Category Archives: 1955

The Seven Year Itch
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Billy Wilder and George Axelrod from Axelrod’s play
1955/USA
Charles K. Feldman Group/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

Richard Sherman: Miss Morris, I’m perfectly capable of fixing my own breakfast. As a matter of fact, I had a peanut butter sandwich and two whiskey sours.

This is not one of Billy Wilder’s most highly rated films but I think it’s one of his funniest.

Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) is a man with a vivid imagination who is a bit of a Walter Mitty.  He sends his wife (Evelyn Keyes) and son off to Maine for the summer while he toils at a pulp fiction publisher in hot, humid Manhattan.  He has strict instructions from his wife and his doctor not to smoke or drink.  Naturally, his resolve withers the minute he is on his own.  Then it crumbles completely when confronted with his new upstairs neighbor  played by a luscious Marilyn Monroe and named in the credits only as The Girl.

The Girl’s apartment has no air conditioning and she is suffering mightily from the heat. Richard’s has air conditioning in every room.  Even Richard’s wildest dreams could not have come up with the situation that falls into his lap.  With Sonny Tufts as an imaginary rival, Oskar Homolka as a psychiatrist, and Robert Strauss as a randy building superintendent.

The title refers to that stage in a marriage when the parties’ attentions supposedly start to wander.  Monroe reveals herself to be an expert comedienne as the temptation in question but your reaction to the movie will probably depend on your views on Tom Ewell’s performance.  I think it is absolutely hilarious.  He’s so lame and full of himself all at the same time.  Recommended.

Trailer

This Island Earth
Directed by Joseph Newman
Written by Franklin Coen and George Callahan; story by Raymond F. Jones
1955/USA
Universal International Pictures
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Dr. Ruth Adams: My mind is my own, and nobody’s going to change it! I’m not going into that room![/box]

Some interesting special effects accompany a plodding and puzzling screenplay.

Dr. Cal Meacham (Rex Reason) is a genius nuclear scientist who also pilots his institute’s private jet.  He is about to make a major breakthrough in harnessing nuclear energy. When he returns from a conference, his plane goes haywire and is finally landed by unknown forces.  Soon enough, he begins getting shipments he hasn’t ordered.  He begins to piece together the parts and finally constructs an “interroceter”.  Unknowingly, he has passed an intelligence test contrived by the planet Metaluna which is looking for nuclear scientists such as himself.  He begins communicating with the alien Exeter (Jeff Morrow) who tells him his plane will be flown to Metaluna at a certain time.  Not one to pass up a challenge, Meacham agrees.

When he arrives on Metaluna, Meacham is met at the airport by Dr. Ruth Adams (Faith Domergue), who he had a fling with at a conference previously.  She denies she ever met him and generally acts very paranoid.  Eventually we find out that Metaluna has gathered many of the earth’s scientists to solve its nuclear energy problems.  The planet has been protected up until now from meteor attacks by an enemy planet by a force field powered by atomic energy.  Its energy reserves are dwindling rapidly.  The rest of the film is occupied with Ruth and Meachum’s adventures and attempts to escape.

For 1955, I thought this had some OK special effects.  It’s fairly talky though and it was never satisfactorily explained why a civilization as superior as Metaluna required Earthlings to solve its problems.    It passes all tests for cheesy late night viewing, however.

Trailer

I’ll Cry Tomorrow
Directed by Daniel Mann
Written by Helen Deutsch and Jay Richard Kennedy from a book by Lillian Roth, Mike Connolly and Gerald Frank
1955/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Lillian Roth: What I’m doing now is ‘wrong’… and I’m *doing* it![/box]

Susan Hayward makes an excellent alcoholic in this inspiring biopic.

Lillian Roth (Hayward) starts life trying to fulfill the dreams of her stage mother (Jo Van Fleet).  She does pretty well as a child act on the vaudeville circuit and then moves on as a teenager to Broadway and even, briefly, to Hollywood.  There she is reunited with childhood sweetheart David.  They defy her mother to become engaged and are on the way to happiness when tragedy strikes.  Lillian goes into a tailspin from which she does not recover for many years.

She is so distraught she is unable to sleep yet insists on performing.  Her nurse gives her her first drink to help her sleep and it is downhill from there.  She breaks with her mother then continues a wild lifestyle until she marries a man she doesn’t love while on a bender.

After that marriage fails she gets even deeper into the sauce.  She thinks salvation may have come when she meets Tony Bardman (Richard Conte), a commanding businessman with a drinking problem of his own.  She marries him thinking that they can help each other break their habits but this marriage is a greater disaster than her first.

The rest of the movie tracks Lillian’s descent to her “bottom” and rebirth to life and love in AA.  With Eddie Albert as Lillian’s sponsor.

I liked this a lot.  It’s one of Hayward’s great roles and not too melodramatic or cliched.  It all rang pretty true to me.  Van Fleet is outstanding in a much more nuanced version of the typical stage mother.  Recommended.

I’ll Cry Tomorrow won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, Black-and-White.  It was nominated in the categories of Best Actress; Best Cinematography, Black-and-White; and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White.

Trailer

She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (Nogiku no gotoki kimi nariki)
Directed by Keisuke Kinoshita
Written by Keisuke Kinoshita fram a novel by Sachio Ito
1955/Japan
Shôchiku Eiga
First viewing/Hulu

[box] among my pitifully/ thatched eaves…/ a chrysanthemum — Haiku by Issa[/box]

This is a picturesque rural romance featuring Kinoshita’s standard buckets of tears.

An old man (Chisû Ryô) is being rowed back to the island where he grew up.  As he goes he reflects on the one true love of his life.  We segue into flashback where we spend most of the film.  Masao is a fifteen-year-old who is preparing to go off to the mainland for high school.  Tamiko is his seventeen-year-old cousin.  Masao’s family is better off than Tamiko’s and she  is more or less a servant in Masao’s household.  The two are inseparable.

Tamiko, however, is considered to be of marriageable age and Masao’s mother is determined that her boy will spend the next several years studying and will not be marrying her.  The rest of the family and the townsfolk are downright nasty and malicious in their gossip.  The young couple has a totally chaste relationship but Masao is beginning to develop feelings for Tamiko.  Mother sets out to break off the friendship resulting in the aforementioned tears.

The best part of this film for me was its observation of old-time Japanese rural culture and the beautiful scenery.  The score is also fantastic.  The story did not really grab me but it’s an OK doomed romance if you like that kind of thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW88NAPXnJE

Stills set to the beautiful music of the film

Summertime
Directed by David Lean
Written by Lean and H.E. Bates from a play by Arthur Laurents
1955/UK/USA
London Film Productions
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Signora Fiorini: When in Italy, you should meet Italians![/box]

David Lean gives us all a romantic holiday in Venice.

Jane Hudson (Katharine Hepburn) is a secretary of a certain age.  She has saved up the money to take a long holiday in Venice.  She is traveling alone and her loneliness is palpable.  She dives into all sights with gusto and understanding, however.

One day, as she is having a drink alone in an outdoor cafe on the Piazza San Marco, she notices a handsome man staring at her.  This makes her uncomfortable.  The next day she goes into a shop to inquire about a red glass goblet and it turns out that the man is the store owner, Renato de Rossi (Rossano Brazzi).  He sells her the goblet and gets her address so that he can let her know if he finds a match to complete a pair.

Jane goes back to the store to ask if he has found the glass.  He shows up at her penzione that night to ask her out.  Jane is both terribly attracted and deeply suspicious of the Italian’s motives.  We share their bliss, followed by Jane’s soul searching.

I could have looked at Lean’s portrait of Venice for hours without a story to keep my attention.  But this is a pretty good tale as well.  My least favorite Hepburn character is the 40-year-old virgin that she played for about a decade around this time.  However, on revisiting the film, I found a lot to like about both her and the character.  Not that I personally could have resisted Rossano Brazzi for more than a minute …

Summertime was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Actress.

Clip – visit to Murano