1950s

  • Rafael Gil – La guerra de Dios AKA I Was a Parish Priest (1953)

    1951-1960DramaRafael GilSpainSpanish cinema under Franco

    A new religious film with Claude Laydu, the bressonian county priest.
    Quote:
    A young priest is assigned to a poor mining parish. There he will try by all means to end, through the Gospel, the justified rancor of the miners, who live in a bleeding situation of misery and social injustice. (FILMAFFINITY)Read More »

  • Delmer Daves – Kings Go Forth (1958)

    1951-1960Delmer DavesDramaUSAWar

    Synopsis:
    Race, love, and war. The Allies have landed in France, set up in a coastal town, where Lt. Sam Loggins, a serious guy from Manhattan’s west side, falls hard for Monique Blair, an American raised in France. Loggins’ sergeant, Britt Harris, a playboy from Jersey, also finds Monique attractive. She chooses one to love and the other to befriend after disclosing her parents’ history and why she lives in France. The men say it makes no difference, a wedding is announced, and the soldiers face a dangerous mission behind enemy lines. But is everyone being truthful?Read More »

  • Malcolm St. Clair – Crack-Up (1936)

    1931-1940DramaMalcolm St. ClairThrillerUSA

    Synopsis:
    Test pilot Brian Donlevy works for a major aircraft plant where a hush-hush project is in progress. Peter Lorre is a deceptively shy plant technician who is actually the head of a foreign spy ring. Eager to get his hands on the plans of a new, secret aircraft, Lorre bribes Donlevy to help him steal the blueprints. Donlevy agrees…Read More »

  • Chris Marker – Casque Bleu AKA Blue Helmet (1995)

    1951-1960Chris MarkerDocumentaryFranceShort Film

    Quote:
    This is a 26 minute short film by Chris Marker, where he interviews and records the, “Lucid testimony of François Cremieux, blue helmet in 1994 in the pocket of Bilac,” in Bosnia-Herzogovina By referring to him as a “blue helmet” they mean that he is a UN peacekeeper. Cremieux tells the story about his experiences in Bosnia, as still photographs are injected between the interview footage.Read More »

  • David Gladwell – Miss Thompson Goes Shopping (1958)

    1951-1960David GladwellShort FilmUnited Kingdom

    David Gladwell’s ability to capture both the idyllic and eerie aspects of country life are used to great effect in this filmic adaptation of Martin Armstrong’s poem about an elderly lady who becomes perturbed by something we cant see. It becomes apparent that she is looking for her past, lost in a memory or the clutches of nostalgia. Miss Thompson’s shopping trip to town is in chaotic contrast to the tranquil nature of her lonely home, which on return seems like paradise. This title is also available on the DVD/Blu-ray ‘Requiem for a Village’ in the BFI Flipside collection.Read More »

  • Jean Genet – Un chant d’amour (1950)

    1941-1950EroticaExperimentalFranceJean GenetQueer Cinema(s)

    From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
    Genet’s only film — hounded by the censors, unavailable, secret — is an early and remarkably moving attempt to portray homosexual passions. Already a classic, it succeeds as perhaps no other film to intimate the explosive power of frustrated sex; male prisoners in solitary confinement “embracing” walls, ramming them in erotic despair with erect penis, swaying convulsively to auto-erotic lust, kissing their own bodies and tattoos in sexual frenzy. In a supremely poetic (and visual) metaphor of sexual deprivation, two prisoners in adjoining cells symbolically perform fellatio by alternately blowing or inhaling each other’s cigarette smoke through a straw inserted in a wall opening, while masturbating. Like all of Genet’s early work, the entire film is, in effect, a single onanistic fantasy, filled with desperate frustration and sensuous nostalgia. In the end, and after many failures, some flowers — painfully passed from one barred window to the next — are finally caught by the prisoner in the adjoining cell in a poetic affirmation of love in infinite imprisonment.Read More »

  • Kon Ichikawa – Biruma no tategoto aka The Burmese harp (1956)

    1951-1960AsianDramaJapanKon Ichikawa

    Captain Inouye is a music lover and he taught his unit to sing. One of his soldiers, Mizushima, learned to play harp to accompany the chorus of his comrades, discovering a gift unknown to himself before war. The music will save the company when Japan surrenders but now the country and its soldiers has to split his spirit in two: either accept, either refuse… either live, either die… but the film finds even more subtle separations, as if receiving like the burman soil it begins and ends with all the scars and tugs of postwar Japan.Read More »

  • Phil Karlson – The Phenix City Story (1955)

    1951-1960CrimeFilm NoirPhil KarlsonUSA

    Quote:
    I’ve always cited this movie as the best ever made in (Alabama), as well as the most authentic. Maybe that’s in part because watching it is experiencing the apotheosis of Southern sleaze—a bit like festering for hours in the seediest possible Alabama Greyhound depot in August without air conditioning…Though the movie’s politics are liberal, its moral outrage is so intense you may come out of it wanting to join a lynch mob.” – Film critic and Alabama expatriate Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing in his book Essential Cinema.Read More »

  • Heinosuke Gosho – Ôsaka no yado AKA An Inn at Osaka (1954)

    1951-1960ClassicsDramaHeinosuke GoshoJapan

    Synopsis:
    Mr. Mito (Shuji Sano), a Tokyo businessman, is demoted and sent to Osaka. There, he finds lodging in the titular inn, and makes the acquaintance of many of the town’s citizens. Notable among them are the maids at the inn, a hard-drinking geisha, and a mysterious woman Mito encounters at the mailbox. In Japan, director Gosho’s name is synonymous with melancholy and finding laughter through tears; An Inn at Osaka bears up that reputation. The struggle to stay afloat in life, especially financially, is a running theme of the film, as all of the characters struggle with looming poverty and gnawing loneliness, but it all ends with a kind of quiet triumph.Read More »

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