After two years of shocks, the 1953 Oscar went to the film everyone expected to win – Fred Zinnemann’s production of James Jones’ novel about life at Pearl Harbor just before the Japanese attack in From Here to Eternity.

The film, which won eight of the thirteen Oscars it was nominated for, was a critical and box-office hit featuring memorable performances by Montgomery Clift as the sensitive hero, Burt Lancaster as his tough sergeant, Deborah Kerr as the company commander’s nymphomaniac wife, Frank Sinatra as Clift’s buddy and Donna Reed as Clift’s prostitute girl-friend, here called a “dance hall girl”. All were nominated for Oscars, the latter two winning. For Sinatra, it was a comeback after several years of decline in which his career took a back seat to then wife Ava Gardner. For Kerr and Reed, it was a career changer in that although they would go back to playing good girls for the remainder of their careers, neither would ever be thought of again as only capable of playing “nice” ladies.

Next in popularity, William Wyler’s Cinderella romance, Roman Holiday was nominated for ten Oscars and won three including Best Actress, Audrey Hepburn. It was her first major film and she beguiled even the harshest critics with her charm and ease as the runaway princess who shares a brief romance with reporter Gregory Peck.

The film also won for Edith Head’s Black-and-White Costume Design and for Dalton Trumbo’s Screenplay, credited to another writer due to Trumbo’s blacklisting.

One of the screen’s most popular and most durable westerns, George Stevens’ Shane was nominated for six Oscars including Best Picture and two Supporting Actors, Jack Palance and ten year-old Brandon De Wilde, but not star Alan Ladd or co-stars Jean Arthur and Van Heflin. The story of a stranger who helps a family, then rallies a town against the bad guys, the film’s best screens were those involving Ladd and the hero-worshiping De Wilde. Who can ever forget De Wilde’s plaintive wailing of film’s last line, “Shane! Come back!”

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Perhaps the least regarded Oscar winning Best Picture winner of all time, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth was a huge commercial success in its day. In fact, it was the biggest box office hit of 1952, one of the rare occasions when the Oscar went to the then most popular film.

To be fair, the acrobats and clowns and other circus folk were shown to their best advantage on screen up to that point. The real Barnum and Bailey, Ringling Brothers Circus performers were used in support of the Hollywood cast, and seeing, or rather not seeing, a huge star like James Stewart hiding behind clown makeup was intriguing. The film courted Production Code problems with its sympathetic view of euthanasia but DeMille surmounted the problem by having his mercy killer himself die.

The biggest problem with the film, especially to today’s audiences, is the dreadful lead performances of Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde. Wilde had always been a bit of a stiff but never more so than here, and Hutton, with her oversized personality, overwhelmed her character. The two made a bizarre couple.

Another problem which is much more obvious now than it was then is the cheesy special effects. It’s quite obvious that miniatures are being used in the climactic train fire sequence. If you’ve never seen a real circus or a film about the circus you might enjoy the film just as people of the time did, but it’s more than likely you’ll come away scratching your head wondering how this ever won a Best Picture Oscar. Its only other Oscar was for Original Story.

Holding up much better through the years, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon was widely publicized as the favorite film of former U.S. President Bill Clinton when he was in the White House. It’s easy to see why the film appeals strongly to Presidents and other men who find life lonely at the top. It’s about a lone hero, played by Gary Cooper in his second Oscar winning role, who is abandoned one by one by his friends and in the end has only the support of his wife, the emerging superstar, Grace Kelly. In addition to Cooper’s performance, Dimitri Tiomkin’s Oscar winning score and Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad’s Oscar winning editing which tells the 90 minute tale in real time, were the film’s major assets.

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One of Oscar’s biggest upsets ever occurred at the 1951 awards when An American in Paris beat both A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun to capture the award for Best Picture.

Fashioned around George Gershwin’s music of the 1920s and 30s, Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris hadn’t even been on the Oscar radar. It was an MGM production and MGM had thrown support behind the costlier Quo Vadis, also in the Best Picture race against Warners’ Streetcar and Paramount’s Sun.

A perfectly charming and delightful film, An American in Paris features a superb cast headed by Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Georges Guetary and Nina Foch. The ballet that ends the film may go on a bit too long, but who can resist Kelly serenading Caron with “Our Love Is Here to Stay” or teaching the kids to sing with “I’ve Got Rhythm” or Geutary, in his best Chevalier imitation, singing and dancing to “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise”? It’s sheer bliss most of the way. Nominated for eight Oscars, it won six.

With twelve and nine nominations, respectively, the year’s two critically acclaimed dramatic films, A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun were expected to take home the lion’s share of the awards and neither came away empty-handed. Streetcar won four including Best Actress (Vivien Leigh), Supporting Actor (Karl Malden) and Supporting Actress and Place won six including Best Director (George Stevens).

Tennessee Williams’ second major play and the second to be filmed after 1950’s not on DVD The Glass Menagerie, Streetcar remains the best film version of any of his plays. Marlon Brando, in only his second film, reprising his Broadway triumph as the loutish Stanley Kowalski, changed the face of screen acting with his largely internalized performance. Vivien Leigh, who played the role of faded belle Blanche DuBois in London, is simply incredible as the tortured soul who might be an older version of Leigh’s Scarlet O’Harahad she lived in a different era. Kim Hunter is equally memorable as the young woman torn between her love for her husband and support for her sister.

Previously filmed as the not on DVD An American Tragedy, the title of Theodore Dreiser’s famed novel, A Place in the Sun has a different structure than Josef von Sternberg’s earlier film which emphasizes the relationship between the protagonist (Phillips Holmes in the earlier version, Montgomery Clift in the later one) and his low-class pregnant girlfriend (Sylvia Sidney/Shelley Winters) over the social climbing youth’s fascination with a society girl (Frances Dee/Elizabeth Taylor) but the climax of both films is the murder trial that ends the film.

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The 1950 movie year was one of the best ever. It provided many pleasures, not all of which were recognized by Oscar.

Oscar nominations, as expected, were dominated by the year’s two best films, both about the underbelly of show business.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, which skewers the Broadway theater world, opens with an awards ceremony, the catalyst for various characters to look back at the start of the winning actress’s career only a year earlier with a jaundiced eye. Billy Wilder’s even more cynical Sunset Boulevard opens with the narrator, a Hollywood writer turned gigolo, floating dead in the Beverly Hills pool of a faded silent screen star.

Setting a new record for nominations, All About Eve received fourteen, winning six including Best Picture, Direction, Screenplay and Supporting Actor, George Sanders as a vicious columnist. Among those it didn’t win were four other acting nods for Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm and Thelma Ritter. Director/writer Mankiewicz became the first, and only to date, back to back winner in both categories.

Davis, whose career had been on the downturn for the last few years, re-emerged at the height of her prowess as a fading star who is undermined by her protégée, Baxter. Holm is her best friend and Ritter, the faithful maid who is the only one to see through Baxter’s façade at first meeting. Gary Merrill and Hugh Marlow co-star and Marilyn Monroe makes a brief but memorable appearance as an aspiring actress “from the Copacabana school of acting.”

We know at the start of Sunset Boulevard that William Holden’s character is dead, which firmly places it in film noir territory. We spend the rest of the film learning what led to his death in the mansion of demented once famous silent screen star Gloria Swanson whose butler Erich von Stroheim was once a famed Hollywood director.

Nominated for eleven Oscars including Best Direction, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress (Nancy Olson), the film won three for Story and Screenplay, Art Direction and Scoring. Swanson, who came out of retirement for the film, is a revelation and has some of the best lines ever given an actress including the immortal “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small.”

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By the end of World War II audiences had had enough of films about the war, but by 1949 Hollywood rightfully concluded that enough time had passed to make the topic marketable again. Three hugely successful films about the war figured heavily in the 1949 Oscar race. Two of them (Twelve O’Clock High and Battleground) were in fact nominated for Best Picture along with the film version of a stage classic (The Heiress), a contemporary suspense drama (A Letter to Three Wives) and the film version of a Pultizer Prize winning novel about political corruption (All the King’s Men). The latter, which was the film with the strongest pedigree, won.

Nominated for seven Oscars, Robert Rossen’s film of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men won three. It took home awards for Best Picture, Actor (Broderick Crawford) and Supporting Actress (Mercedes McCambridge).

Crawford played a thinly disguised version of Louisiana Governor Huey Long and newcomer McCambridge was the political operative who helped guide his career. With real life political corruption and assassinations even more unsettling than those portrayed in the film, audiences discovering it in the intervening years have not been as impressed as contemporaneous audiences were. A 2006 remake with an all-star cast opened to negative reviews and died a quick death at the box office.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’ A Letter to Three Wives, which won the director an Oscar for writing as well as directing, has fared much better over the years. Audiences discovering the film for the first time today are as enthusiastic about it as their parents and grandparents were when they first encountered this film about three women who receive a letter from a fourth telling them she has run off with one of their husbands. Jeanne Crain, Ann Southern and especially Linda Darnell excel as the three women and Paul Douglas, Kirk Douglas and Jeffrey Lynn are fineas the husbands as are Connie Gilchrist and Thelma Ritter as Darnell’s mother and her card playing friend. Celeste Holm is the voice of the woman who wrote the letter.

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Hollywood’s studio execs were beside themselves when not one, but two, British made films were nominated for Best Picture of 1948.

Warner Brothers’ Johnny Belinda led the nominations with 12 nods, but Hamlet and The Red Shoes equaled that number between them and would win a combined total of six to Johnny Belinda’s one, sending the execs into a state of anxiety from which they would never recover. They withdrew their financial support from the Academy, which forced it to seek funding elsewhere, ultimately leading to advertising support generated from televised broadcasts of the awards beginning with the 1952 ceremony. It was the end of an era.

Warner Brothers also had The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in the running for Best Picture with five nominations, while Fox filled the last slot with The Snake Pit,which had a total of six.

Laurence Olivier’s truncated 155 minute version of Shakespeare’s tragedy was considered the definitive screen Hamlet until Kenneth Branagh’s 242 minute complete version forty-eight years later.

Olivier’s melancholy Dane won the actor his only Best Actor award out of ten nominations. As the film’s producer, he also won the Best Picture award, but lost the Best Director award to John Huston for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Hamlet’s other wins were for Best Black-and-White Art Direction and Costume Design. It had also been nominated for Best Score and Best Supporting Actress (Jean Simmons).

Even more revered than Hamlet, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes has long been considered the definitive dance film and one of the most brilliant examples of the use color in film. It’s also credited with inspiring more ballet students than any other source.

Anton Walbrook is mesmerizing as the leader of the dance troupe and Moira Shearer is stunning as the girl who dances herself to death. The film won for its one-of-a-kind Color Art Direction and Dramatic Score. It had also been nominated for Best Editing and Best Motion Picture Story, even though its main theme was taken from a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale.

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The Oscar year 1947 is mostly remembered for two things – Hollywood’s acknowledgement of anti-Semitism in the Best Picture race and the sweep of the major technical awards by the British.

Laura Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement had been a best-seller but ironically most of the studios, which were run by Jewish moguls, wouldn’t touch it. It took the only non-Jewish mogul, Fox’s Darryl F. Zanuck to produce it.

The film, directed by Elia Kazan, has not aged particularly well. Put the blame on the overly somber script or Gregory Peck’s too earnest portrayal of the reporter who poses as a Jew in order to obtain material for a piece he is writing. Far more interesting are the supporting performances of John Garfield, Dorothy McGuire, Celeste Holm, Sam Jaffe, Dean Stockwell and especially Anne Revere. Peck, McGuire, Holm and Revere were all nominated for Oscars, with Holm winning along with Kazan and the film itself.

Gentleman’s Agreement wasn’t the only film about anti-Semitism released in 1947. Edward Dmytryk’s film of Richard Brooks’ The Brick Foxhole re-titled Crossfire had beat it into theatres by five months.

Brooks’ novel, which was about the murder of a homosexual man by a group of marines, was a stinging indictment of intolerance, but because the subject of homosexuality was taboo within the Hollywood Production Code, the film’s script changed the intolerance from homophobia to anti-Semitism.

The film starred the three Roberts – Young, Mitchum and Ryan, the latter Oscar nominated for his chilling portrayal of the killer. Gloria Grahame was also nominated for her femme fatale as was Dmytryk and the film itself.

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The best films are those which are about a specific time and place but which are also universal in their theme and appeal. Such is the case with the 1946 Oscar winner, The Best Years of Our Lives, which is a film about homecoming American servicemen after World War II – the Army officer who returns to his comfortable bank job; the flyer who finds his job in a drugstore has been filled by someone else and the sailor who returns with hooks where his hands used to be. It could be any country, any war, any time, in which the soldiers and sailors return to a world different from the one they left, one in which they no longer comfortably fit.

Oscar winner Fredric March as the officer, Dana Andrews as the flyer and two time Oscar winning non-professional actor Harold Russell as the sailor are all excellent as are the actresses playing the women who love them (Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Cathy O’Donnell) and those who don’t (Virginia Mayo). It’s all exquisitely filmed by legendary director William Wyler, winning his second of three Oscars on his sixth of twelve nominations.

The won seven of the eight Oscars it was nominated for as well as an eighth for Best Supporting Actor winner Russell, who won a second Oscar for himself “bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans through his appearance.” It also won for Best Editing, Scoring and Screenplay, losing only the award for Best Sound, which went to The Jolson Story.

Though not terribly successful on its initial release, but popular enough to secure five Oscar nominations including Best Picture, It’s a Wonderful Life has in recent years surpassed The Best Years of Our Lives as the best loved film of 1946, and why not? Who among us isn’t a sucker for this film about a man who is shown how the world would be a lesser place without his having been in it?

The film became a popular favorite only after producer-director Frank Capra failed to renew the film’s copyright in 1972 and the film fell into the public domain, allowing TV stations to broadcast the film free of charge. It quickly became the broadcast film of choice for every Christmas thereafter. Both Capra and star James Stewart considered it their favorite film. In addition to Best Picture, Actor and Director, it was nominated for Best Editing and Best Sound. None of the other actors including Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell and Henry Travers were nominated.

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