Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Three of 1957’s Best Picture nominees have held up extremely well while the other two have lost the luster they once had. The year’s big awards winner, and still deserving of all its honors, was David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai. With its brilliant score accented by the invigorating Colonel…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Big widescreen color epics were king of the box office from 1953-1955, but not the Oscars where black-and-white prevailed. With the 1956 awards, Oscar joined the party. Only one more black-and-white film would win Oscar’s big prize and that wouldn’t be until 1960. The nominees…

New This Week 1955 was the year the movies and the Oscars met TV head on. While the trend was to bigger, wider, more colorful films, a 35mm. black-and-white film based on a TV play won the year’s major film awards including four of the eight Oscars it was nominated for. The idea may well…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Elia Kazan’s compelling film about union racketeering on the New Jersey docks, On the Waterfront won everything in sight in late 1954, early 1955, including eight of the twelve Oscars it was nominated for. The film’s soiled reputation as an apologia for Kazan and screenwriter…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. 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…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. 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…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. 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,…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. 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…

New This Week 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…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. 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…

New This Week 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…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. 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…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. The war was over but not in the movies as war themed films continued to be popular at the box office, several winning major Oscar nominations for1945 but none nominated for Best Picture. Alcoholism, heretofore a side issue in melodrama and comedy, took center stage…

New This Week By the time of the 1944 Oscars in March, 1945, the end of World War II was in sight. Only one of the year’s five Best Picture nominees dealt directly with the war. The big winner was of course Leo McCarey’s Going My Way, which won seven of the ten Oscars it…

New This Week World War II continued unabated in real life and on the screen in 1943. The Oscar race was once again dominated by films about war. The 1942 New York Film Critics Award winner, Noel Coward and David Lean’s In Which We Serve, was not eligible for Oscar consideration then because it did…