1952 Oscar Shouldabeens

1927/28 through 1997
Dennis Bee
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Post by Dennis Bee »

1952 may just be the year when Hollywood hit bottom. Production was being slashed, studio contracts were being cancelled left and right, television was the most popular medium, and the second and most damaging wave of HUAC hearings in Jan.-Apr. 1952 just about destroyed what was left of the industry's morale. Look through newspaper microfilm of '52, week by week, and you'll see just how much lackluster junk there was in theaters that year. If ever Hollywood appeared to have thrown in the towel, it was in '52. The widescreen processes that would save the industry--especially CinemaScope--had been announced by the end of the year, and the first films were in production. So by early '53, when the awards were given, there was a feeling of anticipation, of waiting for things to get better, but meanwhile they had to honor the year they had just suffered through--and do it, for the first time, on national television.

If the Best Picture that year was between High Noon and The Quiet Man, then you had two leading contenders made far outside the studio structure. The only truly "independent" film ever to win had been Hamlet. High Noon would have been United Artists' first win under its new and revolutionary setup. UA's still nascient clout probably accounts for the failure of The African Queen to be nominated the year before. With all the other strikes against it--the Carl Foreman controversy, the fact that Westerns were rarely considered Best Picture calibre--there was probably just too much studio resistance. The Greatest Show on Earth was the year's only blockbuster (unless you count This Is Cinerama, which played only in NY and LA in '52, but was so big there that tourists were actually journeying to New York, reportedly, just to see it), and voting for it was a kind of fallback. The other factor is that High Noon is a bummer, a bitter, almost despairing film. It is easily the best of the BP nominees this year; it holds up really well, and its great historical interest just makes it richer and more fascinating.

The Quiet Man, Ford's paeon to Irish whiskey, wife-beating, and men slugging each other silly as a form of male bonding becomes more and more queasy-making as the years go on.

I've always adored Singin' in the Rain, catching it at just the right time--in 1973, when I was 19 and Cahiers, Pauline Kael, etc., had lionized it. It was considered little more than a routine musical; it played off, made its money, and little was thought of it.

The odd duck of the '52 Oscars is The Bad and the Beautiful, which opened in LA just in time for Oscar consideration, might not have been widely seen at the time of the nominations, yet won five Oscars including Supporting Actress and Screenplay (beating High Noon by the blacklisted and self-exiled-to-England Foreman), despite not being nominated for Best Picture. Its unfortunate title, which Minnelli and John Houseman, its producer, both hated might have impeded it. (The working title, from the short story it's based on, was Tribute to a Bad Man, which must have given the marketing dept. at MGM the willies). When the voters finally saw it, they embraced it more enthusiastically than they had that better-known and more acid Hollywood-on-Hollywood film from the period, Sunset Blvd.

Like most of the important films in 1952--Singin' in the Rain, High Noon, The Quiet Man--it's a film that looks back at Hollywood's myths about itself and, unlike High Noon at least, ultimately conservative. It's beautifully directed by Minnelli who found his stride in melodrama with this film. It contains career-high performances by Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, and Dick Powell. The Oscar to Gloria Grahame always confused me; I'm glad she had an Oscar, but why for this, which she is hardly in and has little screen time? And of course, she beat out Jean Hagen who might be the most undeserving loser ever in this category.

But clearly, MGM backed the wrong horse; if it had pushed TBATB for BP instead of the clunky Ivanhoe, Minnelli's melodrama could have been the compromise studio winner instead of DeMille's circus thingie and would have been a choice halfway acceptable to posterity.
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Post by Damien »

My top 5 of 1952 are

1. Angel Face (Otto Preminger)
2. The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray)
3. On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray)
4. Ivanhoe (Richard Thorpe)
5. Talk About A Stranger (David Bradley)


but I need to see The Bad And The Beautiful again, which I haven't seen in 30 years, and, as a Leo McCarey cultist, My Son John, which I've never seen.
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Big Magilla
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Post by Big Magilla »

Yes, yes, I know, but this is the "Oscar Shouldabeens" not the "Greatest Films of" forum. Do you go by date of initial showing anywhere in the world or date of copyright?

Thanks for the They Shoot Pictures link. I was unfamiliar with this. But re my copyright comment, Wages of Fear was copyrighted in France in 1952 but not released until 1953 so it's obvious that They Shoot Pictures goes by date of copyright. And, yes, considering Tokyo Story a 1972 film makes about as much sense as consdiering Army of Shadows a 2006 film, but no system is perfect.
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Post by Eric »

I think it's fairly obvious at this point that I don't take into consideration Oscar eligibility when it comes to retroactively dubbing films the best of their year, whatever that entails ... especially not having been alive to have seen them in the theaters when they were released. And Oscar history provides only a snapshot of what films were considered Oscar-worthy in their contemporary setting, not in the slightest an accurate picture of actual artistic quality in any meaningful sense to me. (Which is why I say Tokyo Story was among the best films of 1953, not 1972.)

And the IMDB link was only provided to give a quick, easy rundown of some of the more highly-regarded films of the year. I could've just as easily linked to They Shoot Pictures and their synthesis of multiple critics lists (and probably should've, as it reminded me that Bunuel's El is also in the mix).
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Post by Big Magilla »

The consensus among whom? Who are these imdb voters?

Ikiru and Umberto D. were not Oscar eligible in 1952. While Rashomon was, it had already won a non-competitive Oscar, besides which there was no real love for foregin language films within the Academy at the time. Battling the rise of television, Hollywood, which only a few years earlier had embraced foreign films wholeheartedly, was at its most insular. Studio dominance once again ruled, which is why MGM's rather dull version of Ivanhoe, their most expensive film, was the one that got the push over the more popualr Sining' in the Rain, which had already made its money. That, and the fact that they knew they would not win back-to-back Oscars for musiclas, kept what has since become most popualr film of the year out of the race.

Of the actual nominees, High Noon and The Quiet Man were the only real contenders, or so it was thought. The Greatest Show on Earth win was a shock, but did not come out of nowhere. As I said earlier, it was the most popualr film of the year at the box office.

Yes, legend has it that the Hedda Hopper led atacks on High Noon as Communist propraganda torpedoed the film, but it still won best actor for the highly popular Gary Cooper, whose award was accepted by Hollywood's most virulent anti-Communist, John Wayne, and Dimitri Tiomkin's even more popualr title song so methinks the anti-Communist fears were superficial at best. I think the real reason it lost, was that like Mister Tee, most voters weren't that enthusiastic about any of the nominees and although High Noon and The Quiet Man were the most popular, indifference over the two led to a vote split that allowed the circus flick to slip in just as the vote split between A Place in the Sun and A Streetcar Named Desire allowed An American in Paris to slip in the year before when the year's other enduring popular film, The African Queen, was as ignored as was Singin' in the Rain in '52.
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Eric
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Post by Eric »

Unless you're into Looney Tunes or overrated Howard Hawks comedies, the concensus choice for 1952 would appear to be down to Singin' in the Rain, On Dangerous Ground, Ikiru or The Life of Oharu. Having only seen the first one so far, I can't disagree it's a sorta thin year.

That said, my favorite in a walk is Rossellini's Europa '51.
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Post by Mister Tee »

Legend also says there was tremendous political controversy around High Noon, the expected winner, and at the high-water mark of McCarthyism, voters might have just been scared into voting for insignificance.

Greatest Show truly is an even worse movie than you'd imagine -- actually, I've never watched it straight through: I watched the first half one time, the second another, and barely made it either time.

'52 was the year I was born, and it's one year for which I'm truly unable to come up with a best picture choice with which I feel remotely comfortable. I've never been all that wild about Singin' in the Rain (I saw it in the mid-60s, before the Cahierists declared it a masterpiece); I think High Noon and Quiet Man are okay but not really my thing (John Ford in high-Irish mode just rubs me wrong); I like the Alec Guinness pictures but consider them trivial; I kind of like Member of the Wedding, but that's all.
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Post by Big Magilla »

I don't really know. I was just a child at the time, but circuses were popular then and the film was the number one box office attraction of its year, but still... Maybe they just wanted to spread the wealth, giving best actor to High Noon best direction to The Quiet Man and best picture to veteran Cecil B. DeMille whose only best picture nomination it was up to that point.
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Post by The Original BJ »

I know it's one of Oscar's biggest jokes, but I just saw The Greatest Show on Earth for the first time and this was even worse than I imagined. What a lumbering bore of a movie. If you can even call it a movie. More like a filmed circus, with cutaways to a lazily plotted hack job of a script that for some flabbergasting reason somehow managed to win a writing Oscar!??! It's all directed with stupendous clunkiness by DeMille, who can't even give us one close-up of his star singing the title song for fear we might miss a couple spangles somewhere on his gazillion dollar set.

I'm so glad I wasn't around to see this win. Did people really think this was better than High Noon & The Quiet Man!!? (Not to mention Singin' in the Rain, Rashomon, Bad and the Beautiful, and a whole bevy of films that have got to be better than this thing . . .) What happened?
Reza
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Post by Reza »

--Big Magilla wrote:Maybe she's confusing the Oscars with the Photoplay awards or something. She is getting on in years, you know.

She seems pretty smart recalling various details of her long and eventful life. The book is very informative especially details about her VERY complex relationship with director John Ford.




Edited By Big Magilla on 1299386299
Big Magilla
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Post by Big Magilla »

Maybe she's confusing the Oscars with the Photoplay awards or something. She is getting on in years, you know.
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Post by Damien »

No, there weren't any nominating committees. It is a little surprising that O'Hara wasn't nominated for Quiet Man, given its popularity and the weakness of the Best Actress category that year. But then again, John Wayne wasn't nominated either.
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Big Magilla
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Post by Big Magilla »

I didn't know the Academy had nominating committees in 1952, or any other year for that matter.
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Post by Reza »

Maureen O'Hara - in her autobiography, 'Tis Herself'' - says that Anne Baxter (who was part of the nominating committe for the 1952 Oscars) told her that her name had been chosen as a nominee for The Quiet Man. However, when the results were announced her name was not on the nominee's list for best actress. O' Hara says it was John Ford who blackballed her and convinced the committee to remove her name off the list.

She also goes onto say that she walked in on John Ford, during the shooting of The Long Gray Line, with his arms around and kissing ''one of the most famous leading men in the picture business''. She, ofcourse, doesn't name the actor though it could be Tyrone Power who was her co-star in the film.
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Post by Bruce_Lavigne »

Best Picture
High Noon (Fred Zinnemann)

Best Director
Fred Zinnemann (High Noon)

Best Lead Actor
Gary Cooper (High Noon)

Best Lead Actress
Shirley Booth (Come Back, Little Sheba)

Best Supporting Actor
Donald O'Connor (Singin' in the Rain)

Best Supporting Actress
Jean Hagen (Singin' in the Rain)
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