A Journey Through My Collection: The 1950's
As I move into the decade of the 1950’s, the selections of movies from my collection truly give a decent summary of my tastes. Out of all ten movies, each is at least one of Hitchcock, Westerns and Criterion. The 1950’s is one of my favorite decades for movies, not because it was a squeaky clean nostalgic time, but because after World War II and in the dawn of the Cold War, there starts to come an edge to the subject matter and the quality of filmmaking starts to be a mixture of the oldest filmmakers getting the most of their abilities and young filmmakers coming back from the war with the influences seeing horrors, but also seeing the world. These movies start to have some pretty complex political statements, High Noon and The Searchers are seemingly on opposite ends of the spectrum as told through the Western genre, and A Face in the Crowd and Hiroshima Mon Amour address the effects of the times on individuals and society in general.
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The Gunfighter (1950)
A very well made as a western, this has a very '50's sensibility to it with the focus on fathers and sons, but still a bit progressive portraying the main character as someone who hasn't seen their son until they are eight years old. Gregory Peck is quite a presence on the screen, very tall and lean and one of the boldest moustaches I've seen in a while. I like that westerns back then all tie back together to the same pulp stories of Wyatt Erp and Billie the Kid. I feel like the real stories were probably limited so fictional characters had to pick and choose existing mythologies to create a full world.
Strangers on a Train (1951)
I feel like I knew the name of this movie forever but hadn't seen an actual image or clip from it until I made a point to see it. I feel like this does have a number of iconic sequences, on the observation car of the train, at the amusement park and the tennis match scene is a surprise and very well done. This isn't as much of a train movie as The Lady Vanishes, and that vanishing lady isn't as much of a part of the movie as you would expect from the title. I think I confuse the two movies in my mind, and they're both comfortable suspense pictures from Hitchcock.
High Noon (1952)This is such a simple movie but so well made. It doesn't hurt that the cast is incredible, I could argue that Gary Cooper is my least favorite actor in the bunch and he does exactly what he needs to convey his presence on this film. I feel he can be a bit wooden across his movies, but it doesn't hurt to be standing across Grace Kelly or Lloyd Bridges or Lee Van Cleef to bring out the best in him. This is so well shot, the story is perfect in its simplicity and nothing is dragged out beyond it's utility to grasp the focus of the audience.
War of the Worlds (1953)
A relaxing B-movie, good, not great. What's fun is noticing scenes that were lifted for more influential sci-fi movies of the last 25 years. I didn't realize how closely the hammer in the crater scene of the first Thor movie matched with the crater scene here. I'm sure Thor spiced it up a bit, but this is still fun. The use of forcefields really gave me flashbacks to the Gungan battle scene in Phantom Menace. This got me thinking about the use of forcefields in science fiction I wonder if War of the Worlds in text might have been one of the first uses. Thinking of Star Trek using force fields and their hard sci-fi adherence to things that have some kind of scientific basis like emitting energy or sonic vibrations to break up projectiles makes me think that a lack of this tech means it can't work or it's way too inefficient to be worth it.
Follow up... it looks like the book didn't have force fields. just under 20 years after War of the Worlds, the first mention of something like it came out in 1912, but the first full usage in fiction was around the early '30's. This War of the Worlds film is possibly one of the first uses of force fields in film as a defensive device.
Rear Window (1954)
I think it's pretty easy to admit that this is definitely in my Mount Rushmore of favorite movies. This is so damn close to perfect, close enough that the two imperfections stand out more than new great things that I notice on new viewings. Yes, the flashbulbs and Jimmy Stewart's fall are a little wacky, but they still take away a little of the danger of the film, which is oddly a good thing. For a murder mystery and suspense, this is such a relaxing movie, the main character is wearing pajamas throughout the movie, a neighbor tinkers on the piano throughout the film adding a score from inside the frame, Grace Kelly is such a calming force to the film. The background noise of the city, garden in the courtyard and that the audience surrogate is given a caregiver to check in on us from time to time and give comic relief. There is so much comfort to this film, as we are the ultimate voyeurs but we aren't treated as though we are intruding, until we are approached with some danger. On this viewing I was noticing the detail of the weathered stains on the bricks of the building were details that struck me considering this was entirely a set, built in a studio (dug into the floor), something that struck me as similar to the praise for the aging of the sets in Star Wars, making the Star Wars universe and the apartments of Rear Window feel, "lived in." This is just a perfect movie. I love it.
The Trouble with Harry (1955)
I really love this film. The colors are beautiful and the scenery is great. I love that this film came out the year after Rear Window and the characters and the looks of the two female leads, Grace Kelly and Shirley MacLaine, are very different, but they're both so amazing, and it seems to go against the idea of a "type" for Alfred Hitchcock actresses. Perhaps I have matured out of the farcical nature of this film, but the characters are so nice and enjoyable that it's still quite enjoyable. One scene that stands out is when the lead actor learns that the older woman is preparing to have a man come for tea and that she is not feeling especially confident, and he switches gears to play a role of a beautician or stylist for her to build her up and give her a sense of worth in the situation. It's a very touching scene, especially because the most masculine character in the movie then begins to code more feminine in a way that isn't mocking, but supportive and empathetic and empowering to one of the more sensitive characters in the film.
The Searchers (1956)
I think I finally figured out what was so unsettling about this movie for me. It's not that this plays with racism, or that the main character sucks, or that his "comic relief" friend is perhaps intellectually disabled. It's that this feels more like a Sam Peckinpah movie more than a John Ford film. I think with that revelation, I was able to settle in and appreciate some of the fantastic camera work and great uses of Monument Valley. Regardless, this still isn't quite as good of a Western as many other John Ford movies, even if it is perhaps one of the most repeated and troped westerns of all time. And the knee jerk shittiness still isn't great.
A Face in the Crowd (1957)
I had assumed this might be aligned in story with Network or Bamboozled, and it isn't far off, but It struck as more like Citizen Kane or a little of O Brother Where Art Thou. I love this idea of someone coming out of nowhere to succeed in TV, seemingly genuine in their benevolence and homespun ways, only to let success get the better of them. Perhaps the main character here was always a piece of shit, he left his wife and the circumstances of his divorce read like a serial liar, why did he get divorced in Mexico and why was that divorce thrown out because of the judge's fraud issues? Oddly, this is very interesting to watch in close proximity to The Boys in the Boat to see the thin line of "hobo" life and polite society during the Great Depression. This was also the dawn of television and it really was a situation where someone with no foundation could charm themselves into being a big deal in television. We seem to be coming into a second wave of that phenomenon with internet influencers, where someone could come out of nowhere and become a big star, with no background and a lot of charisma. This could be remade today in internet culture as "The Rizzler."
Vertigo (1958)
Hardly one of my favorite Hitchcock films, this doesn't have the fun of Rear Window or North by Northwest, and isn't a horror staple like Psycho or The Birds, but it masters an especially unsettling suspense that is rather unique. I feel like this gets away with some less than convincing story points, the fear of heights and the laughable effects of falling, the past life con, or the doppelganger con, or that a simple fright from a nun makes Kim Novak fall to her death. On this viewing, I was struck by how beautifully shot this is, the Golden Gate Bridge looks amazing, simple shots are stunning. The sequences of Jimmie Stewart following Kim Novak around are very tense and the hints at the supernatural are so intriguing. It's a bit of a letdown to learn it's all a con. The two cons do seem pretty far fetched and hard to take seriously until I remember seeing a story of a lawyer in Arizona who was disciplined about ten years ago for having sex with a client while claiming to be possessed by the spirit of their client's deceased spouse. In reality, people get conned by the craziest stuff every day.
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
Alain Resnais is a fascinating filmmaker, his career spanned seven decades, and while his films are definitely “weird,” they are not weird in a way that one would expect a movie to be strange. Some of his films give hints to other strange filmmakers, Last Year at Marienbad seems to be a movie that David Lynch has based his entire filmograghy on, Je t'aime, Je t'aime is a bizarre time travel film unlike any kind of movie ever, that seems to have inspired Terry Gilliam quite a bit. But his first prominent film was a Holocaust documentary, Night and Fog (1956), and his editing job before “Hiroshima” was Agnes Varda’s love story La Pointe Courte mixes in documentary footage of the boat jousting event of the town, both give hints at the subject matter and atypical storytelling.
While this incorporates documentary footage of horrors of war in both Japan and Europe, and has a few twists to the story, it’s such a beautiful love story, not just in the relationship, but it is also incredibly well shot as well. The reveal of the woman’s life during World War II is jarring, a shock to our point of view that has spent the rest of the movie delving into the new realities of a cold war with the dawn of atomic weapons. We spend the early parts of the film seeing landmarks, monuments and museums in Hiroshima. Just almost 50 years after this film I visited these same places that looked very similar, even as the rest of the city grew and modernized around the explosion site over subsequent decades. The reality of this film is that there are scars all over the world from the horrors of World War II and greaters horrors perhaps to come as the world moves into the 1960’s. And yet, there is still room for love and heartbreak in the lives of the people living through it.
Final Thoughts
Some of these films are of my absolute favorites, and A Face in the Crowd movies into that group as a first time viewing. I enjoyed The Searchers and Vertigo a little more than in the past and was a little less excited about The Trouble with Harry on this viewing. I love how beautiful the films of the ‘50’s are, this batch of movies really is one of the high points of this exercise. I'm a little worried I'll be more let down with the ‘60’s, although it looks like I'll get a healthy dose of great Italian films.
What’s Next!
La Dolce Vita, One Eyed Jacks, Mamma Roma, The Birds, The Gospel According to Matthew, Juliet of the Spirits, The Group, Oedipus Rex, Snows of Grenoble, Madea.
