Editor’s Note: Freeline Media movie critic Mike Fried is ready to take you on a nostalgic journey, back to the 1950s, with some of his favorite flicks from that era. Read on!
By MIKE FRIED
Mike at the Movies: Back to the 50s
It’s such a glorious decade. Between cheesy entertainment of the highest order to bonafide classics, the 1950s was the last real decade of “‘”Old Hollywood,” but also a decade when upstarts like American International Pictures attempted to set their marks.
Let’s take a look at some of the more famous and not-so-famous wonders of the decade. Som b e you might have seen, some you probably haven’t, and maybe there are one or two that you haven’t even heard of!
The Ten Commandments (1956)
**** 1/2
Cornpone of the highest order — but so well done and so well acted, it’s an extraordinary watch.
Almost every single performance is on the mark, especially Charlton Heston as Moses, Yul Brynner as Rameses and Anne Baxter as Nefertiri (because they couldn’t use the name Nefertiti because people would laugh).
The roadshow version is 3 hours 51 minutes long with the overture and exit music, and it seems half the long.
The prodding matte design is fantastic for a film made almost 70 years ago, and the 4K release doesn’t show any artifacts or tricks.
Edward G. Robinson does not say “So where’s your god now, Moses, yeah!” — that was Billy Crystal’s joke — but you can hear him saying it.
I consider Bible stories to be just that — stories — and yet this is carried out with such an earnest, respectful attitude that it cannot be dismissed.
The banger moment is the parting of the Red Sea and it just works so well; in the 4K version, it does not look fake.
I watch this every Easter/Passover time along with Ben-Hur and it is rewarding.
Battle in Outer Space (1959)
*** 1/2
I like my sci-fi silly. There’s a terrific scene where the astronauts take off their seatbelts after launch and one guy is thoroughly surprised to be weightless. They pull him down, explaining there is no gravity; but then they walk normally after that. That gets me every time.
And there’s also the matter of the Oscar Meyer Lunar Rover. I kid you not.
It’s a laughable but oddly compelling sci-fi film about aliens attacking earth, made all the more enjoyable because it was made in 1958 and released in 1959. As off the wall as the plot is, the actors play it straight, not tongue-in-cheek as they may have been tempted to. It’s the only movie besides Armageddon where there was a dual rocket ship takeoff and this was 40 years before that.
And it really doesn’t matter that the lunar rovers look like the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile. The special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya are really first rate, especially the lunar landscapes and the alien mothership located on it. Akira Ikufube’s rousing score (which does utilize the terrific Japanese Military March music from Gojira) makes the movie even more exciting. Even the slow motion running to simulate the moon’s 1/6th gravity works well.
And a movie called “Battle in Outer Space” would be nothing without a rousing battle in outer space along with the destruction of New York City and the Golden Gate Bridge as well as Tokyo.
The dialogue is laughable (“space torpedos” comes to mind) but this is a fun film.
WATCH IT (preferably the Japanese version)!
Tarantula (1955)
*** 1/2
A man staggers in the desert. He is seriously deformed. He collapses and dies. He has the acromegaly bug; the town doctor says he saw the man not too long ago and he looked fine, and acromegaly takes a while to develop. A scientist named Deemer says these things can happen but, in secret, he is doing rapid growth experiments. When another of his human experiments kills him, he breaks up the lab and a very large tarantula escapes. And it keeps getting bigger.
When it comes to 1950s B-movie horror sci-fi, Jack Arnold owned the decade. Whether it was this film, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Monster on the Campus, This Island Earth, Revenge of the Creature or It Came from Outer Space, Jack Arnold took ordinary scripts (“Science is science, but a girl MUST get her hair done”) and elevated them to an art form. His films marked his own vision of science fiction, and were marked by stark cinematography and great characterizations. With Arnold size mattered — in this film he went big, while in Shrinking Man he went small.
This film is populated with terrific special effects, especially those that showed animals and the titular creature in enormous size. And Arnold made this movie because, as he put it, “People are afraid of spiders.”
It is one of the best giant insect films, up there with Gordon Douglas’ Them!
The acting is good but nothing to write home about, although Leo G. Carroll’s well intentioned scientist sets the tone for the film by describing what he is working on and why (food shortages in the near future).
And the movie under Arnold’s direction moves to a rapid and intense conclusion as the tarantula grows to over a hundred feet long and terrorizes the town. Miniatures are used to great effect but it’s a real tarantula that’s being used. When it is on the move, whiz is good because the ants in Them! didn’t seem all that convincing when they moved.
And if you can see who the Air Force pilot is at the end of the movie, you will have made my day.
WATCH IT!
High Noon (1952)
*****
A western that was unlike any other western up to that time. Instead of good and bad, audiences in 1952 were not ready for a western with a deep moral ambiguity.
Marshall Will Kane marries his sweetheart Amy Fowler and as they prepare to depart, they hear that Killer Diller Miller is going to be on the noon train, coming back to Hadleyville to seek revenge on Kane, the man who sent him away. As Kane seeks to rally a posse, he finds that his friends are few and far between. He has been too good a lawman and many of the folks in town are glad to see him go.
What’s most impactful in this film is it’s one of the first times (not the first — see Hitchcock’s Rope) when a movie is laid out in real time, which gets presented by the ticking of a clock or by the drumbeat of Dmitri Tiomkin’s stunning Oscar-winning score.
It’s hard to believe that Gary Cooper was not the first choice for the role of Will Kane, as iconically associated he’s become with this role. It was offered to his friend John Wayne, who turned it down because he believed the script was critical of blacklisting (it was) and Gregory Peck, who turned it down because he felt it was too close to his role in The Gunfighter just two years earlier. Peck considered it the biggest regret of his career. Brando, Clift and Heston also turned down the job.
And we are all the better for it.
Cooper’s Will Kane was uniquely suited for his taciturn personality. He’s the reasonable one in town. Everyone else is a coward. And the funny thing was that Cooper’s box office clout had dropped by 1951, which is why he was not initially considered for the role. But this role put him right back on top, both at the box office and in stature with his friends. He won the Academy Award — and deservedly so — and it was accepted by his friend John Wayne who suggested that he needed to look for a new agent in the acceptance speech.
The supporting cast is equally fantastic. Grace Kelly is really good as Amy, the new wife who feels betrayed. Lloyd Bridges is fantastic as Harvey, Will’s former deputy who shuns Will because he didn’t endorse him to take over the job. Lon Chaney Jr is the retired sheriff who has turned into a coward. Thomas Mitchell is terrific as the mayor who wishes that Will hadn’t stayed in town.
But the real standout in the supporting cast is Katy Jurado, who shines as Helen Ramirez. She was formerly Miller’s lover, then Kane’s and then Harvey’s. She plays a strong willed independent businesswoman, a role quite different from the ones that her peers were being offered at the time; she was so good that she won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.
Lee Van Cleef has a small role as one of the Miller Gang as does Sheb Wooley (the principal from Hoosiers and the inventor of the Wilhelm Scream) and Robert J. Wilke (General Barnicke from Stripes).
Carl Foreman, the soon-to-be blacklisted writer who conceived the story, found that it had similarities to John W. Cunningham’s short story “The Tin Star,” so he bought the movie rights to the story and adapted it, clearly making it an allegory about the HUAC hearings.
Bill Clinton showed this movie a record 17 times in the White House and he commented, “It’s no accident that politicians see themselves as Gary Cooper in High Noon.” Not just politicians, but anyone who’s forced to go against the popular will. Any time you’re alone and you feel you’re not getting the support you need, Cooper’s Will Kane becomes the perfect metaphor.”
At the time though many echoed John Wayne’s sentiment and felt that the final scene of the film made the movie “un-American.”
The movie won four Academy Awards for Cooper, best score, for best song and for best film editing — which is no better typified than in the scene where Kane writes out his Last Will and Testament with just two minutes until the train arrives. Tiomkin’s syncopated score echoes the besting of the clock and crescendos and on each downbeat another person in town is shown and the sequence ends with the whistle of Miller’s train. It is such a powerful scene, so well directed, that in some aspects the gunfight at the end of the film, as good as it is, is a bit of a letdown. It’s not really but it feels that way.
How the fuck this movie didn’t win Best Picture and was beaten by The Greatest Show on Earth is one of life’s great mysteries and one of the Academy’s big fuck-ups.
If you haven’t seen it, you must.
WATCH IT!
The Thing from Another World (1951)
*****
The one and the original — and the only, until 1982.
Simplistic telling of John Campbell’s short story “Who Goes There?” Involves some Air Force guys going to the North Pole and seeing a large object in the snow. When they investigate, they find something buried under the snow. They’re not sure what it is but they think it might be a flying saucer (hey, it’s the 1950s). They use thermite to blow a hole in the craft and take out what looks like a large man buried in a cake of ice. And, of course, instead of leaving well enough alone, they take it out to the polar expedition base and observe it. But one chucklehead using an electric blanket causes the block of ice to melt, allowing the “carrot top” alien to escape.
The biggest difference between this movie and John Carpenter’s 1982 cult classic is that this movie started out as a literal adaptation of Campbell’s story, but budget considerations prevented the shapeshifter part of the story — which Carpenter embraced — so the movie was fashioned as a pure alien film.
And, in my book, BOTH MOVIES ARE 5/5 FILMS. I prefer this one to 1982 because I grew up watching it and am a huge fan of 1950s B-movie science fiction. Also, no one wears a Dudley Do-Right hat like the one MacReady wears. The film is now considered to be one of the best films of 1951 and one of the great science fiction films of the 1950s.
This movie eschews paranoia and mistrust for banding together to defeat this extraordinarily strong and murderous alien. And it’s done so well. And 30 years before questions arose as to who directed Poltergeist, this film raised those issues as many believed that Howard Hawks directed the film rather than newcomer Christian Nyby. But that’s neither here nor there.
Whoever directed it, it’s an extraordinary film. One of the first things that gets one’s attention is the scene in which every member of the team inspecting a crash site circles around to find the edges of the aircraft that crashed before they realize that they are in a perfect circle and, holy cat, it’s a flying saucer!!!! The incredible thing about this scene was that it looks absolutely freezing; however, it was actually filmed at the RKO Ranch in the San Fernando Valley in one hundred degree weather.
For the rest of the movie, it was partly filmed in Glacier National Park, and at a Los Angeles ice storage plant, which was used to show the actors’ breath condensing in the cold in interior shots; that was one special effect that Hollywood never successfully accomplished. The film was also made without US Air Force support because this film went against policy that UFO’s did not exist.
One of the most incredible scenes – and one of my favorite movie scenes – is the attempt to burn the creature by throwing gasoline on it. This scene is not only a dynamic and exciting scene but becomes even more incredible when one discovers that there was no lighting in this scene aside from the flames. It’s an exercise in outstanding black and white cinematography.
Another thing that helps the story along is the innate tension between the military men and the scientists who have competing goals. The scientists want to study the alien, to learn from it – only science can conquer it. But the military personnel believe that it must be eradicated. And this is so significant in cinema history because it is one of the very first times where this struggle takes place. Just look at Close Encounters and Lacombe’s attempt to convince Major Walsh that the people like Roy Neary have been called to the event falls on deaf ears. So influential was this movie that the original title of Close Encounters was going to track the last line of this movie (see below).
The dialogue is a bit hokey but the cast sells it hook, line and sinker. First and foremost the great Kenneth Tobey stars as Captain Patrick Hendry, in his breakout role, and is the type of role he would make a career out of, especially in the 1950s. Robert Cornthwaite who was only 34 years old, played the elderly Dr. Arthur Carrington who believes that he can communicate and reason with the alien (the source of some of the hokey dialogue). James Arness – yes, Sheriff Matt Dillon – played The Thing and hated it so much he didn’t even go to the premiere. Margaret Sheridan is Nikki, Captain Hendry’s love interest and she’s okay, basically in the movie as Hawks’ protégé.
The best role in the movie, though, is given to Douglas Spencer who, as Ned Scott, plays a reporter who wants to get out the story but which is held up by Air Force regulations. But as a reporter, he is the Vox Populi, the voice of the people, the man asking the questions that his readers want to know and it’s his role that propels the explanatory dialogue along.
But he does much more than that – his final words, chillingly hitting Americans in the forehead just four years after Roswell, are legendary.
“Everyone of you listening to my voice, tell the world, tell this to everybody wherever they are. Watch the skies. Everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies.”
Watch the Skies, indeed.
And WATCH THIS!
Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.
Contact Mike at moviemike3@yahoo.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.
