1950s – PopCult Reviews

PopCult Podcast – Seven Samurai/The Hidden Fortress

Akira Kurosawa is one of the greatest filmmakers to ever live and his movies have had a profound influence on the form. Today we talk about a group of ronin defending a village & the story of a princess in peril that should feel familiar.

PopCult Podcast – Perfect Days/Tokyo Story

Two quiet slice of life dramas get the spotlight this week. Wim Wenders finds poignancy in the life of a public toilet cleaner as he makes connections. Ozu delivers his humanist masterpiece with a quiet family epic.

Movie Review – All About Eve

All About Eve (1950)
Written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

My supporters at Patreon voted, and February’s month-long film series is “Movies About Movies.” This means we will be watching and reviewing films all about various aspects of the industry, mostly narrative, but one documentary thrown in that was the seed of this series. We begin with one of the great American films, a piece of cinema that has rippled through popular culture since its debut. All About Eve emerged from a real-life incident where a stage actress allowed a young fan to become a part of her household staff. Things eventually went south, and the young fan became a toxic element, actively trying to undermine the woman she admired. This was related to the author Mary Orr, who turned it into a short story, which became the basis for this screenplay.

Movie Review – The 400 Blows

The 400 Blows (1959)
Written by François Truffaut and Marcel Moussy
Directed by François Truffaut

You’ll hear this annoying thing from hack directors who get justifiably reamed in the reviews for lousy work. They’ll say that people who are critics are just incapable of making their own art. It’s silly to say that because it tries to say that a thoughtful critique of a piece of art is invalid unless it praises that piece of art. François Truffaut loved movies since he was a child; as a young adult, he secured a job at Cahiers du Cinéma, becoming known as one of their most brutal writers. He earned the nickname “The Gravedigger of Cinema” and was the only Cahiers writer not invited to the 1958 Cannes Film Festival. After seeing Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, Truffaut doubled down on his dreams of making his own feature film. This led to The 400 Blows (alongside Goddard’s Breathless) and the birth of the French New Wave. It seems like critics can make great art, too.

Movie Review – Hiroshima, Mon Amour

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)
Written by Marguerite Duras
Directed by Alain Resnais

Some historical events seem to be glossed over. We’re taught they happened, but then the textbook quickly moves on to other topics. One of these is the atomic bombing of Japan. I personally believe this sits beside the Holocaust as the two most monstrous acts ever performed by humans on each other. Because I came along decades after the act, I was fed the very manicured propaganda around it. Even worse, I was homeschooled and given Bob Jones University’s take. I think most of us couldn’t really articulate what happened directly following the dropping of those bombs or what the mood in Japan was in the following weeks or months. But such a thing could not happen without the people’s lives being devastated beyond anything we Americans have experienced.

Movie Review – Night and Fog

Night and Fog (1956)
Written by Jean Cayrol
Directed by Alain Resnais

It’s an image that your brain can’t quite comprehend at first. Then the camera pulls out. And continues to pull out. And just keeps going beyond anything you could have anticipated or expected. Literal mountains of human hair piled up into a range of which I could not see the boundary. It seemed to go on forever. This isn’t just violence inflicted on one person to another. This is something different. There is a scope & scale that could not have happened by accident. Each action, each cut, each kill was planned. Starvation was part of the plan. This was the same thought an exterminator puts into eliminating an infestation of rats because that is how the Nazis saw these human beings as something to be erased. And with cold, calculated action, they built an entire machine to kill them all.

Movie Review – Touch of Evil

Touch of Evil (1958)
Written & Directed by Orson Welles

None of his peers could come close to touching the natural filmmaking genius of Orson Welles. Sometimes, you hear film people overhype a filmmaker or actor, but in this case, believe the hype. Welles delivers a film that looks like nothing else that was out at the time, pushing the boundaries of American cinema once again. Charlton Heston was cast after the release of The Ten Commandments and was curious who would direct. Welles was already in the cast, and Heston suggested the film legend helm the picture. Universal said they would get back to him. He got the picture, rewrote it, and staged one of the most visually exciting film noirs ever made.

Movie Review – Kiss Me Deadly

Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Written by A.I. Bezzerides & Robert Aldrich
Directed by Robert Aldrich

At one point, around the halfway mark, I turned to Ariana and said, “This main character… he’s a real scumbag, right?” She agreed. The screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides said, “I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it… I tell you, Spillane didn’t like what I did with his book. I ran into him at a restaurant, and, boy, he didn’t like me.” I haven’t read Spillane’s novel or any of his Mike Hammer work, but I liked how nasty the investigator was. It felt in tune with the world of film noir, where everyone seems to be simmering with misanthropy and taking their anger out on the world. Hammer is no exception to this. Kiss Me Deadly is also a film that has influenced many other pictures as varied as Alex Cox’s Repo Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Pulp Fiction. This is by far the most cynical of all the noir pictures we’ve watched.

Movie Review – The Big Heat

The Big Heat (1953)
Written by Sydney Boehm
Directed by Fritz Lang

What is the Law? Who does it exist to protect? It’s becoming more evident to me, maybe to you too, that the Law as an institution in the States (as that is where I grew up) does not exist to protect me. If I benefit from it, that is an unintended benefit. The Law is in place to protect & serve the wealthy ownership class. The main prerogative of the police as an institution is to protect the rich & their property. If that means cracking the skulls of the plebs, they don’t shed a tear over that. The noir genre is full of characters who find themselves on the receiving end of these systems, and over the years, one subgenre has emerged: the rogue cop. It probably didn’t start here, but The Big Heat was likely one of the significant sparks to see this subgenre grow in popularity. It’s a very reactionary response to social injustice, continuing the fixation on hyper-individualist solutions.

Movie Review – Night and the City

Night and the City (1950)
Written by Austin Dempster, William E. Watts, and Jo Eisinger
Directed by Jules Dassin

For years, American film industry censorship worked to soften the edge of noir films. There would always be a good cop, or crime would always punished severely. This caused the stories to lose their bite present in the source material, where writers wrestled with big existential questions and faced the cruelty of life in the modern era. The United Kingdom, while not exempt from moralizing about films, allowed for a more nuanced version of noir to be presented on the screen. At the time of its release, Night and the City was noted for being a film without sympathetic characters (save for maybe one woman). Some critics of the time saw the film as “trashy” and “pointless” in reaction. I take a different stance; this movie points out how desperately people live in the struggle for survival exacerbated by capitalism.