Top 50s Movies

This is the life of a Hollywood movie star named Maria, as told by writer/director Harry et al, from being discovered in Madrid, Spain, until her funeral in Italy.

Two rival motorcycle gangs terrorize a small town after one of their leaders is thrown in jail.

A red balloon with a mind of its own follows a little boy around the streets of Paris.

Broke small-time rancher Dan Evans is hired by the stagecoach line to put big-time captured outlaw leader Ben Wade on the 3:10 train to Yuma but Wade's gang tries to free him.

An unhappily married couple attempts to find direction and insight while vacationing in Naples.

How do we understand faith and prayer, and what of miracles? August 1925 on a Danish farm. Widowed Patriarch Borgen, who's rather prominent in his community, has three sons: Mikkel, a good-hearted agnostic whose wife Inger is pregnant, Johannes, who believes he is Jesus, and Anders, young, slight, in love with the tailor's daughter. The fundamentalist sect of the girl's father is anathema to Borgen's traditional Lutheranism; he opposes the marriage until the tailor forbids it, then Borgen's pride demands that it happen. Unexpectedly, Inger, who is the family's sweetness and light, has problems with her pregnancy. The rational doctor arrives, and a long night brings sharp focus to at least four views of faith.

Sixty-one year old widower Will Varner (Orson Welles), in ill health, owns many businesses and property in Frenchman's Bend, Mississippi, including a plantation. To him, his children are a disappointment, who he sees as not being able to carry on the Varner name in the style to which he has built around it. Son Jody (Anthony Francoisa) has no ambition and does not work, spending much of his time fooling around with his seductive wife, Eula (Lee Remick). He finds 23-year-old daughter Clara (Joanne Woodward) clever, but he feels she also wastes her time on more contemplative pursuits. While most of her contemporaries are married, Clara has been dating Alan Stewart (Richard Anderson), a genteel mama's boy, for six years. Will would not mind Alan so much if he too thought Alan had a bit of a forceful man in him, which he could demonstrate by actually asking Clara to marry him. Conversely, Jody laments that nothing he does is ever good enough for his father, while Clara plain does not like the way he treats them. Into their lives comes Ben Quick (Paul Newman), who Jody hired while Will was hospitalized, to do some sharecropping on currently vacant land. Despite Will believing the unsubstantiated stories that Ben burned down someone's barn as an act of vengeance, Will becomes to view Ben as the son he never had, as he is much the same mold. As such, Will does whatever he can to get Ben to be part of the family to carry on the Varner name the way Will wants it be, which means marrying Clara. Through the process, Clara may come to a realization about what she really wants in life, while Jody does whatever he can to retain his position in the family.

September 1914, news reaches the colony in German East Africa that war has broken out across Europe making British Reverend Samuel Sayer a hostile foreigner. German imperial troops burn down his mission; he is beaten and dies of fever. His well-educated, snobbish sister Rose Sayer buries him and leaves by the only available transport, the dilapidated river steamboat 'African Queen' of grumpy Charlie Allnut. As if a long difficult journey without any comfort weren't bad enough for such odd companions, she is determined to find a way to do their part for the British war effort while avenging her brother and aims high, as God is obviously on their side: construct their own torpedo and use the converted steamboat to take out a huge German warship, the Louisa, which is hard to find or reach on the giant lake. She presses till Charlie accepts to steam up the Ulanga, brave a German fort, raging rapids, bloodthirsty parasites, and the endlessly branching river which seems to go nowhere but impenetrable swamps. Despite fierce rows and moral antagonism between a bossy devout abstentionist and a free-spirited libertine drunken loner, the two grow closer to each-other as their quest drags on.

Ready to catch a train to his hometown, a washed-up boxer tells us about the strange and twisty events that happened to him the past couple of days.

A mysterious creature from another planet, resembling a giant blob of jelly, lands on earth. The people of a nearby small town refuse to listen to some teenagers who have witnessed the blob's destructive power. In the meantime, the blob just keeps on getting bigger.