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1951
The winner is listed first, in CAPITAL letters.
Filmsite's Greatest Films
of 1951
Actor:
HUMPHREY BOGART in "The
African Queen", Marlon Brando in "A
Streetcar Named Desire", Montgomery Clift in "A
Place in the Sun", Arthur Kennedy in "Bright Victory",
Fredric March in "Death of a Salesman"
Actress:
VIVIEN LEIGH in "A
Streetcar Named Desire", Katharine Hepburn in "The
African Queen", Eleanor Parker in "Detective Story",
Shelley Winters in "A Place in the Sun",
Jane Wyman in
"The Blue Veil"
Supporting Actor:
KARL MALDEN in "A
Streetcar Named Desire", Leo Genn in "Quo Vadis",
Kevin McCarthy in "Death of a Salesman", Peter Ustinov
in "Quo Vadis", Gig Young in "Come Fill the Cup"
Supporting Actress:
KIM HUNTER in "A
Streetcar Named Desire", Joan Blondell in "The
Blue Veil", Mildred Dunnock in "Death of a Salesman",
Lee Grant in "Detective Story", Thelma Ritter in "The
Mating Season"
Director:
GEORGE STEVENS for "A Place in the Sun",
John Huston for "The
African Queen", Elia Kazan for "A
Streetcar Named Desire", Vincente Minnelli for "An
American in Paris", William Wyler for "Detective
Story"
 Marking
the decline of the old Hollywood studio system, this was the first year
in which the Best Picture Oscar was given to the film's producers
rather than to the studio that released the film.
Director Vincente Minnelli's An
American in Paris, a lavish, Technicolor, Gershwin-scored
musical, was a major surprise winner of the Best Picture
Award in 1951. (The Arthur Freed-produced film with eight
nominations won a total of six Oscars including Best Picture,
Best Story and Screenplay - Alan Jay Lerner, Best Color
Cinematography, Best Color Art Direction, Best Color Costume
Design, and Best Score for a Musical Picture. In addition,
it was presented with the Thalberg Award for producer Arthur
Freed, and an Honorary Oscar was presented to virtuoso
Gene Kelly.
The film was about an ex-GI painter who remained
in Paris following the war, and became enmeshed in a romantic
triangle between a rich American patroness (Nina Foch) and
a lovely 19 year-old French dancer (Leslie Caron). It was the first musical
to win the Best Picture award since The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Broadway
Melody (1928-9), the first color film to win an Oscar since Gone
With The Wind (1939), and one of only a few Best Picture
winners that received no acting nominations.
The Best Picture film winner marked a major upset,
since it was up against stiff competition from two black
and white melodramas (which had a total of nineteen nominations
between them, 12 and 7 respectively). It was thought that
the two front-runners Streetcar and A
Place in the Sun split
the vote, thereby handing the victory to the MGM musical:
- director Elia Kazan's film adaptation of a
Tennessee Williams play about a neurotic Southern belle who
visits her sister and brother-in-law in New Orleans - A
Streetcar Named Desire (with twelve nominations and
four wins)
- director George Stevens' film based on Theodore
Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy, A
Place in the Sun (with seven nominations and six
wins - Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best B/W Cinematography,
Best Dramatic Score, Best Film Editing, and Best B/W Costume
Design), about ambitious factory worker George Eastman (Montgomery
Clift) who aspired to a more glamorous life with gorgeous
debutante Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor), but was threatened
by lower-class co-worker Alice Tripp's (Shelley Winter)
pregnancy and a false accusation of murder
The remaining two nominees included:
- Quo Vadis (with
a total of eight nominations and no wins) - director Mervyn
LeRoy's and MGM's big budget epic version of Henryk Siekiewicz's
classic novel about Nero's Christian persecution, starring
Deborah Kerr and Robert Taylor - the most
expensive film of its time
[Note: Quo
Vadis had the dubious distinction of not winning in
any of the categories in which it was nominated.]
- 20th Century
Fox's and director Anatole Litvak's WWII thriller Decision
Before Dawn (with
a weak total of two nominations and no wins)
The Best Director category included five major
film directors. The ultimate winner was:
The other four Best Director nominees were:
The entire acting ensemble in A
Streetcar Named Desire (most of whom had performed
in the Broadway stage cast) was nominated for Best Actor/Actress
and Best Supporting Actor/Actress awards (Marlon Brando,
Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden, and Kim Hunter), and three of
the four succeeded and were presented with awards. [Note: It
was the first film ever to win three Acting Oscars.]
The hotly-contested contest for Best Actor went to:
- Humphrey Bogart (with his second
of three career nominations - and his long-deserved, sole career
Oscar win) for his role as gin-loving, earthy skipper Charlie
Allnut in director John Huston's The African
Queen (with
four nominations and one win - Bogart's Best Actor honor).
[Note:
Bogart's win in 1951 was an upset, since it denied the predicted
clean-sweep for the cast of A Streetcar Named Desire,
and a much-deserved Oscar for Brando. Many interpreted Bogart's
win as a payback award, and as a "career"
Oscar (since he had been passed over for major film nominations
or wins - including his many un-nominated roles in The
Maltese Falcon (1941), To Have and
Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946),
and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)).
Bogart's first nomination was for Casablanca
(1943), and he would be nominated one more time for playing
paranoid Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny
(1954).]
The other Best Actor nominees in the competitive category
included:
- Marlon Brando (with his first of eight career
nominations), the 27 year-old front-runner, who
was competing for Best Actor for A Streetcar Named Desire -
his second film performance (he had debuted a year earlier
in The
Men)
as the animalistically-brutish, abusive Stanley Kowalski (the
domineering husband of Stella (Kim Hunter), and the brother-in-law
of visiting Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh))
[Note: Interestingly, Brando and Bogart
were both nominated again in 1954, but this time, Brando won
the Oscar for On the Waterfront (1954).]
- Montgomery Clift (with his second of four
unsuccessful nominations) as doomed George Eastman - a
poor boy who fell in love with rich girl Angela Vickers (Elizabeth
Taylor), but was threatened by dowdy factory co-worker
Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters) and her pregnancy in A
Place in the Sun
- Fredric March (with his fifth and last Oscar
nomination - he had won twice before in 1931-2 and 1946)
as aging, unsuccessful salesman Willy Loman, in director
Laslo Benedek's film adaptation of Arthur Miller's play Death
of a Salesman (with
five nominations and no wins)
- Arthur Kennedy (with his second of five unsuccessful
career nominations) as Larry Nevins - a veteran made blind in WWII
combat in director Mark Robson's Bright Victory (with two
nominations and no wins)
The Best Actress race was another formidable
race between Vivien Leigh and Hepburn:
- Vivien Leigh won the Best Actress Oscar for her role
as the fragile, genteel, tarnished, desperate, and aging
Southern belle Blanche DuBois who was mentally and physically
abused by her brother-in-law in A
Streetcar Named Desire.
[Note: It was Leigh's fifth film,
second Oscar win, and first nomination after her Oscar-winning
performance in Gone
With The Wind (1939). The other best-known films
she appeared in since 1939 included - Waterloo Bridge
(1940), That Hamilton Woman (1941), Caesar
and Cleopatra (1946), Anna Karenina (1947), The
Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961), and Ship of
Fools (1965).
Both of Leigh's two Oscar wins were for playing Southern
belles.]
The other Best Actress nominees were:
- Katharine Hepburn (with her fifth out of a career
total of twelve nominations) - nominated for her performance
in The
African Queen, as prim spinster/missionary Rose Sayer (Bogart's
boat companion aboard a 30-foot river steamboat in German
East Africa during World War I)
- Eleanor Parker (with
her second consecutive nomination out of a career total of
three unsuccessful nominations) as Mary McLeod (detective
Kirk Douglas' wife with a secret past) in Detective Story
- Shelley
Winters (with her first of four career nominations) as
pregnant factory worker Alice Tripp in A
Place in the Sun
- Jane Wyman
(with her third of four career nominations), a past Oscar-winner,
as self-sacrificing nanny-nursemaid Louise in director Curtis
Bernhardt's The
Blue Veil (with two nominations and no wins).
In the race for Best Supporting Actor, Karl Malden (with
his first career nomination and sole Oscar win) won for
his reprised role (from Broadway) as Harold (Mitch) Mitchell
- a mother-dominated bachelor, Brando's card-playing buddy,
and Blanche du Bois' would-be suitor who eventually abandoned
her in A
Streetcar Named Desire.
The other Best Supporting Actor
nominees included:
- Leo Genn (with his sole career nomination)
as Roman nobleman Petronius, in Quo Vadis
- Kevin McCarthy (with his sole career nomination)
as Willy Loman's son Biff, in Death of a Salesman
- Peter Ustinov (with his first of three career
nominations) as mad Roman emperor Nero, in Quo Vadis
- Gig Young (with his first of three career
nominations) as wealthy alcoholic Boyd Copeland, in director
Gordon Douglas' Come Fill the Cup (the film's sole
nomination)
Kim Hunter (with her sole career nomination
and sole Oscar win) won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for
her reprised Broadway performance as Stella Kowalski (the forgiving
wife of Stanley (Marlon Brando) and the younger sister of
Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh)) in A
Streetcar Named Desire.
The remaining four nominees
in the Best Supporting Actress category included:
- Joan Blondell - in her long career - received
her sole Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress for
her role as aging musical actress Annie, in The Blue Veil
- Mildred Dunnock (with her first of two unsuccessful
career nominations) as Linda (Willy Loman's wife), in Death
of a Salesman
- Lee Grant (with her first of four career
nominations - for her debut film role) as an eccentric
shoplifter, in Detective
Story
- Thelma Ritter (with her second of six unsuccessful
nominations) as mother-in-law/servant Ellen McNulty, in director
Mitchell Liesen's The Mating Season (the film's sole
nomination)
The Best Foreign picture (receiving an Honorary
Award) was director Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon - it was
also the first post-war Japanese film to be shown widely
in the West and to attract attention, and it made Kurosawa's
favorite actor, Toshiro Mifune, a world famous star.
Virtuoso
dancer, film actor, singer, director and choreographer Gene
Kelly received an Honorary Academy Award "in appreciation
of his versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer,
and specifically for his brilliant achievements in the art
of choreography on film."
Oscar Snubs and Omissions:
Decision Before Dawn was a minor film
(and nominated for only two Oscars), but since it was supported
by Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, it appeared on the Best
Picture ballot. A number of films should have been nominated
for Best Picture in its place, but weren't. Independent studio
United Artists couldn't muster enough support to get its popular
and entertaining classic film The
African Queen nominated for Best Picture, although
their strong film candidate was nominated for Best Director
(John Huston), Best Actor (Humphrey Bogart), Best Actress (Katharine
Hepburn), and Best Screenplay (James Agee and John Huston).
Christian Nyby's and the Howard Hawks'-produced The Thing (From Another
World) was
completely un-nominated.
Director Alfred Hitchcock's and Warner Bros.'
superb psychological suspense thriller Strangers
on a Train went
un-nominated in all categories except Best Black and White
Cinematography. Robert Walker was snubbed for his great performance
as gay, psycho-pathic killer Bruno Antony, who murdered tennis
pro Guy Haines' (Farley Granger) estranged wife Miriam and
then demanded, through blackmail, the reciprocal murder of
his own tyrannical father.
One of the finest science-fiction films of all
time, Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still, missed
out on the nominations - although its message of peace brought
by an interplanetary traveller named Klaatu (Michael Rennie)
was a welcome relief.
There were at least three worthy Best Actor candidates
that weren't in the list of nominees:
- Kirk Douglas as belligerent, self-obsessed
unscrupulous, big-city newspaper reporter Charles "Chuck" Tatum
stuck in Albuquerque and looking for his 'ace in the hole'
big story, in director/co-writer Billy Wilder's scathing Ace
in the Hole/The Big Carnival (with only one nomination
for Best Original Screenplay)
- Kirk Douglas (again) as obsessive Detective
James McLeod, in William Wyler's Detective Story
- British actor Alastair Sim as miserly Ebenezer
Scrooge in the most definitive version of Dickens' story
- A Christmas Carol (with no nominations)
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