Films released between 1950 and 1959, when television arrived and the studios answered with everything the small screen could not do: widescreen, colour, spectacle and scale. The decade also produced the atomic-anxiety science fiction, the last great westerns of the classical mode, and the beginning of the teenager as a subject. The reviews here look at what the competition with television actually changed on screen.
1950sGiant (1956) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Three hours and twenty-one minutes of Texas across roughly twenty-five years, James Dean's last completed performance, and a film that starts as a marriage drama and ends as an…
1950sThe Greatest Show on Earth (1952) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. DeMille filmed the Ringling Brothers circus for two and a half hours, wrapped it in a love triangle nobody remembers, and it beat High Noon.…
1950sAround the World in 80 Days (1956) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Mike Todd shot the Verne novel in six countries with about forty recognizable faces in one-scene appearances, invented the modern cameo, and beat Giant…
1950sRio Bravo (1959) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Howard Hawks made it as a direct rebuttal to High Noon, which he considered un-American because the marshal asks townspeople for help. It is a hangout film with…
1950s3:10 to Yuma (1957) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A rancher takes two hundred dollars to hold an outlaw in a hotel room until a train arrives, and almost the entire film is the two of…
1950sThe Motorcycle Diaries (2004) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two medical students ride a failing motorcycle across South America in 1952 and one of them becomes Che Guevara afterward. The film's discipline is that it stops…
1950sIndiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A hundred and eighty-five million dollars, seven hundred and ninety million back, and it is still the film that damaged the…
1950sCarol (2015) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two women fall in love in 1952 and the film says almost none of it out loud. Todd Haynes shot it on Super 16 for under twelve million dollars…
1950sGrease (1978) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A six million dollar musical that took close to four hundred million and never stopped playing. The songs are permanent, the leads are twenty-nine and twenty-three playing seventeen, and…
1950sGentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two women on a transatlantic crossing, one openly interested in money and honest about it. Sharper about the economics of marriage than any film of 1953 had…
1950sHammer's 1958 Dracula made the vampire physical, sexual, and bloody. Christopher Lee plays Dracula, and the performance redefined the role.
1950sWhite Christmas is Michael Curtiz's 1954 American musical depicting two World War II Army veterans turned singing act, Bob Wallace and Phil Davis, who follow a sister act to a Vermont inn and discover the inn belongs to their former…
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