Connection
Calder Willingham is a Scriptwriter American born on 23 december 1922 at Atlanta (USA)
Calder Baynard Willingham, Jr. (December 23, 1922 - February 19, 1995) was an American novelist and screenwriter.
Before the age of thirty, after just three novels and a collection of short stories, The New Yorker was already describing Willingham as having “fathered modern black comedy,” his signature a dry, straight-faced humor, made funnier by its concealed comic intent. His work matured over six more novels, including Eternal Fire (1963), which Newsweek said “deserves a place among the dozen or so novels that must be mentioned if one is to speak of greatness in American fiction.” He had a significant career in cinema, too, as a frequent collaborator of Stanley Kubrick as well writing The Graduate (1967) and other notable films.
After dropping out of The Citadel, then working for the Office of War Information in Washington, Willingham moved to New York where he wrote for ten years, setting three novels there. During the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, Willingham was considered at the forefront of the gritty, realistic new breed of Post-War novelists, Norman Mailer, James Jones, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and others, many of whom also made up the Greenwich Village literary scene at the time.
Willingham’s career began in controversy with End as a Man (1947), a withering indictment of the macho culture of military academies, introducing his first iconic character, sadistic Jocko de Paris. The story included graphic hazing, sex and suggested homosexuality, which in a climate celebrating military victory, led the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to file obscenity charges against its publisher, Vanguard Press. The charges were ultimately dropped, but not before a trial which made the book a cause celebre, famous writers rallying to its defense. Reviews singled out its savage humor and realistic dialogue.
Willingham turned the book into a play at New York’s Actor's Studio, where it was an off-Broadway success featuring a young James Dean and also introduced actor, George Peppard. One of Hollywood’s top producers, Sam Spiegel, subsequently commissioned Willingham to adapt the novel to film, his first, re-titled The Strange One (1957) for Columbia Pictures, who advertised it as “the first picture filmed entirely by a cast and technicians from The Actors’s Studio.” Ben Gazarra’s debut got raves and launched his career.
Willingham followed it up with the first in a semi-autobiographical trilogy of novels about an aspiring writer, Dick Davenport. Geraldine Bradshaw (1950) was set in a Chicago hotel during the War where Dick works as a bell-boy (as Willingham had), lusting after a new elevator girl. Its sexual explicitness divided critics who felt its subject beneath his gifts but it sold well and has maintained a cultish following among writers; for example, William Styron reported visiting William Faulkner and noticing it prominently placed on his desk, and it appears on various published lists of “lost classics.” The original version was 415 pages but a 1964 edition, considerably shorter, is definitive and included a foreword from Willingham explaining how the pressure of End As A Man’s success led him to the grandiose idea of filling out the follow-up book with obscure references to the next two in the trilogy. “Success is always dangerous, and early success is deadly," he said in a 1953 interview. “What I went through writing my second book shouldn't happen to a dog."
Next came a second Dick Davenport novel, Reach to the Stars (1951), Dick as a bell-boy in Los Angeles (which Willingham had also been), making observations and sexual hay on the fringe of the upscale Hollywood scene. In 1951, Willingham also published his lone book of short stories, Gates of Hell (1951), mostly comic, the book was revered in literary circles. In 1970, Tom Wolfe called the book "the most undeservedly neglected book since World War II" referring to Willingham as "the great comic genius of American fiction."
Natural Child (1952), Willingham’s first New York novel, was a portrait of two young men and two young women living the bohemian lifestyle of the time. The sophisticated plotting combined with Willingham’s ear for realistic dialogue in one of the lesser-known gems in his collection. To Eat a Peach (1955) chronicled life and lust among adults running a summer camp. Confusion about just how to place writing considered both literary and prurient resulted in the release of two different paperback versions, one with the original title and another with racy cover art re-titled The Girl in the Dogwood Cabin. The seeming ease with which it was written bolstered rumors the novel had been written start-to-finish in three weeks, which turned out to be true.
Busy with film work, it was eight years before Willingham’s next novel, his most ambitious, Eternal Fire (1963), an epic set in Glenville, Georgia, a fictional stand-in for his home town of Rome. It chronicles the proposed marriage of a young heir to a virtuous schoolteacher, plagued by inexplicable suicidal thoughts. It got the best reviews of Willingham’s career, sold well, and firmly established him as one of the major authors of his day. Shelby Foote said the novel convinced him that Willingham was about “the only living American writer qualified to hold Dostoevsky’s coat in a street fight.”
Busy in Hollywood, it was six years until the next novel, another epic, Providence Island (1969), in which a male television executive is shipwrecked with a repressed, married woman and a plain, shy, androgynous one. The book was not as well reviewed as its predecessor but became a best-seller in paperback. Twentieth Century Fox paid a near-record amount to buy the rights for husband and wife Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward but never made the movie.
The novels came slower as Willingham became a more prolific screenwriter. After the film version of End As A Man, producer Spiegel asked Willingham to write The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) for director David Lean. While reportedly writing over 90% of the script, Willingham walked off in a quarrel with Spiegel despite Spiegel’s threat to take Willingham’s name off the credits, a promise Spiegel kept, and they never worked together again. The film swept the 30th Academy Awards winning seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Screenplay, which was credited to Pierre Boulle, author of the book on which it’s based, who did no work on the film. Ironically, forty years later, the Writers Guild gave screenwriting credit to Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson who’d been blacklisted during the McCarthy era and who’d each also worked on the script subsequent to Willingham’s departure.
Paths of Glory (1957) was Willingham’s first collaboration with Stanley Kubrick. Willingham’s dry, ironic humor meshed well with Kubrick’s bravura directorial style. The film, starring Kirk Douglas, remains one of the classic anti-war films ever made. It was produced independently and ignored by the Academy but made a splash with Hollywood’s brainier crowd. Willingham and Kubrick were immediately hired to write and direct another, a film based on Stefan Zweig’s novel, The Burning Secret, but it was never produced. Willingham also continued working with Kirk Douglas, writing The Vikings (1958), a box-office hit starring Douglas, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Kubrick then replaced Anthony Mann as director during filming of Spartacus (1960), which Douglas was also producing, and Willingham came on to rewrite the screenplay and battle sequences.
Though Willingham dropped out of the literary scene when he left New York in 1953, he maintained his friendship with Vladimir Nabokov. Broke and isolated, Nabokov was teaching at Cornell University and considering moving from America. Willingham encouraged him to try to sell his books to Hollywood and passed along a copy of Lolita to Kubrick, who agreed to buy it. Willingham arranged the deal and wrote the first drafts, before giving way to Nabokov, who’d never written a screenplay but contributed significantly and also profited financially. The film, starring Peter Sellers, James Mason, Shelly Winters and Sue Lyon is one of Kubrick’s best, and the screenplay, credited to Nakobov but really an amalgam of Willingham, Nakobov and Kubrick’s work, was nominated for an Academy Award. Willingham’s fifth and final collaboration with Kubrick was a western, One-Eyed Jacks (1961), to star Marlon Brando. The three collaborated on the story for a year before Kubrick left and Brando directed himself in the film.
Willingham’s next assignment was adapting Charles Webb’s novel, The Graduate for director Mike Nichols. The script was revised by Buck Henry, who also received screenplay credit. The film was nominated for 7 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Willingham’s collaboration with actor Dustin Hoffman continued with an adaptation of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, for which Willingham was nominated for Writer’s Guild Award. They attempted a third collaboration, an adaptation of Malcolm Braly’s prison memoir On The Yard, but it was never made. During this period, Willingham also wrote an extended treatment for the film, Patton (1970) and a screenplay for Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974).
But Willingham always considered film work secondary to his books. His penultimate novel, Rambling Rose (1972), was an autobiographical story about his childhood in Georgia featuring comic characterizations of his parents and siblings. The one fictional character is Rose, an eroticized housekeeper who comes to stay with the family as Buddy, age twelve, is just beginning to become curious about sex.
His last novel, The Big Nickel (1975), completed the Dick Davenport trilogy conceived twenty-five years earlier in the wake of first success.
Soon after, Willingham went through a cataclysm: his New Hampshire house burned down, destroying all of his personal papers. He stopped working and regained his health, reading and reflecting during a decade of philosophical and spiritual reevaluation. He re-emerged in 1989 to do movie work again, his first assignment, adapting one of his own novels directly to the screen.
Rambling Rose (1991) starred Robert Duvall, Diane Ladd and Laura Dern as Rose, and although only a modest success, Ladd and Dern were the first mother-daughter team to be nominated together for Academy Awards for their work in the film. Willingham also began a screenplay for Steven Spielberg in 1994 entitled Julie’s Valley about a pioneer family attacked by Native Americans on the Oregon Trail; however, after delivering the draft, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and died February 19, 1995, and the film was never made.
Willingham’s work is now generally out of print. In a biography written for the Literary Guild, author Herman Wouk blamed a twist of fate, a newspaper strike coinciding with publication of Eternal Fire, limiting its readership. Publisher Donald I. Fine echoed this notion in his re-issue of the book in 1986, and perhaps this is a partial explanation why Eternal Fire, arguably deserving of recognition by the literary awards which would have secured him a brighter place in the post-War pantheon, was overlooked. At the same time, as early as 1969, an article entitled “Calder Willingham: The Forgotten Novelist,” appeared in a literary quarterly and most references to him even today refer to him as one of the under-appreciated talents of his generation.
Willingham signe également les scénarios des Vikings (Richard Fleischer, 1958) et du Lauréat (The Graduate, Mike Nichols, 1967). C'est en 1970 qu'il adapte le roman de Thomas Berger, Little Big Man, et fait preuve d'un talent extraordinaire à mêler humour et tragédie dans la lignée des romans piccaresques espagnols. Il écrit le roman Rambling Rose qu'il adaptera pour le cinéma en 1991. Il meurt en 1995 des suites d'un cancer.
(1967)
(Scriptwriter)
(1960)
(Scenario Writer)
(1957)
(Scriptwriter)
(1970)
(Scriptwriter)
(1958)
(Scriptwriter)
Source : Wikidata
Calder Willingham
- Infos
- Photos
- Best films
- Family
- Characters
- Awards
Birth name Calder Baynard Willingham, Jr.
Nationality USA
Birth 23 december 1922 at Atlanta (USA)
Death 21 february 1995 (at 72 years) at Laconia (USA)
Awards Writers Guild of America Award
Nationality USA
Birth 23 december 1922 at Atlanta (USA)
Death 21 february 1995 (at 72 years) at Laconia (USA)
Awards Writers Guild of America Award
Calder Baynard Willingham, Jr. (December 23, 1922 - February 19, 1995) was an American novelist and screenwriter.
Before the age of thirty, after just three novels and a collection of short stories, The New Yorker was already describing Willingham as having “fathered modern black comedy,” his signature a dry, straight-faced humor, made funnier by its concealed comic intent. His work matured over six more novels, including Eternal Fire (1963), which Newsweek said “deserves a place among the dozen or so novels that must be mentioned if one is to speak of greatness in American fiction.” He had a significant career in cinema, too, as a frequent collaborator of Stanley Kubrick as well writing The Graduate (1967) and other notable films.
After dropping out of The Citadel, then working for the Office of War Information in Washington, Willingham moved to New York where he wrote for ten years, setting three novels there. During the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, Willingham was considered at the forefront of the gritty, realistic new breed of Post-War novelists, Norman Mailer, James Jones, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and others, many of whom also made up the Greenwich Village literary scene at the time.
Willingham’s career began in controversy with End as a Man (1947), a withering indictment of the macho culture of military academies, introducing his first iconic character, sadistic Jocko de Paris. The story included graphic hazing, sex and suggested homosexuality, which in a climate celebrating military victory, led the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to file obscenity charges against its publisher, Vanguard Press. The charges were ultimately dropped, but not before a trial which made the book a cause celebre, famous writers rallying to its defense. Reviews singled out its savage humor and realistic dialogue.
Willingham turned the book into a play at New York’s Actor's Studio, where it was an off-Broadway success featuring a young James Dean and also introduced actor, George Peppard. One of Hollywood’s top producers, Sam Spiegel, subsequently commissioned Willingham to adapt the novel to film, his first, re-titled The Strange One (1957) for Columbia Pictures, who advertised it as “the first picture filmed entirely by a cast and technicians from The Actors’s Studio.” Ben Gazarra’s debut got raves and launched his career.
Willingham followed it up with the first in a semi-autobiographical trilogy of novels about an aspiring writer, Dick Davenport. Geraldine Bradshaw (1950) was set in a Chicago hotel during the War where Dick works as a bell-boy (as Willingham had), lusting after a new elevator girl. Its sexual explicitness divided critics who felt its subject beneath his gifts but it sold well and has maintained a cultish following among writers; for example, William Styron reported visiting William Faulkner and noticing it prominently placed on his desk, and it appears on various published lists of “lost classics.” The original version was 415 pages but a 1964 edition, considerably shorter, is definitive and included a foreword from Willingham explaining how the pressure of End As A Man’s success led him to the grandiose idea of filling out the follow-up book with obscure references to the next two in the trilogy. “Success is always dangerous, and early success is deadly," he said in a 1953 interview. “What I went through writing my second book shouldn't happen to a dog."
Next came a second Dick Davenport novel, Reach to the Stars (1951), Dick as a bell-boy in Los Angeles (which Willingham had also been), making observations and sexual hay on the fringe of the upscale Hollywood scene. In 1951, Willingham also published his lone book of short stories, Gates of Hell (1951), mostly comic, the book was revered in literary circles. In 1970, Tom Wolfe called the book "the most undeservedly neglected book since World War II" referring to Willingham as "the great comic genius of American fiction."
Natural Child (1952), Willingham’s first New York novel, was a portrait of two young men and two young women living the bohemian lifestyle of the time. The sophisticated plotting combined with Willingham’s ear for realistic dialogue in one of the lesser-known gems in his collection. To Eat a Peach (1955) chronicled life and lust among adults running a summer camp. Confusion about just how to place writing considered both literary and prurient resulted in the release of two different paperback versions, one with the original title and another with racy cover art re-titled The Girl in the Dogwood Cabin. The seeming ease with which it was written bolstered rumors the novel had been written start-to-finish in three weeks, which turned out to be true.
Busy with film work, it was eight years before Willingham’s next novel, his most ambitious, Eternal Fire (1963), an epic set in Glenville, Georgia, a fictional stand-in for his home town of Rome. It chronicles the proposed marriage of a young heir to a virtuous schoolteacher, plagued by inexplicable suicidal thoughts. It got the best reviews of Willingham’s career, sold well, and firmly established him as one of the major authors of his day. Shelby Foote said the novel convinced him that Willingham was about “the only living American writer qualified to hold Dostoevsky’s coat in a street fight.”
Busy in Hollywood, it was six years until the next novel, another epic, Providence Island (1969), in which a male television executive is shipwrecked with a repressed, married woman and a plain, shy, androgynous one. The book was not as well reviewed as its predecessor but became a best-seller in paperback. Twentieth Century Fox paid a near-record amount to buy the rights for husband and wife Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward but never made the movie.
The novels came slower as Willingham became a more prolific screenwriter. After the film version of End As A Man, producer Spiegel asked Willingham to write The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) for director David Lean. While reportedly writing over 90% of the script, Willingham walked off in a quarrel with Spiegel despite Spiegel’s threat to take Willingham’s name off the credits, a promise Spiegel kept, and they never worked together again. The film swept the 30th Academy Awards winning seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Screenplay, which was credited to Pierre Boulle, author of the book on which it’s based, who did no work on the film. Ironically, forty years later, the Writers Guild gave screenwriting credit to Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson who’d been blacklisted during the McCarthy era and who’d each also worked on the script subsequent to Willingham’s departure.
Paths of Glory (1957) was Willingham’s first collaboration with Stanley Kubrick. Willingham’s dry, ironic humor meshed well with Kubrick’s bravura directorial style. The film, starring Kirk Douglas, remains one of the classic anti-war films ever made. It was produced independently and ignored by the Academy but made a splash with Hollywood’s brainier crowd. Willingham and Kubrick were immediately hired to write and direct another, a film based on Stefan Zweig’s novel, The Burning Secret, but it was never produced. Willingham also continued working with Kirk Douglas, writing The Vikings (1958), a box-office hit starring Douglas, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Kubrick then replaced Anthony Mann as director during filming of Spartacus (1960), which Douglas was also producing, and Willingham came on to rewrite the screenplay and battle sequences.
Though Willingham dropped out of the literary scene when he left New York in 1953, he maintained his friendship with Vladimir Nabokov. Broke and isolated, Nabokov was teaching at Cornell University and considering moving from America. Willingham encouraged him to try to sell his books to Hollywood and passed along a copy of Lolita to Kubrick, who agreed to buy it. Willingham arranged the deal and wrote the first drafts, before giving way to Nabokov, who’d never written a screenplay but contributed significantly and also profited financially. The film, starring Peter Sellers, James Mason, Shelly Winters and Sue Lyon is one of Kubrick’s best, and the screenplay, credited to Nakobov but really an amalgam of Willingham, Nakobov and Kubrick’s work, was nominated for an Academy Award. Willingham’s fifth and final collaboration with Kubrick was a western, One-Eyed Jacks (1961), to star Marlon Brando. The three collaborated on the story for a year before Kubrick left and Brando directed himself in the film.
Willingham’s next assignment was adapting Charles Webb’s novel, The Graduate for director Mike Nichols. The script was revised by Buck Henry, who also received screenplay credit. The film was nominated for 7 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Willingham’s collaboration with actor Dustin Hoffman continued with an adaptation of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, for which Willingham was nominated for Writer’s Guild Award. They attempted a third collaboration, an adaptation of Malcolm Braly’s prison memoir On The Yard, but it was never made. During this period, Willingham also wrote an extended treatment for the film, Patton (1970) and a screenplay for Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974).
But Willingham always considered film work secondary to his books. His penultimate novel, Rambling Rose (1972), was an autobiographical story about his childhood in Georgia featuring comic characterizations of his parents and siblings. The one fictional character is Rose, an eroticized housekeeper who comes to stay with the family as Buddy, age twelve, is just beginning to become curious about sex.
His last novel, The Big Nickel (1975), completed the Dick Davenport trilogy conceived twenty-five years earlier in the wake of first success.
Soon after, Willingham went through a cataclysm: his New Hampshire house burned down, destroying all of his personal papers. He stopped working and regained his health, reading and reflecting during a decade of philosophical and spiritual reevaluation. He re-emerged in 1989 to do movie work again, his first assignment, adapting one of his own novels directly to the screen.
Rambling Rose (1991) starred Robert Duvall, Diane Ladd and Laura Dern as Rose, and although only a modest success, Ladd and Dern were the first mother-daughter team to be nominated together for Academy Awards for their work in the film. Willingham also began a screenplay for Steven Spielberg in 1994 entitled Julie’s Valley about a pioneer family attacked by Native Americans on the Oregon Trail; however, after delivering the draft, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and died February 19, 1995, and the film was never made.
Willingham’s work is now generally out of print. In a biography written for the Literary Guild, author Herman Wouk blamed a twist of fate, a newspaper strike coinciding with publication of Eternal Fire, limiting its readership. Publisher Donald I. Fine echoed this notion in his re-issue of the book in 1986, and perhaps this is a partial explanation why Eternal Fire, arguably deserving of recognition by the literary awards which would have secured him a brighter place in the post-War pantheon, was overlooked. At the same time, as early as 1969, an article entitled “Calder Willingham: The Forgotten Novelist,” appeared in a literary quarterly and most references to him even today refer to him as one of the under-appreciated talents of his generation.
Biography
Il est l'auteur, à ses débuts, des scénarios de la série américaine The Philco Television Playhouse (1948) avant de collaborer avec Stanley Kubrick sur le scénario du film Les Sentiers de la gloire (Paths of Glory, 1957), il sera par ailleurs amené à retravailler avec le cinéaste américain sur la scénarisation des scènes de bataille de Spartacus (1960) ainsi que sur le film la Vengeance aux deux visages (One-Eyed Jacks, 1961, qui sera finalement réalisé par son interprète principal Marlon Brando).Willingham signe également les scénarios des Vikings (Richard Fleischer, 1958) et du Lauréat (The Graduate, Mike Nichols, 1967). C'est en 1970 qu'il adapte le roman de Thomas Berger, Little Big Man, et fait preuve d'un talent extraordinaire à mêler humour et tragédie dans la lignée des romans piccaresques espagnols. Il écrit le roman Rambling Rose qu'il adaptera pour le cinéma en 1991. Il meurt en 1995 des suites d'un cancer.
Best films
(1967)(Scriptwriter)
(1960)(Scenario Writer)
(1957)(Scriptwriter)
(1970)(Scriptwriter)
(1958)(Scriptwriter)
Usually with
Filmography of Calder Willingham (10 films)
Scriptwriter
Add to a movie list
Rambling Rose (1991)
, 1h52Directed by Martha Coolidge
Origin USA
Genres Drama, Erotic
Themes Films about sexuality
Actors Laura Dern, Robert Duvall, Diane Ladd, Lukas Haas, John Heard, Kevin Conway
Roles Author
Rating65%
In 1971 a grown Buddy returns to his former family home and reflects back on his youth during The Great Depression when Rose (Laura Dern) came to live with his family in order to escape her miserable life in Birmingham where she was being forced into prostitution. The Hillyer's are an eccentric family who take Rose in as a domestic servant. Rose quickly begins to admire Mrs. Hillyer (Diane Ladd) who is working on her doctoral dissertation and whom she learns was orphaned at a young age, just as Rose had been. Rose also develops a crush on the paternal and warm Mr. Hillyer that the three Hillyer children and Mr. Hillyer become aware of while Mrs. Hillyer remains oblivious.
Thieves Like Us (1974)
, 2h3Directed by Robert Altman
Origin USA
Genres Drama, Mob film, Crime, Romance
Themes Transport films, Road movies
Actors Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, John Schuck, Bert Remsen, Louise Fletcher, Tom Skerritt
Rating68%
Bowie, a youthful convicted murderer, and bank robbers Chicamaw and T-Dub escape from a Mississippi chain gang in the 1930s. They hole up with a gas station attendant and continue robbing banks.
Little Big Man (1970)
, 2h19Directed by Arthur Penn
Origin USA
Genres Drama, War, Comedy, Comedy-drama, Action, Adventure, Historical, Western
Themes Films about sexuality, LGBT-related films, Political films, LGBT-related films, LGBT-related film
Actors Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Chief Dan George, Martin Balsam, Richard Mulligan, Cal Bellini
Rating74%
In the present day, 121-year-old Jack Crabb, residing in a hospice, recounts his plentiful life story to a curious historian. Among other things, Crabb claims to have had been a captive of the Cheyenne, a gunslinger, an associate of Wild Bill Hickok, a scout for General George Armstrong Custer, and the sole white survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn.
The Graduate (1967)
, 1h45Directed by Mike Nichols
Origin USA
Genres Drama, Comedy, Comedy-drama, Romance
Themes Films about sexuality, Erotic films, Musical films, Films about virginity
Actors Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross, William Daniels, Murray Hamilton, Elizabeth Wilson
Rating79%
Benjamin Braddock, aged twenty, has earned his bachelor's degree and has returned home to a party celebrating his graduation at his parents' house in Pasadena, California. Benjamin, visibly uncomfortable as his parents deliver accolades and neighborhood friends ask him about his future plans, evades those who try to congratulate him. Mrs. Robinson, the neglected wife of his father's law partner, insists that he drive her home. Benjamin is coerced inside to have a drink and Mrs. Robinson attempts to seduce him. She invites him up to her daughter's bedroom to see her portrait and then reenters the room naked, making it clear that she is available to him. Benjamin initially rebuffs her, but after a few days, he clumsily organizes a tryst at the Taft hotel.
One-Eyed Jacks (1961)
, 2h21Directed by Marlon Brando, Bernard McEveety, Paul Baxley
Origin USA
Genres Drama, Action, Western
Actors Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Katy Jurado, Pina Pellicer, Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens
Rating70%
Rio (Marlon Brando) (also called "The Kid"), a shameless philanderer, his mentor Dad Longworth (Karl Malden), and a third man named Doc rob a bank of two saddlebags of gold in Sonora, Mexico. The robbery is successful, but Mexican Rurales track them and catch them celebrating in a cantina, killing Doc. Dad and Rio manage to escape, followed by the Rurales.
Spartacus (1960)
, 3h4Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Mann
Origin USA
Genres Drama, War, Action, Adventure, Historical, Peplum
Themes Films about slavery, Films about sexuality, Sports films, Bisexuality-related films, LGBT-related films, Political films, LGBT-related films, LGBT-related film
Actors Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, John Gavin
Roles Scenario Writer
Rating78%
In the 1st century BC, the Roman Republic has slid into corruption, its menial work done by armies of slaves. One of these, a proud and gifted man named Spartacus, is so uncooperative in his servitude that he is sentenced to fight as a gladiator. He is trained at a school run by the unctuous Roman businessman Lentulus Batiatus, who instructs Spartacus's trainer Marcellus to bully the slave mercilessly and break his spirit. Amid the abuse, Spartacus forms a quiet relationship with a serving woman named Varinia, whom he refuses to rape when she is sent to "entertain" him in his cell.
The Vikings (1958)
, 1h56Directed by Richard Fleischer
Origin USA
Genres Drama, War, Action, Adventure, Historical, Romance
Themes Seafaring films, Transport films, Films set in the Viking Age
Actors Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Ernest Borgnine, James Donald, Alexander Knox
Rating69%
The King of Northumbria is killed during a Viking raid led by the fearsome Ragnar (Ernest Borgnine). Because the king had died childless, his cousin Aella (Frank Thring) takes the throne. The king's widow, however, is pregnant with what she knows is Ragnar's child because he had raped her during that fateful raid, and to protect the infant from her cousin-in-law's ambitions, she sends him off to Italy. By a twist of fate, the ship is intercepted by the Vikings, who are unaware of the child's kinship, and enslave him.
The Strange One (1957)
, 1h40Origin USA
Genres Drama, Biography
Themes Films about sexuality, Théâtre, LGBT-related films, Films based on plays, LGBT-related films, LGBT-related film
Actors Ben Gazzara, Pat Hingle, George Peppard, Geoffrey Horne, Peter Mark Richman, Larry Gates
Roles Pièce de théatre
Rating68%
Cadet Staff Sergeant Jocko DeParis is a senior at the fictional Southern Military College. Using the authority of his own rank, his father's connections with the school, and the college's tradition of allowing upperclassmen to bully new cadets, DeParis effectively does what he pleases. Everyone at the school is either afraid of him or believes he is a normal or even exemplary cadet.
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
, 2h41Directed by David Lean
Origin United-kingdom
Genres Drama, War, Adventure, Historical
Themes Seafaring films, Pont, Prison films, Transport films, Rail transport films, Political films, Évasion
Actors William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Sessue Hayakawa, James Donald, Percy Herbert
Rating80%
In World War II, British prisoners arrive by train at a Japanese prison camp in Burma. The commandant, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), informs them that all prisoners, regardless of rank, are to work on the construction of a railway bridge over the River Kwai that will connect Bangkok and Rangoon. The senior British officer, Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness), reminds Saito that the Geneva Conventions exempt officers from manual labour.
Paths of Glory (1957)
, 1h28Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Origin USA
Genres Drama, War, Historical
Themes French war films, Politique, Prison films, Political films, Films about capital punishment
Actors Kirk Douglas, Ralph Meeker, Adolphe Menjou, George Macready, Wayne Morris, Richard Anderson
Rating83%
The film begins with a voiceover describing the trench warfare situation of World War I up to 1916. In a château, General Georges Broulard (Adolphe Menjou), a member of the French General Staff, asks his subordinate, the ambitious General Mireau (George Macready), to send his division on a suicide mission to take a well-defended German position called the "Anthill." Mireau initially refuses, citing the impossibility of success and the danger to his beloved soldiers, but when Broulard mentions a potential promotion, Mireau quickly convinces himself the attack will succeed.