Tag Archives: 1950s

Songwriter Gus Kahn gets the Hollywood treatment. The film chronicles his success and decline, with his wife Grace sticking by him the whole time.
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As a soccer match is in progress, a group of four criminals robs the stadium office. Before they can make their getaway, a chase begins, and they must split up before they can divide the money. The police have little to go on, since it appears that none of the robbers were experienced criminals. Meanwhile, the thieves have to arrange for dividing the money while trying to avoid being captured.
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As a man returns home to see his dying father, the story of the alienation between father and son is told in flashback. Purposely letting his daughter’s lover get lynched, shooting the lynched man’s father when he threatens him with a gun, and the bullying tactics used by him as a Sheriff causes the son to leave. The son now plans to ruin his father and get his Sheriff’s badge removed.
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An updating of the Faust legend, with a dash of Fritz Lang’s “Der Müde Tod”, to a 1950’s Paris recreated in vividly abstract expressionistic sets.
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An attractive reporter investigating the mysterious destruction of an Illinois town stumbles upon a secret government laboratory conducting radiation experiments on vegetables. The lead scientist is eager to help find out what happened. Together they discover that giant grasshoppers are behind the devastation. Worse yet, thousands of them are headed toward Chicago! Can they be stopped… or is this the BEGINNING OF THE END?
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Jim Piersall is groomed by his loving but hard-driving father (living vicariously through his son) to play major league baseball. His desire to succeed to please his father leads to mental illness and a nervous breakdown. Can he overcome those difficulties and return to the major leagues?
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The plot consists of a Rashomon-like investigation into the life of a man found dead after having been hurled from a train. As security agents, policemen and a medical examiner begin to piece together his identity, three accounts emerge: one set during World War II, one in the immediate aftermath of the war and one in contemporary Poland. In each, the victim seems to have been a mysterious, ambiguous presence, of shifting loyalties and suspicious connections, who invariably set himself against the ruling powers of the time. Critics of the day attacked the film for its depiction of a world rife with secret agents and hidden enemies – a favorite Stalinist theme – yet the film seems rather to insist on how heroism or villainy are so often matters of point of view and timing.
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During the Korean War, strong but worn and cantankerous Sergeant Zack is aided by a young, orphaned Korean boy. Together they encounter and join a small group of American soldiers. The group stumbles upon a Buddhist temple where they decide to hold up, believing it to be empty…
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In mediaeval Japan a compassionate governor is sent into exile. His wife and children try to join him, but are separated, and the children grow up amid suffering and oppression.
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At a lonely military outpost on American Samoa, sticky heat alternates with torrential rain. A ship quarantine strands here Sadie Thompson, a “breezy dame” who sets the Marines afire… and self-righteous Mr. Davidson, powerful head of the Mission Board, who suspects Sadie is a fugitive from the notorious Emerald Club of Honolulu. Meanwhile, Sadie is courted by crude but good-hearted Marine Sgt. Phil O’Hara.
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