Discover Movies

CBS News correspondent Howard K. Smith hosts this year end look at 1958, specifically in the area of the sciences, arts, and humanities.

Chevrolet's 1950 short film, “E for Efficiency,” produced by Jam Handy, touts the efficiency of Chevrolet's valve-in-head engine.

The new Motoramic Chevrolet introduces the big long look.

Entry, 1958 Brussel's Experimental Film Exhibition

A boy learns how to count groups of objects.

Hold on to your hats, strip fans, as the emcee gets our four featured fillies racing to win a Golden G-String!

This institutional film was designed to promote Chevrolet's corporate citizenship rather than any specific model of automobile.

The Cotswolds are the largest areas of Britain, stretching over a hundred miles from Chipping Camden to the city of Bath.

Highlights of thirteen important college football games played during the 1955 season.

This Traveltalk series short visits four villages in the Netherlands.

This travelogue of Canada's Jasper National Park starts with a visit to the totem pole in the town, then to Lac Beauvert and the park's lodge and bungalows, where more than 600 guests enjoy golf, swimming and scenery. Within the park are the Canadian Rockies' highest summit, largest glaciers, greatest ice fields, and deepest canyons. After a lesson about feeding bears, we tour the vast park: Pyramid Lake and Pyramid Mountain, Mount Edith Cavell and Angel Glacier, a horse trail overlooking the Athabasca River, Athabasca Falls, the Great Colombia Ice Field, Athabasca Glacier and the special cars that bring tourists, and finally Maligne Lake, a fisherman's paradise.

The transporting of a distillation colurm, 137 feet long, 500 miles by road from Greenwich to Grangemouth in Scotland. The commentary, spoken by the rigger in charge and one of the tractor drivers, expresses the humour and resourcefulness with which these transport workers tackle their job; and the camera has captured moments of beauty as well as some amusing episodes in this journey of the longest load to travel by road in Britain.

A short film which explores the last day in the lives of six different people.

This film — presented by Dodge, the official pace car of the 1954 Indianapolis 500 Mile Race — gives viewers a chance a to experience the sights and sounds of the 1954 race featuring the country’s top drivers, which was won by Bill Vukovich.

Jack Benny narrates the Screen Snapshots that, utilizing archive footage, traces the career of Al Jolson, and rare off-stage shots of Jolson with stars such as Bob Hope, Eddie Cantor and Pat O'Brien.

A short, paper-based stop-motion film by Toonder Studio's inspired by The Netherlands' history of sea floods.

This Traveltalks short visits Cape Town, the legislative capital of South Africa.

"Dedicated to Detroit and subtitled 'America on wheels.' A fantasy-farce on the car of everyday life. Everything is a vehicle, life is in motion, motion is the means, the automation is the mean mania of today." - S.V.

Colonel father of Renu (Anita Guha) and Judge father of Vinod (Kishore Kumar) are childhood friends; whose fathers used to be friends. Renu loves Indian music and Vinod is highly influenced with the western music. When Colonel and Judge want to extend their friendship to a relationship; Vinod and Renu realize that they do not love each other and plan to make their parents enemies.But when their plan succeeds they realize that they actually love each other and they now have uphill task to revert the damage they have caused. Enters the Contractor (Om Prakash), who wants his son to marry Renu to his fumbling Son (played by Anoop Kumar) for the wealth of the Colonel. Colonel agrees and it adds to the woes of Vinod and Renu. The rest story is would they succeed in uniting their fathers!

Olive has invited the boys over, but finds Popeye old-fashioned compared to the zoot-suited Bluto. Popeye wants to dance a waltz, pull taffy, play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and croquet, and bob for apples, but Olive turns up her nose at all these as Bluto sabotages them. Finally, Bluto pours quick-drying cement in the apple water and drives off with Olive. Popeye, encased in cement, rolls downhill into a vegetable shop, right next to a bin of spinach. Good thing, because Bluto's getting fresh in a very old-fashioned way. A zoot-suited Popeye stops him, and gets the girl.

This newsreel short spotlights several interesting feature stories from a number of countries including: the Hospice of St. Bernard monks and rescue dogs; fishing and cooking in France; and London rabbits who walk only on their front legs.

An exposé on the nightlife of Sweden's capital, Stockholm, in company with Danish actor/singer Max Hansen and Swedish actress Lena Granhagen.

Joe, a college student, decides it's about time for him to get married and settle down. He's drawn to two girls: Ann, a "sophisticated" coed who is so independent that--horrors!--she doesn't even go to church anymore, or Elsie, the sweet young thing he left at home (take a wild guess which one he winds up with).

Molasses, an overweight greyhound, is racing right for the dog pound until Casper the Friendly Ghost lends a paw.

"Bute’s most compact abstract film energizes a jazzy ad jingle to promote RCA’s new stereo recordings! The barrage of visuals features a panoply of animated techniques among which eloquent oscilloscope patterns dance in complex synchronization to the music." — Bruce Posner

This short travelogue, visiting Mexico, was shot in VistaVision.

An early documentary examining reports and hypotheses about flying saucers.

Soon-to-be-18-year-old heroine has decided to run away and elope with her well-meaning boyfriend, who schleps for pennies at the local service station... until her dad gives her the ol’ guilt trip about how important a real Christian wedding in a church is to a successful marriage: "Marriage is a sacred relationship. And you'll be starting right with Christ at the center of your life!" Then she tells her would-be hubby that she’d rather just stay home and play Scrabble with the fam for now instead of putting dents into the headboard: "Marriage is...for real!" All is happy.

The 1953 feature is a Compilation film, with pianist Liberace as the master of ceremonies in which his music is woven in-and-around the presentation of three 1951 shorts, consequently it is comprised of about 45-minutes of footage from the full-showing of the shorts (credits and all as shown on their original release, preceding each) and between those, the maestro is seen and heard playing his own arrangement of 'Chopin's Waltz in C Sharp Minor," and "Polanaise"; Liszt's "Liebestraum"; "The Yaketa-Yak Polka", based on the Tritsch Tratsch polka of Johann Strauss' and the folk song "Orche Tchorina." Scattered between the music is "Groan and Grunts" with Gil Lamb; "Lord Epping Returns" with Leon Errol, and 1950s "Waiting For Baby" with Scott Elliott(billed as Robert Neil) and Suzi Crandall (billed as Susan Crandall.)

A fantastic, growing, decorative canvas, influenced by Indian art but with a moderate element of its own.

A Walt Disney cartoon anthology

Everyday incidents at school and at play teach Alice, Jerry and Eddie to resolve conflicts by compromise, by obeying rules, by finding facts, or finding opinions.

Odds & Ends is a sly comment on the collage film and Beat culture. To discarded travel and advertising footage found at a local film laboratory, Belson Shimane added a mélange of animation—assemblages, cutouts, color fields, and line drawings—and faux hipster narration by Jacobs (credited via the anagram Rheny Bojacs) punctuated by a bongo backing. Strung together with doublespeak and non sequiturs, the monologue skirts the edge of nonsense as Jacobs waxes on about poetry, jazz, “reaching the public,” “having a good time,” and—although “money doesn’t count”—the “possibility of subsidy” through grants. Footage of champagne, tropical beaches, and exotic peoples intermingle with rhythmic drawings and stop-motion flights of fancy. The visuals race on through dazzling transformations, both amplifying and undercutting the patter. —National Film Preservation Foundation. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Iota Center Collection in 2006.

Government-sponsored health information film promoting awareness of the infectious disease, Tuberculosis. The film takes the form of a narrative in which a young man believes he has caught a cold until his wife advises that he attend a doctor. When the doctor diagnoses TB and admits the man to hospital, he goes through the various stages of the disease, and leaves the hospital in good health. A concluding statement reveals that the death rate from the disease has declined from 4, 306 in 1943 to 1, 600 in 1952. An aerial shot of the new James Connolly Memorial Hospital at Blanchardstown, Dublin, concludes the film with an assurance that Ireland's employment of modern methods in treating the disease and the introduction of the BCG vaccine are capable of countering it.

Snapper has to get a sensational picture for the Daily Bow Bow ("Tree Star Edition") or get fired.

Demonstrates an effective method of closing a sale. To do this a salesman must demonstrate the product, overcome any objections, restate the points which have the customer’s agreement and finally persuade the prospect to sign a contract, emphasising the advantages of immediate action.

Correa’s MIT Master’s Thesis.

A BFI-produced documentary about documentary filmmaker John Grierson speaking about documentary.

The Word is a 1953 American short documentary film produced by John Adams. The film is about Frank Laubach and his work on literacy. The Word was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.

This 1959 Encyclopedia Britannica Film explores the lives and actions of Vikings, also called Norsemen or Northmen. While perhaps slightly romanticized, the film attempts to depict the Vikings’ travels and impact on history, by showing their traditions, explorations, their raiding and pillaging of their neighbors, and their eventual conversion to Christianity. The film also portrays the daily life of Vikings, including people plowing fields, harvesting hay, grinding grain, and men making tools and doing metalwork. This is followed by a map and animation of the furthest Viking explorations including to North America and through Russia to Constantinople. The film concludes with the departure of a Viking longship.

Pint-sized punk (PETER VOTRIAN) uses the old five-finger discount to swipe an alarm clock from storekeeper WALTER COY (the mad scientist of I Eat Your Skin) who then tells Christian cop STUART RANDALL. After the cop confers with the boy's grim-faced pa, PAUL BRYAR, the little delinquent is enrolled in Sunday school! And-- surprise, surprise -- once the kid is given a lil' new Testament all his own ("Isn't it slick! Can I write my name in it, Pa?") he decides stealing alarm clocks just isn't his style anymore. And Yes, all is happy. Those Lutherans really do have all the answers!

UCLA Student Film, Preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Surreal interpretive dance of a tormented woman. A woman dances up to a spinning mobile with a diamond necklace hanging off on part and a web at the center. Mesmerized, she mimics the mobile's movemnents in dance. She approaches a clock where every place reads 12, calling out for help. She finds a man, approaching him with desire, kissing him and oral sex is insinuated. The film becomes inverted as she pirouttes repeatly. Back to a positive image, she encounters a door into the heart of the mobile, the web. Sbe closes the door and encounters another version of herself, then again the mobile spinning. She then stabs herself repeately with a knife and screams.

A Trip to Europe

A Scotland Yard detective investigates the connection between a man who suffers from amnesia, a blackmailer and murder.

A documentary short on The Festival in London.

Grateful Gus, a happy-go-lucky panhandler, puts the touch on a bank executive who is hastily absconding with the bank's liquid assets. The banker gives Gus a ten-dollar bill, and Gus is so filled with gratitude that he sticks closer to the embezzler than glue, no matter where the robber goes. This eventually causes the apprehension of the worn-out robber. A policeman gives Gus a reward and Gus then turns his grateful attention to him.

Paging all parents! Need some post-war childrearing advice? Then this is the film for you. It was an instalment in the Your Children series of films produced between 1945 and 1951, dealing with various facets of children's health - in this case, the importance of play to both mental and physical development. The surprise is not that much of it has amusingly dated – of course it has – but how much still feels enlightened and applicable today.

Mutual Savings Bank and the many wonders it has if you bank with them.

Mexican feature film

In the hands of another director, the inner-workings of a magnet laboratory could have caused a whole classroom to fall asleep of boredom. No so when Leacock was hired to produce this twenty-minute version of lab mayhem. Try this: six researchers in a lab at MIT in the late 1950's show-off the power of electro-magnets, and in the process, accidentally set an experiment on fire. Or this: half way through the film the phone rings off screen, and host Francis Bitter says "tell 'em I'll call 'em back later" while he's looking at the camera, discussing bus bars. Leacock’s fleshed out all the personalities here, from "Beans" Bardo, who cranks up the generator to nearly explosive proportions, to the mysterious Mr. Lin, who barely peeks over his shoulder at us, seemingly in mockery, disdain, or curiosity.

Short film by Robert Vickrey.

In this classic movie, two close friends decide to become soldiers and join the army to earn extra money. During their training, they come across two other recruits that take photos where ever they go. They decide to catch the 'culprits' before they discover the 'secret weapon'. To add to the comedy, these to friends get into all sorts of trouble to such an extend that their commanders can not wait to get rid of them.

Shows the relationship of the Constitution to the issue of prior restraint on freedom of expression. Presents the case of Burstyn v. Wilson challenging the constitutionality of New York State's film censorship system and Cantwell v. Connecticut involving questions of freedom of speech and religion. Discusses the questions pertaining to freedom of speech when multiplied via recordings or film, and how the claims of free expression can be weighed against claims for local, state, or federal protection.

Explains some of the causes of children's fantasies and shows how they may affect a child's development. Discusses such common problems as fear of the dark, imaginary friends, and the interpretation of Santa Claus. Suggest ways of making fantasies an impetus to creative living rather than an escape from reality.

Documentary directed by Harisadhan Dasgupta.

A pampered cat, the pet of a Park Avenue penthouse resident, is fed up with his life of ease with the best of food and tender loving care, and yearns to be free to roam Central Park and, perhaps, snare a pigeon or two for his food needs. He manages to escape and stalks triplet pigeons, and soon learns that the penthouse is better than the outhouse.

A tribute to Stan Brakhage's pet dog Sirius, whose decompostion was recorded over 6 months after he had died. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 2010.