Favorite Films By Decade: the 1950s

          Long-time arts editor, film critic and historian Bruce Dancis gives us his highly informed takes, decade by decade, on those films that have had the most impact.

      Here is the second in the series.

—The editors

      My assignment: Choose a movie from each decade of my life that has had the most personal impact, starting with the 1940s and ending in the 2020s.

      We began this series with the ‘40s, and continue now with the 1950s. These aren’t necessarily the “best” movies of the decade or the most innovative; they represent the films that resonated most with me, either from my initial viewing when they were released or when I first engaged with them in subsequent years.

      Some rules to keep these lists doable: 1) Only one film each decade by a particular director; 2) only English-language movies, due mainly to gaps in my knowledge about foreign-language films except for Italian neo-realism, French New Wave and the works of Akira Kurosawa, and 3) no TV miniseries.

      I’m sure I’ve missed some great movies that should be on these lists. Yet this still leaves hundreds, if not thousands, of movies to choose from.

      Let the arguments continue.

The 1950s:

“On the Waterfront” (1954)

      I don’t remember exactly when I first saw this gritty, realistic portrayal of work on a Hoboken, NJ, waterfront controlled by organized crime, but I greatly admired the powerful story of a longshoreman (Marlon Brando) standing up to a corrupt crime boss (Lee J. Cobb), as directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg.

      But by the mid-1970s and early ‘80s, as I did my own research on the Hollywood Left and the Blacklist, and began reading works on the subject (including Lillian Hellman’s “Scoundrel Time,” David Talbot and Barbara Zheutlin’s “Creative Differences,” Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund’s “The Inquisition in Hollywood” and Victor Navasky’s “Naming Names”), I realized there was a far deeper and more controversial meaning behind this movie and its own history.

      Originally planned as a collaboration between two prominent artists on the left—playwright Arthur Miller, who wrote a draft screenplay entitled “The Hook,” and director Kazan—the project changed after Miller and Kazan had a falling out over ex-communist Kazan’s appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he testified against other communists and former communists. Kazan later took out a full-page ad in the New York Times denouncing the Communist Party and defending his stance.

      The script was then completed by Schulberg, another one-time communist willing to “name names” in order to save his Hollywood career; co-star Cobb did the same.

      Given this background, “On the Waterfront” can be seen as a defense of testifying against those you once worked with if you now viewed your former comrades/co-workers/partners as evil or complicit with evil.

      But regardless of the movie’s deeper meanings, there’s no denying the power of Kazan’s on-location presentation and Brando’s astounding, Oscar-winning performance as the boxer-turned-longshoreman with a conscience. Co-stars Cobb, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden and Rod Steiger are also terrific.

      It’s an understatement to say that this is a film that raises important political and moral questions.

Close behind:

      “Some Like it Hot” (1959): “Well, nobody’s perfect” may be the famous last line in Billy Wilder’s cross-dressing farce starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe, but this comedy is just about flawless, as it had to be to beat out Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” and “Ace in the Hole.”

      “North By Northwest” (1959): In a decade filled with great Alfred Hitchcock movies (including “Rear Window,” “Strangers on a Train” and “Vertigo”), this tale about an advertising executive (Cary Grant) who is mistaken for a spy is the Master of Suspense’s most witty and exhilarating film from start to finish.

      “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952): Co-directors Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s genial history of Hollywood’s transition from silent movies to talkies in the late 1920s is told with humor, memorable songs and spectacular dancing, starring Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor; the latter shines exceptionally bright in his athletic performance of “Make ‘em Laugh.”

      “5 Fingers” (1952): One of my all-time favorite spy thrillers, this shamefully neglected film from director Joseph L. Mankiewicz is about espionage in neutral Turkey during World War II, with James Mason starring as the suave valet to the British Ambassador in Ankara and Danielle Darrieux as a countess for whom the valet once worked.

      “High Noon” (1952): Soon-to-be-blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman described his western, directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Gary Cooper as a sheriff who can’t find anyone in his town willing to stand with him against some bad guys seeking retribution, as “a parable about Hollywood and McCarthyism”; it’s no wonder that John Wayne once called it “the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”

      But, perhaps you’re wondering, how could he leave out “The African Queen,” “Born Yesterday,” “Paths of Glory,” “Roman Holiday” and “The Searchers”? 

Coming next week: The 1960s

      Bruce Dancis spent 18 years as the Arts & Entertainment Editor of the Sacramento Bee, after previously serving as an editor for the Daily Californian, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, M.I. (Musicians’ Industry) Magazine, Mother Jones and the Oakland Tribune. He also wrote about Film and TV History in a weekly column about DVDs that was syndicated by the McClatchy and Scripps Howard news services.

      Since 2003 he has co-chaired a summer film program at the Three Arrows Cooperative Society in Putnam Valley, NY. He is the author of “Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War” (2014, Cornell University Press) and appears in the documentary film “The Boys Who Said No! Draft Resistance and the Vietnam War” (2020). He lives in Cardiff, CA, and Putnam Valley, NY.