1950s Movies Trivia
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98 free 1950s Movies trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The 1950s gave cinema widescreen, 3D, the method actor, the teenage rebel and the nuclear monster. Ben-Hur won a record eleven Oscars, Marilyn Monroe stood over a subway grate, James Dean died a month before Rebel Without a Cause opened, and a man in a rubber suit flattened a miniature Tokyo. This quiz covers the Best Picture winners and the films that should have been (Singin' in the Rain was treated as a routine musical), Hitchcock's run from Strangers on a Train to North by Northwest, Billy Wilder's comedies, the westerns of Ford and Zinnemann, Kurosawa and Bergman, Disney's return to fairy tales, and the sci-fi of pods, blobs, giant ants and the Gill-man. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so it works as a classic film round, a movie night warm-up or a test for anyone who knows what "nobody's perfect" is the last line of.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which epic won a then-record eleven Academy Awards?
Ben-Hur
Ben-Hur lost only one of its 12 nominations, Best Adapted Screenplay, a loss blamed on the dispute over the writing credit.
Q 02Who co-directed and choreographed Singin' in the Rain with Stanley Donen?
Gene Kelly
Gene Kelly shot the rain-soaked title number while running a 103°F fever.
Q 03What transition in Hollywood history is Singin' in the Rain set during?
Silent films to talkies
Silent films to talkies was the natural setting because many of its songs, by producer Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, had been written for films of that era.
Q 04Which future Easy Rider star debuted on film in a minor role in Rebel Without a Cause?
Dennis Hopper
Dennis Hopper later clashed with director Henry Hathaway; in the most common telling, he did take after take rather than play a scene Hathaway's way.
Q 05Who plays the two musicians who disguise themselves as women in Some Like It Hot?
Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon
Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon looked so ghoulish in drag during colour tests that Billy Wilder shot the whole film in black and white.
Q 06What is the famous final line of Some Like It Hot?
"Well, nobody's perfect!"
"Well, nobody's perfect!" came from co-writer I.A.L. Diamond while the ending was still unsettled, and it stuck.
Q 07In which Hitchcock film does the camera track back while zooming in, the shot now called the dolly zoom?
Vertigo
Vertigo uses the trick as Scottie looks down, so the drop seems to stretch away and the audience shares his fear of heights.
Q 08Which Marilyn Monroe film shows her white dress billowing up over a New York subway grate?
The Seven Year Itch
The Seven Year Itch first shot the scene at 1 a.m. on Lexington Avenue before crowds of fans, then reshot it on a Fox set.
Q 09Rear Window is shot almost entirely from where?
Inside one apartment
Inside one apartment: Paramount built the whole Greenwich Village courtyard and the flats around it as one enormous set on a single soundstage.
Q 10Who designed the opening title sequence of North by Northwest?
Saul Bass
It was the first film to make extended use of kinetic typography in its credits.
Q 11Which crime novelist's 1950 book did Hitchcock adapt as Strangers on a Train?
Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith's novel got a Raymond Chandler script, but Hitchcock threw it out and had Czenzi Ormonde start again from page one.
Q 12Dial M for Murder was originally intended to be shown in what format?
3D
By its 1954 release interest in 3D had faded, so most cinemas showed it flat.
Q 13Sunset Boulevard stars Gloria Swanson as which faded silent star?
Norma Desmond
Norma Desmond's loyal butler is played by Erich von Stroheim, who really had directed Gloria Swanson back in the silent era.
Q 21Seven Samurai's farmers hire the samurai to defend against whom?
Bandits coming back after the harvest
Bandits coming back after the harvest threaten the village, and Hollywood later remade the story as The Magnificent Seven in 1960.
Q 22Rashomon's story comes from which author's short stories "In a Grove" and "Rashōmon"?
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's stories became a film its own studio doubted, yet Rashomon won the top prize at Venice and opened Western markets to Japanese cinema.
Q 23In The Seventh Seal, what game does the knight play against Death?
Chess
Q 14All About Eve earned four female acting nominations, yet which star won that year's Best Actress Oscar?
Judy Holliday
Judy Holliday won for Born Yesterday, and Josephine Hull took Supporting Actress for Harvey, so all four All About Eve nominees went home empty-handed.
Q 15Which composer wrote his only original film score for On the Waterfront?
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein's score was nominated but lost to The High and the Mighty, one of the few Oscars On the Waterfront missed while winning eight.
Q 16On the Waterfront deals with corruption among which workers?
Longshoremen
Longshoremen's union rackets had been exposed in Malcolm Johnson's Pulitzer-winning New York Sun series, which inspired the film.
Q 17Who played Stanley Kowalski in the 1951 film of A Streetcar Named Desire?
Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando was the only one of the film's four nominated stars to lose, while Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden all won Oscars.
Q 18What distinctive structural device does High Noon use?
The plot unfolds in real time
The plot unfolds in real time, or nearly, and writer Carl Foreman, branded an uncooperative witness by HUAC, moved to Britain in 1952.
Q 19Which film did the American Film Institute name the greatest American Western in 2008?
The Searchers
The Searchers inspired Buddy Holly: John Wayne's line "That'll be the day" became the basis of Holly's song of that name.
Q 20Which director won a record fourth Best Director Oscar for The Quiet Man?
John Ford
John Ford won none of his four directing Oscars for a Western: the others were for The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley.
Chess against Death grew from the medieval church paintings of Death that Ingmar Bergman had never forgotten seeing as a boy.
Q 24Which star won his only Oscar as riverboat captain Charlie Allnut in The African Queen?
Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey Bogart said he lived on baked beans, canned asparagus and Scotch, and he and John Huston were nearly the only ones to escape dysentery.
Q 25Which blacklisted screenwriter's Roman Holiday Oscar went to his front, Ian McLellan Hunter?
Dalton Trumbo
Dalton Trumbo did it again with The Brave One, whose Oscar went to a made-up writer, Robert Rich, so he could not collect that one either.
Q 26Which Frenchman received the screenplay Oscar for The Bridge on the River Kwai, a script he never wrote?
Pierre Boulle
Pierre Boulle wrote the novel, but the real screenwriters, blacklisted Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, received their Oscars only posthumously, in 1984.
Q 27From Here to Eternity follows Army soldiers stationed in which US territory in 1941?
Hawaii
Hawaii was the setting, and to win the Army's cooperation the film toned down the novel, making its sadistic stockade sergeant seem atypical.
Q 28Which Best Picture winner also won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, a double later matched by Parasite?
Marty
Marty began as an hour-long TV play by Paddy Chayefsky starring Rod Steiger, and the modest big-screen version went on to win Best Picture.
Q 29Which 1958 musical won every one of the nine Oscars it was nominated for?
Gigi
Gigi swept all nine without a single acting nomination, not even for its stars Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier.
Q 30Which 1956 film saves its animated title sequence for the very end?
Around the World in 80 Days
Around the World in 80 Days won Best Picture, though it was the first film Mike Todd had ever produced.