There's Always Tomorrow (1956)

There's Always Tomorrow is a beautifully shot (in sparkling black and white) Douglas Sirk film that explores a man's mid-life crisis. Fred MacMurray is married to Joan Bennett, and he has three obnoxious children who take all of her attention – so much so that even when he is trying to communicate his deep existential crisis to her she cannot be bothered to give him any time or even acknowledge that he is in crisis. Into this void steps Barbara Stanwyck, a gorgeous fashion designer from New York who was an old flame and who still loves him. 

You know how this ends. It's 1956. I loved this melodrama because it's Douglas Sirk and it's gorgeously made, but it does a very bad job of selling us all on the idea that MacMurray makes the right choice by going back to the ungrateful group of assholes he calls a family. At the film's end, although MacMurray seems satisfied that he's done the right thing, even for his own happiness, I felt trapped, and I felt that he was trapped in this unhappy situation.

Stanwyck is incredible in this. She gives a cracking good performance that steals every scene she's in. It's a brilliant role and she's amazing.

The Bold and the Brave (1956)

For some reason I had in my head that since I had just watched The Brave One from 1956 that I needed to watch The Bold and the Brave from 1956. It's a movie that was also nominated for a screenplay Oscar in 1957 (in a different category). Anyway, I'm not sure why I felt the need to watch this, but I did.

As it turns out, The Bold and the Brave is not a very interesting war movie, and its central character is a truly hateful human being whom I loathed. 

But Nicole Maurey is fabulous in this movie, and she gives a really gorgeous performance. Mickey Rooney, too, has a great part and is tons of fun. These two actors are the shining lights of this rather dour and taciturn film – one that doesn't have any interesting battle sequences and isn't really about war per se. The Bold and the Brave is actually just a private melodrama between four people; it seems almost to have nothing to do with WWII.

I rented this on YouTube.

The Brave One (1956)

The Brave One is very sweet, and I liked it a great deal more than I probably should have. The thing is, Michel Ray, even though he's not a great actor, is nevertheless compelling, and the plot itself is moving and lovely. The whole thing really shouldn't work, but it does. I think this is due more to the superb score (by Victor Young) and excellent photography (by Jack Cardiff) than it is to the script (by Dalton Trumbo), but obviously this film is most famous for the fact that Trumbo – a blacklisted writer in 1956 – won an Oscar under a pseudonym for writing this film.

Either way I'm not sure what the "From the human heart / ...for the human heart!" tagline is about. Like, is this because it's a film about a bull? Like they thought we would all be thinking from the bovine heart for the human heart? It's weird, right? I don't get it.

RIII (1955)

Laurence Olivier's Richard III is insanely, absurdly bad. The acting is awful, the scenery is terrible, the women all literally wear the same dress. Seriously. It's nuts. The wigs are absurd: you can see his awful wig in the poster. And Olivier rolls his rs incessantly throughout. 

John Gielgud has a really great couple of scenes before he is killed, and Mary Kerridge also comes off pretty well, but nearly everyone else was surely embarrassed by this. Oof. This RIII is apparently rather a classic, too, somehow! I really don't know how. It's a bad film. I think what makes it so bad is that Shakespeare's script just wasn't written for 20th century audiences, and so there are new characters every twenty minutes with whom we are supposed to bond immediately, and characters are killed off without the film seeming even to care. A 20th century writer would give us time with these characters. Films like Cromwell and Anne of the Thousand Days and A Man for All Seasons and Mary, Queen of Scots. But this one... Ugh. oh my god and the ghost sequence at the end. This thing is absurd.

War and Peace (1956)

The war sequences in King Vidor's War and Peace are cool. Well, they're big anyway, and the scale of direction is impressive. But this 1956 movie version mostly feels like a bloated melodrama rendition of Tolstoy's novel with a bunch of USAmerican 1950s moral conservatism and ideology laid over top of it. I liked Mel Ferrer in this or at least I think I liked Mel Ferrer in this. Maybe I just thought he was handsome, though.

The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956)

The Solid Gold Cadillac is delightful. Judy Holliday is so much fun. I thought this whole thing was really cute, but the ending, especially, was perfection.

Der Hauptmann von Köpenick (1956)

The Captain from Köpenick  is excellent. It's very, very funny, while also being a harsh critique of both the German tendency to follow rules – something that would become all the more colorable following the Nuremberg trials – and German economic policies.

Qivitoq (1956)

Qivitoq: Fjeldgængeren (The Mountain Wanderer) is a fairly conventional 1950s melodrama that is sort of invested in colonialism in Greenland. But the thing about Qivitoq is that it is so gorgeously photographed, it is so stunning, that every single annoying thing about the film is easily forgivable. The movie is just beautiful.

Les Orgueilleux (The Proud Ones)

Excellent. And Gerard Phillipe is great!