1951-1960

  • Jean Negulesco – The Best of Everything (1959)

    Jean Negulesco1951-1960DramaRomanceUSA
    The Best of Everything (1959)
    The Best of Everything (1959)

    Amanda Farrow is a waspish, hard edged editor in a paperback publishing house. Jaded and embittered, she is involved in a disappointing affair with a married man and tends to take out her frustrations on the girls under her charge, including Gregg Adams, an aspiring actress who is involved with a Broadway stage director, David Savage, and an ambitious young secretary Caroline Bender, who has just been jilted by her boyfriend and has turned to one of the editors, Mike Rice, for consolation. April Morrison is a young typist who is seduced by rich playboy Dexter Key and soon finds herself pregnant and abandoned by her unsympathetic lover.Read More »

  • Kon Ichikawa – Shokei no heya AKA Punishment Room (1956) (HD)

    Kon Ichikawa1951-1960AsianDramaJapan
    Shokei no heya (1956)
    Shokei no heya (1956)

    Katsumi is a university student who has no respect for his hardworking parents, his professors, or even his friends. He helps one friend obtain a loan to finance a dance, by humiliating his father at the bank where he works. He drugs and rapes Akiko, one of the girls in his class. She becomes infatuated with him, even though he remains aloof. He enjoys goading a rival gang in the pool hall. Finally, when facing the gang, he goes too far in trying to prove his courage. Written by Will GilbertRead More »

  • Kon Ichikawa – Nihonbashi AKA Bridge of Japan (1956) (HD)

    Kon Ichikawa1951-1960AsianDramaJapan

    Ichikawa’s 1956 adaptation of Nihonbashi was the first to take the work of Kyoka Izumi— until then regarded as a writer of common tragic melodramas—and re-evaluate it as a sanbi-ha work of decadence, aestheticism, and intrigue. Ichikawa’s film presents the tragic plot of the young geisha who is unable to enact her love for a man publicly in any way other than a histrionic story of torment, a heart-rending tale of lovers being crushed by fate. Instead Ichikawa shows the contest of wills that transpires as two geisha, Oko (Chikage Awashima) and Kiyoha (Fujiko Yamamoto) fight for the top spot in Nihonbashi, the pinnacle ot the Tokyo geisha world. Nihonbashi is an elegant, if steely, exposition of manners. The young doctor, Shinzo Katsuragi (Ryuji Shinagawa), is the object of affection for both women, but appears to be more the choice reward for the plotting and thieving of these two early modern superwomen, than a lover they swoon over.Read More »

  • Richard Brooks – Blackboard Jungle (1955)

    Richard Brooks1951-1960ClassicsDramaUSA
    Blackboard Jungle (1955)
    Blackboard Jungle (1955)

    Synopsis:
    War veteran Rick Dadier is one of three new teachers hired at North Manual High School, an inner city boys school. This is his first teaching assignment, which he needs to support himself and his insecure pregnant wife, Anne. Despite Principle Warnecke’s assertions to the contrary, Dadier quickly learns that the rumors of student discipline problems at the school are indeed true. The established teachers at the school try to counsel the newcomers, all inexperienced in such situations, as how best to handle the rowdy students. Regardless, Dadier tries to exert discipline in his class, which provokes a violent response. Dadier believes the student leaders against him are Artie West, but more specifically Gregory Miller, who he thinks uses the fact of being black as a means of racial provocation. Dadier has to decide either to leave and teach at a “real” school, or stay and figure out how to get through to his students. If he decides to stay, he has to figure out who the real disruptive influences are, especially as they have resorted to attacks of a personal nature that affect especially Anne.Read More »

  • Joze Gale – Kekec (1951)

    1951-1960ClassicsJoze GaleSloveniaYugoslavian Cinema under Tito
    Kekec (1951)
    Kekec (1951)

    Kekec is one of those films people in Slovenia usually see in their childhood and keep it in their memories as a precious gift for the rest of their lives. It is a double memory: firstly, of one’s childhood, and seconly, of an environment that doesn’t exist in the modern world. In fact, the setting looks so ancient the things you see there could be taken straight from a museum – and this is not far from the truth, since every detail has been made with such accuracy it could also serve as a student’s book of ethnographic elements in rural Alpine settlements. Today, these mountains are suffering greatly from the global warming, and most of the green empty planes you see are filled with small tourist houses. All in all, a film as a memory par exellence!Read More »

  • Kô Nakahira – Chizu no nai machi AKA The Jungle Block (1960)

    Kô Nakahira1951-1960CrimeFilm NoirJapan
    Chizu no nai machi (1960)
    Chizu no nai machi (1960)

    A young doctor falls into a despair of developments. He plans to revenge the disgrace inflicted upon his sister, whose engagement was broken as a result.

    Quote:
    One of the darkest Nakahira films, a tale of gentrification and sexual violence.Read More »

  • Jean-Luc Godard – Opération ”Béton” AKA Operation ”Concrete” (1953) (HD)

    Jean-Luc Godard1951-1960DocumentarySwitzerland
    Opération ''Béton'' (1953)
    Opération ”Béton” (1953)

    Jean-Luc Godard’s first film. After returning to Switzerland, Godard went to work as a manual worker at a dam building site, using the money he earned to buy a camera, and making a short documentary about the building of the Grand Dixence Dam.
    (Also known as Operation ”Concrete”.)Read More »

  • Marika Beiku & Aleksandr Gordon & Andrei Tarkovsky – Ubiytsy AKA The Killers (1956) (HD)

    Andrei Tarkovsky1951-1960Aleksandr GordonDramaMarika BeikuShort FilmUSSR
    Ubiytsy (1956) (HD)
    Ubiytsy (1956) (HD)

    Quote:
    The Killers is a 1956 student film by the Soviet and Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky and his fellow students Marika Beiku and Aleksandr Gordon. The film is based on the short story “The Killers” by Ernest Hemingway, written in 1927. It was Tarkovsky’s first film, produced when he was a student at the State Institute of Cinematography.Read More »

  • K. Asif – Mughal-E-Azam AKA The Great Mughal (1960)

    1951-1960DramaIndiaK. AsifRomance
    Mughal E Azam (1960)
    Mughal E Azam (1960)

    Set in the 16th century AD, the movie brings to life the tale of the doomed love affair between the Mughal Crown Prince Saleem and the beautiful, ill-fated court dancer, whose fervor and intensity perpetrates a war between the prince and his father the great Mughal Emperor Akbar, and threatens to bring an empire to its knees.Read More »

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