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Five Guns West (1955, USA, Corman)

The Confederates send a dirty dozen of hardened criminals to rob the Union, and, although the movie eventually introduces some morally upright characters, you can tell that Roger Corman finds the bad guys more interesting. Watched it all.

The Man With the Golden Arm (1955, USA, Preminger)

Ex-con Frank Sinatra has a talent for drumming, but will he be able to to resis the lure of the OLD DOPE PEDDLER?!!?!  (Probably not).  Watched: 10 minutes.

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Bad Day at Black Rock (1955, USA)

Small-town America is full of bigots, and it takes the occasional visit by big-city liberals to shake them out of their narrow-minded ways. Watched it all. It’s a classic, although with a hypocritical premise. The greatest crime against the Japanese-Americans during the Second World War was committed by the government, not by backwater hillbillies.

Battle Cry (1955, USA)

It remains true in 1955: The only good movies about the Second World War were made during it. It’s not that they were all great, but that they were made by people who bore all the weight and uncertainty of the war on their shoulders, and not these jolly late-comers. Watched: 13 minutes. The only interesting scenes here are actual footage from the battle of the Pacific. Each time I see such clips I react with new emotions, this time was with the realization that, dear God, we’ve been documenting our world in color all the way back to 1942! (Try it yourself – watch this clip, and see how you react.)