Golden Globe Winners Countdown

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.