The Verdict: Best Actor 1952

5. Alec Guinness, The Lavender Hill Mob

4. José Ferrer, Moulin Rouge

3. Kirk Douglas, The Bad and the Beautiful

2. Marlon Brando, Viva Zapata!

1. Gary Cooper, High Noon

IN CONCLUSION

1952's Best Actor lineup stank. It took me the better half of 2018 to get the year wrapped up (Jesus Christ), and I'll attribute no less than 90 percent of that to my brazen laziness. However, there is a fraction to which I'll blame the men: most of these films were an total bore to watch, and quite a few of the men produced performances so uninspiring (Ferrer, Guinness, and the previously reviewed Richardson) that it only perpetuated my lack of motivation to write. As poor as the films were on the Best Actress front, I'd argue that the performances there are dynamic enough to at least prompt a compelling stance out of you. I even had an existential episode where I entertained the thought of putting Best Actor coverage to a close altogether - for indifference is worse than hate, and it can be a chore to piece together an opinion on something you simply don't give a shit about.

But: I'm too much of an obsessive completist to quit Best Actor altogether, and, in thinking about the trying 1940s, I'm reminded of some of the pleasant surprises that I stumbled upon: Michael Redgrave in Mourning Becomes Electra, Richard Todd in The Hasty Heart, Robert Montgomery in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, to name a few. And while I certainly don't hold high hopes for some of 1953's offerings (The Robe and Julius Caesar), there're several male performances in the coming years that pique my interest. Here's to hoping that the coming years will have, at a bare minimum, some consistent semblances of ambition and gumption from the men.

So with that aside, let's talk shop: I had expected that Guinness would make me laugh in The Lavender Hill Mob, that Douglas would wow me in The Bad and the Beautiful, and that Brando would summon his divine Method powers to somehow floor me in spite of his brownface act in Viva Zapata!. As it would turn out, Guinness was disappointing, Douglas was just okay in a poorly structured film that stifled any chance of a potent characterization, and Brando came off as a misfit in an insipid-as-all-hell, dusty biopic. Ferrer and Moulin Rouge were about as underwhelming as I expected both to be. Thus, Gary Cooper, the man I never expected in a million years to crown as a personal preference for Best Actor, comes on through to snatch the top spot. When it boils down to Brando versus Cooper, it helped significantly that I adored High Noon, and felt that Cooper was a greater fit to the film than Brando was to Viva Zapata! (I also really hated Viva Zapata!).

If this result proves anything, it's that expectation does not align with reality, and there's something to be said about the excitement that comes with being unexpectedly surprised by a film and performance that you were sleeping on.

OMISSIONS & OVERSIGHTS

Who might've been the gentleman placing sixth in the votes? With the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle both going for Ralph Richardson in The Sound Barrier, one might look to him. As both The Sound Barrier and The Lavender Hill Mob are highly British films, my imagination suspects that more British voters backed Guinness, thereby displacing Richardson of a top-five slot (I theorize that both Barrier and Lavender did not make a splash in the U.S., but that Lavender was the bigger crowd pleaser in the U.K.). If not Richardson, I think John Wayne in The Quiet Man had to have been sixth or seventh as well, given his film's overall nomination tally.

These two aside, Gene Kelly (or the Golden Globe-nominated Donald O'Connor?) could have snatched up some votes for Singin' in the Rain, though the film's mere two nominations suggests they were long shots. Hans Christian Anderson - a film I've never heard of - was the eighth top grossing picture of 1952, received six (!) Oscar nominations, as well as a Golden Globe nomination for star Danny Kaye...it reads as one of those grotesquely fluffy and sentimental biopics that the Academy went crazy for back in the day, so I imagine Kaye got close as well. The same could be said of Clifton Webb in Stars and Stripes Forever, which 100 percent would have secured Webb a nomination had it been released in the forties. Beyond these, perhaps Laurence Olivier in Carrie could have been an option. I've heard good things about Charlie Chaplin in Limelight, though the likelihood of him getting seems slim-to-none.