my favorite movies of 1951:

(1) A Streetcar Named Desire

(2) A Place in the Sun

(3) Ace in the Hole

(4) Strangers on a Train

favorite of 1951:

A Streetcar Named Desire

(Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden. Directed by Elia Kazan.)

I don’t want realism, I want magic. … I try to give that to people. … I don’t tell truths, I tell what ought to be truth.

A Streetcar Named Desire is the first movie I ever saw in my life, though it’s not recommended as a baby’s first movie. (My parents wrote in their journal about me at the time: “I don’t think he caught all the nuances.”)

Pauline Kael wrote that “Vivien Leigh gives one of those rare performances that can truly be said to evoke pity and terror.” She won the Oscar for Best Actress, and Streetcar became the first movie ever to win 3 of the 4 Oscars for acting. But there was no Oscar for a newcomer named Marlon Brando. Ebert’s review focused on him:

you could make a good case that no performance had more influence on modern film acting styles than Brando’s work as Stanley Kowalski, Tennessee Williams’ rough, smelly, sexually charged hero. Before this role, there was usually a certain restraint in American movie performances. Actors would portray violent emotions, but you could always sense to some degree a certain modesty that prevented them from displaying their feelings in raw nakedness. Brando held nothing back, and within a few years his was the style that dominated Hollywood movie acting. This movie led directly to work by Brando’s heirs such as … Jack Nicholson and Sean Penn.

Woody Allen raved about the movie in his 2020 autobiography, Apropos of Nothing:

It’s the most perfect confluence of script, performance, and direction I’ve ever seen. … The characters are so perfectly written, every nuance, every instinct, every line of dialogue is the best choice of all those available in the known universe. All the performances are sensational. Vivien Leigh is incomparable, more real and vivid than real people I know. And Marlon Brando was a living poem. … The magic, the setting, New Orleans, the French Quarter, the rainy humid afternoons, the poker night. Artistic genius, no holds barred.

Stream A Streetcar Named Desire on Tubi (free with ads) or these sites.

2nd favorite of 1951:

A Place in the Sun

(Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, Raymond Burr. Directed by George Stevens.)

A young man (Montgomery Clift) starts working at his uncle’s company, where he quickly rises up thanks to nepotism. But his whole future is called into question when he becomes torn between a sense of obligation toward his sweet but plain girlfriend who also works with him (Shelley Winters), and his passion for a more alluring upper-class woman (Elizabeth Taylor).

A Place in the Sun made a huge splash at the time, winning 6 Oscars including best director and screenplay. Wikipedia points out that its “acclaim has not completely held up over time,” and it no longer feels as “exciting.” On the other hand, it held up well enough for Woody Allen to draw on it heavily for Match Point (my favorite movie of 2005). You do get the sense that director George Stevens was afraid some of the material could be too shocking or taboo and so he had the actors go through the movie with a soft restraint, while cinematographer William C. Mellor drowned some of the scenes in ridiculous amounts of darkness (though that didn’t stop him from winning one of those Oscars).

But no matter how dated it might feel today, A Place in the Sun is still worth watching for its wonderful cast. We love to see Montgomery Clift’s maddening moral weakness, Shelley Winters in the type of pathetic role she excelled at in one movie after another, and Liz Taylor … well, being Liz Taylor.

You can stream A Place in the Sun on Pluto (free with ads), Kanopy, or these sites.

3rd favorite of 1951:

Ace in the Hole

(Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Richard Benedict, Porter Hall, Ray Teal. Directed by Billy Wilder.)

Criterion sums up this “no-holds-barred exposé of the American media’s appetite for sensation”:

Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole is one of the most scathing indictments of American culture ever produced by a Hollywood filmmaker. Kirk Douglas gives the fiercest performance of his career as Chuck Tatum, an amoral newspaper reporter who washes up in dead-end Albuquerque, happens upon the scoop of a lifetime, and will do anything to keep getting the lurid headlines.

In that New York Times video from 2009, A.O. Scott remarks:

We seem to be hearing a lot of sentimental, high-minded talk about newspapers these days, maybe because they’re on the verge of extinction: they’re the oxygen of democracy, they perform a high and noble civic function. But there’s a … more jaundiced view on display in … Ace in the Hole. Now, this is a Billy Wilder film, which means it walks a fine and crooked line between sharp satire and pitch-black film noir. …

When it first came out, Ace in the Hole was something of a flop, in spite of the fact that Billy Wilder and Kirk Douglas were both at the height of their fame. It’s taken more than 50 years, but the world has finally caught up with this movie’s dark and cynical vision, perhaps because what with the internet and the 24-hour cable news cycle, the extraordinary media frenzy that Wilder depicted has become daily reality. But this movie cuts even deeper and seems almost chillingly up to date. It’s not just about how the media takes trivial events and blows them out of proportion. It’s more about how some journalists … distort, falsify, stage-manage real events.

A review at the time denounced Ace in the Hole as a “ruthless” and “distorted study of corruption and mob psychology that … is nothing more than a brazen, uncalled-for slap in the face of two respected and frequently effective American institutions — democratic government and the free press.”

That we can’t imagine those words being written unironically today speaks to how prescient Ace in the Hole was.

In that video, Spike Lee says:

Only the tremendous … critical and box-office success of Sunset Boulevard [1950] allowed [Wilder] to do a film like this, which is dark for 2007, let alone 1951! … [Ace in the Hole] had the future correct as far as the impact of the media, and how influential it would become, and also how dangerous it would become. It becomes a circus, hence the original title, The Big Carnival. … One of the great things I learned from studying [this] film[] is that no matter how dark the subject matter is, you can still put humor in it.

Stream Ace in the Hole on Pluto (free with ads) or these sites.

4th favorite of 1951:

Strangers on a Train

(Farley Granger, Robert Walker, Ruth Roman, Patricia Hitchcock. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.)

Two fellows meet accidentally, like you and me. No connection between them at all, never saw each other before. Each one has somebody that he’d like to get rid of. So they swap murders! … Then there’s nothing to connect them. … Like, you do my murder, I do yours.

Watch for all the “doubles” in this movie:

Stream Strangers on a Train on the Criterion Channel (try a free trial) or these sites.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.