What Should Have Won, Part III: The 1950s
We are now entering Part III of our revisionist journey through the history of the Oscars. This time we deal with the 1950s.
First, a reminder of the rules: a given film has to have been nominated for at least one Academy Award in any category (not necessarily Best Picture) to be given the Oscar, and no foreign films are eligible.
Still with me? Then let’s move on to the 1950s:
1950
What film won Best Picture: All About Eve
What film should have won: Sunset Boulevard
Both the Oscars and the New York Film Critics agreed this year on Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s elegant and literate comedy about the theater, All About Eve. But I can’t help but think that they were both wrong and that the Golden Globes got it right. In retrospect, it’s pretty clear that Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is the better film – from the dazzling cinematography of John Seitz to the gorgeously baroque performance of Gloria Swanson as the delusion silent film diva Norma Desmond, it teems with the larger-than-life excess of 20s Hollywood (which makes the workaday film industry of the late 40s seem pretty pedestrian by comparison).
1951
What film won Best Picture: An American in Paris
What film should have won: A Streetcar Named Desire
Musicals almost never win Best Picture, so why am I being so churlish in denying Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris the Oscar? Well, the fact is that An American in Paris is pretty much my least favorite MGM musical, and I’ve always found it particularly ironic that MGM made a film about an American going to Paris to become a painter at the very time that New York was supplanting Paris as the capital of the art world. It’s a little too arty and pretentious for my taste, and the ballet at the end butchers Gershwin’s music. My vote would have gone to Elia Kazan’s masterful adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play, with Marlon Brando immortalizing his Broadway performance as Stanley and Vivien Leigh deserving her second Academy Award for playing Blanche – which, as Brando once pointed out, wasn't much of a stretch for Ms. Leigh.
1952
What film won Best Picture: The Greatest Show on Earth
What film should have won: Singin’ in the Rain
It’s hard to believe that what most people think of as the greatest musical ever to come out of Hollywood wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture, but to give the Oscar to Cecil B. DeMille’s idiotic Ringling Bros. travesty, one of the worst films ever to win Best Picture, is adding insult to injury. Of the films nominated for Best Picture that year, John Ford’s The Quiet Man is easily the best, but I have to go with Kelly and Donen’s loving homage to 1920s Hollywood. In case you’re wondering, the New York Film Critics gave their award to High Noon, and while Singin’ in the Rain was nominated for a Golden Globe in the Comedy or Musical category, it lost to With a Song in My Heart.
1953
What film won Best Picture: From Here to Eternity
What film should have won: Stalag 17
Giving the Oscar to Fred Zinneman’s cleaned-up adaptation of the James Jones novel was a defensible choice (it was the choice of the New York Film Critics as well), but I would have gone with Billy Wilder’s taut P.O.W. saga, which includes William Holden’s definitive anti-hero as Sefton, and director Otto Preminger as the snarling Commandant who wishes that he could have given his prisoners a white Christmas: “Just like ze vonz you used to know.”
1954
What film won Best Picture: On the Waterfront
What film should have won: On the Waterfront/Rear Window
It’s pretty obvious that the Academy got it right when they voted for Elia Kazan’s noir-ish dockworker drama (which was the choice of the Golden Globes and the New York Film Critics as well), but I can’t help feeling that Hitchcock’s elegant study in voyeurism deserved the award just as much. So I’m calling it a tie.
1955
What film won Best Picture: Marty
What film should have won: East of Eden
Marty was the Rocky of its day – the little film about a lower-class guy that you rooted for in his quest for bourgeois domesticity, and the Academy went for it, as did the New York Film Critics. Oddly enough, the Golden Globes got it right, and gave their award to Elia Kazan for East of Eden. The mid-50s were definitely the Age of Kazan in Hollywood: he dominated the era as only Griffith had dominated it before, and as no director has dominated it since.
1956
What film won Best Picture: Around the World in 80 Days
What film should have won: Baby Doll/Written on the Wind
There are some years when I’m not sure the Academy should give out a Best Picture Oscar at all. Sometimes I wish they would take after the Pulitzer Prize, which in some years just doesn’t give out an award for drama if they don’t think the competition is strong enough. 1956 is one of those years where none of the nominated films really hold up (as we’ll see, 1988 is another such year). I don’t think I could have stomached voting for Mike Todd’s banal adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, but none of the other Best Picture nominees were much better. So I’m calling it a tie between Elia Kazan’s black comedy of pedophilic lust in the deep South (from a Tennessee Williams original screenplay), and Douglas Sirk’s scathing melodrama, Written on the Wind.
1957
What film won Best Picture: The Bridge on the River Kwai
What film should have won: Witness for the Prosecution
Not one but two of the best films released this year were not nominated for a single Oscar – Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd and Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success. Either one of them would be preferable to any of the films nominated in the Best Picture category, including the overrated David Lean film that actually won. But if I had to choose one of the films nominated for an Oscar that year to give the Best Picture award to, it would be Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution – a taut murder mystery with a plot that keeps you guessing until the very last minute and a bravura performance by Charles Laughton.
1958
What film won Best Picture: Gigi
What film should have won: Vertigo/Some Came Running
I have Vincente Minnelli beating himself this year, for while I have a fondness for Gigi (in particular because it spells the end of an era of musicals at MGM), I can’t help but thinking that Some Came Running, from the James Jones novel, is the better film. But along with that I have to give a nod to Hitchcock’s classic tale of obsessive love, Vertigo. This might have been a good year for a three-way tie, but Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil wasn’t nominated for a single Oscar. Both the New York Film Critics and the Golden Globes gave their Best Picture award to The Defiant Ones.
1959
What film won Best Picture: Ben-Hur
What film should have won: Some Like It Hot
Ben-Hur was the Titanic of the 1950s, winning just about every award in sight. But it’s clear, almost fifty years later, that its sword and sandal glories are a little faded, and the chariot race pales beside the silent version, where the Romans don’t speak with British accents. The film that should have won Best Picture that year was Billy Wilder’s cross-dressing comedy Some Like It Hot, with brilliant performances by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon and a dazzling one from Marilyn Monroe.
That ends the 1950s. I’ll move on to the 60s in a few days.
Tom Moran
Labels: 1950s, Academy Awards, film, Oscars
posted by Tom Moran @ 4:56 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
This is a decade where I either love a certain film from a given year (MARTY in 1955), or else I don’t have any particularly strong opinion one way or the other on it (anything from 1956). We have years like 1950, 1955, and 1959 with some very strong contenders, and then there are years like 1956 with a whole slew of somewhat bloated epics and not a single “small” or “personal” film in sight. Also, it’s with this decade that trying to pick a Best Picture becomes a kind of apple-and-oranges affair. How does one compare, say SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN with HIGH NOON? Or SOME LIKE IT HOT with ROOM AT THE TOP?
1950-Agree on SUNSET BLVD. Another really great work, and very insightful look into the movie business of the late 40s without ever being over-the-top (it’s almost more telling by what it doesn’t show that what it does show). From the 1949 Hollywood, we see the stressed, bored producer; the agent on the links; the strangely melancholy New Year’s eve party. And then from “old Hollywood” we see the abandoned tennis courts, empty swimming pool (“Mabel Normand and Rod La Rocque must have swam in the pool 10,000 midnights ago”…I get chills every time I hear that line). This film shows that the idea of “Hollywood is Dead” is by no means a new concept.
1951-Allright, I’ll say it…A PLACE IN THE SUN, but only because the story is told so well under Stevens’ direction (plus I love the Dreiser story). I saw it again recently, and it’s still quite powerful, especially with Clift’s performance. I don’t know why I enjoy this type of story so much-ROOM AT THE TOP is another one, even Woody Allen’s recent MATCH POINT. Oh well, it’s a purely personal pick but I think it should have won either way.
1952-This is really a toss up for me. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN or HIGH NOON? Ironically, the film that did win this year was the only one of the nominees that I really thought didn’t belong, although perhaps it was a sort of consolation Oscar to DeMille, who had never won a Best Picture award before (and who knew at the time how much longer he was going to be working…but of course his biggest and best known film of his career was still to come). I’ll go with SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN because it’s one of the few films that is just as fresh today as it was when it came out, and I don’t think anyone has ever topped it as a musical film.
1953-SHANE (okay, so I like George Stevens). Although I also agree with your choice of STALAG 17, SHANE is my favorite Western. I can understand the criticisms of those who feel it lacks the “grittiness” and poetry of the Ford and Hawks (and Mann and Boetticher) Westerns, but I really enjoy its focus on story and character development. Plus, there are some really brilliant uses of location, sound and editing that leave me impressed every time I watch it.
1954-A lot to choose from. Despite my fondness for several other nominees that year (A STAR IS BORN and SABRINA among them), I’m going to just agree that the Academy got it right this year with ON THE WATERFRONT.
1955-Another year with some good nominees (MR. ROBERTS, EAST OF EDEN, PICNIC), I will say that MARTY, aside from being one of my favorite films, is also one of the few times that the Academy (at least up through the 1950s) picked not only a truly great film to win, but also a smaller, more personal work as opposed to a major film from one of the Big Seven studios. For me, MARTY’s triumph at the Oscars ushered in the great period of American independent filmmaking that would explode with the New American Cinema of the 1960s, give us the films of Scorsese, Allen, etc., culminating with United Artists’ Oscar win three years in a row from ’75-’77, and finally end with the blockbuster era of the late 70s.
1956-This is like the year of Hollywood showcasing “Movies you could never do on TV”. I’m tempted to give DeMille his big Oscar for THE TEN COMMANDMENTS this year. Can’t see it going to THE KING AND I…a beautiful film but also one of the first to really spell the end of the golden age of the American movie musical…or GIANT, one of my least favorite Stevens films…I actually agree with the Academy’s decision because Mike Todd’s travelogue spectacular is just so entertaining, but as long as we’re only nominating big epics this year, I don’t see any reason DeMille’s Biblical epic shouldn’t have won (it was certainly more deserving than THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH).
1957-Here we agree-the fact that neither A FACE IN THE CROWD or SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS were nominated at all would seem to make any other choice from this year decidedly second-best. However, I would go with 12 ANGRY MEN, although I also agree with your choice of WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION (probably my favorite Christie adaptation).
1958-Since TOUCH OF EVIL wasn’t even nominated, I think I’d agree with the Academy’s choice of GIGI for this year-a delightful musical comedy, one of the last great movie musicals, and a wonderful score to boot. I have mixed feelings about VERTIGO…I like it, but it’s such a strange film. Undeniably something great, yet it seems to generate waves of uneasy laughter from audiences. I can’t imagine a genius like Hitchcock miscalculating the audience response so greatly, so I’m still not sure what he was going for with this strange, mysterious and dreamlike film.
1959-SOME LIKE IT HOT seems like my clear choice, but I have to stop make sure I’m not just selecting it because I find it so incredibly hilarious, even after three dozen viewings. If I am allowed to include the British film that was nominated that year, then I pick ROOM AT THE TOP. However, if I can’t pick that one, then I think I’m actually going to go with George Stevens’ DIARY OF ANNE FRANK.
Can’t wait for the ‘60s list. That should be interesting.
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