Success or Snub? From Here to Eternity (26th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

  To see part 1, click here.

Shane Suite~Shane - Victor Young

Once again, this quest to ascertain on how stupid the decisions the Academy makes by watching every single movie of the past 100 years presents us with a conundrum. The question is not whether or not calling From Here to Eternity the best movie of 1953 was the right call but whether or not calling From Here to Eternity the best movie of 1953 was the right call back on March 25th, 1954. It’s easy to point out that whatever movie won in, say, 2018 would already be forgotten about in just a few years but with a 70-year time gap, especially before the astronomical change in American culture during the 60s, and a film that was respected at the time this can get a bit harder.

1953 has quite a few landmarks in filmmaking as well. Not all of them great but let’s look at a few, shall we?

In addition to CinemaScope, one of the other big crazes that Hollywood attempted in the 50s was more gimmicky films. This led to the first wave of 3-D, the idea of things popping off the screen to hit you square in the face, leading to the audience to go ‘ohh’ and ‘ahh’ with an occasional ‘eeee’ thrown in for good measure. Before this became an expensive gimmick today, it was a pretty cheap gimmick back then. Amusingly, a little contest ensued to see who could be the first out the gate as the first two 3-D films released by a major studio were House of Wax

and Man in the Dark,

which beat House of Wax to release by literally just 2 days. Both movies are pretty mediocre popcorn flicks that have that kind of antiquated style of 3-D filmmaking that makes them annoying to watch if you’re not actually seeing it in 3-D. You know the one I’m talking about. This one.

(While House of Wax in particular defined the 3-D movement, neither of these were technically the first ever 3-D films. The very first was the 1952 independent film, Bwana Devil,

which is somehow an even more wretched waste of celluloid than these two.)

Fresh off of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Marlon Brando tried his hand at being America’s sweetheart in The Wild One.

This is the first biker movie and one of the first counterculture movies, clearly being made by someone who probably has never actually met a biker or was involved in the counterculture. The movie’s okay though Brando is, once again, excellent.

A beloved romantic-comedy, that won Audrey Hepburn the Oscar for Best Leading Actress, was Roman Holiday

the movie that started the whole “princess who doesn’t want to be a princess and lies to a plebeian to make herself seem normal” trope which, once again, is an oddly specific trope that is very prevalent throughout cinematic history. Movie’s good for its era, though nothing special.

With all that said and done, let’s get to the snubs. First, we’re going back to the science-fiction genre that was still making waves at this time. Two notable classics are It Came From Outer Space

which started the “aliens masquerading as humans” trope, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

one of the earliest giant monster movies that takes full advantage of its concept with some grade-A build-up and an awesome finale.

By far the biggest budget and most famous of these, as well as arguably the most famous science-fiction film of the decade, was The War of the Worlds.

Already famous at the time of its release, both for H.G. Wells’ novel (1898) and Orson Welles’ infamous radio play in 1939, The War of the Worlds takes the idea of beings coming from beyond the stars to kill us and kicks the suspense, budget and special effects up a couple notches. While the Universal monsters were very much a personal horror, attacking people one-on-one, the Martians from The War of the Worlds are more what you would call an apocalyptic horror. Something that can end all of humanity as we know it. Considering how the Atomic Age began after the knowledge of a possible Armageddon from the atomic bombs, the allegory is obvious.

Besides being one of the most definitive end of the world movies, the design of the Martians still holds up, even if you can see the strings (fun fact: apparently the negatives that the movie was distributed on degraded over time when they made the jump from movies to TV to DVD; in other words the UFOs didn’t look nearly as fake back in 1953 as they do today). Instead of looking like the typical UFOs, their vessels are more slanted with long scopes on top, making them look like giant birds of prey. The sheer awesome power of the Martians lends itself to a new type of monster. Whereas the Draculas and Wolf Men had pretty clearly defined weaknesses that could be taken advantage of, the Martians’ weakness is entirely unknown. The entire movie is about trying to figure out a way to beat them as they shrug off each and every thing humanity has to throw at them. As they survive more and more, the horror only increases.

As a sheer spectacle, this is one of the most defining films of the Space Age. While not the best movie of the year, as it does slow in the last third, it’s still better than many of the Oscar-baiters that end up becoming frontrunners. Though it would be a lie to say that The War of the Worlds received no consideration as it won an Honorary Oscar for Best Special Effects and, after this year, Best Special Effects would be codified as an official award so credit where it’s due.

Another important cultural touchstone appeared in 1953 in the form of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,

a merry little screwball about a pair of showgirls, ditzy Lorelei (Marilyn Monroe) and cynical Dorothy (Jane Russell), who lie and scheme their way into some rich husbands’ wallets. Pretty typical plot but this film pushed social mores in two key regards: the women’s agency and just how sexy they were allowed to be.

Throughout the whole movie, Lorelei and Dorothy never once sell each other out, backstab each other or try to ruin the other one for a man. In fact, most of the humor comes from them having each other’s back and the humiliating depths they will plunge to keep the other out of trouble. Well, that, and most of the men acting like total dunces and being captivated by their beauty. This ties into how boundary-pushing this movie is in terms of how much they can get away with. In fact, the movie almost feels like (and probably was) specifically designed to push the boundaries of and/or troll the Hays Code. For example, one scene involves Lorelei and her paramour, Piggy (Charles Coburn), having their arms wrapped around each other before the camera zooms out to show that he’s just showing off his snake (literally, a boa constrictor). Though there’s that and then there’s Jane Russell’s showgirl outfit that shows more skin than any movie costume made since 1934 (this is still provocative today, I can’t imagine how it must have seemed back then).

Well, Joseph Breen pitched a fit so hard that he had to retire for his health, the Academy gave him an honorary Oscar to alleviate tempers and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes grossed over $5,000,000 ($57,000,000 in today’s money), becoming the seventh-highest grossing movie of the year and launched Marilyn Monroe into superstardom, with her song “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” becoming a cultural icon. The movie would end up being completely ignored by the Academy which is a tad befuddling considering how big of a deal it was. It’s a much better and more boundary-pushing comedy than Roman Holliday, that’s for sure. Monroe’s performance was iconic enough that she would essentially repeat the “dumb hot blonde” for the rest of her life (though this particular instance has more nuance as it’s revealed that Lorelei is actually smarter than anyone else in the movie). And “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” is one of the most famous songs of the 50s.

My guess for the snub? I think the stuffy-suited Academy members were appalled by the film’s lewd subject matter and chose to ignore it, once again showing how the most boundary-pushing movies aren’t necessarily the ones that actually win Academy Awards. Though, on the flip side, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes would provide the first chink in the armor of the Hays Code, showing how postwar American audiences were more open to risky filmmaking.

(Monroe had two other major films that year called How to Marry a Millionaire

and Niagara.

How to Marry a Millionaire repeats many of the same tropes as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes though it did ultimately gross more. Niagara is a pretty mediocre and dreadfully slow thriller though it did show how Monroe had range as an actress before being typecast as a dumb blonde. 

There was also The Moon is Blue

by Otto Preminger which also raised some eyebrows with its very frank depiction of a one-night stand. Of these 4 movies, I chose to focus on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for this section since it came out first, pushed the envelope the most and I personally think it’s the best movie of the bunch.)

Moving onto some bigger hitters. An interesting record was set at the 26th Academy Awards by Walt Disney for the most Oscars won by a single person in the same night, a record that has since been tied but never eclipsed. Now, granted, all the Oscars are in categories that Disney routinely dominated every year that he was alive but the point still remains. Walt won four Oscars: the Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature (for The Living Desert), Best Documentary Short Subject (for The Alaskan Eskimo), Best Two-Reel Live Action Short Subject (for Bear Country) and for Best Cartoon Short Subject (for Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom). What he didn’t win an award, or was even nominated, for was one of his greatest films, Peter Pan.

Peter Pan is intrinsically intertwined with the pop culture of the first half of the 20th Century, even moreso than the majority of the existing IPs we’ve already covered in this series. It was based on a play in 1904 that saw its first stage production in the Duke’s Theater in England. One successful run later and it toured New York before being unleashed onto the world, becoming a theatrical phenomenon. The story was adapted into a silent film in 1924 but, surprisingly, never received a sound adaptation, even after talkies raged all throughout Hollywood. Probably because Disney was eager to adapt the story and scooped up the rights as soon as he was able though the project languished in development Hell for over 20 years, finally seeing its release in 1953.

A trio of siblings; Wendy (Kathryn Beaumont), John (Paul Collins) and Michael (Tommy Luske); encounter the mystical Peter Pan (Bobby Driscoll), an adventure-loving boy who lives in the far-off Neverland, a place where children never have to grow up. Peter Pan convinces the siblings to accompany him to Neverland and the rest of the movie then depicts their adventures with Peter, his sidekick Tinker Bell and their battles with a group of pirates led by Captain Hook (Hans Conried).

Peter Pan is a story that almost felt tailor-made to be adapted by Walt Disney someday. The plot acts as a very smart allegory of learning to appreciate the joys of childhood with the responsibilities of adulthood and the dangers of going too far in either direction (which seems fitting for a man who was enough of a control freak about the world around him that he eventually decided to just create his own). Everything about Neverland and Peter’s adventures on it reflect what adventure would mean to an Edwardian-era child: mermaids, fairies, pirates, American Indians (the last of which has landed the film in hot water in modern times for stereotyping) etc. Unlike the kids on Pleasure Island in Pinocchio (1940), however, Peter Pan doesn’t suffer his karmic retribution for still acting like a child and is more shown to be misled. The note the movie ends on gets down this balance in a very mature manner, which is surprising for a family film from the 50s.

The way the movie weaves its way towards this is of course most of the fun. Even ignoring the well-defined characters and great adventure, there are a lot of aspects worth homing in on here. The animation is phenomenal, some of the best the company ever put out. On that note, the swordfighting is some of the best in movies up to this point. Because the characters are animated, they’re allowed to be more creative with the swordplay than most other swashbucklers of the day. And the soundtrack is one of the best musicals under the Disney label, all of the songs being easily memorable. My personal highlight is the You Can Fly sequence when Peter is leading the kids to Neverland. When people talk about the magic of Disney, this is one of the first scenes that pops into my head.

We’ve discussed previously how animation is an art form that has never been respected by the Academy but I actually find it to be more egregious in a pre-60s world than later on. In modern culture, animation is seen as being something made exclusively for children and adult animation is a phenomenon that is more tailored to cult classics than actual classics. But it wasn’t like that back then. While animated movies were made for the whole family, basically every movie had to be on account of the Hays Code. It wouldn’t have been entirely unknown for adults to actually go see Disney movies on their own. And this movie was huge, being one of the top 5 box office grossers of 1953.

This has contributed to what has become called the “animation taboo,” which basically means that it’s taken so long for an animated movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture that, now, if and when it finally does happen, the film in question would have to be of such unbelievable quality that would be almost impossible to pull off. If excellent films like Peter Pan and Fantasia (1940) had won, or at least been nominated, this wouldn’t have happened. And, furthermore, animation would probably be more respected as a medium that could appeal to adults, allowing a gateway for who knows how many creative, mature movies that’ll never exist because investors still see it exclusively as kids’ stuff.

Another major snub was the excellent film noir, The Big Heat.

The Big Heat is a great crime thriller/film noir not because of what it adds to the genre so much as how it shows the archetype of the hero for who they really are. The plot is a pretty standard noir affair: homicide detective Sergeant Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) is called in to investigate the apparent suicide of a fellow officer. Through the process of the investigation, Bannion unfurls a conspiracy full of criminals, femme fatales and other tropes. Bannion is, of course, the morally upstanding policeman who won’t let the bad guys get away with their crimes and will do anything to bring them to justice. When I say he’ll do anything, I do literally mean anything, and that’s where the fun of the movie comes in.

Bannion is a very, very violent individual who seems to do what he does not out of a sense of right and wrong but because his ego will not abide these criminals existing in his city. The Big Heat is as much about the conspiracy that Bannion discovers as it is about the trail of death and destruction that he leaves in his wake. It’s especially fascinating as the film invites you to take a thousand-yard view on how much good he really did. Sure, he solves the crime but how much good did solving that crime actually do? When the movie begins, only one person is dead. When the movie ends, because of his investigation, five more people are dead and one brutally maimed. If he had just left the bad guys alone, would anyone else have actually gotten hurt? Or, if he went about it the “right” way, would things have been better then? Is it worth a few lives to make sure that the bad guys get brought to justice? Where is the line?

What makes this clever, and gives the film some freshness even decades after this trope of “renegade cop who doesn’t play by the rules” became old-hat, is that this is all in the subtext. The film is still a very good noir and crime thriller with some fun twists and turns, stylized lighting and memorable characters. It just has a much more violent main character and villains and leaves just enough unsaid to keep you wondering after it was over.

The violence in The Big Heat in particular seems to be pushing the envelope a bit further than most movies up to this point. In every other noir, the films depict relatively benign shootings and the occasional strangulation. Hell, most of the killings tend to happen off-screen. Here, you see a character actually get disfigured with a pot of boiling water and it’s shocking to watch for its time period. The Big Heat is another movie where I can’t talk too much without giving away some of the more ornery moments so forgive me if this section is a bit shorter than some feature length sections.

One of the great Shakespearean adaptations came out in 1953: William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (often shortened to just Julius Caesar).

The movie is largely a 1:1 adaptation of the play: telling of the assassination of Roman consul Julius Caesar (Louis Calhern) by a group of Senators led by Marcus Brutus (James Mason) and Gaius Cassius (John Gielgud) before clashing with Caesar’s protégé, Mark Antony (Marlon Brando). This was treated more or less as the American answer to Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948), as it was the first major American adaptation of Shakespeare to gain major kudos for adapting the Bard’s works in a respectable manner.

The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1599) stands out as unique among many of Shakespeare’s tragedies as it plays with some of the tropes that Shakespeare was used to at this point. Despite being called The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Caesar dies about halfway through the story (sorry for spoiling a 500-year-old story about a 2100-year-old murder) and is a secondary character. Instead, the story seems to be more about Brutus and the struggle he has to murder a man he considers like a brother and how this haunts him. Brutus believes that he’s doing it as an honest public servant but, ironically, he ends up accelerating Rome’s turn into a dictatorship.

Mason gets down this conflict very well and I think is one of the underrated great Shakespearean performances. Though the real show-stealer of the film is Marlon Brando as Mark Antony. Along with A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), this role helped put Brando on the map as being a respected actor and demonstrated his dramatic chops to the world. As weird as it may seem now, there was actually a bit of skepticism when his role was first announced as many did not think he was capable of it. After A Streetcar Named Desire, Brando had a reputation as “the Mumbler” due to his marble-mouthed way of speaking at times. Many thought he was so used to mumbling and only raising his voice for exclamation that he would not be capable of playing Antony. Thankfully, Brando proved all of them 100% wrong as his speech halfway through the movie, one of Shakespeare’s best, is electrifying to watch. This would earn Brando another nomination for the Oscar for Best Leading Actor, which he once again lost in a snub (to William Holden in Stalag 17, a fun character in a fun movie but not nearly this good).

On a more deserving note, Julius Caesar also won the Academy Award for Best Black-and-White Art Direction which is fitting considering the look of this movie. You really feel like you’re transported back in time to ancient Rome: the togas, the marble, it’s all perfect. But what also makes it great is how it doesn’t overtake the story. You could consider Julius Caesar a bit of an offshoot of the Biblical epics being made around this same time but whereas in those movies, the spectacle is the point, here, it takes a backseat to the story. You never catch yourself really enamored with the spectacle. Instead, it keeps its pace as a political thriller with the set design as window dressing.

All this combines to make William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar one of the best movies of the year. It was one of the strongest frontrunners at the Academy Awards though it obviously ended up not winning. It does beg the question why? Not only is it based on a great work of Western literature but it also smoothly builds upon the spectacle that the Biblical blockbusters were giving to create something interesting. What did From Here to Eternity do that makes it so much better than William Shakespeare?

Well, before we can tackle that, we’ve got one last major snub to tackle. In the wake of High Noon (1952), came another excellent, genre-reinventing Western, Shane.

Whereas High Noon kinda kept its allegory about the downfall of America simmering beneath the surface, Shane actually shows a real case of complex American politics back during the days of the Wild West, and I’m not talking about cowboys and Indians here. Shane is set in a hardscrabble town on the Wyoming frontier where a drifter named Shane (Alan Ladd) befriends a family of homesteaders called the Starretts: father Joe (Van Heflin), his wife Marian (Jean Arthur) and their son Joey (Brandon deWilde), doing chores in exchange for food and shelter. The Starretts and their community, however, are in constant conflict with the local cattle-drivers led by Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer) and the film is then about this little local war that Shane finds himself in the middle of.

(Quick history lesson on the whole farmer and cattleman conflict to add some context since I realize it is now a more obscure part of Western history. The Wild West as we know it was formally opened when President Abraham Lincoln signed what was called the Homestead Act. What this Act basically meant was that any plot of land in the federal territories was given to anyone who applied for one, free of charge, so long as they agreed to do something with that land. They could open a saloon, they could lease it to the railroads, they could run a lumber yard but the two most common choices were to either farm the land or raise livestock. If you owned livestock, you often had to then drive the cattle to market where they could be slaughtered and it was very annoying to have to go the long way around a farmer’s field if they were in front of the cattle. So most chose to go with the path of least resistance and drive their cattle through the fields instead, trampling crops. Farmers were understandably pissed about strangers coming onto their home and destroying their livelihood and would usually engage in some form of frontier justice. Frontier justice beget frontier justice and the Wild West kept getting wilder.)

Shane takes the tact of using this to examine a classist dynamic where the rich cattle rustlers constantly bully and torment the good town of poor farmers. What makes Shane excellent though is the character dynamics and they’re not even very allegorical ones. Shane is a very fascinating character because you get the sense that this isn’t his first rodeo (pun intended). The dude is good at fighting, gunslinging and killing, to an almost superhuman degree. Unlike the violent maelstrom of Sergeant Bannion in The Big Heat, however, Shane is a generally likable, easy going guy. It almost seems like he’s cursed by this skill; like he just wants to settle down and join a family but he must always be the one who steps up to kill the bad guy when things go sideways.

This, in turn, leads to a pretty interesting familial dynamic with the Starretts. Joe Starrett is an honest, reasonable man but he’s also starting to get up there in age. Shane is much younger, handsomer and cooler. So it’s only natural that Marian would start flirting with him to add some excitement in her life and young Joey would start idolizing him as a hero. But they don’t go for the easy subplot and make Shane actually start trying to steal away Joe’s wife and son. Instead, he seems to feel guilty that they like him so much. Shane just wants a home; he doesn’t want to be a homewrecker, he doesn’t want to be a brawler and he doesn’t want to be caught in the middle of this turf war but, ultimately, these are the cards that he’s been dealt and he must abide.

The villains are great in this movie too. Rufus Ryker is a fun bad guy to start with but the ante is upped when the movie introduces the mercenary, Jack Wilson (Jack Palance). This is one of the most definitive villains in movie history and started a whole new trope. In every movie with a badass hero who can defeat everyone he meets, we always get the turning point when the bad guys recruit the badass villain who’s even more dangerous to make us afraid for our hero. Before this, Western movie villains were usually just mean outlaws or racist Native American caricatures. Shane was the movie that started the trope of the evil gunslinger who loves killing more than anything and never misses a shot (later examples: Vera Cruz (1954), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), all three movies in the Dollars trilogy (1964-1966) etc.). He's the perfect foil for Shane as a character: unlike Shane who is great at killing but is ashamed, Wilson loves every second of being evil. Despite only appearing in a handful of scenes, he’s the character from the movie that everyone walks away remembering.

And, of course, the cinematography is incredible, the pacing is excellent and the shootouts are genuinely suspenseful. Shane is one of the all-time great Westerns and, along with High Noon, helped breathe some new life into the genre going into the 1950s. The only real flaw with Shane as a movie is that Joey can admittedly be a bit of an annoying twerp at times.

While this is normally the part where I complain about how the movies received no acknowledgments, Shane actually did receive some acknowledgment from the Academy, being nominated for 5 awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Jack Palance and Brandon deWilde and Best Screenplay Writing) and winning a well-deserved Oscar for Best Color Cinematography. In fact, this one of the few years where Westerns were not subjected to genre snobbery as the Academy also nominated The Naked Spur

for Best Screenplay Writing as well. (The Naked Spur is another great Western as well though admittedly not as good as Shane.)

Still, let’s get down to the comparisons. As mentioned, From Here to Eternity gained major attention for showing the darker side of authority in the most hallowed of American institutions. This was admittedly a bit of a heavy take but if that’s the kind of boundary-pushing that wins the Academy Award for Best Picture, then I think the last three films that we mentioned did it much better.

The Big Heat is a movie that shows the darker side of authority. The film was directed by Fritz Lang, the same director who made M (1931) and a survivor of Nazi Germany, and you get the sense that he’s trying to show a mirror of the same kind of meatheaded-ness that marks the start of authoritarianism. William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, besides being based on a great work of Western fiction, asks the question of democracy vs monarchy and shows the Roman Senators grappling with whether they’re doing what they do to save democracy or just to absorb power unto themselves. And Shane demonstrates an underrated darker chapter in American history, showing how certain settlers bullied and terrorized other ones on the government dime. (It bears mentioning at this point that Ryker has a government contract to sell his cattle. That’s not an accidental detail.)

Even ignoring these, Peter Pan is still one of Disney’s all-time great films, delivering a parable of accepting the past while still moving onto the future. And if you really want to talk about a movie that pushes boundaries, you can’t ignore Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. That movie was a bombshell when it came out, in every sense of the word possible.

This is another demonstration of the Academy trying to pass itself off as praising the “boundary-pushing” films while usually choosing the one that barely even goes there. Now, if we’re being totally fair, it probably was not as obnoxious as it is today when you see the Academy do that. Back then, especially in the early 1950s, I don’t think the Academy was making any pretense at being even remotely progressive, politically or artistically. If that’s the case, we can cut it a little slack though then why not acknowledge films that confirm their McCarthyite sense of the world yet are still great movies? Hell, you could even see The Big Heat from the opposite point of view of Bannion’s violent actions being justified.

Really, I think the biggest reason why From Here to Eternity was a zeitgeist that came and went so fast is that it came out during the height of the Korean War. Often called the Forgotten War, Korea gets lost in the middle between World War II and Vietnam when analyzing cultural movements in America. So much so that there weren’t even any Korea-centered films that came out during this time period, which is a major surprise, considering how much of a crapshow it had turned into by this point. During WWII and Vietnam, movies depicting those wars dominated the theater. The only major war movie to come out in 1953 was From Here to Eternity, which doesn’t even take place in Korea. Considering how the Korean War ultimately deteriorated into a battle of egos between President Harry Truman and General Douglas MacArthur, one can see how this current event could make audiences, especially servicemen, more interested in a story of an Army Private being screwed over by his superiors.

Though, at that point, the question then becomes why not make a movie about Korea itself with these movements? Why hesitate to show a story that real soldiers could have sympathized with?

This is a bit of a tough call to make. Because on the one hand, From Here to Eternity was successful, being the second-highest-grossing movie of that year. On the other hand, gross isn’t always everything, as evidenced by the highest-grossing movie of the year being the terrible Biblical epic, The Robe.

Shane was no. 3 at the box office so both of these movies were clearly at the top of people’s minds. Also, in terms of From Here to Eternity using a previous war to analyze Korea, I feel like you can also analyze Shane in that manner too. Similar to how Rhett Butler was symbolic of the American man in the 30s or Rick Blaine in the 40s, Shane seems to encompass the identity crisis of America in the 50s. He’s a guy who just wants to settle down and be left in peace but has the responsibility of helping others out, similar to America basically becoming the world’s policeman in the wake of World War II. Maybe I’m reading a little too deep into it but I think there’s something there.

I don’t see any real good excuse from From Here to Eternity winning that can’t be hand waved away. While we can understand why it won, when another movie comes out that same year that says the same thing in a more interesting way, made a similar amount of money and is a better movie to boot, then you cannot say that this is just something that slipped under the radar. This is another year where the Western got snubbed for genre snobbery. Shane is clearly the superior film. It’s better acted, paced, shot and told.

Calling From Here to Eternity the best film of 1953 was a…

SNUB!

Personal Favorite Movies of 1953:

• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (dir. Howard Hawks)
• I Confess (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
• Peter Pan (dir. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske)
• Pickup on South Street (dir. Samuel Fuller)
• Shane (dir. George Stevens)
• Stalag 17 (dir. Billy Wilder)
• The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (dir. Eugéne Lourié)
• The Big Heat (dir. Fritz Lang)
• The War of the Worlds (dir. Byron Haskin)
• William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

Favorite Heroes:

• Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell) (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes)
• Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift) (I Confess)
• First Sergeant Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster) (From Here to Eternity)
• Howie Kemp (James Stewart) (The Naked Spur)
• Joe Starrett (Van Heflin) (Shane)
• Richard Ward Sturges (Clifton Webb) (Titanic)
• Sergeant Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) (The Big Heat)
• Shane (Alan Ladd) (Shane)
• Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) (Pickup on South Street)
• Wendy Darling (Kathryn Beaumont) (Peter Pan)

Favorite Villains:

• Captain Hook (Hans Conried) (Peter Pan)
• Colonel von Scherbach (Otto Preminger) (Stalag 17)
• Emmett Meyers (William Talman) (The Hitch-Hiker)
• Gaius Cassius (John Gielgud) (William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar)
• Jack Wilson (Jack Palance) (Shane)
• Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby) (The Big Heat)
• Otto Keller (O. E. Hasse) (I Confess)
• Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer) (Shane)
• Staff Sergeant James Judson (Ernest Borgnine) (From Here to Eternity)
• The Martians (The War of the Worlds)