Gordon MacRae

The guy could sing... about that there was never any question.  I think he had the finest, richest, mellowest baritone voice to ever hit the movies. (Stay home, Nelson Eddy.) Gordon MacRae practically raised me.  I never missed a single one of those sunny, nostalgia musicals he made at Warner Bros, mainly with Doris Day.  He was a singer who could act but unfortunately after musicals went out of style, especially his kind of musical, Hollywood didn't take notice of his acting abilities and they cast him aside.  I was very unhappy.  So was he.

Good 50's Films: The Nun's Story

1959 Drama
From Warner Bros.
Directed by Fred Zinnemann

Starring
Audrey Hepburn
Peter Finch
Edith Evans
Peggy Ashcroft
Dean Jagger
Mildred Dunnock
Beatrice Straight
Patricia Collinge
Ruth White
Barbara O'Neil
Colleen Dewhurst

Richard Egan

It's likely even he would have said that he never made it to the top of the Hollywood heap, never achieved the status that he might have once wished for.  But he was most certainly a durable leading man, able to carry a movie and I know (because I just looked it up) that I didn't miss a single film of his in the 50's.  

Remakes: Born Yesterday

Born Yesterday was a popular comedy that ran on Broadway for three years in the late 1940's.  It made a star of Judy Holliday as Billie Dawn, the ditzy, ex-chorus girl girlfriend of Harry Brock, a loud-mouthed, uncouth junk tycoon (Paul Douglas) who is in Washington to try to strike a deal with crooked politicians.  He hires a tutor (Gary Merrill) to teach his girlfriend some etiquette so that she may make a more favorable impression upon the political elite.

Good 50's Films: Oklahoma!

1955 Musical
From The Samuel Goldwyn Company
Directed by Fred Zinnemann

Starring
Gordon MacRae
Shirley Jones
Gene Nelson
Gloria Grahame
Charlotte Greenwood
Eddie Albert
Rod Steiger
James Whitmore
Barbara Lawrence
Jay C. Flippen

Good 50's Films: From Here to Eternity

1953 Romance Drama
From Columbia Pictures
Directed by Fred Zinnemann

Starring
Burt Lancaster
Montgomery Clift
Deborah Kerr
Donna Reed
Frank Sinatra
Ernest Borgnine
Philip Ober
Jack Warden

James Dean: The First American Teenager

He was a renegade... an outsider... a con artist... an iconoclast.  He wasn't so much ahead of his time as he defined his time.  He wasn't an original because two others, Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, hit the scene a little earlier, but the trio was original.  Hollywood had truly never seen anything like any of them.  Dean idolized both actors, recognizing that he had their same enormous talent and deeply troubling ways.

Movie-Making in the 1950s

Ah, at last we have made it to the 1950's, my favorite movie decade.  I could never dispute that the Golden Age of Hollywood, the 1930's and 1940's, was the best that was ever served up and I said as much when those decades were highlighted.  But for me there's never been any that tripped my switches like the fabulous fifties.  There's a good reason.