Many a great movie was made in the decade of the 1950s, but some great films have fallen through the cracks of history, becoming forgotten, hidden gems of cinema.

A quick survey of these unappreciated films turns up a few works that were praised in their day, but later fell out of favor for whatever reason. A few were not loved enough when they came out, and despite gaining a more positive critical reputation over the years, are still not as well-known as they should be.

Some of the signature movie genres of the 1950s are represented here: atmospheric film noirs, sprawling Westerns, intense thrillers, searing dramas.

Actors like the versatile Glenn Ford, the shape-shifting Alec Guinness and the iconic Gary Cooper make appearances in these unheralded movies, directed by the likes of Luis Bunuel, Sam Fuller and Anthony Mann.

10

Naked Alibi

Directed By Jerry Hopper

10 years before playing deranged general Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, Sterling Hayden played a seemingly deranged police chief in the noir thriller Naked Alibi. Hayden’s character goes off the rails when three cops are murdered, and he becomes convinced that an apparently meek and law-abiding local baker (Gene Barry) is the killer.

Kicked off the force for brutality, Hayden goes rogue. He then meets Gloria Grahame, the suspected killer’s Tijuana mol. The baker, it turns out, is not so mild-mannered, or so law-abiding, as everyone thought.

Naked Alibi director Jerry Hopper is not what you would call a revered filmmaker, but he has a fun, roller-coaster ride of a script to work with, and good actors, and does a workmanlike job in delivering an entertaining film noir that deserves to be better-known.

9

Patterns

Directed By Fielder Cook

Rod Serling’s 1955 Kraft Television Theater presentation Patterns had none of the supernatural, sci-fi or thriller trappings that would later make his Twilight Zone the perfect Trojan Horse. All it needed was a boardroom set, a handful of actors, and a story that detailed with razor-sharp precision why capitalism always wins.

Patterns was made into a feature film in 1956, with more sets, most of the same actors (Van Heflin replaced Richard Kiley in the lead, presumably because of his bigger name), and Serling’s same expertly-constructed tale of corporate ruthlessness.

Many a Twilight Zone character would sell their soul to the devil, failing to read the fine print in the process, but Patterns shows how soul-selling works in the real world.

8

Ice Cold In Alex

Directed By J. Lee Thompson

This beautifully-crafted and compelling WW2 suspense film was appreciated in its time, receiving a critics’ prize at the Berlin Film Festival. It’s also a favorite of Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright, who have both included it in lists of the best British films of all time. But it’s still not nearly as celebrated as it deserves to be.

Tarantino, Wright and Martin Scorsese famously exchanged lists of great British films during the pandemic lockdown.

The тιтle Ice Cold in Alex refers to the glᴀss of lager a character promises himself, if he and his companions only manage to succeed in escaping the besieged Tobruk, crossing the desert in a dodgy ambulance and arriving safely in Alexandria. Obstacles include the German Army, a shady South African, quicksand, and a busted suspension.

The group’s hardships take on a Werner Herzog-like dimension when they must go over a towering sand dune by hand-cranking the ambulance up its intimidating slope – in reverse. Anyone who has seen the more-famous Wages of Fear will appreciate Ice Cold in Alex and its grueling tale of survival.

7

Ransom!

Directed By Alex Segal

Glenn Ford brings seething conviction to his portrayal of a father forced to make a terrible decision after his son is kidnapped. Yes, Mel Gibson’s Ransom is based on the same source material. No, Ford does not bellow “Give me back my son!” when he goes on TV to deliver a message to the kidnappers.

Ford does give a searing performance in the scene, going from beseeching to wrathful. 1956’s Ransom! may not be as violent as the Gibson version made 40 years later, but it’s just as harrowing.

Set mostly within Ford and wife Donna Reed’s near-opulent 1950s home, the film betrays its roots as a TV movie, but no opening out is needed. Director Alex Segal, who mostly did television, adds a flourish here and there to keep things from getting dull, but mostly just lets his actors cook, and cook they do.

6

Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe

Directed By Luis Bunuel

Legendary surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel made his English-language debut with this adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s classic novel. Though the film was a box office hit in America, and a hit with critics worldwide, it’s seldom brought up today in discussions of Bunuel’s works.

Bunuel’s 1950s output is by-and-large overlooked, relative to the endless praise heaped upon his 1960s and 1970s films. Robinson Crusoe may seem pedestrian compared to the likes of Viridiana and Belle de Jour, being devoid of those movies’ chic, arthouse trappings, but it shouldn’t be dismissed as a mere work of competent adaptation.

Bunuel’s Crusoe is indeed a superior work of adaptation, and if one considers it as such, leaving aside its lack of “surrealism,” it’s incredibly entertaining, and ranks as one of the best literary adaptations of the 50s. In the role of marooned sailor Crusoe, Dan O’Herlihy gives a career-best performance, one that earned him an Oscar nomination.

5

The Big Knife

Directed By Robert Aldrich

Dark melodramas exposing the truth behind the glitz and glamour of Hollywood became fashionable with the release of Billy Wilder’s immortal Sunset Blvd. Five years into the cycle, Robert Aldrich adapted Clifford Odets’ play The Big Knife, about a corrupted movie star, into a film almost as pungently weird as Wilder’s.

Jack Palance shreds scenery as Charlie Castle, a star with a sordid past. Riveting as Palance’s performance may be, Aldrich thought the star hurt the film’s box office, as audiences didn’t find him likable.

The Big Knife may have been a financial failure, but it succeeded with European critics, scoring a runner-up prize at the 1955 Venice Film Festival. The film is unsparing in its view of Hollywood immorality, and delivers noir-tinged, psychologically intense drama laced with venom.

4

The Horse’s Mouth

Directed By Ronald Neame

The Horse’s Mouth sees Alec Guinness pulling double-duty as star and screenwriter. The film’s single Oscar nomination went to Guinness, for his adaptation of Joyce Cary’s novel, and not for his performance as mercurial, gravel-throated painter Gulley Jimson.

Guinness won Best Actor for Bridge On the River Kwai a year before being nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Horse’s Mouth.

Guinness gave so many memorable performances in the 1950s and 1960s, it’s understandable that his work in The Horse’s Mouth is relatively unappreciated. Understandable but still unforgivable.

Guinness must have wrecked his voice entirely in order to play Gulley Jimson, an oddball painter with no sense of boundaries, whose grandiose personality sees him seeking bigger-and-bigger canvᴀsses on which to execute his artworks, and whose self-sabotaging nature makes him as much an agent of destruction as creation.

It’s easy to see why Guinness pushed to make this movie, and play this character. His efforts should have been rewarded with more accolades.

3

His Kind Of Woman

Directed By John Farrow

Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell teamed up on screen just two times. They co-starred in the ill-fated Howard Hughes production Macao, released in 1952. Their other collaboration came in the Hughes-produced His Kind of Woman, a film Russell later slammed, claiming it was ruined when Hughes fired original director John Farrow and brought in Richard Fleischer for re-shoots.

His Kind of Woman may not have been the film Russell hoped it would be, but it’s nevertheless a hugely entertaining film noir, fueled by the undeniable chemistry between its two stars. Vincent Price leads the supporting cast, having a good time playing a hammy actor.

Film noir may not actually be the right genre box in which to place His Kind of Woman. It has a noirish plot to be sure, but its tone is relatively light, and noir actors are not supposed to enjoy themselves as much as Russell and Mitchum do here.

2

Run Of The Arrow

Directed By Samuel Fuller

A disillusioned Civil War soldier heads west, finding a new home among Native Americans of the plains. It’s not Dances With Wolves, it’s Samuel Fuller’s shockingly bloody Western drama Run of the Arrow, starring Rod Steiger as a man who declares himself without a nation.

Fuller’s film may or may not have directly influenced Kevin Costner’s later Oscar-winning epic. If either film deserves to be remembered, it’s the fierce and vital Run of the Arrow, not the languid, pretentious Dances With Wolves. Costner can’t hold a candle to Fuller either as a storyteller, or as a designer of memorable images.

Fuller’s approach is utterly unsentimental, and incredibly violent for 1957 (Run of the Arrow purportedly was one of the first movies to use blood squibs). The able supporting cast includes Charles Bronson, unfortunately playing a native warrior (not for the last time).

1

Man Of The West

Directed By Anthony Mann

Following his long run of noirish Westerns starring Jimmy Stewart, director Anthony Mann made arguably his greatest movie with a new leading man, Gary Cooper. American critics had little good to say about Man of the West when it came out, but it was a favorite of Jean-Luc Godard, who raved:

With Anthony Mann, one rediscovers the Western, as one discovers arithmetic in an elementary maths class. Which is to say that Man of the West is the most intelligent of films, and at the same time the most simple.

Critical consensus eventually swung around to Godard’s side, and the film now sits at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Working from a script by Reginald Rose, Mann puts an almost operatic spin on some classic Western tropes. Cooper is the former criminal who has tried to go straight, but like Unforgiven’s William Muny, he’s doomed to revisit his despised past.

Cooper is in fine late-career form, despite being too old for his role, but the movie is stolen by Lee J. Cobb as his uncle, a frontier Fagin leading a gang of violent young outlaws. Never mind that Cobb was ten years younger than his “nephew” Cooper.