1956 - ELENA AND HER MEN aka PARIS DOES STRANGE THINGS

Ingrid Bergman who had just entered her early 40's is at her most radiant in this film by the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir.  In this film Bergman is courted by several suitors all of who she manages to hold at bay until she finally chooses the guy she wants.  Bergman had a long career in the film industry with lots of highs in 1940's Hollywood and a big low with her involvement with Italian director Roberto Rossellini (having a child out of wedlock the horror, the horror). 

Elena and Her Men was made after Jean Renoir's return to France.  He had been in exile in Hollywood during World War II.  Renoir struggled in Hollywood and was never very comfortable with the cookie cutter studio approach to film making.   The films he made upon his return to France are considerably more light weight than some of his serious 1930's films such as Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion.  He certainly had the ability to film comedy with the amusing Boudu Saved from Drowning.  So filming a farce 20 years later wasn't difficult for him.

 

Elena and Her Men is frequently mentioned by critics as a variation on his theme of the foolishness of the upper class which he satirized in Rules of the Game.  Renoir certainly ridicules the upper class in this film but this is a very paper thin story for the most part.

 

The film was mostly filmed in the studio.  Claude Renoir who was an outstanding color cinematographer was responsible for the look of the film. This movie is absolutely gorgeous to look at.   Claude Renoir also happened to be the nephew of Jean Renoir.  Jean Marius and actor usually associated with Jean Cocteau is one of Bergman's suitors.  American actor Mel Ferrer is another.

The film was written by Jean Renoir and Jean Serge, the running time is 98 minutes.

1956 - WAR AND PEACE, King Vidor's film of Tolstoy's novel on a very epic scale.

One of those big 1950's epic films.  Photographed in Italy for the most part and featuring a cast made up of Italian and American actors.  The producer Dino De Laurentiis as they liked to say in the film's advertising "spared no expense."

Apparently six credited screen writers were involved with the director King Vidor also doing rewrites during production.  England's top color cameraman Jack Cardiff was responsible for the photography of the film. For the time supposedly 18,000 Italian troops were hired to re-stage the battle scenes, primarily the famous Battle of Bordino.  Director King Vidor had handled complex productions in the past, The Big Parade, Hallelujah and Duel in the Sun with out losing sight of the personal stories of the characters but this film might have gotten away from him in this instance.

If the film had problems it was in the mixed cast.  Henry Fonda was all wrong as the pivotal character, Pierre Bezukhov, his American Midwestern affectations seem completely out of place for a film set in Russia.  Audrey Hepburn who was cast as Natasha Rostova at least looks the part of a Russian Countess.  However Hepburn insisted at the time that her husband Mel Ferrer play Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and he's kind of hopeless.

How's the film?  Well it's long, the color photography is good.  The sets are on a massive scale.  The battle scenes are well staged as is the burning of Moscow.  Frankly the mixed cast of Italian, British and American actors is kind of jarring at times. There is a lot of dubbing that had to occur to get everyone speaking in the same language, in this case English.  The sound has kind of a hollow reverb quality to it which can get fairly distracting.

 

This version of War and Peace is usually compared to the 1967 Russian version. But I think that this is a little unfair.  The two films were made at different time periods and are really two different interpretations of the same story.

 

Here we go, the film was written by Bridget Boland, Mario Camerini, Ennio De  Concini, Gian Gaspare Napolitano, Ivo Perilli, Mario Soldati, King Vidor and Robert Westerby.  The uncredited writers were, Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, Sergio Amidei and supposedly Irwin Shaw and King Vidor's wife Florence Vidor.  The film is 208 minutes.

1956 - THE SEARCHERS - on the big screen.

John Ford's The Searchers is back in a new restoration and making the rounds at revival theaters.  This was probably John Ford's best film since The Quiet Man and probably his last masterpiece.

Ford certainly had his high and low points during the 1950's but with this film he finally had his best story in years,  Ford as was his custom loaded up the cast with a lot of his favorite actors, the famous John Ford stock company as it was called.  Ford also had John Wayne as the lead.  Ford and Wayne had been working together since Ford's silent film days.

 

Just as important as the cast was Ford's film crew.  Winton C. Hoch wsa a master technicolor cameraman who had worked on and off with Ford.  At times Hoch and Ford had a fairly stormy relationship since Hoch was a perfectionist when it came to cinematography but the results were certainly worth it.  Writing the screenplay was Frank S. Nugent who had worked with Ford starting in the 1940's.  Most importantly was the producer Meriam C. Cooper who found the property, raised the money for the production and brought Ford into it.  What all these men had in common was their ability to deal with the cantankerous and a times abusive director. not always an easy task.

 

Ford filmed much of The Searchers in Monument Valley Arizona a location he was very familiar with.  By this time in his career he knew every place that would feature the best locations while filming.  The on location photography is certainly spectacular. 

Although The Searchers is a western, the themes of racism, the treatment of Native Americans and miscegenation are present in the film.  In one of the only times in his career John Wayne  played a racist.  This was fairly tough stuff for the 1950's.  In many ways The Searchers was a career peak for John Ford who probably should have retired after this film but continued to work into the 1960's

The Searchers is not a perfect film but it is a great one. The running time is 119 minutes.

1856 - TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON, very popular 1950's comedy

This comedy about the US Army's occupation of Okinawa after World War II was very popular.  The play which the film was based on won the Tony, Pulitzer, and New York Drama Critics awards.  The play's main theme is basically a sort of "burying of the hatchet" between the Japanese and American nations.Viewed now, the play which the film  followed very closely is just hopelessly dated and in many ways very racist in it's depiction of the Asian people and culture.

Marlon Brando the premier actor of Hollywood and Broadway got it into his head that he wanted to play the character Sakini the interpreter to American officer Glenn Ford.  Ford is supposed to help rebuild a town in Okinawa by constructing a school and starting some local businesses.  The sneaky Sakini persuades Ford to build a tea house instead and start supplying home made liquor to the American Army, a direct violation of his commander's orders.  

 

Teahouse of the August Moon is about the humorous clash of cultures between east and west.  However the citizens of Okinawa come off as brain dead children with their foolish shenanigans.  Almost every interaction between the Americans ends with some excitable behavior which becomes more offensive throughout the film. Clearly the scenes with the Okinawan people are supposed to come off as funny but they are just stupid.  And exactly what Brando, usually an intelligent actor thought he was up to with his pigeon English and silly gestures in his performance is a complete mystery he's an embarrassment.

 The film also has another performer Machiko Kyō as the geisha girl who is living with Ford.  Kyō was an important performer in Japan, she had appeared in Rashomon, Gate of Hell, Ugetsu and Floating Weeds.  Here she plays a subservient geisha named what else "Lotus Blossom."  There is the slight hint of a romance between her and Ford but being that this is the 1950's none of that interracial stuff was going to be allowed. Machiko Kyō must have been an intelligent performer, she smart enough to never appear in another American film again.

 

Well needless to say the film got great reviews and was a big hit with the general public which just goes to prove nothing as far as I'm concerned.  The film now comes off as a piece of 1950's bad taste.

The screenplay which slavishly followed the play was by John Patrick, the running time is 123 minutes.

1956 - A TOWN LIKE ALICE - good World War II war drama

The actor Virginia McKenna's understated but very committed performance is probably the best thing about this war drama.  During the Japanese invasion of Malaya a group of women and children are left behind during the evacuation.  Forced to march from one Japanese prison camp to another the women and children struggle for survival. 

A Town Like Alice was based on a book by Australian author Nevil Shute the writer of the extremely depressing end of the world novel On The Beach.  Besides being a story of survival during the war A Town Like Alice is also an understated love story as well.  Australian actor  Peter Finch plays a prisoner of war who has been forced to drive a transport truck for the Japanese.  At certain points in the film he is able to aid the women until he is finally caught by the Japanese and tortured in a very intense scene.

 Some of the film was apparently filmed on location in Malaya but was mostly shot at Pinewood studios in England.  The story is sort of true and sort of fiction.  Apparently a group of British women were marched and shuffled around Malaya during World War II, but the characters in this film are basically fictitious.

 

For all her quiet reserve Virginia McKenna's character shows a strong will to survive and inspires the other women in her group as well.  I guess it's some of that "steely resolve" stuff the British have in their national character at times.  This film is what I suppose would be called an inspirational story and it could have easily slid into pathos but for the most part avoids that pitfall.  A Town Like Alice was very popular when released and it's available on YouTube in a very good copy

The film was written by W. P. Lipscomb and Richard Mason the running time is 117 minutes.

1956 - ILYA MUROMETS, incredibly large scale Russian epic

 It's big, it's crazy, it's a large scale Russian epic and I do mean large scale. 

Everything about the film is larger than life, the widescreen photography, the cast of thousands, the overacting, the sets, you name it.

 

The film ends with a spectacular battle using an actual fire breathing dragon all of things. Very impressive and remember this is 1950's technology.

 

I've said it before but this a one of it's kind watching experience.

Running time 83 minutes. Written by Mikhail Kochnev.

1956 - THE BATTLE OF THE RIVER PLATE aka The Pursuit of the Graf Spee.

Powell and Pressburger towards the end of their run as a production team known as, The Archers.  The Battle of the River Plate may not be as good as their 1940's masterpieces but it is still a very good war film

During the beginning of World War II the German battle ship, "Admiral Graf Spee" is sinking British merchant ships in the southern hemisphere.  The British Navy sends out a task force to stop the Graf Spee and the film consists of a large scale battle followed by some clever intelligence tricks on the part of the British that eventually stops the run of Graf Spee.

The film as always has a strong focus on characterization particularly adding some depth and complexity to the German captain of the Graf Spee,  Captain Hans Langsdorff a rather sympathetic character.

Powell and Pressburger had real battleships to play with while filming.  Obviously models were used in the actual battles but the battle scenes are exciting.

The film is in many ways in the great tradition of "stiff upper lip" British War films.  But Powell and Pressburger are smart enough to tweak the troupes.

As with every film by The Archers, Powell and Pressburger share screenplay and directing credits.  The film runs 119 minutes.

1956 - AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, one of those 50's super spectaculars

 This was the big one for 1956,  It won many awards and was very popular with movie going audiences.  The producer was a man called Michael Todd who was apparently quite the showman.  He was also known for his chutzpah a man so brash he somehow got Elizabeth Taylor then in her mid twenties to marry him.  Todd was forty seven years old at the time.

Todd was one of the original founders of Cinerama, the wide screen movie process.  He split from that company and patented his own widescreen format called Todd-AO.  Looking for a suitable movie to showcase his widescreen miracle,  Todd decided to make a film out of Jules Verne's Around The World in 80 Days.  Basically pumping all of his money into the film Todd actually found himself with a substantial hit. 

 

The film today looks very much like a widescreen super spectacle.  Lots of photography of scenery, (the film was shot in a lot of different locations) at the expense of a well paced story.  The actors, particularly David Niven have to work hard to have some kind of a presence in the film.  The Mexican actor known as Cantinflas, was hired to play Niven's faithful servant. Cantinflas carries much of the load in the film with lots of unfunny physical comedy.  Cantinflas is unsual casting in that he was primarily known as a verbal comedian in Mexico.

The film is entertaining when the viewer isn't being bombarded with lots of scenic vistas.  The last hour of the film is entertaining. This film is so over the top that the ending credits by Saul Bass run six minutes. 

 

To ensure box office success, Todd loaded the film up with lots of Hollywood actors in parts he called cameos.  The film is almost a record over 1950's actors.

The running time is a whopping 182 minutes.  The screenwriters were James Poe,  John Farrow and S.J. Perelman.

1956 - HELEN OF TROY, one of those big budget sword and sandal epics

How did the director Robert Wise, generally a man of taste get mixed up with this film?  This is the classic story of Helen, queen of Sparta who falls in love with Paris, a prince of Troy.  As in the Greek legend it all leads to the siege of Troy which goes on for years.  The war finally ends with the Trojans dragging the Trojan horse into the city.  The horse is full of Greek soldiers who sneak out and destroy the city from the inside.  "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts," says Cassandra and she's not kidding.

Warner Brothers cast a couple of unknowns as the leads.  A French actor Jacques Sernas as Paris and some Italian sex symbol Rossana Podestà as Helen.  Playing Helen's servant is Brigitte Bardot and I would have to say I think they got the casting backwards.  The supporting cast is the usual bunch of English actors hired to class up one of these big budget epics.

Anyway back to Robert Wise.  Apparently he was looking to shoot a film in widescreen and decided to take this project on. Whatever, the film looks pretty good with the usual cast of thousands deployed for maximum movie carnage.

 

Helen Of Troy is entertaining in the usual way these big budget films are.  Lots of extras, big sets and lots of large scale battles.

The film runs 118 minutes and was written by Hugh Gray, N. Richard Nash and John Twist although I don't think they put a whole lot of effort into the screenplay.

1956 - THE KING AND FOUR QUEENS, boring Western.

All this western has going for it is the star power of Clark Gable because this is a fairly drab film.
Gable is a con man who shows up at a ranch run by 4 women and their battle axe of a mother in law.  He's in search of some buried gold.  Gable charms each of the woman and that's about it for a story.

I suppose the idea was to base the film around Gable's star power but this  approach probably called for a director who could bring out the personalities of the actors a little stronger.  Action director Raoul Walsh was probably not the ideal choice in this case.

The film was shot in CinemaScope which was probably not the best choice for an intimate chamber piece of a story.

86 minutes, written by Margaret Fitts and Richard Alan Simmons.

1956 - CHECKPOINT, British racing film with a ridiculous plot.

To see this is to disbelieve this.  Probably one of the worst stories for a film that I have ever seen.  There are so many plot loopholes and coincidences that I could probably fill up two posts with the insanity of this film. The film has something to do with stealing the blue prints for a racing car smuggling a bad guy across the border during a race and substituting drivers I guess.

The film was directed by hack British director Ralph Thomas and produced by hack film producer Betty E. Box.  How these two had such a long career in the British film industry is a mystery to me.

 For a racing film the cars are kind of cool with featured footage of Lotus Mark 10 Aston Martin.

80 minutes screenplay by Robin Estridge.

1956 - THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, on Blu Ray.

DeMille's final film probably sums up all of the good and bad things about career.  DeMille had an interesting visual sense based on old Victorian and Renaissance paintings and he certainly knew how to deploy large numbers of extras for maximum visual impact.  At the same time DeMille was not the greatest director of actors, he liked things played very broad.  There was no subtlety in a DeMille film.  DeMille also like to use stories from the Bible and American history as a basis for his films and by the time he had dramatized them they bore virtually no resemblance to actual historical events but could be pretty darn entertaining.

The Ten Commandments was a big production for DeMille.  It had the "cast of thousands," impressive scenes, dramatic use of color and lighting and a large of cast of very good actors.  It also had one of the most ludicrous stories about the life of Moses ever put on film.  Since so little was known about Moses, DeMille and his writers were free to invent large chunks of his life story.  In The Ten Commandments DeMille had come up with a bizarre story about a three way love triangle between Moses, the Pharaoh and the Pharaoh's wife which boarders on the tasteless.

Still, this is an amazing film and also a very long one.  This thing just goes on and on and DeMille's cast really pours it on with enough scenery chewing acting to make Al Pacino look subtle.  Amazingly, DeMille was 75 years old when he made The Ten Commandments.  He suffered a heart attack during this production but he continued to direct the film to completion.

Paramount has put together a stunning Blu-ray of the The Ten Commandments.  This film looks really good.

220 minutes,  the screenplay was by a bunch of DeMille cronies,  Aeneas MacKenzie,  Lasky Jr., Jack Gariss and Fredric Frank.

1956 - THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, the Hitchcock remake of his 1934 film.

Hitchcock remakes one of the British thrillers that made his reputation in the 1930's and doesn't do a very good job on it.  The film is long and the suspense sequences are unusually flat.  All the old tricks are present with Hitchcock building suspense with camera angles and cutting but they don't seem to come off this time.  The famous Albert Hall assassination scene is probably the best part of the film but everything else doesn't work.

The casting of the film is pretty good with the exception of James Stewart as the blustering American father.  Stewart stumbles on an assassination plot and has to find and save his son from the team of assassins who have kidnapped the kid to keep Stewart from going to the police.  Stewart really piles on the "as shucks I'm just an average guy from the states" stuff.  He also blunders and blusters around searching for the assassins when it is clear he should have went to the police for help.  By the 1950's Stewart had a tendency to parody himself in his performances if he wasn't careful.

The female lead is Doris Day who isn't bad.  However she has the worst scene singing her popular hit "Que Sera Sera" over and over as a signal to her son.  This song make the climatic rescue scene seem rather ridiculous.  Considering the large budget Hitchcock was working with it seems that he could have been a little more inventive with this scene.

Hard to know what went wrong with this film.  Hitchcock had wanted to remake The Man Who Knew Too Much off and on throughout his career.  When he finally got around to doing it he didn't seem to really care about reinventing the film. 

 This is a very long and boring film. 120 minutes, written by John Michael Hayes.

1956 - IT CONQUERED WITH WORLD another Roger Corman sci-fi quicky

Roger Corman must have knocked this one out in about a day and 1/2.  Corman clearly borrowed from The Day The Earth Stood Still and Invaders from Mars.  Stealing from other movies never bothered Roger Corman very much if he could make a couple of bucks.  

Watching this epic one can't help thinking that they sure didn't put much thought into the monster from the planet Venus.  This think looks like an out of control zucchini with lobster claws.  The flying rubber bat creatures aren't that bad but Corman should have learned a lesson from Val Lewton, "don't show the monster.

The cast is fairly decent.  Peter Graves, Lee Van Cleef and Beverly Garland are actually fairly sincere delivering some of the dialog that includes lines like, "I made it possible for you to come here... I made you welcome to this Earth... You made it a charnel house."

Definition:  charnel house -  "A charnel house is a vault or building where human skeletal remains are stored. They are often built near churches for depositing bones that are unearthed while digging graves. The term can also be used more generally as a description of a place filled with death and destruction." 

71 minutes, written by Lou Rusoff and Corman's go to screenwriter Charles B. Griffith.

1954 - CATTLE QUEEN OF MONTANA, Stanwyck and Reagan

71 year old Allan Dwan, was one of a select group that pretty much invented movie making during the silent film period film.  Dwan was still working into the 1950's.  Cattle Queen of Montana is sort of a B-western with a lot to recommend it.

The film stars Barbara Stanwyck in a very strong role as a woman attempting to set up a ranch in Montana.  She is plagued by evil rancher Gene Evans and some rogue Indians.  Stanwyck is assisted by Ronald Reagan (who's not bad) playing some sort of undercover Army officer.  But the bottom line is that Stanwyck doesn't take any crap from any guy in this film she shoots them if they get out of line.

The action is pretty good with a nasty knife fight, a cattle stampede and an exciting shoot out with the bad guys at the end.  The director Allan Dwan gets to the point and the film zips along in about an hour and a half.  This is essentially a feminist western which also has a very sympathetic point of view regarding native Americans even if they are all played by white actors.  The extensive on location filming is also a big plus in this film.

A favorite with film scholars and directors with Martin Scorsese, this is still a rather modest western particularly well made.

88 minutes, written by Robert Blees and Howard Estabrook.

1956 - WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS, one of Fritz Lang's final American films

One of the last films that Fritz Lang directed before he wrapped up the American phase of his career.  While the City Sleeps has some good and not so good stuff in it.  Lang had to juggle two separate stories, the search for a creepy serial killer and the machinations of a group of executives to gain control over a large Murdock like news organization.

At this point in his career Lang was sick of the film business, tired of dealing with stupid producers and studios.  Lang was always a dictatorial difficult personality to deal with on a film set and like Orson Welles struggled to play the game.  Lang's film budgets got less and less as he descended into "B" movies.  While the City Sleeps isn't exactly a "B" film but it does look kind of cheap.

The film has a good old school Hollywood cast, Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders, Thomas Mitchell, Ida Lupino and Howard Duff.  If they weren't exactly on the "A" list they were all seasoned professionals. 

Lang was still good at the crime stuff, the creepy serial killer with a "mama's boy" fixation, the actual killings, a good chase in the subway chase scene.  What Lang seems uninterested in is the board room drama of who will control the news corporation which takes up the major part of the film.

Also, kind of dramatically suspect is the behavior of the reporter played by Dana Andrews who goes out of his way to provoke the serial killer through his news stories.  At one point Andrews even uses his fiancee as a decoy to draw out the killer. 

The amount of drinking that goes on in this film is amusing to watch,  people are constantly drinking and drinking a lot, Andrews goes out to lunch and just doesn't have one drink he has about four, it's hard to believe anyone could even function at their jobs during the afternoon.

In spite of its flaws, I would still put While the City Sleeps a lot higher than the overrated The Big Heat.

100 minutes