There are split loyalties. But certainly for its day, and quite equally so now, this film is a pretty astute and sophisticated look at post-traumatic dissociative compartmentalization, and it’s really fun to watch it unfold. —A.G. woman, and it is one of the most brilliant soundtracks of its day. Bogart’s antihero is a man of honor, as it suits him—he has no qualms about kissing his dead partner’s widow while the body’s still warm, or turning in the guilty woman he loves to the police. This is a movie—as are many spy movies—that is essentially about trust. ), and wonderful performances by Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer as a traumatized woman and a sociopath determined to drive her out of her mind. Aren’t mob heavies supposed to be intimidating? Referred to by many as the first major noir (after the more obscure 1940 film Stranger on the Third Floor), this John Huston classic set the bar for the archetypal detective, the subgenre as a whole, and the rest of star Humphrey Bogart’s career. Still, Cagney is mesmerizing to watch self-destruct. —A.C. George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib is a curio of a time when misogyny wasn’t so much a fault as a societal given, which may be why the dynamic between married lawyers Adam Bonner (Spencer Tracy) and Amanda Bonner (Katharine Hepburn, whose character thankfully wasn’t named Eve) feels at once well-balanced and hilariously unreal. TV Shows. You just put your lips together and … blow.” Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner at the typewriter. All Rights Reserved, Amy Glynn, Andy Crump, Dom Sinacola, Jim Vorel and Paste Staff. She’s also more than a little desperate, as it turns out. Then it won a bunch of Academy Awards. An hour of the original film was cut and the ending re-shot, and though Welles had left detailed instructions on how it should be edited, the studio overrode him and the excised footage from his rough cut was trashed. Can you believe there was a time when Katharine Hepburn was known in Hollywood as “box office poison”? What gaslighting is (and isn’t) is defined by this film. at least, it’s the most definitive Crawford performance of all time.) Today, with the rest of Dreyer’s oeuvre to reflect on (especially Ordet, which was his only commercial success, despite being just as ponderous and obtuse as Day of Wrath), this film is simpler to parse. Menu. Hilariously acted and expertly filmed, His Girl Friday derives much of its comedic impact from the incredibly clever and lightning-fast banter of the characters. Then it was nominated for five Academy Awards and has become known as one of the most acclaimed films ever made. Menu. —Mark Rozeman. One of the great noirs, this early effort from Billy Wilder revealed the filmmaker’s talent for wonderfully thorny, unapologetically rotten characters—and it doubles as one of the definitive mid-century Los Angeles movies. My top 100 films of the '40s and '50s. —Dom Sinacola. Critical opinion has settled pretty solidly on the “best” films of the cinematically prolific 1940s; look at ten lists and you’ll see a lot of overlap. The opening number, as we drift through the Smith household meeting each member as they pass off bars of “Meet Me in St. Louis” to each other, instantly establishes the warm, familial tone while implanting an ear worm into your subconscious that you’ll find yourself humming days later. Only one, a mime named Deburau (Jean-Louis Barrault), has pure intentions: Naturally, he’s the one who gets hurt. There are disastrous miscommunications and something suspicious hidden in the wine cellar and a couple of Hitchcock’s most iconic shots and a hell of a lot of drinking. YouTube has as deep a selection of new movies as anyone, as long as you’re willing to pay to stream.But the video streaming service also has a great, if hard-to-find, selection of legal free movies. Inspired by Niezsche’s Ubermensch concept and the idea of the “perfect murder,” two college students kill a classmate simply to prove they can and then host a dinner party for their victim’s friends and family to see if they’ll catch on. The city is nearly a character more than it is a backdrop, though of course the hero is Murakami (the great Toshiro Mifune, here appearing in the third of his sixteen eventual roles in Kurosawa’s filmography), a coltish young detective who is obsessed to the point of detriment with retrieving his stolen service gun. One of the first titles to be preserved in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, The Maltese Falcon is landmark filmmaking. But sandwiched in between this probing whodunit lies one of noir’s most sympathetic and purely humanist tales. Classic Movies from 1950's that are not already in one of my other playlist categories.