Favorite Films of the 1950s

The 1950s was a spectacular decade of films. Here are ten of my favorites in chronological order. Maybe not the ten best of the decade, though some certainly are by most people's measure.

It marked the last decade for Bogart, who did some of his best work, and for Gary Cooper. Marlon Brando was at the top of his game, and it was perhaps the best decade for Westerns. Two make my list, but it was a rich genre. Cooper won his second Oscar with High Noon; Anthony Mann and Jimmy Stewart produced five terrific collaborations, including Winchester '73 and The Naked Spur; and Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott combined for several classics.

Hitchcock continued his impressive run and peaked commercially in the decade with several classic suspense films. I include just one, and omit Strangers on a Train, Rear Window and North by Northwest.

Other directorial achievements of note included came from Nicholas Ray, Billy Wilder, and the great John Ford, but other fine films of theirs are omitted.

Foreign directors continued to make wonderful films, even if some weren't shown in America. I include just two here and must omit several worthy ones. De Sica's Umberto D is the best film to ever feature a dog, and Fellini made two poignant films with his wife, Giulietta Masina: La Strada and Nights of Cabiria. Jules Dassin's Rififi is a tight noir that paved the way for heist films, and Henri-Georges Clouzot gave us the Hitchcockian Diabolique and Wages of Fear.

1. In a Lonely Place 1950

Humphrey Bogart's best performance in Director Nicholas Ray's best film. Is he a murderer or not? Gloria Grahame plays his confused lover, trying to help him overcome his inner demons. From the pulp novel by Dorothy Hughes, it contains a memorable last scene. "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me."

2. Sunset Boulevard 1951

Billy Wilder's scathing look at Hollywood follows the weird affair of a has-been movie star, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), with struggling writer Joe Gillis (William Holden). Swanson gives one of film's iconic performances. "Mr. DeMille. I'm ready for my closeup."

3. Tokyo Story 1953

The third of Director Yasujiro Ozo's "Noriko Trilogy," packs an emotional wallop. Setsuko Hara is the generous daughter-in-law in a family whose children are too busy to bother with its aging parents. Now considered on the short list of greatest films ever made, it was not released in the United States until 1972.

4. Shane 1953

One of the most authentic Westerns, it is George Stevens' best film and Alan Ladd's signature role as a retired gunfighter who helps farmer Joe Starett (Van Heflin) fight off cattlemen in a range war. Shot against the beautiful Grand Tetons it is Jean Arthur's last film and includes one menacing bad guy in Jack Palance as Jack Wilson.

5 On the Waterfront 1954

Marlon Brando as dock worker Terry Malloy comes up against the brutal union led by Lee J. Cobb. Brando won a well-deserved Best Actor Oscar in that year's Best Film. The most memorable scene takes place inside a taxi between brothers Brando and Rod Steiger. "I coulda been a contender."

6. The Searchers 1956

John Ford and John Wayne's best collaboration and cinematographer Winton Hoch's masterpiece. Inexplicably neglected at that year's Oscars, it is now on the short list of greatest Westerns. Wayne is a brutally racist Ethan Edwards out to rescue his abducted niece. A great final shot of Wayne in the doorway.

7. Sweet Smell of Success 1957

Easily Tony Curtis' best performance. He is Sidney Falco, a sleazy sycophantic press agent. Burt Lancaster plays the powerful columnist J.J. Hunsecker. Filmed in glorious black and white, New York City never looked more grittier. Ernest Lehman co-wrote the memorable script. "Match me, Sidney."

8. The Bridge on the River Kwai 1957

Director David Lean's first epic, and maybe his best. Alex Guinness gives his signature Oscar-winning performance as a rigid British colonel who helps the Japanese build a bridge. His counterpart is Sessue Hayakara as the Japanese colonel, facing Hari Kari if the bridge isn't completed on time. William Holden leads the commando raid to stop them. With a rousing climax, it deservedly captured that year's Best Film.

9. Vertigo 1958

Alfred Hitchcock's most complex film. Jimmy Stewart is a retired detective afraid of heights and obsessed with a dead woman. The twist, revealed mid-stream, is stunning the first time you see it. A magnificent score by Bernard Hermann, impeccable editing by George Tomasi, and a memorable title sequence by Saul Bass make it one of the most satisfying film experiences.

10. The Cranes are Flying

One of the first Russian films produced after the death of Stalin that deviated from the state's imposed mandate to champion Russia as a military victor, the film tells the story of a beautiful young couple separated by the war. Tatyana Samojlova, as Veronika, promises to wait for Boris, who finds himself on the Eastern front. The film depicts war as ugly and devastating and won that year's Golden Palm at the Cannes Film festival.

Just Misses:

Early Summer 1951 with Setuko Hara.

Moby Dick 1956 with Gregory Peck.

Touch of Evil 1958 with Orson Welles.

Room at the Top 1959 with Simone Signoret and Lawrence Harvey.

 

Touch of Evil (1958) - Orson Welles

Orson Welles as the seedy Captain Quinlan.

Mexican narcotics officer Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) is soon scheduled to testify in a trial against a notorious Mexican crime family, the Grandis. In the meantime, while on his honeymoon, he gets embroiled in corruption in a Texas border town when a car-bombing kills an American developer. Because it's clear the explosive was planted on the Mexican side of the border, Vargas joins the investigation. Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles), the American police captain, thinks he knows who did it, and to prove it, he's not above planting evidence to secure a conviction. "I never framed anyone," he says, "...unless they're guilty." Vargas is shocked by such unsavory police methods and threatens to out Quinlan. To protect his own reputation and pressure Vargas to back off, Quinlan joins forces with Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff).

Welles employs his characteristic camera magic--extended takes, deep focused darkened scenes with jarring angles, and unsettling close-ups, in this, the last of the classic American film noirs, a genre that petered out before 1960. It is a marvelously seedy atmospheric setting, where it's hard to tell the criminals from the cops. In the repulsive Quinlan, Welles creates one of noir's most memorable characters. Thirty years on the job and the murder of his wife has turned him into a man almost diseased by the fifth that cakes his soul. "I'm always thinking of her, drunk or sober," he admits. "What else is there to think about, except my job, my dirty job?" Obese and crude, he hasn’t shaved in days and looks to have slept in his clothes. You imagine he stinks.

Joe Grandi Shrinks in fear. 

In a film full of great sequences, the most critically acclaimed is the audacious three-minute plus opening high crane tracking shot that sets up the car explosion. Cars, street vendors, and pedestrians crisscross in front of and behind Vargas and his wife Susan (Janet Leigh) as they walk down the street and pass through a border inspection station. Complicated and reliant on perfect timing, it is a magnificent technical achievement. Two other memorable scenes both involve Janet Leigh. In the first, Susan—thought to be safely tucked away in an isolated American motel—is overpowered by creepy Grandi gang members, including Mercedes McCambridge in a cameo. She leers at the struggling girl with glee, saying, "I want to watch." Later, with Susan drugged and half-naked on a bed in a downtown hotel, Quinlan and a perfectly terrified Joe Grandi have a tense and pivotal encounter. Quinlan, drunk and sleep-deprived, shows his cruelty and desperation in an effort to protect himself.

Quinlan: "Come on, read my future for me.

Tanya: "You haven't got any."

Quinlan: "Hmm? What do you mean?"

Tanya: Your future's all used up."

The film is all about betrayal. There are four: Quinlan has long-since abandoned the police code of honor and he double-crosses Uncle Joe; Vargas resorts to unethical tactics to trap the big man; and most disturbing, Quinlan's right-hand-man, deputy Menzies, helps him do it. Joseph Calleia plays the loyal Menzies in a great performance. The captain once saved his life by taking a bullet meant for him. When finally forced to see his idol as he really is, corrupt and a killer, Menzies is sick with anguish. He loves the man.        

Janet Leigh thinks she's safe in a motel.

Henry Mancini wrote a wildly effective jazzy/swing score and two terrific supporting roles add to the unsettling nature of the film. Dennis Weaver plays a weirdly nervous hotel night clerk, and Marlene Dietrich is an out-of-place gypsy fortune teller, Tanya, who may have had a fling with Quinlan years ago. Illustrating the depth of his decline, he has become so fat she doesn’t recognize him, saying, "lay off the candy bars." Dietrich has the wonderful last line in the film.  

What Makes Touch of Evil Special:

Welles perfectly captured the visual style of Noir and produced a film significantly more entertaining than his consensus masterpiece, Citizen Kane.

There are lots of little touches thrown in, unnoticed except through repeated viewings. When Quinlan throttles Grandi, hoping to frame Susan for murder, he forgets his cane. He passes through the door, where a sign hangs reminding occupants not to leave anything behind. At one point a Grandi thug throws acid at Vargas. He misses but splashes a poster of the stripper killed in the opening car explosion. In another scene Uncle Joe loses his toupee.

The power of the film lies in Welles' ability to make a morally degenerate character almost sympathetic. Sure Quinlan's methods are as crooked as the criminals he chases, but the man's hunches on the guilty are right on the mark. Something happened to him in the past that we don’t get to see, but you sense he was a good man once upon a time. And betrayal is never pretty, no matter who the target.
  

Inside Story:

The film was famously re-edited by the studio against Welles' ardent wishes, deleting several minutes and reshooting some scenes. Welles didn't want credits shown or background music to interfere with the famous opening tracking shot.

Joseph Calleia played El Sordo in 1944's For Whom the Bells Tolls, which also starred Akim Tamiroff as the guerrilla band leader, Pablo.

Director of photography, Russell Metty, also shot 1961's The Misfits and 1960's Spartacus, for which he won an Academy Award.   

A box office bust in the U.S. upon its initial release, it was lauded elsewhere, named best film at the 1958 Brussels World Fair by critics/judges Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who'd later direct Breathless and The 400 Blows, respectively.

The Famed Opening Sequence:

Film Noir - An American Art Form

Hollywood directors unleashed a new type of film on American audiences in the 1940s, raw, realistic, and black to the core.

As American an art form as jazz, Film Noir sprung out of the national angst surrounding World War II. And like the syncopated rhythmic music developed by black and Creole musicians and first heard on the streets of New Orleans at the turn of the 20th Century, noir films blended existing artistic motifs and slapped in generous doses of improvisation and cynicism to become a new cinematic language or genre that would affect film-makers across the globe.

Its heyday was an approximate fifteen-year stretch starting in the early 1940s. The term film noir, meaning "black film," was coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946 as applied to Hollywood movies of the period. Its roots can be found in American crime novels of the Depression era and German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s.

Though the visual style might vary, its most consistent characteristic was stark, distinctive high-contrast lighting in black-and-white photography, laden with deep shadows and menace. Its citizens were mostly low-rungers: desperate small-time hoods, beat cops, waitresses, lonely saps and loners, and most famously, femme fatales, gals out to move up a rung or two, anyway they could. Along the way the audience is sure to get a good hard look at society's underbelly.

Sunglasses can't disguise Barbara Stanwyk's duplicitous Phyllis Dietrichson.

In Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), smitten agent Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), finds himself in over his head when he joins Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in a plot to kill her neglecting husband to defraud the insurance agency. Stanwyck embodied the cool, calculating femme fatale role as well as any actress. Based on James Cain's hard-boiled crime novel, it ends badly for both of them. Neff never had a chance, saying at the end, "I killed him for money--and a woman--and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the girl. Pretty isn't it?"

Noir icon and champion chump, Robert Mitchum, falls in love with the wrong woman in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), a tale of a detective unable to escape a past mistake. He has a choice, but he can't help turning his back on the good, sensible girl who loves him. Featuring Jane Greer as the twisted object of his affections, and Kirk Douglas as his gangster nemesis, the film contains characteristic voice-over dialog. Some of the best reveals the depths of Mitchum's obsession. "I went to Pablo's that night. I knew I'd go there every night until she showed up. I knew she knew it. I sat there and I drank bourbon and I shut my eyes, but I didn't think of a joint on 56th Street. I knew where I was and what I was doing. What a sucker I was."

Mitchum had bad luck with cars in noirs. When Greer's character realizes he is driving them toward a police barricade, she shoots him dead before police machine gunfire shatters the windshield. Six years later, in director Otto Preminger's Angel Face, dreamy but dangerous Jean Simmons backs him up over a cliff.

Mitchum wasn't the only sap to fall victim to an enticing beauty. Edward G. Robinson starred in two films by German-born director Fritz Lang: The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlett Street (1945). In each he is mild-mannered, middle-aged, and a little dumpy. If it occurs to him that it is odd that the beautiful Joan Bennett seems attracted to him, he pushes it out of his mind--he is infatuated. Both films have the relationship leading to run-ins with Dan Duryea and murder. Duryea, a fixture in many noirs, had a sniveling demeanor and could curl his lip in a sneer with the best of them.

Edward G. Robinson can't resist the beautiful Joan Bennett.

The quintessential heist movie is The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Directed by John Houston and set in Cincinnati, it features a band of small-time crooks, more pathetic than sinister. These are just guys looking for a break in life: Doc Reidenschneider (Sam Jaffe), the recently paroled mastermind hoping for one last big score; Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden), the muscle with a dream of owning a horse farm; Louie Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso), the safe cracker whose wife and kids live in a cramped tenement; and Gus (James Whitmore), the getaway car driver who owns a greasy-spoon.

Noir crime doesn't pay and you can often expect a double-cross. The band comes up against one when, after securing the gems, their fence, dishonest attorney Alonzo Emmerich (Louis Calhern), fails to deliver the payout as promised. Shots are fired and the band disperses to their respective fates: arrest, suicide, and death.

The Asphalt Jungle inspired numerous copy-cats, and to demonstrate its influence overseas, director Jules Dassin produced the similarly constructed Rififi, a stylish 1955 French thriller.    

Comely Marilyn Monroe was introduced to America in The Asphalt Jungle.

    
Director Henry Hathaway pushed the violence envelope to a sick level to show that something stank in post-war American society. If we had defeated Hitler and Tojo in Europe and Asia, we had still failed to eradicate corruption, poverty, and malaise in our own cities. In Kiss of Death (1947) Richard Widmark burst onto screens as Tommy Udo, one of Noir's most demented characters. In one memorable scene, he laughs maniacally as he lashes a woman to her wheelchair and sends her bouncing down a flight of stairs, first taunting her, "You know what I do to squealers? I let 'em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time thinkin' it over. You're worse than him, tellin' me he's comin' back. Ya lyin' old hag!"

Tommy Udo helps a lady down the stairs.

Udo wasn't the only psychopath loitering in movie houses that year. Robert Wise's Born to Kill showed that depravity wasn't restricted to the low and middle class. It featured Lawrence Tierney as the appropriately named Sam Wild, a man without a conscious or morals, and whose liaison with a wealthy socialite out to grab her sister's money is no bargain for either. Claire Trevor played the woman, who one character describes as "the coldest iceberg of a woman I ever saw, and the rottenest inside. I've seen plenty, too. I wouldn't trade places with you if they sliced me into little pieces."

Lawrence Tierney and Claire Trevor form an unholy alliance in Born to Kill.

Ten years later we had made little progress in fixing our problems. They might be covered in a veneer of shiny new refrigerators, green suburbs, cars with power-steering (Chrysler's Hydraguide), and that most sought-after creature comfort, television; but they were alive and well.

No film shined a light under the veneer with better acuity and sharpness than Sweet Smell of Success (1958) by Alexander Mackendrick. The story plays out in the tony clubs and restaurants of Broadway and Times Square, and on the dark, crowded, and wet streets of New York. It's a wonderfully shot film by famed cameraman James Wong Howe in gritty black and white, helped immensely by Elmer Bernstein's tense jazz score--you can almost smell the cigarette smoke and garbage cans, and feel hot sweat running down people's backs in the jostling street venders and crowds. It is a fascinating look at how the media can peddle scandal and insinuation to titillate readers. You can't help but peek.

"Match me, Sidney."

Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster star, Curtis as Sidney Falco, a lapdog press agent who "wants to get way up high, where it's always balmy;" and Lancaster as powerful columnist J. J. Hunsecker. Their relationship, rotten and symbiotic, is the heart of the film.

Happiness is an elusive dream in Film Noir. The genre attracted some of the best Hollywood directors and actors. Film-maker Nicholas Ray fashioned a tense drama from Dorothy Hughes' pulp novel, In a Lonely Place (1950), where the dark soul of a man in on view in all its ugliness. The requisite atmospheric lighting and shadows are here, along with melodramatic music and as flawed a protagonist as ever trod the genre. Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) is a paranoid writer, beset by inner demons and a wild temper. When falsely accused of murder and hounded by the police, he slowly unravels and cracks under the pressure until he risks losing the woman he loves. He sees it happening and that makes his inability to control his emotions and behavior that much more affecting. 

"I was born when she kissed me.  I died when she left me.  I lived a few weeks when she loved me."

Like most noirs, you know it won't end happily. The final scene is gripping as Steele confronts Laura Grey (Gloria Grahame) in her apartment, believing she has betrayed him. He finally goes too far and Bogart sags a broken man. You can't help but feel sorry for him. He came so close.

Noir characters often face moral conflicts. In Otto Preminger's Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) police Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) lets his penchant for excessive use-of-force box him in a corner. His victim, a low-life hood, doesn't matter, but Dixon's plan to cover up a likely manslaughter charge goes awry when his actions put an innocent man under suspicion. That he happens to be the father of the girl Dixon has fallen in love with makes matters even more difficult. Does he confess the crime, face expulsion from the police force and jail time, or keep quiet and win the girl of his dreams? The dilemma leaves the officer at a loss. His lament, "Where the devil am I? I keep coming and going," mirrored the state of confusion America sometime found itself in in dealing with societal woes in the post-war era.

Preminger had earlier cast Andrews as a policeman in Laura (1944), one of the genre's most celebrated efforts. Here, while investigating the killing of Laura (Gene Tierney), Andrews falls in love with the girl's memory, helped along by her striking painting. In a surprise twist, Laura turns up alive. It is an innocent friend who was murdered by mistake.

Dana Andrews has a strange attraction to a portrait of a dead girl.

Noir films petered out at the end of the 1950s as film-makers and American audiences grew tired of the genre. Westerns had taken over on TV, and technicolor epics were the new darlings of cinema. One of the last noirs was one of the best, Orson Welles' sordid Touch of Evil (1958), which depicted corruption in a Texas border town.

Welles played Hank Quinlan, a corpulent policeman not above planting evidence to secure a conviction. "I've never framed anyone," he says, "...unless they're guilty."

Welles infused his film with his signature camera magic: Extended takes, jarring angles, and uncomfortable close-ups. Like the genre itself, Quinlan comes to an abrupt end, floating in a pool of fetid water. It is a fine and fitting death.

In Touch of Evil Uncle Joe Grande is no match for Hank Quinlan.

The Third Man (1947) - Carol Reed

Harry Lime trapped in the sewers.

Carol Reed's story of mystery and suspense in post-war Vienna starts with the arrival of Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) to the city, lured by a job offer from his old friend, Harry Lime (Orson Wells). Martins, an American author of pulp Westerns, is as adrift and vaguely disoriented as the emigres and defeated Germans residing in the closed city.

Like most European capitals at the time, the city is a mess. Suspicion and desperation rule the day. It is divided into four zones, each controlled by one of the Allied powers: France, Britain, the U.S., and Russia, with a free, international zone in the middle. The black market flourishes. Martins is shocked to learn that Lime is dead, the apparent victim of a hit and run accident. At the funeral, a lonely affair attended by three mourners—two men and a beautiful woman—Martins encounters Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), a manipulative British policeman who tells him that his friend was a notorious racketeer. Martins is appalled—he hasn't seen Lime in six years but that doesn't sound like the Harry he knew. Calloway won't  say what Lime was peddling, but hints it was nothing so innocent as tires and cigarettes; he is happy Lime is dead and offers Martins a plane ticket home.

Broke and with no prospects back in the States, prudence suggests that Martins take Calloway up on his offer, but he is offended by the man's callousness. He uses an excuse to linger and "investigate" the accident when one of mourners contacts him, claiming to be a friend of Lime's. This is just the first of several strange characters Martins meets, including a creepy child with a ball. When Martins starts to hear slightly different versions of the accident, he begins to suspect that Lime may have been murdered. A critical detail is the number of men who allegedly carried the body. Were there only two as reported by Harry's friends, or three as reported by another witness? A porter at Lime's hotel may be the key, but he gets tossed to his death out a window.

Alida Valli as the captivating Anna.

Martins falls for Lime's lover, Anna (Alida Valli), a Czech residing in the city thanks to a forged passport. She risks deportation to Russia. Martins will do anything to save her, even if it means turning on an old friend. What Lime was actually up to, and who might be the mysterious "third man," is what Martins learns. Along the way his vision of the man he once admired begins to crumble like the city itself.  It is a thrilling ride.  

The shadowy setting of Vienna.

The City of Vienna is as much a character of the film as the actors. War-scarred streets are strewn with bricks and the pavement is seemingly constantly wet. Dilapidated buildings stand side by side with structures of old world architecture. Director Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker make brilliant use of lighting, shadows, and odd camera angles to give a feeling of discomfort and unease, perfected with crisp black and white photography that suits the mood. Most of the action occurs at night. The bizarre twangy strains of a zither provide the only score. Taken as a whole, it is a masterful creation of a foreign city for the audience, a perfect setting for corruption and intrigue. 

Acclaimed writer Graham Greene wrote the screenplay, though Wells is credited with a famous  cuckoo clock speech beneath a Ferris wheel. It is tight and full of mumbled asides and clipped-off sentences like real speech. Greene bookends the film with two funerals, an apt circumstance given the danger that seems to hover just beneath the surface.

What Makes The Third Man Special:

Memorable scenes and an exotic setting transform a modest mystery into a magnificent story. Tense chases take place over mountains of broken bricks and rubble, and though the sewer labyrinth. There is Lime's dramatic and surprising appearance, the ominous Ferris wheel scene, the frantic cab ride, and best of all, Alida Valli's long, slow walk down a tree-lined boulevard.

"That's a nice girl, that. But she ought to be careful in Vienna. Everybody ought to go careful in a city like this."  

Holly Martins waits for Anna.

It is difficult to say who gives the best performance. Cotton is a convincing romantic, out of his element and awkward around Valli, yet inexplicably hopeful. Valli is impressive as a woman who has dealt with struggle and survived, but is weary of it all. She wears that resigned look of someone who has lost something. Their moments together on screen are touching and wonderful.     

The Third Man is simply one of the most atmospheric films ever made, and possesses the most elegant finale ever shot. In 1999 the British Film Institute named it the greatest British film.

Inside Story:

Director Carol Reed does the voice-over at the start of the film. He lets you know immediately you are in for a treat. A dead body is shown floating in the river as you hear, "I really got to know it in the classic period of the black market. We'd run anything if people wanted it enough and had the money to pay. Of course a situation like that does tempt amateurs."

Reed also supplies the fingers in a critical scene near the end.

The film won the Oscar for Best Black and White Cinematography and was nominated for Best Director and Film Editing. It also won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Other Films of Interest:

Carol Reed as director - Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), Oliver (1968)
Robert Krasker