Steve’s Selections #5 – Elevator to the Gallows (1958)

I find myself in new territory here.  My site has been geared towards writing full reviews of films I would recommend to others.  I knew that one of the things that might happen when Steve and I recommended 12 films to the other to review during the coming year is I might encounter one I would not recommend.  I promised myself that if it happened I would still write a full review to show respect for Steve and for the process.  The problem I am now faced with is how do I write a review of a movie that I felt was just okay?  Do I still write it like any other?  Do I focus on the flaws that kept me from liking it more?  Do I recommend it anyway, since it's close (only a half star away)?  Do I write an analysis of my own reaction and what it might mean about me?  (Or is that too much “navel gazing”?)

Movie – Sayonara (1957)

Sayonara is the oldest mainstream film I can think of that is openly supportive of interracial marriage.  It garnered a lot of notice from having big star Marlon Brando as its lead and from the 10 Academy Award nominations and 4 wins it received, including Best Supporting Actor for Red Buttons and Best Supporting Actress for Miyoshi Umeki.  The latter is the first Asian performer to ever win an Oscar (not counting 1956 winner Yul Brynner who was born in the Asian part of Russia and was ¼ Russian Mongol).  This film, along with a few with similar themes that followed, is credited with loosening up Americans’ attitudes towards the concept of marrying outside your own race.

Movie – Oklahoma! (1955)

Okay, all together now: “Ooooooooooooooooh-klahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain!”  There, now that that’s out of our systems let’s talk about this film.

Oklahoma! is among the biggest and most popular of musicals.  When it opened on Broadway in 1943 it ended up setting what was then a record with more than 2,200 performances.  Both the Broadway cast album and this film’s soundtrack album were immensely popular, spending years on the Best Seller charts.  There are a number of songs that even today many people will recognize.  But this isn’t your standard nice, innocent, happy musical.  If you stop to actually listen to the lyrics you find that they go to some dark places.  And some of the more suggestive lyrics from the stage musical had to be censored to make it past the Production Code requirements for films.

Movie – Human Desire (1954)

In 1953 Fritz Lang directed Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame in the noir film The Big Heat.  The very next year the three joined forces again for Human Desire.  And just like with The Big Heat, for some reason Grahame was not the first choice for the female lead.  Lang wanted Rita Hayworth, but couldn’t get her. 

The film is officially based on the 1890 Emile Zola novel La Bete Humaine, but beyond the big plot points it’s not a very faithful adaptation.  Jean Renoir’s 1938 movie La Bete Humaine starring Jean Gabin and Simone Simon stuck more closely to the way the characters were originally presented, including making the train itself almost a character in the film. 

Movie – The Big Heat (1953)

In my parent post for this set of Gloria Grahame movies I mentioned that she had been twice nominated for Oscars, winning once, but that I felt she should have been nominated two other times.  One of those I discussed in my review of In a Lonely Place.  The Big Heat is the other.  I was surprised when I found out she wasn’t the first choice to play the part she did.  The producers wanted Marilyn Monroe, but she would have cost too much, so they “settled” for Grahame.  I can’t imagine Monroe in Grahame’s role in this film, especially with the grit that is needed for it.  The Big Heat is not a nice film.  The bad guys are really bad, and even the good guy, driven by revenge, does things that are not much better.  The title of the film is very fitting.

Movie – The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)

It didn’t take me much time into watching The Bad and the Beautiful to figure out why this film got greenlit.  It’s a tale of a once successful movie producer who was a towering presence both in the industry and in the lives of the four people who open this film.  Hollywood loves stories about itself and they’ve been making them ever since there was a Hollywood.  And I’m sure contemporary audiences had fun trying to figure out which real Hollywood figures were being fictionalized in the movie.  This film holds the record for winning the most Oscars – five – without being nominated for Best Picture.  Among those is Gloria Grahame’s win for Best Supporting Actress.

Movie – The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)

If you ask people to list the ten least deserving Best Picture winners chances are pretty good that The Greatest Show on Earth will be among them.  Sometimes a film suffers in comparison to another nominee from the same year (i.e. Ordinary People vs. Raging Bull in 1981), or sometimes the film just isn’t Best Picture caliber (i.e. A Beautiful Mind in 2002).  In the case of The Greatest Show on Earth, both of these apply.  Two of the other films nominated that year were High Noon (1952) and The Quiet Man (1952).  Not even receiving a Best Picture nomination was Singin’ in the Rain (1952).  And the overall tone of The Greatest Show on Earth doesn’t scream “Best Picture!”  The mistake that some people make, though, is equating “shouldn’t have won” with “bad movie.”  In the other examples I gave both Ordinary People and A Beautiful Mind are films worth seeing; they just weren’t “Best Pictures”.  The Greatest Show on Earth is the same.  It’s “big with a capital B” entertainment from the undisputed king of big entertainment in the early days of Hollywood: Cecil B. DeMille.

Movie – In a Lonely Place (1950)

Of all the films on the 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list In a Lonely Place was one of the most pleasant surprises.  Even though it starred Humphrey Bogart during his biggest days of fame I literally had never even heard of it before.  I sat down to watch the film knowing nothing about it and not expecting much, and when it was through I felt that this was the second best performance of Bogart’s career. (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre being the best.)  It also cemented in my mind the leading lady status of Gloria Grahame, who co-stars with Bogie.  Each of them reaches beyond their expected screen personas – he usually played the gruff but good man and she usually played the sexy temptress.  And in an era of filmmaking where only one of two endings was possible for a movie like this I was very pleasantly surprised to see this film take a third path.

Movie – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is based on the Pulitzer Prize winning Tennessee Williams play of the same name.  It had first appeared as a Broadway play directed by Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront) and starring Ben Gazzara as Brick and Barbara Bel Geddes as Maggie the Cat.  When it came time to make the film, Kazan passed on it despite already having done two other Williams adaptations – A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Baby Doll (1956).  Instead, Richard Brooks adapted and directed it.  The two main roles were cast with Paul Newman as Brick and Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the Cat.  The result was six Oscar nominations, including the “big five” of Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay.  It did not win a single Academy Award, though.  It was beaten out by Gigi in multiple categories, Newman lost to David Niven in Separate Tables, and Taylor lost to Susan Hayward in I Want to Live.  I’ve seen all five Best Picture nominees for that year (Auntie Mame, The Defiant Ones, and Separate Tables were the other three) and I feel that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was definitely the best film of the five.

Movie – Run Silent, Run Deep (1958)

In my prior review of Crimson Tide (1995) – which you can read here – I wrote that it was closer to Run Silent, Run Deep than to other submarine movies it was trying to emulate.  Crimson Tide featured Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington as a Captain and XO of a submarine who clash with each other.  In Run Silent, Run Deep it is Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster – two people who certainly know how to command the screen.  Now imagine having both of them in the same movie, sometimes opposed to each other and you get an idea of why Run Silent, Run Deep is an entertaining movie.

Movie – Operation Petticoat (1959)

When most people hear “submarine movie” they probably think of intense war films, edge of your seat tension, battle scenes, etc.  Not all films in this genre have been ultra-serious, though.  Now and then people have decided to have a little fun with the situations that could arise on a submarine.  For instance, what would happen if some nurses had to seek safe passage onboard a submarine during WWII?  Imagine the funny issues that could arise.  Operation Petticoat tackled that story and as a reward it received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.  It was also the first big film of director Blake Edwards' career.

Movie – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)

In the early 1950s when Walt Disney (the man, not the studio) saw some footage his photographers had shot of underwater scenes in anamorphic widescreen he decided to make an entire live action film to take advantage of the stunning presentation – a first for his studio.  And what better story to film for this than the classic 1870 Jules Verne novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?  Two prior versions had been filmed, but both were in the early 1900s so they were limited in what they could show.  Disney’s version would be the first to take advantage of what studios could do with modern technology.  This was only Disney’s fifth live action movie ever yet it is still remembered today as one of the best produced by the studio.

Movie – The Searchers (1956)

I’ve never really been one to declare “Best Movie Ever” kinds of films, whether overall or in genres.  This is partially from having seen so many good movies I really don’t want to have to pick a best among them, and partially because my opinion would vary depending on when I was asked to name one.  The Searchers is certainly a movie that many people have named the best film ever made in the Western genre.  I will say that there have certainly been times where I would agree with that.  What I can state is that I consider this film to contain the best film performance I’ve seen from its star John Wayne.

Movie – A Place in the Sun (1951)

One thing I should mention right off the bat is that although this movie stars a young Elizabeth Taylor, known at the time for her Lassie, Father of the Bride, and National Velvet films, A Place in the Sun is not a happy, lightweight movie.  This was Taylor’s first foray into making serious films and it was also her first real adult role.  Lead actor Montgomery Clift, on the other hand, was already an Oscar-nominated performer.  Clift would receive another nomination for this role – one of nine for the film.  It would win six Oscars in all, including Best Director and Best Screenplay (co-adapted from Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy by Maine’s Harry Brown – future screenwriter of Oceans Eleven).  Taylor did not receive a nomination, but co-star Shelley Winters did for playing a woman caught up in a bad situation with Clift’s character.

Movie – North by Northwest (1959)

North by Northwest is one of the best, if not the best, movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock.  Even people who know little about his films can usually name this as being one of his.  They also usually can mention the crop duster scene and/or the Mount Rushmore scene, even if they haven’t seen the film.  For those who have watched it, North by Northwest triggers something in almost all of us because we can shudder about how we would feel if we were trapped in a situation where no one would believe us.  It also lets us live out a fantasy of imagining that were we caught in something like this, we would be resourceful enough to respond to it.

Movie – Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Singin’ in the Rain is the quintessential Hollywood musical and I am far from the first person to consider it the best traditional musical ever made.  It may surprise you to learn that it started out as nothing more than a recycling of songs and props that had been around for years.  Even the iconic title song had been used in several movies prior to this one.  Screenwriters Adolph Green and Betty Comden had the task of taking various songs and filling in a story around them.  The result was a look back the beginnings of the sound era in Hollywood – something recently revisited in The Artist.

Movie – High Noon (1952)

The movie High Noon may be best known to general audiences today from dialogue in Die Hard where Hans and McClane are verbally sparring with each other over westerns.  (“That was Gary Cooper asshole.”)  If this is the case, then that is too bad.  High Noon is a very good movie that is a true classic in the genre and it deserves to be seen.  I would place it among the Top 5 westerns ever made.  Some in the media tried to derisively say George W. Bush saw himself as the Sheriff Will Kane character from this film, but ironically it was his predecessor, Bill Clinton, who named this his favorite movie of all time.  This may be fitting since politics played a big part in the creation of this film.  I will explain.

Movie – Throne of Blood (1957)

The movie Throne of Blood is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth set in feudal Japan.  Its original title is Kumonosu-jo, which literally means "Castle of the Spider’s Web".  That title is just as fitting, but I suppose "Throne of Blood" catches more people's attention.  In addition to adapting Macbeth to this place and time, director Akira Kurosawa also combined it with elements of the Japanese Noh Theater, which would have been prevalent at the time the film is set.  The result is the best movie adaptation of Macbeth ever filmed, and one of the greatest movie adaptations of any of Shakespeare’s works.

Movie – Stalag 17 (1953)

Stalag 17 is a comedy-drama directed by Billy Wilder and starring William Holden.  This was a re-teaming of the two men.  Their prior movie together was Sunset Boulevard (1950.)  Billy Wilder was a great director – one of the best ever.  I discussed his career in my review of Sunset Boulevard.  You can read it here.  Stalag 17 had more humor than Sunset Boulevard, but it also had a more serious subject: a World War II prisoner of war camp.  This isn’t a topic that would seem to lend itself to humor, but Wilder managed it.  He received an Oscar nomination for his direction of this movie.

Movie – 14 Hours (1951)

14 Hours is based on a real event that occurred in New York City in the late 1930s.  A man climbed out on a ledge and spent the next fourteen hours standing there while a police officer talked with him, trying to get him to come back into the room.  A huge crowd gathered below to see what was going to happen.  Although it has some fine performances and cinematography in it, this movie is probably best remembered for something else: it features the screen debut of the 21 year old Grace Kelly.