First Choice: 1955

Game of Love. Two French adolescents drift in the warm round of young love: a modern vegetation mystery made from a novel by Colette (TIME, Jan. 24).

Wages of Fear. The year's most terrifying film: France's Henri-Georges Clouzot watches four rats die in a Latin American trap (TIME, Feb. 21).

Marty. The year's best U.S. picture: the love story of "a very good butcher"; with Ernest Borgnine, Betsy Blair (TIME, April 18).

The Great Adventure. Arne Sucksdorff's camera glides like a serpent through an Eden in Sweden, and the natural world like an Eve reveals her tender, terrible secrets (TIME, June 20).

Summertime. Just one of those things, but it happens in lustered Venice to Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi, and Britain's Director David Lean is one of the best (TIME, June 27).

The Desperate Hours. Hell, in the persons of an infernal trinity of criminals, breaks loose in a suburban home, and Director William Wyler enthusiastically fans the flames, with the help of Fredric March and Humphrey Bogart (TIME, Oct. 10).

Umberto D. The camera sips, more in sorrow than in anger, the dregs of old age; Vittorio De Sica writes a fine finis to the neorealist era in Italian cinema (TIME, Dec. 12).

The Man with the Golden Arm. Nelson Algren's tale of a hot dealer who deals himself a cold card: heroin. A painful, powerful story of human bondage, in which Frank Sinatra is unforgettable (see below).

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