These films were released during the 1950s

The African Queen

John Huston’s classic film had the unusual distinction of being the last film from the American Film Institute’s 100 Years, 100 Movies list to appear on DVD in the United States, not bowing on that format until March of 2010, well into the Blu-ray/Netflix streaming era. You could find it overseas, but only if you had a “region-free” player, and those copies were made from prints that were, to be polite, pieces of mule dung. Yeah, you should have heard the less polite version of that sentence.

Having seen Paramount’s new release, on Blu-ray of course, I have to say it was worth waiting for the studio to sort out who had the rights to The African Queen, find a half-way decent copy, and then take the time to restore the film to something quite near its original glory.

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Them!

Them!

Them! launched what would be Hollywood’s version of the Godzilla movie, expressing our atomic-age fears via giant bugs and insects instead of rubber lizards. This particular sub-genre has been largely forgotten by our collective movie memory, but Them! remains as an example of 1950s sci-fi done with a style and self-confident maturity that the category often lacks.

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To Catch a Thief

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If North by Northwest was a roller coaster ride, then To Catch a Thief was a slightly more sedate roller coaster in a ritzier neighborhood. About as inconsequential as a movie can be, this third collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant succeeds effortlessly on wit, scenery and star power. Continue reading

The Bridge on the River Kwai

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Even before its classic final scene, the subject of madness runs under this particular bridge, as all three of the main characters have their sanity questioned at some point and the chief questioner, played by William Holden, jokingly questions his own mental state. For all its vast scale, The Bridge on the River Kwai remains an indelible and intimate portrait of fanaticism fatally clashing with fanaticism.

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The Searchers

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John Ford’s The Searchers is a movie in desperate search for an identity. For every aspect that is excellent, two more make you want to cringe. The film seems to have feet in two eras. Its ambivalent attitude toward the stereotypical treatment of Native Americans seems slightly ahead of its time, although Hollywood would do much better later. Balancing against this are characters and storylines that would have seemed dated when Ford and John Wayne were first working together back in the thirties.

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From Here to Eternity

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In lesser hands, this movie would have been one long soap opera, but this adaptation of James Jones’ rather bawdy novel manages to wring real human drama out of its characters instead. The real miracle is that the filmmakers managed to tame the rather explicit novel enough to appease the censors and still stay true to the spirit of the story. If all you remember or know about this movie is Burt Lancaster’s famous clinch on the beach with Deborah Kerr, then you owe yourself a viewing of this movie, which has a lot more to offer.

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Paths of Glory

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Legendary French director François Truffaut famously said that it was impossible to make a truly anti-war film, because film inherently glamorizes everything it depicts. That quote is hard to reconcile, however, with the evidence of Stanley Kubrick’s first truly great movie. Continue reading

The Enemy Below

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Often imitated, this movie practically drew the blueprint for the World War II submarine movie. This lean, efficient story of the hunter and the hunted rises above the pack, courtesy of a pair of superb performances in the roles of two crisply drawn antagonists. Some elements of the film seem conspicuously dated, especially the scenes aboard the American destroyer that don’t involve Robert Mitchum hunting the submarine, but when the action is joined, the forced, stilted dialog disappears like it never existed.

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Forbidden Planet

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Seeing Forbidden Planet today is like meeting an old friend’s great-grandfather and seeing the family resemblance. Sort of a gold standard for the science fiction genre during the fifties, this film has its DNA in much of what we’ve seen since in film and on television, particularly the original Star Trek. From fifty years later, however, the movie is also a wonderfully nostalgic mix of forward thinking and amusingly dated social mores.

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The Ten Commandments

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There has to be some degree of irony to a film called The Ten Commandments, since one of those commandments says “make no graven images,” and this film does sort of count as one long graven image. Or am I completely off base?

Either way, this is one of those completely “review-proof” films, where any attempt to analyze or criticize it as you would a normal film. For people who love this film, the basic standards of filmmaking are utterly without relevance to their enjoyment of it. Sure, by our definition of what constitutes a good movie, impresario Cecil B. DeMille’s biblical epic is an overacted, overwrought potboiler, but saying so leaves you feeling like a spoilsport, if not a bloody heathen.

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Lady and the Tramp

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Despite the silly, saccharine and inconsequential nature of its story, Disney’s Lady and the Tramp still stands as one of the great achievements in the history of the Mouse Factory’s animated features. Even if the movie had no story it all, that wouldn’t change the fact that it is one of the most gorgeously illustrated of the Disney animated films. There isn’t a frame of this film that I wouldn’t be happy to have framed and hanging on my wall. The animation of the canine characters fluidly blends realism and anthropomorphic fantasy. The filmmakers also make superb use of the movie’s 2.55:1 CinemaScope aspect ratio, a rarity among animated films of any kind.

The film is also unique in that it was also filmed simultaneously in the 4:3 Academy ratio. However, the “Full Screen” version on the new DVD is not this version, but a pan and scan of the CinemaScope film. That doesn’t matter, since here we watch only the widescreen version if we can, but it’s still sad that one of the original versions of this classic is not available.

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