Tonight’s pageant is the 70th anniversary of the first televised Academy Awards broadcast in 1953. It took place at the Pantages Theater and was hosted by Bob Hope, who began his 19 times as master of ceremonies in 1940, announcing Oscar winners on the radio.
The top 2 highest-grossing movies of 1952 were:
The Greatest Show on Earth, with $12.8 million
This is Cinerama, with $12.5 million
Movie tickets that year cost about 60 cents, so that means DeMille’s circus movie and the Cinerama showreel both sold about 20 million tickets each. (For comparison, Avatar: Way of Water has sold about 33 million tickets, domestic.)
Bosley Crowther at The New York Times was apparently a critic who enjoyed pretty colors:
It is difficult to be certain, in the case of “The Greatest Show on Earth,” whether Mohammed has gone to the mountain or the other way around. That is to say, there in some question whether Cecil B. DeMille or the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus deserves the major credit for this film. Everything in this lusty triumph of circus showmanship and movie skill betokens the way with the spectacular of the veteran Mr. DeMille. And yet the bright magic that is in it flows from the circus as it was photographed for real. One of them must have done the honors. We honestly can’t tell you which. But this we can tell you for certain: two American institutions have combined to put out a piece of entertainment that will delight movie audiences for years. Sprawling across a mammoth canvas, crammed with the real-life acts and thrills, as well as the vast backstage minutiae, that make the circus the glamorous thing it is and glittering in marvelous Technicolor — truly marvelous color, we repeat — this huge motion picture of the big-top is the dandiest ever put upon the screen.
I’m not judging Mr. Crowther. We learned this year that a kid named Steven Spielberg also saw the technicolor spectacle and thought it was dandy.
But, I believe we can all agree that tastes and attitudes have changed over the past 70 years. And maybe we can agree that changes in taste and attitude are normal, natural, and not necessarily all that bad.
Let’s take a look 33 other movies and directors from 1952 that the Oscars mostly overlooked in favor of The Greatest Show on Earth.
Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen)
Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa)
High Noon (Fred Zinnemann)
The Member of the Wedding (Fred Zinnemann)
Forbidden Games (René Clément)
The Quiet Man (John Ford)
Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica)
The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincent Minnelli)
The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir)
Europa ’51 (Roberto Rossellini)
Limelight (Charlie Chaplin)
The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi)
Moulin Rouge (John Huston)
Viva Zapata! (Elia Kazan)
Come Back, Little Sheba (Delbert Mann)
Othello (Orson Welles)
The Big Sky (Howard Hawks)
Monkey Business (Howard Hawks)
Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang)
Clash by Night (Fritz Lang)
Angel Face (Otto Preminger)
The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer)
Pat and Mike (George Cukor)
The Marrying Kind (George Cukor)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Henry King)
Carrie (William Wyler)
Five Fingers (Joesph L. Mankiewicz)
Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls)
The Importance of Being Earnest (Anthony Asquith)
Park Row (Sam Fuller)
Damned impressive. I wonder how many moviegoers in 1952 knew how lucky they were. I wonder how many moviegoers in any year know how lucky we are.
At least there’s one thing we enjoy now that movie lovers didn’t have 70 years ago: With the click of a button, we can find thousands of friends we can talk with about the movies we love.
I don’t even know what I’m trying to express with all this… Or do I?
Happy Oscar Night, to all our friends and family at Awards Daily.