1951-1960

  • Jacques Rivette – Le coup du berger AKA Fool’s Mate (1956)

    1951-1960DramaFranceJacques RivetteShort Film

    Quote:
    Claire (Virginie Vitry) is a chic young Parisian woman married to a somewhat older husband, Jean (Jacques Doniol-Valcroze). As this 28-minute trifle opens, she leaves her husband playing baroque music at the piano, telling him she is off to see her sister, Solange. In reality she meets her lover, Claude (Jean-Claude Brialy) at his apartment; after some idle chatter and love-making he tells her a story of the shriveled heads that the Jivaro indians used to give their lovers as tokens of affection but as she shivers in disgust, he gives her a mink instead. How will they hide it from her husband though?Read More »

  • Sidney Lumet – That Kind of Woman (1959)

    1951-1960ComedyDramaSidney LumetUSA

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    Red (Tab Hunter) meets and falls in love with Kay (Sophia Loren) even though he understands she’s a “kept woman”. It was intended to be Loren’s breakthrough American movie, but failed at the box office. “That Kind of Woman” stands up well thanks to a script by the then blacklisted Walter Bernstein, a strong supporting cast and good performances by Hunter and Loren in the prime of their youth.Read More »

  • Richard Myers – The Path (1960)

    USA1951-1960Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive ArtExperimentalRichard MyersShort Film

    B&W, SILENT.

    “Light as the symbol of the ineffable. The ‘plot’ of this subjective recreation of a dream seems to concern a mysterious journey; the spectator, however, is visually directed toward forms and substances rather than to the protagonists by a filmmaker who is a master of visionary cinema.” – Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art

    “Richard Myers has, thru his films, given us the ONLY consistently creative variable to dream-thinking in our time. All else, in film, slides toward surrealism and/or props itself with misplaced Freudian symbols, at best, or else gets lost in the Jung-le, at the verses. Myers’ work is rooted in what he doesn’t know about, just exactly what he knows – his own home grounds mid-America, and like D.W. Griffith he takes the great risk of being native to his art, attending it on its home-grown grounds/his-UNowned-dreams.” – Stan BrakhageRead More »

  • Marco Ferreri – El Cochecito aka The Little Coach (1960)

    1951-1960ComedyMarco FerreriSpain

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    Description: ALL Don Anselmo wants is a motorized wheelchair. The problem is that there’s nothing wrong with his legs, and his prosperous but parsimonious son, the lawyer, refuses to indulge him. The drastic steps the old fellow takes to stop walking and start riding constitute the plot of ”El Cochecito” (”The Little Coach”), Marco Ferreri’s 1960 movie, which is having its American premiere at Film

    Mr. Ferreri is best known for ”La Grande Bouffe,” a satire about Franco’s Spain in which several gourmands dine themselves to death. ”El Cochecito,” too, has its satiric edge -almost everybody, even likable Anselmo, is utterly self-centered; when Anselmo goes out of his way to reunite a pair of young lovers, it’s an aberration. You’ll need patience, but as the little tale develops, the movie offers a quirkily rueful look at the loneliness and longings of age.Read More »

  • Marlen Khutsiyev & Feliks Mironer – Vesna na Zarechnoy ulitse AKA Spring on Zarechnaya Street (1956) (HD)

    1951-1960DramaMarlen KhutsiyevMarlen Khutsiyev and Feliks MironerUSSR

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    A young school teacher Tanya works at a night school for working people. But it’s uneasy to get used to grown-up men, their constant attempts at flirting, their sometimes too manly jokes and comments. She is especially irritated by Don Juan-like behavior of Sasha Savchenko. She avoids his advances, and Sasha becomes so upset that he drops out of school. After a while, Tanya gets used to this new for her environment, finds in her heart an attraction to Sasha, and there comes Spring, exams time…Read More »

  • Kenji Mizoguchi – Akasen chitai AKA Street of Shame (1956)

    1951-1960DramaJapanKenji MizoguchiPolitics

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    赤線地帯

    Dan Harper wrote:
    Any serious film director is concerned not only with meticulous representation but also with a kind of drama which must, by its nature, question the ethical rightness of things as they are…. Usually, a director is drawn to situations with maximum dramatic potential. Invariably that potential is provided by strife and friction between the individual and his environment. In the Japanese woman, Japanese directors have discovered the perfect protagonist. This does not mean that Japanese directors are feminists – even Kenji Mizoguchi, though he is often so described. It means rather that these directors in seeking objectivity as well as dramatic revelation have, naturally, shown Japanese women as they are.Read More »

  • Henri-Georges Clouzot – Les diaboliques AKA Diabolique (1955)

    1951-1960Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive ArtDramaFranceHenri-Georges ClouzotThriller

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    Quote:
    Among the most enduringly popular motives for murder, in films as in life, is the desire to remove an impediment to happiness—to get somebody, once and for all, out of the way. In life, of course, the goal of freeing oneself by canceling the existence of another human being is frequently thwarted by the haste and clumsiness of the means, the hot urgency of the killer’s drive overriding his better judgment about the care required to escape detection. His guilt becomes obvious, he gets caught, and that desperately hoped-for happiness flies out the window. Clever murderers—of whom there are, thankfully, many more in fiction and movies than in life—temper their homicidal passion with meticulous calculation, arranging their dark deeds with the tender artifice necessary to make unnatural death look natural. They’re artists, of a sort. And the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect murder or a perfect work of art has never stopped either a murderer or an artist from trying.Read More »

  • Ingmar Bergman – Jungfrukällan AKA The Virgin Spring (1960) (HD)

    1951-1960CrimeDramaIngmar BergmanSweden

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    Set in beautiful 14th century Sweden, it is the sombre, powerful fable of wealthy land-owning parents whose daughter, a young virgin, is brutally raped and murdered by goat herders after her half sister has invoked a pagan curse. By a bizarre twist of fate, the murderers ask for food and shelter from the dead girl’s parents, who, discovering the truth about their erstwhile lodgers, exact a chilling revengeRead More »

  • Nicholas Ray – Party Girl (1958)

    1951-1960250 Quintessential Film NoirsFilm NoirMusicalNicholas RayUSA

    Synopsis:
    Lawyer Thomas Farrell has made a career defending crooks in trials. He has never realized that there is a downside to his success, until he meets the dancer Vicki Gayle. She makes him decide to get a better reputation. But mob king Rico Angelo *insists* that he continues his services…Read More »

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