1956 was a year of growing complacency and unrest. Global tensions ratcheted as anti-Soviet uprisings heated up the Cold War. Elvis Presley hit the music charts for the first time with “Heartbreak Hotel”, setting off a worldwide rock n’ roll craze, while President Eisenhower signed a Congressional joint resolution setting “In God We Trust” as the national motto. Throughout the American South, violent clashes between civil rights activists and white supremacists exploded, with Rosa Parks’ arrest in December kicking off the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Beat poet Allan Ginsburg published “Howl”, as America entered its post-industrial era, with white collar jobs outnumbering blue collar jobs for the first time. A 1956 Motion Picture Association of America report notes the major film trend of the year: “We saw greater flowering of the “big picture.” This term has been used to describe pictures, not only big in terms of budget, length, scope and number of stars, but pictures that the industry believes will gain big audiences.“
This list does not feature those 1950s Big Pictures, like all-star melodrama Written on the Wind, or Giant, James Dean’s last film in a leading role before his untimely death. Nor is it 1956 critical darlings like The Killing, by up-and-comer Stanley Kubrick, which Time incorrectly predicted would “make a killing at the cash booths.” These are the less-loved films whose critical reputation grew over the decades, the films of 1956 now considered classics.
10
‘Nightfall’
“You don’t know how many times I’ve stood here and watched it get dark. I know how every shadow falls.” So says Aldo Ray‘s Jim Vanning, wanted for a murder and robbery he didn’t commit, waiting to prove his innocence in Nightfall. From Jacques Tourneur, director of Cat People and Night Of The Demon, comes this non-supernatural noir about a soft-spoken man caught up in a crime. Anne Bancroft plays a down-on-her-luck model, and James Gregory plays the insurance investigator hoping to recover the stolen goods. Both believe in Vanning’s innocence, and get caught up as Vanning flees both the law and the two affable, vicious bank robbers who believe Vanning stole their loot.
Critics were split when Nightfall came out. Every good review had caveats like enormous plot holes, or a too-meager budget to really let the material shine, while every negative review grudgingly admitted to the film’s beauty — Nightfall manages to make a Greyhound bus ride look poetic. Interestingly, Aldo Ray in Nightfall influenced Bruce Willis’ character in Pulp Fiction, with Quentin Tarantino name-checking Nightfall as example of the kind of hapless leading man he wanted. Jacques Tourneur is best known for his supernatural films, but don’t overlook this soft, shadowy crime thriller.
9
‘While The City Sleeps’
From famed director Fritz Lang comes a thriller inspired by Chicago’s real-life Lipstick Killer. The killer’s disturbing home invasion murders are background to the machinations at Kyne Inc., a media empire whose king has just died. Kyne never taught his failson Walter (Vincent Price) the family business, and in a twisted inversion of news motto “if it bleeds, it leads”, Walter creates a juicy new Executive Director job that will go to the department head who catches the Lipstick Killer. The heads of the wire service, newspaper, and TV divisions are gunning for the gig, with uninterested TV anchor Ed (Dana Andrews), Ed’s squeeze and office secretary Nancy (Sally Forrest), and streetwise ace reporter Mildred (Ida Lupino) dragged into their machinations.
While The City Sleeps came just three years after Lang’s The Big Heat, an undisputed classic. Critics at the time admitted the central implausibility of the newspaper murderer scramble, but otherwise the film was well-received. So why the lack of adulation? Unavailability. While the City Sleeps had a VHS release in the 1990s, but beyond that wasn’t available on home media until the mid-2000s. It’s difficult to evaluate something if it’s not seen, and While The City Sleeps was overlooked in favor of Lang’s other noir hits from the time.
8
‘Patterns’
Another vicious office drama, but this one is entirely focused on the boardroom battlefield. Walter Ramsay (Everett Sloane) inherited his father’s company and runs it with ruthless efficiency. Ramsay clashes repeatedly with Bill Briggs (Ed Begley), second-in-command with over 40 years at the company, whose humanist approach irritates Ramsay. Instead of firing Briggs, Ramsay brings in rising star executive Fred Staples (Van Heflin) to replace him, but instead of firing Briggs outright, bullies, humiliates, and undermines him in hopes Briggs will voluntarily retire. Briggs digs in, and Staples is torn between his and Ramsay’s power plays.
Penned by a pre-Twilight Zone Rod Serling, it’s an intense morality play whose lesson about profits over people has aged like a fine wine. Briggs isn’t just a martyr, he’s a man whose chosen business over family repeatedly, and whose age and humanity are seen as liabilities in a pitiless business environment. The film’s ending, with Staples staying at the company, has only gotten more prescient. Believing he can do more good staying and fixing things from the inside, Staples embodies every compromise made by the well-meaning on their path to maintaining the status quo.
7
‘Death in the Garden’
The middle of what critic Raymond Durgnat called Luis Buñuel‘s “revolutionary triptych”, Death in the Garden remains overshadowed by Buñuel’s unarguable later masterpieces, but doesn’t fit in with his earlier surrealist outings or feverish Mexican melodramas. As with This Is Called Dawn (released the same year and while beloved by Buñuel, even less known than this film) and Fever Mounts at El Pao (1959), the backdrop is a totalitarian military society. The “hero” is first shown giving the middle finger, an outsider entering into an explosive situation in an illegal diamond mining town the government’s just forcibly disbanded. As violence between soldiers and miners increases, five people: a priest, a madame, a miner, his deaf-mute daughter, and the outsider-adventurer, flee the carnage into the jungle. From there it’s an unsentimental struggle for survival.
Critics theorize the film is Buñuel’s knock at Fransisco Franco‘s Spain. Buñuel was essentially film coordinator for the left-wing Republican government. When Franco’s right wing Nationalists took over (and remained in power until 1975), Buñuel fled for Hollywood, then Mexico, unable to return to Spain. Death In The Garden’s blunt brutality, where dynamite can kill both sides of a gunfight, and a priest starts a fire with a ripped out bible page, hides Buñuel’s feelings in an intentionally B-grade adventure where something feels a touch off. “B-grade” isn’t an insult, but a sturdy parameter within which Buñuel tweaks conventions just enough to jab at.
6
‘Tea and Sympathy’
According to his biographer, director Vincent Minnelli at a 70s film festival proudly claimed, “I made the first homosexual picture while I was at MGM. That wasTea and Sympathy.” The movie, following the difficulties of sensitive lad Tom (John Kerr) at his rough-and-tumble boy’s prep school, is focused on persecution of differences and rumor mongering more than LGBTQ+ themes, and not just because the restrictive Hays Code forbid mention of homosexuality. The film’s depiction of societal pressure to conform to a specific type of manliness is even more relevant in today’s “manosphere”. Laura (Deborah Kerr) plays the headmaster’s wife, who takes a shine to Tom, and offers the title tea and sympathy.
The play Tea and Sympathy was based on ends with the line, “Years from now, when you talk about this, and you will, be kind.” It’s in the film, said just before it implies the married woman and schoolboy sleep together. But, the Hays code demands punitive action for social transgression, and clearing up any deviant ambiguities. So Tea and Sympathy‘s coda flashes forward to the “present day”, adult Tom gets a letter from Laura clarifying she’s been ostracized for her extramarital actions, and she congratulates him on his marriage to a woman. Despite the obvious tweaks, the core of Tea and Sympathy retains the play’s power.
5
‘Baby Doll’
Elia Kazan‘s Baby Doll was the most notorious film of the 50s. As is often the case, the film’s notoriety outstripped the number of people who actually saw the film. Though passed by the MPAA ratings board, the film was rated “C” for Condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, who successfully pressured many theaters into pulling the film. On paper it’s understandable: The plot has sleazy cotton gin owner Archie (Karl Malden), who signed a deal two years earlier with the now-dead father of Baby Doll (Carroll Baker) to care for her, eagerly awaiting her 20th birthday to consumate their marriage. Meanwhile, Baby Doll sleeps in her own crib, with her senile aunt the only other adult around. Until competing cotton gin owner and Sicilian Vacarro (Eli Wallach) strolls into town and upends everything.
Sex hovers around everything in Baby Doll, but it’s just a sordid form of power in a rotten world. Vaccaro’s ethnicity is balanced by his wealth, Baby Doll’s age and gender are strength and weakness in a man’s world where she doesn’t have anything else, and Archie may be broke and a bad businessman, but as a white male in Mississipi, he’ll never be completely at the bottom of the pile. The film’s malaise outweighs its titillation by a power of ten, and features a stacked cast of Actor’s Studio alumni. Don’t believe the hype, but enjoy the show.
4
‘Bigger than Life’
The first and possibly only 1950s film entirely centered on the dangers of ‘roid rage. Mild-mannered teacher Ed (James Mason) is diagnosed with a rare, usually fatal disease. He agrees to experimental treatments with a new wonder drug, cortisone. Ed recovers completely, and makes good on his promise to spend more time with wife Lou (Barbara Rush) and son Richie (Christopher Olsen). But Lou and Ed’s coworker Wally (Walter Matthau) start noticing Ed becoming rude, aggressive, angry. Ed begins sneaking more and more cortisone, becomes increasingly violent, and makes threats to his family. When confronted by Lou he points out he can’t stop taking the drug, or he’ll die. The film reaches a crescendo when Ed’s stopped from carrying out a family-wide murder-suicide, and ends as happily as a film can after that line’s crossed.
Produced by star James Mason, the film was a box office flop. Mason blamed the fact the film was shot in Cinemascope, saying the widescreen format, combined with DeLuxe color, “had a way of making all films look like very cheap color advertisements from magazines.” Modern critics praise using Cinemascope to raise average family interiors to the grand vistas usually associated with the format. Director Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without A Cause, In A Lonely Place) uses the grandiose psychosis of one suburban man to subtly (no, really) underline the social issues and beliefs of middle-class America. Thoughts on education (“Childhood is a congenital disease. And the purpose of education is to cure it!” Ed yells), medicine, family, and of course, religion (Ed shouting the immortal line, “GOD WAS WRONG!”) are all warped by Ed’s drug-induced mania, but his and his neighborhood’s issues with each topic are present before he’s even diagnosed.
3
‘The Bad Seed’
Speaking to Far Out Magazine director John Waters says “The first person I ever wanted to be was Patty McCormack, who played Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed…I just pretended I was her without telling anyone else what I was doing. I was the bad seed.” The most adorable ice-cold killer to hit movie screens, this movie tied the Hays Code in knots. All criminal action shown onscreen must be punished onscreen, but killing children was also taboo. The Bad Seed has a child murdering her classmates. Your move, Hays. The circle’s squared with a little help from God, or, considering how absentee and useless the men in this movie are, creepy groundskeeper Leroy excepted, let’s say, Mother Nature.
The Bad Seed is an exaggerated parody of the era’s prevailing opinion that the mother was ultimately responsible for any psychological issues in the child. It even throws in a little genetic hysteria, with Rhoda’s mother Christine (Nancy Kelly) taking blame for her daughter’s sociopathy after learning she herself was really the daugher of an Australian serial killer. This is despite the fact Christine is a lovely, moral person, in fact, the only one taking responsibility and action for Rhoda’s murders. With histrionic performances all around, this film intended the level of campiness modern viewers can enjoy watching it with today.
2
‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was thought so little of at the time of its filming, the studio slashed the film’s budget by $100,000, and cut the shooting schedule down four days. It was mostly ignored by critics on its release, but went on to become one of the most influential science fiction films of all time. It was remade in 1976 and 1993, parodied repeatedly, added to the National Film Registry in 1994, and added the term “pod people” to the American lexicon. It’s a low-budget thriller whose scares come not from gnarly effects (the pods look like elongated Brussels sprouts), but from acutely tapping into the paranoia of the 1950s. The aliens are your friends, neighbors, loved ones, drained of all emotions and joined to a growing hive mind. It’s as much a fear of Communism, as presented to the average American, as it is of being that American in Eisenhower’s square, conforming America.
The original ending was more downbeat, with leading man Kevin McCarthy screaming in impotence as trucks full of pods roll on to the next town. Director Don Siegel was angry at studio interference adding the film as we know it’s framing story with a slightly more upbeat ending. McCarthy’s discussion with a doubting psychiatrist ends with his vindication, as victims of a truck accident involving strange pods arrive at the same hospital and the figure of authority sounds the alarm. Otherwise, the film would’ve concluded with the same moment chosen to advertise it: McCarthy screaming to no one, “They’re here already! You’re next! YOU’RE NEXT!”
1
‘The Girl Can’t Help It’
Critics of the day were mixed on The Girl Can’t Help It, some finding it a fun romp, and those not hot on rock n’ roll finding little to like. Which is hard to understand, because this live action cartoon of a movie is all slapstick and high fun. Even if comedy’s not your cup of tea, The Girl Can’t Help It features a murderer’s row of musicians performing, including Fats Domino, Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, and The Platters, among many others. Jayne Mansfield stars as the title girl, Jerri Jordan, whose mobster boyfriend is determined to break her into the music industry. But Jerri just wants to marry and be a mother, much to the chagrin of press agent Tom Miller (Tom Ewell), forcibly assigned to promote her.
There’s mob violence, phone tapping, attempted assassinations, and blossoming romance, all while Mansfield’s mere presence has everyone around her bonking shoes on their head and crashing into walls. Jane Mansfield is entirely in on the joke, doing her finest Marilyn Monroe impersonation and all but winking at the camera. Director Frank Tashlin had a background in animation and music, and it shines in The Girl Can’t Help It. The film has wall-to-wall jokes and great tunes, and is shot in glorious, almost lurid color.
The saying goes that History is the ultimate judge. Whether because these films dealt with touchy subject matter, had budgets too small for their ambitions, or were considered minor works by their directors, they didn’t receive the accolades they’ve slowly earned over the years. But modern time has finally caught up to them. Now is as good a time as any to watch the 1956 films considered classics now, and see for yourself.
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