Sunset Boulevard
Directed by Billy Wilder
1950
Hollywood has never been crueler about itself: Louis B. Mayer told Wilder he had disgraced the industry, which is the highest praise the film could possibly have received.
★ 9.5
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1950
Showing 52 works across all media from 1950
Rashomon
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1950 · Japan
Kurosawa gave the language a word for irreconcilable testimony and opened Japanese cinema to the world: four accounts of one killing, none of which can be squared with another.
★ 9.1
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)
1950 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Pollock worked on the floor and moved around the canvas instead of standing at an easel, laying black enamel across raw cotton in 1950.
★ 8.6
All About Eve
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1950
The sharpest script ever written about ambition: an aging star takes in an adoring young fan, and theater people have been quoting the lines for three-quarters of a century.
★ 8.6
Rollin' Stone
1950 · From The Anthology: 1947-1972
One man, one electric guitar, no band; the Chess single that later named a magazine and a British group.
★ 7.8
Woman I
1950 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
De Kooning dragged the figure back into abstract painting at the moment that was least acceptable, and worked this canvas over for two years.
★ 7.7
The Story of Art
1950 · 688 pages
There is no such thing as Art, Gombrich begins, only artists. From cave paintings to Picasso he explains what each was trying to solve, and you come out able to see it.
★ 7.2
Excavation
1950 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Hooks and curves fill the canvas edge to edge with no center to rest on, and teeth and jaws keep surfacing out of the mass.
★ 7.2
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
1950 · 171 pages
Four children evacuated from wartime London find a wardrobe opening onto snow, a lamppost, and a land where a witch has made it always winter. Lewis buried the Christian story inside an adventure.
★ 6.9
Discourse on Colonialism
1950 · 102 pages
Colonization degrades the colonizer into a brute, Césaire argues, and Hitler applied to Europe the methods empire reserved for everyone else. It turned the civilizing mission into a confession of barbarism.
★ 6.8
The Labyrinth of Solitude
1950 · 398 pages
Mexicans wear masks, Paz argues, because the Conquest left them sons of a violated mother, heirs to two pasts they refuse to join. Mexico has quarreled with these essays for seventy years.
★ 6.5
La Vie en Rose (Louis Armstrong)
1950
Cut in New York with Sy Oliver's orchestra in 1950, Piaf's song rebuilt around a trumpet and a rasp.
★ 6.4
I, Robot
1950 · 224 pages
Robots run on three laws: never harm a human, obey orders, survive. Asimov's stories hunt the cracks in those rules, and roboticists still argue about the Three Laws when drafting AI ethics.
★ 6.3
If You've Got the Money I've Got the TimeLefty Frizzell
If You've Got the Money I've Got the Time
1950
Jim Beck offered a free demo in his Dallas studio; Frizzell's stretched phrasing became the template Haggard and Jones inherited.
★ 6.2
Mona Lisa
1950
Nelson Riddle arranged it uncredited under Les Baxter's name, and Cole's baritone turned a B-side into a million seller.
★ 6.2
Please Send Me Someone to Love
1950
Cut for Art Rupe's Specialty in 1950, Mayfield's prayer for the world arrives before he asks anything for himself.
★ 6.2
I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?"
Computing Machinery and Intelligence · 1950
La Mariee (The Bride)
1950 · Private collection
A bride in red floats through the blue night with a goat playing a cello beside her. Many people know it from a film.
★ 6.1
Hymne a l'amour
1950
Piaf wrote these words for boxer Marcel Cerdan months before his plane went down, and recorded them the following May.
★ 6.0
Los Olvidados
Directed by Luis Bunuel
1950
Mexico City pulled it after three days and demanded it be banned, then Cannes gave Bunuel the directing prize: street children filmed without a trace of sentimentality about them.
★ 5.8
Tennessee WaltzPatti Page
Tennessee Waltz
1950
Stewart reportedly wrote the lyrics on a matchbox cover, and Page's double-tracked vocal held number one for nine weeks.
★ 5.7
I'm Movin' OnHank Snow
I'm Movin' On
1950
Twenty-one weeks at number one, and a chugging beat that lets the train do all the talking.
★ 5.5
Goodnight Irene
1950
Lead Belly died months before Gordon Jenkins's orchestra carried his waltz to thirteen weeks atop the American charts.
★ 4.9
Fragment of a Crucifixion
1950 · Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Bacon used the shape of the cross as an armature for meat rather than religion, with a snarling animal fixed on top.
★ 4.8
Harvey
Directed by Henry Koster
1950
James Stewart played it on Broadway and returned to the part for decades: an unfailingly pleasant man insists his closest friend is a six-foot-three invisible rabbit, and his family wants him committed.
★ 3.7
The Gunfighter
Directed by Henry King
1950
Gregory Peck plays the fastest gun alive as an exhausted man who wants a quiet drink: every revisionist western owes the premise, and Zanuck blamed the mustache for the box office.
★ 3.0
Foreign Affairs · 1950