Hey, early cinema wasn’t making a whole lot of films, so not every year has 10 worthy of looking into. At least this one has a great triple header at the top, two tragically beautiful and one jokingly awesome. Also, what’s up with the treatment of the elderly? Lot of movies this year about older people reflecting on their poor treatment or dealing with a life in poverty. Yeesh.
Don’t worry, even though it’s a short list, it’s a pretty good one.
John Ford tries his hand at an Irish romcom? Sure, why not. Bring John Wayne aboard, and the great Maureen O’Hara (her accent needs work), and you’ve got a wacky comedy that looks straight up gorgeous.
Orson Welles is in blackface. That’s um, not great. But everything else about his Shakespeare production is, looking beautiful and gigantic like every great bard adapation.
Not quite as melodramatic as the soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful” but it’s close. It’s fitting a movie about Hollywood though, that everyone who hates working for Kirk Douglas’s producer really dials up the anger/hatred an extra notch to get their point across.
Kenji Mizoguchi really wanted to make a point about how women are mistreated in Japanese society. He teams up with the awesome Kinuyo Tanaka (they’ll team up again next year too) to tell the story of a woman who’s choices to live for herself are frowned upon by custom, like marrying a samurai (Toshiro Mifune), beneath her status for love.
Vittorio de Sica’s tragic tale about Carlo Battisti’s titular character. A hard working man all his life, he finds that the systems in place in Italy price him out of his decades long existence forcing him to protest for his life, which slowly, tragically, gets taken away from him. de Sica flirts with the unwatchable line a few times, but Battisti’s performance keeps the movie engaging and interesting despite the true systemic coldness he faces.
Akira Kurosawa proves he doesn’t just do samurai films. Consider this brilliance: a lovely portrait of Takashi Shimura’s ordinary man. A middle management type who gets life altering news, Shimura is excellent trying to find some meaning in his last days, while Kurosawa then extends the picture in really interesting ways to show how Shimura’s choices affect his friends/contemporaries going forward.
Garry Cooper plays a man who’s ready to give up the cowboy life for his upcoming marriage to Quaker Grace Kelly. However, 4 men terrorizing his town make him choose to honor his commitment to law enforcement or his wife, as Cooper tries to convince the town to help him. By Western standards, this movie is light on action, but more than makes up for it with its really penetrating look at the fight or flight mentality in people when the stakes get raised.
In a year of bleak, bleak stories Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor are here to “Make Em Laugh.” In addition to that amazing musical number are a host of catchy memorable tunes, great performances from the 3 leads, and an interesting story about Hollywood in flux. In short, this is one of the greatest musicals Hollywood has and will ever make.
