1953 is remembered as the year 20th Century-Fox introduced CinemaScope. Although industry bigwigs and progressive aesthetes immediately hailed the widescreen process as the savior of cinema, the films on 1953's top-ten list prove that standard-aspect-ratio moviemaking was perfectly healthy.

Another technical innovation, 3-D, reached its peak in 1953. Unlike 'Scope, it didn't survive. The fact that only one film on this list, Robot Monster, is in 3-D (and only in part), suggests that 3-D was never really necessary. (There's at least one other 1953-D film we'd like to save from oblivion, if we could only find it: Las Vegas Atom Blast, an independent production we know nothing about, except the title.)

You didn't need special glasses to get the new ultra-seriousness that had arrived in Hollywood by way of the Actors Studio. Spurred by the success of Elia Kazan's 1951 A Streetcar Named Desire, the Kazanification of Hollywood continued unabated in 1953 with big, serious, profound movies about tortured, inarticulate pretty boys. Why did Hitchcock make a movie with Kazanians Montgomery Clift and Karl Malden? Why did George Stevens feel compelled to turn a western into a grandiose statement about the place of cowboys in the universe?

This new-found "maturity" had also overtaken European films. 1953 marks further steps in the ascent of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. Arguably, world cinema has yet to recover from the double whammy of Bergman's existential angst and Fellini's spinning-carousel dreaminess.

Luckily, another kind of movie was emerging in 1953 to counter the effects of all this heavy grotesque stuff. Phil Tucker's Robot Monster and Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda are key works in the grade-Z, sub-Poverty Row exploitation cinema, the hiding-place of lunatic inspiration and goofball hope. Now, movies like these are called "psychotronic" (a term first applied to them by Michael Weldon), but they remain unclassifiable. Far from any of these trends, two Japanese directors quietly turned out the two best films of 1953.

The ten best

1. Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari; Yasujiro Ozu, Japan)

Ozu invented his own film language, capable of incomparably precise and delicate expression. It involves bold compositional contrasts; unflinching frames that hold people and objects in complex, shifting patterns; and an engaging way of moving a story cyclically through repeating locations. His spare, plain stories usually permit him to explore some aspect of a breakdown in traditional family relationships, which is partly why he has been called "the most Japanese of Japanese directors." The more familiar one becomes with Ozu's films, the more one becomes able to respond to them as works of pure emotion. Opening as an elderly couple looks forward to a rare trip to the city to spend time with their grown children, Tokyo Story moves on from there through disappointment, loss, and acceptance. Perhaps Ozu's most accessible work, it's certainly one of his saddest.

2. Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari; Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan)

In 16th century Japan, a time of civil war, two rural potters dream of better lives. One, Genjuro (Masayuki Mori), becomes obsessed with his work, hoping to capitalize on the booming war economy. The other, Tobei (Sakae Ozawa), seeks glory as a samurai. They abandon their wives to horrible fates in this cruel and tragic film that shows how hard dreams die, and then we live with ghosts. Ugetsu, an eerie, supernatural film full of bandits, evil spirits, strife, and mist, remains firmly rooted in the social reality of its characters' lives. Mizoguchi died in 1956, at the age of 58. The peaks of cinematic expression reached by his masterpieces of the Fifties will never be scaled again.

3. The Sun Shines Bright (John Ford, USA)

If people think of John Ford at all these days, it's usually with the condescending respect due a major cultural figure perceived boring, or with a more active left-liberal contempt toward a politically incorrect artist. The Sun Shines Bright, an intensely personal work and Ford's favorite among his own movies, is probably not the film to win him converts. It's devoted to issues that Ford knew full well were likely to bore or piss off most viewers, and Stepin Fetchit is in it. The main character is an old judge (Charles Winninger) presiding benevolently over a small Kentucky town around the turn of the century, clinging fervently to a glorified past of service to the Confederacy. While running a seemingly doomed campaign for reelection against the forces of progress, the judge takes a few last stands against hypocrisy and bigotry: stopping a lynching, taking his place in a dead prostitute's funeral procession. All of Ford's love of habit, lost causes, liquor, obstreperousness, and idleness comes out in this film, and also all his artistry.

4. The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, USA)

Glenn Ford plays a vengeful cop "on a hate binge," who's "decided that people are scared rabbits" and he "spits on them," in this terse thriller that starts with a closeup of a gun about to be used in a suicide. Amazing faces, like those of Gloria Grahame and Lee Marvin, get brutalized in this very understated film that, every so often, explodes into quick, unforgettable moments of violence. In Lang's evocation of what Grahame's character calls "Early Nothing," Glenn Ford puts on a black funeral suit and never takes it off, and neither does Lang. The Big Heat is the first masterpiece in the great director of M's last period, one marked by increasingly abstract plans for better human traps.

5. The Earrings of Madame De (Madame de...; Max Ophuls, France)

France, 19th century. A vain countess (Danielle Darrieux), married to a general (Charles Boyer), falls in love with an Italian diplomat (Vittorio de Sica). Weaving in and out of the lives of these three is a pair of earrings. Ophuls is one of the great stylists of the cinema, and Madame de is one of his most perfect films, the camera following the elegant characters in a swirl of constant motion through a charming, deceitful world. The film starts out like a sardonic study of frivolity, but, as Boyer (who gives a remarkably subtle performance) observes at one point, the characters are "only superficially superficial." In the tragic last third of the film, we're surprised to discover just how much depth they have.

6. Mr. Hulot's Holiday (Les vacances de M. Hulot; Jacques Tati, France)

The perennial classic about the absurdities and enigmas of summer vacation. Tati's inept, solicitous Hulot, setting off chain reactions of disaster within seconds of walking into any room, is endearing and unforgettable. The plotless film is built out of episodes, some of them very funny (Hulot disrupting a funeral, or trying to contend with a fireworks holocaust he's inadvertently unleashed), about unlikely juxtapositions, little processes that go out of control, accidents of timing that lead observers to false conclusions.

7. The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, USA)

Fred Astaire plays a once-legendary song-and-dance man now considered a has-been whose memorabilia are yawned at and who's ignored by reporters when he steps off the train in New York. As Astaire tries for a comeback in an ill-conceived musical version of Faust, The Band Wagon becomes a trenchantly funny study in the relationship between popular art and art. Moments of meditation and solitude alternate with musical numbers that are brightly hopeful ("That's Entertainment"), sleekly minimal ("I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plans"), and elaborately aestheticized (the brilliantly directed film noir parody). The whole thing amounts to the most convincing tribute to the show-must-go-on ethos ever filmed.

8. Anatahan (The Saga of Anatahan; Josef von Sternberg, Japan)

Sternberg, who made baroque, chiaroscuro art objects like The Scarlet Empress and The Devil Is a Woman with Marlene Dietrich in the Thirties, traveled to a studio "constructed for this purpose" (the credits tell us) in Kyoto to make this film, his last. He built a teeming jungle island there, populating it with a group of Japanese soldiers who don't know the war is over and one woman (Akemi Negishi). Over this artificial landscape of desire, which he photographed himself, Sternberg reads clipped, literary narration about humanity's shortcomings, which he also wrote. Anatahan is an extremely personal film; it binds up all its director's aesthetic and thematic preoccupations and glues them together with newsreel footage of war and its aftermath. Therefore, strangely, it has much in common with Robot Monster and Glen or Glenda, especially in its denials of knowability and conflicts of desire, while still existing at the extreme opposite pole to those negatively poetic films.

9. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, USA)

What kind of insane, giddy mood was Howard Hawks in when he made Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ? A musical in only the most garish Technicolor reds, oranges, and pinks, it stars Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell as American bombshells on an ocean liner and in "France, Europe." The famous numbers include the Madonna-imitated "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," the aggressive "We're Just Two Little Girls from Little Rock," and the particularly unsettling "Ain't There Anyone Here for Love?" with Russell being alternately ignored and submerged in a swimming pool by the men's Olympic relay team. A savage attack on male weakness, female greed, and human vanity, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes seems to be saying, well, girls, this is how it is, funny, no? In a decade lousy with sugar-coated child actors, Hawks deserves credit for featuring the unsweetened George "Foghorn" Winslow, the seven-year old with the voice of a bus engine.

10. Robot Monster (Phil Tucker, USA)

Upon confronting the stock footage of reptiles with fans taped to their backs that opens this sci-fi cheapie, you can only ask yourself, "Has time completely stopped?" Then, when a human (or hu-man, as the film would have it) actor finally appears in the form of a little girl to ask her brother, "Am I dead?" you know that first thought has been realized. This film, in only 63 minutes, feels endless, yet totally implodes the cinema into the black hole of planet Ro-Man, the home satellite of the title monster, also called Ro-Man (George Barrows, with the dubbed-in voice of John Brown). Ro-Man, fat and clumsy in a gorilla suit with a TV set in place of a head, chases around the last six people on Earth, with little success, and spends most of his time in a cave with a bubble machine and a sheet-metal TV screen that issues commands. The fact that Robot Monster is childish and soporific doesn't detract from its greatness, but neither does it add to it. Robot Monster is a message from another world.

Honorable mention

1. Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, USA)

An exciting crime thriller about pickpockets and Communists that does everything at once and feels like it's ten minutes long. Richard Widmark and Jean Peters beat the crap out of each other repeatedly, stopping once in a while to listen as Thelma Ritter, playing a stool pigeon who "carries a complete line of personality neckwear," waxes philosophic about morality and her bad back. Fuller divides it up into three kinds of shots: the choker; the suffocating two-shot; and the shocking, mobile long-take.

2. The Bigamist (Ida Lupino, USA)

This extraordinary little film is one of several out-of-nowhere masterpieces directed during a brief period by Lupino, previously considered "a poor man's Bette Davis" when she was a hardboiled Warner Bros. star in the Forties. Edmond O'Brien stars as a refrigerator salesman who, from shambling passively and clumsily through life, ends up with two wives, each unaware of the other's existence. Lupino's understated direction (she also plays one of the wives) seems to enfold the characters with discreet, helpless pity.

3. The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, USA)

Perhaps the best of five Westerns in which James Stewart, under the direction of action poet Mann, turned himself into a rugged, tortured outdoor hero. Here Stewart's a bounty hunter obsessed with bringing back killer Robert Ryan, despite every kind of setback. The film emphasizes insecurity, psychological stress, and the mistrustfulness of solitude.

4. I Confess (Alfred Hitchcock, USA)

A wintry, sorrowful movie that, to most viewers, initially refuses to reveal its riches. Stick with it. On the fifth or sixth viewing maybe, I Confess will kick in. It's not meant to be fun: it's one of the major films about repression. Montgomery Clift plays a Catholic priest who becomes a suspect in a murder because the real killer's secret is protected by the law of the confessional. Clift's face and voice are so tightly controlled he seems to be working on some eastern meditation trick to merge with the wall. Anne Baxter's unhappily married socialite and Karl Malden's relentless cop add to the general misery.

5. Glen or Glenda (Edward D. Wood, Jr.; USA)

Ed Wood's first film, the dramatization of a tract on transvestism, is compulsive, threadbare, brain-damaged. Bela Lugosi appears as the on-screen voice of God, and Wood himself, billed as Daniel Davis, plays the main transvestite. What other director would deliver lines like "Have you forgotten about my other self?" over coffee with a friend or portray the tragic nature of existence by using a couch rolling on its side in a limbo set? Lugosi's unnerving, inspired narration, about mistakes made and stories that must be told, offers weird contradistinction to Josef von Sternberg's caveat "We did not see this," in Anatahan.

Most wanted

1. I Vinti (The Vanquished; Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France)

The second feature-length film by one of the greatest directors, this is a study of disturbed, violent, alienated youth in three episodes, one set in Italy, one in France, one in England. Probably the film has things in common both with the clinical tone of Antonioni's 1953 short "Attempted Suicides" (part of the omnibus film Love in the City) and with the eerily removed melodrama of his beguiling third feature, The Lady without Camelias (also 1953), about the pointless, empty life of a beautiful movie star.

2. Marry Me Again (Frank Tashlin, USA)

An early effort from the director of The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Tashlin, a director of curves and twists in CinemaScope frames, was the most original filmmaker in American Fifties comedy, so this Bob Cummings farce which purportedly satirizes the Korean War, psychiatry, overnight millionaires, and public housing projects, is sorely missed. Evidently, it contains a scene in a theater where the 3-D movie being shown is confused with reality. Shades of Godard's 1963 Les Carabiniers, was this the inspiration for a similar scene in that film?

3. Traviata '53 (Vittorio Cottafavi, Italy)

During the same period when the works of Fellini, Visconti, De Sica, and Antonioni made Italy a player in the international art film market, the country's less ambitious commercial cinema was also coming into its own. Rather than in the enclaves of the poor and restless or the rich and existential, master stylist Cottafavi (Hercules and the Captive Women) made his cinematic home in the artificial worlds of the melodrama and the historical/mythological spectacle. We don't know anything about Traviata '53 but we've seen a still from it that makes it look great: a handful of lounge lizards, including a couple making out on a couch, scattered in fashionably idle poses around an elegant contemporary living room; in the foreground, a man, head thrown back, blowing a trumpet in stylized abandon.

4. The Blazing Sun (Sira' fi'l-wadi; Youssef Chahine, Egypt)

The career breakthrough film for the Egyptian director who won the Cannes Film Festival's special 50th Anniversary Prize in 1997 with a film (Destiny) that has yet to be distributed in the U.S. The young Omar Sharif plays an agricultural engineer who struggles to improve the lot of his native village. The fact that he is also, meanwhile, working on avenging his father's death at the hands of the local pasha hints that this film, like Chahine's career as a whole, may be an eclectic hybrid of social consciousness and melodrama.

5. Run for the Hills (Lew Landers, USA)

War surplus leading man Sonny Tufts and Hollywood tart Barbara Payton play a couple who live in a cave because Sonny's worried about atomic disaster. Although it's no doubt sub-Tashlin, this satire of Fifties paranoia was directed by Lew Landers, and thus bears investigation. Landers made something like a hundred movies between 1934 and 1958. His first feature (directed under his real name, Louis Friedlander) was a disturbing 1935 Bela Lugosi outing called The Raven. In 1956, he made The Cruel Tower, a steeplejack film that's better than The Wages of Fear. Supposedly, the inimitable cad George Sanders, perhaps hot off Rossellini's Voyage in Italy, plays a TV commentator in this. Hard to believe.

Overrated

1. The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur; Henri-Georges Clouzot, France)

A repetitive, machine-like, two-and-a-half hour movie, about some jerks who despise each other, that builds tension so over-meticulously it becomes aggravating. Although Clouzot is often compared to Hitchcock, this film clearly looks in the direction of Hawks. It's a self-consciously vicious slap in the face to the whole Hawks ethic. Yves Montand leads the cast, a macho group stranded without work in rural Brazil. They compete for jobs driving truckloads of nitro through dangerous terrain. It's the trucks you care about here, not the characters. Will the truck go off a cliff? Explode? You want it to, you don't want it to, it doesn't matter anyway because there are two trucks so you can have it both ways. The ending, which is supposed to be deep, is offensive. Long, laughless, murky and yet predictable, The Wages of Fear discovered the formula for practically every movie made today. Eureka!

2. Shane (George Stevens, USA)

Schematic, pointless, and very serious, Shane tries to sum up the entire western genre to no effect. Its portrayal of natural beauty is phony, its situations are underwritten, its characters are bloodless. Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, and Van Heflin could be the movies' most enervated triangle. As Arthur and Heflin's little son, Brandon DeWilde delivers one of those crawly performances that make people cringe at the mere mention of child actors. When Alan Ladd beats up Ben Johnson, a member of John Ford's stock company here playing a heavy, one can only look away from Stevens's presumption.

3. From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, USA)

This gloomy adaptation of James Jones's soldier novel is like an icebox with a few half-thawed hors d'oeuvres: Montgomery Clift playing taps for a dead pal, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr necking on the beach. Zinnemann doesn't try to be a stylist, which is all to his credit. But neither does he manage do anything interesting. Donna Reed and Frank Sinatra won Oscars, not for any reasons that have to do with acting, but because Reed turned against her goody-two-shoes image by playing a prostitute and because the industry felt sorry for Sinatra, then at a career lowpoint, and wanted to be impressed by his look-at-me jerkiness.

4. Roman Holiday (William Wyler, USA)

A wearying romance between Little Miss Perfect (Audrey Hepburn, the original manufactured waif, in her American film debut) and a very handsome block of wood (Gregory Peck). If there's a style less suited to light comedy than William Wyler's, we've yet to experience it. The film's point seems to be that the presence of Americans can make even Rome dull, and as dull as this picture is, it would be even worse if Eddie Albert weren't in it. A better variation on this theme would perhaps be called Ro-Man Holiday, and would feature Audrey Hepburn as the last girl on Earth, being carried through the ruins of the Eternal City by George Barrows in a lumpy gorilla suit and a TV set-helmet.

5. Stalag 17 (Billy Wilder, USA)

We can sort of see why From Here to Eternity is considered great, but with Stalag 17 it's harder to tell. This WW2 saga of American airmen in a German POW camp is pat, contrived, and jokey. It scores a few points, mostly by pitting William Holden's cynical loner against the other prisoners' floundering purposefulness and inept know-how, but they're all easy ones. The cast members, each of whom does a routine pinned to a single funny/irritating character trait, include Otto Preminger in an amusing caricature of the evil commandant. We recommend seeing instead Preminger's own 1953 movie with William Holden, The Moon Is Blue, a more deeply cynical comedy about virginity, seduction, and alcohol.

6. Sawdust and Tinsel (Gycklarnas afton; Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)

Sawdust and Tinsel has the distinction of being the most depressing circus movie ever made. This, however, can't save it, because as soon as it's over you want to forget you saw it. Unfortunately, the image of a grimacing white-faced clown (Anders Ek) with a gun to his head may return at times of hangover or food poisoning. The movie drowns in tears and morbidity and then somebody (Åke Grönberg) gets humiliated and mad so he shoots a caged circus bear. It's all so unrelentingly artistic and so dead serious and full of pain that it becomes, if not funny, at least ridiculous.

7. I vitelloni (Federico Fellini, Italy)

The king of all movies about groups of male buddies (American Graffiti, Diner,...). As with other movies in this genre, full appreciation probably requires that the viewer be a male who likes, or used to like, to hang out in groups of males. The Fellini who directed this film (his third) isn't yet the full-hot-air-blast, hold-on-to-your-elbow-rests Fellini of La Dolce Vita and 8-1/2. He's a more contemplative, more social-conscious observer of life, and he makes a sober, rueful, visually rather padded movie, intermittently successful at evoking a restless, torpid mood.

Check out more from Club Havana's Secret History of Cinema:

Introduction;

1939;

1946;

1968;

1976;

1983; and

1994

Chris Fujiwara and A. S. Hamrah are Club Havana Productions.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Media Zone of the Web site Tripod.