Tag Archives: 1950s

A teen-age rat pack of the Detroit slums, the Purple Gang, headed by psychotic William Joseph “Honeyboy” Willard, teams with adult hijackers during prohibition and in three years controls the city’s underworld. Detective Bill Harley is given a special assignment to break the gang.
Read More »

An industrialist (Joseph Cotton) and a pianist (Joan Fontaine) meet on a trip and fall in love. Through a quirk of fate, they are reported dead in a crash though they weren’t on the plane. This gives them the opportunity to live together free from their previous lives.
Read More »

Ex-sheriff Ben Stride tracks the seven men who held up a Wells Fargo office and killed his wife. Stride is tormented by the fact that his own failure to keep his job was the cause of his wife’s working in the express office and thus he is partly responsible for her death.
Read More »

Told in flashback form, the film traces the rise and fall of a tough, ambitious Hollywood producer Jonathan Shields, as seen through the eyes of various acquaintances, including a writer James Lee Bartlow, a star Georgia Lorrison and a director Fred Amiel. He is a hard-driving, ambitious man who ruthlessly uses everyone – including the writer, star and director – on the way to becoming one of Hollywood’s top movie makers.
Read More »

Lawyer Thomas Farrell has made a career defending crooks in trials. He has never realized that there is a downside to his success, until he meets the dancer Vicki Gayle. She makes him decide to get a better reputation. But mob king Rico Angelo *insists* that he continues his services.
Read More »

Broadway director Bix Bixby, down on his luck (thanks to gambling), is reluctantly persuaded to go to West Point military academy (with Eve, his gorgeous assistant and on-and-off love) to help the students put on a show. Ulterior motive: to recruit student star Tom Fletcher for Harry Eberhart’s new production (Eberhart just happens to be Tom’s uncle). Then, Bixby finds that he himself must live as a cadet. Of course, sundered hearts come into the story also…
Read More »

Downtrodden but creative English school-teacher (Danny Kaye) on archeological trip discovers joys of love and circus life with acrobat (Pier Angeli).
Read More »

A Hollywood film-director has been sent to Hickory Kentucky to find material and acts for a hill-billy picture.He is kidnapped by henchmen of a big-town city slicker who has taken over the operation of the town’s annual jubilee..mostly using bottom-of-the-barrel acts from the swamps of Florida. A Hollywood trade-paper reporter, sent to cover the event, finally thwarts the gang’s plans to loot the civic coffers and the local bank. Jerry Colonna, between the 15 staging of acts from Florida that killed vaudeville, flits in and out as a hired emcee, who also gets kidnapped.
Read More »

When the intelligent criminal Erwin “Doc” Riedenschneider is released from prison, he seeks a fifty thousand-dollar investment from the bookmaker Cobby to recruit a small gang of specialists for a million-dollar heist of jewels from a jewelry. Doc is introduced to the lawyer Alonzo D. Emmerich that offers to finance the whole operation and buy the gems immediately after the burglary. Doc hires the safecracker Louis Ciavelli, the driver Gus Minissi and the gunman Dix Handley to the heist. His plan works perfectly but bad luck and betrayals compromise the steps after the heist and the gangsters need to flee from the police.
Read More »

Owen Marks, parked at Lovers’ Loop with girlfriend Liz Taggart, surprises a peeping Tom, who knocks him out and kidnaps Liz. The police leap into action when they learn the victim is a cop’s daughter. Kidnapper Harold Loftus, the unhinged product of a smothering mother, makes ineffectual advances toward Liz, who staves him off as the police close in, hindered as much as helped by her overprotective father Capt. Dan Taggart.
Read More »

It’s the Great Depression. In the process of robbing a bank of $10,000, Ben Harper kills two people. Before he is captured, he is able to convince his adolescent son John and his daughter Pearl not to tell anyone, including their mother Willa, where he hid the money, namely in Pearl’s favorite toy, a doll that she carries everywhere with her. Ben, who is captured, tried and convicted, is sentenced to death.
Read More »

The story of a young Gerd, played by Liv Ullman in her first leading role, who falls in love with a young boy. She is considered a ‘loose’ woman, and the boy’s family does not accept their relationship. The young couple run away to a cabin in the woods where they meet a rogue man who tests their relationship.
Read More »

“Miseria e Nobiltà” tells the story of the humble families of Felice Pasquale and his colleague who are hired by a Marquis who wants to marry the daughter of a rich but simple cook, So they pose as aristocrats.
Read More »

Alberto Nardi (Alberto Sordi) is a Roman businessman who fancies himself a man of great capabilities, but whose factory (producing lifts and elevators) teeters perennially on the brink of catastrophe. Alberto is married to a rich and successful businesswoman from Milan, Elvira Almiraghi (Franca Valeri) who has a no-nonsense attitude and barely tolerates the attempts of her husband to keep his factory afloat with her money.
Read More »

Rocky Mulloy, back in town after serving 5 years of a life sentence for armed robbery Read More »