Cinema: Choice for 1956

• Share

AMERICAN

The King and I. The year's best musical (TIME, July 16).

Somebody Up There Likes Me. Paul Newman is brilliant as the slum-dumb hero in the story of Rocky Graziano's rise from mug to pug (TIME, July 23).

Lust for Life. A film biography of Vincent Van Gogh (Kirk Douglas), including a cinemuseum tour crammed with four-color, heroic-scale reproductions of Van Gogh's paintings (TIME, Sept. 24).

Giant. In the year's best Hollywood picture, Director George Stevens delivers a three-hour tirade against materialism as the Lone Star State typifies it, and in the process wins a fine performance from the late James Dean (TIME, Oct. 22).

Around the World in 80 Days. Mike Todd makes the Jules Verne classic into a big, colorful show (TIME, Oct. 29).

Secrets of the Reef. Perhaps the most deeply thrilling of all the recent attempts to reveal on the screen the secrets of the sea (TIME, Dec. 3).

FOREIGN

Richard III. Laurence Olivier gives a tidy production to one of Shakespeare's messiest plays, and a powerful, intellectual interpretation of his greatest vaudevillain (TIME, March 12).

The Grand Maneuver. An exquisite exercise in the art of film, all manner and no matter, directed by one of the screen's old masters, René Clair (TIME, Oct. 15).

Vitelloni. The year's best picture by the year's best director, Federico Fellini; a gentle satire on Italy's socially gilded, spiritually gelded youth (TIME, Nov. 5).

Marcelino. The story of a little child and of how he entered into the Kingdom of Heaven; made in Spain by Director Ladislao Vajda (TIME, Nov. 26).