Vertigo
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1958
Nobody has ever made obsession look this beautiful or this sick: a man falls for an image instead of a person, and Hitchcock follows him past every point it should stop.
★ 9.9
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1958
Showing 70 works across all media from 1958
Johnny B. GoodeChuck Berry
Johnny B. Goode
1958 · From Chuck Berry Is on Top
Chuck Berry's intro lick is rock's opening statement, a country boy's origin myth now drifting past the solar system.
★ 9.8
Things Fall Apart
1958 · 209 pages
Okonkwo is a wrestler and a hard man in an Igbo village, terrified of resembling his gentle, indebted father, when the missionaries arrive. Achebe builds a whole world before letting it come apart.
★ 8.9
The Leopard
1958 · 336 pages
Everything must change so that everything can stay the same, says the prince's nephew as Garibaldi's rebels land in Sicily. Lampedusa writes a class watching itself end with autumnal calm and beauty.
★ 8.4
All I Have to Do Is Dream
1958
Two live takes in Nashville, Chet Atkins on guitar, and a harmony that topped three Billboard charts at once.
★ 7.7
Touch of Evil
Directed by Orson Welles
1958
The opening crane shot is the most studied three minutes in film school: Welles was fired off his own picture, and the version we watch was restored from his memo.
★ 7.6
La Bamba (Ritchie Valens)
1958
Cut as the B-side of Donna, a Veracruz son jarocho with Carol Kaye on rhythm and Earl Palmer driving.
★ 7.6
Summertime BluesEddie Cochran
Summertime Blues
1958
Cochran overdubbed his own bass voice for the boss and the senator, Earl Palmer drumming behind the great teenage complaint.
★ 7.4
Good Golly, Miss Molly
1958 · From Little Richard
Little Richard lifted the piano intro straight off Rocket 88, and Earl Palmer's drums do the rest.
★ 7.4
The Americans
1958 · 180 pages
Frank drove ten thousand miles across America in 1955 and 1956, then cut the trip to eighty-three photographs of jukeboxes, funerals, and flags. American photography has not left their shadow since.
★ 7.1
Sweet Little Sixteen
1958 · From One Dozen Berrys
Lafayette Leake's piano, Willie Dixon's bass, and a melody Brian Wilson borrowed so closely he lost the copyright.
★ 6.9
Come Fly With Me
1958 · From Come Fly with Me
Cahn and Van Heusen wrote it to order, and Billy May's first Sinatra arrangement made travel sound like swagger.
★ 6.7
The Hidden Fortress
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1958 · Japan
Lucas took the two bickering peasants and turned them into R2-D2 and C-3PO: Kurosawa's first widescreen film tells an escape story from the point of view of its most useless characters.
★ 6.5
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
1958 · 384 pages
Beauvoir rebuilds the pious Paris girlhood she fought her way out of, and sets against her own escape the fate of Zaza, the friend whose family refused her the man she loved.
★ 6.5
Breakfast at Tiffany's
1958 · 178 pages
Holly Golightly, born Lulamae Barnes in rural Texas, charms money out of men in wartime New York and belongs to nobody. Norman Mailer said he would not have changed two words in it.
★ 6.4
Lonely Teardrops
1958
Berry Gordy wrote it before Motown existed, and arranger Dick Jacobs sped the ballad into Wilson's signature record.
★ 6.3
The Affluent Society
1958 · 276 pages
Galbraith looked at postwar America and saw private opulence beside public squalor, with production manufacturing the wants it satisfies. Two generations of arguments over taxes and public spending have run in his channel.
★ 6.3
★ 6.2
C'mon Everybody
1958
Earl Palmer on drums, Guybo Smith on bass, a B-side flipped into a number six hit in Britain.
★ 6.0
The Dharma Bums
1958 · 244 pages
Ray Smith takes up Zen and mountaineering under Japhy Ryder, drawn from the poet Gary Snyder, who foresees a rucksack revolution. Young Americans read it and went to the mountains by the thousand.
★ 6.0
For Your Precious LoveJerry Butler
For Your Precious Love
1958
Butler's baritone over a doo-wop crawl; the billing change to his name split the group and handed Mayfield the lead.
★ 5.7
Yakety Yak
1958
King Curtis honks the tenor break, later echoed in Yakety Sax, while Leiber and Stoller turn chores into comedy.
★ 5.6
Somethin' Else
1958
Miles Davis plays as a sideman here, on someone else's record, which he almost never did before or after.
★ 5.4
The Pledge
1958 · 192 pages
An inspector swears to a murdered girl's mother he will find her killer, then quits, buys a filling station, and waits with a child as bait. Durrenmatt wrote it against the detective genre.
★ 5.2
1958
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
1958 · 260 pages
Quitting the London fashion trade with almost no climbing behind him, Newby set out for an unclimbed Afghan peak. The funniest travel book in English comes out of that mismatch.
★ 5.0
Tokyo Express
1958 · 160 pages
Two bodies lie on a Kyushu beach, arranged as lovers who died together, and the case turns on four minutes at Tokyo Station. Matsumoto pointed Japanese crime fiction straight at government corruption.
★ 4.5
The Affluent Society · 1958
Bo Diddley
1958
The beat he hammered out here has been borrowed ever since, by Buddy Holly, the Stones and everyone after. He built his own square guitars.
★ 4.0
1958
It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.
The Mackerel Plaza · 1958
The Big Country
Directed by William Wyler
1958
Jerome Moross wrote the score American westerns have been quoting ever since: a sea captain arrives in Texas and refuses to prove anything to anybody, which nobody there can forgive.
★ 3.0
Gigi
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
1958
It won all nine awards it was nominated for, the biggest clean sweep the Oscars had seen: Lerner and Loewe wrote it straight for the screen, and Paris in 1900 looks fabulously expensive.
★ 2.2
Touch of Evil · 1958
The Defiant Ones
Directed by Stanley Kramer
1958
Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis are chained together at the wrist, which was the entire argument in 1958: two convicts break out of a crash in the South and cannot move separately.
★ 1.9
The Affluent Society · 1958
1958
The Long, Hot Summer
Directed by Martin Ritt
1958
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward fell in love making this and married before it opened: William Faulkner boiled down into one Mississippi town, and the heat is doing most of the acting.
★ 1.7