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:
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 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...
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?
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.
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:
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:
