The Year in Films

It all depends on where you sit. To moviegoers, 1953 was almost a banner year, in a half-mast sort of way; considering that there were not so many pictures, there was a surprising number of good ones. To moviemakers sitting in Hollywood, the year was one of the most worrisome in history. The box-office collapse, caused by the ever-widening spread of TV, became calamitous in 1952. By year's end the weekly audience was cut in half, and box-office receipts were down nearly 30%. Then, early in 1953, came the 3-D craze, launched in December 1952 by Arch Oboler's inept Bwana Devil, and seeming to prove that audiences would look at anything that could leap out and bite them. Cinerama, playing in only seven cities, grossed a staggering $6,000,000. But no sooner was Hollywood retooling for 3-D than Cinema Scope rocked the industry with its widescreen, multiple-sound-track productions of The Robe and How to Marry a Millionaire.

In all the uproar of the competing systems, only one thing seemed clear: the days of mass production were over. TV had captured the bread & butter public;

Hollywood could only try to encourage a taste for steak and caviar--i.e., fewer and bigger pictures. What creative value there was was born of economic necessity.

New Beauty. In 1953 Walt Disney turned his camera from paper animals to some real ones and, in a series of natural-history films culminating in The Living Desert, dragged new kinds of beauty out of the depths of nature. In cartoons, Disney was challenged by Stephen Bosustow and a company of imaginative young artists. The Tell Tale Heart and The Unicorn in the Garden did their subjects from Poe and Thurber proud, and set new landmarks in the animator's art.

Even in its old ruts, Hollywood showed more get-up-and-go. William Wyler's Roman Holiday and Dore Schary's Dream Wife were sure, expert comedies of a kind rarely made in the U.S. since the mid 30's George Stevens' Shane was a western evolved with loving care for the beauty of the land it was set in, and Escape from Fort Bravo took a fresh look at Hollywood's tired old Indian wars. Fred Zinne-man's From Here to Eternity did far more than the usual crude job of shoveling a bestselling novel through the censorship screen. Zinneman's epic is as moving a tale of men among men as all but the finest documentaries of World War II.

Hollywood's box-office trouble in 1953 expressed itself occasionally in resentment against the halter of censorship and public prudery. The Moon Is Blue, a cheerful little comedy that dares to use such words as "pregnant" and "seduction," became a sort of test case. Although banned by powerful church and civic groups, the picture showed to capacity crowds.

Better & Better. While Hollywood was struggling to bring forth a new era, most European moviemakers were apparently killing time in the waiting room. Some of the best foreign pictures--Henri-George Clouzot's Le Salaire de la Peur and Vittorio de Sica's Umberto D--were not shown in the U.S., because exhibitors thought they would not make enough money. Even so, the continental-import trade was a little shoddy. The British did somewhat better. They produced a top-notch musical (The Beggar's Opera), a funny farce (The Captain's Paradise), a first-rate war picture (The Cruel Sea), and The Conquest of Everest, probably the year's most memorable movie.

Everest, in fact, was the only picture produced in 1953 that could in any sense be called great. Moviemakers were too busy adjusting to a new era to make many good films. The significance of the past year in pictures lies not in the pleasure given to audiences but in the lesson taught to the industry's bosses and creators: the only answer to better and better television is better and better movies.

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