Two months ago, I started a trilogy of retrospectives, looking at films nominated for Academy Awards - and not nominated but released - during the years for which John Ford was named Best Director. Ford won Best Director four times: for 1935's The Informer, for 1940's The Grapes of Wrath, for 1941's How Green Was My Valley (the only time his film also won Best Picture, interestingly enough), and, finally, for 1952's The Quiet Man. Having looked at the cinema of 1935 two years ago, I focused on the latter three, interesting because not only were two of them back-to-back wins, a rare feat, but because the swathe of time covers the lead-up to WWII and the beginning of a new decade.
1952 is a new world. While there were always international relations and, therefore, film releases, the 50s saw a growing importation of international cinema. Mind, "international" still mostly means "British", but one thing that grew out of WWII was better exportation of cinema from the former Axis countries now occupied by the Allies - Japan, Germany, Italy - as well as the growth of international co-productions (The Medium, for example, is an Italian production of an American work).
Today, the first in our month-long excursion into 1952, we look at six films that were not only all made overseas but were released in their countries and in some parts of the USA before 1952. They all still managed to qualify for this year's Oscars, and indeed, two of them were nominated.
