The Year in Films

Movies in 1954 turned out to be considerably better in quality than they have been for a number of years--but most of the good ones were not made in Hollywood. The economic strain of the early '503 burst at last the giant pod of cinema talent in Southern California. Able, creative people--producers, directors, actors, cameramen--were scattered to the four winds. Some drifted into television, but quite a few went off to the film capitals of Europe, where they stirred new life in the local talent.

In Italy, not far from the sacred groves of ancient times, a new and extravagantly profane Hollywood sprang up. In 1954 the Italians produced 152 films, close to two-thirds as many as were made by all the major U.S. studios combined. And if the Italian producers were not too successful in their efforts to imitate Hollywood, the Italian actresses were outstandingly nice to look at. However, two producers who were not trying too hard to make money, Jean Renoir and Renato Castellani, made two of the year's most beautiful color pictures: The Golden Coach and Romeo and Juliet.

The British moviemakers were wise enough to stick to what they do best--the "little picture" that costs around -L-150,000 ($420,000). During the year the British released in the U.S. two superb little farces (Genevieve and High and Dry}, another almost their equal (The Final Test), and a picture about childhood (The Little Kidnappers) that catches the radiance and anguish of life's morning in frames of quiet poetry. At year's end, too, came a somewhat fuddled but heartfelt and intelligent adaptation of Graham Greene's novel The Heart of the Matter.

The French, as usual, made a handful of fine, original films. Jean Cocteau sent over, in Intimate Relations, what amounts to a formal photograph of an Oedipus complex: a devilish picture, devilishly well made. By contrast there was a flash of the old gaite parisienne in Beauties of the Night, by Rene Clair; and Jacques Tad, in Mr. Hulot's Holiday, composed something like a ballet of pratfalls. In Diary of a Country Priest, adapted from the novel by Georges Bernanos, the camera watched a body dissolve in spirit, while in Pit of Loneliness the spirit of a feeling woman was stifled in perverse carnality; troth touchy subjects were handled with high skill. For those who cared to sniff the festering lilies of romantic decadence. Max Ophuls' tale of love in a dying century, The Earrings of Madame De . . ., was certainly the best of all the French contributions.

Two pictures from Japan outweighed, in many reviewers' scales, the rest of the world's product put together. Ugetsu, perhaps the finest film to be seen during 1954, was a descent into the grey and moaning hell of an Oriental soul. Gate of Hell, its title to the contrary, admitted the Western moviegoer to a pearl-tinted paradise, a vision intonated by a highly sensitive Japanese color sense.

Hollywood's big studios, after several lean years, were more interested in balancing the books than in weighing questions of art. And in fact, business looked encouragingly better at year's end. Three-D was dead, but the wide screen had caught the public fancy. And the policy, adopted last year, of producing only very big or very little pictures made generally for fewer and slightly better films.

The obvious haymakers (The Caine Mutiny, The Egyptian, Sabrina, Country Girl) hit hard. A couple of Columbia's bread-and-butter farces (It Should Happen to You and Phffft!) made Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon a comic staple in the neighborhood theaters. In Knock on Wood, Danny Kaye renewed his lease on the adjective "incomparable," and with Dial M for Murder and Rear Window, the year's best thrillers, Alfred Hitchcock held his title as the world's foremost goose'esh-peddler.

The most cheerful trend of the year produced three whiz-bang musicals. Carmen Jones, which put the U.S. Negro in the Hollywood big time, charged the screen with black lightning; A Star Is Born, the three-hour musical version of 1937's big hit, set Judy Garland back on top of the heap as a musicomedienne; and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a high old roister-doister of a show, in which the legendary rape of the Sabine women, as adapted from Stephen Vincent Benet, was reset (with concessions to the censor) in backwoods Oregon, was larded out with some swell songs and dances.

As the year boomed to a close in a thunder of publicity for the big holiday releases, two pictures stood out as notable Hollywood productions--and neither was made in Hollywood. John Huston's Beat the Devil, written by Truman Capote and shot in Italy, was a magnificent leg-pull: a kind of dipsoid tirade of brilliant comic invention, played with a cross-eyed, morning-after charm by a fine cast (Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre). On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan's burly piece of camereering along the docksides of Hoboken, had excellent photography, though the drama sometimes got out of emotional focus. But the meaning of it all came clear in Marlon Brando, who turned in what was surely the most capacious performance given by any actor during 1954.

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