What We Missed: 1952

A dumb circus movie and Gene Kelly getting wet.

ICYMI: the five films nominated for Oscars in 1952 that we watched were High Noon, Viva Zapata!, The Lavender Hill Mob, Moulin Rouge, and The Bad and the Beautiful. Let’s see what else happened in the movies that year.

1952 Best Picture winner: The Greatest Show on Earth. In the Steven Spielberg Bildungsroman The Fabelmans (2022), the Spielberg stand-in watches Greatest Show on Earth in the theater and it sets him on the path to movie-making. Look, I’m glad director Cecil B. deMille inspired a young Spielberg, but I just can’t get over the fact that some circus movie beat out High Noon for the top prize. Yes, the circus movie has a star-studded cast (including Betty Hutton, Charlton Heston, and Jimmy Stewart as a clown who never takes off his makeup), but it ain’t High Noon.

Highest grossing film: The Greatest Show on Earth. Boo. Another high-grossing project was This is Cinerama, a documentary unveiling the titular Cinerama moviemaking technique. Cinerama films required three cameras and were projected onto a wide, curved screen to be more immersive for the audience. We won’t be covering any Cinerama films in this series, though one of the most famous ones was How the West Was Won (1962).

Best Actress Oscar race: We missed all five Best Actress movies this time around. Shirley Booth took home the trophy for the adaptation of playwright William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba. She starred across from Burt Lancaster and lamented the loss of Sheba, a dog. Julie Harris scored a Best Actress nomination for The Member of the Wedding, which was based on a Carson McCullers novel about a 12-year-old wanting to go on her brother’s honeymoon. The category was rounded out with Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear, Susan Hayward in the biopic With a Song in My Heart, and Bette Davis in The Star.

Relitigating the Best Actor race: They gave it to Gary Cooper. Excellent choice. 

Quick Hits

• Charlie Chaplin made Limelight, his most personal film, about a washed-up comic befriending a suicidal dancer. In 1952, it was screened in New York, but it didn’t get a wider U.S. release because of Chaplin’s communist sympathies. When it was re-released in 1972, it was therefore still Oscar-eligible, and Chaplin won his only competitive Oscar (for Best Original Score) for it that year.

• John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara starred in John Ford’s The Quiet Man. Wayne’s character is a boxer who kills someone in the ring and then moves back to his native Ireland. We hit on The Fabelmans up top, but you should watch its climactic scene of Sammy meeting John Ford because it’s awesome.

• The classic Gene Kelly / Debbie Reynolds song-and-dance flick Singin’ in the Rain came out. It’s ostensibly about actors transitioning from silent film to talkies, but mostly it’s just singin’ and dancin’. It’s not my favorite musical, but I certainly dig Donald O’Conner’s pratfalls in “Make ‘em Laugh.”

• Million Dollar Mermaid was a huge hit for star Esther Williams, who got the nickname “Million Dollar Mermaid” from the movie. Williams is best known for starring in synchronized swimming “aquamusicals,” which is a genre of film we definitely don’t have anymore. Busby Berkeley, the “Wizard of the Chorus Line,” did the choreography.

Trivia Questions

The quiz below serves as a refresher for some of the material covered in the five articles on 1952. The answers can be found in the footnotes. (Note that you can hover over footnotes to see answers if you read this in the Substack app or in your browser. It’s a bit more comfortable than scrolling up and down.)

1. Gary Cooper won an Oscar for playing this WWI sergeant in a 1941 film.¹

2. This song, written by the abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, was based on the soldiers’ song “John Brown’s Body.”²

3. These were our two Quaker presidents.³

4. He ruled Mexico as a de facto dictator from 1876 to 1911.⁴

5. This priest, recognized as the Father of Mexico, issued the 1810 “Grito de Dolores,” which called for rebellion against Spanish rule.⁵

6. In 1923’s Safety Last, this comic dangled from the hands of a clock.⁶

7. Alec Guinness starred in this 1949 Ealing film about a man resolving to murder the eight people ahead of him in line for a dukedom.⁷

8. This allegory from 1360 by William Langland follows the journey of a seeker of spiritual truth and moral guidance.⁸

9. His poem “Maud Muller” ends, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’ ”⁹

10. This Seurat painting inspired the Stephen Sondheim musical “Sunday in the Park with George.”¹⁰

11. This designer, famous for her use of “shocking pink,” did Zsa Zsa Gabor’s wardrobe in Moulin Rouge.¹¹

12. His operetta “Orpheus in the Underworld” contained the song “Can-Can”; he also did the opera “The Tales of Hoffman.”¹²

13. In 1950, he starred as a fictionalized version of cornetist Bix Beiderbecke in Young Man With A Horn.¹³

14. This Justice of the Peace from Val Verde County, Texas, was known as “the only law West of the Pecos.”¹⁴

15. Competition for readers between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and his New York Journal led to the rise of yellow journalism.¹⁵

On to 1953!

1. Alvin York (in the film Sgt. York)

2. “Battle Hymn of the Republic”

3. Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon

4. Porfirio Díaz 

5. Miguel Hidalgo

6. Harold Lloyd

7. Kind Hearts and Coronets

8. “Piers Plowman”

9. John Greenleaf Whittier

10. “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”

11. Elsa Schiaparelli

12. Jacques Offenbach

13. Kirk Douglas

14. Judge Roy Bean

15. William Randolph Hearst