I'd never heard of it, but I just looked at the trailer on IMDB, & bring it on
Hey Robert, I didn't know you lived in Bridgeport, CT. I lived in East Hartford, West Hartford, Newington and Cromwell, CT before moving to Florida. Hartford, CT is where they had the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus fire in 7/6/44 that killed 167 people - http://www.circusfire1944.com/ . I thought that was the last tent performance because of the fire but it wasn't until 7/16/56 - https://www.circusesandsideshows.com/circuses/ringlingbrosbbcircus.html. There is also a Ringling Circus Museum in Sarasota, FL - https://www.ringling.org/circus-museum. I wished I had gone to the Barnum museum - https://barnum-museum.org/ before I left CT.
The Quiet Man, High Noon and Viva Zapata! are three film that stand the test of time as art, entertainment and examples of the medium at its finest. I'll take VZ! with its flaws for how profoundly beautiful and poetic it is over the other two films. It's less dated and a huge influence on Peckinpah etc. High Noon has its moments of terse beauty. The Quiet Man is not the deepest Ford film but it never fails to make me smile and make my heart melt with its visual beauty. I know why DeMille is historically famous but I think there's a reason that Billy Wilder used him as a representative of film past in Sunset Boulevard.
I wouldn't make that assumption as it's been in HD before the Blu-ray release.
Have it your way.
The best explanation I've heard is that The Quiet Man and High Noon cancelled each other out opening the door for TGSOE to win Best Picture. John Ford won Best Director for TQM and back in the day the 2 awards usually went hand in hand. Although not so in 1951 and 1956. Director George Stevens won both years, but his pictures didn't.
One other possibility is that, because 1952 was the height of McCarthyism, voters went the "safe" route and voted for the movie directed by Cecil "We should all sign Loyalty Oaths" DeMille, rather than bringing more heat upon itself by supporting High Noon, whose screenwriter had already been blacklisted, and which John Wayne later called, "the most un-American thing I've ever seen in my whole life."
Frankly, both Best Picture winners from those two years had about six other movies in their respective years, that I would consider superior movies to "An American in Paris" and "The Greatest Show on Earth". Of course, over the years, there are several other BP winners you can say the same thing about.
