443 Films & TV Shows Set In North America During The 1950s
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The Cross and the Switchblade
New York The 1950sOne man's desperation. Another man's hopeful journey. — A film adaptation of a book written in 1963. It tells the true story of Wilkerson's first five years in New York City, where he ministered to disillusioned youth, encouraging them to turn away from the drugs and gang violence they were involved with.
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Che!
🇨🇺 Cuba 🇧🇴 Bolivia The 1950s The 1960sChe Guevara...The Doctor Turned Fighter. The Fighter Turned Revolutionary. The Revolutionary Turned Martyr To Some, Murderer To Others. — Biography of Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who helped Fidel Castro in his struggle against the corrupt Batista regime, eventually resulting in the overthrow of that government and Castro's taking over of Cuba. The film covers Guevara's life from when he first landed in Cuba in 1956 to his death in an ambush by government troops in the mountains of Bolivia in 1967.
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The Happy Ending
Colorado 🇧🇸 Bahamas The 1960s The 1950sMarriage is a 30 billion dollar business! And that's just to get married. — The triumphs and failures of middle age as seen through the eyes of runaway American housewife Mary Wilson, a woman who believes that ultimate reality exists above and beyond the routine procedures of conscious, uninspired, everyday life. She feels cheated by an older generation that taught her to settle for nothing less than storybook finales, people who are disillusioned and restless and don't know why, people for whom life holds no easy answers.
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Cool Hand Luke
Florida The 1950sWhat we've got here is failure to communicate. — When petty criminal Luke Jackson is sentenced to two years in a Florida prison farm, he doesn't play by the rules of either the sadistic warden or the yard's resident heavy, Dragline, who ends up admiring the new guy's unbreakable will. Luke's bravado, even in the face of repeated stints in the prison's dreaded solitary confinement cell, "the box," make him a rebel hero to his fellow convicts and a thorn in the side of the prison officers.
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In Cold Blood
🇲🇽 Mexico Nevada Kansas The 1950sAfter a botched robbery results in the brutal murder of a rural family, two drifters elude police, in the end coming to terms with their own mortality and the repercussions of their vile atrocity.
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I Am Cuba
🇨🇺 Cuba The 1950sAn unabashed exercise in cinema stylistics, I Am Cuba is pro-Castro/anti-Batista rhetoric dressed up in the finest clothes. The film's four dramatic stories take place in the final days of the Batista regime; the first two illustrate the ills that led to the revolution, the third and fourth the call to arms which cut across social and economic lines.
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Black Like Me
Texas Louisiana Georgia The 1950sIt's All True...Every Living Moment! — Black Like Me is the true account of John Griffin's experiences when he passed as a black man.
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Bye Bye Birdie
Ohio The 1950sThe Most WONDERFUL Entertainment EVER! EVER! — A singer goes to a small town for a performance before he is drafted.
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Lolita
New Hampshire Ohio The 1950sHow did they ever make a movie of ... — Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged British novelist who is both appalled by and attracted to the vulgarity of American culture. When he comes to stay at the boarding house run by Charlotte Haze, he soon becomes obsessed with Lolita, the woman's teenaged daughter.
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The Manchurian Candidate
New York 🇰🇷 South Korea The 1950sWhen you've seen it all, you'll swear there's never been anything like it! — Near the end of the Korean War, a platoon of U.S. soldiers is captured by communists and brainwashed. Following the war, the platoon is returned home, and Sergeant Raymond Shaw is lauded as a hero by the rest of his platoon. However, the platoon commander, Captain Bennett Marco, finds himself plagued by strange nightmares and soon races to uncover a terrible plot.
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Period of Adjustment
Tennessee The 1950sThe agonizing pause between the honeymoon and the marriage! — George Haverstick, a Korean war veteran, hastily marries Isabel, whom he met in hospital while he was recovering from a nervous condition. To Isabel's horror, they drive to Florida on their honeymoon in an old hearse. They spend much of the time quarreling, and then, on Christmas eve, they visit George's war buddy, Ralph Baltz. However Ralph's wife Dorothea has just walked out on him, taking their child. Each couple then observes the marital difficulties of the other couple
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David and Lisa
Pennsylvania The 1960s The 1950sAn unusual love story! — Teenager David Clemens develops a hysterical fear that he will die if he comes into physical contact with another person. Perturbed, David's overbearing mother places him in a home for mentally disturbed young people, but David remains withdrawn from the other patients and his psychiatrist. Over time, however, David grows interested in 15-year-old Lisa, who suffers from multiple personalities – one who can only speak in rhyme, and the other, a mute.
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West Side Story
New York The 1950sThe screen achieves one of the great entertainments in the history of motion pictures. — In the slums of the upper West Side of Manhattan, New York, a gang of Polish-American teenagers called the Jets compete with a rival gang of recently immigrated Puerto Ricans, the Sharks, to "own" the neighborhood streets. Tensions are high between the gangs but two kids, one from each rival gang, fall in love leading to tragedy.
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A Raisin in the Sun
Illinois The 1950sThe prize-winning drama that warms the screen with its people and its passions... — Walter Lee Younger is a young man struggling with his station in life. Sharing a tiny apartment with his wife, son, sister and mother, he seems like an imprisoned man. Until, that is, the family gets an unexpected financial windfall.
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Back Street
Nebraska New York The 1950s The 1940sAmbitious but thwarted, Rae Smith meets handsome Marine Paul Saxon, (of the Saxon department store chain), as he passes through Lincoln, Nebraska, on his way home from World War II. There's a definite spark between them but circumstances intervene and he leaves town without her. Later she learns he's married. Determined to make it as a fashion designer, Rae moves to New York and becomes a great success. One day she happens to meet Paul again and again there's that spark but he's still married so, as a form of escape, Rae moves to Rome to set up shop. Once again she meets Paul and finally they begin an actual affair since Paul's shrewish, drunken wife, Liz, won't give him a divorce. Time passes, the affair continues whenever time and place permit, but then, Paul's young son finds out about Rae and Rae's back-street world begins to crumble.
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The Apartment
New York The 1950s The 1960sMovie-wise, there has never been anything like it - laugh-wise, love-wise, or otherwise-wise! — Bud Baxter is a minor clerk in a huge New York insurance company, until he discovers a quick way to climb the corporate ladder. He lends out his apartment to the executives as a place to take their mistresses. Although he often has to deal with the aftermath of their visits, one night he's left with a major problem to solve.
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Psycho
Arizona California The 1960s The 1950sA new—and altogether different—screen excitement! — When larcenous real estate clerk Marion Crane goes on the lam with a wad of cash and hopes of starting a new life, she ends up at the notorious Bates Motel, where manager Norman Bates cares for his housebound mother.
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Ice Palace
Alaska The 1950s The 1940sWhen a man makes love -- that's when a woman can tell. — Alaska: America's last great wilderness frontier. A land of primitive grandeur, of glaciers, mountains and ice-fields. And of ambitious cannery tycoon Zeb "Czar" Kennedy (Richard Burton) and rugged activist leader Thor Storm (Robert Ryan), two rough-hewn men whose bitter 40-year rivalry mirrored their powerful land's struggle for statehood.
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The Savage Eye
California The 1950sA journey through the dark side of 1950s Los Angeles. "The Savage Eye" is largely composed of documentary street footage, which, when coupled with its dramatized material, takes the form of a hybrid narrative about a divorcee who escapes to L.A. to eviscerate her past -- and all notions of love and faith -- with a boozy, cynical abandon.
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Jazz on a Summer's Day
Rhode Island The 1950s...love on a summer's night! — Set at the Newport jazz festival in 1958, this documentary mixes images of water and the town with performers and audience. The film progresses from day to night and from improvisational music to Gospel. It's a concert film that suggests peace and leisure, jazz at a particular time and place.
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I Aim at the Stars
New Mexico 🇩🇪 Germany The 1940s The 1950s The 1930s The 1920sFROM THE EARTH TO THE STARS...this is the story of Wernher von Braun...the man who thrust the world into the Space Age. — The life story of the famed rocket scientist Dr. Werner von Braun, one of the most brilliant and controversial figures of the space age. Dr. von Braun literally pioneered man's adventure into space through his rocket experiments; his was the brain behind the V-2 rockets which blasted London in World War II; his was also the brain which led America into the development and the launching of space satellites.
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The Subterraneans
California The 1950sLove among the new Bohemians! — A disillusioned writer explores the subterranean depths of San Francisco's North Beach district.
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Cada quién su vida
Ciudad de México The 1950sCada quién su vida (To Each Their Own Life) takes place on December 31st in a cabaret in Mexico City during the 1950s, a place where customers go to dance and have fun. Among them are a congressman and a professor who hope to share their experiences and problems with the women there, each of a different category, each with their own problems and heartaches, but always with a sense of humor that keeps them afloat.
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Imitation of Life
New York The 1950s The 1940sFannie Hurst's best selling novel of today's tormented generation! — Lora Meredith, a white widow who dreams of being on Broadway, has a chance encounter with Annie Johnson, a black single mother. Annie becomes the caretaker of Lora's daughter, Susie, while Lora pursues her stage career. Both women deal with the difficulties of motherhood: Lora's thirst for fame threatens her relationship with Susie, while Annie's light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane, struggles with her African-American identity.
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The Blob
Pennsylvania The 1950sIt crawls. It creeps. It eats you alive! — A drive-in favorite, this sci-fi classic follows teenagers Steve and his best girl, Jane, as they try to protect their hometown from a gelatinous alien life form that engulfs everything it touches. The first to discover the substance and live to tell about it, Steve and Jane witness the blob destroying an elderly man, then it growing to a terrifying size. But no one else has seen the goo, and policeman Dave refuses to believe the kids without proof.
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