1950s

TCM writes:
Tense and claustrophobic World War II film deals with the efforts of the British armed forces to defeat the intimidating German battleship Tirpitz. After the RAF fails to sink the vessel, a Navy commander (John Mills) must convince his superiors to let him carry out a bold and experimental mission utilizing midget submarines to take the ship out of commission while it’s anchored in a Norwegian fjord. John Gregson and Donald Sinden co-star in the action-packed tale based on true events.Read More »

Also known as At Great Cost, this adaptation of a story by Mikhailo Kotsyubinsky—a Ukrainian writer executed in the Stalinist purges but rehabilitated in 1955—anticipates the wave of Sixties poetic cinema in its focus on star-crossed lovers and its celebration of nature. Set in the 1930s, the film begins as Solomia is forced into an arranged marriage. She escapes with her lover, Ostep, and for a while it looks as if the fugitives will make a clean getaway. Yet eventually they come to the attention of the police, who mistake them for being part of a gang of thieves. One of the major figures of the earlier current of socialist realism, Donskoy, in one of his first post-Stalin era productions, here loosens his style to reveal a delicate romanticism rarely felt in his earlier films.Read More »

“This made-for-television film was based on Olle Hedberg’s script, which Ingmar Bergman had directed for the City Theatre of Hälsingborg as early as in 1945, and as a radio play the following year. Bergman, who called the play ‘an unpleasant piece’, used stage actors from Malmö. The scarce reviews of the film focused on Bergman’s faiblesse for the puppet theatre and the morality play, with the result that the characters functioned as types.”Read More »

In this drama, a Korean war veteran, a victim of brainwashing while he was a POW, finally goes back to his home in Washington, DC, where he resumes his job at a public relations-opinion research firm. He soon discovers that his company is being run by communists after his partner mysteriously died. Now pro-communist propaganda seems to be their primary business. To stop them, the vet begins cooperating in a full-scale Senate investigation.Read More »

Quote:
One of the later examples of American film noir, The Big Heat is also one of the genre’s most underrated films. Director Fritz Lang utilized many of the elements typical to his other films: unseen yet gruesome violence, relentless pacing, and a hardboiled view of justice and revenge. The sad, realist film has an oppressive feeling of malignity. Glenn Ford is a perfect everyman cop, out for revenge against criminals as well as other cops. In this way, The Big Heat marks a significant transition between the crime movies of two different eras. Read More »

Synopsis:
In Song of the Cart-Pullers (Niguruma no uta, 1959) one of his most visually captivating works, Satsuo Yamamoto resurrected, through the struggles of three-generation family in rural Hiroshima Prefacture, an intimate history of Japanese peasant life, from the harsh late Meiji years to the Taisho Rice Riots and the tragedies of the pacific war.Read More »

A retired sportsman, a young law student and small-time crook team up in order to plan the robbery of some jewels in the Andalusian express train

Based on real facts ocurred decades before, it’s an excellent spanish film noir, that mixed classical elements from noir, neorrrealism, existentialism and social literature of this moment. It’s a hard portrait of spanish society under Franco’s military dictatorship.Read More »

Synopsis:
A detachment of Nazi soldiers escorting Greek Jews to the Oswiencim death camp stops at a small Bulgarian town in 1943. Walter, the non-commissioned officer from the Nazi army, a skeptical and disillusioned intellectual, falls most unexpectedly (even for himself) in love with the Jewish girl Rutt. This new feeling gradually makes him stop and reflect on the events taking place around him and comes face to face with the inhuman nature of fascism. He is tortured by anxious thought about the part he is called to play in the eternal struggle between evil and good. Helped by Bulgarian resistance fighters, Walter organizes Rutt’s escape. When the time arrives he realizes that he has been deceived about the exact departure hour of the prisoners.
— Georgi Djulgerov.Read More »

Quote:
This lush, Technicolor tragic romance from Luchino Visconti stars Alida Valli as a nineteenth-century Italian countess who, during the Austrian occupation of her country, puts her marriage and political principles on the line by engaging in a torrid affair with a dashing Austrian lieutenant, played by Farley Granger. Gilded with ornate costumes and sets and a rich classical soundtrack, and featuring fearless performances, this operatic melodrama is an extraordinary evocation of reckless emotions and deranged lust, from one of the cinema’s great sensualists.Read More »