Cinema: The Year in Films

It all depends on where you sit. To moviegoers, 1953 was almost a banner year, in a half-mast sort of way; considering that there were not so many pictures, there was a surprising number of good ones. To moviemakers sitting in Hollywood, the year was one of the most worrisome in history. The box-office collapse, caused by the ever-widening spread of TV, became calamitous in 1952. By year's end the weekly audience was cut in half, and box-office receipts were down nearly 30%. Then, early in 1953, came the 3-D craze, launched in...

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