Johnny Belinda (1948)

<--- Jane Wyman won the Best Actress Oscar for her role.

Based on a play by Elmer Blaney Harris (which was based on real life events).

Jane Wyman is a deaf and mute young woman named Belinda, who lives on a farm with her father (Charles Bickford) and aunt (Agnes Moorehead). Sadly, they both call her "the dummy" and sadly, she is disliked by almost everyone in the village.

She's befriended by a young doctor (Lew Ayres), who sees her potential, and he decides to tutor her and teach her sign language.

Eventually, the two begin to fall in love.

One day, Johnny is raped by a local fisherman, and becomes pregnant, which affects every one of the characters in the film, including the rapist, who marries the doctor's secretary (Jan Sterling) and at one point decides he wants custody over the child.

The doctor's life begins to crumble when he finds himself involved in a scandal, which leads to a climactic courtroom scene with all parties.

Some great performances. The tone of the film is serious for the most part (little comic relief).

Nominated for 12 Academy Awards. Jane Wyman won the Best Actress Oscar. Directed by Jean Negulesco.  I first watched this in 1990, about twenty years ago.

Ace in the Hole (1951) - Starring Kirk Douglas

As Roger Ebert puts in in a recent review, this film is "a portrait of rotten journalism and the public's insatiable appetite for it". "Ace in the Hole" blew me away when I first saw it and I couldn't stop thinking and talking about it for days afterward. Fresh off his "stop-at-nothing-to-get-to-the-top" performance in "Champion", Kirk Douglas plays another cocky, competitive character, this time newspaper reporter Charles Tatum, who capitalizes on a mine disaster in a small New Mexico town (and churns out such wisecracks as "I can handle big news and little news. And if there's no news, I'll go out and bite a dog.") At the start of the film, his car breaks down in Albuquerque, and we learn that he had been fired from numerous New York paper jobs for boozing and womanizing. He lands a boring gig in a claustrophobic newspaper office and he hates it, as he longs for the noise of New York again. In on scene, Tatum asks a co-worker "What do you know about Yogi Berra?" She replies, "Yogi? That's sort of a religion isn't it?" Tatum: "You bet it is: Belief in the New York Yankees!" One day a story breaks out: In a nearby small town, a man named Leo Minoso is trapped in a mine after a cave-in; his legs are stuck and no one can get close to him without drilling through. This is Kirk's big break, he reasons, and proceeds to take possession of the story. After his story is printed on the front page, the newspaper's sales go through the roof and he's suddenly back in demand. His ruthless thirst for fame and wealth increases as the days pass. Meanwhile, an entire media circus forms around the cave. It's a fascinating story with many themes: loyalty, greed, competition. Lots of build-up to the return and rescue--- there's a chance Leo might not make it out of the cave alive....Will He or Won't He? It's an incredibly emotional film experience and Kirk Douglas as the heartless Tatum is brilliant. Plus great scenery of the desert and mountains. Wilder used thousands of extras and built a huge set - complete with a gigantic ferris wheel and carnival rides, and a pop music stage where a hit tribute song about the rescue of Leo is performed and sheet music is sold for 25 cents. Jan Sterling plays Leo's troubled wife. The commentary on the DVD is brilliant and so is the film. I agree with Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times who wrote, "Although the film is 56 years old, I found while watching it again that it still has all its power. It hasn't aged because Wilder and his co-writers, Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels, were so lean and mean [with their dialogue] . . . [Kirk Douglas'] focus and energy . . . is almost scary. There is nothing dated about [his] performance. It's as right-now as a sharpened knife....When the film was released, the press complained about its portrait of news practices and standards, even though the story was inspired by a real media circus when a man named Floyd Collins was trapped in a Kentucky cave. Today, it is hard to imagine some segments of the press not recognizing their hunger for sensation. "

Read more reviews of this picture from other bloggers at Out of the Past and Goodfellas Movie Blog.
Read another review from Confessions of a Film Philistine