My Top Ten of 1952

Wish I could get these posts done on time, but one does have a full-time job and a social life. Anyway, A few days later than I wanted, but here we go.

Anyway, here are the 77 films I watched for 1952:

Actor's and Sin

Affair in Trinidad

The Atomic City

The Bad and the Beautiful

Because You're Mine

Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla

Bend of the River

Big Jim McLain

The Big Sky

The Black Castle

Breaking the Sound Barrier

Brighton Rock

The Browning Version

The Bushwhackers

The Card (aka The Promoter)

Caribbean

Carrie

Clash by Night

Come Back, Little Sheba

Cry, the Beloved Country

Deadline - U.S.A.

Five Fingers

Flat Top

A Girl in Every Port

The Greatest Show on Earth

Hans Christian Andersen

The Harlem Globetrotters

High Noon

Ivanhoe

Jack and the Beanstalk

Japanese War Bride

The Jazz Singer

Just for You

The Las Vegas Story

The Lavender Hill Mob

Lure of the Wilderness

The Lusty Men

Macao

Man Bait

The Man in the White Suit

The Medium

The Member of the Wedding

The Merry Widow

Million Dollar Mermaid

The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima

Monkey Business

Moulin Rouge

My Cousin Rachel

My Six Convicts

My Son John

Navajo

The Narrow Margin

O. Henry's Full House

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

Park Row

Pat and Mike

Plymouth Adventure

The Pride of St. Louis

The Quiet Man

Rancho Notorious

Rashomon

Red Planet Mars

Road to Bali

Scandal Sheet

Singin' in the Rain

The Sniper

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Son of Paleface

The Star

Stars and Stripes Forever

Steel Town

Sudden Fear

The Thief

Viva Zapata!

Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie

What Price Glory

With a Song in My Heart

Ironically, given the delay, this was one of the quickest Top Tens I've ever made. With apologies to the briefly-considered The Bad and the Beautiful, The Black Castle, Brighton Rock, Million Dollar Mermaid, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Rashomon, and especially the two that did almost make it, My Cousin Rachel and Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie, here are my ten favorite films of 1952, in alphabetical order:

Oscars 1952: Best Director

This is the last of the Oscar Retrospectives in the mini-series "The Winner Is John Ford," focusing on the cinematic years for which John Ford won three of his four Oscars for Best Director (we already looked at 1935, the year he won his first for The Informer).

The Quiet Man was John Ford's passion project. It's the movie that he'd been wanting to make since 1933, constantly researching, rewriting, and re-developing. First, it was a politically-tinged drama, something more akin to The Informer; by the time it hit the big screen, it was a fish-out-of-water romantic-comedy; in every iteration, however, it was a valentine to his parents' homeland, Ireland. Ford was born in Maine, but his parents were both Irish (his mother, according to Searching for John Ford, only really knew Gaelic). Throughout his life, he clung to his heritage and gave time and attention to Irish causes and stories. His Westerns and war films would usually have at least one "stock" Irish character - Barry Fitzgerald dependably on hand, as he is in The Quiet Man; an admirer of the playwright Sean O'Casey, he directed an adaptation of the work The Plough and the Stars and produced a biopic, Young Cassidy; and any criticism people have of How Green Was My Valley is usually directed at how the Welshmen are written as, played by, and treated like Irishmen. But that was Ford. The Quiet Man was finally, finally, his chance to tell an Irish story in an Irish setting with Irish actors - and in color, showing off the beauty of the land. They say passion projects can be doomed to failure, but not only has The Quiet Man maintained its status in cinema - it won Ford his record-breaking fourth Oscar:

It is a feat not likely to be bested any time soon. Only two other directors have even won three, and both of them - Frank Capra and William Wyler - are long dead. Another interesting point: Picture-Director splits are rare, but How Green Was My Valley is the only time Ford won Best Director and the movie Best Picture. The Quiet Man, as we know, lost the big honor to The Greatest Show on Earth, produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

DeMille was also up for Best Director. In 1950, he was given an Honorary Oscar for "37 years of brilliant showmanship"; if the intention was to salute a man at the twilight of his career, it was premature. That same year, his Samson and Delilah became the highest-grossing film; two years later came The Greatest Show on Earth, again, the highest-grossing film of its release year. So, finally, the brilliant showman became a Best Director nominee for the first and only time. He joined a slate that included not only his old friend Ford, but John Huston, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and Fred Zinnemann. 

This slate, in fact:

Oscars 1952: Best Actress

Best Actress 1952 was a year with a clear runaway favorite to win, as only one performance had won the New York Film Critics Circle Award, the Golden Globe, the National Board of Review - and, hell, even the Tony Award! The Oscar was just the last step in an inevitable march for Shirley Booth:

Her competition included Susan Hayward, the only actress anyone considered a viable threat; Julie Harris, who also recreated a role she played on Broadway; and, in their only direct competition against each other, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. The nominees:

Oscars 1952: Best Actor

What to say about this crop of Best Actor nominees except to say that they are unusually great, all of them? How about this: 1941 and 1952 are in conversation with each other. John Ford wins in 1941, never nominated again until 1952, where he wins again. John Huston's directorial is in 1941; by 1952, he's nominated against Ford...and a veteran Oscar winner. For unnominated films, Swamp Water is remade as Lure of the Wilderness. And, if we're talking repeat winners, Gary Cooper finally wins an Oscar in 1941...only to repeat, once again uncontested, in 1952:

But who do you even vote for in this lineup? The Academy spoiled us this year, as witness:

Oscars 1952: Best Supporting Actress

Oscars 1952 was about 25 years of the Academy Awards, about Cecil B. DeMille (in addition to Best Picture, he also received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award), and, interestingly, about Gloria Grahame. Five years after her Oscar nomination for Crossfire, Grahame found herself with her busiest slate yet, four films that showcased her range. In The Greatest Show on Earth, she's the straightforward but good-hearted elephant tamer, a tough cookie but vulnerable - and knows a good man when she sees one. In Macao, she's a gangster's opportunistic sidepiece who tosses in with the hero when she realizes how expendable she might be. In Sudden Fear, she's a gal on the make who realizes, alongside Jack Palance, there's a potential fortune to be made in murder. And in The Bad and the Beautiful, she's the dizzy Southern wife of an author wooed to Hollywood by Kirk Douglas's manipulative producer, who entices her away from hubby and into the arms of a Latin lothario... More comic in pitch than the other roles, it's the one that got her the Oscar:

How does it stand against the others in this category? That's why we're here...

Oscars 1952: Best Supporting Actor

Supporting Actor. What a funny category, always. In 1952, neither the BAFTAs nor the New York Critics nor the National Board of Review had gotten on board with an award the Academy had been handing out since 1936. The Golden Globes had, but none of their three nominees were nominated at the Oscars: not The Happy Time's Kurt Kasznar, not The Bad and the Beautiful's Gilbert Roland, and not the winner, My Six Convicts' Millard Mitchell. Given that, who could be said was the favorite to win among these five?

I'm not sure how Arthur Hunnicutt came to his nod. I can guess that Sudden Fear's great reception pulled Jack Palance along for the ride. And with The Quiet Man once planned as John Ford's followup to The Informer, it seems good and proper that both the director and the star, Victor McLaglen, of that 1935 film would both end up nominated. But all were considered also-rans compared to Richard Burton, a leading man campaigned as supporting by his studio, for his star-making performance in My Cousin Rachel. Like Gary Cooper's second Best Actor Oscar, this was a foregone conclusion.

So everyone was surprised when Mexican actor Anthony Quinn, who'd been playing gangsters, Indians, and other supporting baddies for over a decade, won for playing a genuinely supporting part. He couldn't make it, but his wife accepted on his behalf:

...she being Katherine DeMille, daughter of none other than Cecil B. DeMille. It really was DeMille's night, huh?

Here's how I look at this lineup: 

Oscars 1952: Best Picture of the Year

How often does the biggest moneymaker of the year win Best Picture of the Year? Rarer than you think. Wikipedia's records only go back to 1948 while the Oscars themselves date back to 1927-28; within that narrow timeframe of 76 years, only 12 times has the Academy's choice and "the people's" choice aligned. The last time it happened: 2003's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. The first time it happened - again, according to Wiki info - was 1952's The Greatest Show on Earth! And if cinema about the circus wasn't cross-pollination among the showbiz mediums enough, it was declared the winner in the first-ever Oscars to be broadcast on television:

Yes, this was the 25th Anniversary of the Academy Awards, held at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. Honestly, marking those 25 years by honoring not just the year's biggest hit but one of the Academy's original founders, the greatest showman cinema saw up to that point, makes a lot of sense. It's a great honor for a man without whom the town and the industry would not be what it was - for better and worse. 

The behind-the-scenes circus epic was up against four other films that found themselves in the Top 10 box office hits of the year (honestly, rare that all five would be there, but they are all entertaining). There's Ivanhoe, the Medieval romantic swashbuckler; High Noon, the Western drama about a lawman standing alone against outlaws; Moulin Rouge, a biopic of artist Toulouse-Luatrec; and The Quiet Man, John Ford's romantic-comedy about an American returning to his roots in Ireland. Presented here are my takes on them, in ascending order of how I'd rank them.

1952: Quirky Kind of Christmas

This comes a day late because I needed to organize and better express my thoughts on some of these films. They are thought-provoking. They are entertaining. They are pretty heavy, considering most of them were released on Christmas Day, at least in Los Angeles. Here's how they celebrated Santa and the birth of Christ in 1952:

1952: The Fifth One

This next set of films brings us from November through to mid-December, just before Christmas. Of the six films here, five went on to Academy Award nominations, because the end of the year has always been the time for studios to release their Oscar hopefuls. Well, one says that, but as pointed out before, four of 1952's Best Picture nominees were all released before October. The fifth nominee is among the group you see before you: John Huston's Moulin Rouge.

Moulin Rouge is not to be confused with 2001's Moulin Rouge!. The burlesque dancehall of the title is vibrantly brought to life at the start of the film, but the focus is on the artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, his art, his romantic struggles brought about by his own alcoholism and negative self-worth colored by a disability (the result of being born to parents were first cousins), and his relationship to bohemia, exemplified best by the wild, raw shows of the Moulin Rouge. A hit it was, making back eight times its budget and receiving seven Academy Award nominations - and two wins!

It is one of four "true story" films here, all of them in color, all of them up for Oscars. Here, among others, they are:

1952: The Stars Are Out

You may notice that for most of today's films - all October releases, many of them B pictures - I've very little to say. Well, not every month is going to be full of shoulda-been classics. Still, it's a star-studded group: Susan Hayward in two flicks, Bela Lugosi in a film that bears his name, the Harlem Globetrotters playing themselves, etc.

1952: Quiet Man, September Cinema

September's here, bringing a bouquet of solid cinema - among them, the Best Picture nominee The Quiet Man. 

Long in development, The Quiet Man started life as a short story by Maurice Walsh, published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1933. Director-producer John Ford originally envisioned it as a more dramatic story with the Troubles and the IRA firmly part of the story, as in The Informer. By 1952, we'd had a World War and were in the middle of a Red Scare; except for two joking references, the Troubles and the IRA were no longer part of the picture. Instead, what we get is the story of a man escaping his past by following an ideal of someone else's memory, the Ireland his mother told him about. Indeed, what we get is a love story between an American and an Irishwoman, each learning how to adjust to the other's culture.

The film was a hit with audiences and the Oscars, and was one of six or seven exceptional films released that September:

1952: The Next Two Nominees Are...

Two Best Picture nominees in one month!

Yes, we must be getting close to The Season, because while The Greatest Show on Earth debuted in February, it took til midsummer to get two of our other Best Picture nominees on the board: High Noon and Ivanhoe.

High Noon is, famously, an allegory for the blacklist. Carl Foreman wrote the screenplay about a man looking for friends and fellow defenders, abandoned by the people he thought he could trust when he needed them most, his doom egged on by a town that can only think in terms of how his presence effects their profits. Ivanhoe is not, it's a historical drama based on a beloved work of literature, but it was #1 at the box office four weeks in a row and the second highest-grossing 1952 release.

Both films came at the end of July. Of the twelve films we cover today, they're right in the middle. As you can see:

1952: Sporty Spring

Don’t really have an intro for this batch, here’s six films from the Spring of 1952:

1952: Before It Was a Classic

There's a movie here that you might expect to be our next Best Picture nominee. The movie is Singin' in the Rain. It was not nominated for Best Picture. It wasn't nominated for anything except Best Supporting Actress and Best Musical Score. Yet today, who doesn't know Singin' in the Rain? I've seen people reference it who didn't even know what they were referencing, it's so much a part of our culture. But in 1952, it was one of many films released in April. Here are eight of them:

1952: The Circus Comes To Town

It's February in 1952 and, although no one knows it yet, the Oscar race is over. The Greatest Show on Earth is out. 

It will spend six weeks in a row at the top spot of the box office and end the year as the #1 highest-grossing. It's a high point for producer-director Cecil B. DeMille, a Hollywood veteran since his 1914 film debut The Squaw Man. Since then, he's cemented himself as a master of the art and the business: indeed, the older he gets, the more successful and acclaimed his movies become. The Greatest Show on Earth, a Technicolor epic about life in the circus featuring actual acts and performers from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, is no exception. And it's the only time he will win Best Picture.

But the Academy Awards are in March 1953. Right now, it's February 1952. And it's not the only film in town:

1952: Murder and More

Now we've wrapped up some 1951 releases that were still considered 1952 films, 1952 can officially begin. With murder! Yes, although I did not realize it until I gathered them all together like this, five of the six films here involve murder in one way or another:

1952: Before The Year Begins

Two months ago, I started a trilogy of retrospectives, looking at films nominated for Academy Awards - and not nominated but released - during the years for which John Ford was named Best Director. Ford won Best Director four times: for 1935's The Informer, for 1940's The Grapes of Wrath, for 1941's How Green Was My Valley (the only time his film also won Best Picture, interestingly enough), and, finally, for 1952's The Quiet Man. Having looked at the cinema of 1935 two years ago, I focused on the latter three, interesting because not only were two of them back-to-back wins, a rare feat, but because the swathe of time covers the lead-up to WWII and the beginning of a new decade.

1952 is a new world. While there were always international relations and, therefore, film releases, the 50s saw a growing importation of international cinema. Mind, "international" still mostly means "British", but one thing that grew out of WWII was better exportation of cinema from the former Axis countries now occupied by the Allies - Japan, Germany, Italy - as well as the growth of international co-productions (The Medium, for example, is an Italian production of an American work).

Today, the first in our month-long excursion into 1952, we look at six films that were not only all made overseas but were released in their countries and in some parts of the USA before 1952. They all still managed to qualify for this year's Oscars, and indeed, two of them were nominated.