Top 10 Films of 1959

Six decades ago, world cinema was on the verge of a momentous change that would see production move away from controlled studio settings to authentic location backdrops. French and British film-makers would play crucial roles in this seismic shift, while the first inklings of what would become independent cinema were beginning to emerge in an America still dominated by the Hollywood system. Let Cinema Paradiso take you on a guided tour through the main events and key films of 1959.

The 21 January 1959 marked the end of an era. Cecil Blount DeMille died at the age of 77, having spent 45 years making movies. The son of a Liverpudlian mother, DeMille had made the first feature to be shot entirely in Hollywood, The Squaw Man (1914). Moreover, he had forced the industry to impose a code of 'Don'ts and Be Carefuls' after producing such racy outings as Male and Female (1919). DeMille realised, however, that it was possible to depict sin as long as it was punished in the final reel and this became his leitmotif in such Paramount epics as The King of Kings (1927) and Cleopatra (1934).

Exit Stage Left

Perhaps the saddest loss, however, was that of Preston Sturges, the writer-director who had perfected the art of screwball comedy. Having won the first-ever Oscar for Best Original Screenplay with his directorial debut, The Great McGinty (1940), Sturges went on a remarkable run that saw him produce such timeless classics as Christmas in July (1940), Sullivan's Travels (1941) and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944).

Several familiar faces disappeared during 1959, too, including George Reeves, the actor who headlined TV's The Adventures of Superman (1952-57) and who was played by Ben Affleck in Allen Coulter's Hollywoodland (2006). Two of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers's trusted sidekicks, Eric Blore and Helen Broderick (who were both in Top Hat, 1935), passed away, along with such durable character players as James Gleason (The Bishop's Wife, 1947), Ethel Barrymore (The Spiral Staircase, 1945), Edmund Gwenn (The Trouble With Harry, 1955), Gérard Philipe (Montparnasse 19, 1958) and Victor McLaglen, the stalwart member of John Ford's stock company who won the Oscar for Best Actor in the 1935 adaptation of Liam O'Flaherty's The Informer.

Three major stars also took their leave: Mario Lanza, whose tenor voice thrilled Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures; Lou Costello, whose famous 'Who's on First?' routine with comic partner Bud Abbott can be found in One Night in the Tropics (1940) and The Naughty Nineties (1945); and Errol Flynn, the dashing Australian star of such swashbucklers as William Keighley and Michael Curtiz's The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).

Home on the Range

Another casualty of 1959 was Republic Pictures. Founded by Herbert J. Yates in 1935, the studio had churned out Westerns featuring the likes of John Wayne, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. But it resisted being linked with Poverty Row and sought respectability with headliners like Allan Dwan's Sands of Iwo Jima and John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952), which both starred Wayne, and Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), which brought Joan Crawford out West. As serial production had ended in 1957, Republic's closure did much to hasten the demise of the traditional B movie, as space opera took over from horse opera in the exploitation era.

Duke Wayne remained Hollywood's leading Western star and he was on fine form as cavalry colonel John Marlowe in John Ford's fact-based Civil War story The Horse Soldiers and as Sheriff John T. Chance in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo, in which he was teamed with singers Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson. Both films owed more to the kind of psychological Western that had been refined earlier in the decade by Anthony Mann and James Stewart and Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott. The latter pair reunited for Ride Lonesome, the fifth of their seven 'Ranown' Westerns, which sees Scott's bounty hunter try to prevent Lee Van Cleef from rescuing his prisoner brother, James Best.

Joseph M. Newman serves up a more traditional fare in The Gunfight at Dodge City, which stars Joel McCrea as gunslinger-turned-lawman, Bat Masterson, while Anthony Quinn rides into town to help Henry Fonda restore order to a terrorised town in Edward Dmytryk's Warlock. Quinn also protects his son after sheriff Kirk Douglas accuses him of murdering his wife in John Sturges's Last Train From Gun Hill. Robert Ryan plays another uncompromising cattle baron in André De Toth's Day of the Outlaw, while US Marshal Robert Taylor similarly finds himself opposed by an entire town in Michael Curtiz's The Hangman. Pistolero Robert Mitchum becomes caught between some hostile Apaches and a patrol of Texas Rangers in Robert Parrish's The Wonderful Country, while the 1916 war against Pancho Villa provides the backdrop for Gary Cooper's road to redemption in Robert Rossen's They Came to Cordura.

The genre would be revitalised during the ensuing decade by the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, Duccio Tessari and Antonio Margheriti after Robert Bianchi had started the cycle with La sceriffa (1959). Translating the Italian generic term 'Peplum' into 'Sword and Sandal', American producer Joseph E. Levine cashed in on the success of Ben-Hur and made a killing at the box office with low-budget adventures set in Ancient Rome. Such was the vogue for pictures like the biblical duo of King Vidor's Solomon and Sheba and Victor Tourjansky's Herod the Great that 20th Century-Fox commissioned Joseph L. Mankiewicz to make Cleopatra. But, while Elizabeth Taylor signed her contract to star in 1959, it would take four years for the ill-starred epic to reach cinema screens and so underwhelm audiences that the studio almost went bankrupt.

The action field wasn't entirely taken up by centurions, however, although J. Lee Thompson remained in the imperial sphere by sending Kenneth More and Lauren Bacall to India for North West Frontier. The disregarded rights of an indigenous population also prove crucial to Mel Ferrer's Green Mansions, which sees American fugitive Anthony Perkins accept a mission to murder bird girl Audrey Hepburn, who is believed by the local tribes to be an evil spirit. However, the jungle in Val Guest's Yesterday's Enemy is located in Burma, where Stanley Baker is attempting to fight a rearguard against the advancing Japanese in 1942.

Rewinding two years, the setting for Michael McCarthy's Operation Amsterdam is the Occupied Netherlands, as Peter Finch reluctantly accepts an order from British major Tony Britton, as they seek to liberate a consignment of industrial diamonds. Gregory Peck is given an equally difficult mission in Lewis Milestone's Pork Chop Hill, as he is ordered to capture a Chinese stronghold during the Korean War in order to strengthen America's hand at the Panmunjom peace talks.

Thrills and Spills

Scottish director Sidney Hayers brought a little 'kitchen sink' realism to the Second World War Home Front in Violent Moment, in which army deserter Lyndon Brook goes on the run after killing the girlfriend who has put their young son up for adoption. Aldo Ray busts younger brother Neil McCallum out of jail and seeks sanctuary on an island in Sydney Harbour in Harry Watt's The Siege of Pinchgut, while the Little Tokyo district of Los Angeles provides the setting for Samuel Fuller's The Crimson Kimono, as Korean War buddies-turned-cops Glenn Corbett and James Shigeta find their friendship being tested by Victoria Shaw when they investigate the murder of a stripper.

Homicide is very much to the fore in Richard Fleischer's Compulsion and Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder. The former sees Orson Welles give one of his finest performances as a lawyer modelled on Clarence Darrow prosecuting Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman as a pair of psychotic students based on Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who had kidnapped and killed a 14 year-old Chicago boy in 1924. The case is equally sordid in Preminger's Production Code-challenging courtroom drama, which earned seven Oscar nominations for its tense depiction of the battle between prosecutor George C. Scott and small-town attorney James Stewart over whether army lieutenant Ben Gazzara is guilty of murdering the man who raped his wife, Lee Remick.

Harry Belafonte agreed to join Ed Begley and Robert Ryan in Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, a seething film noir adapted by Abraham Polonsky from a William P. McGivern novel about a nightclub singer who teams with an ex-cop and a racist killer to rob a bank in upstate New York.

With its chic score by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, this remains in a different league to the crime flicks being produced across the Atlantic. Nevertheless, there's still much to intrigue in items like John Lemont's The Shakedown, which sees Terence Morgan emerge from the slammer to set up a cheesecake photographic studio in a bid to reclaim his Soho turf from interloper Harry H. Corbett. Corbett essayed an even seedier character named Spendosa in Cover Girl Killer, which was directed by Terry Bishop, who was also responsible for Life in Danger, in which casual labourer Derren Nesbitt is targeted by a lynch mob when a child killer escapes from an asylum.

Another young girl finds herself in danger after witnessing a murder in J. Lee Thompson's Tiger Bay, a police procedural set in Cardiff that saw John Mills co-star with his young daughter, Hayley, whose performance led to her being awarded a life-changing contract by Walt Disney. The multicultural nature of the port area is rightly emphasised and race also has a key role to play in Sapphire, one of the many postwar 'problem pictures' made by director Basil Dearden and producer Michael Relph that follows Scotland Yard detectives Nigel Patrick and Michael Craig in their efforts to find the killer of a black woman who has been pretending to be white.

This theme also informed John Cassavetes's ground-breaking indie drama, Shadows, and Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life, a remake of John M. Stahl's 1934 adaptation of a Fannie Hurst novel about two widows and their difficult daughters. In the first version, Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers struggle to keep Rochelle Hudson and Fredi Washington on the straight and narrow, while the latter sees Lana Turner and Juanita Moore despair of Sandra Dee and Susan Kohner. Both Moore and Kohner received Oscar nominations, only for the latter to retire in 1964 to raise her sons, Paul and Chris Weitz, who have been doing very nicely for themselves since joining forces as director and producer on American Pie (1999).

Although 1959 saw the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences withdrew its prohibition on those blacklisted during the Hollywood Witch-Hunt, Joseph Losey opted to remain in Britain, where he made Blind Date, the first of his many collaborations with Stanley Baker, who plays a police detective convinced that Dutch artist Hardy Kruger murdered his French mistress, Micheline Presle. Baker also starred as the pilot flying the plane that grieving father Richard Attenborough plans to blow up mid-flight in Jet Storm, one of Baker's seven collaborations with Cy Endfield, who most famously directed him in Zulu (1964).

Despite Cold War tensions escalating following Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev paid a surprise visit to Hollywood during a summit at Camp David with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. As American cinemas were showing the kind of 'duck and cover' information films, Khrushchev was invited by 20th Century Fox to watch Shirley MacLaine and Juliet Prowse shoot a scene for Walter Lang's Can-Can (1960), which he would later claim was in very poor taste.

Khrushchev had no objection when he later met Marilyn Monroe at a special luncheon that was boycotted by Bing Crosby, Ward Bond, Adolphe Menjou and Ronald Reagan, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, who still supported the efforts of the House Un-American Activities Committee to rid Hollywood of Communism. Several big names did turn out, however, including Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, Kim Novak. Dean Martin, Ginger Rogers, Kirk Douglas, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Henry Fonda, Debbie Reynolds, Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Dick Powell, June Allyson, Bob Hope, David Niven, Charlton Heston and Frank Sinatra. Moreover, Edward G. Robinson and Gary Cooper accepted an invitation to travel to Moscow for a screening of Delbert Mann's Oscar winner, Marty (1955). which became the first American film to play in the USSR after the Second World War.

Back in the real world, fear of nuclear war and the mutations it might generate inspired such low-budget science fiction offerings as Roy Del Ruth's The Alligator People, Bernard L. Kowalski's Attack of the Giant Leeches, Douglas Hicock's Behemoth: The Sea Monster and Edward Bernds's Return of the Fly, which was one of several films made in 1959 by the prolific Vincent Price, who also headlined such horrors as William Malone's House on Haunted Hill, Crane Wilbur's The Bat and William Castle's The Tingler, which famously used a vibrating device called 'Percepto' to send shockwaves through the seats at key points in the action.

Known as 'The King of the Gimmicks', Castle produced some of cinema's most enduring cult classics. But 1959 also saw the release of Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s Plan 9 From Outer Space, whose making is fondly remembered by Tim Burton in Ed Wood (1994), which teams Johnny Depp as the cross-dressing Wood and the Oscar-winning Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi, the horror icon whose scenes were posthumously supplemented by Wood's wife's chiropractor wearing a black cape. Another alien invasion occurs in Spencer Gordon Bennett's The Atomic Submarine, which contrasts strikingly with more traditional adventure fare like Henry Levin's lively adaptation of Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and such interstellar odysseys as Ib Melchior's The Angry Red Planet and Robert Day's First Man into Space.

The following year, Price would embark upon a cycle of films adapted from the works of Edgar Allan Poe with director Roger Corman, who spent 1959 making such exploitation gems as The Wasp Woman and A Bucket of Blood. American International Pictures teamed with Britain's Anglo-Amalgamated on Arthur Crabtree's Horrors of the Black Museum, which took its title from the crime memorabilia collection at Scotland Yard. Most American horrors were still filmed in monochrome, but Hammer had demonstrated the value of using lurid colour and star director Terence Fisher had a busy year in making The Mummy, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Man Who Could Cheat Death and The Stranglers of Bombay.

Chuckles and Tunes

While Jerry Lewis was tying up what was then the most lucrative contract in Hollywood history - by which Paramount guaranteed him $10 million, plus 60% of the profits on two films a year until 1966 - Larry Fine, Moe Howard and Joe Besser were releasing the 190th and final Three Stooges short, Sappy Bull Fighters. Taking the trio down Mexico way, the action stuck to the slapstick formula that had been the Stooge trademark since 1934. But 1959 saw Russ Meyer introduce a new form of comedy to American cinema, when he chronicled the saucy fantasies of a bashful salesman in The Immoral Mr Teas, which launched a cycle of what became known as 'nudie cuties' by such cult directors as Doris Wishman, David F. Friedman and Herschell Gordon Lewis, whose went on to become 'the Godfather of Gore' and several of his 'splatter' titles are available to rent from Cinema Paradiso.

The two highest-grossing comedies of the year were Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot and Michael Gordon's Pillow Talk, which teamed Doris Day and Rock Hudson for the first time after she had been less successfully paired with Jack Lemmon in Richard Quine's It Happened to Jane. Wilder's audacious drag farce saw Tony Curtis employ a sly Cary Grant impersonation while posing as an oil tycoon to seduce Marilyn Monroe. Curtis had co-starred with Grant in Blake Edwards's Operation Petticoat, which was the year's third most profitable comedy and became the most successful picture in Universal's history. But it wasn't the story of five nurses helping a naval duo renovate the stricken submarine, USS Tiger, that made the headlines.

During an interview with Joe Hyams of the New York Herald Tribune, Grant had admitted using LSD and confessed, 'Now I know that I hurt every woman I loved. I was an utter fake, a self-opinionated boor, a know-all who knew very little.' However, as he had a 75% stake in the film's net profit, Grant was desperate for the story to be spiked to protect his investment and his reputation. Hyams refused and gossip columnist Louella Parsons helped trash his good name. Eventually, Grant settled out of court when Hyams sued him and even collaborated with him on a three-part memoir entitled 'Archie Leach' for the Ladies Home Journal.

Among the other hit comedies produced in Hollywood in 1959 were Frank Capra's A Hole in the Head, in which Frank Sinatra sang the Oscar-winning number, 'High Hopes', and the Disney duo of Charles Barton's The Shaggy Dog and Robert Stevenson's Darby O'Gill and the Little People. While the former transformed the fortunes of veteran actor Fred MacMurray, the latter did little for the career of Sean Connery, would have to wait another three years to make his name as James Bond in Terence Young's Dr No (1962).

Back in the Scot's homeland, another long-running franchise was getting into gear, as producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Rogers followed Carry On Sergeant (1958) with the equally popular duo of Carry On Nurse and Carry On Teacher (both 1959). The latter starred Ted Ray, who also headlined the duo's Please Turn Over, in which teenage daughter, Julia Lockwood, writes a racy bestseller based on the lives of her family and neighbours. This gentle strain of post-Ealing comedy also informed the likes of Cyril Frankel's Alive and Kicking, which follows Sybil Thorndike, Kathleen Harrison and Estelle Winwood to an Irish island after they escape from a retirement home, and Gilbert Gunn's Operation Bullshine, which charts the chaos that ensues after Barbara Murray and her ATS group are posted to Donald Sinden's anti-aircraft battery during the Second World War.

The year's other British comedies were built around the personalities of their stars: Leslie Phillips in David Eady's The Man Who Liked Funerals; Brian Rix in Darcy Conyets's The Night We Dropped a Clanger; Norman Wisdom in Robert Asher's Follow a Star; Sidney James in Lance Comfort's Make Mine a Million; Terry-Thomas in Mario Zampi's Too Many Crooks; and Ian Carmichael in Sidney Gilliat's Left Right and Centre. The latter pair also joined forces in John Boulting's I'm All Right Jack, which saw a fine turn as union leader Fred Kite by Peter Sellers, who also sparred amusingly with Constance Cummings in Charles Crichton's The Battle of the Sexes and took the roles of Duchess Gloriana XII, Count Rupert Mountjoy and Tully Bascomb in Jack Arnold's adaptation of Leonard Wibberley's superpower satire, The Mouse That Roared.

There was also a comic feel to two of the year's British musicals, with Antony Newley juggling being 'the King of Rock-a-Boogie' with National Service in John Gilling's Idol on Parade and Tommy Steele playing a sailor who winds up in a Spanish bullring in John Paddy Carstairs's Tommy the Toreador. By contrast, there was a grittier edge as Liverpudlian crooner Frankie Vaughan twice teamed with Anna Neagle in husband Herbert Wilcox's dramas, The Heart of a Man and The Lady Is a Square. Similarly, Cliff Richard's screen career got off to kitchen sink start, as he cameo'd alongside Laurence Harvey in Val Guest's Expresso Bongo and Anthony Quayle in Terence Young's Serious Charge.

Across the pond, Walt Disney did his bit by breaking his studio's budget record in shooting Sleeping Beauty in Super Technirama 70. Yet, with Elvis Presley in the army, the traditional musical was in abeyance, despite Vincente Minnelli's Gigi (1958) winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. While there wasn't much to sing about on the Hollywood front, Danny Kaye enjoyed a change of pace as trumpeter Loring 'Red' Nichols in Melville Shavelson's biopic, The Five Pennies, while Chuck Berry, Jackie Wilson, Richie Valens and Eddie Cochran got the toes tapping alongside DJ Alan Freed in Paul Landres's Go, Johnny, Go! But the change in emphasis in a genre that had been a Hollywood standby since the introduction of sound in 1927 signalled a wider shift in cinematic methods and tastes, as the 1950s drew to a close.

The Changing Face of Cinema

Two of 1959's most enduring dramas were inspired by actual events, as Millie Perkins and Audrey Hepburn respectively excel in George Stevens's The Diary of Anne Frank and Fred Zinnemann's The Nun's Story, which was adapted from a novel by Kathryn Hulme that was based on the life of Belgian sister, Marie Louise Habets. Hepburn was nominated for Best Actress, only to lose out to Simone Signoret, for Jack Clayton's take on John Braine's novel, Room At the Top, which, like Tony Richardson's version of John Osborne's play, Look Back in Anger, launched the trend for social realism in British cinema that persists to this day.

Centring on the brainwashing of POWs during the Korean War, John Krish's Captured also opted for a pared down approach that contrasted with the more formulaic melodramatics on view in such solidly made British dramas as Robert Day's Life in Emergency Ward 10, Robert Siodmak's The Rough and the Smooth and Lewis Gilbert's Ferry to Hong Kong, which sees teacher Sylvia Syms fall for the charms of Curt Jurgens, who has been foisted on to ship's captain Orson Welles after being deported.

There was a touch more topicality about Stanley Kramer's On the Beach, an adaptation of a Nevil Shute apocalyptic thriller that placed Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire on the verge of oblivion. But there was still a Masterpiece Theatre feel about the acting, as there was in a fine Tennessee Williams adaptation, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Suddenly, Last Summer. Returning to the Big Easy, it was scripted by Gore Vidal and brought Best Actress nominations for both Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn for their potent performances as a woman who is institutionalised after witnessing the murder of her cousin on a European vacation and the aunt seeking to persuade doctor Montgomery Clift to lobotomise her.

While these films have the depth and intensity of great art, they are somewhat cinematically conservative. Elsewhere around the world, master film-makers were producing fine works in their tried-and-trusted styles, with Yasujiro Ozu employing a static, low-angle camera to film the affecting tales of everyday Japanese life told in Floating Weeds and Good Morning, while Fritz Lang ruminated once more on the capricious nature of fate in Tiger of Bengal and The Tomb of Love. There was more visual ingenuity in Satyajit Ray's The World of Apu, which formed the concluding part of the neo-realist 'Apu trilogy' that had started with Pather Panchali (1955) and Aparajito (1956).

Masaki Kobayashi also pushed boundaries with his adaptation of Junpei Gomikawa's The Human Condition, a nine-hour study of Japanese society under the growing influence of militarism that was released over the next two years in three parts, 'No Greater Love', 'Road to Eternity' and 'A Soldier's Prayer'. The war remained a pivotal topic in Europe, as such fascinatingly contrasting pictures as Roberto Rossellini's Il generale della Rovere, Bernhard Wicki's The Bridge, Jerzy Kawalerowicz's Night Train and Grigori Chukhrai's Ballad of a Soldier all testify.

But the impetus towards a new kind of cinema came from France, where established directors like Georges Franju and Robert Bresson were producing innovative pictures like Head Against the Wall and Pickpocket. Adapted from a novel by Hervé Bazin, the former centres on the relationship that develops between lawyer's son Jean-Pierre Mocky and Anouk Aimée when he is committed to the care of strict doctor Pierre Brasseur, while the latter draws on Fedor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment for a compelling study of loner Martin LaSalle's descent into crime that contains some extraordinary sequences of stealth theft and makes bold use of camera distance, ambient sound and fades between scenes.

But, as Left Bank intellectual Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour suggested, a new wave was coming and it broke at the Cannes Film Festival. Marcel Camus's Black Orpheus might have won the Palme d'Or (as it would also win the Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA for Best Foreign Film) for his tale of the Rio favelas, but it was the opening presentation that shook critics and audiences alike.

Based loosely on his own experiences and featuring a standout performance by teenager Jean-Pierre Léaud, François Truffaut's The 400 Blows confirmed the arrival of the nouvelle vague. Fellow Cahiers du Cinéma critic Eric Rohmer made his own mark with The Sign of Leo, while Claude Chabrol took the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival with Les Cousins. Later in 1959, Chabrol and Truffaut would collaborate on a story for their colleague, Jean-Luc Godard, who would start filming Breathless (1960), which prompted the younger generation of American directors to realise that Hollywood had to move with the times or get left behind.