Category Archives: 1956

Fire Maidens of Outer Space
Directed by Cy Roth
Written by Cy Roth
1956/UK
Criterion Films
First viewing/YouTube

[box] Hestia: I’ll go with my beloved to earth but I shall return! [/box]

This movie is bad in almost every possible way.  I had a lot of fun watching it.

A joint British-American expedition (Plan 13) launches for a three-week journey to the 13th moon of Jupiter, evidently the only body in the solar system capable of sustaining life.  And how!  It comes complete with oxygen, trees, beautiful female humans, and a “Creature”. We discover that the lost continent of Atlantis evacuated to this location.  The girls are dressed in Atlantan garb which happens to resemble that worn in the “Late Minoan” period.  All the men have died out except for one old man.  He looks at the astronauts with a greedy eye.  The girls start doing some fancy footwork and drinks are being drugged …

One ludicrous episode follows another in this hilariously bad movie.  The only complaint I had is that the YouTube print was so dark that I could barely discern the Creature. Judging from the still, perhaps this was a problem in the original as well.

Trailer

The Teahouse of the August Moon
Directed by Daniel Mann
Written by John Patrick from his play and a book by Vern J. Sneider
1956/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Sakini: She say she can’t be equal, Boss, until she has everything Lotus Blossom have.

Captain Fisby: What Lotus Blossom has, the government doesn’t issue![/box]

I was actually dreading watching Marlon Brando in Yellow Face.  Instead, I was charmed and entertained.  Go figure.

The movie takes place on Okinawa during the American Occupation of Japan.  Sakini (Brando) is the Okinawan interpreter for the fusty Col. Wainwright Purdy (Paul Ford), a man whose main activity seems to be posting signs banning fraternization between officers and GI’s.  Purdy is aiming for a promotion to General, all for the benefit of his wife of course.

Purdy is impressed to be getting an intelligence officer assigned to his unit, which is in charge of the Democratization of Okinawa.  Unfortunately for him, he gets Capt. Fisby (Glenn Ford), who has been moved from one assignment to the next for incompetence. He sends Fisby to the village of Tobiki to spread democracy and build the locals a school house.  Tobiki is Sakini’s native village and he accompanies Fisby.

The amount of mischief Sakini gets up to is astounding.  His greatest triumph is probably getting a geisha, Lotus Blossom (Machiko Kyô), for the unwilling Fisby.  Then the villagers demand a tea house instead of a school and things go downhill from there.  Within a few weeks, Fisby has gone native.  Col. Wainwright sends a psychiatrist Capt. McLean (Eddie Albert) to investigate.  McClean succumbs to the charms of the villagers even faster than Fisby did.  Clearly, the U.S. is set to lose this particular battle with the Japanese.  With Harry Morgan as the Colonel’s sergeant.

I really enjoyed this comedy of culture shock and Americanization run riot.  I don’t know that I’ve seen Brando do comedy before.  He is actually warm, funny, and the best thing about a movie full of other good performances.  Plus we get the great Machiko Kyô showing her versatility in an over-the-top farcical role.  Give it a try if you dare.

Trailer

Good-bye, My Lady
Directed by William A. Wellman
Written by Albert Sidney Fleischman from a novel by James H. Street
1956/USA
Batjac Productions
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] Walden Grover: That’s a lot of money.

Skeeter Jackson: That’s a lot of dog.[/box]

This story of a boy and his dog came as a very pleasant surprise.

Skeeter Jackson (Brandon De Wilde) and his Uncle Jesse Jackson (Walter Brennan) live in a cabin near a swamp.  They live very simply.  Skeeter goes to school but Uncle Jesse is illiterate.  Skeeter is an orphan and storekeeper Cash Evans (Phil Harris) paid to keep him out of the orphanage.  Skeeter doesn’t trust Cash much but Uncle Jesse has a bickeringly friendly relationship with him.

Skeeter has been hearing an unearthly laughter coming out of the swamp.  Uncle and son track it down and it turns out to be a little dog they cannot catch.  The dog doesn’t bark. It only emits a strange yodel, runs like the wind, and cries real tears.  Cash goes to the swamp with his hunting dogs determined to capture the animal.  She is much too fast for his dogs.  Finally, Skeeter lures her in with kindness and food.  Thereafter, this is Skeeter’s dog, which he names Lady.

The rest of the movie is taken up mostly with Skeeter’s efforts to train the animal as a bird dog, a task at which she proves to be enormously talented.  Lady becomes famous far and wide and people begin visiting the cabin.  What will happen when research proves Lady to come from an ancient race of African hunting dog?  With Sidney Poitier as an educated neighbor and Louise Beavers as his mother.

I was half expecting something really corny but liked this movie a whole lot. The simple backwoods story is very well written and the acting is just wonderful.  I had no idea Phil Harris could act and Brennan and Poitier are, of course, outstanding.  There are no real surprises here but a ton of warmth and humor.  Recommended for the whole family.

Trailer

The Benny Goodman Story
Directed by Valentine Davies
Written by Valentine Davies
1956/USA
Universal International Pictures
First viewing/Netflix rental

Alice Hammond: I can’t remember when I’ve been so moved.
Benny Goodman: That wasn’t me – that was Mozart.

The pacing of this fictionalized biopic is not too good but the music is glorious.

As a boy, Benny Goodman (Steve Allen) is the youngest and so receives the least coveted instrument.  It is a clarinet.  He proves to be a prodigy and his teacher dreams of a classical career.  His practice piece is Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto.  His family needs money so he gets a job in a dance band.  Once he hears jazz, he is in love.  High-society beauty Alice Hammond (Donna Reed) frequently accompanies her jazz-lover brother to Benny’s gigs.  She initially has nothing but disdain for popular music.  But when Benny plays the Mozart Concerto at a soiree at the Hammond family manse she begins to fall in love.

Movie is in color but the best stills are in black-and-white

The story takes us through the ups and downs of Benny’s career and the couple’s protracted romance.  It culminates when Goodman’s orchestra plays at Carnegie Hall with other jazz greats.  With Sammy Davis Sr. as Fletcher Henderson and Harry James and Gene Krupa as themselves.

I love swing music and Benny Goodman and enjoyed listening to the many selections included in this movie.  The story just kind of meandered on and on without many high points.  The acting is not bad though.  Steve Allen does quite well in a performance as restrained as Goodman was.

Warning from Space (Uchûjin Tôkyô ni arawaru)
Directed by Kôji Shima
Written by Hideo Iguni from a novel by Gentaro Nakajima; English dialogue by Jay Cipes and Edward Palmer
1956/Japan
Daiei Studios
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say ‘I want to see the manager.’ — William S. Burroughs [/box]

I should have heeded the warning.

Aliens shaped like stars covered in cheap fabric hold a pow wow on Planet Paira.  Number 1 is chosen for a mission to Earth to contact Dr. Kamura.  Sightings of flying saucers begin to increase.  Unforunately, the terror of seeing the motionless alien causes panic among the Earthlings.  So Alien Number 1 returns to Praia where it is transformed into the likeness of a tap-dancing night-club singer.  Alien Number 1 reportedly does a number of very suspicious things before finally making contact with Kamura.  When she does, Paira delivers its message.  A runaway planet from another galaxy is due to enter the shared orbit of Earth and Paira and will wipe out both planets unless it can be stopped.  Paira wants the nuclear nations to cooperate to detonate atom bombs sufficient to alter Earth’s orbit (????).  The only other possibility is an untested explosive formula that some bad guys are after.

After I saw pictures of the aliens, I had high hopes for this movie.  Unfortunately, the smiles come only in the first five minutes.  After that, very little happens.  I watched a dubbed version but have no reason to believe subtitles would help in the least.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kC68EY6NvU

Clips

Tea and Sympathy
Directed by Vicente Minnelli
Written by Robert Anderson based on the play by Robert Anderson
1956/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Repeat viewing/YouTube

Tom Lee: I’m always falling in love with the wrong people.
Laura Reynolds: Who isn’t?

This holds up remarkably well for a film that has dated in so many ways.

Bill Reynolds (Leif Erikson) and his wife Karen (Deborah Kerr) are the house parents of a boarding house at an upscale boys school.  Bill is also a coach and spends most of his time outdoors participating in various activities with the boys.  Tom Lee is a sensitive eighteen year old who lives in the house.  He spends his time apart from the others, listening to music and thinking.  He also has agreed to play a female part in the school play.  The final straw comes when, instead of going to a racous beach party, with his fellows he is caught on another part of the beach chatting with the faculty wives and demonstrating the proper technique for sewing on a button.  Thereafter he becomes known as “Sister Boy” and is mercilessly hazed by the other boys.

Despite his prowess at tennis, Tom is a grievous disappointment to his father and Coach Reynolds.  He is forced to drop out from the play and his roommate, at the insistence of his father, announces he is moving in with another boy the next year.  Laura feels a lot of sympathy for Tom, who reminds her of her late first husband.  She tries to stand up for him but is shouted down by her uncommunicative husband.  Things take a turn for the worse when Tom decides to try to prove himself with the local “bad girl.”

Now we can have movies about the love that dare not speak it’s name but in the 50’s the whole thing had to be approached very gingerly.  It is enough that Tom is “different”.  The filmmakers also found it necessary to tack on a moralistic coda emphasizing the “wrongness” of the resolution of the problem. Nevertheless, the movie remains quite moving and watchable, thanks to the sensitive performances of all concerned.  Recommended.

X the Unknown
Directed by Leslie Norman
Written by Jimmy Sangster
1956/UK
Exclusive Films/Hammer Films
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Dr. Adam Royston: It’s a particle of mud. But by virtue of its atomic structure it emits radiation. That’s all it is. Just mud. How do you kill mud?[/box]

Here is another scary science-fiction film from the early days of Hammer Films.  So far these are really working well for me.

A British army unit is receiving training in the use of geiger counters.  One of the men is taking his time and gets a reading where no isotopes have been planted.  Suddenly the earth swallows him up.  A comrade nearby receives radiation burns.  Mysteriously, no radiation is found in the area thereafter.

The authorities seek an explanation at an atomic research facility.  There they meet with renegade scientist Dr. Adam Royston (Dean Jagger) who has been conducting some unauthorized experiments involving cobalt.  He agrees to investigate and is soon joined by a detective (Leo McKern) from the Atomic Energy Commission.

A series of horrific deaths ensue accompanied by mysterious break-ins into locations containing radioactive materials, such as the lab and a hospital.  No explanation is forthcoming until Royston comes up with a complicate theory involving the evolution of intelligence at the earth’s core.  After that it is a race to the end as the deaths continue and the deadly substance grows and becomes visible.  With Anthony Newley as one of the soldiers.

I liked this one a lot.  It is impressive how creepy something can be without much in the way of special effects, a monster, or blood.  I don’t think Dean Jagger ever gave a bad performance and he has just the right air of sober thoughtfulness here.  Recommended to sci-fi fans.

Trailer

Izumi (Fountainhead)
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi
Written by Zenzô Matsuyama from a story by Kunio Kishida
1956/Japan
Shôchiku Eiga
First viewing/Hulu

Water is the driving force of all nature. — Leonardo da Vinci

This movie demonstrates that love triangles can be just as tedious in Japanese as they are in English.  Pity.

I don’t have the character names in front of me.  This botany student goes with his professor to study plants in the mountains.  While there he witnesses the water war going on between some farmers who would like to improve their rice fields and a villa owner on whose property lies the only reservoir.  The student decides he will search for an additional water source.

We spend almost all our time on a second story, however.  The student falls for the villa owner’s beautiful secretary.  The owner is also taken with her.  The secretary can’t make up her mind.  In the meantime, a waiflike girl who met the student one time in a garden two years ago can’t forget him.  His friends try to make a match between the pair but the student is not interested.  We fumble around inconclusively for the next one and a half hours.

Kobayashi is one of my favorite directors.  He had a dud script on his hands.  At no time did I care who the characters ended up with.  Most of the time I was baffled by their actions.  I kept waiting for the water feud and the corrupt businessmen who wanted to turn the villa into a hotel to come back into the picture.  That could have made an interesting movie.

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
Directed by Fred Sears
Written by Curt Siodmak, George Worthing Yeats, and Bernard Gordon from a book by Donald E. Keyhoe
1956/USA
Columbia Pictures Corporation/Clover Productions
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Gen. Edmunds: When an armed and threatening power lands uninvited in our capitol, we don’t meet him with tea and cookies![/box]

Ray Harryhausen’s special effects lift this B space invasion movie over the average 50’s fair.

Dr. Russell A. Marvin (Hugh Marlowe) is a rocket scientist.  He has just married his secretary Carol, who happens to be the daughter of the General commanding the space program.  They are rushing to a rocket launch when they see flying saucers.  At the beginning, they can hardly convince anyone of this but then the General steps into say that all previous rockets launched by the program have either crash landed or disappeared into the sea.

It turns out that the aliens were trying to communicate with Marvin via a continuous motion translation machine but their timing was off so the words came out really fast and sounding like spaceship noise.  Anyway, they capture the General and finally persuade the Marvins to talk with them.  They drained all knowledge from the General’s brain and attempt to demonstrate the futility of trying to prevent the takeover of earth.  They instruct Russell to order the leaders of the world to gather in Washington DC.

The U.S. Army is not to take this challenge lying down and race to develop “magnitizers” and “solidified electricity” to defeat the enemy.

There is little to differentiate this movie from dozens of similarly themed movies of the 50’s. Little that is except for Ray Harryhausen’s awesome stop motion special effects.  The final scenes of the saucer attacks on Washington landmarks are pretty thrilling, especially when you think how many moving parts he had in play.  There’s also a  cool alien hidden under those blank robot looking shells.

Trailer