griggs's - 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die List

This was the first movie produced in Israel. It deals with the outbreak of hostilities during the war for independence in 1947. The message of this film was the sadness and stupidity of people killing each other and how "it's always the old who lead us to war and only the young who die..."

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The slickest big-time New York City gamblers, Sky Masterson (Marland Brando) and Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra), can't resist making or taking a bet on anything. So when a pretty missionary (Jean Simmons) sets up shop in the neighbourhood, Nathan slakes a grand that Sky can't seduce her.

But all bets are off when Sky falls madly in love in this romantic musical spectacular that sets the Big Apple afire with excitement!

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Rick Todd (Dean Martin) and Eugene Fullstack (Jerry Lewis) share an apartment and have dreams for the future. Rick is an aspiring artist looking for a break. Eugene loves comic books, especially The Bat Lady series.

He is so engrossed with her stories that he has nightmares and dreams of his own comic book characters. Their luck begins to change when Abby Parker (Dorothy Malone) is fired as the artist for the Bat Lady. Rick pitches his own comic book series and Eugene gets to meet Bessie Sparrowbrush (Shirley MacLaine), who, unbeknown to him, is the artist's model the Bat Lady. Rivalry and romance ensues for all four of them, with several song and dance numbers along the way.

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Alexander Mackendrick's last Ealing comedy and certainly one of the best, William Rose received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Sir Alec Guinness stars in one of his most vivid disguises, in this killingly funny black comedy gem.

The villains plot to kill the old lady who discovers their robbery. But the pensioner is not as harmless as she seems! A rare colour film from Ealing in the '50s, it was premiered in 1955 at the end of the Ealing Green period.

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Having just served a prison term for possession of heroin, poker dealer Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra) vows to stay clean and find success as a jazz drummer. His wife (Eleanor Parker), left disabled by a car crash, is equally determined he should remain in the lucrative gambling business.

Pressurised by his wife after being asked to deal in a high-stakes game, Frankie's fear of failure leads him straight back to the nearest fix...

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"Lola Montes" is a visually ravishing, narratively daring dramatization of the life of the notorious courtesan and showgirl, played by Martine Carol.

With his customary cinematographic flourish and, for the first time, vibrant color, Max Ophuls charts the course of Montes's scandalous past through the invocations of the bombastic ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) of the American circus where she has ended up performing. Ophuls's final film, 'Lola Montes' is at once a magnificent romantic melodrama, a meditation on the lurid fascination with celebrity, and a one-of-a-kind movie spectacle.

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A middle-aged lawyer, Frederik Egerman (Gunnar Björnstrand), his inexperienced young wife, Anne (Ulla Jacobsson), and her step-son, Henrik (Björn Bjelfvenstam), are invited to spend the weekend at the country mansion of a beautiful actress, Frederik's ex-mistress, Desiree Armfeldt (Eva Dahlbeck).

Amongst the guests are Desiree's current lover Count Malcolm (Jarl Kulle) and his wife Charlotte (Margit Carlqvist). During the course of the weekend these three couples meet, separate and exchange partners, providing some lively comedic action and illustrating. Bergman's sardonic attitude towards the vagaries of love. Behind the scintillating and witty approach to this charming period comedy of manners lie and illusions and pretensions of the haute bourgeois, which Bergman cleverly illustrates with his collection of fickle husbands and scheming women.

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At the close of World War II, a Japanese army regiment in Burma surrenders to the British. Private Mizushima (Shôji Yasui) is sent on a lone mission to persuade a trapped Japanese battalion to surrender also.

When the outcome is a failure, he disguises himself in the robes of a Buddhist monk in hope of temporary anonymity as he journeys across the landscape - but he underestimates the power of his assumed role.

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When multiple residents of a small Californian town begin to suffer from identical frenzied delusions, Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) suspects the community is in the grip of a new kind of epidemic.

But his investigations soon reveal the terrifying truth - uncovering not a medical emergency, but a hidden extraterrestrial invasion that threatens mankind's very existence.

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"Forbidden Planet" is the granddaddy of tomorrow, a pioneering work whose ideas and style would be reverse-engineered into many cinematic space voyages to come. Leslie Nielsen plays the commander who brings his space-cruiser crew to Planet Altair-4, home to Dr.

Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), his daughter (Anne Francis), a dutiful robot named Robby...and a mysterious terror. Featuring sets of extraordinary scale and the first allelectronic musical soundscape in film history, 'Forbidden Planet' is in a movie orbit all its own.

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The film takes its title from Hitler's decree that anyone who 'endangered Germany's security' was to Vanish with out trace (in the) night and fog' of the Third Reich.

A harrowing look at concentration camps and the Holocaust, it carefully juxtaposes documentary footage, shot in black and white by the Allied troops, who liberate the camps with contemporary colour footage of a tour of the ruins of Auschwitz in the 50s. The images that Resnais presents are so haunting that any attempt to describe them in words is almost futile. How does one comment on footage chronicling the German Army executing the logic' of the 'Final Solution'.

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With 'The Searchers', John Wayne and director John Ford forged an indelible saga of the frontier and the men and women who challenged it. Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, an ex-Confederate who sets out to find his niece, captured by Comanches who massacred his family.

He won't surrender to hunger, thirst, the elements or loneliness. And in his obsessive quest, Ethan finds something unexpected: his own humanity. One of the most influential movies ever made.

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The rich are generally different. But in matters of the heart, they’re just as scatterbrained as the rest of us.

Heiress Tracy Lord (Grace Kelly) is engaged to one man (John Lund) attracted to another (Frank Sinatra) and, just maybe, in love again with her ex-husband (Bing Crosby) in this effervescent musical reinvention of Philip Barry’s play The Philadelphia Story featuring an endlessly delightful Cole Porter score. Among High Society’s high points: Sinatra and Celeste Holm ask Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Crosby and Kelly share True Love, Der Bingle and Ol’ Blue Eyes swing-swing-swingle Well, Did You Evah? And Crosby and Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong jive with Now You Has Jazz.

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One of the greatest American films of the 1950s and a high point in the careers of both the lead actor James Mason and director Nicholas Ray.

Mason gives a towering performance as Ed Avery, a happily married schoolteacher who agrees to take a new 'miracle drug' when diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease. It is not long before the drug begins producing malevolent and murderous side-effects that bring to the fore all of Ed's long-repressed frustrations with his life. Mason's support is, exceptional: Barbara Rush as Ed's devoted wife, Christopher Olsen a s his cruelly punished son and Walter Matthau as his faithful colleague. One of cinema's most persuasive portraits of psychological turmoil, the film also succeeds magnificently as searing melodrama and subversive social critique, with Ray, his scriptwriters and cinematographer achieving a perfect balance between emotional realism and exprer;sionist allegory.

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In Melville's self-confessed 'love letter to Paris', the world-weary hero weaves his way through a stylised Parisian underworld, a failed gambler wearing a trench coat and a gentleman's code of honor.

His pursuit of the ultimate heist takes him on a journey from the Sacre Coeur to Montmartre and Pigalle. Encountering betrayal, secrets and a dangerously seductive young girl, Bob Le Flambeur seeks to carry out his one final crime, despite warnings from L'inspecteur, his loyal friend yet adversary.