"Baby Doll" (1956)

Let's see, Tennessee Williams' first original screenplay. Does he serve up his usual steamy stew of Southern Gothic sexuality, libidinous and repressed in equal measures? Well, for starters there's a 19 year old virgin bride (Carroll Baker) who sleeps in a crib and sucks her thumb like she's longing for, ahem, well let's keep going...she's just three days away from consummating her arranged marriage to a braying lunkhead (Karl Malden) who's so pent up he takes to leering at her through holes in the bedroom wall. Then there's the arch rival to Malden in the cotton gin game (Eli Wallach in a sly film debut). He sets his Big Bad Wolf lothario moves on Baker soon enough, but is he really after her post-pubescent charms or trying to get information on the culprit who burned down his cotton mill? This film detonated like an A-bomb in the middle of the buttoned down 1950's. Banned at the time by numerous cities and the Catholic League, it still has the audacious power to shock and titillate, all told with William's patented blend of hyper emotional dialogue dipped in sorghum soaked drawls. A first rate production design by twins (!) Richard and Paul Sylbert and canny direction by Elia Kazan are the icing on the whole sweet 'n salacious outing. Prepare to clutch your rosary.

"The Big Country" (1958)

What's in a name? Everything if you're talking about this quality western. Big story. Big cast. Big music. Big widescreen vistas. And most importantly, Big Theme. Gregory Peck, doing his stoic and taciturn best, is an educated gentleman from back East who comes out West to marry his fiancé (Carroll Baker), the bratty scion of a wealthy cattleman with a big ranch (Charles Pickford). How big? BIG. You know that because every character in the movie tells him. But trouble starts when Peck realizes he's caught in the bickering crossfire between his future father-in-law and another rival rancher (Burl Ives). These two old coots go at it tooth and nail, threatening and insulting each other 'til things get really dicey. Each has a son figure by his side, Charlton Heston and Chuck Connors, to further goad pacifist Peck into manning up and takin' sides. Now, given the era it was filmed, the whole movie can be read as a Cold War allegory (Will these two warring factions fight to the death and kill everybody along with them?), but it's just more fun to sit back and watch all these great actors play out the story against director William Wyler's wide screen panoramas. Lovely schoolteacher Jean Simmons is around to vie for Peck's heart, and Ives steals the picture--and took home the Oscar--for his blustery patriarch turn. Major points for some great Saul Bass titles and the justifiably iconic score by Jerome Moross. Just try and get the recognizable title theme out of your head. You will lose.

"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1941)

This film version of Robert Louis Stevenson's tale of a scientist's experiments with mind and body transformations via a laboratory potion was castigated and an embarrassing flop on it's initial release.
Many thought Spencer Tracy's two character performance was hammy and hamfisted. He even thought it would ruin his career! It's time for a rewrite. Let's start with the production. It got the full luxe MGM treatment.There's nothing like fog-blanketed Victorian London to set a moody tone and here you get those eerie cobblestoned passageways with a murderous cloaked madman flitting about the barred parks and side streets like a superhuman acrobat. Chillingly beautiful. And then the cast: Tracy brings a nuanced interpretation to the halved protagonist, more psychological than Freddie Kruger scary. Stevenson's idea of Everyman being a receptacle of Good and Evil is ratcheted up another Freudian notch. The Evil is our id, sexual repression leads to beastly carnality. The good doctor is torn between his virginal fiance, Lana Turner as a dewey Victorian Barbie doll, and the lustier bad girl, Ingrid Bergman as a hotly-totsy barmaid garbling a dubious Cockney accent. Each woman toys with his inner urges (given how stunningly beautiful they're filmed by lensman Joseph Ruttenberg, is it any wonder?) and each summons up that creepy ol' Mr. Hyde in some disturbing shock moments. But if there's one reason to see how legendary director Victor Fleming spins the yarn, it's in the Jekyll-to-Hyde mutation sequences. The images that are careening thru Jekyll's brain are so bizarro you wonder "How did this get past the Hayes office??" Need I say more than Tracy flogging two horses with a whip, one white, one black, who morph into galloping naked Turner and Bergman? If that doesn't get you to watch this underrated classic I don't know what will.

"Sea Wife" (1957)

What is it about survivors lost at sea in a lifeboat that makes for good movie watching? It must be the enormity of powerful Mother Nature bearing down on those little people trying to eke out an existence despite all odds. We know someone--probably not all--will survive, so there's an element of suspense. Of course there's always little or no food or water, the unbearable sun, the long stretches of tedium where all you have to do is discuss Life...and don't forget sharks! It's all here as four strangers from a torpedoed steamship during WWII bob along in the Indian Ocean in a rubber raft...a beautiful young woman (Joan Collins), a British army officer (Richard Burton), a boorish racist of a businessman (Basil Sydney), and black seaman (Cy Grant). Things get steamier as Burton falls in love with Collins but she's got a Very Big Secret. You have to watch and see if he finds out what she's hiding before the castaways get rescued. (And do please overlook some of the special effects, they're a mite 1950's cheesy). In case you're wondering, Burton and Collins don't wed on the high seas, the title refers to an old sailor's term for mermaid, the men's nickname for La Joan when she takes a dip over the vessel's side.

"Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison" (1957)

John Huston directed this quasi remake of his very own "The African Queen". If the formula works, why mess with it? Here we have another two character adventure story with a prim woman and a rough around the edges man thrown together into hyper survival mode in an exotic locale during wartime. A nun (Deborah Kerr) and marine (Robert Mitchum) are the only castaways on a remote island in the South Pacific during WWII. Two polar opposites, they befriend each other and learn to survive even when the Japs land and takeover the island. Things get even knottier/naughtier as Mitchum starts falling for Kerr. Great suspense and terrific chemistry between the two leads (this is the first of four films they made together). Mitchum's own favorite of all his roles.

"The Rose Tatoo" (1955)

Remember that episode of "I Love Lucy" where Lucy schemes to get a part in an Italian movie and she wants to emulate those lusty Italian actresses of the day so she ends up getting inspiration by stomping grapes in a vineyard? Well, Anna Magnani was one of those prime leading ladies of Italian neo-realism cinema and this movie brought that sensibility to Hollywood. It's a fine adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play (he did the screenplay), and he wrote the piece with Magnani in mind. How different she must have seemed from all the perfectly made-up and coiffed actresses of the time! Loud, unkempt, zoftig, with a face far from classically beautiful, she's totally refreshing and unforgettable. No wonder she walked away with Academy Award Best Actress honors that year. And if you come expecting Williams' usual mix of Southern Gothic sturm und drang told in poetic purple language, think again. This story of emotionally closed off widow opening herself up to a younger new love is happier and lighter in tone, an opera buffa set on the steamy Gulf Coast. Burt Lancaster is the clownish new paramour serving up a character you almost want to hate he's trying so hard to be likable, but before long he wins Magnani (and you) over. Yes, there's a lot of symbolism flying around--not one, but FOUR characters sport the title skin art--but with acting this good, all shown off in Oscar winner James Wong Howe's nuanced black and white cinematography, you'll go along for the earthy ride.

"Broken Lance" (1954)

An excellent cast in a re-telling of King Lear set in the Old West.  As in any version of this tragedy, it's all about the old man, and here it's a standout performance by Spencer Tracy as an ornery old cuss of a cattleman trying to deal with the sharp rattlesnake's tooth of his thankless children. But it's not a brood of daughters bickering over control of the ponderosa, it's four sons (Robert Wagner, Hugh O'Brian, Earl Holliman, and the eldest Richard Widmark). Tracy is effortless, by turns mean, stubborn, frightening, and tender (especially in his scenes with his Indian wife, the lovely Katy Jurado and his youngest half-breed son, his "Cordelia", the almost too handsome Wagner). And to thicken the plot's stew, Tracy must deal with a big mining company who is poisoning his land's water and has the state's shifty governor (E.G. Marshall) in its back pocket. A topnotch production  with director Edward Dmytryk making fine use of the widescreen Cinemascope vistas, plus a rousing western score by Leigh Harline.