1958 - INDISCREET, a polished production of a very slight story

This should have been an entertaining romantic comedy.  The leads were Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.  The producer/director was Stanley Donen a man of taste and style.  The writer was Norman Krasna an old pro at this romantic comedy stuff.  The cinematographer was F.A. Young who was usually associated with David Lean's super epics, it looks very pretty in technicolor.  The end result of all this effort is a very mild film with lots and lots of talk.

Bergman plays what else, a world famous actress who enters into an affair with rich banker Cary Grant who is apparently married. The film's contrived plot hangs on the premise that Grant actually isn't married but is pretending to be married to avoid having to get married, well something like that.  

 

This film was made under the Cary Grant, Stanley Donen production company Grandon.  It was the first of their three films which included The Grass is Greener and Charade.  The idea seemed to be to film sophisticated and very glossy entertainments of "the privileged class enjoying their privileges" as they liked to say.

For all the good looking clothes and impressive London locations the film just doesn't really come off with it's dumb premise.  Grant and Bergman make a good looking couple but they don't really have any genuinely witty dialog to work with.  They are supported by English character actors Cecil Parker and Phyllis Calvert who are much better at delivering Krasna's lame dialog and frankly when they are off screen they are really missed.  I guess if you are a fan of classic Hollywood stars like Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman the film is sort of enertaining.

The running time is an overlong 100 minutes.   

1958 - DUNKIRK, a good version of a frequently told World War II story

If the famous Dunkirk "miracle" is remembered in the movies today, it's probably for the spectacular Christopher Nolan film that was released in 2017.  This version of the Dunkirk evacuation is also a very good account of this decisive moment for the British during World War II.

The film was a production of Ealing Studios and it's a little different from their famous comedies but it was made with all the care that they brought to all of their productions.  The producer was the legendary Michael Balcon who also was the head of the studio.  Balcon was probably one of the most important individuals in the development of the British cinema.  He was responsible for developing a lot of talent which included individuals like Alfred Hitchcock, Alec Guinness, Alexander Mackendrick, Jack Hawkins, Joan Greenwood and Charles Crichton to name just a very few.

There were no hammy actors in this film.  John Mills, Bernard Lee and Richard Attenborough were character actors first if movie stars at all.  This film was shot in France, and England with very careful attention payed to getting the physical production right. The director was Leslie Norman a competent technician who spent a lot of his career working in British television.

 

Dunkirk was written by David Divine, the running time is 134 minutes. 

1958 - APPALACHIAN SPRING, a record of choreographer Martha Graham's ballet.

Martha Graham, a choreographer and dancer and a woman who literally worked until she died was persuaded to allow one of her most famous ballets Appalachian Spring to be filmed.  Graham had apparently been very resistant to photographing her choreography but this performance turned out very well.

Graham had conceived the ballet in the 1940's and composer Aaron  Copland in collaboration with Graham wrote the music.  It was one of her most successful productions.  Graham was considered to old for the main lead the young bride at the time of the filming but she was insistent that she dance the part.

 

The story of the ballet is supposedly a tribute to the pioneering spirit of America as a young couple dance on their wedding day. Copland's music intermixed with variations  the old song Shaker song " Simple Gifts" into the ballet.

The minimalist set design was by another frequent Graham collaborator Isamu Noguchi.  Appalachian Spring was very well photographed in black and white.  It would probably be of interest to people interested in ballet and dance, this presentation this is very well done.

The running time is 30 minutes. 

1958 - MAIGRET SETS A TRAP, character study disguised as a crime story

Inspector Maigret the famous French detective had been around since the 1930's.  The character has also been in many films almost from the start of his literary career.  Charles Laughton portrayed him in a 1950 film Man On The Eiffel Tower directed by Burgess Meredith.  In 1958, Maigret Sets a Trap showed up in America in a slick film production.

The Maigret character was played by Jean Gabin.  Gabin in his younger years was a romantic lead in films like Pépé le Moko, Port of Shadows and The Human Beast.  As Gabin grew older he took on more character driven parts as he assumed the role of "elder statesman" in the French cinema.  Gabin's take on the Maigret character is sort of a French version of Lt. Columbo, a detective who uses his brains instead of his gun etc.

In Maigret Sets a Trap the detective is after a serial killer of women.  Maigret has to match wits with the killer in the same sort of "as shucks" manner that Peter Falk did on Columbo.  Frankly the mystery and crime elements of the film are a little obvious but the entertainment value is in watching a great French actor do his acting thing.

 

This is a very good looking film with excellent black and white photography and overall an impressive studio production.  Jean Gabin went on to play the Maigret character in two more films.

The film was written by Jean Delannoy, Rodolphe-Maurice Arlaud and Michel Audiard.  the running time is 119 minutes. 

1958 - LETTER FROM SIBERIA, early film from Chris Marker

Chris Marker who is generally considered part of the French "New Wave'" filmmakers that showed up towards the end of the 1950's, didn't exactly fit in with that bunch which included Truffaut, Goddard, Rivette and Chabrol.  Marker was interested in more than just making films.

Marker was essentially an artist working in different types of visual media.  One of his interests was the short form essay, not exactly a documentary and not exactly a fictional film.  Letter from Siberia is a fascinating film made early in his career.

 

Traveling to Siberia, Maker documented Siberian life which at the time was considered a vast mysterious and foreboding expanse barely inhabitable.  Maker's film shows an area which indeed was vast but he also shows the lives of the inhabitants which range from reindeer riding Siberian cowboys to workers constructing gigantic power plants and cities in order to harvest the natural resources of Siberia.

 

Marker's presentation with the omniscient narration, spoofs of animated cartoons, pet bears and satires of western advertising is very witty.  Marker continued to work on and off in the film world.  His best known film is his clever time travel story  La Jetée which was later turned into the Terry Gilliam film 12 Monkeys.

 Written by Chris Marker, the running time is 62 minutes.

1958 - THE TRAPP FAMILY IN AMERICA, a sort of sequel.

 I doubt fans of The Sound of Music are aware that it is actually a remake of a German film called The Trapp Family (1956)  that version of the singing Von Trapp Family also made a lot of money.  The German studio Gloria Films just like their Hollywood counterparts knew a money making machine when they saw it and went ahead and released the further adventures of the Von Trapp Family as The Trapp Family In America.

The story is basically about the Von Trapp Family traveling around America by bus performing their dreary religious song repertory.  Not unlike Julie Andrews, Maria Von Trapp is a goody two shoes who realizes that the paying American public wants to hear music they can relate to in this case a chorale version of "Oh Suzanna" apparently. The Von Trapps eventually end up in Vermont where they buy a farm which I believe is still owned and managed by some of their descendants.  That's about all this film is, a bunch of people riding around on a bus, a bunch of kids singing and Maria Von Trapp as her smiling happy self.

 

I suppose a couple of things to note.  Maria Von Trapp was played by an actor named Ruth Leuwerik who was a big star in Germany in the 1950's.  The real Maria Von Trapp wrote a book about her experiences and eventually sold it to Gloria Films while signing away her rights to any profit participation in the film.  This sequel apparently made quite a bit of money.  Much like American audiences, there is sometimes no accounting for taste when it comes to the German movie goer.

Overall this film is mighty dreary.  There really is no conflict and there is a whole lot of singing the viewer has to sit through.  As with any "based on a true story" film the “facts” are mighty wobbly compared to the real story of these singing songbirds.  This is not much of a film, The Trapp Family In America is more of a curiosity than an interesting story.

The film was written by what else an ex Nazi named Herbert Reinecker, the running time is 103 minutes.

1958 - BRINK OF LIFE, aka SO CLOSE TO LIFE

Three pregnant women about to give birth meet and bond in a hospital ward.  That's about it for the plot of this soap operish film.  If you are looking for a film celebrating childbirth you have certainly come to the wrong film, this is an Ingmar Bergman film.

This film is unbelievably depressing even for a Bergman film.  All the relationships between the women and their husbands are shall we say kind of lacking.  The plot line moves from one angst ridden pregnant woman to another and needless to say the film does not resolve itself with a happy ending.

If the film has anything going for it, it's the cast of performers Bergman assembled for this film.  Ingrid Thulin, Eva Dahlbeck, Bibi Andersson, Max Von Sydow and Erland Josephson are all members of Ingmar Bergman's famous "stock company."

 

It's difficult to see what Bergman saw in this pointless story.  This is one of his rare films where he doesn't take a writing credit.  Unaccountably the film won several awards at the Cannes Film festival for Bergman, Thulin, Dahlbeck and Andersson.  I won't argue that the film is well acted and well made, but it is an awfully depressing slog to sit through.  However all the women are very good at crying on cue.

The film was written by Ulla Isaksson, the running time is 84 minutes.

1958 - THE MAGICIAN - another interesting Bergman film.

It's science versus spiritualism, man vs woman, and Ingmar Bergman vs his previous films with a couple of pot shots at the existence of god that are frequently found in a Bergman film.

A near mute Max Von Sydow is the leader of a performance troupe touring Sweden in what appears to be the mid 1800's.  The troupe ends up a village where they are detained and questioned by the authorities particularity a doctor named Vergerus played by another Bergman regular Gunnar Björnstrand.

 

This films entertains because Bergman is such a good filmmaker.  He makes the encounters between the performers and the authorities interesting and at times thought provoking.  Bergman is also good at throwing in a little romance and sex courtesy of yet another one of his regular performers, Bibi Andersson who is always a very welcome addition in a Bergman film.

 

I don't think I would count The Magician as one of Bergman's greatest films like Wild Strawberries, Smiles of a Summer Night or The Seventh Seal, but it is a very good film. 

Written by Ingmar Bergman, the running time is 107 minutes.

1958 - THE LAW AND JAKE WADE, disappointing but okay western

Considering the talent in front and behind the camera, this should have been a much better western.  Reformed bad guy turned sheriff Robert Taylor rides into another town to free his bank robber buddy Richard Widmark playing another psycho killer.    Taylor has seemed to forget the Widmark is a real bad guy,  Widmark takes Taylor prisoner along with Taylor's girlfriend.  The girlfriend seems a rather improbable plot device to get a woman into what is essentially an all male story.  They all set out for an abandoned ghost town to get the loot from the last robbery they pulled together.  It all ends predictably of course.

What this story has going for it is on location shooting in the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, California This is a favorite place of the director John Sturges.  Sturges has also staged some decent gunfights and encounters with some Native Americans in a ghost town.  Sturges was at his peak as one of the best action directors in Hollywood.

The chief culprit in this film is the writer William Bowers whose best films were spoofs of the western genre in films like Support Your Local Sheriff and The Sheepman, Bowers seems a little out of his element scripting a film that is more a western action drama than a comedy.  Interesting enough Bowers played a Senator in The Godfather Part II.

 

John Sturges is a couple of years away from his masterpieces, The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven, but his talent is very evident even in a rather tired western story like this one.  The film does have nice photography courtesy of old pro Robert Surtees.

The running time is a quick 88 minutes

1958 - THE LONG HOT SUMMER, half baked southern family drama

Take a couple of William Faulkner stories about the old South and rewrite them to focus on everyone's favorite 50's movie couple, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and you end up with this mediocre film.  We're in Mississippi (although shot in Louisiana) where the problems of the rich Varner family seem to be of monumental importance.  Daughter Clara played by Joanne Woodward has been "keeping company" with repressed homosexual  Alan Stewart.  Into Clara's life comes virile Ben Quick who walks around with his shirt off a whole lot.

The head of the Varner family is played by Orson Welles giving one of his over the top performances in someone else's film.  Angela Lansbury is his long time mistress who wants to get married.  Tony Franciosa is his wimpy son who is married to "hot to trot" Lee Remick.  In this cast there is not a southerner in the bunch.  The main plot seems to be will independent and spirited southern belle Clara see the light and end up with Ben Quick, a tough guy on the outside but in reality a very sensitive soul or will she continue to purse the repressed gay guy.  I wonder how it will all come out?

 

This film does have widescreen on location photography to recommend it.  Orson Welles is really the whole show with his glorious hammy performance  and all these young method actors are at the beginnings of their career.  The director Martin Ritt was a New York guy who had trained at the Actors Studio with all of these performers so he knew how to work with them.  Welles was his usual bad boy self on the film but apparently Ritt was able to tame him.

 

There is really nothing all that remarkable about this film.  If anything it’s full of lots of good Hollywood liberals who probably didn’t have a clue about southern culture.  The writers Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. pasted together a screenplay which was really just a watered down version of Tennessee Williams's Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.  Newman and Woodward were good east coast Democrats and director Martin Ritt was also a left winger. Probably the farthest south any of these Hollywood guys ever got was Mailibu California.

The running time is 115 minutes.

1958 -THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN, is a failed attempt to say something about elephants.

It's hard to bring any enthusiasm to writing about a film that is a boring failure.  A bestselling novel by the author Roman Gary is turned into a mess of a film by the director John Huston.  If you are going to make a movie about saving African elephants from hunters,  Probably hiring  Huston who among other things was a big game hunter may not have been a great approach

This was filmed as an independent production from Darryl F. Zanuck.  Zanuck had stepped down from running 20th Century Fox and now acting as his own producer hired Huston to direct it.  But it appears Huston didn't bring a lot of interest or enthusiasm to the film. The story moves along from one boring scene to the next.  The novel of The Roots of Heaven was a metaphor for saving humanity but the end result of this film seemed more like a poor man's 1940's Tarzan movie with Tarzan leading an elephant charge against some evil African bad guys for some reason.

Apparently the film was the typical on location troubled production.  The temperatures during the days were over 100 degrees and the nights weren't much better.  The acting is not great nor is it terrible it just has that "phoned in" or is it "paycheck" approach to performing, nobody really seems to care. The water and the heat made a lot of the cast and crew ill with the exception of the big drinkers, Trevor Howard, Erroll Flynn and Huston who fortified themselves with booze

  

The film shot for five months on location then everyone stumbled back to Paris to finish the film so Zanuck could be with his current mistress Juliet Greco who appeared in the film where she mostly struggled to act.  Orson Welles is prominently featured in the credits but he was probably in the film a whole fifteen minutes.  In interviews John Huston had spoken about how he failed to make a decent film and would have liked to remake it.  But this was a case of just being a little to late for that.

The screenplay was by Roman Gary and Patrick Leigh Fermor, the running time is 126 minutes.

1958 - RUN SILENT RUN DEEP, a very good war film

A very good war film, Burt Lancaster's production company purchased the rights to the book and hired Robert Wise to direct.  Wise was known as the consummate professional and a superb craftsman.  Lancaster was known for eating film directors for lunch.  This didn't appear to keep the production team from turning out an exceptional war movie about the submarine service.

Clark Gable is the new captain of the submarine USS Nerka.  Lancaster is the executive officer, Gable had previously had his submarine torpedoed in the Bungo Straits where ever that is.  As the captain of the Nerka, Gable wants to avenge the deaths of the men killed on his previous mission. 

Against orders Gable sails the Nerka back into the Bungo Straits.  The dramatic conflict involves Gable out for revenge and Lancaster who wrestles with trying to assume command of the Nerka in order to stop Gable from sinking yet another submarine through his supposed reckless behavior.

Run Silent Run Deep was filmed on sets that approximated the actual interior of a World War 2 submarine, the model and special effects work was at a very high caliber for a 1950's film.  Gable and Lancaster were both commanding personalities.  The film had a very good screenplay by John Gay.  Along with Robert Wise's excellent direction Run Silent Run Deep couldn't miss.  

Run Silent Run Deep is an impressive example of a Hollywood film production delivering the goods for a change. The running time is a tight 93 minutes.

1958 - VARAN THE UNBELIEVABLE, Ishiro Honda's remake of Godzilla

Even for Toho studios which was never above reusing footage from their previous kaju films this is a mighty lazy film.  Varan The Unbelievable is essentially a quick remake of Godzilla with some King Kong story line stuff thrown in. 

It's the same old thing,  some scientists on a remote island stumble onto a monster living in a lake.  The monster gets pissed off and starts stomping on people and wrecking stuff.  The military is called in but can't seem to find a weapon that will kill it until the last moment when a scientist develops some kind of explosive or something that will finally finish off the monster.

Even for Ishiro Honda who was always the good company man this film is mighty derivative.  Apparently it started out as a TV show and was expanded into a feature film.  Whatever the background story, the whole who thing just seems mighty tired story wise and special effects wise.

The film was written by Shinichi Sekizawa who is the author on many of these kaju films notably, Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, Mothra and the insane fantasy Latitude Zero among many others.

The running time is 101 minutes.

1958 - GIGI, an MGM musical about prostitution.

 Coming towards the end of MGM's dominance in musicals, Gigi was a very classy film with a lot of big time talent involved.  For starters lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Fritz Loewe were very hot with their hit musical based on Shaw's Pygmalion, My Fair Lady which was playing on Broadway at the time.   In addition, MGM producer Arthur Freed assembled a group of very talented people in front and behind the camera.

Cecil Beaton designed the costumes and sets and never meet a weird headpiece for a woman he didn't like.  Andre Previn adapted and conducted the music and most importantly Vincente Minnelli was assigned to direct the film.  In front of the camera were Leslie Caron, Louis Jordan, Maurice Chevalier and Hermoine Gingold.  Gingold and Chevalier were expert scene stealers and Caron and Jordan did make an attractive couple.

One of the oddest things about Gigi was the complete lack of dancing in this film, very unusual for a musical.  The other odd thing about this film was the story.  This is essentially a film about a young girl being trained to be a prostitute by her grandmother.  The girl manages to turn the tables on everyone and holds out for marriage.  

 

This film looks very good it was photographed by Joseph Ruttenberg in that MGM style where everything is very pretty.  Minnelli directed with his usual fussy precision spending as much time on the set design as he did on the actors.

 

For all that, the film does work and is very entertaining.  This is truly towards the end of the MGM musical run.  Freed went on to produce Bells Are Ringing which was his final musical film.

The film was written by Alan Jay Lerner, the running time is 115 minutes.

1958 - THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, a film about a big fish.

Ernest Hemingway's popular novella which probably helped him win the Nobel Prize in literature was purchased by Warner Brothers studio.  Classy film director Fred Zinnemann was hired to turn it into a prestige film.  A very miscast Spencer Tracy played the "old man."  Then everything went wrong.  Hemingway was hired to catch a marlin and that never happened.  The sea wasn't very hospitable to filming in Havana and decision was made to film in a tank with a plastic fish on a sound stage.  A frustrated Zinnemann quit the production.

 

John Sturges was hired to complete the film, and it's probably a miracle that he actually finished it. How's the end product?  Well considered all the problems and compromises made, not that bad.

The color photography is at times stunning, the score by Dimitri Tiomkin is good.  Spencer Tracy's narration isn't bad.  The film got decent reviews but the public didn't show up.  So much for art pictures I guess.

Peter Viertel wrote the screenplay.  The film runs 85 minutes.

1958 - JAZZ ON A SUMMER'S DAY, a documentary on the Newport Jazz Festival

The photographer Bert Stern filmed this concert during the Newport America's Cup yacht races. But probably the real star of the production was the editor Aram  Avakian who not only did an impressive job assembling it but had to sync up the sound that was recorded separately.

It's a good film but apparently Bert Stern the director didn't know a whole lot about jazz so he let the producer George Avakian select the acts that were filmed.  This led to some strange omissions.

Performers like Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and Ray Charles were left out.  Instead we get a whole lot of Louis Armstrong and I mean a lot, being interviewed and playing what else, The Saints Go Marching In.

 

 

Still an impressive achievement even with the exclusion of some of the best jazz musicians who were performing at the festival.

 

Written by  Albert D'Annibale and Arnold Perl, the running time is 85 minutes.

1958 - SOME CAME RUNNING, another 1950's small town melodrama

There were several  challenges for Vincente Minnelli. He had to take a 1000 page novel and condense it into a coherent narrative and put up with hot tempered Frank Sinatra a performer only interested in shooting 1 or 2 takes in his scenes.  That Minnelli could pull this off is somewhat of a tribute to his skill as a storyteller.

Some Came Running is one of those stories that wants to eviscerate the sleazy underside of small town American life.  Sinatra is a supposedly sensitive author returning home after his service in the army.  He hooks up with cardsharp Dean Martin playing a character called "Bama" who holds women in such low regard he calls them pigs to their faces.  Shirley MacLaine is the trampy women who has a big crush on Sinatra and Martha Hyer is the frigid prude who is enamored of Sinatra's writing talent but doesn't want to sleep with him.  

 

 

Stir this mess of characters up and you've got one fairly stylish Peyton Place of a film.  Minnelli was a director who primarily made his reputation as a director of musicals, but he was pretty good at filming comedies and dramas.  The film is famous for it's crazed carnival scene towards the end of the film where Minnelli and his cameraman William Daniels pull out all the stops.

 

 

 

The screenplay was by John Patrick and Arthur Sheekman.  It runs a rather longish 136 minutes.  This film is for lovers of exaggerated melodrama.