1954 poll: SCFZ does Cannes

[flip]

To determine how often we at SCFZ think Cannes gets it right.

This poll will award the SCFZ Palme d'Or, a Grand Prix, and two Jury Prizes, to the top four films (respectively).

From the Cannes nominees, listed below, if you want to participate:
--> award to every nominee you've seen a rating from 1 to 5 stars
--> you should assign ratings as follows (do not use your ordinary ratings scale), as best as you can quickly approximate:
5 stars: in the top 10% of Cannes nominees from this decade
4 stars: in the top 30%
3 stars: in the middle
2 stars: in the bottom 30%
1 star: in the bottom 10%

This is the same system as in the Academy Awards poll. I'm encouraging ratings like this so we're not measuring whether generous voters have seen a film, but how a film, in SCFZ's view, ranks against its competition. The nominees are (copy/pasting from this list is preferable to me than typing things up from scratch) :

editorial comment - this year is bananas, huge slate of nominees, very few of which now have any currency, hopefully scfz has seen a few of these:

Adventures of the Barber of Seville (Ladislao Vajda)
All is Possible in Granada (Carlos Blanco and Jose Luis Saenz de Heredia)
As Long As You're Near Me (Harald Braun)
Before the Deluge (Andre Cayatte)
Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (Robert Webb)
The Boy and the Fog (Roberto Gavaldon)
Bread of Love (Arne Mattsson)
Chronicle of Poor Lovers (Carlo Lizzani)
Circus Fandango (Arne Skouen)
Comedians (Juan Antonio Bardem)
Five Boys from Barska Street (Aleksander Ford)
From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann)
Gate of Hell (Teinosuke Kinugasa)
Le Grand Jeu (Robert Siodmak)
The Great Adventure (Arne Sucksdorff)
The Great Warrior Skanderbeg (Sergei Yutkevich)
An Inlet of Muddy Water (Tadashi Imai)
Kiskrajcar (Marton Keleti)
Knave of Hearts (Rene Clement)
Knights of the Round Table (Richard Thorpe)
Komedianti (Vladimir Vlcek)
The Last Bridge (Helmut Kautner)
Little Boy Lost (George Seaton)
The Little Kidnappers (Philip Leacock)
The Living Desert (Walt Disney and James Algar)
Love in a Hot Climate (Georges Rouquier and Ricardo Munoz Suay)
Love Letter (Kinuyo Tanaka)
Maddalena (Augusto Genina)
Man of Africa (Cyril Frankel)
Marina's Destiny (Isaak Shmaruk and Viktor Ivchenko)
The Martyr of Cavalry (Miguel Morayta)
Mayurpankh (Kishore Sahu)
Memories of a Mexican (Carmen Toscano)
The Monster (Salah Abu Seif)
Naked Amazon (Zygmunt Sulistrowski)
Neapolitan Carousel (Ettore Giannini)
Pamposh (Ezra Mir)
Si mis campos hablaran (Jose Bohr)
Song of the Sea (Alberto Cavalcanti)
Stars of the Rusian Ballet (Gerbert Rappaport)
Struggle in the Valley (Youssef Chahine)
Two Acres of Land (Bimal Roy)
Windfall in Athens (Michael Cacoyannis)



Because it might be possible for a film to win with a single 5-star rating in this poll, I'll be adjusting one-vote point totals as follows:
5 --> 4.25
4 --> 3.6
3 --> 3
2 --> 2.4
1 --> 1.75
and in case of any ties, films with more votes will win (on the premise that the rating is more reliable).

[flip]

This was the 7th Cannes Festival (not counting 1939), and was, if I didn't miss anything looking at past slates, the first in which there was, in competition, more than one film directed by a woman (Memories of a Mexican by Carmen Toscano, and Love Letter by Kinuyo Tanaka). As best I can tell, only two previous competitions featured even one woman-directed film - the first festival in 1946 (a film by Barbara Virginia) and the second in 1947 (a film by Nicole Vedres).

[Silga]

5 stars:

From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann)

[flip]

i have only seen two of these films:

4 stars
Gate of Hell (Teinosuke Kinugasa)

3 stars
From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann)

[wba]

5 stars
From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann)

4 stars
Knights of the Round Table (Richard Thorpe)

[Monsieur Arkadin]

5 Stars
Struggle in the Valley (Youssef Chahine)

That's the only one I've seen. But maybe I can get to one or two before this closes

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

I've only seen one, which I just happened to watch on Monday! I was very impressed by it.

5 stars
Love Letter (Kinuyo Tanaka)