my favorite movies of 1950:

(1) The Asphalt Jungle

(2) In a Lonely Place

(3) Sunset Boulevard

(4) All About Eve

(5) Rashomon

(6) Harvey

(7) The Man Who Cheated Himself

favorite of 1950:

The Asphalt Jungle

(Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, Sam Jaffe, Jean Hagen, Marilyn Monroe, James Whitmore. Directed by John Huston.)

There are some movies I absolutely love from beginning to end. Others, I appreciate … but need to make more an effort to find the greatness in them. The Asphalt Jungle is the latter kind. It gets off to an unremarkable start, and for a while it might seem like a fairly standard “heist” movie. But as it goes along, there are transcendently beautiful moments, and you realize that this movie is less about jewel thieves than about broken people who struggle to make human connections.

Honey, you sure were dreamin’! … You were talkin’ in your sleep. … It was all jumbled up, but I heard one word real plain. You called it out several times: “corn cracker”! What’s that mean?

Corn Cracker? Corn Cracker was a colt. … Yeah, he was a tall, black colt. Yeah, I remember what I was dreamin’! I was up on that colt’s back, and my father and grandfather were there, watchin’ the fun. That colt was buck-jumpin’ and pitchin’. And once he tried to scrape me off against the fence, but I stayed with him, you bet! Then I heard my granddaddy say, “He’s a real Handley, that boy — a real Handley!” And I felt proud as you please!

Did that really happen, Dix, when you were a kid?

Not exactly. The black colt pitched me into a fence in the first buck, and my old man come over and prodded me with his boot and said, ‘Maybe that’ll teach ya not to brag about how good ya are on a horse!’ … Why, our farm was in the family for generations! 160 acres … a fine barn and 7 brood mares. … And then everything happened at once. My old man died, and we lost our corn crop. That black colt I was telling you about — he broke his leg and had to be shot. That was a rotten year. I’ll never forget the day we left. Me and my brother swore we’d buy Hickory Wood Farm back some day. … One of these days, I’ll make a real killin’, and then I’m gonna head for home. First thing I do when I get there, I take a bath in the creek and get this city dirt off me.

Stream The Asphalt Jungle on these sites.

2nd favorite of 1950:

In a Lonely Place

(Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy. Directed by Nicholas Ray.)

In a Lonely Place starts out seeming like it’s going to fit neatly into the genre of film noir. The police are questioning Humphrey Bogart, a Hollywood screenwriter who’s suspected of murdering a young woman on the night she was seen at his apartment. His neighbor, a would-be starlet played by Gloria Grahame, shows up at the police station with an alibi for Bogart, though not an airtight one. There’s instant chemistry between those two. At that point, you might think you’re settling in to watch a movie focused on cops trying to get to the bottom of whether Bogart is the killer, with some romance thrown in to keep things exciting.

But this movie’s center of gravity shifts to something different. Bogart’s character was successful in his screenwriting career before he fought in World War II, but his star has faded after the war. His history of violent behavior is an open secret, but he’s tolerated; his agent excuses him by saying he’s “dynamite” and so we have to expect that now and then he’ll “explode.”

All this adds up to multiple movies in one: a crime movie, a movie about movies with a satirical edge (though it wouldn’t be called a comedy), and an ahead-of-its-time drama about an abusive industry figure.

While that seems like a solid premise on paper, what takes it to another level on the screen is Bogart and Grahame, who captivate your attention with acting that doesn’t seem like acting. They seem like real people — Bogart really is the writer who has a sweet and playful side but lashes out when he gets triggered. I’ve mostly been talking about him, but Gloria Grahame ends up being the one who most vividly comes to life. You can see things through her eyes as a human being, not a movie cliche. Bogart’s character hints at this when he describes her: “She’s not coy or cute or corny.”

Whatever you start out expecting In a Lonely Place to be, it peels off its outer layers to reveal more disturbing things lying underneath.

Stream In a Lonely Place on Amazon Prime, Tubi (free with ads) or these sites.

3rd favorite of 1950:

Sunset Boulevard

(Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Nancy Olson, Erich von Stroheim, Cecil B. DeMille. Directed by Billy Wilder.)

Haven’t I seen you before? … You’re Norma Desmond! You used to be in silent pictures — used to be big!

I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.

That’s one of the greatest lines in any movie I’ve seen. The line is brilliantly economical: in just a few simple words, it tells us so much about the self-aggrandizing delusions of the former movie star at the center of Sunset Boulevard: Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson.

Ebert summed up this dark-comedy noir:

“Sunset Boulevard” is the portrait of a forgotten silent star, living in exile in her grotesque mansion, screening her old films, dreaming of a comeback. But it’s also a love story, and the love keeps it from becoming simply a waxworks or a freak show. … “Sunset Boulevard” remains the best drama ever made about the movies because it sees through the illusions, even if Norma doesn’t.

Stream Sunset Boulevard on Pluto (free with ads), Kanopy, or these sites.   

 

In a Lonely Place

(Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy. Directed by Nicholas Ray.)

In a Lonely Place starts out seeming like it’s going to fit neatly into the genre of film noir. The police are questioning Humphrey Bogart, a Hollywood screenwriter who’s suspected of murdering a young woman on the night she was seen at his apartment. His neighbor, a would-be starlet played by Gloria Grahame, shows up at the police station with an alibi for Bogart, though not an airtight one. There’s instant chemistry between those two. At that point, you might think you’re settling in to watch a movie focused on cops trying to get to the bottom of whether Bogart is the killer, with some romance thrown in to keep things exciting.

But this movie’s center of gravity shifts to something different. Bogart’s character was successful in his screenwriting career before he fought in World War II, but his star has faded after the war. His history of violent behavior is an open secret, but he’s tolerated; his agent excuses him by saying he’s “dynamite” and so we have to expect that now and then he’ll “explode.”

All this adds up to multiple movies in one: a crime movie, a movie about movies with a satirical edge (though it wouldn’t be called a comedy), and an ahead-of-its-time drama about an abusive industry figure.

While that seems like a solid premise on paper, what takes it to another level on the screen is Bogart and Grahame, who captivate your attention with acting that doesn’t seem like acting. They seem like real people — Bogart really is the writer who has a sweet and playful side but lashes out when he gets triggered. I’ve mostly been talking about him, but Gloria Grahame ends up being the one who most vividly comes to life. You can see things through her eyes as a human being, not a movie cliche. Bogart’s character hints at this when he describes her: “She’s not coy or cute or corny.”

Whatever you start out expecting In a Lonely Place to be, it peels off its outer layers to reveal more disturbing things lying underneath.

Stream In a Lonely Place on Amazon Prime, Tubi (free with ads) or these sites.

4th favorite of 1950:

All About Eve

(Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, Hugh Marlowe, Thelma Ritter, Marilyn Monroe. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.)

I’m obviously limited in having a feel for the time when these movies came out, decades before I was born. But when you watch movies like All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, and In a Lonely Place, you get a sense that something new was happening around 1950 — that conventional romanticism was giving way to wry, detached self-awareness, as if Hollywood had become disillusioned about its own ability to cocoon audiences in a rapturous dream world.

There are many ironic “meta” moments in this movie about theater, but one in particular is chilling. George Sanders talks about how different actors are from everyone else: “We’re a breed apart from the rest of humanity, we theater folk. We are … displaced personalities.” And right in front of him while he’s saying that is a young actress, not yet well-known in 1950, named Marilyn Monroe.

Stream All About Eve on these sites.

 

5th favorite of 1950:

Rashomon

[Japanese]

(Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyō, Masayuki Mori, Takashi Shimura. Directed by Akira Kurosawa.)

Rashomon was the original movie to bring international attention to Japanese cinema. Criterion’s essay on the movie says:

Kurosawa’s films have a tragic dimension that is rooted in his at times pessimistic reflections on human nature, and Rashomon was the first work in which he allowed that pessimism its full expression. Haunted by the human propensity to lie and deceive, Kurosawa fashioned a tale in which the ego, duplicity, and vanity of the characters make a hell out of the world and make truth a difficult thing to find. Whose account of the crime is reliable? Whose is correct? One cannot tell — all are distorted in ways that flatter their narrators. This is truly a hellish vision — the world dissolves into nothingness as the illusions of the ego strut like shadows on a shifting landscape. …

Here’s a video on what makes Rashomon a great movie (with spoilers). He has interesting thoughts on how the movie was a reaction to Japan’s devastating experience with World War II:

Stream Rashomon on the Criterion Channel (with extras including commentary), Max, or Kanopy. If you don’t subscribe to the Criterion Channel, try a free trial.

6th favorite of 1950:

Harvey

(James Stewart, Josephine Hull. Directed by Henry Koster.)

Elwood P. Dowd (Jimmy Stewart) claims to have a best friend who’s an invisible giant rabbit named Harvey, so his family wants to have him committed.

Think carefully, Dowd. Didn’t you know somebody, sometime, someplace, by the name of Harvey? Didn’t you ever know anybody by that name?

No, no, not one, Doctor. Maybe that’s why I always had such hopes for it.

(How to stream Harvey.)

7th favorite of 1950:

The Man Who Cheated Himself

(Lee J. Cobb, Jane Wyatt, John Dall. Directed by Felix E. Feist.)

You know the truth!

The truth can get you 20 years. … He set up an alibi for himself that’s going to work for you.

The Man Who Cheated Himself might not be one of the all-time great noirs. Eddie Muller in the videos below criticizes the acting or casting of all three leads — which suggests that the weak link was the directing. A more skilled director could have given this movie a better energy. But it’s redeemed by a compelling story that goes beyond the typical noir formulas of “femme fatale” and “partners in crime.” It turns into a drama between two brothers who are both detectives: the older one is a seasoned detective who tries to manipulate his younger brother, a rookie.

The movie is also memorable for a climactic hideout in Fort Point, “a masonry seacoast fortification located on the southern side of the Golden Gate at the entrance to San Francisco Bay.” That scene isn’t what you’d expect from a crime movie: it’s not so much thrilling as it is quietly poignant.

The Man Who Cheated Himself is in the public domain, so it’s widely available including on Tubi (free with ads) and these sites.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.