The Year's Best

Hollywood will wait until March to award its Oscars for the movies' brightest achievements of 1949, but last week critical kibitzers everywhere had loosed their own showers of laurels. Two of the weightiest forums reached major agreement on one picture: Italian Director Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thief won the National Board of Review's blessing as the year's best film, and the vote of the New York Film Critics as the best foreign-language movie.

Producer-Scripter-Director Robert Ros-sen's All the King's Men won the New York critics' award as 1949's best English-language picture, but failed to appear on the National Board's ten-best list. Except for The Bicycle Thief, only four films won recognition from both groups: Britain's The Fallen Idol and Quartet, MGM's Intruder in the Dust, and France's Devil in the Flesh.

For the best performances, the Film Critics named Broderick Crawford in All the King's Men and Olivia de Havilland (for the second year in a row) for her work in The Heiress. The critics' honors for direction went to Carol Reed's staging of The Fallen Idol. Ignoring actresses, the National Board chose Ralph Richardson as the best performer, for his roles in both The Fallen Idol and The Heiress, and singled out De Sica for the director's kudos.

As usual, the box office gave a different verdict, reflected in Variety's list of the year's biggest grossers. Some were holdovers from 1948, but even among those of 1949's crop (including some good ones), not one was even mentioned by the New York critics or the National Board: Jolson Sings Again, Pinky, I Was a Male War Bride, The Snake Pit, Joan of Arc, The Stratton Story, Mr. Belvedere Goes to College, Little Women, Words and Music, Neptune's Daughter.

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