▶

Picnic (1955, USA)

On youth and age, beauty and brains – and sex, which is dealt with more directly here than in any movie I’ve seen since the time of Mae West. The Hayes Code, apparently, is dying. Most of all, though, this is a snapshot of mid-50s America, honest but not cynical, and free from the preachy nostalgia you get when later generations look back on it. Watched it all.

Crashout (1955, USA)

The dangerous gang of escaped convicts includes the always-sympathetic William Bendix, which means that the Hayes Code is dying, allright. This is probably the sort of movie parents had in mind when they worried about what was becoming of their children. Watched: 14 minutes.

Gelosia (1955) - Visit from the priest

▶

Gelosia / Jealousy (1955, Italy)

Looks like the Italians have finally shaken off the neo-realist legacy, and are making actual movies again, with actors and scripts. Good for them! This is a nice little melodrama about passion! jealousy! murder! doomed love! etc., all leading up to: tragedy! Watched it all. It’s awful-wonderful, and I think I have a better understanding of the phrase “Catholic guilt” now. One character here literally dies from it.

All That Heaven Allows (1955, USA)

Rock Hudson doesn’t seem terribly interested in Jane Wyman, and he doesn’t seem terribly interesting himself. But I like the scenes with the daughter who has been reading Freud. Watched: 26 minutes.

▶

The Ladykillers (1955, UK)

The British are nostalgic about Ealing Studios, but they didn’t make all that many good movies, and only a few really great ones. This is one of them. One of the many many great things about it is how amazingly ugly and evil Alec Guinness manages to look. Watched it all.

The Seven Little Foys (1955, USA)

Oh, Bob Hope. You’re the worst. You really are. But I don’t blame you, I blame the entire generation of moviegoers who thought you were the very definition of wittiness. Watched: 3 minutes.

▶

The Seven Year Itch (1955, USA, Wilder)

I have a theory that makes Marilyn Monroe’s character a lot more interesting: She’s actually quite intelligent, and is just stringing Tom Ewell along for the fun of it. Watched it all before, and again now, this time slightly more attuned than before to the nuances of 1950s innuendo.

Conquest of Space (1955, USA)

So now we know what inspired the title sequence for Pigs! In! Spaaaaaace! Watched: 5 minutes. This movie is begging for a m3stking, but I don’t think it ever got one.

Summarnattens leende / Smiles of a Summer Night (1955, Sweden, Bergman)

What confuses me about Ingmar Bergman is how someone can be so talented, and at the same time make movies that feel so irrelevant. Perhaps it was a mistake for him to work in a country where he was vastly more competent than anyone else. Or maybe I’ll change my mind when I’ve seen more of his classics. Watched: 25 minutes.

▶

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.

▶

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.)

▶

Rock’n Roll Revue (1955, USA)

Well this isn’t quite rock’n roll. But it does have that swing, and it certainly makes me want to go out there and invent rock’n roll right away. Watched it all.

The French They Are a Funy Race (1955, France, Sturges)

It was sad the way Preston Sturges was forced out of the movie industry in the mid-40s, after making  the only funny movies of the entire decade. It’s even sadder to see that, by this point, his first movie in years, he has forgotten how to make them. A few years later, he would be dead – leaving behind a half-finished but enjoyable autobiography. Watched: 4 minutes.

▶

A Kid for Two Farthings (1955, UK, Reed)

There are movies, very rare ones, that seem not like movies at all, but a rift in space, opening up to a purer, more distilled level of reality. This is one of them. Watched it all.

Age 13 (1955, USA)

There’s nothing wrong with a teenage boy that can’t be cured with a little bit of psychoanalysis: Insecurity, juvenile delinquency, even the horrible life-sucking sadness of a mother’s death. Watched: 10 minutes.

▶

The Night of the Hunter (1955, USA, Laughton)

This is the stuff that cult movies are made of: A rambling script, ambitious visuals, and Robert Mitchum as an evil preacher with “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles, chasing two children through Super-Depressed America. I’ve seen better, but this is so much more fun. Watched it all. Unforgettable moment: A dead woman sitting in her car under water, her hair waving alongside the seagrass.

Godzilla Strikes Again (1955, Japan)

In the dub vs sub debate, I favor subtitles, and, allthough everyone is entitled to their opinion, in the case of dubbing, that opinion happens to be EVIL. But today’s dubbers, at least, we know better than to dub a Japanese movies with actors whose stereotyped accents are so annoying that you start cheering for Godzilla as he razes their cities to the ground. Watched: 24 minutes.

Summertime (1955, UK, Lean)

A movie where the city of Venice itself is the story, reflected in the wide eyes of tourist Katharine Hepburn. We see it as she sees it, wandering randomly about. The entire movie is shot in Venice, much of it outdoors, and I can’t imagine anyone seeing not wanting to go there afterwards, and yet it doesn’t feel like a commercial. It feels like .. adventure. Watched: 43 minutes.

▶

Richard III (1955, UK, Olivier)

Evil is such a generic word. It is its more specific forms that appall me, such as the bitter, lonely failure who has only one spark of brilliance in him: The ability to destroy good people, in order to prove to history that he was there, that he really lived. Watched it all.

Simba (1955, UK)

The Empire never played a big role in British movies, it’s almost as if it isn’t there, and when it is, the movies are rarely any good, (except for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp). In this one, British colonists in Kenya face the Mau-Mau rebellion. The more liberal-minded of them believe that if only they treated the black Africans more kindly, the rebellion would lose its support, and the movie seems to take their side. But an old hard-line character is closer to the truth: The real choice they face, he says, is between showing who’s boss – or getting out of Africa. Liberal colonialism is a contradiction. Watched: 18 minutes.

▶

It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955, USA)

Ladies and gentlemen, watch American-Japanese cultural exchange in action: First Ray Harruhausen creates the original giant angry dinosaur for The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, then the Japanese reinvents it as Godzilla, and now here the Americans reimport and improve on the Godzilla formula. Voluntary cultural imperialism is such a beautiful thing to behold. Watched it all.

▶

The Man from Laramie (1955, USA, Mann)

If 100 years of western movies have taught us anything, it is that when you’re the boss of a sleepy, isolated town, and a dangerous-looking stranger arrives, you should not burn his wagons, shoot his mules, drag him through the dirt, and then return his gun to him and hope he leaves town peacefully. Watched it all.

Bride of the Monster (1955, USA, Wood)

This Ed Wood movie is almost competent. The way he goes straight to the fun part – evil scientist! monster! giant squid! – makes me wish he had the abilities to match his vision. Imagine what a genuinely good screwy sci-fi-horror filmmaker could have done with Bela Lugosi and Tor Johnson. Watched 14 minutes.

▶

Violent Saturday (1955, USA)

The kind of caper movie where the team Assembles in the first part, Executes in the second, and Fails Tragically in the third. I’ve seen this story before, and will see it again. But for some reason that I can’t explain, this particular version of it feels epic, like a long train building up speed. Watched it all.

A Generation (1955, Poland)

I love the scene in every Communist propaganda movie where the young girl stands before the crowd and holds a stirring speech about the People, the fire of truth burning in her eyes, and also the scene where the wise old worker explains his Marxist faith in simple, folksy terms, like a Communist Jesus. It makes me want to have myself put up against a wall and shot. Watched: 30 minutes.

▶

The Trouble With Harry (1955, USA, Hitchcock)

It was easier to hate Hitchcock back in the early 50s, when his old formulas were getting stale, but something has changed. They’re all hits now. Hard as I try, I am unable to find an excuse to hate them. It’s very frustrating. I think I’ll have to become a .. *shudder* .. fan. Watched it all.

The McConnell Story (1955, USA)

This is the earliest war movie I’ve seen that is centered around the jet plane. The sound when they fight is terrifying. It’s the sound of war birds, roaming the skies to defend the free world and/or bomb the local peasants. It’s the sound of the second half of the 20th century. Watched 5 minutes.

▶

Himmel ohne Sterne (1955, West Germany)

All the German post-war movies I’ve come across so far have been East German. This is the earliest I’ve seen from the West, and it’s one of those honest, quiet movies countries sometimes make about their great tragedies. The characters stand between two traumas: The memory of friends and family lost in the War, and now the division of family and friends between East and West. Watched it all. It’s even more moving in retrospect: Decisions lightly made in the late 40s, were final.

Man Without a Star (1955, USA)

Kirk Douglas, the greatest rogue and/or asshole of his age. Watched: 14 minutes. All non-brilliant Westerns should open with a Frankie Laine song, to compensate.

▶

Phffft (1954, USA)

A happily divorced couple try to rediscover the single life, which involves more alcohol, creepy strangers, annoying roommates and fear of dying alone than they remembered. Watched it all.  Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday aren’t great Hollywood lovers, they’re slightly pathetic people whose best shot at happiness is to tolerate each other’s flaws.

Lucky Me (1954, USA)

Doris Day has my favorite voice of the 1950s so far – it gives me goosebumps. In this movie she dresses like a civilized woman, but that doesn’t fool me for a second: I can tell there’s a singing, dancing, gun-toting (and arguably lesbian) Calamity Jane underneath. Watched: 14 minutes.

Dial M For Murder (1954, USA, Hitchcock)

I’m not a fan of murder mysteries, I’m skeptical of Hitchcock, and unconvinced of Grace Kelly, but even so, this is absolutely perfect. And I always did tolerate Columbo, which this is a precursor to, down to the “just one more question” routine. Damn you Hitchcock, why won’t you let me hate you? Watched it all before, and again now.

The Garden of Eden (1954, USA)

A city woman stumbles into a nudist colony where she learns that being naked is the most natural thing in the world, for both kids and adults.  Watched: The naughty bits, of which there is actually quite a lot. The “gosh, I guess clothing is just a social convention like any other” moments are like a badly written Heinlein novel. They should have gotten him to write this, he was a real life nudist.