This is a year of drawn out, languid films. Some of those films benefit greatly from the slower pace, and some are just a product of their time. Also, Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe and a really deep bench of great female talent shine this year, as well as the lesser known but great directors like William Wyler, George Stevens, Fred Zinnemann, and Howard Hawks. Also admittedly, this is one of those years I need to watch more than half of the films again because they’ve left my mind.
No musical starring Marilyn Monroe could be that bad. Howard Hawks early and often puts Monroe and Jane Russell front and center, carrying this musical with their charm and talent. Monroe’s rendition of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” is so famous that Madonna ripped it off later.
Finding inspiration in himself always is Frederico Fellini. This film made him an international star, telling a tale of 5 friends from a small town with dreams of making it big and having fun along the way. One of the characters might want to make a movie or two, who knows? Parts of the story are timeless, parts haven’t aged well at all. But because it’s Fellini, it looks great. Worse places to hang out than in a beautiful small Italian town.
This is NOT a Kurosawa film from Japan, but still very great. Kenji Mizoguchi’s eerie, mysterious almost supernatural drama contains a deep lesson about dreams, ambition, vanity, consequences and war profiteering. With lots of great ladies like Machiko Kyo and Kinuyo Tanaka delivering wonderful performances when given the opportunity to shine, Mizoguchi’s parable of the consequences of greed remains important to this day.
Normally mysterious figures have an heir of menace about them, but it is the 50s. Shane (Alan Ladd) is a mysterious drifter who wanders onto a Wyoming family’s ranch, and just…makes their lives better. For all it’s sappy earnestness, it’s much deeper than the surface suggests, as the movie thinks through its gunfights and western cliches as it becomes more of a story about how hard it is to build a community from nothing.
Jacques Tati debuted his most famous character in this film, about the titular character having a vacation on a quaint beach town in the Loire Valley. Tati’s affinity for silent comedies shines through, as well as his keen observations about how amusing daily life can be; you’ll laugh out loud at a seashell search and the big climax.
This movie has one of the great action thriller premises ever: men have to drive a truck of explosive chemicals over patchy road terrain for an oil company. I wish this movie had gone the Mad Max Fury Road route, and dispensed with the expository dialogue. Because the minute those trucks get moving, this movie makes you grip your seat and not let go until the end.
What a great year for non Kurosawa Japanese directors! Yasujiro Ozu’s screenplay is the winner here though, penning a subtle but brilliant story about an aging couple trying to visit their adult kids. The movie can be very slow moving, but if you’re patient enough, it rewards you with a slap in the face of poetic, well executed melancholy and tragedy that every person sadly will go through at some point in their lives.
The Best Picture winner is most famous for Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr making out on the beach. The movie uses a touch of melodrama to build around the fateful events of Pearl Harbor, giving us a taste of how life was like on and off the base, in the leadup to the surprise attack. Frank Sinatra proves he can act in this thing, winning an Oscar for his role here. But maybe even better than him are Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift, turning the “humorless sergeant” and “haunted put upon private” into fascinating characters.
Audrey Hepburn won an Oscar for this totally winning romcom. She plays a princess who goes undercover on a holiday in Rome, accompanied by journalist Gregory Peck. It’s got beautiful locations, solid chemistry between the leads, and the princess fantasy, except the writing is much better than you’d expect, and the ending is just lovely.
Billy Wilder can be hit or miss for me, but this is a big hit. Playing POWs in a camp that murders you if you try to escape, the prisoners, William Holden among them, amuse themselves in darkly funny ways to keep morale up and power through their imprisonment, while also trying to weed out the mole in their bunk.
