This is a top heavy year, with 4 all timers about Hollywood, princesses, and subjective reality: peak efforts from Walt Disney, Billy Wilder, Joseph Mankiewicz, and Akira Kurosawa.
Dated and cringe inducingly backward in its racial view, the movie is one of the better shot ones of the era, on location in Africa, with lots of fun adventure sequences, and some ironically fun payoffs like shooting a gun at an alligator.
Light and breezy, Vicente Minelli’s family comedy is so well known it was remade pretty successfully in the 90s. Forever 50 Spencer Tracy is excellent as the codgerly dad with a heart of gold, and young Elizabeth Taylor lights up the screen as the bride.
Another light frothy romcom. Judy Holliday with her boopity boop voice is mildly irritiating and mostly winning as an ex chorus girl engaged to an old tycoon. But wouldn’t ya know it, William Holden is right there waiting in the wings, to help her find true love! Didn’t see that coming!
Jimmy Stewart plays a good natured drunk who happens upon a 6 foot 3 inch tall rabbit named Harvey, confusing and scaring the hell out of everyone he knows. Whimsy is present in most of this Broadway adaptation, with Jimmy Stewart’s downplayed commonplace reactions making this movie a light delight.
John Huston rounds up the usual suspects for this heist thriller. There’s the organizer (Louis Calhern and Sam Jaffe), the local dreamer (Sterling Hayden), and Marilyn Monroe for a hot second. There’s also lots of fun twists and turns in the story as you can imagine the caper might not go according to plan.
Nicholas Ray’s noir gets two amazing performances. One from Gloria Grahame, as a lonely neighbor who provides an alibi for Humphrey Bogart’s writer turned suspect in a murder. Bogart, the consummate pro, is also spectacular here, blurring the lines of artistic creation and reality. The end of this movie is also well constructed, making a murder somehow the second most scary part of the movie in part thanks to Ray’s construction.
Disney’s classic princess fairy tale about fairy godmothers, glass slippers, and evil stepmothers. The main beats you’ll remember, but most of the great parts of this story revolve around the talking mice, who encounter all sorts of harrowing adventures to help their Cinderelly get her happily ever after.
Most comedies have a hard time holding up over time. Not so with this one, because of Joseph Mankiewicz’s excellent screenplay. And because of the sensational Bette Davis, pissed off that she’s the aging talent being replaced by a smarmy double crossing stuck up Anne Baxter.
The Rashomon effect is a term lawyers are familiar with; it comes from this Akira Kurosawa classic. A traveling husband and wife are killed by a wandering man (Toshiro Mifune). But here’s the rub, everyone who witnessed the murder has an entirely different view of events from the other person. Kurosawa’s smart script dives into subjective reality, with an ending fitting the morally fascinating tale that proceeded it.
In a career of great films, this is Billy Wilder’s masterpiece, and probably the best movie about Hollywood ever made. William Holden is our narrator, an innocent writer broke and looking for a screenplay to write. He stumbles into the house of former actress superstar Norma Desmond (silent film star Gloria Swanson, giving one of the best performances I’ve seen), who, along with her butler Erich von Stroheim has built a residence and reality around her fame and belovedness in Hollywood. What follows is an amazing twisty noir, as we see Norma’s reality start to mess with her cloistered existence.
