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Ni liv / Nine Lives (1957, Norway, Skouen)

A resistance fighter battles ice, snow, blindness, gangrene, and, incidentally, one or two German soldiers, in the mountains of northern Norway. Watched it before, several times, and again now.  There are two basic Norwegian archetypes: One is the missionary, who goes out among the barbarians to preach the (today, secular) Gospel. The other is the one we meet here: The lone, foolhardy man whose battle with the elements becomes the path to some sort of sturdy peasant’s equivalent of spiritual enlightenment. I like that one better. We all do.

Nightfall (1957, USA)

Enigmatic man gets kidnapped by a gang of mobsters who wants to know where “the money” is. Great setup for a claustrophobic interrogation thriller, right? Instead the movie goes into flashback, to tell us who the enigmatic man is, who the mobsters are, and what really happened to “the money”. Yawn. Watched: 22 minutes. Look, if your story has a dull beginning, don’t just dump it in the middle. Find a better beginning.

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Run of the Arrow (1957, USA)

One of those magnificent confederate underdogs you always find hanging about in westerns decide to join up with the Sioux nation rather than give his oath of allegiance to those goddam yankees. Watched it all. Look, never mind the politics, confederates just make better protagonists.

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No Time to Be Young (1957, USA)

The young people today, they’re psychopaths, frauds, whiners, sluts, and criminals. Civilization is doomed. Watched it all.

The Spirit of St. Louis (1957, USA, Wilder)

The life of Charles A. Lindbergh, or at least the part of it that didn’t involve being a Nazi. If anyone can make a biopic that doesn’t suck it’s Billy Wilder, but probably not even he could make one that is actually worth watching. Biopics are the spawn of Satan’s own commitee meetings. Just don’t. Watched: 12 minutes.

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Quatermass 2 (1957, UK)

It’s becoming clear where Dr Who got its combination of sci-fi and horror from. Quatermass should be designated an honorary 0th Doctor. Watched it all.

The Depraved (1957, USA)

Boy meets girl. Girl has asshole husband. Boy murders husband. (Boy probably goes to prison?) The asshole husband in this movie is unusually sadistic, but in a believable way. He’s the sort of petty, tyrannical lord of the household you’re prepared to believe may really exist. It makes the old story feel not so old any more, and if it wasn’t for everything else about this movie, it could have been good. Watched: 34 minutes.

The 27th Day (1957, USA)

Ooh, look! It’s the earliest movie I’ve seen where ordinary people are kidnapped by aliens! Unfortunately, they’re the kind of passive-aggressive aliens who put their victims through tests to make some tiresome point about cosmic peace. “You want to destroy your world? Sure, have these super-weapons, go ahead. See if we care.” Watched: 14 minutes.

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A Face in the Crowd (1957, USA, Kazan)

A drunkard hobo turned free-talking radio talk show host sells out to the corporate elite and becomes a bullshitter on national TV, a man who understands his mass audience so well that he despises them all. Watched it all. The Elvis era is barely a year old, and TV only a decade, and already the message movie folks believe they can see where it’s all headed: Individualism, sex, and consumerism, in a hot, steamy embrace. And they were right, it was. That’s what we got. And that’s not such a bad thing, considering the alternatives. But nobody can accuse the result of being honest.

The Night America Trembled (1957, USA)

This TV documentary tells the story of how Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the Worlds radiocast fooled thousands of gullible people into thinking they were being invaded by Martians – which itself is a myth that has fooled hundreds of millions of gullible people, and you’re probably one of them. Aren’t facts fun? Watched: 6 minutes.

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My Gun is Quick (1957, USA)

Well, something is changing in Hollywood. They barely even pretend any more that the women who hang around in cheap bars in hard-boiled detective stories aren’t prostitutes. And the hard-boiled private investigators are getting harder-boiled. Watched it all. It’s up there with the good noirs, and not in a phony retro way either. Robert  Bray punches like he believes it.

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Three Violent People (1956, USA)

Westerns alternate between sympathizing with the Union and the Confederates in the Civil War. On the whole, I think the southerners come out better more often, perhaps because they make better underdogs, like Charlton Heston here, who returns home from the war to find his ranch threatened by carpetbaggers.  Watched it all. I don’t know who the three violent people the title refers to are. This is not a violent western. The violence here is brief – and realistic: The moment the carpetbaggers meet unexpected resistance from Heston and the other Texas ranchers, they flee. Wouldn’t you?

Yield to the Night (1956, UK)

Just once I wish a movie that opens with a prisoner who is waiting to be hanged for murder, would stay with the prisoner in the present, instead of going into flashback mode to explain why they’re there. There’s nothing less interesting than why these characters become murderers. But two weeks on death row? Now that would be a movie. Watched: 13 minutes.

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The Battle of the River Plate (1956, UK, Powell & Pressburger)

The story of a single battle in the South Atlantic during the early days of World War 2. Watched it all. Powell & Pressburger made some of the best movies of the 1940s. After some excessively operatic movies in the 50s, it looks like they’re now back on earth, with a movie that builds up slowly like a symphony of naval warfare.

La Sorcière (1956, France)

A French engineer comes to work in a remote and backwards Swedish village, where he meets a beautiful witch, but before she can bewitch and seduce him, and condemn him to spend the rest of his life in a sinful orgy of earthly Swedish pleasures, the helpful villagers come to his rescue by lynching her. Phew! Watched: 2 minutes.

Love Me Tender (1956, USA)

Watched: 2 minutes, and the music. Never mind the movie, which is just good enough, let’s talk about Elvis. Having fast-forwarded through more or less all the musical movies of the 40s and 50s, I can confirm that, although before Elvis there was something, he makes it all seem like nothing. You could say the same thing about rock’n roll in general, but with Elvis, there’s more. In the live clips of him I’ve seen from 1956, it’s like you’re watching a god of entertainment, descended down to earth to walk among mortals. All this is old news, but there is a difference between knowing something, and feeling it. Now I feel it.

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Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956, USA)

The highly advanced race of aliens who arrive at Earth are a bit clumsy at first contact situations, aren’t they? Send a message nobody understands, then randomly destroy everything in sight when your storm trooper ambassador is understandably shot at by confused earthlings. And when they later go to full-scale war, it’s not at all clear what they’re trying to achieve. Watched it all, colorized, of course – almost always watch the colorized version, especially a pure effects movie like this. Few filmmakers in the B&W era would have said no to color if they’d had the budget.

Helen of Troy (1956, USA)

This movie has a serious casting problem. Helen of Troy is supposed to be most beautiful woman of her time, but her maid is played by the woman who really was, Brigitte Bardot. Watched: 5 seconds of the overture, (yes it’s one of those), plus the obligatory decadent banquet scene, which is short, but makes up for it by being extra decadent.

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Giant (1956, USA)

Like Rock Hudson’s Texas ranch, this movie goes on forever. I’m probably not the first person to make that observation. This is the sort of movie that gives you time to think of things like that. It’s also a pretty good story about life, family, land, and oil, at least for the first five or six hours, until James Dean’s makeup and the force-fed message of racial equality grinds you down. Watched it before, and again now.

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The Man in the Gray Flannell Suit (1956, USA)

A New York PR professional with a family in the suburbs who has bad memories from the war – now that sounds a bit familiar. This is basically a prequel to Mad Men, especially the way it looks and feels. Watched it all. The novel is probably better, but this isn’t too bad. It’s also a good war movie, (through a rare good use of flashbacks). The war scenes feel like they were made by people who actually fought in the war, unlike most 50s war movies, which feel like they were made by the little brothers who stayed home and dreamed of glory.

Godzilla – King of the Monsters (1956, Japan/USA)

This is the original Godzilla, mixed with new footage of an American journalist who pretends that he’s part of the plot, like someone crowding in on a photograph he doesn’t belong in. Watched: 4 minutes.

Disneyland Dream (1956, USA, Barstow)

A home movie shot by a family that won a vacation to Disneyland, goofing off with a camera along the way. It’s amazing. After all these movies, it’s like watching an entire age take off its Hollywood mask and reveal its inner self to be a cheerful, dorkish family of five. Watched it all. (And you can, too, at the Internet Archive.)

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Over-Exposed (1956, USA)

I’m not saying it’s okay that Cleo Moore has to be exceptionally talented, hard-working, wise to the sneaky ways of men, and also ruthless, in order to make a career as a woman photographer, but it’s certainly more inspirational than the idea that equal opportunity should apply to mediocrities as well. Watched it all. It’s only a moderately good movie, one of those pseudo-feminist movies Hollywood has been making since the 30s about successful career women who, on second thought, decide in the end that she’s better off marrying that whiny boyfriend who resents her ambition than with making lots and lots of money at the top of her profession. Ambition almost kills her. How convenient!

Who Done It (1956, UK)

Benny Hill looked sleazy even back in 1956. There’s just something about his face. Watched: 10 minutes.

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Forbidden Planet (1956, USA)

Leslie Nielsen lands on a planet that hasn’t been informed that Freudianism has been discredited back on Earth, and thus triggers a planet-scale sex and violence-related neurotic breakdown. Watched it several times before, and again now. It’s perfect. The least interesting thing you can say about this movie is that it has a bit of The Tempest in it. As if the reason this movie is good is that it features a father and a daughter who lives in isolation, and not, you know, the actual story itself, which is completely different.

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Storm Center (1956, USA)

Bette Davis believes that her small-town library should have books of all kinds in it, including pro-Communist propaganda, even if it makes some people angry. It’s a matter of principle, of being brave enough to expose yourself to ideas you disagree with. Watched it all. There actually weren’t all that many red scare movies in the 50s, and anti-red scare movies like this were better made, anyway. This one captures the mystical commitment librarians and book lovers throughout the ages have felt to the Idea of the Library as an intellectual free zone, a theme that for some reason feels relevant to some other things I’ve been writing about lately. (The child actors are awful, though. And the story is didactic, but I agree with the message, so I don’t mind.)

Et Dieu… crea la femme / …And God Created Woman (1956, France)

I wonder if there were people in the 50s who swore that they watched Brigitte Bardot movies for the plot and the dialogue. Watched: 10 minutes. I hate French movies, I really do. Even when they have such an .. interesting plot and well-formed dialogue as this one. It’s not a prejudice, I’ve given them every chance, but it almost never works.

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The Mountain (1956, USA, Dmytryk)

The sets and scenery in this climbing movie are so spectacular that you hardly notice the characters, although they’re interesting in their own respect: Aging mountain climbing Spencer Tracy and his greedy asshole grave robber of a brother. Watched it all.