Tag: 1949

Director: Henry King
Stars: Gregory Peck, Hugh Marlowe, Gary Merrill
Genre: Drama, War
Country: USA

A hard-as-nails general takes over a bomber unit suffering from low morale and whips them into fighting shape.

Director: Anthony Mann
Stars: Ricardo Montalban, George Murphy, Howard Da Silva
Genre: Crime, Drama, Film-Noir
Country: USA

Mexican and American federal agents tackle a vicious gang exploiting illegal farm workers in southern California.

Director: Byron Haskin
Stars: Lizabeth Scott, Don DeFore, Dan Duryea
Genre: Crime, Drama, Film-Noir
Country: USA

Through a fluke circumstance, a ruthless woman stumbles across a suitcase filled with $60,000, and is determined to hold onto it even if it means murder.

Director: Yves Allégret
Stars: Madeleine Robinson, Gérard Philipe, Jean Servais
Genre: Drama
Country: France | Netherlands

During the cold and rainy off-season a man arrives in a seaside town and, giving his name only as Pierre, checks into the only hotel which remains open. His arrival arouses curiosity and a degree of suspicion, as people note that he appears to know the area, yet gives no explanation for his presence at that bleak time of year in the dead-end town.

Director: Giuseppe De Santis
Stars: Vittorio Gassman, Doris Dowling, Silvana Mangano
Genre: Drama
Country: Italy

Two criminals on the run end up working in a rice field and decide to recruit other workers for their next robbery.

Director: Emlyn Williams
Stars: Edith Evans, Emlyn Williams, Richard Burton
Genre: Drama
Country: UK

A peaceful North Wales village is about to disappear once and for all under the waters of a dam that is about to be built by a powerful water company commanded by a city businessman, at one time a local resident of the place. It’s time for the simple villagers to take action and try to save the only place they know and love.

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Stars: Ib Koch-Olsen
Genre: Documentary, Short
Country: Denmark

Documentary short film about the work of Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), one of the most famous Danish sculptors, who spent a good part of his life in Italy.

Director: Sam Wood
Stars: James Stewart, June Allyson, Frank Morgan
Genre: Biography, Drama, Romance
Country: USA

Star major league pitcher Monty Stratton loses a leg in a hunting accident, but becomes determined to leave the game on his own terms.

Director: Mark Robson
Stars: Dana Andrews, Susan Hayward, Kent Smith
Genre: Drama, Romance
Country: USA

After being visited by an old friend, a woman recalls her true love, the man she met and lost years ago.

Director: Clarence Brown
Stars: David Brian, Claude Jarman Jr., Juano Hernandez
Genre: Crime, Drama
Country: USA

In 1940s Mississippi, two teenage boys and an elderly woman combine forces to prevent a miscarriage of justice and clear a black man of a murder charge.

Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Stars: Edward G. Robinson, Susan Hayward, Richard Conte
Genre: Crime, Drama, Film-Noir
Country: USA

After years in prison, Max promises revenge on his brothers for their betrayal. His lover Irene and memories of his past yield him a broader perspective.

Director: Don Siegel
Stars: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, William Bendix
Genre: Crime, Film-Noir, Romance
Country: USA

An army lieutenant accused of robbery pursues the real thief on a frantic chase through Mexico aided by the thief’s fiancee.

Director: Ted Tetzlaff
Stars: Bobby Driscoll, Barbara Hale, Arthur Kennedy
Genre: Drama, Film-Noir, Thriller
Country: USA

To avoid the heat of a sweltering summer night a 9-year-old Manhattan boy decides to sleep on the fire escape and witnesses a murder, but no one will believe him.

Director: Max Ophüls
Stars: James Mason, Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Ryan
Genre: Drama, Film-Noir, Romance
Country: USA

An L.A. department store ambitious young model gets her wish of marrying a millionaire but she eventually discovers that rich life isn’t always a happy one.

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Stars: Eva Henning, Birger Malmsten, Birgit Tengroth
Genre: Drama
Country: Sweden

A needy couple in a bad marriage travel back to Stockholm after a trip to Italy. Meanwhile, a widow resists seductions from two different persons – her psychiatrist and a lesbian friend.

Director: Robert Hamer
Stars: Eric Portman, Guy Rolfe, Nadia Gray
Genre: Crime, Romance, Thriller
Country: UK

A clever and dedicated French police official, a cleverer master-thief whom he secretly admires, the woman loved by the official who is in love with the thief, at the outbreak of World War I.

Director: Anthony Pelissier
Stars: Valerie Hobson, John Howard Davies, Ronald Squire
Genre: Drama, Fantasy
Country: UK

A young boy receives a rocking horse for Christmas and soon learns that he is able to pick the winning horse at the races.

Director: Kenneth Anger
Stars: Yvonne Marquis
Genre: Short
Country: USA

A soundtrack plays folk rock as a woman prepares, at noon, to take her Borzois for a walk. She goes through her dresses, all 1920s style flapper gowns, holding them one at a time, shaking them as if they are dancing. She picks one – in puce. She puts it on, delighted, adds perfume, languishes on a chaise for a few minutes, then goes for her walk. It all has a 20s feel.

Director: Maya Deren
Stars: Chao Li Chi
Genre: Short
Country: USA

The setting with the low walls and river views is located in a private area of The Cloisters museum.

Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Stars: June Allyson, Peter Lawford, Margaret O’Brien
Genre: Drama, Family, Romance
Country: USA

A group of sisters experience life’s difficulties and its pleasures while growing up in nineteenth-century America.

Director: Pietro Germi
Stars: Massimo Girotti, Charles Vanel, Jone Salinas
Genre: Crime, Drama
Country: Italy

A young, by-the-book judge is appointed to a Sicilian village controlled by corrupt leaders and the mafia.

Director: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Stars: David Farrar, Jack Hawkins, Kathleen Byron
Genre: Drama, Romance, Thriller
Country: UK

As the Germans drop explosive booby-traps on Britain in 1943, the embittered expert who’ll have to disarm them fights a private battle with alcohol.

Director: Michael Curtiz
Stars: Joan Crawford, Zachary Scott, Sydney Greenstreet
Genre: Drama, Film-Noir, Romance
Country: USA

A small town corrupt sheriff manipulates local candidates to the state legislature but he eventually comes into conflict with a visiting carnival dancer.

Director: Henry Koster
Stars: Loretta Young, Celeste Holm, Hugh Marlowe
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Country: USA

Two nuns arrive unannounced in the small New England town of Bethlehem, where they recruit various townspeople to help them build a children’s hospital.

Director: King Vidor
Stars: Bette Davis, Joseph Cotten, David Brian
Genre: Drama, Film-Noir, Romance
Country: USA

Resentful of her small-town life, a married woman schemes to run off with a rich businessman.

Director: John Farrow
Stars: Ray Milland, Audrey Totter, Thomas Mitchell
Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Film-Noir
Country: USA

A district attorney rises to political success and the governorship but loses his sense of morality once he starts associating with the shadowy and perhaps diabolical Nick Beal.

Director: Alexander Mackendrick
Stars: Basil Radford, Joan Greenwood, Catherine Lacey
Genre: Comedy, Crime
Country: UK

Scottish islanders try to plunder 50,000 cases of whisky from a stranded ship.

Director: Jules Dassin
Stars: Richard Conte, Valentina Cortese, Lee J. Cobb
Genre: Drama, Film-Noir, Thriller
Country: USA

A war-veteran-turned-truck driver attempts to avenge the crippling and robbing of his father at the hands of an amoral produce scofflaw.

Director: Robert Wise
Stars: Robert Ryan, Audrey Totter, George Tobias
Genre: Crime, Film-Noir, Sport
Country: USA

Because aging boxer Bill Thompson always lost his past fights, his corrupt manager, without telling Thompson, takes bribes from a betting gangster, to ensure Thompson’s pre-arranged dive-loss in the next match.

Director: Jacques Becker
Stars: Daniel Gélin, Brigitte Auber, Nicole Courcel
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Country: France

Hopes and love and ambitions and friendship in a group of young jazz-loving Parisians.

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Stars: Toshirô Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Miki Sanjô
Genre: Drama
Country: Japan

A surgeon gets syphilis from a patient when he cuts himself during an operation. The doctor’s life is destroyed, but unlike the patient, he doesn’t destroy others along with him.

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Stars: Doris Svedlund, Birger Malmsten, Eva Henning
Genre: Drama
Country: Sweden

A film director tries to create the best film in history, but finds out that human abilities have their limits.

Director: Jean Grémillon
Stars: Suzy Delair, Fernand Ledoux, Paul Bernard
Genre: Drama
Country: France

An eccentric man (Paul Bernard) endangers himself when he makes advances toward the girlfriend (Suzy Delair) of a saloon keeper (Fernand Ledoux).

Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Stars: Serge Reggiani, Michel Auclair, Cécile Aubry
Genre: Drama, Crime
Country: France

An adaptation of Abbe Prevost’s classic French novel ‘Manon Lescaut’, updated to post-World War II France, in which a former French Resistance activist rescues Manon from villagers who want to lynch her for collaborating with the Nazis. They move to Paris, but their relationship quickly turns stormy after they get involved in profiteering, prostitution and murder.

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Stars: Howard Vernon, Nicole Stéphane, Jean-Marie Robain
Genre: Drama, Romance, War
Country: France

1941 in a small town in Nazi occupied France. Against the will of its elderly male and his adult niece residents, the Nazis commandeer a house for one of their officers, Lt. Werner von Ebrennac, to live in for as long as he is in the area on Nazi business.

Director: Howard Hawks
Stars: Cary Grant, Ann Sheridan, Marion Marshall
Genre: Comedy, Romance, War
Country: USA

After marrying an American lieutenant with whom he was assigned to work in post-war Germany, a French captain attempts to find a way to accompany her back to the States under the terms of the War Bride Act.

Director: Don Hartman
Stars: Robert Mitchum, Janet Leigh, Wendell Corey
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance
Country: USA

A young widow is romanced by a sales clerk whom she inadvertently got fired.

Director: Luis Buñuel
Stars: Fernando Soler, Rosario Granados, Andrés Soler
Genre: Comedy
Country: Mexico

Concerns a family’s attempts to change the patriarch’s somewhat indulgent and hedonistic ways by fooling him into thinking his large fortune is gone.

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Stars: Kinuyo Tanaka, Mitsuko Mito, Kuniko Miyake
Genre: Drama, Romance
Country: Japan

A woman’s struggle for equality in Japan in the 1880s. Eiko Hirayama leaves Okayama for Tokyo, where she helps the fledgling Liberal Party and falls in love with its leader Kentaro Omoi, just as the party is being disbanded by the government.

Director: Raoul Walsh
Stars: Joel McCrea, Virginia Mayo, Dorothy Malone
Genre: Western
Country: USA

In Colorado territory, outlaw Wes McQueen escapes jail to pull a railroad robbery but, upon meeting pretty settler Julie Ann, he wonders about going straight.

Director: Henri Decoin
Stars: Louis Jouvet, Madeleine Robinson, Léo Lapara
Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery
Country: France

A police detective with a striking resemblance for a murdered criminal impersonates the deceased to identify his murderer.

Director: Fred Zinnemann
Stars: Van Heflin, Robert Ryan, Janet Leigh
Genre: Drama, Film-Noir, Thriller
Country: USA

An embittered, vengeful POW stalks his former commanding officer who betrayed his men’s planned escape attempt from a Nazi prison camp.

Director: René Clément
Stars: Jean Gabin, Isa Miranda, Vera Talchi
Genre: Drama, Romance
Country: Italy | France

A French fugitive arrives in Genoa, where he becomes entangled with an Italian woman and her daughter.

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, Michael Wilding
Genre: Crime, Drama, Romance
Country: UK

A young gentleman goes to Australia where he reunites with his now married childhood sweetheart, only to find out she has become an alcoholic and harbors dark secrets.

Director: John Berry
Stars: Richard Basehart, Audrey Totter, Cyd Charisse
Genre: Crime, Drama, Film-Noir
Country: USA

A meek pharmacist creates an alternate identity under which he plans to murder the bullying liquor salesman who has become his wife’s lover.

Director: Fred M. Wilcox
Stars: Margaret O’Brien, Herbert Marshall, Dean Stockwell
Genre: Drama, Family
Country: USA

A girl is sent to live with her uncle on his estate when her parents die. There she discovers much intrigue, family history and secrets and personal baggage. In particular, a screaming child and…a secret garden.

Director: Anthony Mann
Stars: Robert Cummings, Richard Basehart, Richard Hart
Genre: History, Romance, Thriller
Country: USA

Robespierrre, a powerful figure in the French revolution, is desperately looking for his black book, a death list of those marked for the guillotine.

Director: Thorold Dickinson
Stars: Anton Walbrook, Edith Evans, Yvonne Mitchell
Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Horror
Country: UK

An elderly countess strikes a bargain with the devil and exchanges her soul for the ability to always win at cards. An army officer, who is also a fanatic about cards, murders her for the secret, then finds himself haunted by the woman’s spirit.

Director: David Lean
Stars: Ann Todd, Trevor Howard, Claude Rains
Genre: Drama
Country: UK

The Passionate Friends were in love when young, but separated, and she married an older man. Then Mary Justin (Ann Todd) meets Steven Stratton (Trevor Howard) again and they have one last fling together in the Alps.

Director: Vincente Minnelli
Stars: Jennifer Jones, James Mason, Van Heflin
Genre: Drama, Romance
Country: Japan

A provincial doctor’s wife’s romantic illusions about life and social status lead her to betray her naive husband, take on lovers and run up ruinous debts.

Director: Yasujirô Ozu
Stars: Chishû Ryû, Setsuko Hara, Yumeji Tsukioka
Genre: Drama
Country: Japan

Noriko is twenty-seven years old and still living with her widowed father. Everybody tries to talk her into marrying, but Noriko wants to stay at home caring for her father.

Director: Nicholas Ray
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, John Derek, George Macready
Genre: Crime, Drama, Film-Noir
Country: USA

An attorney defends a hoodlum of murder, using the oppressiveness of the slums to appeal to the court.

Director: Samuel Fuller
Stars: Preston Foster, Barbara Britton, John Ireland
Genre: Drama, History, Romance
Country: USA

Bob Ford murders his best friend Jesse James in order to obtain a pardon that will free him to marry his girlfriend but is plagued by guilt and self-disgust.

Director: Vincent Sherman
Stars: Ronald Reagan, Patricia Neal, Richard Todd
Genre: Drama, War
Country: UK

In the final days of WW2, in a M.A.S.H. unit in Burma, a severely wounded corporal watches in dismay as fellow soldiers pack-up to return home but a caring nurse and five remaining soldiers bring him solace.

Director: Edward Dmytryk
Stars: Sam Wanamaker, Lea Padovani, Kathleen Ryan
Genre: Drama
Country: UK

Geremio, a young Italian immigrant to New York City, works as a bricklayer and is courting an Italian girl, Annunziata, by mail. He lies to her that he owns his own home and, after they are married, has to rent one for their three-day honeymoon.

Director: Kenneth Anger
Stars: Kenneth Anger, Gordon Gray, Bill Seltzer
Genre: Short, Drama, Horror
Country: USA

A wordless film, save for a voice-over introducing us to the imagery of dreams. A shirtless young man dreams of awakening to finds photographs of a muscular sailor carrying him in his arms.

Director: Jacques Tourneur
Stars: Victor Mature, Lizabeth Scott, Lucille Ball
Genre: Drama, Sport
Country: USA

Pete Wilson is on top. He is the highest paid professional football player in the league. He has seen other players come and go, but he was MVP last year and the future looks rosy. But Pete discovers that he has a condition that may end his career and all that he knows is football.

Director: Henry Hathaway
Stars: Richard Widmark, Lionel Barrymore, Dean Stockwell
Genre: Action, Adventure, Drama
Country: USA

Whaling ship captain Bering Joy takes his grandson Jed on a whaling trip to teach him core life values while First Mate Dan Lunceford is tasked with tutoring Jed.

Director: Mark Robson
Stars: Kirk Douglas, Arthur Kennedy, Marilyn Maxwell
Genre: Drama, Film-Noir, Sport
Country: USA

Boxer Midge Kelly rises to fame…mainly by stepping on other people.

Director: William A. Wellman
Stars: Van Johnson, John Hodiak, Ricardo Montalban
Genre: Action, Drama, History
Country: USA

True tale about a squad of the 101st Airborne Division coping with being trapped by the Germans in the besieged city of Bastogne, Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge in December of 1944.

Director: William Dieterle
Stars: Loretta Young, Robert Cummings, Wendell Corey
Genre: Drama, Film-Noir, Thriller
Country: USA

A beautiful psychology professor tries to hide a self-defense killing.

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Stars: Toshirô Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Awaji
Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery
Country: Japan

During a sweltering summer, a rookie homicide detective tries to track down his stolen Colt pistol.

Director: Jacques Tati
Stars: Jacques Tati, Guy Decomble, Paul Frankeur
Genre: Comedy
Country: France

Once a year the fair comes for one day to the little town ‘Sainte-Severe-sur-Indre’. All inhabitants are scoffing at Francois, the postman, what he seems not to recognize. The rising of the flagstaff under his direction nearly leads into a catastrophy – but everybody tells him, how important his work is.

Director: Georges Franju
Stars: Georges Hubert, Nicole Ladmiral, Alfred Macquart
Genre: Documentary, Short
Country: France

Bucolic scenes from the outskirts of Paris are contrasted with stark footage from slaughterhouses.