When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences looked back at 1953, it gave its Best Picture award to From Here to Eternity. I like that one, but I like these better:
1. Glen or Glenda
Written and directed by Ed Wood
It draws heavily on found footage, espouses radical sexual politics, and refuses to obey any genre constraints. It jumps merrily from B-movie drama to mock educational film to surreal dream imagery. Unlike all those "socially conscious" liberal studio movies of the '50s, it actually challenges the consensus of its day, sometimes with arguments that adopt the era's assumptions and sometimes in ways far removed from the mainstream. And it casts the guy who played Dracula as God. Isn't it time we recognized this picture as a landmark underground film, as daring and unconventional as anything by Brakhage, Deren, or Conner?
2. Duck Amuck
Directed by Chuck Jones
Written by Michael Maltese
Bugs and Daffy never had much use for the fourth wall to begin with, but in this short they pretty much obliterate it.
3. The Naked Spur
Written and directed by Anthony Mann
There's an intense psychological thriller lurking beneath this cowboy-movie setting, with James Stewart in one of his most complex and morally ambiguous roles.
4. Tokyo Story
Directed by Yasujirō Ozu
Written by Ozu and Kôgo Noda
Self-absorbed adults grow emotionally estranged from their parents. Quiet but devastating.
5. Eaux d'Artifice
Written and directed by Kenneth Anger
Not much happens in this film—there's a woman walking in a garden, and there's water, and there's the color blue, and there's a burst of a different color. As far as I'm concerned, it's Anger's masterpiece.
6. Ugetsu Monogatari
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Written by Matsutarô Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda, from stories by Akinari Ueda
A samurai movie about potters, not a potted movie about samurais.
7. El
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Written by Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza, from a novel by Mercedes Pinto
Sometimes I think Buñuel was never better than when he was helming Mexican potboilers. He certainly had a knack for transforming them into something strange.
8. Niagara
Directed by Henry Hathaway
Written by Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Richard L. Breen
A Hitchcockian nightmare about death and marriage.
9. Stalag 17
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Wilder and Edwin Blum, from a play by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski
I could do without some of the supporting cast, but it's still the funniest movie ever set in a wartime prison camp.
10. Summer with Monika
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Written by Bergman, from a novel by Per Anders Fogelström
According to Eric Schaefer's Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, an abridged version of this movie—dubbed into American English, rescored by Les Baxter, and with marketing materials that played up the picture's nude scene—lit up the exploitation circuit while the full film was being screened in arthouses. I like to imagine that somewhere it landed on a double bill with Glen or Glenda.
Honorable mentions:
11. The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot)
12. The Big Heat (Fritz Lang)
13. Pickup on South Street (Sam Fuller)
14. The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli)
15. Little Fugitive (Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin)
16. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks)
17. Mr. Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati)
18. Daybreak Express (D.A. Pennebaker)
19. The Tell-Tale Heart (Ted Parmelee)
20. Eneri (Hy Hirsh)
Great unsung performance: Richard Boone in Vicki.
Worst narration: Apparently, Anatahan was Jim Morrison's favorite movie. Does that mean we can blame Morrison's habit of reciting bad poetry over Ray Manzarek's sometimes-sublime keyboards on Josef von Sternberg's decision to recite his monotonic narration over his own sometimes-sublime photography? Probably not, but of everything wrong with Anatahan—and there is a lot wrong with it—surely the narration tops the list.
Of the films of 1953 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Roman Holiday.
