98 Fun Facts About 1950s Movies

Which epic won a then-record eleven Academy Awards?

Ben-Hur lost only one of its 12 nominations, Best Adapted Screenplay, a loss blamed on the dispute over the writing credit.

Who co-directed and choreographed Singin' in the Rain with Stanley Donen?

Gene Kelly shot the rain-soaked title number while running a 103°F fever.

What transition in Hollywood history is Singin' in the Rain set during?

Silent films to talkies was the natural setting because many of its songs, by producer Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, had been written for films of that era.

Which future Easy Rider star debuted on film in a minor role in Rebel Without a Cause?

Dennis Hopper later clashed with director Henry Hathaway; in the most common telling, he did take after take rather than play a scene Hathaway's way.

Who plays the two musicians who disguise themselves as women in Some Like It Hot?

Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon looked so ghoulish in drag during colour tests that Billy Wilder shot the whole film in black and white.

What is the famous final line of Some Like It Hot?

"Well, nobody's perfect!" came from co-writer I.A.L. Diamond while the ending was still unsettled, and it stuck.

In which Hitchcock film does the camera track back while zooming in, the shot now called the dolly zoom?

Vertigo uses the trick as Scottie looks down, so the drop seems to stretch away and the audience shares his fear of heights.

Which Marilyn Monroe film shows her white dress billowing up over a New York subway grate?

The Seven Year Itch first shot the scene at 1 a.m. on Lexington Avenue before crowds of fans, then reshot it on a Fox set.

Rear Window is shot almost entirely from where?

Inside one apartment: Paramount built the whole Greenwich Village courtyard and the flats around it as one enormous set on a single soundstage.

Who designed the opening title sequence of North by Northwest?

It was the first film to make extended use of kinetic typography in its credits.

Which crime novelist's 1950 book did Hitchcock adapt as Strangers on a Train?

Patricia Highsmith's novel got a Raymond Chandler script, but Hitchcock threw it out and had Czenzi Ormonde start again from page one.

Dial M for Murder was originally intended to be shown in what format?

By its 1954 release interest in 3D had faded, so most cinemas showed it flat.

Sunset Boulevard stars Gloria Swanson as which faded silent star?

Norma Desmond's loyal butler is played by Erich von Stroheim, who really had directed Gloria Swanson back in the silent era.

All About Eve earned four female acting nominations, yet which star won that year's Best Actress Oscar?

Judy Holliday won for Born Yesterday, and Josephine Hull took Supporting Actress for Harvey, so all four All About Eve nominees went home empty-handed.

Which composer wrote his only original film score for On the Waterfront?

Leonard Bernstein's score was nominated but lost to The High and the Mighty, one of the few Oscars On the Waterfront missed while winning eight.

On the Waterfront deals with corruption among which workers?

Longshoremen's union rackets had been exposed in Malcolm Johnson's Pulitzer-winning New York Sun series, which inspired the film.

Who played Stanley Kowalski in the 1951 film of A Streetcar Named Desire?

Marlon Brando was the only one of the film's four nominated stars to lose, while Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden all won Oscars.

What distinctive structural device does High Noon use?

The plot unfolds in real time, or nearly, and writer Carl Foreman, branded an uncooperative witness by HUAC, moved to Britain in 1952.

Which film did the American Film Institute name the greatest American Western in 2008?

The Searchers inspired Buddy Holly: John Wayne's line "That'll be the day" became the basis of Holly's song of that name.

Which director won a record fourth Best Director Oscar for The Quiet Man?

John Ford won none of his four directing Oscars for a Western: the others were for The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley.

Seven Samurai's farmers hire the samurai to defend against whom?

Bandits coming back after the harvest threaten the village, and Hollywood later remade the story as The Magnificent Seven in 1960.

Rashomon's story comes from which author's short stories "In a Grove" and "Rashōmon"?

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's stories became a film its own studio doubted, yet Rashomon won the top prize at Venice and opened Western markets to Japanese cinema.

In The Seventh Seal, what game does the knight play against Death?

Chess against Death grew from the medieval church paintings of Death that Ingmar Bergman had never forgotten seeing as a boy.

Which star won his only Oscar as riverboat captain Charlie Allnut in The African Queen?

Humphrey Bogart said he lived on baked beans, canned asparagus and Scotch, and he and John Huston were nearly the only ones to escape dysentery.

Which blacklisted screenwriter's Roman Holiday Oscar went to his front, Ian McLellan Hunter?

Dalton Trumbo did it again with The Brave One, whose Oscar went to a made-up writer, Robert Rich, so he could not collect that one either.

Which Frenchman received the screenplay Oscar for The Bridge on the River Kwai, a script he never wrote?

Pierre Boulle wrote the novel, but the real screenwriters, blacklisted Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, received their Oscars only posthumously, in 1984.

From Here to Eternity follows Army soldiers stationed in which US territory in 1941?

Hawaii was the setting, and to win the Army's cooperation the film toned down the novel, making its sadistic stockade sergeant seem atypical.

Which Best Picture winner also won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, a double later matched by Parasite?

Marty began as an hour-long TV play by Paddy Chayefsky starring Rod Steiger, and the modest big-screen version went on to win Best Picture.

Which 1958 musical won every one of the nine Oscars it was nominated for?

Gigi swept all nine without a single acting nomination, not even for its stars Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier.

Which 1956 film saves its animated title sequence for the very end?

Around the World in 80 Days won Best Picture, though it was the first film Mike Todd had ever produced.

Who plays Rameses opposite Charlton Heston's Moses in The Ten Commandments?

Yul Brynner got the part after Cecil B. DeMille saw him on Broadway in The King and I and went backstage to offer it.

Which 1954 film was the first released in Paramount's VistaVision widescreen process?

The process used twice the surface area of standard 35mm film.

Who is the mysterious clown who never removes his makeup in The Greatest Show on Earth?

James Stewart's clown is secretly a doctor on the run from the law, which is why he never takes off his makeup.

In the 1950 film Harvey, what kind of animal is Elwood Dowd's invisible friend?

A rabbit over six feet tall: Josephine Hull, who played Elwood's sister on Broadway, kept the role on film and won an Oscar.

Which Bill Haley & His Comets song is heard in the school drama Blackboard Jungle?

Rock Around the Clock stirred up trouble: at one London screening, teenage Teddy Boys tore up cinema seats and danced in the aisles.

What is the name of Lee Marvin's rival motorcycle gang in The Wild One?

The Beetles and their rivals come from a story inspired by a 1947 motorcycle rally that got out of hand in Hollister, California.

Who made his feature directing debut with 12 Angry Men?

Sidney Lumet, trained in live television, shot the whole film in under three weeks on a low budget.

Which real lawyer who faced down McCarthy played the judge in Anatomy of a Murder?

Joseph N. Welch was the Army's lawyer who, at the 1954 hearings, asked McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency?"

In which real London court is Witness for the Prosecution set?

The Old Bailey case turns on a triple twist: the prosecution's star witness was secretly working to free the man she testified against.

Why was Paths of Glory kept out of French cinemas for many years?

Its negative depiction of the French military kept the film unseen in France for years, and Kubrick had shot it at a studio near Munich.

Who plays the murderous preacher Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter?

Robert Mitchum starred in a film that failed with audiences and critics, and Charles Laughton took it so hard he never directed again.

Who starred as a disfigured sculptor in the 1953 horror film House of Wax?

Vincent Price had barely worked in horror before House of Wax, and the role turned him into a lifelong horror star.

The 1954 film Them!, the first of the big-bug monster movies, is about which huge creatures?

Ants mutated by radiation from the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico, and the hunt for their nest ends in the storm drains of Los Angeles.

Which 1954 monster film was shaped by a US hydrogen bomb test that irradiated a Japanese fishing crew?

Godzilla was made months after the Lucky Dragon No. 5 came home with a contaminated catch, setting off a panic in Japan about eating fish.

Which future star had his first leading role in The Blob?

Steve McQueen was paid just $3,000, yet Paramount bought the low-budget film for $300,000, handing its makers an instant profit.

Forbidden Planet is often considered a loose adaptation of which Shakespeare play?

The Tempest's island becomes a far-off planet, and Louis and Bebe Barron scored the film with electronically generated sounds instead of instruments.

What was Disney's 1950 Cinderella credited with doing for the studio?

Saving it from near-bankruptcy mattered: by 1947 Disney was over $4 million in debt after wartime losses and costly flops such as Pinocchio and Fantasia.

Which Disney animated feature was filmed in the widescreen Super Technirama 70 process?

Sleeping Beauty was Walt Disney's most expensive animated feature to date, yet it was not a box-office success on its first release.

Which warlord did John Wayne play in The Conqueror (1956), shot downwind of a nuclear test site?

Genghis Khan became a byword for miscasting: in 1980 Wayne was posthumously given a Golden Turkey Award for Worst Casting for the role.

In Bedtime for Bonzo, future president Ronald Reagan plays a professor raising which animal like a child?

A chimpanzee named Bonzo is brought up like a human child because the professor wants to settle the nature-versus-nurture debate and prove that decency can be taught.

Which US agency secretly helped fund the 1954 British animated film of George Orwell's Animal Farm?

The CIA bought the screen rights from Orwell's widow through undercover agents and revised the script, treating the farmyard fable as a weapon against communism.

Which frontiersman did Fess Parker play in a 1955 Disney film amid a national coonskin cap craze?

Davy Crockett merchandise, from coonskin caps to bubble gum cards, had earned more than $300 million by the end of 1955. Parker went on to play Daniel Boone on television too.

Which American monument hosts the climactic chase in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller North by Northwest?

Mount Rushmore was largely rebuilt in the studio: mock-ups of the huge carved faces were intercut with real footage of the monument for the chase.

In An Affair to Remember, the lovers agree to reunite six months later at which New York landmark?

Empire State Building is where he waits in vain, because she is struck by a car while hurrying there. The ending later helped inspire the 1993 hit Sleepless in Seattle.

Which Western gave Elvis Presley his 1956 screen debut and was renamed after his hit ballad?

Love Me Tender was shot as The Reno Brothers, then renamed when advance orders for Presley's single passed one million copies, a first for a single.

Which star won an Oscar in her first American film, as a runaway princess in Roman Holiday?

Audrey Hepburn got the part only after first choices Elizabeth Taylor and Jean Simmons proved unavailable, and a screen test sent to the director in Rome sealed it.

Which singer revived his career by winning an Oscar as Private Maggio in From Here to Eternity?

Frank Sinatra took Best Supporting Actor for the part, one of eight Oscars the war drama won from 13 nominations, and its release began a remarkable revival for him.

Which tune do the British prisoners whistle as they enter the camp in The Bridge on the River Kwai?

Colonel Bogey March was a 1914 tune by a British Army bandmaster, and composer Malcolm Arnold wrote a fresh counter-melody to run beneath the whistling.

In Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), which sea creature attacks the submarine Nautilus?

A giant squid attack had to be filmed twice: the first version, staged at dusk on a calm sea, was scrapped and reshot at night in a storm to hide the model's cables.

In which 1950s film do alien seed pods grow emotionless copies of a town's residents?

Invasion of the Body Snatchers gave American slang the phrase pod people, after the blank duplicates that take over the town of Santa Mira, California.

Creature from the Black Lagoon follows scientists who meet the Gill-man in which river's waters?

The Amazon setting grew out of a dinner-party tale: a Mexican cinematographer told the producer legends of half-fish, half-human creatures said to live in the river.

Which eccentric tycoon took over RKO Pictures in 1948 and sold the declining studio in 1955?

Howard Hughes dismissed three-quarters of the workforce within weeks of taking over, and production virtually shut down for six months while he shelved pictures he disliked.

In which 1953 musical comedy does Marilyn Monroe perform her famous diamonds number in a pink dress?

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes pairs her with Jane Russell as showgirl best friends bound for France, and the pink-dress routine has been recreated by many later artists in homage.

Which painter did Kirk Douglas play in Lust for Life, opposite Anthony Quinn's Oscar-winning Gauguin?

Van Gogh brought Douglas a Golden Globe and the New York critics' prize but no Oscar, while Quinn won Best Supporting Actor as his friend and rival.

In The Incredible Shrinking Man, which basement creature does the tiny hero finally kill with a pin?

A spider of the black widow kind, as in the novel, proved too small on camera, so the director filmed tarantulas instead and steered them with little puffs of air.

Which 1956 musical set in Siam had Deborah Kerr's songs dubbed by the unseen singer Marni Nixon?

The King and I kept its ghost singer hidden from audiences, but Kerr broke Hollywood convention by publicly crediting Nixon for the voice.

Which playwright's A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof both became 1950s films?

Tennessee Williams knew Hollywood from the inside: years before these adaptations, MGM had briefly kept him under contract as a staff screenwriter.

Which director's last picture was The Ten Commandments, a remake of part of his own 1923 epic?

Cecil B. DeMille made it his first widescreen film and his most successful, and it proved his final work as a director before his death in 1959.

Which John Steinbeck adaptation was the only film starring James Dean released in his lifetime?

East of Eden reached cinemas six months before his fatal crash, and its tale of a son competing with a favoured brother for a father's affection retells Cain and Abel.

In Pillow Talk, what do the feuding characters played by Doris Day and Rock Hudson have to share?

A telephone line split between two homes, known as a party line, starts the feud: the decorator and the playboy composer have only ever met over the phone.

Which Oscar-winning song is sung as a signal to a kidnapped boy in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)?

Que Sera, Sera was introduced on screen by Doris Day, who sings it so her captive son will hear, and her record of it climbed to number two on the Billboard chart.

In The Caine Mutiny, what goes missing from the officers' mess and sets off Captain Queeg's inquiry?

Strawberries, a single quart of them, are enough for Queeg to convene an elaborate inquiry, and his officers come to believe he is paranoid and unfit for duty.

In On the Beach (1959), survivors of a nuclear war await the drifting fallout in which country?

Australia takes in Gregory Peck's American submarine commander, who docks at Melbourne, the last major city on Earth that the drifting fallout will reach.

Which director, who left Germany as the Nazis rose, made Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot?

Billy Wilder worked as a journalist in Vienna before the movies, reached Hollywood in 1934 and had his first major hit as a co-writer of the comedy Ninotchka.

Which biblical epic starring Richard Burton was the first feature released in CinemaScope?

The Robe was shot twice over, once with the new anamorphic lenses and once flat, because many cinemas were not yet equipped to show the wide format.

Which Best Picture winner builds to a 17-minute wordless ballet set to George Gershwin's music?

An American in Paris spent about half a million dollars on that finale alone, dressing its sets and costumes in the styles of painters such as Dufy, Rousseau and Utrillo.

In The Day the Earth Stood Still, which hulking robot accompanies the alien visitor Klaatu?

Gort belongs to an interplanetary police force of invincible robots, and he was played by Lock Martin, an actor who stood more than seven feet tall.

Which H. G. Wells novel became a 1953 film that moved its story from Victorian England to California?

The War of the Worlds won the Oscar for its visual effects, trading the novel's striding metal tripods for manta ray-shaped machines that float above the ground.

Which future Bonanza star played the troubled student turned monster in I Was a Teenage Werewolf?

Michael Landon plays a teenager injected with a serum that regresses him to primitive instincts; two years later he became Little Joe Cartwright on television.

Which William Castle horror film put vibrating devices in some cinema seats, a gimmick billed as Percepto?

The Tingler is about a parasite on the human spine that feeds on fear, and the seat devices were triggered by the action on screen so viewers felt it too.

Which British studio revived Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy in vivid colour from the late 1950s?

Hammer Films, founded back in 1934, became famous for Gothic horror, with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as the two actors most associated with the company.

Which John Wayne Western did director Howard Hawks make in 1959 as a rebuttal to High Noon?

Rio Bravo gives its sheriff a hero's nerve: Hawks had complained that a good lawman would not go running through town asking for help, so his turns amateurs away.

Which Japanese director made Ikiru and Seven Samurai after Rashomon won the top prize at Venice in 1951?

Akira Kurosawa averaged about a film a year through the decade, and the Golden Lion for Rashomon stunned a film world largely unaware of Japanese cinema.

Which Swedish director made Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal in the 1950s?

Ingmar Bergman first found worldwide success with the comedy Smiles of a Summer Night, then won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1957 for The Seventh Seal.

Which Federico Fellini film about a travelling strongman won the first Best Foreign Language Film Oscar?

La Strada took the inaugural award in 1957, with Anthony Quinn as Zampanò, the brutish performer who buys a simple-minded young woman from her mother.

Which François Truffaut debut about a misunderstood schoolboy became a defining French New Wave film?

The 400 Blows centres on Antoine Doinel, a semi-autobiographical character reflecting Truffaut's own life, and it won him the Best Director award at Cannes.

In The Wages of Fear (1953), four desperate men drive trucks loaded with which dangerous cargo?

Nitroglycerin is needed to blast out an oil well fire, and the mountain roads are so rough that the oil company's own unionised drivers are spared the job.

Which British war film about the bouncing bomb raids inspired the Death Star attack in Star Wars?

The Dam Busters was a deliberate, acknowledged model for that climax, and George Lucas hired its special effects photographer, Gilbert Taylor, to shoot Star Wars.

In The Lavender Hill Mob, stolen gold is smuggled out of Britain as souvenir models of which landmark?

The Eiffel Tower paperweights are cast from bullion stolen by a meek London bank clerk, played by Alec Guinness, who had supervised gold deliveries for twenty years.

Which Orson Welles noir opens with a crane shot of over three minutes tracking a car with a time bomb?

Touch of Evil got Welles as its director after star Charlton Heston suggested him, and he also rewrote the script and played the veteran police captain Hank Quinlan.

Which stop-motion pioneer animated the sword-fighting skeleton in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)?

Ray Harryhausen called his method Dynamation, and this was the first film in which he used full colour widescreen stop motion for the effects.

Which director of On the Waterfront had testified as a friendly witness before HUAC in 1952?

Elia Kazan never lived it down: when he received an honorary Oscar in 1999, some actors in the audience stayed seated without applauding and about 250 demonstrators protested outside.

Who co-directed The Silent World, the 1956 undersea documentary that won the top prize at Cannes?

Jacques Cousteau shared the credit with Louis Malle, and it remained the only documentary to win the Palme d'Or until Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004.

Which comedian hosted the Hollywood half of the first televised Academy Awards in 1953?

Bob Hope had to wear a blue dress shirt with his dinner jacket that night, because a traditional white one would have been too bright for the television cameras.

The 1950s intermission cartoon Let's All Go to the Lobby stars a singing, walking line of what?

Snack foods, among them popcorn, candy and a soft drink, urge the audience to buy refreshments, and the advert joined the US National Film Registry in 2000.

Which Indian director's 1955 debut Pather Panchali, the first of the Apu Trilogy, won a prize at Cannes?

Satyajit Ray was a commercial artist who turned to film-making after meeting Jean Renoir in India and seeing the Italian neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves in London.

Which Ed Wood film, often branded the worst ever made, used footage of the late Bela Lugosi?

Plan 9 from Outer Space played in obscurity on television for years before a 1980 book gave it the worst-ever label, and it has since gained a large cult following.

Which Sandra Dee film of 1959 is credited with carrying California surf culture into the mainstream?

Gidget follows a tomboy who finds surfing more appealing than chasing boys, and surf historians name the film the single biggest factor in taking the sport mainstream.