Success or Snub? An American in Paris (24th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

 To see part 1, click here.

Fanfare for the Bull~Miklós Rósza - Quo Vadis

It may interest you to know that An American in Paris is actually only the second color film to have won the Oscar for Best Picture (the first being Gone With the Wind (1939)), and the first one in over a decade. In addition, 1951 was a pretty strong year for movies, which makes this decision a bit more interesting. Let’s run down some quick-hitters, most of which were good movies but had varying reasons why they wouldn’t have been considered movie of the year material.

A couple famous stories got somewhat notable film adaptations in 1951. There was a remake of Show Boat

which is one of those rare remakes that is better than the original (which isn't saying much since watching paint dry is better than watching the 1936 Show Boat).

        There was a very excellent adaptation of Death of a Salesman

starring Fredric March though it was ignored by the Academy and audiences since its commentary on the failure of the American dream didn’t play well with 1950s audiences.

Walt Disney continued his Silver Age output with Alice in Wonderland

which didn’t make quite as big of a splash as Cinderella (1950) and was accused of Americanizing a great piece of British literature. Critics were a fickle mistress back then in case you can’t tell. Film is nowadays considered one of Disney’s best and does a great job at blending its surreal setting and animation with a good narrative.

Probably the most iconic version of A Christmas Carol came out that year with the British adaptation, Scrooge (released as A Christmas Carol in the United States).

This is the most famous version of the story with most of its imagery and tropes being what immediately pops into your head when you hear of A Christmas Carol (though, for my money, the best one is the 1984 version starring George C. Scott, which we will never discuss in this series since it was a made-for-TV movie and, thus, ineligible for the Oscars). Alastair Sim’s portrayal of the titular character is the most quintessential Scrooge and was a severe snub for the Best Acting Oscar. In fact, despite being one of the most famous and complex characters in Western literature with a new film adaptation coming out at least once a decade, no actor’s portrayal of Ebenezer Scrooge has ever been nominated for an Academy Award.

Moving onto original films, one of my favorite pieces of weird film history came out this year in the form of Bedtime for Bonzo.

In case you’ve never heard of this, Bedtime for Bonzo is a screwball comedy where a college professor (Ronald Reagan) tries to prove that chimpanzees can be raised to act like human children and hijinx ensue from there. It’s an above-average screwball for its time with some solid laughs but nothing special beyond its pretty ridiculous concept. It got a second wind in the 70s and 80s, though, when the starring actor ended up running for political office, touting his career as a celebrated actor and people would counter the “celebrated” part of this claim by pointing out that his most famous and highest-grossing film was Bedtime for Bonzo. Instead of replying with his other, actually excellent films (i.e. Kings Row (1942), Storm Warning (1950)), Reagan lovingly embraced Bedtime for Bonzo, to the point of showing it to visiting dignitaries at Camp David. To put in perspective just how bizarre this is, imagine if Adam Sandler became President of the United States and he ended up unironically showing Billy Madison (1995) to fellow heads of state and still came off as a respected statesman.

Billy Wilder made another film noir masterpiece with Ace in the Hole

a movie that acts as a colorful commentary of the symbiotic relationship between journalists and tragedies: the film’s setup is that a newsman (Kirk Douglas) sabotages a rescue operation for a man trapped in a cave-in so that the newsman can milk it for a story. Similar to Alice in Wonderland, this is now considered one of the best films of 1951 but didn’t earn that title until years later. In a more optimistic time, Ace in the Hole’s cynical story wasn’t received well and it became a moderate failure. Won’t fault the Academy for ignoring this one but will still highly recommend it if you like old films.

A historically significant film for reasons unrelated to the art of film was The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel.

This film is pretty instrumental in the making of the Rommel myth, a type of historical thinking that tried to turn Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (James Mason) into a respectable folk hero who just got caught up on the wrong side of history. While well-meaning, it’s also inaccurate as Rommel was a much more morally onerous character in real-life (even if not officially a member of the Nazi party, no officer would’ve served as one of Hitler’s Field Marshals without being supportive of some atrocities). The film, and the myth surrounding it, largely existed as a way to celebrate some brand of Germanism as a propaganda buffer against Russian Communism so they decided to celebrate the highest-ranking guy in the Third Reich who had some shades of gray. Movie itself is solid.

One of An American in Paris’ biggest competitions at the Oscars that year was A Place in the Sun.

The film is trying to be a commentary on the price of the American dream as it tells the story of a blue-collar worker named George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) who rises to the upper class, ruining a few lives along the way. At the time, this was very liked, winning six Academy Awards (Best Director for George Stevens, Best Screenplay, Best Black-and-White Cinematography, Best Black-and-White Costume Design, Best Film Editing and Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture). While it’s not a bad movie, it’s still a pretty boring and safe one. A Place in the Sun feels like it doesn’t take many chances and comes off as pretty Oscar-baity, especially compared to one of our feature presentation films that also deals with commentary on American culture in a far darker manner.

In terms of setting a tone for the rest of the decade, one of the biggest splashes in 1951 had to have been Quo Vadis.

Along with Samson & Delilah (1950), Quo Vadis jump-started the 50s trend of big 3-hour-long Biblical epics becoming a highly lucrative form of revenue for Hollywood. The film is centered in imperial Rome and concerns a Roman centurion, Commander Marcus Vinicius (Robert Taylor), in one of the earliest “Who’s the savage?” stories. Vinicius is sent to quell a rebellion in the outer regions, quite literally finds Christianity there and ends up converting himself to the religion and renouncing his heathen paganism before being caught up in the famous Christian purges under Emperor Nero (Peter Ustinov).

These Christian epics present a bit of a weird “chicken or the egg” situation as to ascertaining why they were so successful, especially since it’s a very oddly specific genre that never really saw a real second wind in later years like other classic genres such as the Westerns, noirs, swashbucklers etc. (not to say that they don’t make Biblical epics anymore, they’re just never quite as successful). There’s two theories at work here. On the one hand, movies were in a constant battle with TV and the one thing that films definitely had over TV programs was budget: a TV show of this scale and this epic of a story was simply not possible on television back then. On the other hand, I also think part of it was just a response to the increased conservatism of America in the 1950s, particularly being poised against the perceived “Godlessness” of Communism. Like most things, it was probably a bit of column A, some of column B.

Since Hollywood was undergoing its own little brand of embracing McCarthyism after the HUAC hearings and the Blacklist, this film celebrating Christianity fit right in and was a frontrunner at the Academy Awards, being nominated for 8 awards (winning none of them). Going back to it today, Quo Vadis is fun with a great scale though it, and most other Biblical epics of the decade (e.g. The Robe (1953), The Story of Ruth (1960) etc.), lack the same level of panache that Cecil B. DeMille’s films had. While DeMille’s films seem to be a lot more confident in how majestic they are, movies like Quo Vadis feel the need to constantly remind you how amazing Christianity is and come off pretty corny by comparison (and DeMille’s films are already very corny to begin with so let that sink in).

Rashomon Suite~Fumio Hayasaka - Rashomon

But I digress. This same track of reasoning per the HUAC trials is most likely why a more fluffy film ended up winning the Best Picture after 6 straight years of fairly challenging films being the Best Picture winner. There were (at least) six truly excellent films that came out in America in 1951, only one of which was nominated for Best Picture. Let’s go down the list.

        One of the most beloved movie romances of all time came out that year with The African Queen.

Set in colonial Africa circa World War II, Rose Sayer (Katharine Hepburn) is a socialite whose family is killed by the Nazis. She manages to get rescued by the operator/owner of a small dingy steamboat called the African Queen, Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart), who offers to take her to safety though eventually they morph the plan into trying to stop Nazis and help the war effort.

What makes The African Queen impressive is how minimalist the story is. 80% of the film is just set on this boat going down a river. Very few other characters show up, making most of the film’s success shouldered by Bogart and Hepburn who are, of course, excellent. I also do think that the film does have some interesting class commentary in a post-WWII America and world that was quickly becoming more apparent.

There’s an argument for how the fetishization of being part of the upper-class was destroyed by the culture shock of World War II. Post-WWII, the middle-class basically exploded and being part of it became more and more relatable and more and more what Hollywood began aiming for. The idea of this posh, erudite socialite falling in love with a grimy, dirty steamboat captain was something that would’ve been completely unheard of in a movie made even ten years ago. But, as time goes on, they manage to cross this social barrier and do what they can to kick some Nazi ass. What’s refreshing is that they don’t even really mention this barrier all that much in the movie; you can instantly understand it by just the look and performances of the two characters.

This would also be the movie that finally won Humphrey Bogart the Oscar for Best Leading Actor, even though he should’ve won it at least twice by now (for Casablanca (1942) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)). Was it truly the best performance of the year or did the Academy just give it to him because he was due one and it was clear that with his steady diet of whiskey and cigarettes he wouldn’t be long for this world? (Said diet ironically might’ve saved his life for a few more years; Bogart was the only one of the cast and crew who didn’t almost die of dysentery since he didn’t drink any of the set-on-location water.) I can leave that up to you but, regardless, it is a great performance in a great movie.

(Last notable fun fact of The African Queen is that this was the first movie produced by Sam Spiegel, another Hollywood legend whose name will pop up again as he was known for producing some of the greatest films in cinematic history. The alleged story of how he got involved is also one of my favorite Hollywood fairy tales. This is entirely anecdotal from an older industry professional and not formally verified so take it with a grain of salt. The way the story goes is that Spiegel wined and dined Bogart and Hepburn about The African Queen for a month while expensing all of their bills to Warner Bros. Spiegel, who was not employed by Warner Bros., would get an irate phone call from one of the producers for stealing from them. Spiegel then blackmailed the producer, saying that Hepburn (one of Warner Bros.’ most lucrative stars) was so excited about The African Queen that she would likely not renew her contract with the studio if they pulled out of financing the picture and convinced them to go along with Spiegel as producer. Even if the story is not true or exaggerated, its sheer badassery shows a good vignette of how Hollywood works.)

Speaking of movies about rivers, another truly great film came out that year called Le Fleuve (Eng.: The River).

Directed by Jean Renoir, the same man who directed La Grande Illusion (1938), The River is one of the great coming-of-age stories. The movie is set on the bank of the Ganges River in British India as it centers around an upper-crust British family, particularly the daughter, Harriet (Patricia Walters). The movie's basically just a drama of her and her family living in the British Raj, particularly after the family is visited by a one-legged officer, Captain John (Thomas E. Breen). Harriet quickly develops a crush on Captain John and begins squabbling with her sisters for his attention.

Despite this plot sounding very insipid and melodramatic, The River has a very laidback and mature atmosphere to it. There’s no great adventure, no villain, no needless drama. It’s just a slice of life. People fall in love, hearts are broken, people are born, people die, wars happen, there’s peace and yet the river will keep on flowing and so will life. This a very powerful parable and the movie is beautifully understated in letting the audience interpret the moral for themselves.

I also want to take time to acknowledge how artfully and tastefully the film deals with the race issue and its portrayal of Indian culture. Similar to the above moral, race exists in this film in a distant echo that is shown, not told (all of the family’s servants are Indian, waiting on them hand and foot). The movie is very respectful to Indian culture, showing the characters partaking in Hindi celebration and giving real honest-to-God depth to many of the minority characters. One of the best characters in the movie is Melanie (Radha Burnier), a biracial woman who feels frustrated not being fully accepted by either groups of people.

The slice-of-life story combined with beautiful cinematography does make this a strong contender for being the best movie of the year. You could even argue the timeliness, since this is only a couple years after India achieved its independence and Mahatma Gandhi was killed. The movie kinda has this Gone With the Wind feel where it’s the death of a culture for childhood even if that culture’s death is actually a good thing for the people that it was oppressing. There’s a real sadness to the adults that contrasts with the whimsiness of childhood that gives The River its own unique identity.

As long as we’re talking about foreign films that were ignored, we must also mention the American release of Rashomon.

Directed by Akira Kurosawa, another of the greatest directors who ever lived, Rashomon was the sleeper hit at the Venice Film Festival, being a surprise winner for the Golden Lion (the big award and often considered, along with the Palme d’Or, one of the most prestigious awards in the film industry). This praise led to it being released in America in December of 1951, opening the floodgates for more Japanese films, particularly samurai films, being dubbed and released in the West.

The samurai movie genre, called chambara in Japan, is a fairly interesting one which does have some cultural parallels to the Neorealist and rubble movies in Europe being made around the same time. Japan was almost completely annihilated by World War II and movies about samurai allowed filmmakers to experiment with allegorically looking back to its country’s past without making it hit too close to home for the audience (also because movies depicting WWII were banned in Japan at the time). Most of these movies usually examine very violent settings of samurai who are challenged by upcoming social mores and try to fit their old ways into a new world that will no longer accept these ways. Some of the more edgy films will even really let the characters have it and examine how the militaristic, violent samurai ruin lives of those below them (e.g. Ugetsu (Eng. Rain-Moon Tales) (1953), Sanoshu Dayu (Eng. Sansho the Bailiff) (1954)). (It bears mentioning that Rashomon was neither the first samurai movie made nor Kurosawa’s first major success in Japan. It was, however, the breakout film for both in the West.)

Rashomon takes place on a cold, rainy day where a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura), a priest (Minoru Chiaki) and, later, a commoner (Kichijiro Ueda) take shelter from the storm beneath the Rashomon city gate. While passing the time, they recount with each other the court case they just witnessed where a samurai (Masayuki Mori) was murdered by a bandit (Toshiro Mifune) who coveted the samurai’s wife (Machiko Kyo). Where the fun of the movie begins is that each participant of the crime has a completely different take on how the crime actually took place. Depending on who’s telling the story, they each come off as completely different (so when the wife tells the story, she’s an unabashed victim but in another version, she seems downright bitchy).

This set-up has come to be known as the Rashomon Effect, referring to a filmmaking style of telling the exact same story from different perspectives to showcase how people’s biases can lead to unreliable stories. The Rashomon Effect has been imitated in countless other films and TV shows, with most sitcoms usually having an episode where each of the characters swap stories of the same event, with their own implicit biases warping the story with each telling.

The commentary on the looseness of one’s own biases warping reality as we know it is a large reason for this film’s success. Post-WWII and during the Cold War, many folks were always wondering how exactly the world got to this point. Especially in Japan, where the Imperialism culture is what led the country on a collision course that climaxed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the society was undergoing a gigantic mea culpa. Rashomon has a very clever moral of just encouraging people to take a look in the mirror and acknowledge their own damn faults.

I don’t think I need to tell you that both this movie and The River were both snubbed, being completely ignored from the Academy for all their awards. Rashomon, like Bicycle Thieves (1947) before it, did garner a paltry Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, before this became its own dedicated category and was just an honorary award. Supposedly, the fact that both these movies came out the same year and only one was acknowledged was the impetus for folks to start petitioning for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film to be added to the ceremony (though this didn’t happen until 1956).

Going back to America, let’s also take some time to acknowledge the genre snobbery that was always so present with the Academy. Besides the Biblical epic, the movie genre most intrinsically associated with the 1950s would have been science-fiction. The genre got its big start this year with one of the best science-fiction movies of all time, The Day The Earth Stood Still.

Quick history lesson to add context why sci-fi was on everyone’s minds in the 1950s: In 1947, an unidentified flying object crashed into the desert outside Roswell, New Mexico and was quickly seized by the United States government. Stories quickly abounded about how the object was extraterrestrial in origin, notably one woman’s testimony of encountering little green men near the crash site, meaning that there was something out there beyond the stars and it would be coming very soon. (75 years and God only knows how many declassified memos later, the true story is that apparently that this UFO was a Soviet spy balloon shot down by the Air Force, remained classified to avoid an international incident and the “little green men” were a couple of guys in poorly-fitted hazmat suits that were seen in the middle of the night. Of course, maybe that’s exactly what they want you to think!) As the conspiracy theories grew and grew, captured by the imagination of scientific breakthrough in a post-atomic bomb world, Hollywood happily cashed in to jumpstart a new trend of movies.

Of course, science-fiction movies didn’t begin in the 1950s and go back to the dawn of cinema (i.e. Georges Méliès’ La Voyage dans la Lune (Eng.: A Trip to the Moon) (1902)) and you had the serials such as Flash Gordon (1936) but the 50s is the decade that is most associated with the genre. Watch any period piece set in the 50s and you’ll usually have a scene of a kid watching some sci-fi monster show on the crappy black-and-white TV. The first film in this boom was technically Rocketship X-M (1950) but 1951 was the year that the genre really took off (pun intended). Most sci-fi films were usually B-movie creature features, filling the void that the monster mash movies left behind, sporting cool monsters from outer space, being created or protected by a mad scientist, killed by a jocky hero and everyone learns a lesson about how technology will kill us all unless we learn how to use it in a more responsible manner. These films ran the natural gamut from great to Godawful though it was also a rare surprise when you had one with a higher budget.

The Day The Earth Stood Still stands out as a few pegs above the rest and was one of the first what you would call “high-brow” sci-fi. A UFO lands in Washington D.C. and out of it emerges an alien life form (that conveniently looks exactly like a human) named Klaatu (Michael Rennie) who desires to speak with Earth’s leaders about something very urgent. Within minutes of leaving his spaceship, he is shot and almost killed by the military and is only saved by the intervention of his giant robot bodyguard, Gort (Lock Martin). Klaatu escapes army custody and embarks on a journey through American suburbia to try to find someone who’ll listen to the message that he traveled millions of light years to deliver.

The Day The Earth Stood Still is very pointed about its criticisms of American culture and Cold War hysteria, showing an alien who is completely confused as to why there is so much hatred when we should be banding together to prevent nuclear destruction. While it would be easy to go after the government, letting Klaatu escape from the military and start talking to normal American people with their own prejudices was a stroke of brilliance. Similar to Rod Sterling’s famous Twilight Zone (1959-1964), director Robert Wise knows that making a pointed satire of American culture was a quick ticket to getting your movie blacklisted and bombed. But by introducing aliens and creating a clearly fictional dialogue, you could get away with a lot more and get the audience to calm down and start thinking.

The Day The Earth Stood Still also introduced most of the famous tropes of the sci-fi genre that have been copied ever since. The alien that insists that he comes in peace, the majestic flying saucer and, of course, the giant killer robot. Considering how he’s the movie’s most iconic character, first-time viewers might be surprised by how little Gort ends up doing. (Even back then, he was the character featured in all the posters and trailers so audiences would’ve been equally surprised.) Yet, I think this also very cleverly ties into the satire as well. Both us, and the military brass in the movie, are so focused on the robot and how to kill it, that we’re completely ignoring Klaatu and what he has to say.

The Day The Earth Stood Still was very lauded for a sci-fi film back then and captured a smart, pointed satire of 1951’s America. Though the effects are pretty dated today, it still remains a fairly elegant and well-paced thriller. Throughout the 1950s, science-fiction would occasionally gain some acknowledgment from the Academy though it was almost always for the SFX awards, not once for the big ones. And if there ever was one that did make you think and should’ve warranted a nomination, it was The Day The Earth Stood Still.

(Besides The Day The Earth Stood Still, the other notable sci-fi films of 1951 were The Thing From Another World

and When Worlds Collide.

Both are good as well though I’m homing in on The Day The Earth Stood Still because it’s a genuinely excellent film. For a modern analogy, this is the difference between talking about First Blood (1981) being snubbed versus Commando (1985).)

Sci-fi isn’t the only case of genre snobbery present here though. Starting in 1951, Alfred Hitchcock began his most illustrious output, making a new masterpiece what seemed like almost every other year. Forgive me if we start sounding like a broken record for the next few installments but the fact that he only ever won the Oscar once in his life remains one of the great mistakes of the institution. To start with, we have Strangers on a Train.

Strangers on a Train Suite~Dimitri Tiomkin - Strangers on a Train

Often considered one of Hitchcock’s best films, this amazing thriller has one of the best and simplest set-ups for a murder-mystery. Celebrity tennis player, Guy Haines (Farley Granger), is going through a messy divorce with his hated wife, Miriam (Kasey Rogers). On his way home to finalize the divorce, he “meets” a stranger on the train, Bruno Antony (Robert Walker), and vents to him about the divorce. Antony offers a proposal to Haines that they swap murders: Antony will kill Haines’ wife if Haines kills Antony’s father. Haines does what all people do when they meet crazy folks on the train and ignores Antony but soon finds out that Antony was in no way joking and is stalking Haines, his wife and his new girlfriend (Ruth Roman), committing crimes that it seems only Haines could have committed.

From there, you get one of the most breakneck, well-written, well-paced thrillers ever made. Even over 70 years after its release, Strangers on a Train is still a very good, very fun movie and, in terms of sheer mastery over the art of cinema, it’s arguably the best and most competent movie of 1951. You could honestly teach an entire class in filmmaking from this movie alone.

Compare the slow pace of when Antony is stalking his first victim, giving a constant sense of fright and suspense, versus the fast and frenetic pace during Haines and Antony’s showdown at the end of the movie, giving a constant sense of excitement. Or how during dialogue scenes, most of the dialogue exists in long two shots, going into a close-up whenever a character has a frightening revelation. This scene in particular I liked to show students when I used to teach introduction to filmmaking. The set-up is that Antony is going to frame Haines by leaving his lighter at a crime scene. Haines needs to finish his tennis match as soon as possible to head him off. Meanwhile Antony accidentally drops the lighter down a storm drain and has to get it back, buying Haines some extra time. Notice how the editing itself changes depending on which character we’re seeing: the quick pace of the editing during Haines’ tennis match timed to the swinging of the tennis rackets contrasted with the long shot of Antony’s arm S-L-O-W-L-Y reaching for the lighter. Yet in both sequences, the camera only gets closer and closer as each character gets closer and closer to their goal, creating more and more suspense. The whole movie is filled with amazing scenes like this.

While you could argue Strangers on a Train doesn’t really have any real themes besides being a fun movie, then again, neither does An American in Paris (although I have heard that Strangers on a Train could be seen as an allegory for McCarthyism with the whole “being blamed for a crime you didn’t commit” thing). Yet why was An American in Paris showered in accolades while Strangers on a Train completely ignored? Genre snobbery, plain and simple. Thrillers like this were seen as kind of the action movies of their day, great fun but not culturally relevant and deserved to be sneered down upon, while musicals were given the red carpet treatment. Yet just because one’s a musical and the other’s a thriller, the musical must be acknowledged.

I’m also going to die on the hill that Strangers on a Train was a severe snub for the Oscars for Best Black-and-White Cinematography and Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Robert Walker. With the exception of Psycho’s (1960) Norman Bates, Bruno Antony is Hitchcock’s best villain and one of the few villains from the Golden Age of Hollywood who remains genuinely menacing. While there were nasty bad guys in movies before this, Antony was one of the first characters in a mainstream movie to come off as a truly disturbed psychopath whose grip on reality is tenuous at best. If you account for the antiquated style of acting, this is still a truly menacing performance.

And, finally, An American in Paris’ biggest competition that year (besides A Place in the Sun) was A Streetcar Named Desire.

This is where this decision gets especially weird as A Streetcar Named Desire was hailed as a truly great film by both critics and audiences at the time and is still often considered one of the best American films of the 50s. Based off of a play by Tennessee Williams, which itself is considered a contender for the greatest American play of the 20th Century, the plot revolves around a Southern belle, Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh), who has fallen on bad times and moves in with her sister and brother-in-law, Stanley (Marlon Brando) and Stella Kowalski (Kim Hunter), in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The rest of the film is largely a character study on Blanche and her relationship with the Kowalskis.

Similar to A Place in the Sun, A Streetcar Named Desire acts as a commentary on American culture, distilled into the character of Blanche DuBois. However, A Streetcar Named Desire seems to handle its themes with much more of an elegant and darker touch, particularly how it pertains to the American South and how the real culture of the South is completely divorced from what Southerners would like to think it is. Blanche seems to live wishing that she was a belle from Gone With the Wind, being curtsied to and fancied by men and being doted on. (The fact that Blanche is played by an older Vivien Leigh, who played Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, is a stroke of casting brilliance.) Of course, this is not at all how the real world works and she is given rude awakening after rude awakening.

Enter Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, the standout performance of the piece. Stanley is a mean, drunken, violent boor of a man who takes a sadistic delight in berating Blanche and tearing apart her doe-eyed view of the world. Marlon Brando is often considered one of the, if not the, greatest movie actors who ever lived and A Streetcar Named Desire acted as his breakout film, garnering him a nomination for Best Actor, which is not bad for a first movie. Hell, some even argue that he should’ve won here and that he wasn’t awarded simply because of studio politics demanding that Bogart win an award. Along with Bruno Antony from Strangers on a Train, Brando’s Stanley Kowalski is one of the first truly vile, menacing villains in movie history and he’s still quite a terror. (This movie also has one of the bizarre showcases of the Mandela effect as his scene of him screaming “Stella! Stella!” is often included in famous movie romance scenes. The scene actually depicts a drunken Stanley shouting at his wife to come to him for sex. I honestly have no idea how these wires got crossed.)

While A Streetcar Named Desire is excellent, I personally do find the film flawed and could be deserving of a remake. The original play by Tennessee Williams really takes no prisoners and contains some material in Blanche’s backstory that would not have passed the Hays Office. As a result, some parts of the film feel somewhat confusing and difficult-to-understand. Watching this the first time, I didn’t really get the full meaning of the phrase, “I’ve always depended upon the kindness of strangers.” What makes it confusing though is that the climax of the movie still depicts Stanley’s most barbaric act which is definitely not Hays Code-friendly but was somehow still included so I don’t know what’s going on here in regards to the censorship. All I do know is that it makes the film hard to follow at times.

I also do wish the movie was a bit more stylized considering how it depicts a woman’s flights of fantasy being destroyed. Though that’s a personal nitpick as the movie doesn’t fall into the trap that a lot of play adaptations fall into where they just basically film the play. A lot of the locales, especially the Kowalski house, are shot very close to center, giving the movie a very claustrophobic feeling as the walls close in on Blanche.

Regardless, A Streetcar Named Desire is a very good movie. Considering the string of films that won the Academy Award for Best Picture right before this, and considering the prestige of the film, you would think that this would be the easy shoo-in for the Academy Award for Best Picture. How the Hell did A Streetcar Named Desire not win the award?

Well, I have two theories. Option A is, as mentioned above, that Hollywood was feeling the heat from HUAC and, in the wake of the blacklist, decided to elevate a fluffier film instead of more hard-hitting movies. Option B is that, similar to Judy Holliday’s undeserved Oscar win for Born Yesterday (1950), Academy votes were split between A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun allowing An American in Paris to sneak ahead from third place. Looking at the line-up for the nominees for Best Picture (An American in Paris, Decision Before Dawn, Quo Vadis, A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun), option A looks more likely though I imagine that second half played a part as well.

This once again gets back to the heart of why we do this blog series in the first place. This is a pretty silly and stupid way to choose the quote, unquote, “best movie of the year” but because the Academy Awards constantly sell themselves as prestigious and have never taken steps to circumnavigate the possibility of this happening, really shows that they’re not quite as great as they would like to think they are. Even ignoring that, again, most of the movies we gave the feature treatment to are still truly excellent, even considered so back then, and were completely ignored on all the big awards. Why? Because Hollywood and the Academy dictated that they didn’t matter so they’re not going to give them the time.

Nowadays, most critics and film historians wouldn’t even consider An American in Paris in the top 10 movies of 1951. While a technological breakthrough, it’s one of Gene Kelly’s weaker movies with bland characters and a terrible ending that’s elevated by the song and dance sequences. But if that’s cause célébre for best movie then why aren’t Hitchcock’s thriller scenes in Strangers on a Train or the robot attacks in The Day The Earth Stood Still worth being nominated for Best Picture, especially since these films have fascinating characters and great endings? Or Rashomon which literally invented a whole new way of filmmaking? Well, we already beat the dead horse with a stick quite thoroughly at this point so why reiterate?

Calling An American in Paris the best movie of 1951 was a…

SNUB!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1951:

• Ace in the Hole (dir. Billy Wilder)
• Alice in Wonderland (dir. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske)
• Death of a Salesman (dir. László Benedek)
• Le Fleuve (The River) (dir. Jean Renoir)
• Quo Vadis (dir. Mervyn LeRoy)
• Rashomon (dir. Akira Kurosawa)
• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol) (dir. Brian Desmond Hurst)
• Storm Warning (dir. Stuart Heisler)
• Strangers on a Train (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
• The Day The Earth Stood Still (dir. Robert Wise)

Favorite Heroes:

• Alice (Kathryn Beaumont) (Alice in Wonderland)
• Biff Loman (Kevin McCarthy) (Death of a Salesman)
• Captain Andy Hawks (Joe E. Brown) (Show Boat)
• Charlie Allnut and Rosie Sayer (Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn) (The African Queen)
• District Attorney Burt Rainey (Ronald Reagan) (Storm Warning)
• Guy Haines (Farley Granger) (Strangers on a Train)
• Harriet (Patricia Walters) (Le Fleuve (The River))
• Klaatu (Michael Rennie) (The Day The Earth Stood Still)
• Margaret Mitchell (Ginger Rogers) (Storm Warning)
• Stella DuBois (Kim Hunter) (A Streetcar Named Desire)

Favorite Villains:

• Barr (Hugh Sanders) (Storm Warning)
• Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) (Strangers on a Train)
• Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) (Ace in the Hole)
• Emperor Nero (Peter Ustinov) (Quo Vadis)
• George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) (A Place in the Sun)
• Hank Rice (Steve Cochran) (Storm Warning)
• Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando) (A Streetcar Named Desire)
• Tajomaru (Toshiro Mifune) (Rashomon)
• The Cheshire Cat (Sterling Holloway) (Alice in Wonderland)
• The Queen of Hearts (Verna Felton) (Alice in Wonderland)