The 1950s was a decade of giants: Kurosawa, Hitchcock, and Ozu were all at or near their peak, producing films like Vertigo and Tokyo Story that cinema is still measuring itself against. Hollywood simultaneously fought television with widescreen spectacle while its finest directors quietly made their most personal work. See what Macca made of it all below.
Rating: 3.0★
There are films that arrive trailing so much reputation that the act of watching them becomes almost secondary to the weight of what you already know. On the Waterfront is one of those films. Released in 1954 by Columbia Pictures and Horizon Pictures, it tells the story of Terry Malloy,
Rating: 3.5★
Paths of Glory arrived in 1957 as something of an anomaly: an American studio picture that had the nerve to portray the French military command of the First World War as venal, cowardly, and casually murderous. Based on Humphrey Cobb's 1935 novel, itself drawn from a real court
Rating: 4.0★
There is a particular kind of American film that Hollywood occasionally stumbled into during the 1950s, almost by accident: modest in budget, intimate in scale, and completely unconcerned with spectacle. Marty (1955) is the purest example of the type. Produced by Hecht-Lancaster Productions, the independent outfit that Harold Hecht
Rating: 3.0★
There is a version of Jazz on a Summer's Day that I could watch on a warm Friday evening with a glass of something cold and feel completely at peace with the world. Bert Stern's 1959 film, a record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, is
Rating: 3.5★
Sometimes you just want a lean, punchy, no-nonsense bit of classic noir. No grand ambitions, no bloated runtime, no second-guessing itself. Just sharp dialogue, hard shadows, and a plot that knows exactly where it's going. Pickup on South Street delivers all of that and then gets
Rating: 3.5★
There is a slightly awkward truth I have had to make my peace with after working my way through a fair chunk of Ingmar Bergman's filmography: I keep coming away respecting these films rather than loving them. I admire them. I think about them afterwards. And then I
Rating: 3.0★
There are a handful of films so woven into the culture that you feel you've already seen them before you actually sit down and watch them. Rebel Without a Cause is one of those films. The red jacket, the flick-knife, James Dean as the patron saint of
Rating: 4.0★
There is a premise at the heart of The Defiant Ones so brilliantly simple it almost feels like a provocation: two escaped convicts, one Black and one white, physically shackled together by a heavy iron chain. Stanley Kramer had the nerve to put that image on screen in 1958, long
Rating: 3.0★
Jean Genet is best known to most people as a novelist and playwright, the author of works like Our Lady of the Flowers and The Maids, a writer whose entire creative life was shaped by time spent on the margins of French society, including real spells in prison. Un Chant
Rating: 2.5★
There's something genuinely lovely about seeing a Golden Age Disney animation back on a screen, even if the film in question isn't quite the studio's finest hour. Sleeping Beauty has bags of charm, no question about it, and as a piece of animation history
Rating: 3.0★
There are some films you feel like you already know before you've even sat down to watch them, and Disney's Cinderella is the textbook example of that. The rags-to-riches fairy tale, the glass slipper, the pumpkin carriage, the wicked stepmother, and that Fairy Godmother
Rating: 3.0★
There's something genuinely rare about The Bigamist. A film from 1953, made under the watchful eye of the Production Code, about a man who marries two women and somehow manages to make you feel sorry for him rather than furious at him. That's either a neat
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