The Silent World Directed by Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle Written by Jacque-Yves Cousteau 1956/France FSJYC Production/Raquin Associes/Societe Filmad/Titanus
First viewing/YouTube[box] The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever. — Jacques Yves Cousteau [/box]
Not what I was expecting. The Calypso kills a baby whale with its propeller and the crew “avenges its death” by massacring a bunch of sharks.
During the Calypso’s voyage we get life on board, lots of coral reefs, divers, fish, a sunken ship, the aforementioned whale encounter, turtle rides, a storm, and a desert island.
How times have changed! It doesn’t stop with the Calypso getting so close to a pod of whales that it bumps into one, knocking the breath out of it, and mortally wounds a baby. Then the crew punishes a ton of sharks for being attracted to its blood. That’s not enough. The crew feels compelled to hitch a ride on a sea turtle by hanging on to its flipper and riding a bunch of giant tortoises on the Galapagos that surely weigh less than they do. All this I believe was in the name of “drama”. Of course the most effective and beautiful scenes are simple observation of underwater life. We’ve seen them all many times before but Cousteau pioneered them.
The Silent World won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, Feature.
I Will Buy You (Anata kaimasu) Directed by Masaki Kobayashi Written by Zenzo Matsuyama; story by Mirnoru Ono 1956/Japan Shochiku Eiga
First viewing/Hulu
[box] If you have a bad day in baseball, and start thinking about it, you will have 10 more. — Sammy Sosa [/box]
1956 seems to be a crossroads in Japanese cinema with more broadly socially conscious films being made. Here Kobayashi progresses to the critical stance that would exemplify his later master works.
Goro Kurita is an extremely talented college home-run hitter. Daisuke Kishimoto is a scout dead-set on sighing Kurita to the professional Tokyo Flowers team. All the other teams in the league have the same idea. Kurita is managed to within an inch of his life by the opportunistic Ippei Tamaki. Tamaki has paid for Kurita’s college education and, at least in his opinion, made him the player he is. Tamaki is now looking for a big pay off.
The story follows all the bribery and tricks employed by Kishimoto as he attempts to get the deal signed ahead of the other teams employing the same tactics. There are various twists and turns along the way.
If Kobayashi intended this to be a microcosm of Japanese society as a whole, he certainly took a very dim view of it. I liked this one, especially the ending, which I was not expecting and which made the piece all the more scathing.
Federico Fellini’s La Strada was the winner of the first official Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film. Bela Lugosi died at the age of 73. Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier III of Monaco on April 18 and retired from films. Montgomery Clift suffered a life-changing incident following a dinner party at the home of co-star Elizabeth Taylor, when he crashed his car into a telephone pole and incurred broken bones and facial injuries requiring plastic surgery. Afterwards his life slowly declined due to a destructive lifestyle and substance abuse.
Actor/director Dick Powell’s (and RKO’s) The Conqueror was released. It was shot in Utah in 1954 near a nuclear weapons test site in the Nevada desert . Of The Conqueror’s 220 cast and crew members, 91 contracted cancer by 1980. It was the last film produced by Howard Hughes and a flop at the box office and with the critics.
Rock Around the Clock featured disc jockey Alan Freed and was the first film entirely dedicated to rock ‘n’ roll. The first commercially-feasible videotape recorders (with 2 inch tape reels) were sold for $50,000 in 1956. Videotape became a staple of TV productions.
In U.S. news, Dwight D. Eisenhower won a second term as U.S. President. 13-year-old Bobby Fischer beat Grand Master Donald Byrne in the NY Rosenwald chess tournament. “In God We Trust” was made the U.S. national motto.
Andersonville won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Diary of Anne Frank won for drama. Elvis Presley entered the U.S. charts for the first time with “Heartbreak Hotel”. The song was the number one hit of the year, spending eight weeks atop the Billboard charts,
Momentarily triumphant Hungarian students
Nikita Khrushchev, then First Secretary of USSR Communist Party, denounced Stalin’s excesses.
October was a big month for international news. The Suez Crisis, also named the Tripartite Aggression and the Kadesh Operation, was an invasion of Egypt in late October 1956 by Israel, followed by the United Kingdom and France. The aims were to reopen the Suez canal, regain Western control of the canal and to remove Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser from power. After the fighting had started, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Nations forced the three invaders to withdraw. The episode humiliated Great Britain and France and strengthened Nasser.
On October 23, the Hungarian Revolution broke out against the pro-Soviet government, originating as a student demonstration in Budapest. Hungarian forces drove Soviet troops from Budapest and Hungary attempted to leave the Warsaw Pact. By the end of the month, Soviet troops had retaken Budapest and decisively put down the revolution.
For 1956, I plan to organize my viewing a little differently. To keep the best films spread out more, I will be viewing in a random order rather than starting off with the highest rated films and working roughly downward as currently. The complete list of films I will select from can be found here.
I’ve now seen 80 films that were released in 1955. A few were reviewed only here. It was quite a deep year with 59 available films rated 7/10 or higher by IMDb users. Lately, I have thought that it would never end! That’s not to say that I didn’t watch many fantastic films – too many to fit all the films I rated 9/10 or over in this favorites list. Also rans were: Richard III; The Desperate Hours; Night and Fog; All That Heaven Allows; Oklahoma!; Marty; and Rebel Without a Cause.
Le Amiche Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Alba de Cespedes from a novel by Cesare Pavese 1955/Italy Trionfalcine
First viewing/Netflix rental
[box] One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood. — Lucius Annaeus Seneca [/box]
How refreshing to find a 1950’s movie in which the career woman is the most balanced and admirable character! I liked this early Antonioni offering a lot.
Cleilia (Eleonora Rossi Drago) comes to Turin to prepare for the opening of a new studio of the Rome fashion house she works for. She finds the project almost hopelessly behind schedule and must take charge of the lackadaisical workmen. One morning, a maid runs into her room at the hotel announcing that the woman in the next room is dead. It turns out that the woman, Rosetta, is not dead but nearly so due to a suicide attempt. She recovers. Gradually, Cleilia becomes part of Rosetta’s circle of friends. She takes pity on the young socialite and gets her a job at the studio to distract her from her worries.
All of Rosetta’s friends have one type of man trouble or another. The principal story involves Lorenzo, a painter, and his wife Nene (Valentina Cortese), a potter. Lorenzo shows a portrait he painted of Rosetta at a show. The show is not a success. In the meantime, Nene is invited to show her ceramics at a celebrated gallery in New York. Part of Rosetta’s problem is that she fell in love with Lorenzo while he was painting her. After her recovery, she instigates an affair. We continue to follow the friendship and romantic lives of our protagonists.
This has some of the familiar Antonioni themes of alienation and upper class ennui but there is also a sense of agency in these women that is very good to see for the period. The men are really secondary. For me the outstanding performance was that of Valentina Cortese who is being torn up by the conflict between her art and her love for her cheating husband. I loved the ending as well. Recommended.
The Rose Tattoo Directed by Daniel Mann Written by Tennessee Williams and Hal Kanter from Williams’s play 1955/USA Paramount Pictures
First viewing/Amazon Instant
[box] “Everybody is nothing until you love them.” ― Tennessee Williams, The Rose Tattoo[/box]
The rest of the film is not as strong as Anna Magnani’s tour-de-force Academy Award winning performance.
Serefina delle Rose (Magnani) immigrated to the U.S. from Sicily and now lives somewhere in the South with her husband Rosario and fifteen-year-old daughter Rosa. She is completely devoted and enthralled by Rosario, who wears a rose tattoo on his chest. (Obviously, the rose symbolism is going to be taken to the limit in this movie.) He is a truck driver and when caught hauling “something else” under his bananas gets into an accident and is killed. Serefina is overcome with grief and spends her days in her nightgown and robe, embarrassing the hell out of Rosa.
Serefina continues with her business as a seamstress. She becomes obsessed with preserving Rosa’s innocence. She does not take it kindly when Rosa falls in love with a young sailor at a high school dance.
One day, a woman comes into pick up a blouse she wants to wear to a convention in New Orleans. The blouse is not ready, one thing leads to another, and a terrific argument ensues. The woman blurts out that Rosario was having an affair. This is shattering news to Serafina and she intially refuses to believe it. She ends up trying to pry the information from Rosario’s confessor at church. She is unsuccessful but so distraught that she needs a ride home.
Alvaro Mangiacavallo, whose sister had been trying to make a match for him with Serafina any way, comes to the rescue. The rest of the movie follows the uneasy courtship between Alvaro, “who has the body of Rosario, the face of a clown and smells like a goat”, and Serafina.
Burt Lancaster’s character is the big question mark in this film. I’m uncertain as to whether the usually reliable actor was taking it way over the top or whether he is playing the character as written. At any rate, his shenanigans add a comic tone to an otherwise dark story and seem incongruous. Otherwise, there is nothing exactly wrong with the movie but it didn’t send me.
The Rose Tattoo won Academy Awards in the categories of Best Actress; Best Cinematography, Black-and-White; and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White. It was nominated in the categories of Best Picture; Best Supporting Actress (Pavan); Best Costume Design, Black-and-White; Best Film Editing; and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.
The End of the Affair Directed by Edward Dmytryck Written by Lenore J. Coffee from a novel by Graham Greene 1955/UK Coronado Productions
First viewing/Amazon Instant
[box] Sarah Miles: If there is a god, then he put the thought of that prayer in my mind, and I hate him for it.[/box]
This movie made me want to read the source novel and see the 1999 remake with Ralph Fiennes. That’s another way of saying that I thought Van Johnson weakened this version of the story.
The setting is London during the tail end of WWII while V2 rockets are still flying. Maurice Bendrix (Johnson) is an American war correspondent. He is writing a novel about the British civiil service and gets friendly with Henry Miles (Peter Cushing) while looking for background. At a party hosted by the Mileses, he looks in a mirror sees Henry’s wife Sarah (Deborah Kerr) kissing a man. This leads him to invite her to lunch for more “background” and they begin a love affair.
The affair is passionate on both sides but Maurice is filled with doubts and jealousy. Finally, they are able to spend five days alone together while Henry is traveling. The house is hit by a V2 while Maurice goes off by himself to investigate something. When he returns after the explosion Sarah flees and thereafter refuses to answer his calls or see him.
It turns out that Sarah thought Maurice had been killed and in her prayer promised God that she would end the affair if he lived. Sarah is not a churchgoer and the rest of the movie deals with her crisis of faith and Maurice’s bitterness and attempts at reconciliation.
I was looking forward to this one for the subject matter. I think Johnson was all wrong for his part. I never got his attraction for Sarah or his anguish properly. The movie was a bit more of a melodrama than I was ready for. It needed some more bite or something. I’m not sorry I saw it, however.
Dreams (Kvinnodröm) Directed by Ingmar Bergman Written by Ingmar Bergman 1955/Sweden Sandrews
First viewing/Hulu
[box] “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” ― Edgar Allan Poe[/box]
I enjoyed this lesser-known Bergman film but it is certainly not a must-see.
Suzanne (Eva Dahlbeck) is a fashion photographer and Doris (Harriet Andersson) is her model. When they have to go to Gotheberg for work, Suzanne dreams of a meeting with her married lover and Doris is at loose ends, having just broken up with her boyfriend.
The rest of the film is broken up into individual stories of the women. Doris is picked up by an elderly man (Gunnar Bjornstrand) who proceeds to indulge her every expensive whim and Suzanne does have the longed-for reunion. Both incidents turn out very different from what they could have expected.
This is quite OK but fairly trivial. There is one fantastic sequence when Bjornstrand and Andersson ride some scary attractions at an amusement park. The stories start out looking comic but switch tone mid-way through. The transitions are not all that smooth.
Killer’s Kiss Directed by Stanley Kubrick Written by Stanley Kubrick 1955/USA Minotaur Productions
First viewing/Amazon Instant
[box] Gloria Price: It’s a mistake to confuse pity with love.[/box]
Stanley Kubrick’s second feature is strong on visuals but weak on plot and dialogue.
Davey Gordon is a boxer who has just lost his last chance at the championship. He has decided to return to his uncle’s horse farm near Seattle. One night before he leaves, he hears a woman, Gloria, screaming in the apartment across the way. He rescues her from a much older man’s unwanted advances. The man, Vincent Rapallo, is the boss of the dime-a-dance joint where Gloria works.
Davey and Gloria hit it off and she plans to accompany him back to Seattle. Vincent refuses to give up his pursuit, however.
This movie seems padded with filler at only 67 minutes. It contains some of the corniest dialogue I’ve heard in awhile as well. (The conversation between Davey and his uncle is priceless). The acting is no great shakes. The whole suffers from the post-production dubbing of the entire sound track. The leading lady is not even voiced by the same actress. Despite all this, you can clearly see a master craftsman in the making. Some of the images are stunning and the staging of the action sequences is innovative.
Daddy Long Legs Directed by Jean Negulesco Written by Phoebe and Henry Ephron from a novel by Jean Webster 1955/USA Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
First viewing/Netflix rental
[box] When an irresistible force such as you/ Meets an old immovable object like me/ You can bet just as sure as you live/ Something’s gotta give/ Something’s gotta give/ Something’s gotta give — Lyrics by Johnny Mercer[/box]
The May-December romance and dream ballet don’t do this musical any favors. It has its pleasures, however.
Jervis Pendleton III (Fred Astaire) is one of the world’s richest men, but is mostly interested in playing the drums and otherwise having fun. On a trade mission to France, his car breaks down and he has to go to an orphanage for help. There he spots eighteen-year-old Julie Andre charmingly teaching English to the other orphans. He wants to adopt her but the American ambassador convinces him that this would be unseemly. He then opts to finance her college education in the U.S. Julie is required to write letters to him and in the process develops a fascination with the anonymous benefactor she refers to as “Daddy Longlegs”.
After this has gone on for a couple of years without a response, Jervis’ aid (Fred Clark) and secretary (Thelma Ritter) become concerned that the girl is falling in love with him. Now intrigued, Jervis visits the school and after one dance at the hop falls in love with his charge. She loves him, too, but a new encounter with the ambassador messes things up until the happy ending.
I really wish they could have done this without Astaire and Caron becoming a couple. It should have been easy enough. There is some fantastic dancing here though, not least from Caron. It says something that I could take my eyes off Astaire long enough to appreciate her footwork. Unfortunately, there is a long dream ballet sequence that, while well danced, stops the movie in its tracks.
Daddy Long Legs was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color; Best Music, Original Song (for “Something’s Gotta Give”) and Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture.
I’ve been a classic movie fan for many years. My original mission was to see as many movies as I could get my hands on for every year from 1929 to 1970. I have completed that mission.
I then carried on with my chronological journey and and stopped midway through 1978. You can find my reviews of 1934-1978 films and “Top 10” lists for the 1929-1936 and 1944-77 films I saw here. For the past several months I have circled back to view the pre-Code films that were never reviewed here.
I’m a retired Foreign Service Officer living in Indio, California. When I’m not watching movies, I’m probably traveling, watching birds, knitting, or reading.
Photographs and videos found in this blog, unless indicated, are not owned by me and are here only for the purpose of education and discussion. Media found here are not intended for any commercial purpose. Copyright infringement is not intended.
Written material belongs to me and is copyrighted by flickersintime.com
2. 
