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Nolte: What Should’ve Won the Best Picture Oscar – 1950 to 1959
20 Apr 2021
In part four of this series we look at the movies that should have won the Best Picture Oscar between 1950 and 1959.
The cult of oh-so-sophisticated movie writers love to run down the 50’s, as a decade lost to Eisenhower-era conformity and cinematic bloat crafted by studios desperate to compete with TV. As you’ll see below, nothing could be further from the truth. The 1950s were an embarrassment of movie riches.
Let’s begin…
What a year for movies.
Sunset Boulevard, The Asphalt Jungle, Where the Sidewalk Ends, D.O.A., Broken Arrow, The Third Man, Panic in the Streets… Still, writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz’s timeless tale of ambition, deceit, and getting your just desserts refuses to age. A hoot of a classic filled with amazing dialogue, a Marilyn Monroe appearance, a Bette Davis performance for the ages, and an ending that still offends tight-assed feminists.
Joan Collins in Land of the Pharaohs
Credit: Getty
In April 1954, a scorching day of slave labour was afoot, in a stone quarry near the unfinished Egyptian pyramid of Zawyet El Aryan, outside Giza. Many thousands of extras were needed to achieve one of the grandest location shots in Howard Hawks’s Land of the Pharaohs, which had just started production in an extreme state of unreadiness.
An uncharacteristically nervous Hawks hoped to put his best foot forward by getting at least one huge money shot in the can. To court favour, he sent the rushes post-haste to Jack Warner at Burbank, to show where the $1.75m budget – which would balloon to an ultimately ruinous $3.15m – was going.