The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Sex & Melodrama. S1E6

The Story of Film examines cinema in the period of 1953-1957. It looks at the growth of movie-making around the world and examines how sex and melodrama dominated the period. It looks at the work of directors in Egypt (Youssef Chahine), India (Guru Dutt, Satyajit Ray), China (Xie Jin), Japan (Akira Kurosawa), Brazil (Nelson Pereira dos Santos), and Mexico (Fernando de Fuentes, Emilio Fernández, Luis Buñuel). In the United States, films like All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Johnny Guitar (1954) examine repressed sexuality. It also looks at the work of Kenneth Anger, Delbert Mann, Elia Kazan, and Nicholas Ray. It then turns to four classic films by four masters of American cinema Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), John Ford's The Searchers (1956), Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959). Finally, it goes to Britain to look at the work of directors David Leen and Lindsay Anderson.