1952: Quiet Man, September Cinema

September's here, bringing a bouquet of solid cinema - among them, the Best Picture nominee The Quiet Man. 

Long in development, The Quiet Man started life as a short story by Maurice Walsh, published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1933. Director-producer John Ford originally envisioned it as a more dramatic story with the Troubles and the IRA firmly part of the story, as in The Informer. By 1952, we'd had a World War and were in the middle of a Red Scare; except for two joking references, the Troubles and the IRA were no longer part of the picture. Instead, what we get is the story of a man escaping his past by following an ideal of someone else's memory, the Ireland his mother told him about. Indeed, what we get is a love story between an American and an Irishwoman, each learning how to adjust to the other's culture.

The film was a hit with audiences and the Oscars, and was one of six or seven exceptional films released that September:

Sounds Like Paramount: 1931-32, Day Three

Among the many ways the Fifth Academy Awards differed from the ones to come: this was the second and last ceremony in which the Sound Recording category went to the studio's sound department instead of an individual film and its sound engineers. For the second year in a row, the winner was Paramount.