The Guide to Films Set in the 1950s

Cinema, in its purest form, is an act of rebellion. It is the vision of a single artist clashing with conventions. There are the great classics that defined dramatic cinema—and you will find them here—but the true heart of cinema beats in this rebellious soul: films that refuse to be contained in a formula.

This freedom, however, often comes with significant constraints. Limited budgets, small crews, and accessible equipment are not just obstacles to overcome, but catalysts for innovation. The need to be resourceful has given rise to a recognizable aesthetic, a visual language that turns limitation into strength.

This is not a simple list, but a path that unites the fundamental pillars, from the most famous films to the most unknown independent cinema. These are works that, through their vision, have redefined the boundaries of dramatic cinema, offering unforgettable glimpses into the complexity of the human condition.

Ikiru (To Live) (1952)

Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged bureaucrat in Tokyo who has spent thirty years in a monotonous job, earning him the nickname “The Mummy.” When diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer, he is forced to confront the emptiness of his existence. After a failed attempt at hedonistic escape, he dedicates his final months to fighting the very bureaucracy he served, to build a playground for children.

Widely considered Akira Kurosawa’s humanist masterpiece, Ikiru is a profound meditation on mortality and a scathing critique of post-war Japanese bureaucracy. The film avoids all sentimentality. It is a direct accusation against a modern society that, in its rush toward efficiency, has lost sight of the meaning of life. The narrative structure is bold: the protagonist dies two-thirds of the way through the film, and the final act is a mosaic of memories at his wake. It’s here the film lands its most powerful blow. Watanabe’s colleagues, drunk, remember his transformation and vow to live with the same purpose, only to return, sober, to the same apathetic routine the next day. Watanabe’s rebellion is not the loud rebellion of youth, but a singular, stubborn, and silent act of creation against a system of death.

Umberto D. (1952)

In Rome, Umberto Domenico Ferrari is an elderly retired civil servant trying to survive on a meager pension. Unable to pay his rent, his landlady threatens eviction, renting his room by the hour. With no family and his only companions being the young maid Maria and his dog Flike, Umberto desperately fights to maintain his dignity in the face of poverty and society’s indifference.

This film is the terminal and purest gem of Italian Neorealism. Vittorio De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini create a work of realism so ruthless it becomes almost unbearable. The film was a commercial disaster and was fiercely attacked by Italian politicians of the time, particularly Giulio Andreotti, who accused De Sica of “slandering Italy” by showing poverty instead of the “economic miracle” of reconstruction. Its independence is not just stylistic (using non-professional actor Carlo Battisti) but political. The film is a denunciation of a society that, in its rush toward the future, has decided to forget and discard its most vulnerable. The true tragedy of Umberto D. is not poverty itself, but one man’s daily struggle to maintain decorum and dignity while everything is stripped away from him.

Los Olvidados (The Forgotten) (1950)

In the violent slums of Mexico City, a group of delinquent children survives on the streets. The arrival of the cruel teenager “El Jaibo,” an escapee from reform school, drags the group into a spiral of increasingly serious crimes. Young Pedro, one of the boys, desperately tries to find an honest way out, but social determinism and the violence of their environment condemn him to a tragic fate.

During his Mexican exile, surrealist master Luis Buñuel took a government commission for an uplifting film about delinquency and twisted it into one of the most brutal and pessimistic films ever made. It is the antithesis of any Hollywood film about “troubled teens.” Buñuel applies an almost documentary-like, neorealist gaze but infuses it with his signature surrealist cruelty. Poverty here ennobles no one; it brutalizes, corrupts, and destroys. The famous dream sequence, in which Pedro is offered raw meat, is a flash of Buñuel’s genius, suggesting that the forces destroying these boys are as primal, psychological, and innate as they are economic. Los Olvidados is an indictment of society’s indifference, a film so harsh it initially shocked and offended Mexico, before winning Best Director at Cannes and cementing Buñuel’s return.

The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur) (1953)

In a squalid, isolated South American village, a group of desperate men, mostly penniless European immigrants, are trapped by poverty. The only entity that matters is an American oil company, the SOC. When an oil well explodes, the company offers an enormous sum to four men to undertake a suicide mission: transport two trucks loaded with unstable nitroglycerin over 300 miles of treacherous mountain roads.

This French-Italian thriller by Henri-Georges Clouzot is perhaps the most tense and suspense-laden film in cinema history. It is a masterpiece of physical and psychological tension that lasts over two and a half hours. But The Wages of Fear is much more than a thriller. It is a work of absolute existential nihilism and a ferocious critique of rapacious American capitalism. The SOC oil company is the true antagonist, a faceless entity that first creates the misery that traps the men and then uses that same misery to blackmail them into dying. The four protagonists are not heroes; they are walking corpses, stripped of all illusions. Clouzot uses suspense not to entertain, but to torture the viewer, making every jolt of the truck a comment on the fragility of life in a materialistic and indifferent universe.

Salt of the Earth (1954)

Based on a real-life strike in New Mexico, the film documents the struggle of Mexican-American miners at the Empire Zinc Company. They demand equal pay and safe working conditions, the same as their white (“Anglo”) colleagues. When the company gets an injunction banning the men from picketing, their wives, led by the determined Esperanza Quintero, take their place on the front lines.

This is one of the most important and suppressed films in American history. It is an act of “guerrilla cinema.” It was made by a team of Hollywood professionals blacklisted during McCarthyism, including director Herbert J. Biberman and writer Michael Wilson. The film was attacked as “communist propaganda,” its lead actress Rosaura Revueltas was deported, and theaters were threatened to prevent its screening. Shot in a neorealist style using the real miners and their families as actors, the film is radical on two fronts. Not only is it a powerful statement for union rights and racial justice, but it is also one of the first deeply feminist films, showing how the strike forces the men to confront their own chauvinism and the necessity of gender equality at home.

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954)

An experimental 38-minute short film by underground director Kenneth Anger. Inspired by a “Come as Your Madness” costume party, the film is a visual and occult ritual. Characters (including author Anaïs Nin as Astarte) dressed as mythological deities (Shiva, Isis, Pan) gather in a “pleasure dome” to drink a potion and participate in a psychedelic orgy.

If Salt of the Earth is the political protest, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is the spiritual, sexual, and artistic protest. In an era defined by puritanical conformity, Anger launches a frontal assault on materialism and sexual repression. Inspired by occultist Aleister Crowley, the film is an invocation of paganism, magic, and queer sexuality. There is no narrative; it is a pure visual experience, a “fever dream” designed to alter the viewer’s consciousness. Filmed in 1954, it is underground cinema in the most literal sense: a secret ritual for a secret culture. It is a pre-psychedelic work of art that anticipated and helped create the visual language of the 1960s counterculture.

Dementia (1955)

An almost-silent experimental horror film follows “The Gamin,” a young woman, on a single nightmarish night in the slums of Los Angeles. Haunted by traumatic memories of a violent father, her descent into madness takes her to sordid jazz clubs, exposes her to depraved wealthy men, and leads her to murder, only to awaken in her squalid apartment.

This is one of the strangest cinematic artifacts of the decade. A unique hybrid of film noir, German Expressionism, and Freudian psychological horror. It’s a 56-minute dive into the repressed female Id, a “waking nightmare” that anticipates David Lynch by decades. The film was banned in New York for its “sensational depiction of female violence.” In an era when women were only allowed to be virtuous wives or punished femmes fatales, Dementia presented the female psyche as a territory of nightmares, rage, and homicidal violence. The fact that it was banned and later re-edited with a tacked-on narration (as Daughter of Horror) proves just how radical it was. This wasn’t the paranoia of politics, but the paranoia of the psyche, of sex, and of trauma, which the conformist society wanted to suppress.

Ordet (The Word) (1955)

On an austere rural farm in Denmark, the Borgen family is divided by faith. The patriarch, Morten, is a devout but liberal Christian. Of his three sons, Mikkel is an agnostic, Anders wants to marry the daughter of a tailor from a rival fundamentalist sect, and Johannes, a theology student, has gone mad and believes he is Jesus Christ. Tragedy strikes when Mikkel’s wife, Inger, dies in childbirth.

This masterpiece by Carl Theodor Dreyer is not just an independent film; it is transcendental cinema. It is a slow, severe, and difficult film to approach, but one of almost unequaled spiritual power. In a decade obsessed with science (the atom, space), anxiety, and materialism, Dreyer made a film that affirms, without irony and with absolute seriousness, the literal power of the miracle. Dreyer never ridicules faith, but he sharply criticizes organized religiosity, dogma, and the bigotry that divides men. His visual style, made of long, slow camera movements and a white, spectral light, creates a “super-reality” that forces the viewer to reconsider the boundary between the material and the spiritual. The ending is one of the most shocking moments in cinema history.

The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)

The first manned British space rocket returns to Earth but crash-lands. Of the three astronauts, two have mysteriously vanished. The sole survivor, Victor Carroon, is in a catatonic state. He soon begins to mutate into a horrific alien creature, a plant-like organism that absorbs human life to grow. Professor Quatermass must track him down and destroy him before he infects all of London.

This Hammer production, based on a hugely popular BBC series, is the cornerstone of British sci-fi horror. Unlike many contemporary American B-movies, the film is shot with an almost film noir seriousness and documentary-style realism. The horror is not just the monster, but its nature: it is an invasion from within. Carroon, a national hero, has become the enemy. This film perfectly encapsulates the paranoia of the 1950s, which was not just fear of an external invasion (the Soviets), but of internal contamination (the “fifth column,” the spy). It’s an allegory for the fear that the “progress” of war (the bomb, rocket technology) had infected humanity on a biological level, rendering it unrecognizable.

Crazed Fruit (Kurutta kajitsu) (1956)

Two brothers from a wealthy family spend their summer at the beach, amidst sailboats, gambling, and casual sex. The younger, more naive brother, Haruji, falls in love with Eri, a mysterious young woman. He soon discovers that his older, cynical, and sexually experienced brother, Natsuhisa, is also seeing her. Eri is trapped in a secret that will lead the love triangle to a tragic and violent conclusion.

This film is the birth certificate and quintessence of the “Taiyozoku” (Sun Tribe) movement. Based on a controversial novel, it was a scandal in Japan. It’s the Japanese equivalent of Rebel Without a Cause, but far more nihilistic and sexually explicit. The film is an anarchic reaction to the rigid tradition of the previous generation, showing a privileged post-war youth, wealthy but spiritually empty, seeking meaning only in thrills, sex, and self-destruction. With a style that anticipates the Japanese New Wave, Crazed Fruit is an exploitation film that perfectly captures youth rebellion in the 1950s as a global phenomenon, not just an American one.

I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)

Tony Rivers (a young Michael Landon) is a troubled high school student, consumed by a rage he cannot control. His girlfriend convinces him to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Brandon. However, Brandon doesn’t want to cure him; he wants to use him. Through hypnosis and an experimental serum, Brandon regresses Tony to a primitive and savage state, turning him into a murderous werewolf.

Produced by American International Pictures (AIP), this is the apex of 1950s teen exploitation cinema. The title alone is a masterpiece of marketing. The film is a perfect metaphor for the greatest fear of 1950s adult America: not communists, but teenagers. The film identifies adolescent anger, emerging sexuality, and rebellion against authority as a form of monstrosity. Its stroke of genius is that it’s not magic, but science and psychiatry that unleash the monster. It is the adult (the mad scientist) who, in an attempt to “cure” and control the adolescent, unleashes his violent nature. It is the dark, angry side of Rebel Without a Cause, transformed into a monster movie.

Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället) (1957)

The elderly and glacial Professor Isak Borg undertakes a long car journey from Stockholm to Lund to receive an honorary degree. He is accompanied by his daughter-in-law Marianne, who does not hide her disdain for his coldness. During the trip, a series of encounters (with hitchhikers, with his elderly mother) and, above all, a series of nightmares and daydreams, force him to revisit his past and confront a life of selfishness and emotional emptiness.

Like Ikiru, this masterpiece by Ingmar Bergman is a film about mortality and the search for meaning. Bergman, who wrote the screenplay while hospitalized, creates a psychological “road movie.” The physical journey across Sweden becomes a journey through time and memory. The film is famous for its dream sequences, particularly the opening nightmare (clocks without hands, a hearse), which capture pure existential anxiety. Wild Strawberries defines 1950s European auteur cinema: personal, philosophical, mature, and completely uninterested in Hollywood narrative conventions. It is a heartbreaking work about the difficulty of connecting with other human beings before it’s too late.

Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament) (1958)

It is May 8, 1945, the last day of World War II in Poland. Maciek, a young and charismatic anti-communist resistance fighter (Home Army), receives an order to assassinate a local Communist Party secretary. In a single, fateful night in a dilapidated hotel, Maciek struggles with his mission, falls in love with a barmaid, and questions the point of continuing to kill now that the war is over.

This masterpiece by Andrzej Wajda is the foundational film of the “Polish School.” Produced during the post-Stalinist political “thaw,” the film tackles an incredibly taboo subject: the tragic, fratricidal civil war between Polish nationalists and the new communist rulers. Zbigniew Cybulski, “the Polish James Dean” (who acts in his own clothes and sunglasses), became the icon of a generation. The film is a masterpiece of moral ambiguity, humanizing both sides and capturing the paradox of 1950s Eastern Europe: a world “no longer at war, but not yet at peace,” trapped in a historical limbo, forced to choose between two equally desolate futures.

I Bury the Living (1958)

Robert Kraft (Richard Boone), a businessman, reluctantly accepts the chairmanship of a cemetery committee. In his new office, there is a large map of the plots, where occupied graves are marked with black pins and sold-but-empty ones with white pins. By mistake, Kraft places a black pin on a “white” plot. The next day, the plot’s owner dies. Convinced he has the power of life and death, Kraft sinks into paranoia and guilt.

This independent B-movie is a forgotten gem, a psychological thriller that could have been a perfect episode of The Twilight Zone. Shot in a high-contrast noir style and set almost entirely in the claustrophobic cemetery office, the film is a masterful example of creating an atmosphere of terror with minimal means. The film is an exploration of paranoia and the power of suggestion. The entire premise is a metaphor for the Cold War and McCarthyism: the act of “marking” someone on a list (or a map) can have deadly consequences, whether the power is real or only perceived.

The Blob (1958)

In a small Pennsylvania town, teenager Steve (a young Steve McQueen) and his girlfriend Jane see a meteorite crash. The gelatinous substance inside, “The Blob,” begins to consume every living thing it touches, growing larger and larger. The town’s adults, including the police, refuse to believe the kids. It’s up to the “juvenile delinquents” to organize the resistance against the monster.

Produced by an independent company and shot in vivid color, The Blob is often dismissed as pure camp, but it is a fundamental cultural document. It’s a “teen exploitation” film that, for once, sides with the teenagers against the obtuseness and incompetence of the adults. The Cold War metaphor is obvious: the “Blob” is an amorphous, red mass that consumes and assimilates everything. It doesn’t reason; it can’t be negotiated with. It is the “Red Scare” transformed into a gelatinous special effect. The film is crucial because it flips the “youth rebellion” dynamic: here, the kids aren’t the threat, but the only hope against the conformist menace that the adults refuse to see.

The Cool and the Crazy (1958)

Bennie is a new high school student who is actually a marijuana dealer (“tea,” “reefer”) working for a drug kingpin. Seducing the good girl Jackie, Bennie tricks his way into the school’s social group, introducing them to pot and turning them into violent, paranoid “addicts.” One of the boys dies during a failed robbery, and Bennie finds himself in an out-of-control spiral of violence.

This is a classic exploitation film, designed to capitalize on adult fears of juvenile delinquency and drugs. It’s a 1950s update of 1930s anti-drug propaganda films like Reefer Madness. While it appears unintentionally comical today in its hysterical portrayal of marijuana (which supposedly makes one instantly addicted and violent), the film is a fascinating document of the decade’s moral panic. It shows how underground culture (in this case, drug use) was viewed by the dominant culture: not as a form of rebellion, but as a contagious and deadly disease threatening to infect the good kids of the suburbs.

Anticipation of the Night (1958)

A radically non-narrative 40-minute avant-garde film. Director Stan Brakhage uses a handheld camera to capture fragments of first-person perception: night lights, shadows, a child crawling on the grass, a playground. The film is a lyrical flow of colors and shapes, concluding with the controversial and metaphorical image of the protagonist (the shadow of a man) hanging himself.

This film marks Brakhage’s break from “psychodrama” (influenced by Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger) and the beginning of his mature “lyrical” style. It is his declaration of aesthetic independence. Brakhage seeks to capture “an eye unruled by the laws of perspective,” the eye of a child seeing the world for the first time. It is the cinematic equivalent of Abstract Expressionism. In an era dominated by clear narrative and plot, Brakhage declares war on narrative itself, believing it to be a lie that prevents us from truly seeing. The suicidal ending suggests that the “voyeur” artist, the narrative adult, must die to allow this pure, infantile vision to be born.

Shadows (1959)

John Cassavetes‘ directorial debut follows the lives of three African-American siblings in New York during the Beat era. Hugh is a jazz singer struggling to find work; Ben is a troubled trumpeter. Their younger sister, Lelia, is light-skinned enough to “pass” for white, and her romance with a white man, Tony, triggers a crisis of fragile racial and social identities when he discovers her true family.

This film is the milestone, the birth certificate of true American independent cinema. Shot on 16mm with a shoestring budget, financed in part by a radio appeal, and using non-professional actors from an acting workshop, Shadows broke all of Hollywood’s rules. Its style, initially improvised (though later rewritten), and the jazz score by Charles Mingus capture the fluidity and anxiety of bohemian life. The film is revolutionary because it’s not “about” racism in a paternalistic way; it’s about the fluidity of racial identity and the complex interpersonal relationships in an environment that boasts of being above race, but isn’t. Cassavetes invented a new language for looking at life: messy, honest, and painfully real.

Pull My Daisy (1959)

A foundational short film that captures the essence of the Beat Generation. Directed by photographer Robert Frank and painter Alfred Leslie, the film shows a group of Beat poets (Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky) invading the home of a railway brakeman. The brakeman’s wife is trying to host a respectable bishop for dinner, but the poets turn the event into anarchic, comedic chaos. The entire film is unified by the spontaneous, jazz-like narration of Jack Kerouac.

If Shadows is the drama of the Beat Generation, Pull My Daisy is its comedy, a “parody” of the movement itself. Based on a real-life incident from Neal Cassady’s life, the film was celebrated for years as a masterpiece of cinéma vérité improvisation. In reality, it was carefully planned and staged. But its truth lies not in its technical spontaneity, but in its spirit. Kerouac’s narration, which sounds improvised, is the Beat aesthetic (spontaneous prose, “first thought, best thought”). The film captures the central conflict of the decade: high, conformist culture (the bishop) versus the anarchic, intellectual, and childish energy of the Beats. It mythologized its protagonists, turning the poets into icons.

A Bucket of Blood (1959)

Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) is a shy, bumbling busboy at “The Yellow Door” beatnik café. Desperate to be accepted by the pretentious artists and poets who surround him, he accidentally kills his landlady’s cat. To hide the crime, he covers it in plaster and passes it off as a sculpture. Hailed as a genius, Walter is forced to find new “subjects” for his art, moving on to “sculpting” human beings.

Produced and directed in five days by the “King of B-movies” Roger Corman, this film is one of the first and best black comedy horrors. In the same year as Pull My Daisy, Corman was already satirizing the beatnik scene. It’s a sharp, cynical critique of two worlds: the pretentiousness of the underground art scene and low-budget horror films (including his own work). The film unmasks the culture of “cool,” showing how the beatnik critics are so intent on finding “deep meaning” that they mistake a murder for a masterpiece. It’s a perfect metaphor for the culture of conformity: Walter is a “nobody” whose violence is born from the desire to conform to a new kind of conformity: artistic non-conformity.

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Aliens arrive on Earth with “Plan 9” to resurrect the dead, creating an army of zombies. Their goal is to stop humanity from developing a “Solaranite” weapon that could destroy the universe. Their invasion, involving cardboard flying saucers and stock footage of Bela Lugosi (who died before filming), is thwarted by an airline pilot and the police.

Often labeled “the worst film ever made,” Plan 9 is, paradoxically, one of the most important films of “Z-grade” independent cinema. Directed by the inimitable Ed Wood and financed by a Baptist church, the film is a monument to technical incompetence and sincere passion. It is essential for understanding the 1950s because it is pure subconscious, unfiltered by talent, budget, or studio control. It is atomic anxiety in its rawest state. The film’s logic is the logic of a paranoid dream: the aliens are both the threat and the voice of reason (warning us of our own destructive nature). Plan 9 is cinematic art brut, an invaluable document of the decade’s obsessions with UFOs, the living dead, and nuclear Armageddon.

Scorpio Rising (1963)

Although filmed in the early 1960s, this experimental short by Kenneth Anger is the definitive dissection of the biker subculture and the cult of rebellion born in the 1950s. The film has no dialogue, instead using a pop soundtrack (from Elvis to Little Peggy March) to create a fetishistic and ironic montage of leather-clad bikers, icons of James Dean and Marlon Brando, Christian imagery, comics, and Nazi symbols.

This film is “a death mirror held up to American culture.” It is one of the most influential works of underground cinema, the invention of the music video. Anger explores the blatant homoeroticism of biker culture and its fusion of rebellion, the occult, and a fascination with fascism. The film was tried for obscenity, making it a landmark case for freedom of expression. Anger takes the 1950s hyper-masculine rebel icon (Brando, Dean) and reveals its queer subtext and its proximity to a fascination with power and death. It is the most radical critique of 1950s iconography ever made.

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)

Germany, 1943: Maria Braun gets married during a bombing raid. Her husband Hermann leaves for the front and disappears. In the post-war years of West Germany’s “economic miracle,” Maria uses her intelligence, her body, and her ruthless determination to climb the social ladder and become a wealthy businesswoman, cynically awaiting Hermann’s return.

The first film in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “BRD” trilogy is an allegory for the nation. Maria is West Germany: pragmatic, capitalist, successful, but emotionally dead and built on a (Nazi) past that has been willfully forgotten. Fassbinder, a key figure of the New German Cinema, uses the style and tropes of 1950s Hollywood melodrama to critique post-war German society. The “economic miracle” is not a triumph, but a cold transaction. The ending, an ambiguous, suicidal gas explosion while the 1954 World Cup victory plays on the radio, is the perfect metaphor: the public birth of the new Germany coincides with private destruction.

Veronika Voss (Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss) (1982)

Munich, 1955. A sports journalist, Robert Krohn, meets Veronika Voss, a former star of the UFA (Nazi propaganda) cinema era. Once celebrated, she is now a spectral figure, addicted to morphine. Robert falls for her and discovers she is being held prisoner by a corrupt doctor, Dr. Katz, who is draining her of her money in exchange for the drugs that keep her enslaved.

The other chapter of Fassbinder’s BRD trilogy is a film noir shot in expressionistic black and white. It is a German Sunset Boulevard. If Maria Braun was about the economic present, Veronika Voss is about the unforgotten Nazi past. Veronika is the Nazi past: once fascinating, glamorous, but now decadent, addicted, and exploited by new powers. Fassbinder directly links the Germany of the 1950s to that of the 1930s. The film is a devastating critique of “denazification”: the past wasn’t overcome; it was simply locked away in a private clinic, drugged, and robbed.

Blue Velvet (1986)

A college student, Jeffrey Beaumont, returns to his idyllic hometown of Lumberton. He finds a severed human ear in a field. His amateur investigation leads him into the town’s dark underbelly, into a vortex of sadomasochism, crime, and madness embodied by the singer Dorothy Vallens and the sociopath Frank Booth, a man who huffs gas from a mask.

David Lynch’s neo-noir masterpiece is set in the 1980s, but it is esthetically and thematically rooted in the 1950s. The opening is a parody of the suburban idyll: white picket fences, red roses, smiling firemen. Lynch uses this “bucolic atmosphere evocative of the distant 1950s” as a facade. The severed ear is the invitation to look under the perfect lawn. Blue Velvet is the central thesis on the decade’s hypocrisy: conformity and perversion are not opposites, but two sides of the same coin. The suburban idyll requires the violent repression of deviance. Frank Booth is the “return of the repressed” of the 1950s, the violent, sexual Id that the society of facades tried to pretend didn’t exist.

Poison (1991)

Todd Haynes’ directorial debut is a foundational film of the “New Queer Cinema.” It is composed of three intertwined stories, each in a different style: “Hero” (a faux-documentary about a boy who kills his father and flies away), “Homo” (a prison love story inspired by Jean Genet), and “Horror.” The latter is a perfect stylistic imitation of a 1950s sci-fi B-movie.

The “Horror” section of Poison is a brilliant deconstruction. It tells of a scientist who isolates the “elixir of human sexuality,” drinks it, and transforms into a murderous, contagious “leper,” disfigured and ostracized by society. Haynes uses the 1950s B-movie aesthetic for a radically modern purpose: to talk about the AIDS crisis. In the 1950s, monsters were metaphors for communism; Haynes re-purposes the metaphor, showing how the “scientist” (the homosexual) is turned into a contagious monster by his own sexuality. It is a critique of how society, in the 1950s as in the 1980s, uses the language of horror and disease to pathologize and ostracize the communities it fears.

The Long Day Closes (1992)

A deeply autobiographical film by British director Terence Davies. Set in Liverpool in 1955-56, the film has no traditional plot. It is an impressionistic and fragmentary portrait of the life of young Bud, his working-class family, his struggles with school and Catholic religion, and his deep love for the cinema and the pop music he hears on the radio.

This film is not about the “history” of the 1950s, but about memory. Davies uses the music and film clips of the era to build an “emotional archive.” Unlike Lynch’s harsh critique, Davies looks back at his 1950s childhood with complex nostalgia. It is an era of repression (especially for a young gay boy, like Davies himself), but the home, his mother, and, above all, popular culture (cinema, music) provided a language for escape, beauty, and the construction of identity. The film is independent in its radically personal and non-narrative form, suggesting that our identity is nothing but a collage of the cultural fragments we have loved.

Gods and Monsters (1998)

A semi-fictional account of the last days of James Whale (Ian McKellen), the director of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. Set in the 1950s, Whale, retired, suffering from a stroke, and openly gay in an era that did not tolerate it, lives in his garden. He develops a complex and provocative friendship with his young, handsome, heterosexual gardener, Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser).

This film uses the 1950s setting to ask a crucial question: what happens to “monsters” when they get old? Whale, the man who defined Universal horror in the 1930s, is now an outcast in Hollywood, both for his old-fashioned style and his homosexuality. Whale and his Frankenstein “monster” become metaphors for each other: misunderstood, marginalized, desperate for connection. The film contrasts Whale’s wit and culture (a man of the 1930s) with the obtuse conformity and repressed virility of the 1950s (embodied by Boone). It is an elegy for a forgotten queer pioneer and a critique of how the age of conformity tried to erase his legacy.

The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

Santa Rosa, California, 1949. Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) is a laconic, chain-smoking barber, an invisible man. Suspecting his wife Doris is cheating on him with her boss, “Big Dave,” Ed attempts an anonymous blackmail scheme to get $10,000 to invest in a new business: dry cleaning. The plan fails miserably, dragging him into a spiral of murder, UFOs, and existential philosophy.

The Coen brothers craft a perfect stylization of 1940s/50s film noir, shot in expressionistic black and white. But it is a postmodern noir. The classic noir protagonist was a man tormented by pathos; Ed Crane is a man tormented by emptiness. He is the 1950s man in the gray flannel suit, but devoid of any internal drive. The film is obsessed with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: the act of observing changes reality. The Coens use the post-war setting to suggest that modern anxiety stems not from crime, but from the fundamental uncertainty of the universe.

Far from Heaven (2002)

Hartford, Connecticut, fall 1957. Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) is the perfect suburban wife and mother, “Mrs. Magnatech.” Her idyllic Technicolor life shatters when she surprises her husband, Frank (Dennis Quaid), kissing another man. As Frank struggles with conversion therapy, Cathy finds comfort in her African-American gardener, Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), sparking a social scandal.

Todd Haynes created a “brilliant recreation” of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas. The film perfectly imitates their visual style, saturated colors, and themes. But there is a crucial difference: Haynes makes explicit the taboos that Sirk, in the 1950s, could only imply. It’s an act of cinematic criticism that demonstrates how melodrama, often dismissed, was the only genre in the 1950s that attempted to address complex social repressions. Far from Heaven exposes the two pillars of the decade’s repression: homophobia (the “sickness” to be cured) and racism (the forbidden love), trapping the protagonist in a “polite” social cage.

Howl (2010)

An independent and experimental film documenting the birth of the Beat Generation. The film weaves three styles: an interview with a young Allen Ginsberg (James Franco); the first, historic public reading of “Howl” at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 (shot in black and white); and the dramatization of the 1957 obscenity trial against publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who dared to publish the poem.

This film is not a traditional biopic. It’s a “dramatized documentary” that seeks to capture the spirit of the poem. The animated sections, which visually translate Ginsberg’s torrential language, and the courtroom scenes are the heart of the film. Howl is a film about the defense of underground art. The 1957 trial was a crucial moment: it was the legal battle that pitted the conformist morality of the 1950s against the new freedom of expression. The film is a perfect epilogue, returning to the origin of the cultural and legal rebellion that defined the end of the decade.

Carol (2015)

New York, 1950s. Therese (Rooney Mara), an aspiring photographer, works at a department store during the Christmas season. There she meets Carol (Cate Blanchett), an elegant, older woman trapped in a loveless marriage of convenience. An immediate and deep attraction sparks between them, evolving into a forbidden and dangerous love affair, under the threat of Carol’s husband, who tries to use it to gain custody of their daughter.

Based on the novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (which was published under a pseudonym at the time), this Todd Haynes film is another dive into the 1950s. Unlike Far from Heaven, Carol does not imitate melodrama, but the more subdued, arthouse aesthetic of the period. It is a film about repression and the power of “the gaze”: stolen glances, restrained gestures. In the 1950s, female homosexuality was treated as a crime or a sickness. The novel and the film are revolutionary because they refuse to punish their protagonists, giving them agency and hope in an era that denied their existence.