We figured it was time to have a place to talk about Steve’s latest video subjects that do not have an UMR page.
2,998 thoughts on “Steve’s Top 10 Charts YouTube Forum”
I have seen 12 top 1957 film noir movies, most of them in the top half of the ratings. Favourites are Sweet Smell of Success, Edge of the City, Hell Drivers, Nightfall, Time Without Pity, Slaughter on 10th Avenue, The Long Haul, The Burglar, and Crime of Passion.
I have also seen The Brothers Rico, House of Numbers and The Unholy Wife.
Favourite posters and stills are from Sweet Smell of Success, Edge of the City, Hell Drivers, The Long Haul, The Burglar, The Brothers Rico and The Unholy Wife.
“I ALWAYS do what naturally comes next!” – John Heard as Jack Saunders in 1991’s thriller Deceived.
HI STEVE: I accept that that you should invariably use the same traditional sources to maintain consistency of ratings comparisons. Anyway if you had included Hell on Frisco Bay and had given that movie its dues it might have been crowded at the top: 3 movies tying at NO 1!!!
Your quotes do mount an excellent defence for classifying Body Snatchers as a film noir; though a lot of the arguments are highly technical and would probably be lost on the ‘man-in-the street’ who is not technically-minded about movies – take me for instance!
Kevin McCarthy was once a great pal of Brando and Monty Clift and the 3 used to takes turns at each-other’s homes dressing up in funny clothing and playing almost-childish games together. There are home-video clips on the internet of some of their a****g about.
However when it was revealed that Clift was gay Kevin’s agents advised him to keep out of Monty’s company as continuing to be his pal might in those highly-circumstance times have harmed Kevin’s career.
Kev duly obliged and cut Monty adrift so there were no more social threesomes as in the old days. Kevin did continue to have a reasonably successful career overall and certainly a very long one spanning 73 years from 1937-2010, Kev living until a ripe old 96.
However ostracising Monty never elevated McCarthy’s career to the major star level so that obviously he did not end up in the same star league as Brando and Clift and when he died in 2010 he left behind a net worth quoted today at just $1.6 million which is low compared with the money that droves of other movie stars have accumulated.
William Hurt for example who died recently left a net worth last assessed at $20 million in 2020 and Wikipedia says “Kevin McCarthy is best remembered for portraying the male lead in the horror science fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).”
I have seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but I would not consider that to be noir at all.
All told, I got exactly 50% total seen, another low total for me.
Favourites are The Killing, While the City Sleeps, A Kiss Before Dying, The Killer is Loose, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, Death of a Scoundrel, Slightly Scarlet, Please Murder Me!, and Julie.
I have also seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Wrong Man, The Harder They Fall, Crime in the Streets, Storm Fear, and The Houston Story.
Favourite posters and stills are from The Killing, The Wrong Man, The Harder They Fall, While the City Sleeps, A Kiss Before Dying, The Killer is loose, Death of A Scoundrel, and Slightly Scarlet.
Hi Flora, check out my reply to Bob for the reason I included Body Snatchers on the noir chart. Your tally of 15 out of 30 is a lot better than my 5 out of 30. My favourites are Body Snatchers, The Killing and A Kiss Before Dying, I have also seen The Wrong Man and The Harder They Fall. I may have seen some of the others, like While the City Sleeps, but can’t remember for sure. I wish I was marking them down decades ago. 🙂
Thanks for commenting, much appreciated. Glad you liked the posters and stills. Next video next Friday.
1/Terror at Midnight
2/Inside Detroit- Pat O’Brien reduced to low budget B movies/support roles.
3/The lovely Karen Sharpe [I presume].
4/Price of Fear
5/2 for Julie-Leading man Louis Jourdan a big Brando fan!
6/Please Murder Me
7/Victor George Henry Sanders in one of his few top-billed lead roles
8/Storm Fear
9/Nightmare
10/Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
11/Both for While the City Sleeps especially posed ensemble one. Great movie!
12/2 for The Wrong Man -disappointing Hitch offering.
13/Lovely photos of Diana Dors supposedly Britain’s answer to America’s Monroe in the 1950s
14/Slightly Scarlet. Rhonda my fave B movie actress in the way that Crawford/Day/Durbin and Julia Roberts are my top A list ladies.
15/2 for Harder they Fall. STEIGER to Bogie: “Your boxer aught to be able to take a brutal beating.” BOGIE [Reaching for Rod] “Let’s see how much YOU can take!”
16/2 for A Kiss Before Dying. Almost a forgotten gem and arguably Wagner’s best role as the cold-blooded killer.
17/2 for Unguarded Moment. Leading-man George Nader was in real-life the quiet and highly-respected guru leader of the Gay community to which Rock Hudson belonged. When Rock died he had thought so highly of George that he left the Hudson fortune to him.
18/A Cry in the Night. This is probably what my wife will hear coming from me when I jolt awake in the darkness and realise that Steve has excluded Laddie’s Hell on Frisco Bay!
19 & 20/ Once again I applaud Steve tying this pair because as often as not they are in contention for being designated top B movie of all time. Body Snatchers was of course a Joseph Raymond McCarthy-era “Red Scare” film with the Snatchers [ie the Pods] representing Uncle Joe’s beloved Commies in their endless quest to subvert places like Virginia.
Indeed I suspect that had it been a big budget A list movie those Hollywood perennial Reds Hunters The Duke or Laddie might well have been cast in the Kevin McCarthy lead role. As it was Dick Powell and Joseph Cotton were initially considered for Kevin’s role; though it occurs to me that an actor named “McCarthy” was probably the most appropriate to cast in a Red Scare movie!!
Body Snatchers was in fact shot in just 20 days for a tiny budget equivalent to around $4 million in today’s money but made a fortune for its producers and indeed crashed the Cogerson magical 100 million dollar barrier in adjusted domestic grosses. The Killing had a similar frugal budget but lost for its makers the equivalent of almost1.5 million in 2022 dollars and is credited with a dismal $30 million adjusted domestic gross in the Cogerson. The Work Horse review rates them 82% for Body Snatchers and 89% for The Killing which Bruce has tied at No 1 in 1956 with the Duke’s The Searchers. Can a B movie get any greater accolade than that?
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Apart from the exclusion of Ladd’s Hell on Frisco Bay Steve’s 1956 Film Noirs video is almost perfect and worth a 99% rating in my book. A bonus is Ladd on the set of A Cry in the Night which he narrated and which stars Edmond O’Brien who the following year supported Laddie in the western Stampeded aka The Big Land.
Here is my own pick of the very best POSTERS with as usual FL = Foreign Language version:
1/1st and FL ones for Over Exposed – wow!
2/ALL the FL ones for Harder they Fall
3/A Woman’s Devotion – wow!
4/1st one for Spin a Dark Web
5/1st one for Behind the High Wall
6/1st one The Come On
7/FL one for Price of Fear – Lex Barker in his post-Tarzan career.
8/ALL for Slightly Scarlet – wow! Payne a fave 1950s B movie hero of mine
9/1st one for Death of a Scoundrel
10/FL one for Storm Fear -Wilde beginning to get over-weight.
11/ALL for Nightmare-Edward G’s career continues to slide at box office
12/A Cry in the Night
13/FL one for Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
14/Blonde Sinner – wow!
15/1st And FL one for While the City Sleeps – great fave of mine.
16/Deadlier that The Male. a Prestigious panel of worldwide directors ranked Jean Gabin 6th greatest actor of all time and in that spot tied him with England’s Lord Olivier
17 & 18/ALL for Invasion of the Body Snatchers and ALL for The Killing- I can’t remember a tie before but I approve of Steve’s decision
19/FL for The Unguarded Moment – Esther trying -and failing – to start a new career for herself as a dramatic actress after her career in swimming roles was over
20/FL one for Julie – one of Doris’ few perceived flops [relatively speaking] in her heyday though it did make a tiny profit of around the equivalent of $6 million in today’s money.
21/1st one for The Scarlet Hour. I saw this on a double bill with Hitch’s 1955 The Trouble with Harry which for me was most disappointing though I still remember it for Shirley’s debut – and for Royal Dano’s supporting stint as Deputy Sheriff Calvin Wiggs!! [Who on this site could actually FORGET a Royal Dano performance?]
Hi Bob, thanks for the review, generous rating (ooh), info, trivia and quotes, always appreciated. Happy you liked the posters, stills and lobby cards.
Including Don Siegel’s Body Snatchers on the 1956 noir chart was always going to be controversial and I’ve already had one complaint on my channel. Flora here at the UMR disagreed with the choice too. But a number of sites do list it as noir including one of my reference books. It has elements of noir for sure and if you view it as an allegory for communist infiltration it is paranoia noir disguised as sci-fi horror.
Sorry about the exclusion of Hell on Frisco Bay, as you may have guessed it wasn’t mentioned in any of the reference books I use, but it did get a noir tag in wikipedia. I have an average rating of 6.2 for that film which means it would easily have made the top 20 on this chart. [Bob growls]
One film scored 10 out of 10 from my sources and that was Invasion of the Body Snatchers, three more scored 9 – The Wrong Man, The Harder They Fall and The Killing.
My Video Top 5 –
The Killing 8.35
Invasion of the Body Snatchers 8.35
The Wrong Man 7.9
The Harder They Fall 7.7
Deadlier Than the Male 7.4
The UMR Critics Top 5 –
The Killing 8.9
Invasion of the Body Snatchers 8.2
The Harder They Fall 8.1
The Wrong Man 7.9
A Kiss Before Dying 6.9
– Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Noir, Not Horror –
(Robert Barger)
“Body Snatchers was made in 1956, fitting the film neatly within the universally agreed upon timeframe of true film noir which ran from 1941-1958. This truism only proves a minor point. Aesthetically, Body Snatchers incorporates the typical and standard film noir elements of “low-key lighting, deep-focus cinematography, wide angle lenses and tension inducing” (Belton). Siegel’s use of “criss-crossed light and shadow” (Van Fleet) and composition lines are pure film noir derived from various sources including “window blinds, greenhouse walls, and staircase railings”
As if the technical elements alone are not enough to convince one that Body Snatchers is more film noir than anything else, consider the mode of the film. Most of the picture is one man’s reaction to paranoia and a perceived “mass hysteria”. This film was released at a time when the threat and fear of communism was palpable and tangible; responsible for sparking a rabid fear in the public consciousness. The red scare was not only a source of real paranoia, it sparked actual mass hysteria. A tenet of film noir is undoubtedly “its ability to make audiences uneasy” (Belton). Few topics could make a 1950s audience more uneasy than a picture where every person’s body, as well as consciousness, is hijacked by alien pods, the film climaxing with the main character frantically shouting directly into the camera “You’re in danger! They’re after all of us! They’re here already!”
I have seen 12 top 1957 film noir movies, most of them in the top half of the ratings. Favourites are Sweet Smell of Success, Edge of the City, Hell Drivers, Nightfall, Time Without Pity, Slaughter on 10th Avenue, The Long Haul, The Burglar, and Crime of Passion.
I have also seen The Brothers Rico, House of Numbers and The Unholy Wife.
Favourite posters and stills are from Sweet Smell of Success, Edge of the City, Hell Drivers, The Long Haul, The Burglar, The Brothers Rico and The Unholy Wife.
Hi Flora, your tally 12 out of 25 easily beats my 2. I’ve seen just Hell Drivers and Sweet Smell of Success from noir 1957. Both are favourites.
Thanks for commenting, much appreciated. Glad you liked the picture gallery. The last video in this series next friday.
“I ALWAYS do what naturally comes next!” – John Heard as Jack Saunders in 1991’s thriller Deceived.
HI STEVE: I accept that that you should invariably use the same traditional sources to maintain consistency of ratings comparisons. Anyway if you had included Hell on Frisco Bay and had given that movie its dues it might have been crowded at the top: 3 movies tying at NO 1!!!
Your quotes do mount an excellent defence for classifying Body Snatchers as a film noir; though a lot of the arguments are highly technical and would probably be lost on the ‘man-in-the street’ who is not technically-minded about movies – take me for instance!
Kevin McCarthy was once a great pal of Brando and Monty Clift and the 3 used to takes turns at each-other’s homes dressing up in funny clothing and playing almost-childish games together. There are home-video clips on the internet of some of their a****g about.
However when it was revealed that Clift was gay Kevin’s agents advised him to keep out of Monty’s company as continuing to be his pal might in those highly-circumstance times have harmed Kevin’s career.
Kev duly obliged and cut Monty adrift so there were no more social threesomes as in the old days. Kevin did continue to have a reasonably successful career overall and certainly a very long one spanning 73 years from 1937-2010, Kev living until a ripe old 96.
However ostracising Monty never elevated McCarthy’s career to the major star level so that obviously he did not end up in the same star league as Brando and Clift and when he died in 2010 he left behind a net worth quoted today at just $1.6 million which is low compared with the money that droves of other movie stars have accumulated.
William Hurt for example who died recently left a net worth last assessed at $20 million in 2020 and Wikipedia says “Kevin McCarthy is best remembered for portraying the male lead in the horror science fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).”
I have seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but I would not consider that to be noir at all.
All told, I got exactly 50% total seen, another low total for me.
Favourites are The Killing, While the City Sleeps, A Kiss Before Dying, The Killer is Loose, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, Death of a Scoundrel, Slightly Scarlet, Please Murder Me!, and Julie.
I have also seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Wrong Man, The Harder They Fall, Crime in the Streets, Storm Fear, and The Houston Story.
Favourite posters and stills are from The Killing, The Wrong Man, The Harder They Fall, While the City Sleeps, A Kiss Before Dying, The Killer is loose, Death of A Scoundrel, and Slightly Scarlet.
Hi Flora, check out my reply to Bob for the reason I included Body Snatchers on the noir chart. Your tally of 15 out of 30 is a lot better than my 5 out of 30. My favourites are Body Snatchers, The Killing and A Kiss Before Dying, I have also seen The Wrong Man and The Harder They Fall. I may have seen some of the others, like While the City Sleeps, but can’t remember for sure. I wish I was marking them down decades ago. 🙂
Thanks for commenting, much appreciated. Glad you liked the posters and stills. Next video next Friday.
BEST STILLS IN STEVE’s 1956 FILM NOIRS VIDEO
1/Terror at Midnight
2/Inside Detroit- Pat O’Brien reduced to low budget B movies/support roles.
3/The lovely Karen Sharpe [I presume].
4/Price of Fear
5/2 for Julie-Leading man Louis Jourdan a big Brando fan!
6/Please Murder Me
7/Victor George Henry Sanders in one of his few top-billed lead roles
8/Storm Fear
9/Nightmare
10/Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
11/Both for While the City Sleeps especially posed ensemble one. Great movie!
12/2 for The Wrong Man -disappointing Hitch offering.
13/Lovely photos of Diana Dors supposedly Britain’s answer to America’s Monroe in the 1950s
14/Slightly Scarlet. Rhonda my fave B movie actress in the way that Crawford/Day/Durbin and Julia Roberts are my top A list ladies.
15/2 for Harder they Fall. STEIGER to Bogie: “Your boxer aught to be able to take a brutal beating.” BOGIE [Reaching for Rod] “Let’s see how much YOU can take!”
16/2 for A Kiss Before Dying. Almost a forgotten gem and arguably Wagner’s best role as the cold-blooded killer.
17/2 for Unguarded Moment. Leading-man George Nader was in real-life the quiet and highly-respected guru leader of the Gay community to which Rock Hudson belonged. When Rock died he had thought so highly of George that he left the Hudson fortune to him.
18/A Cry in the Night. This is probably what my wife will hear coming from me when I jolt awake in the darkness and realise that Steve has excluded Laddie’s Hell on Frisco Bay!
19 & 20/ Once again I applaud Steve tying this pair because as often as not they are in contention for being designated top B movie of all time. Body Snatchers was of course a Joseph Raymond McCarthy-era “Red Scare” film with the Snatchers [ie the Pods] representing Uncle Joe’s beloved Commies in their endless quest to subvert places like Virginia.
Indeed I suspect that had it been a big budget A list movie those Hollywood perennial Reds Hunters The Duke or Laddie might well have been cast in the Kevin McCarthy lead role. As it was Dick Powell and Joseph Cotton were initially considered for Kevin’s role; though it occurs to me that an actor named “McCarthy” was probably the most appropriate to cast in a Red Scare movie!!
Body Snatchers was in fact shot in just 20 days for a tiny budget equivalent to around $4 million in today’s money but made a fortune for its producers and indeed crashed the Cogerson magical 100 million dollar barrier in adjusted domestic grosses. The Killing had a similar frugal budget but lost for its makers the equivalent of almost1.5 million in 2022 dollars and is credited with a dismal $30 million adjusted domestic gross in the Cogerson. The Work Horse review rates them 82% for Body Snatchers and 89% for The Killing which Bruce has tied at No 1 in 1956 with the Duke’s The Searchers. Can a B movie get any greater accolade than that?
\
Apart from the exclusion of Ladd’s Hell on Frisco Bay Steve’s 1956 Film Noirs video is almost perfect and worth a 99% rating in my book. A bonus is Ladd on the set of A Cry in the Night which he narrated and which stars Edmond O’Brien who the following year supported Laddie in the western Stampeded aka The Big Land.
Here is my own pick of the very best POSTERS with as usual FL = Foreign Language version:
1/1st and FL ones for Over Exposed – wow!
2/ALL the FL ones for Harder they Fall
3/A Woman’s Devotion – wow!
4/1st one for Spin a Dark Web
5/1st one for Behind the High Wall
6/1st one The Come On
7/FL one for Price of Fear – Lex Barker in his post-Tarzan career.
8/ALL for Slightly Scarlet – wow! Payne a fave 1950s B movie hero of mine
9/1st one for Death of a Scoundrel
10/FL one for Storm Fear -Wilde beginning to get over-weight.
11/ALL for Nightmare-Edward G’s career continues to slide at box office
12/A Cry in the Night
13/FL one for Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
14/Blonde Sinner – wow!
15/1st And FL one for While the City Sleeps – great fave of mine.
16/Deadlier that The Male. a Prestigious panel of worldwide directors ranked Jean Gabin 6th greatest actor of all time and in that spot tied him with England’s Lord Olivier
17 & 18/ALL for Invasion of the Body Snatchers and ALL for The Killing- I can’t remember a tie before but I approve of Steve’s decision
19/FL for The Unguarded Moment – Esther trying -and failing – to start a new career for herself as a dramatic actress after her career in swimming roles was over
20/FL one for Julie – one of Doris’ few perceived flops [relatively speaking] in her heyday though it did make a tiny profit of around the equivalent of $6 million in today’s money.
21/1st one for The Scarlet Hour. I saw this on a double bill with Hitch’s 1955 The Trouble with Harry which for me was most disappointing though I still remember it for Shirley’s debut – and for Royal Dano’s supporting stint as Deputy Sheriff Calvin Wiggs!! [Who on this site could actually FORGET a Royal Dano performance?]
Hi Bob, thanks for the review, generous rating (ooh), info, trivia and quotes, always appreciated. Happy you liked the posters, stills and lobby cards.
Including Don Siegel’s Body Snatchers on the 1956 noir chart was always going to be controversial and I’ve already had one complaint on my channel. Flora here at the UMR disagreed with the choice too. But a number of sites do list it as noir including one of my reference books. It has elements of noir for sure and if you view it as an allegory for communist infiltration it is paranoia noir disguised as sci-fi horror.
Sorry about the exclusion of Hell on Frisco Bay, as you may have guessed it wasn’t mentioned in any of the reference books I use, but it did get a noir tag in wikipedia. I have an average rating of 6.2 for that film which means it would easily have made the top 20 on this chart. [Bob growls]
One film scored 10 out of 10 from my sources and that was Invasion of the Body Snatchers, three more scored 9 – The Wrong Man, The Harder They Fall and The Killing.
My Video Top 5 –
The Killing 8.35
Invasion of the Body Snatchers 8.35
The Wrong Man 7.9
The Harder They Fall 7.7
Deadlier Than the Male 7.4
The UMR Critics Top 5 –
The Killing 8.9
Invasion of the Body Snatchers 8.2
The Harder They Fall 8.1
The Wrong Man 7.9
A Kiss Before Dying 6.9
– Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Noir, Not Horror –
(Robert Barger)
“Body Snatchers was made in 1956, fitting the film neatly within the universally agreed upon timeframe of true film noir which ran from 1941-1958. This truism only proves a minor point. Aesthetically, Body Snatchers incorporates the typical and standard film noir elements of “low-key lighting, deep-focus cinematography, wide angle lenses and tension inducing” (Belton). Siegel’s use of “criss-crossed light and shadow” (Van Fleet) and composition lines are pure film noir derived from various sources including “window blinds, greenhouse walls, and staircase railings”
As if the technical elements alone are not enough to convince one that Body Snatchers is more film noir than anything else, consider the mode of the film. Most of the picture is one man’s reaction to paranoia and a perceived “mass hysteria”. This film was released at a time when the threat and fear of communism was palpable and tangible; responsible for sparking a rabid fear in the public consciousness. The red scare was not only a source of real paranoia, it sparked actual mass hysteria. A tenet of film noir is undoubtedly “its ability to make audiences uneasy” (Belton). Few topics could make a 1950s audience more uneasy than a picture where every person’s body, as well as consciousness, is hijacked by alien pods, the film climaxing with the main character frantically shouting directly into the camera “You’re in danger! They’re after all of us! They’re here already!”
https://tvovermind.com/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-noir-not-horror/