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: 2.5★
There are certain films that loom large in the collective memory simply by virtue of existing at the right moment in history, and Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959) is a fairly textbook example. Based on the centuries-old fairy tale made famous by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm,
Rating: 3.0★
By 1950, Walt Disney Productions was in a complicated position. The studio had spent much of the 1940s producing package films, anthology features stitched together from shorter segments, largely as a financial necessity born out of the Second World War disrupting overseas markets. Features like Dumbo had shown the studio
Rating: 3.0★
By the early 1950s, Hollywood was, in most respects, still a man's world behind the camera. The major studios employed armies of contract directors, and women were conspicuously absent from that roster. Ida Lupino was the exception. Already a well-established actress by that point, she had turned
Rating: 2.5★
Robert Bresson occupies a singular position in the French cinema canon, a director so committed to his own aesthetic principles that his films feel less like conventional narratives and more like philosophical arguments made in moving images. By the time Pickpocket arrived in 1959, Bresson had already established himself as
1950s
Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) arrived at a strange crossroads in American cinema: too modest to be a prestige picture, too unsettling to be a forgettable B-movie. Adapted from Jack Finney’s serialised novel The Body Snatchers and shot at Allied Artists on a budget
1950s
Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) is the studio’s middle-period work par excellence: technically polished, commercially tested, narratively cautious, and just slightly off. Made between two of Disney’s commercial successes (Cinderella in 1950, which had rescued the studio from one of its periodic financial near-misses, and
Genre Documentary
Letter from Siberia (1957)
Genre Horror
★★★ — The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
Genre Science Fiction
★★ — Invaders from Mars (1953)
Genre Drama
★★★ — Stolen Face (1952)
Genre Crime
★★½ — Cairo Station (1958)
Genre Drama
★★★ — The Ghost of Yotsuya (1959)
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