75th Golden Globe Awards

In 1953 Singin’ in the Rain.

1952 was the year the Hollywood Foreign Press decided to give a separate award for best musical or comedy, in addition to drama. The acting categories had already been separated a year before, so when the award went to An American in Paris.

The classic black and white A Place in the Sun was adapted from the 1925 novel An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, the second adaptation of the same novel (after the film titled An American Tragedy in 1931). Directed by George Stevens, the movie starred Montgomery Clift as a young religious man from Chicago who travels to California to work for his wealthy uncle and falls in love with two very different and seductive women (played by Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters).

An adaptation of  Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title, All The King’s Men follows the rise and fall of an ambitious politician, who starts out as progressive, socially conscious man and ends up in a quagmire of corruption and tragedy. Warren’s book was a roman a clef about controversial politician Huey Long, the populist senator and governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932, assassinated in 1935.

“I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. deMille” and  “I am big.

This was the film of the year: after winning three Golden Globes (Best Picture, Best Director, John Huston, and Best Supporting actor, his father Walter Huston), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre went on to win three Oscars. It is remembered as one of John Huston's finest movies, with Humphrey Bogart and Tim Holt headlining a great cast.

A taboo theme – rape – became a landmark in the convoluted trajectory of Romanian-born director Jean Negulesco through Hollywood. Born in a poor family in Romania, Negulesco left home at age 12, became a dishwasher in Paris, worked as an orderly in a field hospital; during World War 1, learned drawing and painting, emigrated to the US and landed a job as a sketch artist and, soon, art director on the Paramount lot.

The issue of antisemitism gets the Elia Kazan treatment in this tight drama sprung out of a personal experience: when producer Darryl F. Zanuck’ application to join the prestigious Los Angeles Country Club was denied because it was assumed (incorrectly) that he was Jewish.

War comes home in director William Wyler’s drama about three servicemen returning from the blood-soaked battlefronts of World War II to hometowns they no longer recognize. The project started as an article in Time magazine about the difficulties encountered by troops coming home, turned into a screenplay by MacKinlay Cantor, commissioned by producer and studio head Samuel Goldwyn.

A powerful drama about four days in the life of an alcoholic writer spiraling out of control, The Lost Weekend is the fourth film of Billy Wilder’s extraordinary career as a director and only his third US production. Self-exiled in Hollywood after the ascent of Nazism in his native Austria, Wilder had left behind over a decade of steady work as a screenwriter, and was, in his own words, “learning to do it all over again”, in great part thanks to his collaboration with writer Charles Brackett, who would be his writing partner throughout his career.