Category Archives: 1956

There’s Always Tomorrow
Directed by Douglas Sirk
Written by Bernard C. Schoenfeld and Ursula Parrott
1956/US
Universal International Pictures
IMDb page
First viewing/Criterion Channel

Ann: [to Vinnie] It’s funny. I’m positive your father hasn’t done a thing to be ashamed of, but, you know something, I wouldn’t blame him if he had.

I really liked this sudsy Sirkian melodrama with its hidden savage indictment of middle-class values and life in suburbia.

Toy manufacturer Clifford Groves (Fred MacMurray) has been married for many years to Marion (Joan Bennett). They have two teenagers and one pre-teen. They live in Los Angeles.

The story starts on Marion’s birthday. Clifford goes the extra mile to arrange roses, a dinner in town, and theater tickets. He can’t tell Marion the plan because the children occupy the phone 24/7. Then when he gets home Marion can’t go because the youngest daughter has a dance recital. He can’t even give away the tickets.

Then former employee Norma Miller Vale (Barbara Stanwyck) calls him up. She is now a successful dress designer. He offers to take her to the theater and she takes him up on it. They leave during intermission and he shows her his latest toy. Norma is delighted.

Despite Clifford’s pleading that he must get out of his rut and spend some alone time with his wife, he is disregarded again and again. Marion clearly puts their kids before him. He gets more and more depressed and chummy with Norma. His kids decide they are having an affair and are determined to break it up.

I sympathized so completely with the MacMurray character in this story. While nominally about a love triangle, it is really about the stultifying climate in suburbia and society’s expectations of men and women in a marriage. All the acting is very good. Stanwyck is charming as a lovelorn lass and as a dynamic business woman.

I had never seen or heard of this movie and was very glad to catch up with it as part of the Joan Bennett collection on the Criterion Channel.

Moby Dick
Directed by John Huston
Written by Ray Bradbury and John Huston from the novel by Herman Melville
1956/USA
Moulin Productions
First viewing/Netflix rental

Captain Ahab: From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Ye damned whale.

In a time before the Save the Whale movement, John Huston captured the grandeur and deeper meaning of the Herman Melville classic novel.  Better yet, in the end it is the Whale, or make that Nature or an Omnipotent God, that triumphs.

The film is remarkably faithful to the novel in plot, setting and dialogue.  In 1841 a man (Richard Basehart) who asks us to call him Ishmael arrives in New Bedford, Massachusetts.  He is tired of life on shore and wants to find out what whaling is like.  At the inn, he is told he will have to share a bed.  Thus he meets Queequeg, a cannibal harpooner, and the two become fast friends.  They vow to ship out together and are hired for a three-year voyage on the Pequod.  Before the ship sails, a stranger called Elijah predicts disaster for the ship and its Captain.

Pip: That ain’t no whale; that a great white god.

Early in the voyage, we see the camaraderie among the sailors and watch them work.  Eventually, Captain Ahab (Gregory Peck) emerges from his cabin and announces a reward for the first man that spots the white whale named Moby Dick that cost him his leg.  Moby Dick is a renowned behemoth that has maimed more than one man and sank more than one ship.  The men are game but Starbuck (Leo Gann), the Chief Mate, is troubled.

He becomes more troubled when Ahab insists going after Moby Dick before concentrating on filling the ship’s hold and returning home.  But Starbucks idea of mutiny is not shared by the other men and Ahab carries on until Elijah’s prophecy is fulfilled.  With Orson Welles as a preacher who delivers a sermon on the story of Jonah.

I didn’t have high hopes for this film as I love the novel but thought it would be impossible for any film to convey what makes it great.  Huston managed admirably however.  This is largely accomplished by skillful lifting of the actual language of the text and a production design that looks to be taken from 19th Century illustrations.  I’m not a huge Gregory Peck fan but he is ferocious and a perfect Ahab here.

Like the novel, this film is more about the Ahab’s blasphemy in trying to get vengeance on Fate, Nature, or God than it is a simple whaling adventure.  Huston captures the biblical underpinnings of the novel brilliantly while keeping the action engaging as well.  The whale hunts were not too graphic for me.  Recommended.

This post is part of The Animals in Film Blogathon being hosted by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood.  Other excellent posts on this theme can be found here.

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Elena and Her Men (Elena et les hommes)
Directed by Jean Renoir
Written by Jean Renoir and Jean Serge
1956/Italy/France
Franco London Films/Les Films Gibe/Electra Compagnia Cinematografica
Repeat viewing/My DVD collection

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” ― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte[/box]

One would hardly know that a great director was behind this lackluster farce.

The beautiful Polish Countess Elena Sokorowska (Ingrid Bergman) has many admirers and a talent for bestowing good luck upon her favorites through the gift of a daisy.  Her household has run out of pearls to sell though and she decides to marry an elderly munitions manufacturer.  One day she goes out to glimpse General François Rollan (Jean Marais), a war hero.  She meets Henry de Chevincourt (Mel Ferrer), who takes her to meet his friend Rollan.  She gives the General a daisy and he is named as the next Minister of War.

Elena goes off to the country home of her intended but keeps being drawn back to the General, who falls on hard times whenever his lady throws away his daisy.  It is the clever Chevincourt who really loves her, however, and he plots to win her amid the political intrigue surrounding Rollan.

I forgot almost everything about this film as soon as I turned it off.  Bergman and the scenery looked very beautiful but there seemed to be no point to telling this story.  For me, it just lacked the humor and romance that could have saved it.

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The Killing
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Written by Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson from a novel by Lionel White
1956/USA
Harris-Kubrick Productions
Repeat viewing/Amazon Instant

Johnny Clay: You’d be killing a horse – that’s not first degree murder, in fact it’s not murder at all, in fact I don’t know what it is.

Early in his career, Kubrick had it all together.

Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) has emerged from five long hard years of prison and immediately sets out planning a spectacular robbery designed to let him retire from his life of crime and marry his patient girlfriend (Colleen Grey).  We watch the planning of an elaborate scheme to steal up to $2 million in the take of a race track before it can be delivered to the armored car.  The set-up involves a number of moving parts, including a couple of insiders, a muscle man, a sniper and a crooked cop.

As always with these things, the heist relies on each of its members.  And if we ever learned anything, it is that you can’t trust a criminal.  With Elisha Cook Jr. as a race track cashier and Marie Windsor as his bored and greedy wife.

This film is only 85 minutes long and each minute is packed with style. The camera work is gorgeous.  I have deliberately kept the plot synopsis brief so viewers can savor every development.  It has one of the great ironic endings and last lines of all time IMHO.  Highly recommended.

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Baby Doll
Directed by Elia Kazan
Written by Tennessee Williams
1956/USA
Newtown Productions
First viewing/Netflix rental

Baby Doll: Sometimes, big shot, you don’t seem to give me credit for very much intelligence at all. I’ve been to school in my life – and I’m a magazine reader!

I don’t know what I was expecting but it certainly was not this fantastic black comedy!

Baby Doll Meghan (Carol Baker) is nineteen years old and sleeps in a crib.  She is married to Archie Meghan (Karl Malden).  They have an “agreement” that the marriage will not be consummated until she turns 20, which will happen in a couple of days.  Baby Doll does not appear to be enthusiastic and makes it clear that her part of the deal is contingent on the couple retaining the furniture they bought on credit.  This seems doubtful as Archie’s decrepit cotton gin has been put out of business by a modern operation in town.

Baby Doll has pretentions of gentility and Archie sees himself as a good ol’ boy but they both behave like stereotypical White Trash.  Archie has liquor bottles stashed around the place which he frequently sips from on the sly.  The couple lives in squalor with Baby Doll’s Aunt Rose Comfort (Mildred Dunnock) who acts as chief cook and bottle washer when she is not over visiting an acquaintance at the hospital in order to nibble on their chocolate candy.

Finally the furniture company comes and repossesses all the furniture in the house save the nursery set.  In desperation, Archie sets fire to the competition.  Outsider Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach in his film debut) who operates the gin is on to Archie and arrives to get his cotton processed and get revenge.  It turns out revenge is sweeter than expected when he sets eyes on Baby Doll.

My sense of humor is idiosyncratic and possibly warped but I thought this was hilarious. The writing is jam-packed with terrific one-liners and double entendres.  I love Eli Wallach and he is deliciously wicked here.  The other actors match him in excellence.  The direction is also fantastic.  I loved all the shots of farm hands of different races cracking up at the goings on.  Recommended.

The film was condemned by the Legion of Decency for “carnal suggestiveness” and led to an organized nationwide boycott by Catholics.  It was cancelled by 77% of the theaters scheduled to show it.  The film is very suggestive but not graphic by any means.

Baby Doll was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Actress; Best Supporting Actress (Dunnock); Best Writing, Best Screenplay – Adapted; and Best Cinematography, Black-and-White.

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