1952 Alternate Oscars

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.

1952 Alternate Oscars

My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ.

Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show On Earth is the first best picture winner not to make my top ten since 1936's The Great Ziegfeld (although I was rather generous with a couple of winners in between).

As a semi-documentary of what kids might have once felt about the circus, The Greatest Show on Earth is actually pretty good. I know I myself really enjoyed the circus when I was ten. But I'm not ten anymore. (Neither, apparently, are most ten year olds these days, judging by the demise of Barnum & Bailey. But that's a subject for another time.)

If you're wondering, the other best picture winners so far that failed to crack my top ten are The Broadway Melody (1928-29), Cimarron (1930-31) and Cavalcade (1932-33). There will no doubt be others in the future. We'll see.

My pick for best picture, Singin' In The Rain, is a serious contender for the best musical of all time. It's also a great comedy and a great romance. That it's also a nifty history of Hollywood's transition from silent films to talkies is a bonus.

Certainly it's the best movie Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O'Connor and Jean Hagen ever made.



I almost gave my best actor award to John Wayne for The Quiet Man but Takashi Shimura's poignant portrayal of a dying bureaucrat determined to give his wasted life meaning is one of the most moving performances in the history of cinema. He's a worthy winner — Takashi Shimura was Akira Kurosawa's go-to guy, appearing in 21 of the director's thirty films, more than any other actor. In 1954, he starred in the action masterpiece, Seven Samurai, playing the role Yul Brenner would tackle in the English-language remake, The Magnificent Seven. Versatile actor.

John Wayne fans need not despair, however — the Duke will hoist the trophy a little later in the decade, guaranteed.

On the other hand, if you think Gary Cooper deserves an alternate Oscar, I'm pretty sure this is your last chance to vote for him ...

Alternate Oscars: Vote For The Best Picture of 1952

Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (1952)

Katie-Bar-The-Door is still out of town, so Mister Muleboy and I again met at the AFI-Silver, this time for the Charlie Chaplin talkie Limelight.

This was Chaplin's third sound picture and the last film he made in the United States. I guess everybody has their favorite Chaplin talkie — I assume most would choose The Great Dictator (1940), his savage spoof of Adolf Hitler, while others might go for Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a black comedy about a serial killer whose latest victim simply refuses to die.

Me, I prefer Limelight.

It's the story of an alcoholic has-been (Chaplin) who rescues a suicidal ballerina (Claire Bloom), nurses her back to health, gets her on her feet again. During the day, she talks about her troubles; at night he dreams of his past as London's greatest music hall comedian. Once she recovers, her career takes off while his continues to decline. Along the way, a love triangle of sorts develops, with the ballerina torn between her platonic devotion to Chaplin while falling deeply in love with a shy young composer (played in a nice Freudian twist by Chaplin's son Sydney).

Chief among the film's delights is the casting of Buster Keaton as his stage partner, the only time these two silent comedy legends appeared in a movie together. Both men were past their primes here — Chaplin hadn't had an unalloyed success since Modern Times in 1936 and Keaton's heyday was even more distant, with his peak years running from just 1920 to 1928 — and Keaton's appearance is not much more than a cameo. But boy, what a cameo.

In their scene together, Chaplin's has-been teams up with Keaton's has-been to perform a silent sketch where two clumsy musicians destroy a piano and a violin mid-concert. If you've ever seen Chaplin in, say, The Pawnshop or Keaton in The Boat, you know just how much damage these guys can do.

Chaplin always played well off an opposite number — think of Roscoe Arbuckle, Eric Campbell, Mack Swain and Harry Myers — and his and Keaton's contrasting styles, the clown and the stoneface, work especially well. For a few minutes, the two legends defy the passage of time and remind us of what made them so special in the first place.

The novelty of seeing the silent era's two greatest comics together at last would be enough to make the film worth watching, but Chaplin also revisits the Tramp in at least three scenes, albeit with a different moustache and a check vest. Sure, he's not twenty-five anymore, but he can still bring it.

There's something poignant about watching a fading legend facing his loss of talent, energy and inspiration so directly, and those scenes where the has-been looks out on an empty theater that once was filled with cheering fans must have been particularly haunting for Chaplin as his real-life audience deserted him. But Chaplin being Chaplin, he finds an answer: to inspire the next generation, the only immortality an artist ever really knows.

Nigel Bruce — better known as Dr. Watson to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes — turns in a good supporting performance as a theater manager, and there's a long ballet sequence reminiscent of The Red Shoes that I thought was quite beautiful. There's also a terrific silent gag about a high-end prostitute working the theater crowd that was worthy of Ernst Lubitsch.

Which is not to suggest that Limelight is a perfect film. Far from it. It suffers from the same flaw as all of Chaplin's sound pictures — he talks too much! In the silent era, Chaplin's Tramp could speak volumes with a single look. In the sound era, he simply speaks volumes. And frankly, as a moral philosopher, Chaplin is a hackneyed windbag.

Too, your opinion of Limelight depends on your willingness to tolerate Chaplin's return to the theme that haunted most of his work — his compulsive need to rescue damsels in distress. No doubt he was replaying, consciously or not, his boyhood situation with his mentally-ill mother, but the fact is, damsels who are chronically in need are beyond help, and the rest get better and move on, which suggests that the compulsion to rescue them is less about helping others and more about courting rejection and self-pity.

At least here, Chaplin at last finds the only solution to the dilemma that really works. I'll leave it to you to discover what that is.

Look, I'm not one of those people forever crabbing about Chaplin and sentimentality. Sentimentality is just a way of saying "an appeal to emotion rather than reason" and I happen to think that that's exactly what the movies are for, to bypass the frontal lobes and head straight for the lizard brain where love and anger and fear reside. If a movie can make me think, fine; but it had better make me feel something first or it's wasting my time.

My quibble here is that, at least where the ballerina's story is concerned, Chaplin more insists on the sentiment than actually creating it.

Still, the good far outweighs the bad.

I'd like to tell you that Limelight was a critical and commercial success, but the fact is, the film never received a proper release in the United States. When the film was completed, Chaplin boarded a boat to visit his home in England, and as soon as the ship cleared the harbor, the U.S. government declared Chaplin an undesirable alien and revoked his visa.

There were two types of anti-Communists in the 1940s and '50s: those seeking to best the Soviet Union in the existential struggle of the Cold War (e.g., Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, George Kennan, George Marshall); and those seeking to destroy their political and personal enemies with scurrilous accusations (Joe McCarthy, HUAC). Chaplin was a victim of the latter. He wouldn't return to America for twenty years.

The odd situation with Limelight did lead to the answer to a trivia question that film fans often get wrong: name the movie for which Chaplin won a competitive Oscar. In 1972, fans of Chaplin realized Limelight had never played in Los Angeles, so they rented a theater for a week and screened it, making it eligible for an Oscar under the rules of the time. Chaplin's original score received a nomination and when the envelope was opened, Chaplin had won. It was a sentimental gesture, but then Chaplin was a sentimental man so it seems fitting.

Awards or no, though, Chaplin achieved his immortality — he continues to inspire artists and will for as long as films are shown.

Little Of Column A, Little Of Column B: The Prisoner Of Zenda

I don't about you, but sometimes I see a remake of a movie and end up wishing I could combine elements of both it and the original. The 1952 version of The Prisoner of Zenda, which TCM broadcast again last night, is just such a movie. I like it, and I like the original 1937 version, too (and I especially like the book they're both based on). But I like Ronald Colman and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. from the '37 version better while I prefer Deborah Kerr and Jane Greer from the '52 version.

Mind you, there's nothing wrong with, respectively, Stewart Granger, James Mason, Madeleine Carroll and Mary Astor. They're great. I just think in these particular roles, the other pairings are better.

Now if only somebody could whip out their computer and cut and paste the two films together, we might really have something.

Early Dragnet

Check out the actor who opens the door after the first commercial break of this episode of Dragnet that aired on February 14, 1952.

The Lina Lamont Fan Club Throws Down The Gauntlet

FlickChick, author of the blog A Person in the Dark and president of the Lina Lamont fan club, is on the offensive:

"Yes, loyal fans," she writes, "we are still here. No matter how hard her enemies try to destroy her legacy, Lina Lamont's fans will not rest until the truth is known and Lina is awarded her proper place in the history of film."

You know the story—one of the biggest stars of the silent era, Lina Lamont's career took an abrupt turn for the worst with the advent of sound. While her screen partner Don Lockwood went on to a big career in sound pictures with wife Kathy Selden, Lina quickly faded from public view—and from the public's memory.

"They have rediscovered Louise Brooks," says FlickChick. "Now it's time for a Lina Lamont revival!"

We here at the Monkey will do our part. Digging through my treasure trove of silent era memorabilia, I've come up with this vintage poster of the biggest hit of Lina's career, The Royal Rascal.

Stop on over at A Person in the Dark, read the whole story and show your support for this worthwhile cause!

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1952)

"Looking up at him, I thought this is no actor but the hero of all mythology brought miraculously to life, a purely beautiful being."—Louise Brooks, on meeting John Wayne for the first time

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: High Noon (prod. Stanley Kramer)
nominees: The Bad and the Beautiful (prod. John Houseman); Bend of the River (prod. Aaron Rosenberg); The Narrow Margin (prod. Stanley Rubin)
Must-See Drama:

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Singin' In The Rain (prod. Arthur Freed)
nominees: The Importance of the Being Earnest (prod. Teddy Baird); Limelight (prod. Charles Chaplin); Monkey Business (prod. Howard Hawks); Pat and Mike (prod. Lawrence Weingarten); The Quiet Man (prod. Merian C. Cooper and John Ford)
Must-See Comedy/Musical:

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Ikiru (prod. Sôjirô Motoki)
nominees: Casque d’Or (prod. Raymond Hakim, Robert Hakim and André Paulvé); Le plaisir (prod. Édouard Harispuru, M. Kieffer and Max Ophüls); Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games) (prod. Robert Dorfmann); Saikaku ichidai onna (The Life of Oharu) (prod. Hideo Koi and Kenji Mizoguchi); Umberto D. (prod. Giuseppe Amato, Vittorio De Sica and Angelo Rizzoli)
Must-See Foreign Language:

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Takashi Shimura (Ikiru)
nominees: Gary Cooper (High Noon); Kirk Douglas (The Bad and the Beautiful); José Ferrer (Moulin Rouge); Stewart Granger (Scaramouche and The Prisoner of Zenda); Charles McGraw (The Narrow Margin); Robert Mitchum (Macao, The Lusty Men and Angel Face); Robert Ryan (On Dangerous Ground); James Stewart (Bend of the River)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: John Wayne (The Quiet Man)
nominees: Cary Grant (Monkey Business); Gene Kelly (Singin' In The Rain); Michael Redgrave (The Importance of Being Earnest); Spencer Tracy (Pat And Mike)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Shirley Booth (Come Back, Little Sheba)
nominees: Marlene Dietrich (Rancho Notorious); Julie Harris (The Member of the Wedding); Jennifer Jones (Ruby Gentry); Jean Simmons (Angel Face); Lana Turner (The Bad and the Beautiful); Marie Windsor (The Narrow Margin)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Maureen O'Hara (The Quiet Man)
nominees: Joan Greenwood (The Importance of Being Earnest); Katharine Hepburn (Pat and Mike); Judy Holliday (The Marrying Kind); Anna Magnani (Le carrosse d'or a.k.a. The Golden Coach); Debbie Reynolds (Singin' In The Rain); Ginger Rogers (Monkey Business)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Fred Zinnemann (High Noon)
nominees: René Clément (Jeux interdits a.k.a. Forbidden Games); Vittorio De Sica (Umberto D.); Akira Kurosawa (Ikiru); Anthony Mann (Bend of the River); Kenji Mizoguchi (Saikaku ichidai onna a.k.a. The Life of Oharu); Max Ophüls (Le plaisir)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly (Singin' In The Rain)
nominees: Anthony Asquith (The Importance of Being Earnest); Charles Chaplin (Limelight); George Cukor (Pat and Mike); John Ford (The Quiet Man)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Donald O'Connor (Singin' In The Rain)
nominees: Ward Bond (The Quiet Man); Barry Fitzgerald (The Quiet Man); Buster Keaton (Limelight); Victor McLaglen (The Quiet Man)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Jean Hagen (Singin' In The Rain)
nominees: Edith Evans (The Importance of Being Earnest); Gloria Grahame (The Bad and the Beautiful); Katy Jurado (High Noon); Margaret Rutherford (The Importance of Being Earnest)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Adolph Green and Betty Comden (Singin' In The Rain)
nominees: Carl Foreman, from the story "The Tin Star" by John W. Cunningham (High Noon); Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni (Ikiru); Frank S. Nugent, from a story by Maurice Walsh (The Quiet Man)

SPECIAL AWARDS
"Make 'Em Laugh" (Singin' In The Rain) music and lyrics by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown (Song)