Please welcome back guest critic Doug Strassler, who last wrote for The Critical Condition about The Golden Globes. He’s a classic cinema buff, and he is here to rock the Best Picture Expansion Project for 1951.
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Welcome to my first guest edition of the Best Picture Expansion Project! Mark has very generously allowed me to tap into my encyclopedic Oscar knowledge to join him in revisiting various years of Academy Awards past and envisioning how that year’s crop may have looked if the newly instituted rule that doubled the field of nominees from five to ten applied back then.
1951 is a year that stands out in my memory because four strong films, all remembered fondly despite their differences, swept the main categories. (Here is a full list from the year.) Yet there are even a few more that I feel are equally deserving of inclusion in the canon. See which ones you also remember, after the jump.
Actual Best Picture Nominees
An American in Paris (winner)
Decision Before Dawn
A Place in the Sun
Quo Vadis
A Streetcar Named Desire
In Retrospect: I maintain that despite two prestigious adaptations, a World War II movie, and a lavish epic, the Academy got it right. Paris is a beautiful, balletic romance that doesn’t get enough credit and in some (only some – please don’t hate!) ways rivals Singin’ in the Rain as the best movie musical of the 1950s. Neither Decision or Vadis really holds up, though I can see why both fit the bill in 1951.
Place, a glossy but effective treatment of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, would earn director George Stevens the first of his two statuettes. And Streetcar made a nice showing for itself, winning three of the year’s four acting Oscars (including one for the recently departed Karl Malden), a feat only repeated once (you’ll read about it in my next Expansion). The only category it lost was for star Marlon Brando, who’d have to wait three more years for his On the Waterfront Oscar.
But now it’s time to shine a light on some of 1951’s other worthy contenders:
The Expansion Pack
6. Strangers on a Train
One of Alfred Hitchcock’s best thrillers, pure and simple. Robert Walker caps his career with his work as a sophisticated psychopath, and Hitch employs some of his greatest strokes in just about every scene. Not every film can claim to have inspired everyone from Danny DeVito (Throw Momma From the Train) to Cat Stevens (“Peace Train”) to Sonic Youth (“Shadow of a Doubt”). This is a film that should never be forgotten.
7. The Day the Earth Stood Still
Banish any thought of the dreadful Keanu remake from your mind; this is the real thing. Both timely and timeless, this alien invasion tale mixes suspense and commentary on nuclear threat with a hint of romance (the sultry Patricia Neal can even get to an extraterrestrial Michael Rennie) and some Christian allegory for good measure. Klaatu barada nikto, indeed.
8. Alice in Wonderland
A classic among toddlers and college coeds alike, this Disney version of the Lewis Carroll novel sure has something for everyone. Perhaps that’s no surprise, with at least three directors and more than a dozen different writers on board. The film wasn’t a commercial hit when it was first released, but that’s okay. Sometimes it takes audiences time to catch onto greatness (here’s looking at you, Raging Bull).
9. The Lavender Hill Mob
He may be best known for more serious turns in everything from The Bridge on the River Kwai to Star Wars, but Alec Guinness proved to have one of the deftest hands at comedy in this heist flick, as one of a trio of gold thieves. Director Charles Crichton, (who’d later direct A Fish Called Wanda) elevated the caper to an art form with this film, and clearly Guinness wanted more: in his next film, the similarly-minded Kind Hearts and Coronets, he’d play not one but eight roles.
10. Ace in the Hole
This cynical look at the media was Billy Wilder’s maiden voyage as a triple threat (director/producer/writer), and features one of Kirk Douglas’ better performances. Much darker than Wilder’s last film, the previous year’s already-barbed Sunset Blvd., many people turned away from the film, an examination of how self-serving and destructive human nature can be. But just because people didn’t turn out in droves doesn’t mean it isn’t quality. Just ask Alice.
The Snubs
The biggest snub of the year is, I would imagine, that of the film that nabbed Best Actor for Humphrey Bogart over Brando — The African Queen. John Huston’s film is great fun, and paired Bogart, one of the greatest leading men, with one of the great leading ladies (Katharine Hepburn) of all time, but despite some impressive action sequences, the film is also little more than a starry trifle. If anything, William Wyler’s noir Detective Story, also starring Kirk Douglas, would have made my cut first. Fun fact: When Brando won three years later, among the nominees he beat was Bogart for The Caine Mutiny.
To enjoy the rest of the Best Picture Expansion Project, please go here.
6 responses so far ↓
1 katy // Jul 8, 2009 at 8:19 am
Well, this was a delightful read. I suspect I agree with Doug’s lineup … who could argue with Alice in Wonderland and Strangers on a Train? But I’m just not confident in the breadth of my film viewing in this era to make any strong claims. (Besides Alice, Strangers, American in Paris, and Streetcar, I don’t think I’ve seen these films.)
Although … that said, my father would weep that you excluded African Queen. And honestly, it’s the Bogart film I most easily tolerated being forced to watch on video as a kid, what with the fun jungle cruise and all. There were even real laughs. And Hepburn was in high form, and wore the great hats. (And wasn’t there unmarried sex? In the early 1950s?)
Okay, so maybe I can disagree after all. African Queen rocks! Thanks for doing this, Doug …
2 Doug // Jul 8, 2009 at 10:01 am
Thanks for the feedback, Katy! Great hats and sinful livin’ do make for a valid argument, but I’ll stay strong for now. (Also, I think I prefer Hepburn as a spinster in Summertime, a few years later.)
3 ferretrick // Jul 8, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Its been a long time since I saw the African Queen, but I’m not remembering sex. I do think it deserves a spot in the top ten-the aforementioned action sequences, two screen icons at the top of their game. a great script…I vote this one in.
I really, REALLY don’t see Alice in Wonderland. I don’t even consider it one of Disney’s better films, much less Best Picture of the year. I don’t even think the Disney studio itself really favors this one (i.e. it was always widely available on video/DVD, when the “classics” are released for about a year and then pulled from shelves, you see very little Alice merchandise, etc. The music isn’t memorable, neither are most of the characters, the animation is nothing special. The only thing it really had going for it was the Queen of Hearts and she doesn’t appear till nearly the end.
I do agree with Strangers on a Train…the rest of the films I either haven’t seen or don’t remember well enough to comment.
4 Destiny // Jul 8, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Doug, it’s nice to meet another classic film buff. I think 1951 is one of the most interesting Oscar years because the three films at the center: An American in Paris, A Place in the Sun, and A Streetcar Named Desire are so different and yet each captures something special about the era and the post-WWII experience.
Personally, I would have given best picture to A Place in the Sun for it’s honest and simple story-telling coupled with it’s lush black and white cinematography. The sheer beauty of Clift and Taylor together on screen at that point in their careers is mesmerizing. As for my expansion pack, it’s pretty similar to yours Doug, we must have similar taste.
6. Strangers on a Train
7. Detective Story (I prefer it to Ace in the Hole, which is very, very dark)
8. The Day the Earth Stood Still
9. The Desert Fox (anchored by one of James Mason’s best performances, the first real American work to look at the war from the German side)
10. Royal Wedding (I can make the argument that Royal Wedding with it’s amazingly inventive dance routines, like Astaire’s memorable dance on the walls and ceiling of his hotel room as well as his partnership with a coat rack, was more inventive and has had a more lasting impact than the American in Paris ballet. Feel free to disagree, but both films are brilliant.)
Honorable mentions would go to The Lavendar Hill Mob, Ace in the Hole, He Ran All they Way and The Mating Season. I have to admit that I have never liked the African Queen, I find it excruciating to watch and after giving it 2 chances, I won’t give it a third.
5 Doug // Jul 8, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Good to e-meet you, Destiny! Our tastes really do overlap. I almost included Royal Wedding and He Ran All the Way. And I agree that Desert Fox is a good film too. (I think it’s a crime James Mason never won.) I’ll have to pad more snubs into my next column.
I also see your point on Place in the Sun — while I think Taylor and Winters could have been replaced by better actresses, they worked in the film, whose lighting and cinematography is, I believe, it’s greatest asset.
I sure hope we agree next time too!
6 Michael // Jul 8, 2009 at 6:13 pm
But . . . but . . . but . . . Streetcar, despite the trivially laundered ending, is a screenplay largely by Tennessee Williams, the greatest writer of American dialogue I know, and Brando’s performance in this film changed American acting, and, combined with Kazan’s directing, paved the way for a revolution in American cinema, theater, and television. I can’t imagine valuing another of these films above it.
And African Queen was written by James Agee, a great American prose stylist and a great film critic, too–I don’t see it as a starry trifle but an honest-but-still-epic misfit love story, and I don’t know if it gives me a bigger crush on Hepburn or Bogart . . . can’t an iconic film get some love?
And . . . Alice in Wonderland? Really? Utterly second-rate Disney, gaudy, crassly American instead of wryly British like its source, and full of low-rent Sammy Cahn songs–really an unworthy adaptation of a classic. (Disney would do worse with the Black Cauldron, but the Winnie-the-Pooh series showed they could do sensitive adaptations when they decided to.)
Strangers on a Train? Mesmerizingly creepy and suggestive. Hitchcock’s reputation is a bit much for me, but this one’s as skillful as they come.
(I, a complete pushover for musicals, have never found a way to care about American in Paris–the characters leave me completely uninvolved, the humor is underpowered, and the whole thing feels like it’s quoting other, more vital musicals with more compelling stories–and the big number looks garish and emptily showy to me. Minority opinion, I know.
WHAT A YEAR IN FILM!
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