What We Missed: 1954

Audrey Hepburn! Carmen Jones! Godzilla!

ICYMI: the five films nominated for Best Actor Oscars in 1954 were On the Waterfront, The Country Girl, The Caine Mutiny, Robinson Crusoe, and A Star is Born. The links provide our trivia writeups on those films while this post discusses what else was happening in the movies that year.

1954 Best Picture winner: On the Waterfront. Twelve Oscar nominations overall and eight wins, including Best Picture, Best Director (for Elia Kazan), and Best Screenplay (for Budd Schulberg). What, you wanted to give the top prize to anodyne romance flick Three Coins in the Fountain? No, the Academy nailed this one. 

Highest grossing film: White Christmas. A Michael Curtiz musical starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera-Ellen where the four of them put on a Christmas extravaganza to save a failing inn in rural Vermont. The songs were written by Irving Berlin, though the titular song came from a previous Crosby-Berlin film, Holiday Inn (1942).

Best Actress Oscar race: UPSET ALERT. This was Judy Garland’s award to lose, but somehow Grace Kelly left the auditorium holding the statue. The also-rans for the award included defending champion Audrey Hepburn, who notched a nomination for being Audrey Hepburn the movie Sabrina, and Jane Wyman, who was recognized for Magnificent Obsession.

But the thing to know about this race? Dorothy Dandridge’s nomination for Carmen Jones, a movie based on the Bizet opera “Carmen” that was made with an all-Black cast (the male lead was Harry Belafonte). Dandridge’s Best Actress nomination was the first for a Black woman, and Halle Berry, after winning an Academy Award for Monster’s Ball (2001), dedicated her win to trailblazers Dandridge, Lena Horne, and Diahann Carroll. 

Relitigating the Best Actor race: UPSET ALERT. Going into the Oscars, the smart money said that Bing Crosby would pick up his second statue, but instead Brando came out on top for Waterfront. We were spoiled for choice in 1954: Brando, Crosby, and Bogart would each serve as an excellent winner in most years. If you make me pick just one, I’m choosing Bing, whose Country Girl role had a Yurchenko double pike degree of difficulty.

Quick Hits

• A musical adaptation of the rape of the Sabine women? What? Yep. (Though it’s by way of a short story, "The Sobbin' Women", by Stephen Vincent Benét.) Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is mostly just a singin’-and-dancin’ good time, including its famous barn raising fight scene. But if you like your musicals with less abduction, 1954 also had Brigadoon, based on the Lerner and Loewe show.

• Two classic Japanese movies: Seven Samurai (the Akira Kurosawa movie that TSDPT named tenth-best ever) and Godzilla (the Godzilla movie that TSDPT must have forgotten to rank).

• A Grace Kelly - Alfred Hitchcock twofer: Dial M for Murder and Rear Window. 

• The Glenn Miller Story: Jimmy Stewart starred in the biopic about the trombonist and bandleader who made hits like “In the Mood,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” and “A String of Pearls.”

Trivia Questions

The quiz below serves as a quick refresher for some of the material covered in the five articles on 1954. 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. (I find that more comfortable than scrolling up and down.)

1. This man, the first American to conduct at La Scala, scored On the Waterfront.¹

2. Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint both won acting Oscars for On the Waterfront, but none of the three men from that film who were nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category won. Name these three men.²

3. Joe Louis fought this German in 1936 and 1938 in bouts that came to represent the struggle between democracy and fascism.³

4. The Apocrypha states that this woman is the mother of the Virgin Mary.⁴

5. Prince Albert, the son of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier, ascended to the throne of this country in 2005.⁵

6. This playwright was the author of “The Country Girl,” “Waiting for Lefty,” and “Golden Boy.”⁶

7. This author of “The Caine Mutiny” also wrote the two-part WWII saga “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance.”⁷

8. He was the HMS Bounty’s Master’s Mate who led the mutiny against Captain Bligh.⁸

9. This man, captain of the Discovery, suffered a mutiny in 1611 and was left in the bay that now bears his name.⁹

10. He was the author of “Robinson Crusoe” and “Moll Flanders.”¹⁰

11. This filmmaker directed Un Chien Andalou (1929) with Salvador Dalí.¹¹

12. “Robinson Crusoe” was likely inspired by the tale of this man, a Scottish buccaneer who was marooned on a Pacific island off the coast of Chile.¹²

13. The Harvey Girls (1946) featured this song with a train line in its title.¹³

14. This Judy Garland film featured the song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”¹⁴

15. This librettist worked with George S. Kaufmann on “You Can’t Take It With You,” whose film adaptation won Best Picture in 1938.¹⁵

See you in 1955!

1. Leonard Bernstein

2. Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger

3. Max Schmeling

4. St. Anne

5. Monaco

6. Clifford Odets

7. Herman Wouk

8. Fletcher Christian

9. Henry Hudson

10. Daniel Defoe 

11. Luis Buñuel

12. Alexander Selkirk

13. “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.”

14. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

15. Moss Hart