November 28, 2020
1951-1960, Anthony Mann, Romance, USA, Western
1,533 Views
Paul Tatara, TCM wrote:
Some movie projects, no matter how promising, seem doomed to one form of failure or another. When RKO first filmed Edna Ferber’s popular Western novel, Cimarron, in 1931, it was a major critical success, and even snagged the Oscar® for Best Picture. But it was an expensive movie to make, and the studio lost a pile of money on it. Then, when MGM enlisted Anthony Mann to remake Cimarron in 1960, the production was beset with an assortment of problems, including studio interference and a misbegotten romance between its lead performers, Glenn Ford and Maria Schell. Read More »
August 25, 2020
1951-1960, Drama, Italy, Luchino Visconti
2,934 Views
Quote:
Le notti bianche (White Nights) occupies a central position within Luchino Visconti’s body of work. In appearance at least, it consummates a break with the neorealism of the 1940s and early 1950s and looks forward to The Leopard (1963), in its rendering of subjectivity by visual style, and to Vaghe stelle dell’orsa (Sandra; 1965), in its dependence on metaphor as a structuring device. But appearances can be deceptive, for in 1960, Visconti returned to realism with Rocco and His Brothers, and in its way, Le notti bianche is also fundamentally a realist film, in spite of its excursions into fantasy. Read More »
June 1, 2020
1951-1960, Classics, Drama, France, René Clément
1,624 Views

Synopsis:
Gervaise Macquart, a young lame laundress, is left by her lover Auguste Lantier with two boys… She manages to make it, and a few years later she marries Coupeau, a roofer. After working very hard a few more years, she succeeds in buying her own laundry (her dream)… But Coupeau starts to drink after having fallen from a roof, and Lantier shows up… A faithful adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel “L’Assomoir”, depicting the fatal degeneration of a family of workers, mainly because of alcohol. Read More »
September 1, 2019
1951-1960, Alexandre Astruc, Arthouse, Classics, France
2,230 Views
Not much one can say other than providing Godard’s review of the film:
I don’t give a damn about the merry-go-round decorated by Walt Disney, he lunch on the grass with imitation plastic clothes, the chewing-gum green of a ball of wool. I don’t give a damn about any of the lapses in taste piled up by Astruc, Claude Renoir and Mayo.Or about Roman Vlad’s saxophone either. Actually it isn’t bad. But anyhow, the real beauty of Une Vie lies elsewhere.
In Pascale Petit’s yellow dress shimmering amid the Velazquez grey dunes of Normandy. That’s wrong! Not Velasquez grey? Not even Delacroix grey, howl the connoisseurs. Read More »
August 1, 2014
1961-1970, Comedy, Crime, France, Philippe de Broca
1,839 Views


Synopsis:
‘A family of aristocrats have fallen on hard times. To pay for repairs to their crumbling country chateau they are forced to use their home as a hotel. The local garage mechanic, Charlie, provides a constant stream of guests for them by sabotaging any car that arrives in his garage. The latest arrival is an important-looking man, Cesar Maricorne, accompanied by his two aides. When she learns that he is a gangster who has just robbed a bank, the aging Marquise realises that her family’s financial worries may be at an end…’
– Films de France Read More »
January 30, 2012
1951-1960, Classics, Drama, Richard Brooks, USA
666 Views


Ryevsk, Russia, 1870. Tensions abound in the Karamazov family. Fyodor is a wealthy libertine who holds his purse strings tightly. His four grown sons include Dmitri, the eldest, an elegant officer, always broke and at odds with his father, betrothed to Katya, herself lovely and rich. The other brothers include a sterile aesthete, a factotum who is a bastard, and a monk. Family tensions erupt when Dmitri falls in love with one of his father’s mistresses, the coquette Grushenka. Two brothers see Dmitri’s jealousy of their father as an opportunity to inherit sooner. Acts of violence lead to the story’s conclusion: trials of honor, conscience, forgiveness, and redemption. Read More »