Best Scenes of 1952

The wide difference of opinion apparent in the "Ten Best" lists of critics and "Ten Worst" lists of carpers this year portends a difficult session for the Academy Awarders. While there were perhaps more than a per percentage of good pictures, there were no masterpieces, artistically or financially.

The box office bust that followed such films as death of a salesman and Streetcar Named desire in "51 was a delight to the quo Vadis school of cinema which holds that art is not entertainment, and to add to the Oscar committee's woes, several studies have withdrawn their financial support from the Awards.

Despite this return to reaction, the coveted CRIMSON kudos for the best scenes of the year go, in no particular order, to the following:

The stone-clicking sequence from Pica Zapata, in which the backwoods Bonaparte is led away by soldiers to the ominous cadence of impassive peasants clicking stones; the recurrent low angle, high tension shot of the rails beside the desert station in High Noon; the lack of a final scene in The Snipe, which would have been anti-climatic in the best beat-the audience over the head tradition.

The inimitable sound effects in the laboratory scene of The Man in the white Suit: the greatest train wreck ever filmed in The Greatest Show on Earth; the scene in The Quiet Man in which Barry Fitzgerald walks into the newly weds cottage after their fast night and finds the broken bed; the climax of the Crimson Pirate a perfect parody, during which a balloon and a submarine attack a square rigger.

The breath asking scene of the spitfire over Dover which sets the powerful pace before the titles flash on the screen in Breaking the Sound Newton, buried in the sand up to his head and teaming eloquently at the rising tide in the title role of Black-beard Charlie Chaplin's imitation of a violin is with unsanforized legs in limelight.

All of Cineravna a series disconnected scenes which infringe even after the novelty has worn off--this is line of no other celluloid safari into the dimension of depth: all of The Start Shares another experiment but in two dimensions a faithful reproduction of one of Joseph Comad's shorter works, remarkably unembellished of by twist on gimmick, and proof that the gauche, black and white film has hardly exhumed its possibilities for either entertainment on aesthetics.