the big clue that vindicates Andrews really isn't much of anything, just a letter with no actual evidence attached. Is there going to be a big reveal where all the planning we saw was a lie, and actually the two of them killed the girl together? Nope! Turns out Andrews somehow knew that he could kill the girl and leave no evidence- setting it up so that he could then pretend to have killed the girl, and leave some evidence! It's foolproof! Because obviously, if he didn't take part in the elaborate, dangerous charade, the cops would have... never found him, because there was no evidence. But then he gives it all away in an incredibly stupid way, because of course he does. And then he's put right back on death row, because his ex-fiancee said so (again, with no actual evidence.) Oh, and Andrews has a big speech about what a dick the DA is for railroading him, in spite of the fact that said railroading was the starting point for his whole plot.

There is lots and lots of Joan Fontaine making her Joan Fontaine face and being indecisive, though. You know that face, where she sort of twists her mouth sideways? The face she makes in every single movie she's in? Yeah, that one.

I should be clear that I actually really enjoyed this movie, at least the end of it- it's genuinely bananas, in a way professionally made movies from this era rarely are. I have no idea of why it wound up being so dumb, though my vague recollection from the Lotte Eisner book is that it's because they made Lang change the ending, which would make sense. But at any rate, this is worth a watch, but I'm not even sure it would make a list of the top 50 best Fritz Lang movies, and the man only made forty something.

[YnEoS]

I won't be submitting a list, because there are too many important films from this decade that I haven't seen yet. But I do hope people have seen Second Run's 2 Polish releases that qualify for this list Eroica and Night Train.

[zedz]

[-X Frank Tashlin says hi

If any of you haven't seen The Girl Can't Help It, run don't walk.

[swo17]

If any of you haven't seen The Geisha Boy (at least the first half hour), take a bullet train don't walk.

Fixed.

[Wu.Qinghua]

I won't be submitting a list, because there are too many important films from this decade that I haven't seen yet. But I do hope people have seen Second Run's 2 Polish releases that qualify for this list Eroica and Night Train.

I haven't seen Second Run's 'Eroica', but only the Polish disc. Maybe that's the reason why not Eroica, but Kasimirz Kutz' Krzyz Walecznych / Cross of Valour will make my list. But two other films of Munk will make it, too. At least. (Night Train's not my cup of tea though.)

[domino harvey]

Sounds like Tashlin will be a victim of vote-splitting this round. I only found room for Hollywood or Bust! and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? but I'm kicking myself for not finding a place for Susan Slept Here. I guess there was only room for titles with punctuation

[knives]

I somehow accidentally left him off (I thought The Geisha Boy was '60s for some reason). He'll hopefully make my ;60s list though.

[Shrew]

The Girl Can't Help It is actually on my list (one of the musicals, though I guess it is more a comedy). Rock Hunter and Artists and Models were hanging around the bottom half of the list but have been steadily swallowed up by other contenders. I haven't had a chance to watch Geisha Boy, but Susan Slept Here can't overcome my deepset aversion toward Dick Powell and May-December romances.

On to something completely different, the director of whom I've grown most considerably fonder of this round is Sirk. But I think that has as much to do with the confused way I first approached his films as reviewing them and watching more. In discussing Sirk, I feel there's too much emphasis put on the "subversiveness" of the melodramas, to the point that way back when before I had seen any I expected dark cynical films sneering at idiocy of their plots and histrionic characters. I imagined Sirk as some silently disgruntled aesthete taking revenge upon American housewives by pointing out how silly they and their choice of entertainment were. Sure the films are hacking away at the perceived problems of 50s society: conformity, rigid family structures, materialism, but as domino and many others have pointed out before, lots of films and other artists were doing just that throughout the whole decade. I feel there's a tendency to highlight that subversiveness (moreso than any other ordinary film of the decade) in order to make up for the perceived detriment of "femininity".

The danger of that is readings like that at Criterion Contraption, where everything is just a joke and all this melodrama in between is a waste of time. What I realized after watching a few films of Sirk's is just how seriously the films take their characters and situations, despite their overwrought and often ridiculous nature. To respond the above blog post: yes, the ending of Written on the Wind is a big penis joke, but it's also one that succintly defines Malone's relationship with her father and men in general and the full psychic cost of her sacrifice of giving up Mitch. There's humor here, but there's also so much more.

Of course, that doesn't stop Magnificent Obsession from being a big, long, mostly boring sermon. In giving itself entirely to the most ridiculous of melodramas, MO seems to lack some tension between the high and low art of Sirk's later films. My favorite is Written on the Wind, which thrives on that tension between the serious and the ridiculous, case in point being the dance of death sequence. It's ludicrous yet the construction makes it wonderfully tragic. Or the great opening credits which spell out all the luridness of the film, only to undercut that as it reveals the reality (and the tragedy) of the situation. Imitation of Life shares a similar energy, but here it gets sublimated along racial lines. While the melodrama of the white people pales in comparison to the heartrending and all too painful tragedy of Annie and Sarah Jane (to the point that it even makes Annie fall asleep), the film doesn't condemn the luckier folks for their relatively minor difficulties. It's perhaps subversive in its approach to race, but it doesn't have any sense of haughty superiority over its source material or foolish characters.

But then, Sirk's two more highly pedigreed films: A Time to Love/Die and Tarnished Angels, don't strike me as particularly interesting, perhaps because of that lack of tension. They're still good movies with plenty to recommend, but they lack the odd humor wrapped up in the devastating moments of drama. Perhaps they're just played too straight, as opposed to the fun mixed with melancholy of Written on the Wind, There's Always Tomorrow or All That Heaven Allows, which opens up the films to some less clearly defined space.

Edit: Fixed the title silliness.

[knives]

It's A Time to Love, not live. Live is for the book.

[swo17]

Just a note for anyone who's already submitted a list and realized that they forgot to include something, discovered something else in the meantime, or want to make a change for any other reason: I'll accept list revisions right up to the deadline, which is as of this moment just a hair under four days from now.

[matrixschmatrix]

Night and Fog

Oh my god. There's almost nothing you can say about this movie, it drives you into a corner and makes you weep like a child. Literally, in my case. Part of the power of it is that it refuses to allow the horrors it depicts to be historical, dead, locked away- they're alive, and they're part of us, and I honestly can't deal with looking at that. Thank Christ this movie is half an hour long, if it were 90 minutes I think I'd be dead by the end of it.