All posts tagged "1950s"

Grace Kelly & Raymond Burr in Rear Window (1954, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Grace Kelly & Raymond Burr in Rear Window (1954, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

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Eartha Kitt - I Want to Be Evil (via Greatest Hits Purr-Fect)

Prim and proper, the girl who’s never been cased,
I’m tired of being pure and not chased.
Like something that seeks it’s level
I wanna go to the devil.

I wanna be evil, I wanna spit tacks
I wanna be evil, and cheat at jacks
I wanna be wicked, I wanna tell lies
I wanna be mean, and throw mud pies

Play count: 382

Stills via Cinderella (1950, dir. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske) “Fantasy, if it’s really convincing, can’t become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time. In this new dimension, whatever it is, nothing corrodes or gets run down at the heel or gets to look ridiculous like, say, the celluloid collar or the bustle.” -Walt Disney

Stills via Cinderella (1950, dir. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske)

“Fantasy, if it’s really convincing, can’t become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time. In this new dimension, whatever it is, nothing corrodes or gets run down at the heel or gets to look ridiculous like, say, the celluloid collar or the bustle.”

-Walt Disney

Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, dir. Elia Kazan) “The thing about the ‘tradition’ in the 19th century was that it worked then. It made a woman feel important, with her own secure positions and functions, her own special worth. It also made a woman at that time one with her society. But today it is an anachronism. So Blanche requires protection - a haven, a harbor. She is a refugee, punch drunk and on the ropes, making her last stand, trying to keep up a gallant front, because she is a proud person. But still - she’s also a misfit, a liar, her ‘airs’ alienate people…She doesn’t know how to make a living. She doesn’t know to work…She’s a last dying relic of the last century now adrift in our unfriendly day.” -Elia Kazan on Blanche

Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, dir. Elia Kazan)

“The thing about the ‘tradition’ in the 19th century was that it worked then. It made a woman feel important, with her own secure positions and functions, her own special worth. It also made a woman at that time one with her society. But today it is an anachronism. So Blanche requires protection - a haven, a harbor. She is a refugee, punch drunk and on the ropes, making her last stand, trying to keep up a gallant front, because she is a proud person. But still - she’s also a misfit, a liar, her ‘airs’ alienate people…She doesn’t know how to make a living. She doesn’t know to work…She’s a last dying relic of the last century now adrift in our unfriendly day.”

-Elia Kazan on Blanche

Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter (1955, dir. Charles Laughton)

Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter (1955, dir. Charles Laughton)

Robert Walker & Laura Elliot in Strangers on a Train (1951, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) In one of Hitchcock’s most famous shots, Strangers on a Train’s pivotal murder is seen as reflected in a pair of glasses. Hitchcock & his director of photography, Robert Burks, achieved this effect by placing a concave mirror on the floor and having the actress, Laura Elliott, stand next to it as she simulated slowly falling dead to the floor. Elliot’s reflection in the concave mirror as she fell was filmed and the shot was then printed onto the lenses of the glasses (scene on youtube here).

Robert Walker & Laura Elliot in Strangers on a Train (1951, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

In one of Hitchcock’s most famous shots, Strangers on a Train’s pivotal murder is seen as reflected in a pair of glasses. Hitchcock & his director of photography, Robert Burks, achieved this effect by placing a concave mirror on the floor and having the actress, Laura Elliott, stand next to it as she simulated slowly falling dead to the floor. Elliot’s reflection in the concave mirror as she fell was filmed and the shot was then printed onto the lenses of the glasses (scene on youtube here).

Robert Walker & Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train (1951, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) “You do my murder, I do yours…for example, your wife, my father. Crisscross.”

Robert Walker & Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train (1951, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

“You do my murder, I do yours…for example, your wife, my father. Crisscross.”

Jan Sterling in publicity still for Ace in the Hole (1951, dir. Billy Wilder) “I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.” -Sterling as Lorraine Minosa in Ace in the Hole

Jan Sterling in publicity still for Ace in the Hole (1951, dir. Billy Wilder)

“I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.”

-Sterling as Lorraine Minosa in Ace in the Hole

Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole (1951, dir. Billy Wilder) Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against a relatively honorable hero. This emotional snake pit, the darkest of Wilder’s dark meditations on American folkways, takes place under the relentless sun of a flat New Mexican desert. The noir is interior—inside a mountain tunnel where a man is trapped and suffocating, and inside the mind of a reporter rotting from accumulated layers of self-induced moral grime. The 1951 movie, fascinating in the sweep and savagery of its indictment, and a flop when it opened, points to the direction noir would take in the fifties, hiding in broad daylight in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk. But if Hitchcock diabolically upended our expectations of the leading man, Wilder went much, much further. This satire of the media circus that would envelop us all goes beyond noir into saeva indignatio, and beyond Swift into something more intensely and disturbingly personal. -Molly Haskell, Ace in the Hole: Noir in Broad Daylight

Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole (1951, dir. Billy Wilder)

Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against a relatively honorable hero. This emotional snake pit, the darkest of Wilder’s dark meditations on American folkways, takes place under the relentless sun of a flat New Mexican desert. The noir is interior—inside a mountain tunnel where a man is trapped and suffocating, and inside the mind of a reporter rotting from accumulated layers of self-induced moral grime.

The 1951 movie, fascinating in the sweep and savagery of its indictment, and a flop when it opened, points to the direction noir would take in the fifties, hiding in broad daylight in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk. But if Hitchcock diabolically upended our expectations of the leading man, Wilder went much, much further. This satire of the media circus that would envelop us all goes beyond noir into saeva indignatio, and beyond Swift into something more intensely and disturbingly personal.

-Molly Haskell, Ace in the Hole: Noir in Broad Daylight

Diana Dors in Yield to the Night (1956, dir. J. Lee Thompson) (via bfi.org.uk) In the face of overwhelming public support for capital punishment, Yield to the Night attempted to make a case for the abolition of hanging within the format of popular film. And, decades before Dead Man Walking (1995), it focused not on a miscarriage of justice, but on the final days of someone who is guilty of her crime, even going as far as showing us the murder being committed in a gripping pre-credits sequence (one of the first of its kind in British cinema). [Director J. Lee] Thompson was clear in his defence of his tactics: “For capital punishment you must take somebody who deserves to die, and then feel sorry for them and say this is wrong. We did that in Yield to the Night: we made it a ruthless, premeditated murder.” Yield to the Night marked a notable break from the breezy bonhomie of most British productions of the period. Instead, the film dared to engage with the darker elements of 1950s society and refused to compromise, allowing its heroine no last-minute reprieve from her fate, instead closing on a heart-breaking final close-up of her face, numb with horror as she’s led away to the gallows, before cutting away to her unfinished cigarette still smouldering in the ashtray while its smoker is herself being extinguished. The film is the cinematic equivalent of George Orwell’s famous essay on witnessing a hanging, in which it’s only when he sees the condemned man do something as simple as walk around a puddle to avoid getting his feet wet on the way to the scaffold, a tiny, futile gesture of self-preservation on the brink of death, that Orwell is struck by the “unspeakable wrongness” of what is about to happen. -Melanie Williams, “Diana Dors: An angry young woman”, The Independent (2006)

Diana Dors in Yield to the Night (1956, dir. J. Lee Thompson) (via bfi.org.uk)

In the face of overwhelming public support for capital punishment, Yield to the Night attempted to make a case for the abolition of hanging within the format of popular film. And, decades before Dead Man Walking (1995), it focused not on a miscarriage of justice, but on the final days of someone who is guilty of her crime, even going as far as showing us the murder being committed in a gripping pre-credits sequence (one of the first of its kind in British cinema). [Director J. Lee] Thompson was clear in his defence of his tactics: “For capital punishment you must take somebody who deserves to die, and then feel sorry for them and say this is wrong. We did that in Yield to the Night: we made it a ruthless, premeditated murder.”

Yield to the Night marked a notable break from the breezy bonhomie of most British productions of the period. Instead, the film dared to engage with the darker elements of 1950s society and refused to compromise, allowing its heroine no last-minute reprieve from her fate, instead closing on a heart-breaking final close-up of her face, numb with horror as she’s led away to the gallows, before cutting away to her unfinished cigarette still smouldering in the ashtray while its smoker is herself being extinguished.

The film is the cinematic equivalent of George Orwell’s famous essay on witnessing a hanging, in which it’s only when he sees the condemned man do something as simple as walk around a puddle to avoid getting his feet wet on the way to the scaffold, a tiny, futile gesture of self-preservation on the brink of death, that Orwell is struck by the “unspeakable wrongness” of what is about to happen.

-Melanie Williams, “Diana Dors: An angry young woman”, The Independent (2006)

Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria (1957, dir. Federico Fellini) The subject of loneliness and the observation of the isolated person has always interested me. Even as a child, I couldn’t help but notice those who didn’t fit in for one reason or another—myself included. In life, and for my films, I have always been interested in the out-of-step. Curiously, it’s usually those who are either too smart or those who are too stupid who are left out. The difference is, the smart ones often isolate themselves, while the less intelligent ones are usually isolated by the others. In Nights of Cabiria, I explore the pride of one of those who has been excluded. -Federico Fellini

Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria (1957, dir. Federico Fellini)

The subject of loneliness and the observation of the isolated person has always interested me. Even as a child, I couldn’t help but notice those who didn’t fit in for one reason or another—myself included. In life, and for my films, I have always been interested in the out-of-step. Curiously, it’s usually those who are either too smart or those who are too stupid who are left out. The difference is, the smart ones often isolate themselves, while the less intelligent ones are usually isolated by the others. In Nights of Cabiria, I explore the pride of one of those who has been excluded.

-Federico Fellini

Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria (1957, dir. Federico Fellini)

Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria (1957, dir. Federico Fellini)

Still via Sleeping Beauty (1959, dir. Les Clark, Eric Larson, and Wolfgang Reitherman)

Still via Sleeping Beauty (1959, dir. Les Clark, Eric Larson, and Wolfgang Reitherman)

“Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He’ll have a world all to himself, without anyone.” “The best laid plans of mice and men and Henry Bemis, the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time. Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis…in the Twilight Zone.” -Rod Serling, “Time Enough to Last” (1959) (online here), The Twilight Zone

“Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He’ll have a world all to himself, without anyone.”

“The best laid plans of mice and men and Henry Bemis, the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time. Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis…in the Twilight Zone.”

-Rod Serling, “Time Enough to Last” (1959) (online here), The Twilight Zone

Jean Wallace & Cornel Wilde in The Big Combo (1955, dir. Joseph H. Lewis) “I treated her like a pair of gloves. When I was cold, I called her up.”

Jean Wallace & Cornel Wilde in The Big Combo (1955, dir. Joseph H. Lewis)

“I treated her like a pair of gloves. When I was cold, I called her up.”