The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues Directed by Dan Milner Written by Lou Ruskoff; original story by Dorys Lukather 1955/USA Milner Brothers Productions
First viewing/Amazon Instant
[box] William S. ‘Bill’ Grant: You seemed a little anxious not to be seen.
George Thomas: Well, I saw two strangers standing over a corpse. Not being the hero type, I decided this was no place for me.[/box]
This is one of those movies where everybody acts suspicious but we never exactly find out why. That coupled with the early reveal of the ludicrous monster makes this a stinker.
In so far as I understand it, here goes. We open with a shot of the monster slaying a fisherman. A man in a suit is examining the body when he is interrupted by a federal agent. He tells the agent his name is Ted Baxter but we soon learn he is actually genius scientist Dr. Ted Stevens. Next we are introduced to genius scientist #2, Professor King. He is the most suspicious of all and conducts all his experiments behind locked doors. His secretary and assistant are both trying hard to find out what goes on in King’s lab. King lives with his beautiful adult daughter. Two guesses as to what happens when Stevens meets her.
Anyway, a bunch of stuff and several deaths happen before we learn that the monster is guarding a large radioactive deposit.
1955 is turning out to be a good year for bad movies. This one also ranks lower on IMDb than Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster, which sets a very low bar indeed. It thoroughly deserves its abysmal rating. See the Joe Dante clip for the reasons why.
Conquest of Space Directed by Byron Haskin Written by James O’Hanlon, Philip Yordan, Barré Lyndon, and George Worthing Yates from a book by Chesley Bonestell and Willy Ley 1955/USA Paramount Pictures
First viewing/Amazon Instant
[box] Sergeant Imoto: Some years ago, my country chose to fight a terrible war. It was bad, I do not defend it, but there were reasons. Somehow those reasons are never spoken of. To the Western world at that time, Japan was a fairybook nation: little people living in a strange land of rice-paper houses… people who had almost no furniture, who sat on the floor and ate with chopsticks. The quaint houses of rice paper, sir: they were made of paper because there was no other material available. And the winters in Japan are as cold as they are in Boston. And the chopsticks: there was no metal for forks and knives and spoons, but slivers of wood could suffice. So it was with the little people of Japan, little as I am now, because for countless generations we have not been able to produce the food to make us bigger. Japan’s yesterday will be the world’s tomorrow: too many people and too little land. That is why I say, sir, there is urgent reason for us to reach Mars: to provide the resources the human race will need if they are to survive. That is also why I am most grateful to be found acceptable, sir. I volunteer.
General Samuel T. Merritt: Thank you, Sergeant Imoto. You’re not a little man.[/box]
This George Pal space extravaganza would be the definition of mediocre if it were not so strange.
It is the contemporary future and a unit of the International Space Agency works on a space station constructing a space ship. Its commander is Col. Sam Merritt, who designed the space station. Merritt is a no-nonsense guy to say the least, having commandeered his son Barney for involuntary work there and taking no flak whatsoever from any of his men. We learn early on that prolonged stays on the station can cause “space fatigue” which manifests itself in different forms. One of the astronauts who was selected for the initial expedition experiences temporary paralysis and is booted out of the program. Col. Merritt is secretly experiencing severe headaches and insomnia.
An official from earth comes to deliver new orders sending the spaceship to Mars, rather than the moon as had been expected. Here is where the colonel begins to wig out. He calls for volunteers and his son tears up his transfer orders to become second in command in the craft. Once launched the colonel, now promoted to general, spends much of his time reading his bible. He begins to view landing on Mars as the ultimate blasphemy. Can the ship and crew survive its commander’s hysteria?
The special effects are rudimentary even compared to earlier science fiction films produced by George Pal. The story is a little reminiscent of Moby Dick with the General as Ahab. It’s heavy on the melodrama with some not-too-comic relief from the resident Brooklynite and Irishman. Yet I watched it all in a single sitting. The biblical prophesies piqued my interest. I really could not figure out whether the filmmakers meant them as a warning until the end.
Rififi (Du rififi chez les hommes) Directed by Jules Dassin Written by Jules Dassin, Rene Wheeler, and Auguste de Breton from a novel by Le Breton 1955/France Pathé Consortium Cinema/Indusfilms, Societe Nouvelle Pathe Cinema/Primafilm
Repeat viewing/Netflix
[box] Mario Ferrati: [to Tony about Cesar] For a job with you he’ll come. Cesar! There’s not a safe that can resist Cesar and not a woman that Cesar can resist.[/box]
This excellent heist film never loses its fascination.
Jewel thief Tony le Stephánois (Jean Servais) is released from prison looking old and ill with a persistent cough. His first stop is the home his young friend Jo shares with his new wife and young son, also named Tony. Another associate proposes that Tony lead a daylight robbery of a jewelry store show window. Tony refuses the offer. His prime goal at the moment is to get revenge on his lover Mado, who took up with evil nightclub owner Grutter while Tony was in prison.
This accomplished, Tony is ready for another job. On his terms of course. He has in mind a complex scheme to rob the jeweler’s safe. His old gang is game and one of them calls on an Italian safecracker friend of his named Cesar (Jules Dassin under the name “Perlo Vita”).
We follow the gang’s preparations and then get 32-minutes of thrilling dialogue and music-free footage of the actual heist. Can the gang sustain its plan until the bitter end?
The heist sequence of this film has never been topped. It is so completely spell-binding that one does not even notice the absence of any sound other than the dull tapping of the mallets and muffled whirr of drills. The rest of the movie is not quite on that level but Dassin shoots Paris lovingly, the acting is very good, and the jazzy score is a treat. I really can’t figure out how it missed the 1001 Movies list. Recommended.
Clip – the song “Rififi” (no subtitles)
American Trailer – dubbed (I watched a subtitled version)
Godzilla Raids Again Directed by Motoyoshi Oda Written by Takeo Murata and Shigeake Hidaka; story by Shigeru Kayama 1955/Japan Toho Company
First viewing/Amazon Prime
[box] [last line; Japanese version] Shoichi Tsukioka: Kobayashi… we beat Godzilla for you.[/box]
The quaint language used in the English dub wrecked this otherwise worthy first Godzilla sequel for me.
Kobayashi is forced to crash land his plane on a remote island. His pilot friend Tsukioka comes to rescue him. This is when the men witness a resurrected relative of Godzilla battling the Angilas monster. They report when they come home and a high-level meeting is called. Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura) from the first movie tells the crowd that, now that the oxygen destroyer and its creator have perished, Japan is doomed.
The two monsters set off toward Osaka. For a while, authorities are successful in attracting the beasts off shore through the use of bright lights. Unfortunately, some escaped convicts manage to set a refinery on fire and the battle is on in downtown Osaka. The rest of the film follows the all-out effort to defeat the monster.
Rumor has it that the original Japanese version of this movie is up there with the original Gojira. The only one available to me though was dubbed in English. This might not have been so bad except that the characters were made to speak in a very old-fashioned and slightly ridiculous lingo as when a crowd is said to be “making merry” in a night club. The character of Kobayashi, played by one of the Seven Samurai, comes off as comic and mentally slow, when in fact he is the hero.
Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende) Directed by Ingmar Bergman Written by Ingmar Bergman 1955/Sweden Svensk Filmindustri
Repeat viewing/DVD collection
#313 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
[box] Mrs. Armfeldt: I am tired of people. But that doesn’t stop me from loving them.[/box]
For my money, this is the most charmingly poetic romantic comedy of all time.
The story takes place at Midsummer near the end of the 19th century in Sweden. Lawyer Fredrik Engerman (Gunnar Bjornstrand) has married his young ward Anne (Ulla Jacobsen). She is now about 18 but the marriage is still unconsumated. The pair live with servants, including randy parlor maid Petra (Harriet Andersson), who is the same age as Anne. Fredrik’s gloomy adult son from his first marriage, Henrik, a student of theology, is visiting.
One day as he is enjoying a chaste nap with Anne, Fredrik utters the word “Desiree” in his sleep. This is the actress Desiree Arnfelt (Eva Dahlbeck). Desiree and Fredrik had an affair following the death of his first wife at the end of which she dumped him. Fredrik and Anne go to see Desiree in the theater but Anne asks to return home with a sick headache, a fairly common maneuver with her. Frederik sneaks out later to visit Desiree. Their reunion is interrupted by the arrival of her lover Count Carl Magnus Malcolm, a pompous and macho officer.
Desiree decides to do a little match-making, including some of her own, and invites Fredrik and Carl Magnus, with their respective wives, as well as Henrik for a weekend at her mother’s country estate. We get a lot of great dialogue plus a complicated suite of romantic maneuvers before every person at the event ends up with the right partner.
I love this movie. It reminds me a bit of Renoir’s Rules of the Game without the tragedy. All the acting is perfection as are many of the shots and moments. Desiree’s mother is priceless. The ending is sublime. I wish Bergman had continued to direct some comedies later into his career. Highly recommended.
The story was remade as Sondheim’s Broadway musical A Little Night Music and the 1977 movie made from that musical.
The Court Jester Directed by Melvin Frank and Norman Panama Written by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank 1955/USA Dena Enterprises
First viewing/Amazon Instant
[box] Hawkins: But did you put the pellet with the poison in the vessel with the pestle?
Griselda: No! The pellet with the poison’s in the flagon with the dragon! The vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true![/box]
This musical send-up of “Robin Hood” features what is probably Danny Kaye’s best performance. As a bonus, it reunites us with Basil Rathbone, who even does some fencing.
Hubert Hawkins (Kaye) entertains the rebel band headed by the Black Fox and is often assigned to care for the infant heir to the throne of England. He is in love with Maid Jean (Glynnis Johns), one of the rebel soldiers. Evil King Roderick I, who has usurped the throne receives news that the infant lives. Hawkins and Jean are assigned to move the boy to a hidden sanctuary.
On the way, they run into Giacomo, who is on his way to become jester to the King. This looks to be the ideal way to infiltrate the palace and Hawkins takes his place.
Once Hawkins arrives, there are any number of mishaps before the fairy tale ending. One of the most amusing of these is when a witch (Mildred Natwick) hypnotizes Hawkins to woo the Princess Gwendolyn (Angela Lansbury).
I’m not the world’s greatest Danny Kaye fan but he keeps his shtick under control here and is entertaining. Rathbone has aged a lot by 1955 but he’s still a very good villain and a graceful fencer.
Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard) Directed by Alain Resnais Written by Jean Cayrol 1955/France Argos Films
Repeat viewing/Hulu
#305 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
[box] Récitant/Narrator: With our sincere gaze we survey these ruins, as if the old monster lay crushed forever beneath the rubble. We pretend to take up hope again as the image recedes into the past, as if we were cured once and for all of the scourge of the camps. We pretend it happened all at once, at a given time and place. We turn a blind eye to what surrounds us and a deaf ear to humanity’s never-ending cry.[/box]
This is almost poetic in its sadness and very hard to watch.
The film contrasts banal color images of contemporary deserted concentration camps with highly graphic black-and-white still images and archival footage of the suffering of Holocaust victims.
I have seen this a couple of times before. You almost, but not quite, become desensitized to the horrific pictures of the dead and dying. It’s the details that killed me this time. There’s footage of a man taking an elderly lady in a wheelchair to the deportation train that I find heartbreaking in so many ways. And all the faces. And the poor bodies. Too much for me.
The Beast with a Million Eyes
Directed by David Kramarsky and Roger Corman (uncredited)
Written by Tom Filer
1955/USA
San Mateo Productions
First viewing/Amazon Prime
[box] Carol Kelley: Yes. I’m not easy to get along with am I? Oh, I don’t know. I think I could stand it, except for … [looking at the horizon] out there… all that wasteland and mountains. We might as well be on another planet. Oh, Alan without Sandy I don’t know what would happen to me. It’d be just you and me and… Him [/box]
IMDb users have rated this film lower than Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster, which came out the same year. There are several reasons for that but it’s also bizarrely fascinating if you have the patience.
The film begins with portentous voice-over narration from the Beast. The Kelley family, and their mute and creepy handyman “Him”, live on a date farm in the middle of nowhere. Mother Kelley is bored beyond distraction and has turned very, very mean, especially toward her teenage daughter Sandy. Soon a UFO’s high pitched drone breaks all of Mother Kelley’s prized glassware, putting her into an even worse mood.
Then assorted animals including the family dog, a cow, chickens, and a flock of pigeons attack. At some point Mother begins to see the light and realize the error of her ways. We learn that Love is stronger than the Beast. Spoiler Alert: The Beast is revealed to be what looks like a modified tea kettle with a superimposed hand puppet.
This is from early in the career of schlock-master Roger Corman and was made near where I live for a budget of $30,000. It looks like virtually the entire budget was spent on the poster art. The acting is godawful. The story makes no sense and of course zero was spent on special effects. And yet it kept my interest despite the very slow pace. It was all so bizarre that I kept wondering what would happen next.
The Big Combo Directed by Joseph H. Lewis Written by Philip Yordan 1955/USA Security Pictures/Theodora Pictures
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime
[box] Mr. Brown: Diamond, the only trouble with you is, you’d like to be me. You’d like to have my organization, my influence, my fix. You can’t, it’s impossible. You think it’s money. It’s not. It’s personality. You haven’t got it. You’re a cop. Slow. Steady. Intelligent. With a bad temper and a gun under your arm. With a big yen for a girl you can’t have. First is first and second is nobody.[/box]
As far as I am concerned, this is up there with Out of the Past in epitomizing all that is film noir.
Mr. Brown (Richard Conte) runs a crime syndicate. He ruthlessly took it over from a former crime lord and his own immediate boss Joe McClure (Brian Donlevy). Despite a decided lack of success so far, he is being doggedly pursued by detective Leonard Diamond. It seems that it is almost impossible to pin anything on Mr. Brown and Diamond’s own boss warns him off the case. But Diamond carries on, not least because he is in love with Brown’s blonde girlfriend Susan (Jean Wallace). For her part, Susan’s life disgusts her so much that she attempts suicide as the story opens.
Mr. Brown is fascinating in his sophisticated evil-doing and keeps getting away with murder while he takes revenge against Diamond in numerous ways. But Diamond is equally stubborn, if not more so.
This movie has everything. John Alton’s low-key cinematography is perfection. The acting, particularly Conti’s, is excellent and the dialogue is about as hard-boiled as you can get. We also get memorable performances by Earl Holiman and Lee Van Cleef as two hit men who are just a bit too fond of each other. This is a gritty and violent film that may even surpass Lewis’s other film noir classic, Gun Crazy. Highly recommended and currently available on YouTube.
James Dean was featured in his first major role and film, director Elia Kazan’s East of Eden. The actor was killed in a car accident on September 30, 1955, having appeared in only three films. Both of his Best Actor Oscar nominations – for East of Eden and Giant – were given posthumously. He remains the only person to have two posthumous acting nominations.
The first feature animation in CinemaScope, Walt Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, was released in the US. It also marked Disney’s first full-length cartoon based on an original story rather than an established classic. Disneyland opened in a former orange grove in Anaheim, California, in July 1955, at a cost of $17 million. Another Disney first was the ABC-TV debut of The Mickey Mouse Club on October 3, 1955.
Blackboard Jungle was the first film to feature a rock-‘n’-roll song, “Rock-Around-The-Clock” (sung by Bill Haley and His Comets during the opening credits).
United Artists withdrew from the Motion Pictures Association of American when it refused to issue a Production Code seal to its controversial film about drug addiction, director Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm. The film’s success helped to loosen restrictions on such films. The code was amended to permit portrayals of prostitution and abortion as well as light profanity (the use of the words ‘hell’ and ‘damn’).
A solitary white passenger during the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger and was arrested, leading to the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald’s restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois. The Salk polio vaccine received full approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. A young Jim Henson built the first version of Kermit the Frog.
President Eisenhower sent the first military advisors to South Viet Nam. USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, put to sea for the first time.
A Fable by William Faulkner won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams won for drama. The instrumental “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” by Perez Prado was ranked the number one song by Billboard.
The Soviet Union announced the end of the war between the USSR and Germany, which began during World War II in 1941. Eight Communist Bloc countries, including the Soviet Union, signed a mutual defence treaty in Warsaw, Poland, called the Warsaw Pact. It would be dissolved in 1991. The Austrian State Treaty, which restored Austria’s national sovereignty,was concluded between the four occupying powers following World War II (the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and France) and Austria, setting it up as a neutral country.
Ngô Đình Diệm proclaimed Vietnam to be a republic with himself as its President (following the State of Vietnam referendum on October 23) and formed the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. The Vietnam War began between the South Vietnam Army and the North Vietnam Army in which the latter was allied with the Viet Cong.
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.
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