Tutti-Frutti
1955 · From Here's Little Richard
A nonsense holler cleaned up just enough to press, and the moment rock and roll stopped asking permission.
★ 9.5
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1955
Showing 74 works across all media from 1955
Lolita
1955 · 317 pages
Humbert Humbert explains how he became stepfather to a twelve-year-old girl and drove her across America. Nabokov gives the monster the most beautiful prose in English and dares you to enjoy it.
★ 9.1
Pather Panchali
Directed by Satyajit Ray
1955
Indian cinema arrived in the world with this: Ray shot it on weekends with a first-time crew and no money, and the children seeing a train is pure wonder.
★ 8.5
The Night of the Hunter
Directed by Charles Laughton
1955
Charles Laughton never directed again after it failed, and critics have spent seventy years calling it a masterpiece: a preacher with tattooed knuckles and two children on a river.
★ 8.4
Maybellene
1955 · From Chuck Berry Is on Top
Ida Red, a 1938 Bob Wills fiddle tune, turned into a car chase, with Johnnie Johnson's piano running underneath.
★ 8.4
Night
1955 · 120 pages
Wiesel was a religious teenager when his town was emptied and he arrived at Auschwitz with his father. He tells it in short flat sentences, and the flatness is unbearable.
★ 8.3
Mannish BoyMuddy Waters
Mannish Boy
1955 · From The Anthology: 1947-1972
Waters answered Bo Diddley's answer to his own song in 1955, holding one chord and a stop-time riff throughout.
★ 8.1
Folsom Prison Blues
1955 · From Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar
A prison film in Germany gave Cash the song; he borrowed the melody from Gordon Jenkins and later paid up.
★ 8.1
Pedro Paramo
1955 · 144 pages
Looking for the father he never met, a man walks into a Mexican town where everyone he speaks to is dead. Voices drift free of their bodies, and magical realism follows.
★ 8.0
Notes of a Native Son
1955 · 149 pages
Baldwin buries his father on his nineteenth birthday while Harlem riots, and winters as the only Black man in a Swiss village. He turns his own life into an argument about America.
★ 7.9
A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
1955 · 276 pages
On a Georgia back road a grandmother who talked her family into a detour meets an escaped killer. O'Connor's stories stay funny until the violence arrives, which is how grace arrives too.
★ 7.8
Bo Diddley
1955 · From Bo Diddley
Jerome Green's maracas, a tremolo guitar shaking like heat haze, and the beat that took Bo Diddley's name.
★ 7.6
Mystery Train
1955 · From The Sun Sessions
Two years after Junior Parker cut it at Sun, Moore's slapback guitar turned the same train into rockabilly.
★ 7.6
Ain't That a Shame
1955
Bartholomew and Domino wrote it, Pat Boone's cover took the number one, and Domino's rolling piano triplets outlasted it.
★ 7.5
I'm a ManBo Diddley
I'm a Man
1955 · From Bo Diddley
One chord cut at Chess in March 1955, and Muddy Waters answered it with Mannish Boy by May.
★ 7.3
East of Eden
Directed by Elia Kazan
1955
The only James Dean performance released while he was still alive: Steinbeck's Cain and Abel moved to a California lettuce valley, and Dean improvises his way through it.
★ 7.3
Diabolique
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
1955 · France
Clouzot got to the material just before Hitchcock could buy it and made the more frightening film: a wife and a mistress conspire against the same terrible man.
★ 7.1
Illuminations
1955 · 304 pages
Benjamin asks what photography did to art and answers that a work loses its aura once anyone can copy it. Elsewhere history appears as an angel blown backward, staring at the wreckage.
★ 7.1
Rebel Without a Cause
Directed by Nicholas Ray
1955
The teenager as a subject starts here: James Dean in a red jacket, a knife fight at an observatory, and parents who have no idea what is happening.
★ 7.0
In the Wee Small Hours
1955
Sixteen ballads in one unbroken mood, recorded after his marriage to Ava Gardner fell apart, and built to be heard in order.
★ 6.9
The Great PretenderThe Platters
The Great Pretender
1955
Twenty minutes in a Las Vegas hotel washroom, by Ram's account, and Tony Williams sings heartbreak behind a smile.
★ 6.9
The Quiet American
1955 · 180 pages
Greene put a British correspondent and an idealistic young American in Saigon, fighting over the same woman and over a theory. He saw the American war in Vietnam a decade before it started.
★ 6.7
The Great Twenty-Eight
1955
Berry trained as a beautician and worked on a car assembly line in St. Louis when Muddy Waters told him which Chicago label to try.
★ 6.7
Tristes Tropiques
1955 · 424 pages
Levi-Strauss opens by declaring he hates traveling and explorers, then takes you into Brazil's interior among the Bororo and Nambikwara. Science, memoir, and philosophy run together in mourning for what contact destroyed.
★ 6.6
The Sacrament of the Last Supper
1955 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
The room is a twelve-sided glass chamber and a torso hovers over the table. Dalí called this sort of thing nuclear mysticism.
★ 6.5
Rififi
Directed by Jules Dassin
1955 · France
Dassin was blacklisted out of Hollywood and made this in France for almost nothing: the half-hour robbery at its center plays in near-total silence, and the genre has been imitating it since.
★ 6.5
The Great Crash, 1929
1955 · 224 pages
Galbraith reconstructs how a country talked itself into buying stock with borrowed money, from the Florida land boom onward, and names the bezzle: the embezzlement a rising market hides and a crash exposes.
★ 6.4
The Talented Mr. Ripley
1955 · 288 pages
Sent to Italy to fetch a shipping magnate's son, Tom Ripley falls for the life instead, murders his friend, and wears his name. Highsmith makes you want him to get away with it.
★ 6.3
The Sun Sessions
1955
Elvis was a nineteen-year-old truck driver. That's All Right came out of the three of them messing about during a break Sam Phillips had called.
★ 6.3
A Dance to the Music of Time
First Movement
1955 · 732 pages
Powell's twelve novels follow one English generation from a boarding school in 1921 into the 1970s. These first three introduce the narrator Nick Jenkins and Widmerpool, the ridiculous boy whose rise never stops.
★ 6.2
Memed, My Hawk
1955 · 392 pages
Five villages belong to Abdi Agha. The boy Memed runs, is dragged back, kills, and takes to the mountains, where Kemal turns a peasant's revolt into an epic of Turkey's Çukurova plain.
★ 6.2
The Greek Myths
1955 · 784 pages
Graves retells every Greek myth, cites his ancient sources, then argues underneath that all of it encodes a matriarchal religion the Greeks overthrew. Generations of English readers got their mythology from him.
★ 5.9
The Opium of the Intellectuals
1955 · 467 pages
Marx called religion the opium of the people. Aron answered that Marxism is the opium of intellectuals, then took apart the founding myths of Left, Revolution and Proletariat. Paris shunned him for decades.
★ 5.9
God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children · 1955
Kiss Me Deadly
Directed by Robert Aldrich
1955
Film noir's meanest specimen: Robert Aldrich turned Mickey Spillane's detective into a thug worse than the criminals he chases, and gave the genre an ending nobody in 1955 was ready for.
★ 4.9
The Sweet Flypaper of Life
1955 · 106 pages
Sister Mary Bradley, a grandmother Hughes invented, tells death to wait because her feet are caught in the sweet flypaper of life, then walks you through DeCarava's photographs of her Harlem block.
★ 4.7
Tristes Tropiques · 1955
I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King · 1955
All women are stimulated by the news that any wife has left any husband.
The Acceptance World, A Dance to the Music of Time · 1955
1955
Marty
Directed by Delbert Mann
1955
It holds both Best Picture and the Palme d'Or, which only three other films manage: a Bronx butcher who has given up on meeting anybody meets somebody, and it runs ninety-three minutes.
★ 3.4
The Seven Year Itch
Directed by Billy Wilder
1955
The subway grate photograph is more famous than the film: Billy Wilder strands a Manhattan husband alone for the summer, Marilyn Monroe moves in upstairs, and the fantasies start immediately.
★ 3.2
They think that I can make friends if we move. Just move, everything will be roses and sunshine.
Rebel Without a Cause · 1955