#11 — Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957) War films have long been a staple of Hollywood, a situation only compounded by the staggering surplus of stories that could be culled from WWII, a global conflict that could be forever … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Eleven
#12 — Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957) Apparently, the official translation of the original Japanese title of Akira Kurosawa’s revisioning of Macbeth is Spider Web Castle. This isn’t purely metaphor, since the game of thrones being played in the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twelve
#13 — Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) Sometimes when a work of art can reasonably be deemed prescient, what’s actually happening is the fiction is tapping into a fundamental truth about human nature, something that can carry forward and be … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirteen
#14 — The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) There’s so much about The Seventh Seal that amazes me, all of it timeless and yet compounded by placing the film in the context of its era. I love the film’s experimentalism, … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Fourteen
#15 — 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957) In the annals of cinema, there are undoubtedly more impressive debut directorial efforts than Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, but there are few that so perfectly captured and forecasted the defining strengths … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Fifteen
#16 — The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959) Steven Spielberg once attributed the initiating spark of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial to none other than François Truffaut, noting that the French filmmaker told him on the set of Close Encounters of the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Sixteen
#17 — The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) Westerns, long a staple of Hollywood filmaking, were absolutely huge in the post-War years. According to Glenn Frankel’s book on the making of The Searchers, by the time John Ford’s iconic film was … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Seventeen
#18 — Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) One of my favorite moviegoing experiences occurred in the fall of 1996, when I saw the restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in Chicago. Handled by the team that previously provided similar touch-ups to Spartacus … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Eighteen
#19 — Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954) Seven Samurai is an unassuming epic. It may seem a strange description for the three hour tale of a band of misfit warriors recruited by a desperate rural town to stand up … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Nineteen
#20 — The African Queen (John Huston, 1951) There are gateway films for everyone, those features that unlock something inside that inspires a previously absent appreciation for, say, foreign cinema or art house fare. I can’t actually pinpoint what opened … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twenty
Coffee for Two 