12 Angry Men
Directed by Sidney Lumet
1957
Nothing beats it as a filmed argument, and it happens in a single room: eleven jurors want to go home, one will not, and the temperature keeps rising.
★ 8.7
Browse by time · year
1957
Showing 111 works across all media from 1957
Doctor Zhivago
1957 · 673 pages
Yuri Zhivago, a doctor who writes poetry, is carried through war and revolution and away from the women he loves. Pasternak lets history arrive like weather, and the Soviets banned it outright.
★ 8.4
Paths of Glory
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1957
France stayed uncomfortable enough to keep it out of cinemas for eighteen years: Kubrick tracked the camera down the trenches and staged an injustice that still makes people furious.
★ 8.3
Jailhouse Rock
1957
Leiber and Stoller wrote it as a goof; Scotty Moore's solo nearly derails the take and Presley never blinks.
★ 8.3
The Seventh Seal
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
1957 · Sweden
No image from any film has been parodied more: a knight plays chess with Death on a beach, and Bergman is completely serious about the question underneath it.
★ 8.3
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Directed by David Lean
1957
Lean built an epic about the seduction of a job well done: a British colonel in a Japanese prison camp finds a strange satisfaction in building their bridge properly.
★ 8.2
That'll Be the DayBuddy Holly and the Crickets
That'll Be the Day
1957
Holly took the title from a John Wayne line and recut it in Clovis after Decca shelved the first version.
★ 8.2
Wild Strawberries
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
1957 · Sweden
Bergman cast the founding father of Swedish cinema as an old man reckoning with his own coldness: a drive across the country, punctuated by dreams that keep ambushing him.
★ 7.8
The Cairo Trilogy
1957 · 1313 pages
A Cairo merchant rules his household as a tyrant and drinks his nights away with singers while his wife may not step outside. Over three generations, revolution and war reach inside that house.
★ 7.8
You Send MeSam Cooke
You Send Me
1957 · From Sam Cooke
Cooke credited it to his brother L.C. to dodge his publisher, then carried it to number one on both charts.
★ 7.8
Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On
1957
One microphone, Roland Janes muted behind the boogie piano, and a July 1957 television debut that turned it national.
★ 7.7
On The Road
1957 · 416 pages
Sal Paradise crosses and recrosses America with Dean Moriarty, a car thief who talks nonstop and cannot sit still. Kerouac made restlessness the American subject, and the prose runs on the same fuel.
★ 7.7
Nights of Cabiria
Directed by Federico Fellini
1957 · Italy
Giulietta Masina gives the performance that everyone remembers from Fellini: a Roman streetwalker keeps hoping harder than her luck deserves, and the film never once pities her.
★ 7.7
Peggy SueBuddy Holly and the Crickets
Peggy Sue
1957
Cut in Clovis as "Cindy Lou" until Allison's girlfriend got the title, and his paradiddles never let up.
★ 7.7
Great Balls of Fire
1957
Lewis argued theology with Sam Phillips between takes at Sun, decided the devil could wait, and cut it anyway.
★ 7.7
Wake Up Little SusieThe Everly Brothers
Wake Up Little Susie
1957
Felice and Boudleaux Bryant's plot is an alibi, Boston banned it as suggestive, and it still topped the pop chart.
★ 7.4
All Shook Up
1957
A shaken Pepsi bottle gave Blackwell the title, and Presley's version held number one for two solid months.
★ 7.3
Got My Mojo Working
1957 · From The Anthology: 1947-1972
Waters heard Ann Cole sing it on tour, cut a single that flopped, then made it his signature at Newport.
★ 7.3
Bye Bye Love
1957
Some thirty acts turned the Bryants' song down; Don Everly's intro, written for something else, took it to number two.
★ 7.1
Blue Train
1957
Coltrane's only record as a leader for Blue Note, made as a favor to the label's founder while he was under contract elsewhere.
★ 7.1
Not Fade AwayBuddy Holly and the Crickets
Not Fade Away
1957
Jerry Allison pounded the beat out on a cardboard box, and a B-side that never charted outlived nearly everything.
★ 7.1
The Seventh Seal · 1957
If everything is imperfect in this world, love is perfect in its imperfection.
The Seventh Seal · 1957
Everyday
1957
A celesta played by the producer's wife, Jerry Allison slapping his knees for drums, and two minutes of pure lift.
★ 6.9
Who Do You LoveBo Diddley
Who Do You Love
1957 · From Bo Diddley
Jerome Green's maracas, Jody Williams on lead guitar, graveyard imagery, and a shuffle that skips the Bo Diddley beat.
★ 6.9
The Baron In The Trees
1957 · 320 pages
At twelve, refusing a plate of snails his father demands he eat, Cosimo climbs into an oak and never touches ground again. He reads, loves, and fights the eighteenth century from the branches.
★ 6.8
Throne of Blood
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1957 · Japan
Shakespeare's Macbeth moved to sixteenth-century Japan with every line of the poetry gone: Kurosawa substitutes fog, Noh masks worn as faces, and a forest that seems to be watching the castle.
★ 6.8
Rock & Roll MusicChuck Berry
Rock & Roll Music
1957 · From One Dozen Berrys
Willie Dixon on bass, Lafayette Leake on piano, Chicago in May 1957, and Berry arguing the case for backbeat.
★ 6.7
The Uses of Literacy
1957 · 384 pages
Hoggart set down working-class Leeds as he had lived it, then indicted the slick magazines displacing it. Seven years later he founded the Birmingham center that made popular culture an academic discipline.
★ 6.6
Voss
1957 · 464 pages
In 1845 a German explorer attempts to cross Australia, bound across the desert to a woman in Sydney he barely knows. It took the inaugural Miles Franklin Award, Australia's foremost literary prize.
★ 6.6
The Poetics of Space
1957 · 268 pages
Bachelard reads the house as our first universe: the cellar holds our fears, the attic our reveries, and drawers, shells, and corners hold the rest. Architects have designed by it since the 1960s.
★ 6.6
Walkin' After Midnight
1957 · From Patsy Cline
Written for Kay Starr and shelved, resisted by Cline, then sung to victory on Arthur Godfrey's talent show.
★ 6.5
The Wapshot Chronicle
1957 · 400 pages
Leander Wapshot pilots a decrepit ferry while his rich cousin dangles the family fortune at his sons, payable only if they father sons. Cheever sends the boys into an America that baffles them.
★ 6.5
Mythologies
1957 · 288 pages
A magazine cover shows a black soldier saluting the French flag, and Barthes explains what that image says about empire. His essays on wrestling and steak made every ordinary object readable as ideology.
★ 6.5
Birth of the Cool
1957
Recorded in 1949 and 1950 by a nine-piece band with a tuba and a French horn, and not gathered onto one record until 1957.
★ 6.5
Here's Little Richard
1957
The words to Tutti Frutti were too obscene to record, so a local songwriter rewrote them in fifteen minutes over a lunch break.
★ 6.4
The Cat in the Hat
1957 · 61 pages
A cat in a striped hat arrives where two children are stuck indoors, and takes the place apart. Seuss did it in 236 words and buried the Dick and Jane primer.
★ 6.4
A Death in the Family
1957 · 310 pages
Knoxville, 1915: a man is called out at night to his sick father and killed on the road home. Agee follows the six-year-old son through the days after, in prose of unbearable precision.
★ 6.3
The Assistant
1957 · 246 pages
In a failing Brooklyn grocery, the drifter who helped rob the place returns to work for the Jewish owner without pay. Malamud turned that store into the moral center of Jewish American fiction.
★ 6.3
Keep A-Knockin'
1957 · From Little Richard
Charles Connor's drum intro opens it, and Bonham borrowed the same beat for Led Zeppelin's Rock and Roll.
★ 6.2
Brilliant Corners
1957
The title track was so hard to play that after twenty-five attempts they gave up and spliced a version together from pieces.
★ 6.1
Experiencing Architecture
1957 · 245 pages
Rasmussen teaches you to feel a building before you name its style: the hardness a child finds bouncing a ball off a wall, Rome's Spanish Steps descending in the rhythm of a polonaise.
★ 6.0
West Side Story
1957
Nearly every song is built on the same jarring interval, a tritone, which Bernstein threads through the whole score from the opening bars.
★ 5.8
Witness for the Prosecution
Directed by Billy Wilder
1957
The closing credits ask the audience not to reveal the ending, and audiences mostly obeyed: Wilder turns an Agatha Christie courtroom into a comedy about a barrister who is supposed to be resting.
★ 5.8
Maybe
1957
A Manhattan church studio, Richard Barrett's piano figure, and a sixteen-year-old lead vocal that opened the girl-group era.
★ 5.5
Atlas Shrugged
1957 · 1200 pages
The people who keep the world running go on strike. Dagny Taggart holds her railroad together as the competent vanish, and Rand's case that selfishness is a virtue still powers American libertarianism.
★ 5.5
The Colonizer and the Colonized
1957 · 169 pages
Colonialism does its damage both ways, Memmi argues: the settler corrupted by privilege he will not renounce, the colonized shrunk to the myth invented for him. He was a Tunisian Jew, and both.
★ 5.4
On the Road · 1957
★ 5.1
Ella and Louis
1957
Two voices at opposite ends of everything, one crystalline and one like gravel, backed by the Oscar Peterson quartet with no written arrangements.
★ 5.1
A Rage in Harlem
1957 · 159 pages
Jackson, a pious Harlem hearse driver, loses his savings to a con man promising to turn tens into hundreds. Himes wrote the funniest and most violent Harlem in American crime fiction.
★ 4.9
South from Granada
1957 · 320 pages
In 1920 an Englishman settled in the mountains south of Granada, in a village called Yegen. Brenan sets down its customs, its poverty and its gossip, an Andalusia the Civil War would erase.
★ 4.8
Bitter Lemons of Cyprus
1957 · 288 pages
Buying a house in the hill village of Bellapais, Durrell watched Cyprus slide from Mediterranean idyll into insurgency, and ended up speaking for the British government as his Greek friends turned against him.
★ 4.8
When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning.
Reflections on the Guillotine · 1957
Atlas Shrugged · 1957
Songs for Distingue Lovers
1957
Her voice had gone by then, and she sings behind the beat and around the notes, which turns out to be the whole point.
★ 3.6
12 Angry Men · 1957